Conquistador (45 page)

Tom looked at Adrienne. “What happened to your Old Man's indifference to FirstSider sensibilities?”

She shrugged: “Well, we'd look pretty conspicuous with an all-pink-faces workforce in twenty-first century
Oakland,
wouldn't we, Tom? Lawsuits would be the least of it. A lot of genuine traffic goes through that complex—which means we can divert a certain amount without suspicion. We keep shuffling the deck so that nobody notices the kernel at the center of the peanut, to mix a metaphor. That means the outside has to look as genuine as possible.”

Henry Villers nodded vigorously. “RM and M is Oakland's mostest equal-opportunity false-front scam. So, patiently and slowly I accumulated clues that something funny was going on there. All the while neglecting the really funny thing.”

He paused, and Tom took up the obvious straight line. “Which was?”

“Which was that RM and M had the Oakland police in their pockets, starting about thirty years ago. If I hadn't been quick and pig headed, they'd have steered me away from investigating, the way they did with most others who smelled a rat.”

“Make it forty-odd years,” Adrienne said. “You got caught in 1998, right? According to the GSA records, we've had our nominees running the Oakland police department continuously from about 1956. Not that they actually know
who
they're working for.”

“That would take a lot of . . . Sorry,” Tom said.

Henry Villers grinned whitely. “Brother, with the sort of money RM and M had to throw around, you could bribe Superman.” He adopted a man-of-steel pose: “ ‘Ten million dollars,' the Man says. ‘No, no, I am Superman!' Then it's thirty million. ‘No, no, I stand for Truth, Justice and the American Way!' So then it's fifty million, and Superman comes back: ‘I'll kill anyone you want! I'll fly shit across the border! Up, up and away! Whoooosh!' ”

Villers took a pull at his beer. “Ahhh . . . So my reports got a lot of attention. Right from the top. Oh, gosh-wow-goody-gumdrops, says I, visions of promotions dancing in my head. Then one night I get called to a private, off-the-reservation meeting with the chief, no less . . . and wake up here,” Henry finished sourly.

“Have you had . . . a rough time here?” Tom asked.

“What, you mean apart from better than half the people thinking I'm a rape-crazed subhuman just-down-from-the-trees dope fiend nigger barbarian and locking up their daughters and sidling away with their hands on their wallets at the first sight of me?” Henry said with a twisted smile. “Apart from
that,
not much. It beats getting dropped into the bay in concrete overshoes.”

He laughed bitterly. “It's funny, in a way. This place is full of the worst sort of rednecks—”

“Oh, come now, Henry,” Adrienne said. “Not the very
worst
sort.”

“OK, I grant you, your grandpa didn't like the one-gallus, white-sheet, burning-cross, three-hundred-pounds-and-pimples-and-that's-just-the-women set,” Henry conceded. “But that was because he despised them for being no'count white trash, not because of they way they felt about black folk. He's just so fucking genteel about it his ass bleeds, like Robert E. Lee or something. Anyway, the odd thing is that there's no
official
discrimination here. Unless you're a
nahua,
of course, and most of them aren't in our beloved Commonwealth long enough to stop being glad they're not starving or getting their hearts chopped out to juice up Monster of the Week. They don't have time to realize the way they get fucked over
here.
”

Tom thought rapidly. “Ah, there's no official discrimination because there aren't enough African-Americans here to count?”

Henry drank some of his beer and thumped the tankard down, extending a pointing finger at Tom.

“Give the game warden a chocolate spotted owl!” he said. “I mean, man, all twenty-seven of us—not counting my two kids with Susie, Ralph's daughter—are not exactly going to start sitting down in many lunch counters. That's twenty-seven out of a hundred and fifty thousand, with no more coming. None since me, nearly ten years ago, and mostly we live over in New Brooklyn, so people in the other Family domains don't see much of us.”

“New Brooklyn?” Tom asked.

“Uncle Sol—Solomon Pearlmutter—called his domain's main town that,” Adrienne said. “He wanted to call it the New Lower East Side, but got talked out of it. It's over where San Francisco got started FirstSide; the Pearlmutter domain runs from the Golden Gate down to a little beyond San Mateo. Everyone thought he was crazy for claiming it, since there's not much good farmland or timber there.”

She grinned, and the two men chuckled.

“After the Old Man, Uncle Sol was the smartest man I ever met,” she said. “And Granddad always said Uncle Sol had more sheer wattage, he was just less practical. When they played chess, it was like mountains colliding. New Brooklyn is the second-largest town in the Commonwealth now, a big seaport and manufacturing center with fifteen thousand people, and it all belongs to the Pearlmutters and their affiliates. They make almost as much off it as they do off their cut from the Gate and the Commission's properties. Not to mention they donated the land for the University of New Virginia, which is about where Stanford sits FirstSide. Uncle Sol always said knowledge isn't just power; it's also wealth.”

