1636: The Viennese Waltz

CHAPTER 27

August 1635

Moses Abrabanel’s Office, outside Vienna

“Because the people like calling it ‘BarbieCo.’” Susan grinned. “I know the name sounds silly, but that doesn’t stop people from liking it.”

“Actually, Ms. Logsden,” Moses Abrabanel said, “it doesn’t sound that silly. Not here in Vienna. What most people know about Barbies is how expensive they are, not that they were cheap toys up-time. At least not the cheap part. And, of course, the rumors of the Barbie Consortium. . they’ve all heard those. So what did you want to see me about?”

“Well, we want you to endorse Barbie preferred.” She hesitated, then said, “The way you did the American dollar back in ’31.”

Moses felt like he’d been hit with a brick. This was not what he had in mind when he counseled the emperor not to shut them down a week ago. “Endorsing the money of a nation, is one thing. Endorsing the stock of a private company, well, that’s quite another, ah, thing.”

“We’re aware of that, believe me, Herr Abrabanel. But we are planing to build a skyscraper here in Vienna. Such a building would act as a long-term income source.”

“So?”

“So, acquiring BarbieCo stock-which guarantees a two percent annual income but can, if our projects prosper, become a much better investment-is a good idea.”

“Well enough. I will look into it, and if we decide we are interested, we will acquire some BarbieCo stock. But that’s not what you’re asking for. You’re asking our family to guarantee the value of your stock with our money.”

“Yes. Which doesn’t cost you anything at all unless you are forced to buy it, which you won’t be, because it’s going to be circulating throughout the community.”

“You hope,” Moses said, shaking his head. “I hope so too, even though what you’re doing is too close for comfort to usurping the crown’s right of creating money.”

“Not at all. It’s stock in a corporation. I admit that it’s negotiable and fungible, so that under certain circumstances it can act like money. But in no way are we claiming any endorsement or legal recognition by the government of Austria-Hungary or any government, for that matter. What it is, is limited liability part-ownership in BarbieCo, formerly known as American Equipment Company, a stock corporation registered in the State of Thuringia-Franconia.

“Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarian reichsthaler is losing ground against the American dollar, even faster than silver bullion. You don’t have enough money to run your economy and you can’t introduce more without a panic. Besides we think introducing our-” She shrugged. “-sort-of-money is necessary. . and not just for us. Your family has a lot invested in Vienna and Austria-Hungary in general. If this malaise keeps up, those investments are going to be seriously damaged. Frankly, sir, even if Prince Karl was to invest every penny he owns, it wouldn’t be enough.”

“I’m aware of that,” Moses agreed. “But there is still the danger of inflation and you’re still asking us to risk getting stuck with thousands, perhaps millions, of reichsthaler worth of prettily printed paper.”

“That could happen,” she acknowledged. “But I don’t think it’s likely, for a couple of reasons. First, given any reason at all to feel confident in BarbieCo preferred, people will use it. Also, if we can buy up enough of the patents that Ferdinand has been selling, we can break the industrial logjam.” She stopped for a moment. “And that’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, even if he is your emperor.”

“His father started it,” Moses put in. “And his clerks have continued selling patents on up-timer inventions as a matter of course. Honestly, Ms. Logsden, we haven’t had that much choice. The government simply needed the money.”

“Maybe. But you were killing the goose that would have been laying the golden eggs. You know, and I know, and your emperor ought to know, that it’s just plain stupid. .”

“I heard you the first time, Ms. Logsden. And by now I tend to agree. But it wasn’t so cut-and-dried at first. After all, you up-timers offer patents, do you not?”

“Limited patents, to the people who invent things, yes. Not just to anybody who’s willing to cough up a few bucks.” Then Susan visibly paused and contained herself. “I’m sorry, Herr Abrabanel. I didn’t come here to criticize either you or the emperor. The fact is, if we’re going to do any good here at all, for ourselves or for Vienna, or for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, we need to be able to introduce more money than we can afford to ship in from Grantville. But if we can do that, and we can free up some of those patents, there is a very good chance that we can set up a boom like the one that’s going on in the USE.”

“That sounds very attractive. .” Moses paused. The girl herself was. . very attractive. It was invigorating to be discussing matters of business and finance with such a young and attractive woman. So very, very. . attractive. He pulled his mind back to the conversation with an effort. “But, how do you plan to do it?”

