by David Weber
Mike glanced at the marijuana plants. "If you thought the 'War on Drugs' was stupid, how's about the 'War on Unauthorized Reading?' "
Dan grimaced. Then, held up his hand in a gesture of peace-making. "All right, all right. But—" He turned his head and studied the final member of the little group, who had kept silent throughout. The only one of them, as it happened, who had been born in the 17th century—and had the elegant and aristocratic apparel to prove it.
"But," he repeated, "I want you to stay out of it personally. Let Francisco handle it. Him, at least, I trust to be reasonably judicious. And if the word ever gets out, it'll look better anyway having a well-regarded banker being the one who did the, ah, 'negotiations.' At least he's not a union strong-arm boy or a former professional boxer."
"Sure, no sweat," said Mike. Francisco Nasi, formerly a high courtier in the Ottoman Empire, a shaker-and-mover among the widespread and influential Abrabanel family, and now perhaps Grantville's most highly esteemed banker, was a man of many parts. Mike had high hopes that the young Sephardic Jew would prove to be as good a head of his new intelligence and counter-intelligence service as he had been at everything else in his life. Especially with Uriel and Balthazar Abrabanel to serve as his advisers, since they were too old to serve as functioning spies any longer.
But he left all that unspoken. He saw no reason to start another long argument with Dan Frost. Seeing as how his new intelligence service was completely informal and had—mentally, Mike cleared his throat—ah, never actually been approved by Congress or anybody else except Mike himself.
Francisco let Harry handle the introductory negotiations. By the time he walked through the smashed-open door of Freddie Congden's shabby trailer, the introduction was pretty much over.
Freddie, his eyes looking a bit dazed and his hand covering a bleeding mouth, was looking sideways at the drawer of a nightstand next to the filthy couch on which he apparently slept most nights. Judging, at least, from the number of empty beer containers perched on the nightstand, he wasn't in the habit of reading himself to sleep—whatever other use he had for the books he owned.
"Do it," said Harry cheerfully, the butt of the heavy revolver he'd used to split Freddie's lip now curled back into his fist. "Go for it, you piece of shit. Betcha anything you want I can blow your spine into four separate pieces before you even get that drawer open. And what good would it do you, even if you could get it open? When was the last time you fired it, anyway? Much less cleaned it? Huh?"
Almost casually, his boot lashed out and drove Freddie down onto the couch. "Fuck you, asshole." Harry leaned over, pulled the drawer completely out of the nightstand, and slid it onto a nearby formica table. The trailer's dining table, that was, insofar as the term could be used to refer to a piece of furniture which was so completely covered with debris that even a cup couldn't have been set down on it. In the course of sliding the drawer onto the table, Harry sent a small landslide of rubbish tumbling to the floor.
He glanced, very briefly, into the drawer. "Where the hell did you get that piece of crap, anyway? Musta bought it from some guy standing by the road with a placard that said: 'Will sell Saturday Night Special for food.' "
He shook his head. "Jesus. You were a cheapskate about everything, weren't you? What I can't figure out is how you ever came to own any books in the first place."
Finally, Freddie spoke. "Jeez! Hey, Harry, I'm in the union."
"Freddie, you were the sorriest damn member the United Mine Workers ever had. And if you're smart, you won't remind me about it." Harry stepped forward a pace or two. "And answer my question. Where in the hell did you get all the books you've been selling? I didn't think you'd read anything since you dropped out of high school—not even a newspaper."
"I don't know what you're talk—" Harry's boot drove him back into the couch, leaving a muddy print on his chest. Freddie gasped for breath.
"You get one lie, Freddie," said Harry softly. "You just had it." He nodded toward Nasi. "You either do it the man's way—or you'll do it my way. Personally, I'd suggest you throw yourself on the mercy of the banker. That's sorta what you might call a 'strong recommendation' kind of suggestion."
