1636 The Devil's Opera (Ring of Fire) (3 page)

Gotthilf looked over the railing of the bridge at the water moving sluggishly through the moat. Dark water; it looked very cold. He shivered and moved on, feet crunching in the gravel after he stepped off the bridge.

Only the busiest streets in the exurb of Greater Magdeburg were graveled. Most of them were bare dirt. One thing that Gotthilf did appreciate from the cold was that the ground was frozen most of the time, reducing mud to solid. He still had to watch his step, because an ankle turned in a frozen rut could hurt like crazy, but at least he didn’t have to scrape the muck and mire off his boots like he did in the spring and fall.

There were more people on the streets now, as the sun rose higher in the eastern sky behind him. The bakers had been up for hours, of course, and he swung by one to grab a fresh roll for breakfast, since he hadn’t felt up to facing his mother across a table that morning. He munched on that as he walked, watching everyone walking by.

Construction workers of every stripe were moving briskly about; carpenters, masons, and general laborers were in demand for the new hospital expansion, as well as several other projects in the city, not to mention the navy yard. Several women were out selling broadsheets and newspapers, including the shrill-voiced hawk-faced young woman who handed out Committee of Correspondence broadsheets in that part of town.

But still no cabs. He shook his head. Never a cab when you wanted one.

A hand landed on Gotthilf’s shoulder, startling him. He looked up to see his partner, Byron Chieske, settling into place alongside him.

Gotthilf had to look up at Byron. In truth, he had to look up at most adults. He wasn’t very tall; not that he was a dwarf, or anything like that. Nor was he thin or spindly. He was a solid chunk of young man; he just wasn’t very tall.

Byron, on the other hand, was tall, even for an up-timer. He stood a bit over six feet, was well-muscled, and had large square hands. His clean-shaven face was a bit craggy in feature, but not of a nature that would be called ugly.

“Yo, Gotthilf,” Byron said. “Ready for the meeting with the captain this morning?” The captain would be Bill Reilly, another up-timer. Byron was a lieutenant. The two of them had been seconded in early 1635 to the Magdeburg city watch to lead in transforming that organization from what amounted to a group of gossips, busybodies, and bullies to an actual police force on the model of an up-time city police group. They had both been involved in police and security work up-time; they both had at least some education and training in the work; and they had both been in an MP detachment from the State of Thuringia-Franconia army that was stationed in Magdeburg at the time, so they had been available.

“As ready as I’m going to be,” Gotthilf muttered, “considering we have nothing of worth to report.”

“Yeah, Bill may chew on us a bit,” Byron conceded as they walked down the street toward the station building. “But he knows we can’t make bricks without straw. No information, no leads, no results.”

Gotthilf snorted. Byron looked at him with his trademark raised eyebrow, and the down-timer snorted again, before saying, “You know, for someone who professes to not darken the door of a church, you certainly know your way around Biblical allusions.”

Byron chuckled. “Oh, I spent a lot of my childhood in Sunday School, Gotthilf. I may have drifted away from it some as an adult, but a lot of it stuck.” He shoved his hands in his coat pockets, and grinned down at his partner.

Gotthilf grinned back at Byron, who seemed to be in a garrulous mood this morning—by the up-timer’s standards, anyway. Byron was ordinarily one who wouldn’t say two words where one would do, and wouldn’t say one where a gesture or facial expression would serve instead. So to get five sentences out of him in as many minutes bordered on being voluble.

As they stepped on down the street, Gotthilf’s mind recalled their first meeting, ten months ago. He had trouble now even remembering why he had joined the watch; something to do with wanting to do something to prove to his father he was more than just a routine clerk, if he recalled rightly. He had been smarting from another comparison to his brother Nikolaus, studying law at Jena. Not that his father was impressed with the city watch, either, as it turned out.

On the day that he met Byron, Gotthilf was the youngest member of the city watch, the newest, and possibly the angriest. He hadn’t really wanted to be paired with the lieutenant, and he wasn’t of a mind that the over-tall up-timer had anything to teach him or anything to bring to the city watch. But their first case—one involving the murder of a young girl and a young blind lad involved in petty thievery—had opened his eyes to what the
Polizei
could do.