“First, we license a bunch of patents. Not preventing the patent holders from using them, but allowing us to use them as well. Then we do a major project that will employ a lot of people. We can spend some money on this. Money for salaries, for instance. But most of the expense of the project is going to have to be paid for in stock. In BarbieCo preferred. That will get money and BarbieCo preferred out into the economy where it can circulate, funding other businesses. We’re going to do it basically the way Sarah says FDR did it, with what amounts to a big public works project that will eventually pay for itself.”

“FDR? What is FDR?”

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Susan said. “The President of the United States, back. . ah, up. . in the twentieth century, in our Great Depression.”

“Ah. I have indeed heard of the Great Depression. Still, when my family endorsed the American dollar back in 1631, we put the floor considerably below what we expected the American dollar to be worth. We had every expectation that even if we were forced to buy up a great many of them, we could then spend them on Grantville goods and either make a profit or at worst only take a fractional loss. I guess we could see our way clear to offering to buy your stock at half the face value.”

Susan shook her head. “I don’t disagree, but we can’t afford to do it that way this time. We need a base of the face value.”

“Then I don’t see how I can help you. The two percent interest you’re offering on your BarbieCo stock is not enough to justify the risk. Not nearly enough.”

“I can make you one of two offers and let you take your pick. One hundred thousand thalers in BarbieCo as an up-front fee for the endorsement, or at the end of 1637 we will promise to give you half again the BarbieCo stock you already possess. Or buy it back for reich money at face value at that time, our choice. We don’t want you trying to buy up all the BarbieCo in the world in the last half of 1637. This way, if you drive it up against the reichsthaler, you will lose money.”

“Which would you recommend?” Moses asked, curious to see what she would say. If BarbieCo was good, then the best deal was the up-front thalers, because all the Barbies would have to do to pay them off would be buy up the necessary reichsthaler using BarbieCo and pay the Abrabanel family in reichsthaler.

She looked Moses straight in the eye and said, “If you’re smart, you’ll take the thalers up front.”

The discussion continued for over an hour as they talked out the details of the Barbies’ proposal. It was a risky venture and Moses might not have gone for it, in spite of being quite impressed, but for the fact that Prince Karl had invested considerable silver in it.

Office in Vienna

“I most certainly will not!”

“Very well, sir. Thank you for your time,” Vicky Emerson said. Then she got smoothly to her feet, turned on her heel and walked out the door.

“Well, that was a disaster,” she told Millicent. “He’s not going to accept BarbieCo preferred. Not ever, apparently.”

“Yeah, I heard,” Millicent said. “And I really liked that location, too. Oh, well. The next on the list is in the old Jewish Quarter.”

“We’ll send Susan to talk to Moses on that one,” Vicky said. “I think he likes her, anyway. Did you see his eyes glitter the last time we had a meeting?”

“I think she likes him, too.” Millicent giggled. “I just don’t think she’s noticed it yet.”

The old Jewish Quarter, Vienna

“Ick,” Susan said.

“The aftermath of a fire in this city is never pretty,” Moses pointed out. “And do be careful. You don’t want to fall into an open basement.”

“I’ll be careful. The burnt part doesn’t really matter,” Susan said. “We were going to have to bulldoze the place anyway.”

“Bulldoze?”

“Like the Fresno scrapers. Only bigger. I meant that we’d have to tear the building down to the basement level anyway. So we can get the whole block?”

“Oh, yes. But it’s going to cost a great deal.”

“They’ll take Barbie preferred?”

“Yes,” Moses said. “They’ve agreed to that, though quite a bit of it will be coming to my family, I suspect. So. .”

“I understand,” Susan said. “It puts you in an uncomfortable position. You want to get the best deal you can for your friends, but you’re concerned that we’ll pay too much and put your family out of pocket. Don’t let it worry you. I don’t intend to let any more of the Barbie preferred out of my hot little hands than I have to.”

Hot little hands. Moses had to forcibly bring his mind back to the business at. . hand.

Susan was still talking. “. . I’m going to send Judy and Vicky after them.”

And that’s just what she did.

Beauty Shop at Race Track City

“Fraulein von Up-time,” Frau Lechner rushed up and gave a rough curtsey. “Welcome, welcome.”

Trudi was so shocked it took her a few moments to react, by which time she had been gently hustled to the head of the line. “Wait! I’m not von Up-time. I’m Gertrude von Bachmerin.”

Everything stopped. Suddenly Frau Lechner was looking at her like she was a fraud or a liar. She examined Trudi’s face then looked at the wall, then back at Trudi, then back at the wall. Trudi followed her gaze to the wall, where there was a list of services. And tacked next to each service were bills. BarbieCo stock certificates. Several of them were the six pfennig notes with Trudi’s face on them. A shampoo was one trudi, a set was one trudi, coloring was a trudi and three millies.

