1635: Music and Murder (65 page)

Benedikt laid a groschen on the table. "We have money. How much we pay depends on what wares you have."

Harold scratched his chin, thinking. "I'll want some silver—quite a bit of it for some of my stock—but maybe you boys can help me." Benedikt cocked his head and nodded for the up-timer to continue. "I want some breeding stock—dogs—fighting dogs, you understand?"

"Like they use in bear baiting?" Benedikt asked.

"What's bear baiting?"

The two brothers looked at each other with obvious astonishment. Benedikt turned back to Harold. "Bear baiting? Where a bear is chained to a post, and a pack of dogs is loosed upon him? It is good sport."

"Chained?" Harold went beyond astonishment. "Chained how?"

"By the neck, or by a hind leg. There is much cheering, and betting on whether the dogs kill the bear or the bear kills the dog."

Thrills were running up and down Harold's spine. "You're serious? They really do this? Where at?" He swallowed spittle.

"They did not do this in the up-time?"

"Are you kidding? I've seen dog fights and cock fights, but never anything like what you're talking about. The animal rights folks would have had to change their pants, they'd have been so upset. The old ladies in the churches would have screamed so loudly if something like that show was put on, the government would have shut it down so fast your head would be spinning. They'd have thrown everyone they found at it in jail, and lost the keys to the locks."

A bear-dog fight! Harold was salivating. It would be like something out of the old Roman days, he thought. Man oh man, he had to get in on this!

"So, uh, you boys know someplace where this happens?"

Benedikt got a knowing look in his eyes, like he knew he'd hooked a fish. Harold didn't care. If they could take him to a place where fights like that happened . . .

"This is not our first time in Magdeburg, Herr Baxter." Benedikt's voice was smooth. "There is a bear pit outside the city. We know where it is." He turned to Ebert and rattled something else off too fast for Harold to follow. Ebert stood and went to the bar. "Ebert will see if the bar man knows when a fight will be."

When he came back, Ebert rattled off some fast words in their version of German that Harold didn't catch. Benedikt asked a question, and Ebert nodded. Benedikt turned back to the up-timer with a smile that bordered on sly. "Fortune smiles on us. Tonight, Herr Baxter; there is a fight planned tonight."

****

Byron and Gotthilf had been searching for Albrecht Lang for a couple of days now, and even the normally ebullient Gotthilf was starting to show some signs of irritation. They walked along this morning, hands in pockets, with none of their normal conversation. For lack of a better destination, they were headed to the street where Byron had first seen the man, with the intention of once again questioning everyone in sight.

"I suppose that," Gotthilf finally said, "if nothing else, we might make ourselves so great a nuisance that someone will say something just to get rid of us."

"That's possib . . . " Byron stopped in mid-word and grabbed Gotthilf by the shoulder. "There he is—straight ahead and off to the left, next to that vegetable cart."

It took a moment for other people to move out of the way enough for Gotthilf to spot their target. "I see him. He looks like a rat."

Byron chuckled, leaned over and murmured, "I'll go around the crowd and come up on the other side of him. Count to a hundred, then move toward him."

One of the things that still sometimes amazed Gotthilf about the up-timer lieutenant was that he could slide through a crowd of people like a knife through water—barely a ripple showing his passage. He wasn't sure if it was an up-time thing, or a tall person thing, or maybe just a Byron thing, although if he had to pick he'd probably take the last. But after a moment, he shrugged and started counting.

" . . . 98, 99, 100." Gotthilf tugged at his jacket, patted the pockets where his new badge and his pistol rested, and started toward the object of their search. "Herr Lang?"

"Yes?" An obsequious smile appeared on the pointed face of the peddler. "How may I help you, Herr . . . ?"

Gotthilf pulled his badge out and showed it to Lang. "
Polizei
." Before he could get another word out, Lang whirled and started to run . . . right into Byron, who grabbed him, spun him around and hauled one hand up behind him until his elbow was almost touching his shoulder blade.

