The Devil's Opera(112)

Byron’s snort covered Gotthilf’s muffled chuckle.

“They would—if someone bothered to tell them.”

Honister was now confused, but spread his hands in a please explain gesture. Byron beckoned to Gotthilf, who stood and stepped over to stand beside his fellow sergeant.

“The people you want to talk to are the clerks,” Gotthilf began, “not the merchants themselves. The clerks see everything, hear almost everything, and talk to each other in the course of business. They will bring something to their masters’ attention if they think it warrants it, but they will see and hear things that the masters may never learn about.”

Honister looked thoughtful, and gave a slow nod.

“So I need to go back and question the people who work for the masters, rather than the masters themselves.”

“Yep,” Byron said. “Let me give you another tip: don’t question them in the offices.”

“Ah, right,” Honister replied after a moment’s thought. “Catch them at their favorite taverns and buy them ale. Or watch for them at the end of the day and walk with them on the way home.”

“You got it,” Byron said. “Make it informal, make it casual and out from under the boss’s eye, and they’re much more likely to tell you things you want to hear.”

“You might start with Johann Dauth at the Bünemann corn factor’s office,” Gotthilf added. “Tell him we sent you and ask him to help.”

Trust Gotthilf to remember someone from a previous case who might be useful, Byron thought to himself.

Honister pulled his notepad out of its jacket pocket and made a note of the name. “Johann Dauth. Got it.” He closed the notepad, tucked it away, and nodded first to Byron, then to Gotthilf. “Thanks for the help. Maybe I can pick up some information now.”

Byron watched the sergeant leave the room, exchanged a grin with Gotthilf, and turned back to the report he was reading. He was going to recommend to Captain Reilly that he order mandatory spelling lessons for everyone who wrote reports. The “I’ll spell it however I think it sounds” mindset of the down-timers was driving him nuts.

A few minutes later, another detective walked into the office and headed for his desk.

Byron looked up. “So, Kaspar, you still working on that murdered streetwalker case?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

Although Magdeburg had a small red-light district—partly a holdover from the days of Catholic rule when such establishments were recognized by the city government of the time, and partly a result of someone just trying to make a few dollars—there were always a few women who drifted around the edges of Magdeburg’s societies trying to just survive by practicing the world’s second-oldest profession. The war and the rampaging armies had shattered so many families that the wonder was that there weren’t more of them. They would hover around the edges of the various markets on market days and outside the taverns at night. Byron and Gotthilf had dealt with several of them off and on over the past year, including one case that still gave Gotthilf occasional nightmares.

“Making any headway on it?”

The detective pulled out his notebook. “Not sure where she came from. Called herself Annalise. Probably in her middle twenties, although like most of these women she’s had a hard life so it’s hard to tell. Long dark hair, brown eyes. According to some of the other girls she mostly kept to herself, but one of them said that she didn’t talk like a Magdeburger. From what I can tell, that meant that she came from somewhere else recently, and that she may have had more education than these women usually get.”

Gotthilf understood what Kaspar meant when he said the woman didn’t talk like a Magdeburger. Given the scope of the massacre in 1631, there weren’t all that many people left whom you could really call Magdeburg natives. But even in the short time since the city had been rebuilt and started expanding rapidly, a distinctive patois had emerged in the capital which made its residents easy to recognize. For one thing, almost all Magdeburgers spoke Amideutsch now rather than one of the older German dialects. For another, they spoke Amideutsch with a clipped, almost brusque, manner. Byron said it reminded him of the way people named “New Yorkers” had spoken in the up-time world he’d come from.

“Anything else?” he asked.

Kaspar glanced at his notes. “Only that she had a customer recently that had hired her several times. Well-to-do, from the sound of it, although that could have been just bragging.”

“Anybody see this man?”

“No.”

“Well, that doesn’t help much,” Byron said.