Grantville Gazette V

by Eric Flint

  "Was this because he was interested in current events?" Adducci asked rather drily.

  "It is said that each time he asked three questions. 'Are the ravens still flying over the mountain? Are the dead trees still overhanging the cliff ? Has the old woman awakened ?' Each time, the visitor answered, 'Yes, Yes, and No.' Each time, Barbarossa replied, "Then I shall have to sleep another hundred years."

  "What did each question mean?"

  "The ravens led him to battle. So if they were still at his mountain, there was no battle he needed to fight. The dead trees would blossom when it was time for him to come forth. Those who study the lore of the ancients believe that the old woman was the giant druidess who confronted Drusus and prophesied that the Romans would come to disaster, who was too old to follow Widukind's retreat, so he buried her under a pile of stones with the words, 'She will come back.' Come back to prophesy disaster to the enemies of the Germans, of course."

  "I think I've got it," Tony Adducci said. "Frederick Barbarossa is for you guys here in Thuringia what Jock Yablonski was for us in the United Mine Workers back in West Virginia."

  Count August blinked in turn.

  "Here," Tony said. "Let me tell you about Jock."

  He'd tell him about Jock, Tony thought to himself. He just wished that he didn't have to tell him about Tony Boyle at the same time. Sommersburg had found that history of the Pendergast Machine in Kansas City that Melissa Mailey stuck into the books designed to teach him about the American political system a lot too inspirational already.

  "His name was Jablonski, really, but he spelled it with a 'Y' so people wouldn't pronounce it wrong. Joseph Jablonski. Jock Yablonski."

  * * *

  Tony got up. He talked better when he was standing up, walking back and forth. "Jock was born in Pittsburgh—that was in Pennsylvania, the state just north of West Virginia. As far as geography went, it was all part of the Appalachian highlands, all part of the great coal fields. He went into the mines as a boy. His father was killed in a mine explosion. He moved up through the business side of the union. When he was only twenty-four years old, he was elected to represent fifteen thousand miners on District Five's executive board. That board made union policy. He was active in UMWA politics for nearly forty years. John L. Lewis, the greatest of the UMWA presidents, called him his right-hand man. Lewis said, 'Whenever I have trouble in the coal fields, I need him.'"

  "John L. Lewis?" Cavriani asked.

  "You can find him in all the encyclopedias if you look. He was famous," Tony shrugged off the interruption. "There wasn't any real democracy in electing the UMWA presidents. When Lewis died, an old man, one of the vice-presidents, stepped into the office, and he appointed Tony Boyle as vice-president, who succeeded in turn. Boyle was no militant—didn't confront the owners on safety issues, for example. He actually opposed the extension of benefits for black lung disease—coal miners' pneumoconiosis—by the Pennsylvania legislature, and was furious when Yablonski went over his head to get it passed. Called it insubordination. Boyle was also a manipulator—turned the districts into trusteeships, which meant that the membership wouldn't be allowed to vote for their district officers any more. He'd appoint them."

  "I take it," Count August said, "that democracy was not universally appreciated up-time. Not even in your West Virginia."

  Tony Adducci smiled grimly "You take it right. It's funny in a way. Just like you have your Barbarossa right here in Thuringia, the crisis in the conflict between Boyle and Yablonski came to a head right near Grantville. You've maybe heard people singing the song about the 'Mannington Mine Disaster.' It was at Farmington, right beyond the border of the Ring of Fire, heading east past the high school. There was a big explosion in Consolidation Coal Company's number-nine mine. Ninety-nine miners were inside; only thirteen managed to escape right away. They got eight more out later. That left the rest of them to die underground. Seventy-eight men."

  He continued to pace. "It was a disaster, but it wasn't a surprise. Safety people had known for a long time that cold weather increased the danger of methane. But there weren't any special warnings; they didn't follow the federal safety regulations, either. Boyle didn't show up until more than two days later. All dressed up, with a rose in his lapel. He didn't say anything about the safety violations; he didn't speak with the families of the victims; just went back to his office in Washington, D.C. Even praised Consolidation. After fifteen more explosions, the company sealed off the mine to cut the fires off. With the men still down there."

  "This, I take it, was not a popular move," Cavriani commented.

  "According to Jock's son Ken, Jock said, 'But that sonovabitch Boyle. With those people dead in the mine, how could that bastard stand up and praise the company's safety record the way he did?' And Jock decided run against Boyle in the next election."

  Adducci slammed his fist down on the table. "Boyle had control of the machine. Jock lost. But Tony wasn't satisfied with that. He set some goons from District Nineteen to get rid of Jock. Three months later, about, Ken wondered why his father hadn't shown up for the Inauguration Day events. He went to the house and found his father dead. And his mother and sister. Brutal. Jock had five gun shells pumped into him; his wife Margaret two; his daughter Charlotte two. They were shot in their beds. Blood all over their beds."

  "Somehow," Count August commented, "most of your books about American politics do not seem to include episodes such as this."

