Ring of Fire II(198)
"Never mind," he said. "What's done is done. I'll be off to Grantville at first light."
Chapter 3. The Elf
Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia
November 1634
Noelle Murphy—Noelle Stull, now, having just changed her name legally—finished her report, and leaned back in her chair. Sitting at the desk in his office, Tony Adducci did the same. He looked to Carol Unruh, sitting in another chair facing the desk, at a diagonal from Noelle.
"Seems pretty complete to me, Carol. I'm not a lawyer, of course."
Noelle had to keep herself from smiling. "Not a lawyer" was putting it mildly. In point of fact, Tony Adducci's formal education extended to a high school diploma and two years at Fairmont State, from which he'd left to get a job in the mines without even picking up an AA degree. The main reason he'd been selected to be the secretary of the treasury for the New United States, not long after the Ring of Fire, was because he'd helped Frank Jackson keep the books for Mike Stearns' UMWA local. In those days—as was still the case, more often than not—Mike selected his administrators primarily because he thought they were solid men he could rely on, pedigrees and credentials be damned. And, in the case of posts like Tony's, knew that they were honest.
Noelle's suppressed smile would have been simply one of amusement, however, not derision. When all was said and done, Mike's crude method had worked pretty well. It had given the new government he'd been forced to set up in the midst of crisis and chaos a great deal of solidity and unity, however rough the edges might have been, and he'd simply shrugged off charges of "UMWA favoritism."
As the years had passed since the Ring of Fire, a number of those initial appointees had been gently eased out, when it turned out they simply weren't up to the job. But Tony had kept his post through all of the transformations—from the NUS as an independent principality, to its later status as a semi-independent principality within the Confederated Principalities of Europe, to its current (and hopefully final) manifestation as one of the provinces within the federal United States of Europe. Ed Piazza, who'd replaced Mike as the president of the SoTF after Mike became the prime minister of the USE and moved to Magdeburg, was no more inclined to replace Adducci than Stearns had been. He was capable, honest, and made up for his own lack of training by knowing how to use the skills of subordinates or associates who did have it.
Such as Carol Unruh, in fact, Ron Koch's wife although she'd kept her own name. Carol was the assistant director of the Department of Economic Resources, one of the branches of the Treasury Department. Her academic background might have been on the skimpy side for an equivalent position in the universe they'd come from. But by post-RoF Grantville standards, she was highly educated. She had a BA in mathematics and statistics and had taken graduate courses in the same subjects. She'd squeezed in the graduate courses on a part-time basis while she was bringing up her two children, but she'd always planned to go back full-time and finish her doctoral program once the kids were out of the house and she could really concentrate. Nobody much doubted she would have, either, except that the Ring of Fire had put paid to those plans as well as many others. Still, she was qualified enough to have been accepted as the University of Jena's instructor in statistics, whose male faculty was normally hostile to the idea of women teaching at the university level, outside of medicine and a few other special subjects.
"Oh, it's plenty good enough to put Horace Bolender behind bars," she said.
"Keep him behind bars," Tony growled. "Noelle and Eddie already got that much accomplished. The fucking bastard."
"He hasn't been convicted yet, Tony," Carol pointed out. "In fact, I think he's even going to manage to raise the bail money."
Again, Noelle had to fight to keep from smiling. Not at Tony's praise but at Carol's reaction. Unruh had the sort of prissy sense of duty that compelled her to add the caution—given that, in cold-blooded personal terms, she stood to benefit the most if Horace Bolender got convicted. Her title of "assistant" director was something of a formality these days. Bolender had been the director of the Department of Economic Resources, until Carol's suspicions and the investigative work by Noelle and Eddie Junker that those suspicions engendered had turned up plenty of evidence that the man had been using his post to feather his own nest.
Now, Carol was actually running the department, and everyone expected that it wouldn't be long before President Piazza made her the official director. Where a different sort of person in her position might have been pushing for a conviction, Unruh was being meticulously fair-minded and scrupulous.