"Herr Lang," the up-timer pronounced, "we have some questions for you. Now, we can do this one of two ways: you can come with us politely and we'll buy you a beer afterwards, or we arrest you on suspicion of selling stolen merchandise and you can talk to us in the magistrate's court. What's it going to be?"

"I . . . I know n-nothing," Lang stammered.

"You are wrong," Gotthilf purred with a stark smile. His voice dropped to a murmur. "You know about Harold Baxter, and you really, really want to tell us all about him." Lang turned white, and would have dropped had Byron not been holding him up. "So let's go find that beer and you can tell us what you know."

****

Harold sat straight up in bed, then almost fell back again as someone drove a hot railroad spike through his temples. His stomach was calm, for which he would have thanked God if he believed in him. But his head felt as if someone was using the inside of it as an anvil to pound out horseshoes. He stood and stumbled to where his bush jacket hung from a peg in a wall. From one pocket he pulled a pill bottle, from which he shook a couple of APCs into his hand. Another of the many pockets produced a flat Jim Beam bottle with perhaps a finger's worth of amber liquid in it. The pills went into his mouth, followed by the last of the whiskey. Holding the bottle up in front of him, Harold said, "So long, Jim. I'm going to miss you." He screwed the cap back on the bottle and set it on the table. Something else that could be sold.

It wasn't long before Harold felt half-way human again. What did he drink last night? The memory came to him: oh, yeah—shots of gin chased with ale. He remembered drinking Ebert and Benedikt under the table after the bear fight.

The bear fight! His normally fulsome vulgar vocabulary failed him at the thought of what he had seen last night. The bear pit was really a pit, a big hole that had been dug in the ground, with seats that Harold could only call bleachers built up on both sides of it. Obviously, this pit had been here for quite a while and had regular enough action if the owners went to the extent of building the seating. A beer keg to one side and some guy selling sausages on skewers passed for a concession stand. Harold approved of the owners' smarts, and he was more than a little envious that they could operate so freely in the here and now. Well, it was going to be his turn soon.

The fight, now—well, that was the most fun he'd ever had with his clothes on, better even than the last time he beat a woman into submission until she let him do whatever he wanted with her. The thrill of watching a dozen dogs tear into that bear and the bear tear back was way beyond sex. The blood flowed until much of the bottom of the pit was littered with dog corpses and red mud.

It ended finally. The bear's ears were bloody ribbons, his front paws were mangled and his sides and back legs had had strips of hide torn off of them. Two dogs were left, both of which could have been ancestral stock of Rottweilers from the looks of them. They danced in and out, until finally the bear charged to the limit of the chain locked onto his left hind leg. That quickly it was over. The bear fell, and the two dogs were at his throat in black and tan blurs. Moments later, the weakening roars and bawls of the bear fell silent, to be replaced by the cheers of the crowd—those of them who hadn't lost money by betting on the bear, that is.

Harold came back to the present, grinning for all he was worth. He knew what he wanted to do, now. He wanted to buy some breeding stock from the guy who owned the two big black and tan almost-Rottweilers and breed some dogs. Give him two years with good stock and the training he could give the resulting pups, and he could start cleaning up.

Then he remembered what was supposed to happen this morning. He looked at his watch . . . only 9 a.m., more or less. Good, he still had time to get his stuff together before the Schiffer brothers showed up. Harold grabbed his jacket and headed out the door of his room.

It wasn't far to the goldsmith's shop. A few minutes later Harold stepped into the front door of Master Alaricus Glöckner. He was met by Dieter, the master's son and oldest journeyman.

"Good morrow to you, Herr Baxter."

"Hi, Dieter. I need to pick up my footlocker."

"Pick up?"

"I'm taking it with me."

"Ah. A moment, please." He turned to an apprentice and murmured something that sent him scurrying for the back of the shop. "Will you be bringing it back?"

"Probably not."

Dieter frowned a little. Harold could see that he was sorry to lose the storage fees they had been assessing to keep his case in the safety of their strongroom. "Well, let me figure up the final charges, then."

The apprentice lugged the footlocker through the back door in the middle of the bargaining over the storage fee. Harold was feeling so good that he only put up a token resistance and paid over a silver pfennig, receiving two broken bits back as change. Just as he bent over to grab the footlocker handle, the back door opened again and a girl entered the shop.

