“Men!” She rolled her eyes. “And you’re no better than Mike Stearns or Gustav Adolf!”
She lowered her eyes and gave him a twisted half-grin. ” ‘Mr. Pittsburgh.’ What a laugh. Tax breaks, you dumbbell. Gustav Adolf is about to strip away the tax exemption from Germany’s nobles. Well . . . those of them, at least, who are willing to vote for it. And a lot of them are going to, I’ll give them full credit for it. But then what? How easy is it going to be to collect the taxes?”
He winced.
Mary’s half-grin twisted still further. “You know as well as I do—you ought to, John, as many accountants as you had on your payroll—how energetically they’re going to try to dodge the bullets. And they’ll have all the advantages you didn’t have. A poorly educated civil service, for starters—not like those sharpies in the IRS, you can be sure of that—a population which doesn’t even consider it ‘corruption’ unless the stealing takes place in broad daylight—”
Now, he was scowling. He understood her point, and perfectly. After all, he had spent untold hours closeted with his accountants and tax lawyers, in years gone by, figuring out every angle to shave money from his tax bill. But . . .
Even in his day and age, up-time, with all the complex dodges a highly industrialized and well-educated society provided, the key to efficient tax collection had been the basically cooperative attitude of the tax-payer. Sure, everybody would look for the legitimate loopholes. But, in truth, not all that many people really tried to break the law outright. Especially when—
“Jesus, you’re right,” he whispered. “Give them a legal loophole . . .”
“At last. The dawning light.” Her smile was positively serene. “You let me trot around and show all those noblewomen how their husbands can swindle the emperor all the way to their opera houses—as founding contributors, of course, they’ll be entitled to their own box seats—and they’ll cough up the money he needs for his soldiers and his ironclads. Gladly enough, believe me. They won’t want any surly foreigners sailing up the river to interrupt their parties. And Gustav Adolf doesn’t really lose anything in the process, because—you know this as well as I do—he’d never get his hands on that money anyway. They’d hide that much from him, be sure of it. So why not have them hide it in broad daylight? And, while you’re at it, provide this place with universities and art institutes and musical centers—which anybody can use, after all—and also make them feel like they’re important. A part of it, not just the sheep that got shorn.”
He stared up at her. Then, rose abruptly to his feet.
“Let’s try it. What the hell.” He took her coat off the rack by the door and held it up. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Radio station at the naval base. I’m going to call the President. If the idea comes from him, Gustav Adolf will listen.”
“It’s the middle of the night!”
“So what? It’s not far to walk.”
Still, she hesitated. Simpson gave her that same twisted half-grin.
“Come on, Mary. In for a penny, in for a pound. We’re living in the middle of the so-called ‘radical district,’ in case you didn’t know. Sure, those CoC youngsters are just barely this side of ruffians. They rub me the wrong way just looking at them. But I’ll give them one thing: this is the only part of the city that’s pretty much crime free.”
Harshly: “They call it ‘knee-capping.’ Except they do it with a hammer instead of a gun. That’s the established penalty for robbing or stealing. First offense. You don’t want to know where it goes from there. Let’s just say it ends up in the Elbe and leave it at that.”
Mary’s eyes were wide. “You’re kidding.” She turned to face the door, her expression apprehensive, as if worried that wild-eyed anarchists would break in any moment.
“No, I’m not kidding. But”—this with a bit of a chuckle—”I assure you that we don’t have to worry about them. Say whatever else, those CoC roughnecks approve of the United States. The Navy in particular, I think, the way I see them coming down to the wharf all the time to admire the ironclads.”