Trudi tried to explain. “Yes, that’s me. It’s my prom picture from the senior prom. I did attend school in Grantville and I am a Barbie, I guess. But I’m not an up-timer. I was born in 1617.”

Everyone was looking at her.

Frau Lechner asked, “How can you be a Barbie and not an up-timer?” She sounded quite suspicious, and from the mutters around the room she wasn’t the only one.

“Because the up-timers don’t care!” Trudi blurted. There was silence again. Trudi looked around the room at the shocked faces, and she was back in Grantville on her first day in high school. Being shown around the school by a girl who spoke the most atrocious German that Trudi had ever heard, but still managed to get across the basics and introduce Trudi to the rest of the little group of girls who were not yet known as the Barbie Consortium. The girl suggested that she should try out for the junior varsity cheerleading squad. Being accepted by the Barbies had meant the world back then. Not all of the up-timers had been so accepting.

“At least, the good ones don’t,” she continued. “The ones like General Stearns and the Barbies. The up-timers are people. Some are mean and some think too much of themselves. But mostly they are good people who will look at you, not your blood lines. Just like they accepted the daughter of an imperial knight who barely owned a village into the Barbie Consortium.”

“What is the Barbie Consortium? Is that the BarbieCo on the money?”

“No,” Trudi shook her head. “BarbieCo is an investment corporation. A consortium is sort of a partnership. Judy Wendell found out how much the dolls were worth from her older sister Sarah and told her friends. When I met the Barbies, they knew how much their dolls were worth but hadn’t sold them yet. They were holding onto them, waiting for the right opportunity. That opportunity came when the Higgins Sewing Machine Corporation went public.

“I didn’t have any Barbies.” Trudi paused a moment at their confused looks. “The up-time made dolls, I mean, and I didn’t have much money. But when Judy and the rest decided to invest, I managed to scrape together enough to buy a few shares. Not that I was part of the Barbie Consortium back then. I was just sort of on the outskirts of it. I was teaching them German and down-time social conventions and they were teaching me English and cheerleading and stuff like that.

“Over the next several months, I got invited into several deals. Some I could afford to invest in, others I couldn’t. But they had enough stuff going on that it took some keeping track of and that job mostly fell to Millicent. And she hired me to help her because I’m good with accounts.”

Every face in the beauty shop was turned to Trudi as she reminisced. “The wedding between Karl Schmidt and Ramona Higgins was a big deal for the Barbies and Millicent got me into it. After that I had some money. And there was the germanium.” Again she had to explain. “Germanium is a material like iron or copper. It’s used in electronics. Anyway, there was a small deposit of it on our family lands, tailings from a worked out mine. The Barbies found a market for it and that got my family out of debt.

“For the last couple of years, I have been investing with the Barbies in most of the deals. But I’m not the only one. I don’t know why Heather decided to put me on the stock certificate, not one of the others.”

Actually Trudi did know, or at least could make a good guess. This whole “preferred stock as money” was her proposal and it was a safe bet that when Judy had written Heather she’d made that clear. The Barbies had never had a truly fixed membership. Each deal was a new arrangement and none of the Barbies had been in on all of them. For that matter, very few of the deals included only the Barbies. Still, she wondered how the rest of the down-timer Barbies were going to react. Trudi took a vicki from her purse and handed it over, collected her change, and sat down for her wash and set. And through it all, she talked about the Barbies and the up-timers.

Not that the conversation remained one-sided. These women weren’t ignorant of up-timers. While most of the customers were from the Them of Vienna, some of them lived and worked in Race Track City, and all of the staff lived here.

But a combination of circumstances had locked the Sanderlins and Fortneys into a sort of pseudo-lords of the manor role. They owned, or owned in part, many of the businesses in Race Track City, including this one, and people had been coming to them indirectly for loans for the better part of a year now. Besides, they were the emperor’s representatives, so far as the race track and the 240Z were concerned. At the same time, there were only a few up-timers here, so they had to be more careful about offending the powers-that-be than up-timers did in Grantville or Magdeburg. So whatever their preferences might have been, the up-timers were treated as upper Hofbefreiten or lower nobility.

This was a complete up-time style beauty shop. Gayleen Sanderlin had insisted on that. They provided washing, setting, perms and dye jobs, with the chemicals and dyes shipped in all the way from Lothlorien Farbenwerk in the Ring of Fire. By now, after a year of practice, they were pretty good at it. They also did manicures and pedicures with clear or colored nail polish. There were eight chairs and a waiting area. The shop had six hairdressers and fifteen customers either getting something done or waiting to have something done.