"Didi, did you . . . " She turned pale, stopped and placed a hand on the wall.

"Did I what, Rosina?"

Harold straightened with the footlocker in hand, smiled at the girl and walked out of the shop. His smile broadened as people stepped out of his way.

****

Gotthilf watched as Byron pounded on the door of the room for the second time. Still no response. The up-timer looked around. "Doesn't look like he's here. You know the way to that goldsmith Lang mentioned?"

"Glöckner. I think so."

"Let's go, then."

****

"Do we go see Herr Baxter now, Benedikt?"

"Soon, Ebert."

"And will he give us the pretty things?"

"One way or another, Ebert. One way or another."

****

Gotthilf stopped in the middle of the street.

"What's wrong?" Byron raised an eyebrow.

"I turned the wrong way at that last corner. We need to go back that way."

The two men reversed direction.

"I thought you said you knew the way."

"I do, but I haven't come at it from this direction before."

"Where's a map when you need one?"

"Oh, shut up."

****

Harold set the footlocker on his bed, then reached over to close the door. He pulled a couple of keys from his pocket, opened the padlocks, and threw open the lid to the footlocker. A quick check verified that everything was still there; all the pieces he needed to tempt the Schiffer brothers. Closing the lid, he snapped the padlocks back and put the keys back in his pocket.

The bush jacket went back up on its peg. Harold stretched, then scratched his chin. The rasp of stubble and beard irritated him all of a sudden, so he decided to shave. It took a moment to unlock the small bag he had chained to the bed frame and pull out his soap and shaving mirror.

The mirror got set up on the mantle over the small fireplace. He poured a small amount of water in the basin on the table, and lathered up enough suds to cover his face. It wasn't as good as shaving cream, but it worked. Harold pulled the straight razor out of his pants pocket, opened it, and lightly thumbed the edge. Still sharp from the last time he had worked it over, so he walked over to the mantle and began to shave.

He mused as he scraped the blade over his cheeks, flicking the suds and bristles against the nearby wall. The razor and the mirror were all he had left of his grandfather, the man who had practically raised him. Old Grandpa Horace had been a hard man, but he'd made sure that Harold had grown up strong. The old man seemed to live forever, but when he died, all that Harold had wanted from his effects was the razor and the mirror. He remembered watching Grandpa shave on Saturdays: the careful stropping of the razor, the ritual of mixing the shaving soap in the mug and brushing it on the sunken cheeks and knobby chin, the watchful examination of the face in the small mirror and careful movements of the hand with the razor. He wouldn't say that he missed the old coot, but something had left his life when they put that pine box in the ground back behind the hill country house where he'd lived and died.

The mirror was very old now, and the silver backing was clouding and pulling away from the glass. Harold wouldn't use anything else though. Sometimes he thought he saw Grandpa Horace looking back at him from that tarnished image with an expression like those he used to have when he would take that razor strop to Harold. Sometimes he shivered, sometimes he laughed, but always there was a cold feeling to his spine.

There was a noise behind him. In the cloudy glass he saw the unlocked door of his room open—
stupid mistake, Harold
, he thought he heard his grandpa say—and Death step through.

****

Benedikt looked at the body of Harold Baxter lying at his feet, and cursed roundly and soundly and at great length. "Dead, just like Vogler," he said through clenched teeth, "and just as useless to us." He looked to where Ebert was holding up the length of copper rod, examining the blood and hair on it with every evidence of interest. "Ebert!" Startled, his brother looked to him. "Drop that."

"Okay." The rod clanged to the floor.

The room was a mess. Some of the furniture had been overturned; filth was everywhere. Benedikt looked around. "He said he would have the merchandise here this morning. Now where . . . " His eyes lit on the strange chest sitting on the bed. The smile that had started to blossom turned into a thunderous frown instead when he saw the locks on the chest. They had to be up-time work. A close look confirmed that, and also confirmed that they would be hard-pressed to open them. The chest, on the other hand, looked to be less strong.