Another man might have accompanied those words with some sort of threatening physical gesture. The fact that Harry said the words without moving a muscle beyond those needed to speak made the implied threat . . . frightening. Francisco Nasi was a little taken aback. He realized that he still had a tendency to think of Harry the way the up-timers did: as the often-reckless and always pugnacious youngster he'd always been, but one who, nevertheless, was basically quite decent. Decent, Harry Lefferts still was—Francisco was quite sure of that. But he too had been subtly transformed in the two years since the Ring of Fire. This was no "kid," any longer. This was a very, very dangerous man.
Freddie, obviously, had no doubt about it at all. He looked away, blood still oozing from the gash on his lip. "What the hell," he mumbled. "Was just books, fer Chrissake, and I needed the money. Only fair, dammit, all the money I wasted on that rotten kid."
Francisco had already started searching the trailer. Behind him, he heard Harry's cold answer. "Call your kid George 'rotten' again, fuckhead, and you'll spit teeth. I remember the little guy, y'know. He always seemed beaten down, scared to death by everything. With a father like you, that ain't hard to understand."
Nasi opened one of the interior doors of the trailer and entered the small room beyond. After taking two steps, he came to a halt. The room was . . . impressive.
The room was clean, for a start—certainly by the standards of the rest of the trailer. Francisco suspected that was because the son George had kept it clean when he lived there, and Freddie had never entered it since except to steal his own son's possessions for the sake of treason.
"That poor boy," he murmured.
The room was practically a library in its own right. Outside of a narrow bed, every wall except one was covered with shelving. Cheap shelving, naturally—Freddie wouldn't have allowed anything else. But the books resting on those shelves weren't particularly cheap. No fancy first editions, of course, and only a few of them were hardcovers. But every shelf was packed with paperbacks of all kinds, ranging from children's books George must have gotten as a little boy all the way through dog-eared copies of a history of the American civil war by someone named Foote and a thick volume on the principles of astronomy.
Nasi's eyes moved to the one wall which was bare of shelves. From the ceiling, suspended by a string over the bed, hung a plastic model of some sort of spacecraft. Francisco wasn't positive, but he thought it was a replica of what the up-timers called an "Apollo." He'd seen pictures of them. Behind it, covering most of the wall, was a very large stellar map showing the galaxy. In a corner inset, the Solar System was displayed.
For a moment, Nasi felt a pang of sorrow. He could imagine the life of young George Congden, with a sullen brute of a father and a terrified mouse of a mother. Trying to carve out for himself, in the one little room which belonged to him, a world of his own imagination. Quietly but stubbornly fighting his father for every dime he could get, to buy another precious book or a map of another universe.
Another universe. "Good luck to you, George, wherever you are," Francisco murmured. "At least you won't have your father to worry about any more."
By then, Harry had come over and peeked in. "Jesus," he said.
Francisco glanced at him, shaking his head. "Why did they leave it all behind them?" he wondered. "I'm sure the boy must have been heartbroken."
Harry's head-shake was one of anger, not puzzlement. "I didn't see her leave, myself, but I heard about it. All Anita had—the only thing she owned except maybe a suitcase or two of clothes for her and the boy—was a beat-up old Fiesta. There'd have been no way to fit this stuff into it." His jaws tightened, making him looking scarier than ever. "But I'll tell you this for sure, Francisco. However heartbroken George might have been at leaving his books behind, he'd have done that i
n a minute to get away from his father. Any kid this side of an insane asylum would. Freddie Congden is a real piece of work."
Harry turned on his heel and walked back into the main compartment of the trailer. In seconds, he was standing in front of Freddie again, with Francisco a step or two behind him. Freddie himself was still on the couch, dabbing at his lip with a grimy rag of some kind.
"Okay, Freddie, here's how it's gonna work. If we wanted to, we could have you arrested. I'm not sure we could get an actual charge of treason to stick, since I think—I'm no lawyer, y'know, so I'm guessing a little—that 'treason' has a lot of fancy curlicues and quibbles that your case might not exactly match. But it doesn't matter. I'm not a lawyer, but Mike Stearns has the best one in town as his attorney general. 'Trafficking with the enemy,' whatever—we'd make enough charges stick to put you away forever. If you were lucky, that is. Keep in mind the jury'd be mostly German, and those folks'd have no trouble at all voting for the noose. Don't doubt it for a minute."
