1636 The Devil's Opera (Ring of Fire) (31 page)

Before long he came to the low doorway into the tavern and ducked through it. Once inside, he looked around, saw that the crowd was still light. He released the breath he had been holding, relaxed, and headed for the counter where Veit the bartender was serving up mugs of ale.

A minute later, Stephan was seated at a scrap of a table in a back corner, elbows propped on the top and sipping at the ale. Sipping because it was better than Veit’s usual lot, and actually could be allowed to pass over the tongue slowly without inducing disgust or nausea or comparisons to the inside of one’s oldest boot.

Stephan wanted nothing more than to just let his mind empty out, but it kept worrying at Master Schmidt. He wasn’t sure what was going on, for the master was being remarkably tight-lipped about it, but he was certain that something out of the ordinary was in the wind. If for no other reason than the fact that the master had had him gather as much coin as he could quietly manage, exchanging what USE paper scrip was on hand with a few of the other merchants and those guild treasuries who could be trusted to keep their mouths shut. It wasn’t the first time that a merchant of Magdeburg had needed solid coin, after all, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Stephan knew who would keep a closed mouth, and that was who he had approached. Of course, one usually paid a premium when one desired quick service, but the master knew that as well as Stephan did, and had actually seemed satisfied in a sour sort of way at the sums that had been amassed.

But why? Stephan kept circling back to that question. Unfortunately, every time he arrived at it, the answer was still “I don’t know,” and that would start the process all over again.

Something was going on.

* * *

“Friend, you look like you’re at the end of a long day,” someone remarked. Samuel Bauer looked up in startlement to see a stranger sitting on the stool across the table from him. He’d been so wrapped up in his beer he hadn’t even perceived the man approaching.

He shook his head to clear his head, and shrugged. “Yah, a long day. But then, every day is long, right?” He raised his mug and sipped.

“True, true,” the other man said with a chuckle. “At least for those of us who have to work for our bread and salt and hope the masters and foremen have the money to pay us at the end of the day.”

They chatted back and forth, commiserating with each other on the evils of working for an uncaring boss, and congratulating each other on having won out so far by simply surviving. They had a friendly argument about the merits of Samuel’s job as a ledger poster for Master Georg Schmidt, and the other fellow’s job as a bricklayer.

The other man bought the second round when Samuel discovered his mug was empty, so it was only fair that Samuel bought the third. And somewhere after that he kind of lost track of a lot of things.

When he was awakened the next morning by his wife, his head was throbbing to the beat of a demon’s hammer and the taste in his mouth was beyond foul. And as he stumbled down the streets toward the bridge across the Big Ditch, he muzzily wondered what had become of his new friend…or even what his name was. He remembered it started with a P. Peter? Paulus?

* * *

Schardius looked around the main foyer of the opera hall. Good, no one was in sight. He slipped a key out of his pocket, walked over and unlocked a single door at the far end of the foyer. After stepping through it, he locked it again.

He smiled in the darkness at the thought of how surprised Frau Higham and others would be if they knew he had that key. It was amazing what a few pieces of silver could buy from someone low enough in the social ranks that everyone forgot about him…like the building custodian.

Schardius pulled a Grantville device from his pocket, cranked the handle several times, and smiled again as light bloomed in the darkness from the flashlight. He’d paid good money for the battery-less flashlight. Good money. And this wasn’t the first time that he’d found use for it.

Directing the light ahead of him, he continued his explorations of the nonpublic areas of the opera hall.

* * *

“Take a deep breath, dear.”

Marla obliged the seamstress by expanding her diaphragm to its maximum, which of course caused her waistline to also expand. The seamstress’ hands fluttered around her torso, checking the fit and making sure the cloth draped right.

“Right, dear, you can relax now.”

Air whooshed out of Marla’s lungs. The seamstress smiled as the expired breath made the frills of her cap flutter a bit.

“Move for me, please, how you would on the stage.”

Marla decided she was getting a bit tired of being this woman’s puppet—she wasn’t nearly as personable as Frau Schneider, the seamstress who made most of Marla’s clothes. But she stalked grandly back and forth a few times as directed, humming one of the big arias; then stood and made several of the grand gestures that the part of Guinevere called for.