  "Of course they gloss over them, especially the school texts. That's why it's up to us to remember. What's that quote? 'People who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.' In short, then," Tony Adducci summed up, "Jock Yablonski led the fight against corruption in the UMWA. He fought against Tony Boyle and his machine. He didn't go away just because he was dead. A couple of months after he was murdered, people organized the Miners for Democracy. It tried to accomplish reform from inside the organization. Also worked to improve mine safety conditions. To get better health benefits for all miners.

  "Three years later, a federal judge overturned Boyle's election on the grounds of massive vote fraud. The court ordered a new election. MFD ran a slate and won. It wasn't all over like magic, then. There was vote fraud again in District Thirty-One a year later. It was five years before Boyle was convicted of arranging the murders. As they say, 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.'"

  "It is," Count August said, "a truly magnificent mythos. Worthy indeed of comparison with Barbarossa. I had not realized that you had such."

  "Myth?" Tony was shocked. "I was eight years old when Boyle's thugs shot Jock Yablonski. My daddy had taken me to lots of his rallies." He reached out across the table, extending his arm and turning his hand upwards so that the count could see his palm. "I've shaken his hand. There's a snapshot at home, somewhere, showing me doing it. I was just a little kid, four or five years old, maybe. But I shook Jock Yablonski's hand myself."

  He got up. "Dad's here in town. He's not in very good shape, but if you're willing to come and listen to him, he'll spin you yarns about Jock Yablonski for hours."

  * * *

  "Arch Moore's problem," Horace Bolender said, "was that in his last term, after 1985, he got so greedy that he didn't stay bought. He'd take a bribe from one party; then go out and take a bigger one from someone else. Now that was corruption for you—more than would fly even in West Virginia state politics. Gaston Caperton beat him in 1988. Gerry Simmons worked on Caperton's campaign. If you look at his kids, the first one was born that year and they named him Gaston C. Then the other two boys are Jay and Bobby, for Jay Rockefeller and Robert Byrd. Big time Democrats politically, those Simmonses, most of them."

  "Ah," Marcus von Drachhausen asked, "what was the final disposition of this governor's corruption?"

  "He was prosecuted and sentenced to five years in prison in 1990. If he'd been content with what he collected from 1969 to 1977, he'd have got away scot free. There's a lesson in that. 'Don't let your reach exceed your grasp or what's a
prison for,' to misquote somebody."

  "It didn't hurt Shelley, though," Norman Bell pointed out.

  "Shelley?" Drachhausen raised his eyebrows.

  "Arch's daughter, Shelley Capito, that's her married name. She got elected to the United States House of Representatives five years after Arch went to prison. That would have been ten years before the Ring of Fire happened. It was a political family, after all. Arch served in the House himself. You can't keep them down for long."

  Drachhausen understood how that worked completely. He was, after all, married to Louisa, the elder daughter of Count August von Sommersburg. The von Sommersburg line had not survived in Thuringian politics for almost four hundred years by allowing occasional setbacks to get them down.

  "One of the U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Arch came out and made some mealy-mouthed statements. Stuff like, 'Throughout the history of man, government officials have strayed from the straight and narrow. Other states have had a history in the past of having very serious corruption problems.'"

  "Haw, ain't that the truth, though," Daniel Cunningham said. "Compared to New Jersey, West Virginia smelled a lot like a rose. Though, of course, Wally Barron—he was governor back in the early sixties—ended up in prison for corruption, too. Though it took the nice Nellies ten years and he eventually went down for jury tampering connected with the trials in which he was acquitted."

  "The fact is, though," Bolender pointed out, "that there was just about always some do-gooder chasing down people and putting them on trial. That's one of the hazards of doing politics American-style, Drachhausen. I used to keep a scorecard. Between 1984 and 1993, the U.S. attorney's office convicted nearly a hundred state and local officials. That included five people pretty high up in the governor's office and four members of the state legislature. Nine sheriffs, thirteen deputy sheriffs. Several lobbyists or staffers. Busy little beavers, those federal prosecutors."

  "The immediate problem," Bell pointed out, "is that your boss, and Marcus' boss here"—he pointed to Drachhausen—is one of those do-gooder types. Personally, I think we're going to have to keep an eye on Tony Adducci. Or he's going to be racketing around yelling about rigging of state purchasing contracts. Or about taking bribes from big companies." He threw a significant look at Drachhausen. "If they can't get you for what you actually did, they'll get you for extortion, mail fraud, obstruction of justice, or tax evasion. If we all tried to run a railroad their way, nothing would ever get done."

  Bolender shook his head. "The fact remains, Arch took twenty-five thousand dollars as a political contribution on the understanding that the contributor would get a bank charter, but the corporation never got it. That's just not honest. The least you can do, when you take a bribe, is deliver the goods. Especially when you're putting on the pressure and saying that if you don't get the bribe, you'll see to it that the charter or whatever never makes it through the normal channels. It was that second part that let them get him on extortion."

  "What I find most unnerving," Marcus von Drachhausen said to Bell in private after the meeting, "is not that your officials were corruptible but that, ultimately, your prosecutors indicted them and your juries convicted them."