Freddie left off dabbing his lip, his face growing pale. "Hey, what the hell! We're just talking about kids' books—and they were my own property to begin with!"
Harry smiled thinly, put his left hand around his throat, and mimicked a man strangling to death. Then, after lowering the hand:
"Save your breath, Freddie—especially since you haven't got all that many breaths left to spare. I can just see you trying that argument on the jury. Buncha primitive Krauts, y'know—most of 'em holding a lot of silly grudges on account of how the people you've been selling your books to have been murdering and raping and looting and butchering and burning out their families for the past fifteen years or so."
Freddie's face was very pale, now. "Yeah, that's the way it is, Congden," said Harry coldly. "If you want to try your luck, go ahead. But I suggest you consider my alternative."
Freddie's swallowed. "What alternative?"
"From now on, you work for us. You'll keep living here, just like you have been. And you keep selling your kid's books and stuff. Except you'll tell your customers you're starting to run a little low on your stock, so from now on you'll have to sell them copies of the books." Harry glanced at the littered dining room table. "You'll have to clean that off, since you'll be spending most your time from now on sitting at that table, hand-copying the books we tell you to copy—with certain adjustments in the text."
He hooked a thumb at Nasi. "Francisco here will tell you what adjustments he wants. I think the real spy types would call him a 'control officer.' But you and me are coal miners—even if you were the sorriest bastard ever went down in a mine—so you can just think of him as your boss. From now on, Freddie, you'll do whatever Francisco tells you to do. Understand?"
Freddie's eyes flicked at Francisco, then back. His lips twisted a bit. "Get somebody else. I ain't taking orders from no kike. Anybod—"
This time, Harry's boot drove into his belly. Freddie lurched forward on the couch, clutching his stomach, his mouth gasping for breath.
An instant later, the gasp turned into a gag. Harry had the barrel of his revolver pressed against the back of Freddie's throat. Freddie was literally cross-eyed, staring at the gunbarrel in his mouth. The eyes grew round as well as crossed when he saw—and heard—Harry cock the hammer.
"This is a .357, did I mention that?" Harry's tone of voice was light-hearted. "And I do want to thank you, Freddie, since you're gonna make it possible for me to win an old argument with Darryl, whenever I see him next. Him and me had an argument about it, way back when. Darryl claims if you blow a man's head off with your gun shoved all the way down his throat—handgun, that is, major caliber, magnum round—you'll blow your own hand apart along with it. 'Hydrostatic shock,' somethin' like that—Darryl always did fancy himself with big words."
Harry grinned. Watching, Francisco thought it was the coldest and most savage grin he'd ever seen in his life.
"Me," continued Harry, "I think Darryl's full of shit. I bet I can blow your brains right out of the back of your head without getting worse than maybe a split thumb. 'Course, I admit, Darryl's bound to claim the experiment was no good—on account of you got no brains to begin with—but I can't say I really give a damn. I'd like to do it anyway, just 'cause I despise your sorry ass."
For a moment, Nasi thought Freddie might faint. Then, seeing the man's eyes rolling wildly at him, Nasi patted Lefferts on the shoulder.
"I think he's seen the light of day, Harry."
Harry withdrew the gunbarrel, tilted it away, and lowered the hammer. Then, made a face at it and stepped over to the dining table. He plucked a rag of some kind from the debris—a towel, perhaps; it was hard to tell—and started hurriedly wiping off the barrel. "Damn," Harry muttered. "Your saliva's worse than acid. My favorite piece, too."
Harry lifted his eyes from the task and gave Freddie a look of sheer menace. "You will take orders from your boss, shithead—that's Mister Nasi, to you—or you won't have to worry about a German jury. I'll just kill you myself. Save the taxpayers some money."
"Okay," croaked Freddie.
