Ring of Fire(196)

Morris barked a laugh. "He spent a lot of time in Edith Wild's house in Grantville himself, you know. I've heard him complain about the lack of toilet paper here in Prague several times."





"So have I," muttered Len, giving Ellie a glance. "I also heard him pissing and moaning about no electricity, too."





Ellie's face looked pinched. She'd undoubtedly heard the same thing from him. Morris knew that Wallenstein spent a lot of time with Ellie and Len, watching them as they set up a telephone center in his palace. Not so much because he was trying to oversee the work, about which he knew effectively nothing, but simply because he was interested. Wallenstein was a curious man, interested in many things. Except when his shaky health was acting up, or he was distracted by his obsession with astrology, Wallenstein's mind was always alert and active.





The pinched look on Ellie's face went away, replaced by . . . something else. She cocked her head sideways a bit.





"I'm curious about something. It sounds like—no offense—you're almost planning to set up Bohemia as a counterweight to the CPE. Even a rival. Doesn't that bother you any?"





Morris shrugged. "Some, sure. But I talked to Mike about it before we left Grantville, and he agrees that it's the only way to do it. That's not just because of the Jewish question, either. Mike's thinking about the whole picture."





"What Wallenstein wants is one thing," Judith chipped in. "What he winds up with . . . well, that's something else. He's not the only player in the game."





Mention of the word game jogged Morris' mind. Like him, Len was a chess enthusiast. "Think of it as a fianchetto, Len. You move up knight's pawn one rank, creating a little pocket for the bishop. Then the bishop sits there, protected, but ready to attack at a diagonal."





"Yeah, I know. I like the maneuver myself. But what's the—oh."





" 'Oh,' is right. And that's just what Wallenstein might be saying, one of these days. Chess is just a game, so it has firm and hard rules. Real life doesn't. A bishop can take out its own queen, in the real world, if that ever proves necessary. Try to, anyway."





While Len chewed on the analogy, Morris returned to the table and sat down again. "It's a race, really. That how Mike puts it. A strange kind of race, because we're trying to beat the same man we're allied with—without ever attacking him directly. He'll try for one thing, but the means he has to use for his ends can turn around and bite him on the ass. In our world, the Japanese wound up being saddled by a military dictatorship as they modernized. But who's to say the same thing has to happen here? Maybe it will. Then, again, maybe it won't."





Honesty forced him to say the next words. "It'll be dangerous, I admit. You'd be a lot safer staying back in Grantville."





Oddly, that did it. Ellie sat up straight. "You think I'm afraid of these assholes? Bullshit. Len, we're staying."





"Yes, dear," he murmured.





"And stop smirking."





"Hey, look, they got the best beer in the world here, just like they did four hundred years from now. You admitted it yourself, just the other day."





"I said, stop smirking."





* * *



The last conversation Morris Roth had that day was the one he hadn't foreseen or planned on. After everyone had left and he and Judith were getting ready for bed, his wife said to him:





"There's one last thing, O great Machiavellian prince of the Jewish persuasion."





"Yes?"





"I want you to stop bullying Jason."





Morris stared at her. Judith was busy turning down the covers, but she looked up at him squarely.





"Yes, you are," she said firmly. "He's just a young man who wants to become a rabbi, Morris. That's all. There's at least one of those rabbis in the ghetto whom he likes a lot, and wants to study with. So let him do what he wants, instead of trying to force him to be your Reform champion who'll slay the dragon of Orthodoxy. Let him study and decide for himself what he thinks. And if he winds up becoming an Orthodox rabbi, so be it."





Morris felt his jaws tighten. "You really want to listen to him at prayer, thanking God for not making him a woman?"





Judith shook her head. "That's neither here nor there, Morris. No, of course I don't. So what? I know how much you miss Rabbi Stern and our old synagogue and Hillel House. So do I. But you can't force Jason to become something he isn't. He's not even twenty-three years old, for Pete's sake. Steve Stern was a middle-aged man with all the confidence of someone who'd studied the Torah and the Talmud for years and was an experienced rabbi. How can you possibly expect Jason to substitute for him? Just because you want to launch a Reform movement two hundred years ahead of schedule? Well, then, why don't you do it yourself, big shot? Instead of trying to jam a kid into it, while you turn yourself into another Rothschild."