Trudi had expected to wait, but had been rushed to the head of the line. Seated now, in the shampoo chair, with her neck on the neckrest and one of the hairdressers using what amounted to a watering pot to wet her hair with warm water, Trudi proceeded to tell them how up-timers acted in the wild. So to speak. As she was describing Grantville High and TwinLo Park, she in turn learned about the founding of Race Track City and the up-time style beauty salon that Gayleen Sanderlin had insisted upon, and who came here and how often.

Princess Maximilliana von Liechtenstein was a regular with a weekly appointment, as were perhaps half a dozen others. The salon was a place where ladies of high standing could, literally, let their hair down and chat. It wasn’t good to get too familiar, whatever Frau Sanderlin said, but it was acceptable for the staff, with all proper deference, to share the latest gossip and express their opinions.

Trudi realized as they talked that this place was another center of revolution-not overt like the Committees of Correspondence-but a whisper here, a wink and a nod there, repeating opinions along with reporting on the latest scandal. A place where the female They of Vienna could exchange information and affect opinion without ever meeting.

“I was at the beauty salon and I heard that von Dorkfish was having it on with his wife’s maid,” followed by “Did you hear the emperor is going to shift troops to the south? Sadi von Linden said her husband is being sent to Hungary, rather than the border with Bohemia,” followed by “The Sonny Steamer can be used as a model for a bigger engine that will pull several wagons behind it, if they get permission for the railroad,” followed by, followed by. . for a year now. Juicy gossip, politics, technology, and attitudes, especially attitudes shared by the woman washing your hair repeating and reinterpreting what she has heard.

By the time Trudi left the salon, she had a much clearer view of what had been going on in Vienna since even before the Ring of Fire. And the women in the shop had a much clearer view of how up-time investment worked and the value of BarbieCo stock. If that view lacked some of the mathematics and scholarly accuracy that Sarah Wendell would have insisted on, it was still much more reassuring for these women, shop girls and great ladies alike.

“Gresham’s law says that bad money drives out good,” Trudi explained, “because people hold onto the good money and spend the bad money. Well, in the USE people hold onto American dollars and spend silver.”

Von Hatch Apartment, Vienna

“You turned them down?” Elena von Hatch shouted at her husband, “They offered you BarbieCo for that damned useless mine and you turned them down! My mother told me you were an idiot and she was right!”

“It’s not like it was American dollars. It’s just paper.”

“It’s ownership in BarbieCo, so it’s ownership in everything that BarbieCo owns! All the factories, all the businesses. Just like reichsthaler notes are ownership of silver in the royal vaults.”

“But how much ownership? With a reichsthaler, it’s a ninth of a Cologne mark of silver, but how much is a BarbieCo thaler? Tell me that.”

“A ninth of a Cologne mark of silver’s worth,” Elena insisted, going a bit farther than Trudi had, “but it’s backed by buildings and machines, so as they build more buildings and machines it can be worth even more.”

Another Apartment, Vienna

“How was your day, dear one?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” Jager said. “Ludolf came it for some licensing and gave me these instead of reichsthaler.” He showed his wife the green and orange sheets. “I didn’t want to argue. Ludolf is mostly fair, if a bit stiff. Do you think he was cheating me?”

“No, those are fine. I was out at Race Track City getting my hair done and there are signs all over the place. These are as good as cash, and they pay interest as well. Not a lot. Well, maybe not a lot. It depends on how well the company does, because they are participating preferred. But a minimum of two percent annual interest. That is written on the back.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Viveka was explaining it to me.” She took the money from his hands. “No, you didn’t get a hayli. A judi and two vickies.” She pointed at the writing that curved around the bottom half of the portraits in the center of the sheets. One of them said, “Judith Elaine Wendell.” The other said, “Victoria Maureen Emerson.” Then she continued. “Apparently, Gertrude von Bachmerin-that’s the six pfennig BarbieCo note-was in the shop to get her hair done yesterday morning and explained it all. Anyway, Gertrude is sort of a von Up-time by adoption, even though she was born in this century. And the BarbieCo stock is just like American dollars, except in the normal denominations instead of that weird system that the up-timers use.”

Jager let it wash over him, at least for the most part. The important point was the bribe he had gotten from Ludolf was good money. That, and the fact that he was going to be very very polite to up-timers in the future, even this Gertrude von Up-time by adoption. A smart man didn’t offend people who could wave their hands and make money appear out of nowhere. He also wondered why the up-timers out at Race Track City hadn’t done it months ago.