So now, even at his young age of twenty-three, Gotthilf was an ardent supporter of the captain and the lieutenant, having quit his clerking position and thrown himself into the job. He was now one of three detective sergeants on the force, partnered with Byron, and still one of the youngest men in the
Polizei.

And that and a pfennig will get me a cup of coffee at Walcha’s Coffee House,
he gibed at himself.

The two men walked into the station house, hung their coats on pegs in the hallway, and headed for their desks. They flipped through the papers and folders lying there, then looked at each other.

“See the captain?” Gotthilf asked.

“Yep,” Byron responded.

They headed for Reilly’s office on the second floor. Byron took the lead.

“Chieske, Hoch.” The captain set down his pencil, folded his hands on top of the document he was reading, and nodded toward a couple of chairs a bit to the side of his desk. “Have a seat. Any progress on that floater case?”

“The one the riverfront watch pulled out of the water a few days ago who looked like he’d been run through a meat tenderizer before he got dumped in the river?”

“That’s the one. The floating corpse who was identified as…” Reilly picked up a different document from his desk. “…one Joseph Delt, common laborer.” His eyebrows arched.

“Officially, nothing to say,” Gotthilf began.

Reilly nodded. “And unofficially?”

“Nothing,” Byron responded with a shrug before Gotthilf could speak.

The captain steepled his hands in front of his face. “Why? Or why not?”

“No leads, Captain,” Chieske responded.

“Make some. Start flipping over rocks and talking to bugs and snakes if you have to, but get me some results, and soon. You know as well as I do what’s going on here, Byron. It’s not as if American history wasn’t full of it.”

Seeing Sergeant Hoch’s quizzical expression, the police chief elaborated. “Magdeburg’s a boom town full of immigrants, with more coming in every day. We had a lot of cities like that in America back up-time. It went on for centuries. Certain things always came with the phenomenon, and one of them was the rise of criminal gangs. I’ll bet you any sum you want—don’t take me up on it, I’ll clean you out—that what we’re seeing here is one or more crime bosses trying to establish themselves in the city. These men being killed are the ones who were too stubborn, too stupid—or just couldn’t learn—to keep their mouths shut.”

He leaned back in his seat. “There’s no way to completely stop it from happening, but we need to at least keep it under control. Because if we don’t and it gets out of hand, sooner or later the city’s Committee of Correspondence will decide it has to crack down on the criminals. I don’t want that, Mayor Gericke doesn’t want that, you don’t want that—hell, the Fourth of July Party and even the CoC itself doesn’t want it. But it’ll happen, sure as hell.”

Gotthilf made a face. The leader of Magdeburg’s Committee of Correspondence was a man named Gunther Achterhof. Like most people in today’s Magdeburg, he was an immigrant. He’d arrived from Brandenburg with his younger sister, the two of them being the only survivors of a family ravaged by the mercenary armies that had passed through the region.

Gunther had also arrived with a sack full of the ears and noses of stray mercenary soldiers he’d killed along the way. He was an honest man, but one whose concept of justice was as razor sharp as the knife he’d used to kill and mutilate those soldiers. If he unleashed the CoC’s armed squads on the city’s criminal element, they’d certainly bring order to the streets—but they’d also shred any semblance of due process and reasonable legality in the doing.

As it stood, there was already a fair amount of tension between the CoC and the city’s fledgling police force. If these kinds of killings continued with no one apprehended, the CoC’s existing skepticism concerning the value of a duly-appointed police force would just be confirmed.

“You got it, Captain,” Byron said.

“Go on,” Reilly waved a hand. “Go encourage the good citizens of Magdeburg to be good citizens.”

Gotthilf followed Byron up the hall, down the stairs and out the main entrance of the building, grabbing their coats on the way. He caught up with his partner outside, waving for their driver to bring up the light horse-drawn cart they used for transportation.

“So what are we going to do?” Gotthilf asked as the cart pulled up.

“Dig some more,” Byron replied tersely. Gotthilf followed his partner onto the cart, and they left to begin digging.

* * *

The city of Magdeburg in the year 1635 was unique throughout Europe—throughout the world, actually. There was no place like it.

