Ring of Fire(176)
"Maybe so. Then again, maybe not. They're frustrated, Morris, and I can't say I blame them for it. So let's give them something constructive to do. Let them go to Prague and see if they can convince Europe's largest Jewish community to throw its support behind Wallenstein."
Morris was already thinking ahead. "That won't be easy. The Jews in Prague are Ashkenazim and they're Sephardic. Not to mention that Prague's Jewry is orthodox, which they really aren't—well, they are, but they often follow different—and . . . Oh, boy," he ended lamely.
"I didn't say it would be easy, Morris."
"Dunash will insist on arming the Jews."
Mike shrugged. "So? I'm in favor of that anyway. As long as those guns aren't being used to help Polish noblemen gouge their peasants, I'm all for the Jewish population being armed to the teeth."
"Will Wallenstein agree to that? As it stands, Bohemian laws—like the laws of most European countries—forbid Jews from carrying weapons."
Mike jerked at thumb at the bedroom door. "Why ask me? The man's right in there, Morris. Negotiate with him."
After a moment's hesitation, Morris squared his shoulders and marched into the bedroom.
* * *
When he came back out, a few minutes later, he had a bemused expression on his face.
"Well?"
Mutely, Morris showed Mike a sheet of paper from Wallenstein's legal pad. When Mike looked down at it, he saw Wallenstein's shaky scrawl.
AGREED
JEWS MAY BE ARMED
BUT MUST SUPPORT ME
OR I WILL BURN DOWN THE GHETTO
"He's not the nicest guy in the world," Morris observed. He folded up the sheet and tucked it into his short pocket. "On the other hand . . ."
Mike finished the thought for him. "He's ambitious as Satan and, whatever else, one of the most capable men in the world. Plus, he doesn't seem to share most of this century's religious bigotry. That doesn't mean he won't burn down the ghetto. He will, Morris, in a heartbeat. But he won't do it because you're Jews. He'll do it because you failed him."
* * *
Judith agreed more quickly than Morris would have thought. Indeed, his wife began packing the next morning. But the first thing she put in the trunk was the biggest ladle they had in the kitchen.
"We'll need it," she predicted.
2
"It looks a little weird without the statues," mused Len Tanner, adjusting his horn-rim glasses. He leaned over the stone railing of the Charles Bridge and looked first one way, then the other. The bridge was the main span across the Vltava river, and connected the two halves of the city of Prague. It had been built almost two centuries earlier, in the fourteenth century—though not finished until the early fifteenth, moving as slowly as medieval construction usually did—and had been named after the Holy Roman Emperor who commanded its erection. The Karlüv most, to use the proper Czech term, although Tanner said they hadn't given it that name until sometime in the nineteenth century. In this day and age, it was still just called the Stone Bridge.
Watching Tanner, Ellie Anderson almost laughed. Something in the little twitches Len was making with his lips made it clear that he'd have been chewing on his huge mustache, if he still had one.
But, he didn't—and wouldn't, as long as Ellie had anything to say about it. However many of Len Tanner's quirks and foibles she'd grown accustomed to and decided she could live with, that damned walrus mustache was not one of them. She preferred her men clean-shaven and always had, a quirk of her own she suspected came from memories of a great bearded lout of a father. Dim memories. He'd been killed in a car wreck when she was only seven years old, caused by a drunk driver. Him. It was a one-car accident and the only other casualty had been the oak tree at the sharp bend in the road near their house.
Fortunately, the oak tree had survived. Ellie's memories of the oak tree were a lot more extensive, and a lot fonder, than those of her father. Years later, she'd even built a treefort in it. The neighbors had been a little scandalized. Not so much by the implied disrespect for her father—truth be told, nobody in that little eastern Kentucky town had had much use for Dick Anderson—but because it was yet another display of the tomboy habits that had already made her the despair of the town's gentility.
"Gentility" as they saw themselves, anyhow. Ellie had thought then—still did—that the term was ludicrous applied to seven matrons, not one of whom had more than a high school education and only two of whom had ever been anything more than housewives and professional busybodies.