Ring of Fire III(40)

He might come to regret that judgment. Captain von Haslang’s own assessment of the enemy commander had steadily grown over the past two and half days. Given that a siege of Regensburg now seemed inevitable, he’d be a lot happier if Major Simpson and his men weren’t part of the defending force.

But, like Colonel von Schnetter, he didn’t think it was worth the casualties to prevent that from happening. If a man sought perfection, he should find a different trade than that of a professional soldier.

* * *

To her great relief, Bonnie found that her new assignment was not as hard as she’d thought it would be. (For years thereafter, whenever confronted with a quandary, she would throw up her hands and exclaim “Oppenheimer!”) That was true for three reasons:

First, Heinz Böcler turned out to be far better in his General Groves persona than she was when she tried to imitate a world-class nuclear physicist like Oppenheimer. Within less than an hour after their arrival in Regensburg, he had the city’s officials and guild masters eating out of the palm of his plump little hand.

How he managed that was something of a mystery to Bonnie. It was certainly not due to his dazzling personality. Heinz was a pleasant enough fellow, but he possessed about as much in the way of social charm as you’d expect from a man raised by a parson, educated to be a clerk, and filled with the ambition to write a history book.

Her guess was that Heinz fit, to a T, every pompous city official and stuffed-shirt guildmaster’s notion of what the personal secretary of a provincial administrator should be like. So, oddly enough, it was his very lack of charisma that lent him great authority.

The second factor working in her favor was Brick Bozarth. Bonnie had completely forgotten—if she’d ever known at all, which she probably hadn’t—that the State of Thuringia-Franconia had sent Bozarth to Regensburg back in 1634. The man served as one of the SoTF’s semi-official trade representatives and consuls to the Oberpfalz.

Bozarth’s precise position in the SoTF’s bureaucracy was never clear to Bonnie. The middle-aged ex-miner had nothing more than a high school diploma, so far as his education was concerned. In his days as a coal miner, he’d operated a continuous mining machine—a skill that was about as useful, in the here and now, as knowing how to pilot a submarine. She suspected that his main qualification for his post was simply the fact that was a member of the United Mine Workers.

In the period after the Ring of Fire, Mike Stearns had leaned very heavily on the membership of his union   local to provide him with a ready-made cadre. Those days were over now. Mike himself had left for Magdeburg and the man who succeeded him to serve as the province’s president, Ed Piazza, was not and had never been a coal miner.

By then, though, certain social customs had become rooted in the State of Thuringia-Franconia. The same customs didn’t hold much sway elsewhere in the United States of Europe. Being a UMWA member in Magdeburg province, for instance, was certainly respectable—even admirable—but gave a man no particular status in political terms.

In the governing circles of the SoTF and its surrounding officialdom, on the other hand, membership in the UMWA had much the same informal prestige and ability to open doors that being a Harvard or Yale graduate had provided back up-time. That hadn’t been due to the supposedly superb education one received at those Ivy League schools, no matter what people claimed. That education was certainly excellent, but so was the education a person could get at MIT or the University of California, or any number of top universities in America, public as well as private. Indeed, in many fields, the education someone could get outside of the Ivy League was quite a bit better.

No, the real cachet that having an Ivy League degree had given people back up-time was social, not educational. Being a graduate of Harvard or Yale put you in the right old boys’ networks. Being a UMWA member did much the same in the SoTF.

Thankfully, Bozarth had not taken his post to be a sinecure. Being fair, very few UMWA people did. They might not necessarily be the best person for a job, but they almost always carried out those jobs with the same blue-collar work ethic that they’d taken into coal mines.

So, as soon as Bonnie explained her needs to him, Bozarth knew exactly where, how and from whom those needs could be met. He knew Regensburg very well by now, especially that part of Regensburg that was involved in what he considered “useful work.”

Brick defined that term the way coal miners do. If you knew how to make something or fix something or grow something, you were a stout fellow. If you were a parson, you were regarded with respect but otherwise dismissed as being of no practical use. If you were a lawyer, you were automatically under a cloud of suspicion.