“We’ll give it a go sometime,” Judy said, “but go on.”
“Between the race track, the water park, the gardens and the shops, this is a great place to spend a day if you live in Vienna. We get a lot of people out here most weekends. It didn’t happen all at once, but just sort of grew.
“These days the royal family mostly takes the royal steam yacht. It makes it like a twenty-minute trip and Ferdinand can even hold a sort of mini-court on the yacht.”
“Royal steam yacht?” Vicky asked.
“Yep. A catamaran with a steam engine. It will do about fifteen knots, which makes it a really easy commute, so the emperor comes out here a lot. That brings members of the court and once they are here they buy stuff. Honestly, it’s the members of the court who have kept us as close to in the black as we are. The speed runs are really popular. They get to see the emperor and the 240Z going really fast. I have to say, the people here are as addicted as any up-time NASCAR fan. I don’t see it myself, but it seems to strike a chord with the down-timers.”
Judy nodded. They had all seen the track with its raised ends and the bleachers on either side of the straightaway.
“We get lots of foot traffic between the canal and the track. The emperor’s real Hofbefreiten mostly have the area between the canal and the gardens at Schloss Neugebuade. They get just as much of the traffic, but they aren’t as willing to give credit, which means they are probably making out like bandits. It’s something between a duty free shop and a mall, and we control almost half of it,” Hayley explained.
“You mean the Sanderlin-Fortney Investment Company?” Vicky asked.
“Yes. Ferdinand’s Hofbefreiten have the rest of it and more snob appeal than we have, but our stuff is cheaper and, more often than not, better quality. Partly that’s because through you guys we have been able to save on the imports from Grantville and Magdeburg. Lathes, clocks, sewing machines, that sort of thing.”
“I like the way Race Track City is laid out,” Karl commented.
“Thanks. I’ll tell Dad you said so,” Hayley said. “He drew up the layout and the roads and stuff.”
Sonny Fortney had designed Race Track City starting with a two-lane street with a twenty-five-foot median in the middle with turnarounds. It was designed for cars but aside from the cars they had brought or built here, there weren’t any, so it ended up as a wide open parklike road between the docks and the race track. On either side were shops, restaurants, anything that Hayley, her parents and the Sanderlins could come up with to make money. And anything Ferdinand’s courtiers could come up with, as well.
The courtiers tended to look down on the clients of the Sanderlin-Fortney Investment Company, but that was nothing new. For the most part, the Fortneys and Sanderlins let it roll off their backs.
And Race Track City was making money. Enough money that even with the majority of its customers buying on credit, it was still almost running in the black. The problem Hayley had was that a “little bit in the red” from eighteen separate businesses is a lot in the red. The problem the upper crust of Vienna had was that Race Track City was competition for them. Just barely so far, but it was growing. The people in charge in Vienna wanted Race Track City brought to heel. Well, what they really wanted was it shut down, but that was unlikely to happen. They argued that it was unsafe, being outside the city walls. They argued that the proprietors of shops in Race Track City were avoiding city fees and taxes, which was true. They argued that the goods sold in Race Track City were of inferior quality, which was not.
“So how is that all connected to the wall around Race Track City?” Millicent asked.
“It’s all connected to the ‘forcibly incorporate Race Track City into Vienna’ business. Which is still working its way back and forth between the burghers of Vienna and the emperor’s court. The burghers are insisting that it’s unsafe out here without the protection of the city walls and that we are not really Hofbefreiten. And some of the Hofbefreiten out here are arguing on the burghers’ side. So far the emperor isn’t buying it, but he is planning to put a wall around Race Track City and use the river and the river boats to connect the two in case of attack.”
“And,” Dana Fortney added, “once a wall is around Race Track City, the burghers are going to argue that it’s all part of Vienna and we need to get their permission to do business.”
“Which they will gleefully deny,” Susan said. “We know the drill by now. Getting the burghers of Vienna to agree to blow their noses when they have a cold is the next best thing to impossible, as we have learned to our regret.” She was talking about the roadblocks that the burghers of Vienna and the courtiers as well, had put in the way of building anything in the city proper. Problems that would, of course, all go away if the right hands were properly greased with large amounts of silver.