Grantville Gazette - Volume V (14 page)

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 make 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.

"I have been lonely, a little," Carol was saying. "Almost all my friends were over in Fairmont, in the church there, and clubs. Or wives of men we knew through Ron's work, though those were more acquaintances. Pleasant to see, now and then, but not really friends. We hadn't had our house in the country here very long before the Ring of Fire and I'd never really had any reason to come west, over to Grantville. The only thing that kept me sane, that first year, was that Ron is really my best friend and always has been, ever since we met."

That led to a discussion of their meeting while she was an exchange student in Germany, the fact that they had known right away, "um, about ten minutes later," that they really must marry each other just as fast as they could persuade their respective families that it was a good idea, the negotiations with the families that took quite some time since they thought that this decision was too impulsive to be wise, and the like.

Aura Lee reciprocated with her own confidences. Her friends, too, had been in Fairmont. At the time of the Ring of Fire, they had only recently purchased a house on the far eastern edge of the territory included in it. "It's near the Edgertons," she said. "In fact, it was Ardelle Edgerton who told us it was on the market. It's been interesting, I suppose, but overall, I wish now that we'd stayed in Fairmont."

She paused. "Except, of course, that Joe has done so well here. This time suits him. He has a real career, not just a job. Not that he wasn't doing fine up-time. Joe's fifteen years younger than Tom, you know—that's Harlan's father, Tom and his wife were left up-time—and thirteen years younger than Dennis. Far from a spoiled youngest. That's not really irrelevant. He went into the army in 1973. Missed the fighting in Viet Nam. Spent his whole time in transportation and then went to work for the state highway department when he got out in 1979 and finished his technical course. Joe's not the . . . smoothest . . . guy in the world. His edges have filed down quite a bit over the fifteen years since we got married, just maturing, but . . . when I got out of college—that's nearly twenty-five years ago now—he certainly wasn't what my folks, especially not my mother, would have preferred for me. Much less five or six years before that, when we started dating."

"Family problems?" Carol asked sympathetically.

"I wasn't going to sneak around the fact that I liked Joe a lot better than I liked any other guy. We wrote. Perfectly harmless letters, once a week. Spring of my junior year in high school, he'd written back in October about a racial problem that had broken out in the barracks in Louisiana. I was taking American Government, and I asked him if I could use the letters as part of a class presentation on the general topic of race relations in the armed forces. He said that was fine, so I did. There wasn't anything embarrassing in our letters—I took those two to class and used them as one of the exhibits. The teacher actually called Pop and asked him if he knew that Joe and I wrote to each other. When Pop said that yes, he knew, and the letters went out on Monday morning as regular as clockwork, that sort of took the excitement out of it for everybody else, I think."

After some time, Inez cleared her throat and suggested that they really ought to come to the topic of the meeting, which was the training of Idelette.

Leopold Cavriani smiled. "Tweedledum and Tweedledee went forth to fight a battle," he said.

Inez looked at him with some confusion.

"Papa has come to love your nonsense rhymes," Idelette told her solemnly. "I think he means that Mrs. Koch and Mrs. Stull are very alike. Such as both of the Tweedles had a common interest in the rattle. I do not think he means that they are likely to battle. Are Mrs. Fodor or Mrs. McIntire or Mrs. Utt back in Grantville yet?"