  "Hell, Marcus," Norman said. "Nobody ever claimed that it's a perfect world. You do your part. Keep an eye on Adducci for us. We'll do our part.

  * * *

  "Part of the problem, of course," August von Sommersburg said, "is that the county itself will become extinct at my death. As Gleichen did with the death of the last count, which has posed so many interesting administrative and legal problems for the administration of Thuringia."

  "But you have daughters," Tony Adducci protested. "One thing that I do know is that back early on, when we were still the NUS rather than the SoTF, Congress changed the law so that daughters can inherit equal with sons. You were in the House of Lords then, what's the Senate now. You voted for it yourself."

  "Louisa and Elena can now inherit my property. They cannot inherit my title and jurisdiction. There is a distinction."

  "Well, why not?"

  Count August looked a little abashed—an expression that did not sit well on the face of a man who normally resembled a portrait entitled "Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a Pirate."

  "I was a second son. While primogeniture does not generally prevail in the Germanies as it does in England, nonetheless there is a limit to how often a small principality can be subdivided and still support its rulers. When my father died in 1603, my older brother was already married to a woman of equal birth and had two sons. He and his wife were young and healthy. I had become very fond of one of my mother's ladies-in-waiting. A noblewoman, of course, but of the lower nobility. Not of equal birth. I bargained with my brother. If he would consent to a morganatic marriage for me, I would, naturally, not have children with inheritance claims. It was done. I married in 1603. All seemed well. My brother and his wife had two more sons before his death in 1607. But all four died as children, the last of them in 1608, just a year after his death. So I became count and count I still am. But my daughters cannot become reigning countesses; they do not hold the rank."

  "Your wife has been dead for years. Why didn't you remarry?"

  Count August provided him an explicit, not to say somewhat embarrassing, explanation of the medical problems that, occurring as a result of advancing age, made it impossible for him to contract a canonically valid second marriage and rendered such an attempt at marriage futile for the purpose of producing heirs in any case.

  Count August didn't seem to find it embarrassing at all.

  It occurred to Tony that any number of Grantville men with whose wives the count had flirted unashamedly over the past three years would be most relieved to hear it. Not, of course, that he would ever violate a confidence. On the other hand, this wasn't the confessional. Perhaps just a hint, in a couple of cases, wouldn't come amiss.

  Count August, however, was proceeding onward to other thoughts. Primarily those associated with his disappointment in his son-in-law, Marcus von Drachhausen. The man was turning out to be, as time went on, not to mention as the military successes of Gustavus Adolphus went on, too Saxon in his allegiance for Count August's tastes. Given the nature of the divorce laws that prevailed within the Ring of Fire, and that the laws of the Ring of Fire did not automatically assume that a wife's domicile was that of her husband, might it be possible for his elder daughter Louisa to shed this encumbrance and retain custody of their three children?

  "I know that I used my position as senator to get him appointed as your deputy in the first place," the count said rather apologetically. "But I really did not have many options two years ago. Now, however, if I can arrange a divorce for Louisa once the child she is currently expecting has been delivered . . . If we get rid of him, then so can you."

  "Might your daughter not object to this?"

  "I can't imagine why. He's closer to my age than he is to hers, not to mention that he is often personally unpleasant. We had to accept him in order to placate Saxony in the matter of a border dispute—a lawsuit that went bad, unfortunately. If she comes to Grantville to receive its superior medical services during her delivery—why, I really do not see any pressing reason that she should leave again."

  Tony advised him to consult a lawyer. Preferably two lawyers, one up-time and one down-time. He mentioned in passing that Laura Koudsi had just opened a suitable practice. Not that he would ever resort to steering, but Laura and her family were also parishioners at St. Mary's.

  * * *

  "Why don't you meet with both of them?" Inez Wiley suggested. "Together. I called Ron Koch and Carol has come to town for a meeting with Tony Adducci. That might give you a better idea. I'll see both of them at the League of Women Voters this noon, I'm sure. Carol would never miss it when she's here. Lunch is about the only time that working women can get together, so we keep the meetings short and snappy."

  Cavriani nodded. "That might be best."

  "May I mak
e a suggestion?" Inez asked.

  "Since this will profoundly affect a girl whom you have agreed to foster in your home, most certainly."

  "Bring Idelette along. So you can see whether she hits it off better with one of them than the other."

  * * *

  The people who hit it off were Carol Koch and Aura Lee Stull. They had seen one another at meetings before, but their paths had not really crossed previously. While Cavriani, Inez, and Idelette watched with fascination, they sank deeply into shop talk, digressed into the fact that they both missed jogging even though it really wasn't necessary in a world where most people walked everywhere they went, and then meandered into children.

  Although they were only two years apart in age, with Carol actually the younger, her children were several years older, so she started discussing opportunities for higher education, down-time apprenticeship possibilities, and similar matters that were clearly of enthralling interest to both women. After which they went back to shop talk and provided an entertaining version of what each knew about the adventures of the three draconian lady auditors who had taken on Franconia and triumphed over it, more or less.