“That’s good, dear. Did you feel anything binding on you?”

The seamstress looked to be older than Aunt Susan, Marla thought, maybe even as old as her grandmother. She’d let her get away with “dear,” but if she started using the down-time equivalent of “Hon,” things would commence to get fractious, as Aunt Susan used to say.

“I think I did,” Marla said in response to the question. She moved her left hand and arm in a somewhat contorted gesture. “It felt tight in the shoulder right…” She stopped in mid-movement. “…there.”

“Hold there, please.”

The seamstress stepped up close and peered at the fabric of the costume, running her fingers up and down the seams.

“Ah,” she said. “I see the problem. It will be easy to fix. Thank you, dear, you can take that one off now.” She turned away and called to another woman, “Frau Ballauf.”

Marla stepped behind the partition screen with alacrity as the other two women bent their heads in conversation over a clipboard. That was the last costume she had to try on. It had been a long morning, and she was ready to get back into her jeans and sweater.

Amber Higham had mobilized the production dressers for the costume fitting. Marla turned her back to the other young woman, who began unbuttoning the buttons down the back of the costume. After a moment, Marla was able to shuck the top of the costume forward and begin loosening the waistband of the skirt. Another few moments, and she was free of all that cloth, skinning her way back into soft worn denim and her favorite bulky yellow sweater.

“Thanks, Sophie,” she said as her head popped through the top of the sweater. “I think we’re going to need all the practice we can get dealing with this stuff. The costume changes are going to be fun,” she rolled her eyes to match her sarcastic tone, “especially the two in the third act.”

The dresser smiled as she gathered up the skirt to clip it onto the special hanger made for it. “You will do fine, Marla.”

“That’s
we
, partner,” Marla replied as she ran her fingers through her long hair, fluffing it out a bit. No pony-tail today; she wasn’t in the mood for it for some reason. “I won’t be able to do it without you.”

* * *

“Schardius, your time is coming, and that, soon,” Georg Schmidt snarled, slipping as he ducked into an alley. It took him a moment to regain his balance; then he went on, unaware that he had been overheard.

* * *

Marla gave a quick wave to the dresser and stepped out into the main room again. She spotted Amber standing by the door and headed that way.

“Hey, Amber.”

“Marla.”

She settled in beside the director and leaned back against the wall.

“So how’s it going?”

Amber grunted. “You tell me. Can you live with the costumes?”

“Yep.” Marla grinned. “They’re actually not too bad. I was afraid they’d be skin-tight or something, and these folks have never heard of Spandex.”

“Good.” The woman that the seamstress had talked to came up to them, carrying her clipboard. She nodded to Marla, and Amber said, “Sorry, I should have introduced you. Frau Ballauf, this is Marla Linder. Marla, this is Frau Frontilia Ballauf. She’s my new administrative assistant and stage-manager-in-training. I borrowed her from Lady Beth Haygood at the school.”

“Stole, actually, after I had only been there two days,” Frau Ballauf said dryly. “Frau Haygood felt she had been—how did she put it—strong-armed after your conversation.”

“She’ll get over it.” Amber waved a hand in a pooh-pooh gesture. The two women had a quick conversation about a couple of the items on the clipboard, then Frau Ballauf nodded to Marla again and turned back to the controlled chaos in the room.

“Frontilia?” Marla whispered with a giggle. “That sounds like something out of a bad Star Trek movie. Can’t be from any part of Germany I’ve ever heard of.”

“She’s actually from the Vogtland.”

Marla tilted her head at that.

“Southwest of Dresden,” Amber clarified.

“Ah.” Dresden, Marla had heard of. Anyone in Germany who possessed a spark of awareness had some idea of where Dresden was. The siege of that city by a Swedish army was, after all, one of the top three topics of conversation/arguments/disagreements in Magdeburg. “So what’s she doing here?”

“Her husband had a distant relative who owned property rights of some kind in Magdeburg. It took a while after the sack in 1631 for him to hear that his relative had died in the sack, and that due to the deaths of some other kinsmen elsewhere, he was probably the heir. She said he dithered about it for quite some time, but he finally decided to come to Magdeburg to claim the property.”

