Well, perhaps they were better than that—they had been effective bürgermeisters before the sack of the city, after all, in a venal sort of way—but not much.
“You realize, of course, that this fire may have ended your tapping the revenues of this project.” Schardius knew how to deal with untoward events. He was a very successful trader, after all, with all that was implied by that label. So his voice was calm, and steady, and had just the right touch of firmness to it. “At least for a while.” He watched the reactions of his partners carefully.
Westvol was predictable. His eyes widened, for all the world like a five-year-old spoiled child who had just been informed that his greatest wish was not only not going to be granted, neither were any of the other wishes on his current “If you love me you will get me this” list.
“But the newspaper said they put the fire out quickly and salvaged the wood…” Westvol began.
“Shut up, Johann,” Kühlewein growled. “He’s right. It doesn’t matter what the article said, Leonhart Kolman told me they lost nearly half of the wood outright, and a lot of what’s left is only usable now to feed the steam engine in the crane. You know the price of wood these days…especially the long timbers we had to have brought all the way from the mountains.”
Praise be to God, Schardius thought to himself with more than a touch of sarcasm. Kühlewein just took the lead to be Dee. There might be hope for the man after all if he could recognize reality when it stepped up and slapped him in the face.
Westvol looked like he was going to cry, until his face lit with a sudden smile. Schardius had been waiting for that.
“And no, you can’t file a claim against the accident insurance, Johann.”
“Why not?” the bürgermeister asked with a note of petulance.
“Do you remember when we were drawing up the project plans and you insisted on the high deductible on the insurance to hold the premium costs down?” Schardius drew his eyebrows together in a serious frown.
“Yessss.” That was drawn out slowly by the hapless Westvol, who was bright enough to see what was coming.
“Well, the cost of the damage is only just a bit more than the deductible.”
“Oh. Then why did we buy the insurance, then?”
“Because you insisted we should.”
Westvol had no response to that, which was just as well. Schardius extended his frown to the fuming Kühlewein, who glared back but didn’t say a word.
“So what are we going to do?” Westvol finally asked.
“We are going to order more timber, pay the costs of the fire company, and have Kolman beat into his people that this cannot be allowed to happen again.”
The meeting tailed off in repeats of that theme. But underneath it all, Schardius had two thoughts. First, a question—was the fire an accident? And second, a desire—if it wasn’t, he really wanted to hurt somebody.
* * *
Georg Schmidt was delighted. “Ha! Take that!” he declared, smacking the paper with his hand.
His secretary, Stephan Burckardt, looked around the edge of the office doorway.
“Did you need something, sir?”
“No, Stephan, I do not. The newspaper has given me all I needed.” The smile on his face felt as if it was stretching stiff muscles; which it might have been, given how less than happy he had been of late.
Schmidt gestured expansively. “Go, Stephan. You and the others take the rest of the day off—with pay. Go. I will see you tomorrow.”
Stephan’s head disappeared from the doorway almost as if it had been a figment of Schmidt’s imagination. It reappeared a moment later long enough to say, “Thank you, sir,” then disappeared again.
Georg looked back to the paper, reading the article one more time, smiling as he heard the troop of feet in the hallway headed out the front door.
“Ha!” he exclaimed again. “You think you can beat me, Kühlewein? You and your money man? Oh, no. You will pay for cheating me out of my contract. You will pay dearly.”
He crossed to the window and stared out it, clasping his hands behind him.
“A good start,” he murmured. “A good start.”
This attacked the project, which would hurt all of the consortium who got the project contract awarded to them. But he really wanted to hurt Andreas Schardius. If he hadn’t poked his nose into Schmidt’s business, the other members of that consortium couldn’t have won the contract. So it was Schardius, he decided, more than any other, who deserved to be ruined.
He rocked back and forth on his feet, smiling. His Italian servants would deal with Schardius, he thought, despite all the hard men surrounding the other merchant. Indeed they would.