They all hushed at the knock on the door and kept quiet while Trudi directed the townhouse servants in laying their private dinner. There was some surprise when Trudi had them set it up as a buffet and informed them that she would handle the service alone.
* * *
The girls were in a suite of four rooms, none very large, in one wing of the von Liechtenstein townhouse. Judy wondered just who had been bumped out of the rooms to give them this much space. As it was, the six of them, including Sarah, shared three bedrooms, and this salon would be used for any meals they took away from the family and as an office.
“You know,” Susan said, after she’d filled her own plate and sat down, “I don’t know how anybody stands never having any privacy. From what we’ve learned over the last few years, I don’t know why everyone isn’t stark raving mad from being surrounded all the time. And Vienna is more crowded than anyplace I’ve ever seen.”
“You don’t miss what you’ve never had,” Trudi pointed out. “Even during the worst years, I always had a maid in my room at night.”
“You lived alone after your grandfather died for too long, Susan,” Judy said. In truth, Judy worried about Susan quite a bit. Her experiences in Grantville, due to the gossip about her tramp of a mother, had soured Susan on a lot of things. Men, for instance. While Susan was perfectly happy to deal with anyone in a business sense, she kept any male at arm’s length in a personal sense. Everything Susan did was directed at business and making more and more money.
It ticked Vicky off for anyone to worry about her but that didn’t stop Judy. Vicky was a steam roller. All push and no finesse. She was a gun-toting steam roller these days, too, as well as being in mourning for Bill Magen. “Yea, though I walk through the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, ’cause I’m the meanest bitch in the valley” used to be Vicky’s motto. After Bill’s death during the Dreeson assassination, Vicky hadn’t said it as much. But that worried Judy even more. And now, with the Catholic church seeming to disintegrate before their eyes in the last few weeks, Judy was really worried about how Vicky was going to handle it.
And Gabrielle was here, planning to attend a down-time medical university. Which Judy thought wasn’t going to be a lot of fun.
“When will all our stuff get here, again?” Judy asked. “Is it next week, or the week after?”
“Two weeks from tomorrow,” Millicent said. “If they don’t have too much trouble on the road or with the barges. Though I have no idea where we’re going to put it all.”
“You can put a bunch of it out by the race track,” Hayley offered. “We’ve got more space out there and it’s turning into a decent little town on its own. And we’ve got houses built out there, too.”
“So what’s the situation, Hayley?” Susan asked. “I’ve been reading your reports, and it looks like you’re spending more than you’re making.”
“If you don’t count the IOUs,” Hayley said. “We’ve got a whole bunch of them.”
“Are they any good?” Susan asked. “A pile of IOUs means nothing if they don’t get paid off.”
“I really don’t know what’s wrong,” Hayley admitted. “We make good products, we’re selling them at a fair price, but if we weren’t giving credit we’d be out of business.”
“I may know what’s going on,” Judy said. “Sarah’s been talking about it. Austria-Hungary is broke. Not just the emperor. The whole frigging country.”
“What do you mean?” Hayley asked.
“You’ll have to ask Sarah.” Judy shrugged. “I don’t really understand it.”
“Hayley, other than that little problem, how’s the situation?” Millicent asked.
“Dire, but if Sarah can fix the broke problem and if the Catholic church doesn’t implode and take Austria-Hungary with it, there could be some major opportunities. Another problem is that corruption isn’t just common, it’s institutionalized. The local bureaucrats aren’t paid at all. They work for tips.”
“That’s true in Germany, too,” Millicent said. “At least sometimes.”
“Yes, but Germany was enjoying the benefits of fifteen years of war.” Hayley gave the group a sardonic look.
“Benefits?” Trudi asked. There hadn’t been much in the way of benefits in her experience of war.
“Sorry, Trudi. But aside from-or perhaps because of-the rape and pillage, war tends to loosen things up.”
“I’m willing to forgo my traditional bribe for allowing you to do business in exchange for your not shooting me.” Trudi nodded. “Or not taking your troops out of the way so someone else can burn down your town. Which was the subtle stick you up-timers used.”
“I don’t mind tipping for good service,” Judy said.
“Neither do I,” said Hayley. “But no one is offering to burn down Vienna, so we can’t tip them by stopping it. Besides, a lot of the power structure here in Vienna seems intent on receiving bribes for screwing us over. And that I do mind. But unless the Ottomans decide to attack, I don’t see what’s going to get the burghers and the Hofbefreiten to forgo their traditional kickbacks. And there is enough resentment of up-timers and enough just plain old fear of competition that they are being completely unreasonable anywhere they can.”
“The Hofbefreiten?” Vicky asked.
“The upper crust, the Nob Hill crowd, ‘They of Vienna’. . you get the idea. The Liechtenstein family are members of the nobility, sort of the Hofbefreiten, because they are part of the court. The city council and the guild masters are a competing but intermixed power structure and they both want bribes to get anything done. Partly it’s who gets invited to which parties. At the same time, if you’re not on the right party list, it’s really hard to do business above a pretty meager level.
“Rob Sanderlin and Dad’s position as a master craftsmen in unique crafts puts us in the Hofbefreiten branch and since Race Track City is outside Vienna, effectively the whole town is Hofbefreiten in a way. Which doesn’t make the burghers love us. There are some things I could have done on my own in town but with the burghers locking everyone not a member of the club out, it would have caused a fuss. Mostly SFIC has worked out of town.”
“So how do we break it open?” Vicky asked.
“I’m not sure we can. There’s another problem.”
“What’s that?” Judy asked.
“There is a real possibility of government seizures of anything we do. We have some political clout because the emperor really likes the cars. . but it only goes so far. The Hofbefreiten and the burghers are holding a lot of royal debt, most of it overdue. And even the Hofbefreiten proper, the ones in Vienna, aren’t all that thrilled with Race Track City. Unless Sarah’s Karl can come through with some counter pressure, His Imperial Majesty might keep the lenders happy by shutting us down.”
“So where’d they get the money to loan the emperor?” Millicent asked.
“Vienna has the only bridge over the Danube for a good distance in either direction. It has been able to siphon off a fair chunk of the Danube trade and the cross-river traffic as well. Locally, it’s wine country.”
“Is the wine any good?” Vicky asked.
“It’s white.” Hayley shrugged. “Other than that, I couldn’t say.”
“Barbarians!” Vicky complained. “I’m surrounded by barbarians.”
“Do you still have ‘The Bottle’?” Hayley asked.
“She does,” Trudi said. “I saw to its unpacking this afternoon.”
“That may just be a criminal offense,” Hayley told them, apparently trying to sound worried but not making a very good job of it. “There is a law against importing wine. It’s mainly aimed at the Hungarian wine trade but. .” Then she continued with the lecture. “Look, Vienna grew up taxing a cut of all the traffic on or crossing the Danube. They have lots of practice at figuring just how much they can skim. That provided them excellent training for becoming a city of government functionaries who know just how much they can charge in kickbacks without making the project obviously unprofitable. They’ll charge just enough so that the merchant doesn’t go the eighty miles out of his way to get to the next crossing. Or so that the petitioner to the emperor doesn’t complain about the bribes he had to pay to get in. Except they are afraid of the up-timer innovations and they don’t have any good measuring stick to figure how much the bribe should be. Put the two together and you get an entrenched bureaucracy that consistently overcharges.