The Eastern Front(35)

"I think I will not pursue this matter any further. Lest my image of you as an urbane and genteel man of the world suffers terminal harm." Rebecca gestured toward a far door. "This way, please. The others are already here."



Ed could hear Constantin Ableidinger when he was still twenty feet away from the door—which was closed, and thick. The former schoolteacher who'd been the central leader of the Ram Rebellion and was now Bamberg's representative in the USE House of Commons was one of the loudest men Piazza had ever met. Ableidinger seemed to find it impossible to speak in any tone of voice softer than a fog horn.

"—he mad?" were the first two words Ed understood, followed by: "What would possess him to do such a thing?"

Melissa Mailey's much softer response was muffled until Rebecca began opening the door. Ed caught the rest of it:

"—a shame, it really is. Wilhelm always seemed much shrewder than that."

The discussion broke off as Piazza and Rebecca entered the room. The eight people already present turned to look at them. They were sitting at a meeting table made up of four separate tables arranged in a shallow "U" formation. The open end of the "U" was facing away from the door, allowing the participants to look out of a wall of windows which gave a view of Magdeburg's scenery.

Ed wondered why they'd bothered. There was a lot to be said for the capital city of the United States of Europe. It was certainly dynamic—and not just in terms of the booming industries that produced the smoke and soot that turned the sky gray except after a rainfall. Under Mary Simpson's leadership, Magdeburg was becoming the cultural center of the nation, as well. She and Otto Gericke were also pushing hard to have a major university founded in the city.

Scenic, though, Magdeburg was not. The view through the windows was mostly that of blocks of the functional but dull apartment buildings that housed most of the city's working class; with, in the distance, the ubiquitous smokestacks from Magdeburg's many factories, mills, forges and foundries. It was probably the ugliest urban landscape Piazza had ever seen, except the mills lining the Monongahela southeast of Pittsburgh when he'd been a teenager.

Then again, those same working class districts were what gave the Fourth of July Party a political hammerlock over the city and province of Magdeburg. So there was a certain logic to the seating arrangement.

"Where's Helene?" asked Charlotte Kienitz, one of the leaders of the Fourth of July Party from the province of Mecklenburg. She was referring to Helene Gundelfinger, the vice-president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia.

"She should be here by mid-afternoon. She had to sort something out with the abbess of Quedlinburg." Ed got a wry smile on his face. "Who's here visiting Mary Simpson and Veronica Richter, so Helene has to deal with them too."

Melissa, seated at the far end of the tables, barked a little laugh. "I swear, I've never seen anything that generates more wrangling over details than schools do. That's one thing the two worlds on either side of the Ring of Fire have in common."

There was an empty seat next to the mayor of Luebeck, Dieterich Matthesen. After removing a notepad and placing it on the desk, Ed set his briefcase on the floor, leaning it against one of the table legs. Then he pulled out the chair and sat down.

By the time he did so, Rebecca had resumed her own seat. "To bring Ed up to date on what everyone was discussing when he came in, we have received word from reliable sources that Wilhelm Wettin and his Crown Loyalists plan to impose the most sweeping possible variation of their citizenship program. What is sometimes colloquially referred to as Plan B."

James Nichols, sitting next to Melissa, grunted sourly. "Otherwise known as The Bürgermeister's Wet Dream."

"Or the Hochadel Folly," added Anselm Keller. He was an MP from the Province of the Main, and was sitting next to Albert Bugenhagen, the young newly elected mayor of Hamburg. To their right, on the table that form the left end of the U, sat the two remaining attendees at the meeting: Matthias Strigel, the governor of Magdeburg province, and Werner von Dalberg.

Von Dalberg, like Melissa Mailey and James Nichols and Charlotte Kienitz, held no governmental position. His prominence in the Fourth of July Party stemmed from the fact that he was universally acknowledged as the central figure for the party in the Upper Palatinate. Given that he'd had to maneuver with the provincial administrator, Ernst Wettin, and—much worse—the Swedish general Johan Banér, he'd had to be a skilled politician as well as organizer. The political situation for the Fourth of July Party—every political party in the USE, actually—was always tricky in those areas that were still under direct imperial administration.