When they returned to Stoner's place, where Mike had waited for them, Harry made an announcement. "I think I've got the knack for this Double-O-Seven stuff. All I gotta do now is learn that fancy game. Whazzit called? Shummin-de-fur, or something. Y'know, what they play in Monaco."
Nasi seemed to choke a little. Mike shook his head firmly.
"Not a chance, Harry. You'd have to give up your boilermakers and learn to drink dry martinis. Shaken, not stirred."
Harry scowled. "Well, forget it then. I guess I'll just have to learn to be a country-boy roughneck instead."
Part III
Those mackerel-crowded seas
Chapter 18
The English Channel was brisker than usual, even for September. Despite the bright sunlight, the temperature hovered around no more than fifty degrees, and the wind blowing out of the northeast had teeth to it. It put a lively chop on the Channel's blue water and whined in the rigging, and Maarten Harpentzoon van Tromp, lieutenant-admiral of Holland, drew its freshness deep into his lungs as he stood on the quarterdeck of his flagship and gazed astern at the other ships of his fleet.
"They make a goodly sight," the man standing beside him said, and Tromp glanced at him. At thirty-four, Vice-Admiral Cornelisz Witte de With was two years younger than Tromp, which made both of them very young indeed for the posts they held. But there seemed to be a lot of that going around lately, Tromp told himself with a small, crooked smile.
"That they do," he agreed, turning his eyes back to the weather-stained canvas of the ships forging along in Amelia's wake. Their formation keeping was indifferent, to say the very least. But that was typical of a Dutch fleet, and even from here he could almost taste the confidence, born of forty years of victory at sea, which filled their crews. "I'd like it better if more of them were regular Navy ships," he added after a moment, and de With chuckled.
"Wouldn't any of us?" he responded. "But the States General is doing well to keep forty ships in commission. There's not much left, even with the French subsidy, after they pay for the Army and the border fortresses' upkeep. And it isn't as if we're not used to it!"
"No. No, it isn't." Tromp shook his head and thought about the purloined pages he'd been shown by Constantjin Huygens, Prince Frederik Hendrik's secretary. They'd been frustratingly vague, not to mention fragmentary and incomplete, but they'd also been fascinating, especially with their hints of how countries of the future would maintain their fleets. Still, he wasn't sure he approved of the notion of a nation which maintained hundreds of state-owned naval vessels. The expense must be staggering, if nothing else. Besides, the long-standing practice of hiring and impressing armed merchant ships in time of war favored a nation like the United Provinces. The Dutch bred the finest seamen in the world, which turned the Republic's enormous merchant marine into one vast naval reserve. His present command boasted only twenty-seven regular warships, but they were supported by eleve
n more vessels of the East India Company's fleet and another thirty-six well-armed, well-found merchantmen.
Most of them were smaller than his own Amelia's fifty-six guns, and all of them were built for the shallow waters of the North Sea and the Baltic. Other countries—like Spain—might build larger, more heavily armed ships. There were rumors that Charles Stuart had recently decided to lay down a ship which would mount over a hundred guns, although the current restiveness in England might disorder his plans. But no one built handier ones than the Dutch. Or put finer crews aboard them. And the Dutch Navy had the first officer corps of professional seamen in European history, as well.
Seventy-four ships. Cornelisz was right; they did make a goodly sight, and he allowed himself a moment of unalloyed pleasure as he surveyed it. But the moment was brief, and he turned back to de With with a frown.
"Tell me honestly, Cornelisz," he said, his voice half-buried in the sound of wind and wave. "What do you think?"
"About what?" The taller de With looked down his proud prow of a nose with an expression of artful innocence, and Tromp grimaced.
"You know perfectly well what," he growled, and waved a hand at the ships trailing along behind Amelia, including de With's own flagship, the Brederode. "This—all of this. You and I, Richelieu and Oquendo. And these 'Americans'!"
"I think we live in wondrous times," de With replied after a moment. "Beyond that, I don't begin to understand . . . and God hasn't gotten around to explaining it to me yet."
Tromp barked a laugh and reached out to slap de With on the biceps.