“Sounds kind of like what Mrs. Dreeson went through a couple of years ago,” Marla said.

“Yeah, similar set of circumstances. Just dawned on me, there’s probably been a lot of that happening all over, between the fighting and the plagues. Anyway, you’ll have to sit down with Frontilia and get her to give you the whole story over a glass of wine someday. Suffice it to say that while her adventures with her husband on the trip here weren’t quite as exciting as Ronnie Dreeson’s, they exacted their toll. They got here a few months ago, and they no sooner arrived and got settled into a rooming house than he dropped dead from a heart attack. He was standing talking to her one moment, the next he was lying on the floor, gone.”

“That’s terrible,” Marla said, horrified at the thought of anyone losing a mate like that.

“Yeah. And to top it off, after the funeral, when she finally tracked down someone who could tell her where the property was actually located, it turned out it was one of the lots that Gericke condemned in the emperor’s name to build one of the big fancy boulevards in the Old City. She had to hire a lawyer—some guy named Lentke, if I remember correctly—but she did screw some money out of Mayor Gericke as compensation for the loss of her husband’s rights.”

“She sounds tough,” Marla said.

“Believe it. She might not knock Ronnie off her throne as Queen of the Tough Old Broads,” Marla could hear the capital letters in Amber’s tone, “but I’d say she’s a candidate for Crown Princess. Anyway, the money she got wasn’t enough to go back home on or even live here for very long. She had worked with a school back in her home town, so when she somehow found out about Desfig”—that was how Amber pronounced the acronym for the Duchess Elisabeth Sofie Secondary School for Girls, where Marla taught music—“Lady Beth hired her right away.”

“And then you poached her before I could even meet her at the school,” Marla grinned.

“And then I poached her,” Amber agreed with her own grin. “And it’s a good thing I did, too. The woman is an organizational genius. Even at this late date she’s going to make my job easier.”

“Cool.”

Marla leaned back against the wall again. Frontilia, huh? Well, it wasn’t the prettiest of names, but one thing was for certain; if someone called it out, there wouldn’t be half-a-dozen or more heads turning around like there would be if you called out Anna or Elizabeth. More power to her.

* * *

Schardius flicked his light across the sign on the door. Women’s Dressing Room.

Aah.

He stepped into the room, and shone his light around. Several small shallow tables with mirrors on the wall. A few of them had placards with names on them. He walked down the room, reading them, until he found one in particular.

Marla.

* * *

“Georg Schmidt?” Ciclope murmured to Pietro as they approached the work site that morning. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Pietro muttered back. “This guy came out of the same place of business that the boss went into after he changed his clothes in that other house. I followed him to a tavern and got him drunk. He was a cheap drunk, too.” Pietro spat to one side in emphasis, but the redness in his own eyes indicated that the clerk may not have been all that wimpy.

“Georg Schmidt,” Ciclope murmured again. “Well, we’ll just have to see what we can make out of that.”

Someone tugged on his jacket and he spun around, fist cocked to level what he suspected was a pickpocket. Instead, he saw a skinny boy holding up a folded piece of paper in his left hand. There was something odd about the boy’s stance.

“What do you want?” he snarled, lowering his fist.

“Man paid me to give this to you.”

The boy’s voice wavered a bit, but Ciclope had to give him points for standing his ground.

“You sure it’s for me?”

“I don’t see any other one-eyed men around,” the boy replied cheekily.

Ciclope snatched the paper out of the boy’s hand.

“Man have a name?”

“No.”

“What did he look like?”

“Old…almost as old as you, a little bit fat, soft hands.”

Ciclope exchanged glances with Pietro. That fit Schmidt. He turned back to the boy, but he was gone, weaving through the press of workers heading for the construction site. He crammed the note into his pocket.

“Aren’t you going to read it?” Pietro nagged.

“Later,” Ciclope muttered. “Not out here in front of everyone. Get to work.”

He took his own advice and headed into the gate.

Chapter 37