"Quite high," Leonhard answered with an evil gleam in his eyes. "Quite high."
"You enjoyed that, didn't you?" David asked.
"Me? Oh, no, Master David." Leonhard smirked. "I couldn't possibly."
"Right," David said. "I'm sure. Before I get started on it, I've got a little project for you. Herr Kunze says Don Fernando wants to buy a lot of stuff from the USE. We'll need to check with the government on some of it. Here's his wish list. Look into it, will you?"
David felt his own smirk beginning as he watched Leonhard gape at Don Fernando's wish list. David decided to let Leonhard deal with the government's response to Don Fernando's desire for long distance radios. It would keep him busy.
Overloaded inbox or not, David was happy to be back in his office. Even the tower of paper was going to be easier to deal with than the last few months of high school. Latin was giving him fits. Calculus was even worse. He'd managed to stay caught up in his other classes, but those two were a torment. With finals no farther away than they were, it was going to take a lot of work.
David sat down and began to go through all the proposals that had been forwarded to his desk. "Brent, have a look at this," he wrote on one, then reached for the next.
David read through it then read through it again. "Leonhard! What the hell is this?"
Leonhard didn't look up. "Mrs. Simpson has invited OPM to become a corporate sponsor of the Magdeburg Opera House. She points out that corporate sponsorship is a tax deductible charitable contribution. According to our attorney, we may actually save more in taxes than we contribute. Something about corporate tax brackets, he said. We are in the highest one at the moment."
David continued to read while Leonhard spoke and noted the details of the sponsorship request. In addition to the Opera House there were plans to sponsor a library, a museum, a theater and a college. All good causes he thought, and began to calculate the totals.
All together the bill would come to something close to thirty million dollars over the next three years. From the proposal's details, OPM was not the only corporate sponsor being solicited. Several other businesses were already listed as sponsors.
David checked the approved box and tossed the request into his outbox. Business as usual, he thought, and began to smile.
This'll Be the Day…
Walt Boyes
"I'm looking for Father Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld," the well-dressed man said as he crowded the doorway. "I'm told he has his office here." The man was dressed in black, mostly velvet, with white at the neck and the cuffs.
He was clearly a down-timer, thought Josef, the Jesuit brother who served as doorman for the Spee household. Up-timers habitually referred to Father Friedrich as "von Spee" because that was the way their up-time histories listed him. Down-timers usually called him by his correct territorial name, "von Langenfeld."
"May I say who is asking?"
"I am Father Goswin Nickel."
"Father Provincial!" Josef's eyes grew very wide. "We weren't expecting you… I didn't recognize you… Please come in! Come in, come in!"
"Cease your babbling, my son," Father Nickel said, smiling, as he entered the house. "Please tell me if Father Friedrich is within."
"He is not, Father," Brother Josef said, "He is at the cathedral rehearsing the choir. He has some new Kirchenlieder, some hymns, that he has written for them to sing."
"Please have someone send for him, then, and also, if you would be so kind, have someone see to my horse."
"At once, Father."
The Jesuit provincial allowed himself to be led to the sitting room, where he sat down to wait for Spee. "Spes fuerat, spes Fridericus erat," he recited to himself softly. "In Spee they placed hope, Friedrich was their hope." Perhaps yet again, he thought.
The drum set looked incongruous in the apse of the cathedral, thought Friedrich Spee, even though he'd written the music that required it. The young man who played it was dressed in the style known as lefferto after the up-timer, Harry Lefferts, and he even sported a patch over one eye. The patch, as Friedrich knew, was entirely for show. The young man, whose name was Franz, had told him so, and that he only wore it because he thought it made him look "bad." It appeared that "bad" was somehow good in the new cant of these up-timer-aping youth. Friedrich smiled, and shook his head, ruefully.
Up-timer-aping, indeed. For was not what he had written for the cathedral choir here in Magdeburg up-timer-aping as well? A work for rock band and choir. At least, since he was now on the staff of the up-timer Cardinal Mazzare, he'd had no problem with the nihil obstat and the imprimatur necessary to be able to print the work and get it performed by the cathedral choir. He'd had more problems trying to figure out how to work around the "electric guitar" and the "electric piano" he'd heard in the recording that Cardinal Larry's friend the Methodist minister in Grantville had let him listen to, something called Godspell. He had substituted a massed section of Spanish guittarrones, all played in the up-timer style by a band of surly lefferti, and the cathedral organ. He was sure it was not rock and roll, but it sounded good to him.
What do they say in Grantville, "It's not rock and roll, but I like it?" He laughed out loud at the thought, causing the nearer members of the choir to stare at him strangely.
"All right, then," Friedrich said, tapping his baton on the lectern. "From the start, if you will, please."
Just as the band and choir swung into the first part of the chorale, Friedrich heard a commotion at the back of the cathedral. He swung around, to see several people running up the aisle. They were armed, and one had a huge wheel-lock pistole. The man with the pistole stopped and aimed it at Friedrich. It went off with a thunderous boom, but the ball, thankfully, missed and lodged itself with a great spray of splinters into the pulpit in front of which Friedrich had placed his conductor's lectern.
"Ow, scheiss!" One of the splinters had found a target in the lead guittarrone player. Friedrich turned, but the young lefferto waved him off. "I'm fine, Father. I'm fine."
The cathedral guards had by now caught up with the assassins, if that's what they were, and they were clubbing them down in the narthex of the cathedral. Friedrich strode quickly up to them in a half-run hampered by his cassock.
"Stop it, you!" he shouted. "They are down! Stop it!"
He began to pull the cathedral guards off the small group of intruders, and managed to get the beatings to stop.
"Who are you?" he asked the quondam shooter.
"You are a witch! And a helper of witches!" the man shouted, and was whacked by the end of one of the guards' staves for his pains. "Father del Rio says you are no true Jesuit! He says you are demon-inspired. He says you and your demon friends from the future will deliver us all to the Devil!"
One of the others pulled a knife from his doublet but a guard was faster, and knocked it out of his hand before he could throw.
"Father Friedrich," the chief of the guard detachment began, "I think it would be better-"
"If I were not so close to them until you see who else has weapons?" Friedrich finished for him.
"Yes, Father."
"Fine, take them to the prison, but no more beatings!"
"Yes, Father."
Friedrich turned, and slowly walked back to the altar. He was not surprised to find himself shaking. "I think we've practiced enough for one day," he said. "Let us get back together in the morning after Mass."
Friedrich was just coming down the steps of the cathedral, his unbuttoned cassock skirts flapping behind him when his secretary, Pieter van Donck, rushed up to him. Van Donck was a Flemish seminarian from the Jesuit college and seminary at Douai. He was short and stout where Spee was tall and slender. "Mutt und Jeff," Cardinal Mazzare had called them when he first met van Donck in Spee's company. Of course he had had to explain the up-timer reference, Spee thought wryly.
"Father Friedrich," the young Jesuit scholastic began, panting.