Otherwise, Simon Jones, the minister of my church back home, came through town, with that hippie Tom Stone's two younger boys and an Italian woman painter, on his way back to Grantville. Funny company for him to be keeping. But I expect you've already heard that.
Best wishes,
Nathan Prickett
"I'm not here to tell you how to put your men through drill," Nathan said firmly. The Frankfurt militia officers were a touchy bunch, a lot of them. Not the captain, who was the head guy, but several of the lieutenants.
"I'm a veteran, yeah. One three-year enlistment from 1986 through 1989. Not an officer. I went in right out of high school, because I couldn't afford to start college right away. We were in the middle of an economic bust in Grantville, the year I graduated."
Someone asked a question.
"College? I guess you'd call it your 'arts faculty' at a university like Jena. Or a 'philosophy faculty.' But I'd planned to major in engineering, or something technical."
The man nodded. "Leiden," he said.
Nathan didn't catch the reference, so he kept going. "Never did get to college. By the time I got out of the army, I'd decided to start my own business, so I took a job to start saving money." He looked around the room. "Any questions? Is that clear?"
No more questions.
"Okay, one three-year enlistment. 'That's all, folks,' just like the cartoons say. I've been in the National Guard ever since, but that's weekend warrior stuff."
More technical terms to explain.
"Look, the main point is. You keep on teaching your troops to fight. I teach them how to take care of the new guns the city council has paid out their good tax money to buy." He looked around the room again. "Any questions? Is that clear?"
He'd learned the hard way, his first few trips over to Frankfurt for Ruben Blumroder, that "Any questions?" and "Is that clear?" were his best friends.
He hadn't expected Jason Waters to come tracking him down at the tavern where he ate dinner, but here he came. So he nodded. The two of them consumed stew and bread in silence for a while. Waters broke it.
"Ever run across a guy named Wackernagel?"
"The courier?"
"Um-hmmn. Guess you have, if you know his name."
"Read it in the paper. He's being the friendly local guide for Henry Dreeson's trip this fall."
"Yeah, that one."
"Never actually met him. Haven't gotten back to Grantville much these last couple of years."
"He works out of Frankfurt."
They both went back to dipping rye bread in the stew juice. That was about the only way to make it chewable, once it got stale.
Waters broke the silence again. "He's got a brother-in-law who runs a print shop here. Name's Neumann."
"Haven't met him." Nathan figured that he had the home court advantage and wasn't about to give it up. If Waters wanted something, he'd have to come right out and ask for it.
"Higgenbottom's run into him several times."
"Haven't seen much of Wayne since I got here."
"You run across some pretty odd people in Frankfurt. It's big enough that they can sort of keep themselves under the radar, if they're careful. Not like a village, where you've only got a couple hundred people and they all know each other."
"Odd, as in peculiar? Or odd, as in this could get to be a problem?"
"Plenty of the first around. Harmless religious nuts of various persuasions. Wayne's thinking that there's some of the second kind. Religious nuts of the ayatollah persuasion."
Nathan nodded.
"Jessica-sister of Bill Porter over at the power plant-divorced Wayne last year. He worked in Morgantown all his life. Managed the campus mail system for WVU. Doesn't belong to a church in Grantville. Wasn't born there. Didn't go to school there."
"So?" Nathan hated having to put that question mark at the end of his words. It amounted to giving up points. But Waters was a reporter. A word professional, so to speak. He'd probably had whole classes in turning conversations around on the people he talked to.
"There's at least one of the ayatollah bunches that's gotten hold of their own duplicating machine, Neumann says. One of the Vignelli machines. Got it used from Freytag when he bought a new model. They've been on the market for more than a year now-the machines, I mean. A trickle at first. Now it's a pretty wide stream. They're coming out of Tyrol, mostly, but there are already some knock-offs on the market."
Nathan gave up and asked a straight question. "What does that mean?"
"It means they're funded. The group of would-be ayatollahs, I mean. And well-funded. Even second-hand, a Vignelli will set you back a couple thousand dollars. The price will be coming down, of course, but for now, it's almost entirely print shops that are buying them. For small runs, they're cheaper than setting type."
"And?"
"Higgenbottom thinks somebody ought to know. And since you're Wes Jenkins' son-in-law and he's still the grand pooh-bah over in Fulda and since they had a problem with those pamphlets a while back…"
"You're nominating me for the fall guy."
"That's pretty much it."
At least they'd picked on him because of Wes and didn't know anything about his relationship to Francisco Nasi. Nathan picked up his pen.
Dear Don Francisco.
He'd better write to Wes, too. Just in case Waters or Higgenbottom asked about it, some day. CYA. Always.
Grantville
Jacques-Pierre Dumais decided that he would talk to Velma Hardesty at the 250 Club, sitting at a table right out in the open. Why not? Veda Mae Haggerty had introduced them to one another in public. Madame Hardesty was upon occasion a waitress there. Duck and Big Dog drank there; he worked for them. It was natural enough for him to come in with them, at first, and then to come back. The regulars didn't object, because the Garbage Guys had all vouched for him.
If you went slinking around, someone was eventually bound to notice that you were slinking.
As far as Jacques-Pierre was concerned, Grantville's greatest contribution to the education of seventeenth century spies was that delightful couple, Boris Badenoff and Natasha. He had transcribed every episode of the tapes featuring the Russian pair, the squirrel, and the moose, listening to them over and over. With sketches of the best scenes, after he had learned to use the "pause" button. He sent them back to Henri de Rohan for use in training. A splendid object lesson in how not to gather intelligence. Himself, he preferred to go places where he had some reason to be and speak openly with people who also had some logical reason to be there.
He stopped to examine the place carefully on his way in. The 250 Club had missed out on most of Grantville's ongoing redevelopment. The building itself backed up to a rise. Above it, the hill rose fairly high. There wasn't really anything behind the building except a narrow walkway, because it was too close to the slope. That cut had been made, Duck had told him, nearly a half-century before the Ring of Fire.
The front of the building was a dull red. The back was painted in a faded dark green, a kind of paint that weathered, but did not peel. Part of the walkway had always been kept open to allow the beer delivery man to run his hand truck to the back door. It was hard to tell the color in places. Before the Ring of Fire, everywhere there wasn't junk, generations of beer deliverymen and meter readers had rubbed against the paint and sworn over damaging their clothes. The rest of the walkway used to be blocked by a pile of old refrigerators, broken bar furniture, and other miscellaneous junk that eventually merged into the former scrapyard if a person went that far. The junk was gone now. The Garbage Guys had paid Ken Beasley enough to make it worth his while to let them have it. The color of the paint was a little brighter where the junk had protected it.