The Dreeson Incident(163)

Weitz claimed—genuinely, Dumais thought—to know nothing at all about who carried out the assassinations of Dreeson and Wiley. That didn't prevent him from having opinions. No matter who shot the men, their deaths might be useful. He directed Dumais to duplicate a flyer he had drafted, accusing Veronica Dreeson of harboring anti-Semitic beliefs because she had not been standing on the steps of the synagogue next to her husband the way Inez Wiley was Standing By Her Man. Dumais was to make some extra stencils for him to distribute in other towns. Plus doing a run of the flyers from one stencil right here and now.



Jacques-Pierre did so with great efficiency. That very afternoon. Not because he sympathized with the man's views about the Jews, but on the theory that the sooner Weitz left town again, the better. Strangers really were attracting a lot of official attention in Grantville right now.



Weitz took the stencils and left immediately. As soon as he had distributed the stencils to his contacts, the flyers would appear in multiple locations on the same day. He told Dumais that was one of Locquifier's favorite techniques, now.



It was astonishing in a way that even now, after the assassinations, Weitz managed to drop the flyers themselves, piles of them, at various points inside the Ring of Fire without being caught.



That evening, Dumais wrote a really long report for Duke Henri de Rohan and sent it out of Grantville in four copies—two to Benjamin de Rohan in Frankfurt and two to the duke himself in Besançon. In each case, one by the postal system and one by courier. At least one of them should get through. He hoped. It should be enough to enable them to make sense of all the newspaper reports, which were totally confusing, even right here in Grantville where it had all happened. They must be worse elsewhere.





Bryant Holloway certainly found the flyer completely confusing. He waved it at Jacques-Pierre. "But the attackers were the ones who were anti-Semitic. Weren't they?" he asked. "Not Ronnie Dreeson?"



Dumais admitted that they were, while wishing that Holloway had not brought up this topic in the dining room of the Willard Hotel. Luckily, no one was at the nearby tables.



"You were working with them, weren't you?" Holloway peered at him suspiciously. "The demonstration out at the hospital and everything? You had me find those men for you."



Dumais granted this also. Only as far as the hospital went. But it was probably too much to hope that even Holloway would swallow the argument that the occurrence of two riots and two assassinations on the same day had been purely coincidental. At least, not that the two demonstrations had been coincidental, considering that he had directed Weitz to Dumais.



"But then, if someone goes around saying that Ronnie Dreeson hates the Jews, that would make it seem like she's on your side, wouldn't it? Why would you want that?"



"I do not hate the Jews," said Jacques-Pierre mildly. All he needed—or didn't need—at that point was for Veda Mae to start insisting to Bryant that "we" are anti-Kraut; not anti-Jewish. With Holloway agreeing that the point of the whole thing was that they did not like having all these Kraut immigrants in Grantville.



Holloway was now digressing into a diatribe against his father-in-law's wife. Again. He was irrationally hostile to the woman, for no apparent reason that Jacques-Pierre could determine.



Veda Mae started out, once more, on the issue of the baptism of the Beasley child at MaidenFresh Laundries. Adding, this time, a new grievance: that Vesta Rawls and that manager of hers, Mitch Hobbs, who was marrying a Kraut girl, had given that Kraut preacher permission to come down and hold services in the entryway every Sunday afternoon, so Jarvis Beasley's Kraut wife, the bigamist, could go to church.



"This is just the thin edge of the wedge," she insisted. "Watch and see if I'm not right. Pretty soon, there won't be Kraut churches just on each side of town. Pretty soon, there'll be one right in the middle, with all of the proper ones, like the Baptists and Methodists. The Catholics, even.



Dumais drew a deep breath, trying to sort out the tangents into which the two of them could fly at the slightest passing thought from the essentials of the issue in regard to Mrs. Dreeson.



He patiently pointed out that propaganda did not have to be true to be effective, but just have the tiniest element of plausibility. He pointed out that from his reading of American history, he had concluded that enough of the up-timers would be inclined to assume that almost any German had covert anti-Semitic tendencies that the fact that Mrs. Dreeson was not there, combined with her lack of publicly displayed grief, should be sufficient to drive a wedge between the up-timers who held positions of authority in Grantville and the SoTF and the USE and the Richter family.