On the one hand, it was old. The city name originally meant “Mighty Fortress,” and historical records indicated that it was founded in the year 805 by none other than the Emperor Charlemagne. Histories of the Germanies, whether contemporary or from the up-time library in Grantville, mentioned the city often. It had many connections with Holy Roman Emperors over the years. It became the See of the Archbishop of Magdeburg in 968, and its first patent and charter was given in 1035. It was even one of the easternmost members of the Hanseatic League. And Martin Luther had spent time there, beginning in 1524, which perhaps explained the subsequent dogged Protestantism of the city.

On the other hand, Magdeburg was new. The city had been besieged by the army of the Holy Roman Empire from November 1630 until May 20, 1631. The siege culminated in the Sack of Magdeburg, in which over 20,000 residents were massacred. Over ninety percent of the city was destroyed by fire, and what little wasn’t burned was ransacked, looted, plundered, and pillaged. Magdeburg was devastated; prostrate.

Then came the Ring of Fire, with the arrival of Grantville, West Virginia, from the future. And everything changed.

Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden and champion of the Protestant cause, connected with the up-timers from Grantville, and set in motion a train of events that gave birth—or rebirth, if you prefer—to the modern Magdeburg of 1635.

Pre-Ring of Fire Magdeburg was small, by up-timer standards. The area within the city walls was about half a square mile. It was shaped something like a right triangle, with the long side of the triangle running parallel to the river Elbe, and the hypotenuse side running from northeast to southwest. The normal population of the city had been about 25,000 people. That boosted to nearly 35,000 during the siege, as everyone from the surrounding regions who had a contracted right for shelter and sanctuary moved into the city when the HRE army approached.

Magdeburg in 1635 was a very different creature. Gustavus Adolphus, now proclaimed emperor, had decreed that the city would be the capitol of what became the United States of Europe. Otto Gericke was appointed mayor of the city, and was given imperial instruction to make Magdeburg a capitol city of which the emperor could be proud. And things just kind of mushroomed from there.

Instigated by the up-timers, north of the city were the naval yards, where the iron-clad and timber-clad ships of the USE Navy had been constructed. There wouldn’t be any more ironclads in the foreseeable future, and the timberclad construction had slowed down considerably. But the yard was still working and its work force was still fully employed. The navy yard’s machine tools and facilities were being turned into the USE’s major weapons manufacturing center and were now working around the clock. In theory, that was to provide the army fighting the Poles with the weapons they needed. But nobody was oblivious to the fact that those same weapons could easily be used to defend Magdeburg itself, in the event the current crisis turned into an all-out civil war.

South of the city was the coal gas plant, surrounded by a constellation of factories that were powered by the plant’s output. All of these operations drew hungry unemployed and underemployed men from all over the Germanies. So, since early 1634, the city had become home to a horde of navy men, factory workers and skilled craftsmen. Inevitably, construction workers had followed to provide homes for the work force and facilities for the employers. All this gave Magdeburg a certain flavor, a “blue-collar” spirit, as some of the Grantvillers called it, which was certainly fostered by the Committees of Correspondence. It also made for interesting times.

But workers, and their families, need places to sleep, and food to eat, so rooming houses and bakeries and such began to grow up to the west of the old city. And it turned out that the big businesses along the river side needed smaller businesses to make things for them, so various workshops began to appear in the western districts.

By late 1635, Greater Magdeburg occupied several square miles along the riverside and to the west. No one had a good estimate as to how many people lived in the new city because of the constant influx of new residents, but the Committees of Correspondence had recently told the mayor that they thought it was approaching one hundred thousand. Germans, Swedes, Dutch, Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, even the odd Austrian, Bavarian, or Romanian could be found in the city streets or swinging a hammer at the Navy yard.

A population of that size would naturally have a leavening of rough-edged men. Hard men, one might call them, who would be more inclined to follow the ways of Cain than of Abel. Mayor Gericke realized in late 1634 that the city watch of the old city was not able to deal with the influx of these men, so in early 1635 he requisitioned a couple of Grantvillers with police experience from the up-timer units contributed to the USE army to try to mold the city watch into something that could provide up-time style civic protection and police services to the whole city.