Henry Villers nodded. “No flies on that dude; I met him once just before he died, old but still sharp as a razor. He also said only dumb krauts like the von Traupitzes would think you could get rich here growing wheat. Anyway, nobody's afraid of us; most people don't even see any of us more than once a year, which means only a few get upset about us. I think our Supreme Honky is content to let us vanish like a handful of soot in a snowstorm and pat himself on the back about what a goddam humanitarian realist he is. Motherfucker. If there were twenty-seven
thousand
black folk here, or even twenty-seven
hundred,
it'd be a different story.”

You betcha,
Tom thought.
Point scored. You can't have much racism when there aren't any other races to practice it on, so to speak.

“Adrienne,” Henry went on, “put me in touch with Ralph when I got shanghaied here.” He raised his stein to her. “For which I thank you.”

“De nada,”
she said. “Now, Ralph's story . . .”

The older man told it, then concluded: “So the bastard gave me this land and a loan to get started, yeah. And I love my wife and my kids and grandkids, and I've had a pretty good life here. But it ain't the life I'd have chosen, and if he thinks all this charity-from-on-high makes up for that, he's got another think coming.”

Tom finished his hamburger. It had been about as he'd expected: delicious, the meat leanly flavorful but juicy and basted with just a touch of fiery sauce; tangy onions and tomatoes tasting of the earth; home-made garlic mayonnaise; all on a kaiser-style bun warm from the beehive-shaped earth oven on the other side of the patio with bits of caramelized onion in the crust, and a spear of pickle on the side that crunched nicely. Quite possibly the best hamburger he'd ever tasted, even including the ones his own father used to make at Fourth of July barbecues. The fries had been done in olive oil, and they weren't formed from extruded powdered potato painted with beef fat.

“OK,” Tom said. “Now”—he looked questioningly at Adrienne, who was wiping her fingers on a checked cloth napkin. She nodded—“if you wouldn't mind a hypothetical question, would this Commonwealth be better or worse if the Collettas were running it? Instead of the Rolfes and their supporters.”

Ralph Barnes choked on his last swallow of beer. Henry Villers thumped him on the back, but there was a gray anxiety in the glance he shot Adrienne. She made a soothing gesture.

“Let's consider that a hypothetical hypothetical, for now,” she said.

Ralph nodded vigorously. “Oh, hell, that's no contest. Yeah, the Old Man's a throat-cutting pirate,” he said. “And unlike a lotta people here, I don't use ‘pirate' as a compliment. Sorry, princess, but I'm not going to start shading it at this late date. Yeah, he's a nasty piece of work. But he's smart, and he's consistent, and he was willing to stop when he got what he wanted. He makes the rules to suit himself, but then he keeps 'em, usually. And you can trust his promises. The Collettas . . . old man Salvatore had about as much of the milk of human kindness as a lizard does; he and Otto von Traupitz were neck and neck in the Sheer Absolute Fucking Evil sweepstakes, in their different ways. Giovanni tries to live up to the old bastard. Neither of them ever heard of the concept ‘where to stop.' And they'd
change
the rules whenever it gave 'em a moment's advantage. Plus, personally, I'd be a dead man if they took over. I dissed his dad to his face. Giovanni don't forget.”

“Ditto, ditto,” Henry said. “Those Collettas would have had me on an auction block. Not that they're prejudiced. They'd do it to anybody they could. Not to mention their friends the Batyushkovs, who
are
prejudiced 'gainst us black-asses, as they so charmingly put it, and the von Traupitzes, who'd probably render me down for soap. Me for starters.”

Barnes frowned and thought for a moment. “Don't get me wrong, Warden Tom. If there was a chance for a revolution here, I'd be out on the barricades in a minute, and I'd dance around the guillotine when they chopped the heads off the whole rotten gang—present company excepted.”

“God, that's big of you, Ralph,” Adrienne said, chuckling.

Barnes scowled and waved the interjection aside. “There's a lot here I don't like. But it could get a hell of a lot worse. And I've got my kids and grandkids to think about. They were born here and it's their home.”

He looked at Adrienne. “This hypothetical . . . it ain't
totally
hypothetical?” She nodded. “Then anything I can do, princess, you just ask.”

She put her hand on his and squeezed; he returned the pressure.

“And say . . .” He frowned. “One thing. The Collettas're close with the Batyushkovs these days, right? Well, there's something I ran across a while ago. You know Sergei Ilyanovich Batyushkov?”

“The geneticist?” Adrienne asked. “The Batyushkov Prime's nephew?”

“Well, for starters, he ain't a geneticist. He's a theoretical physicist,” Barnes said. “I read some articles by him a while ago. And yeah, he was called Sergei . . . but the last name wasn't Batyushkov. Sergei Lermontov, Ph.D.”

“I'm definitely going to be less conspicuous without Tom along,” Roy Tully said to himself as he finished washing the breakfast dishes. “I love the big guy like a brother, but . . .”

What had Anna Russell said about Siegfried, the hero of the Ring Cycle? He murmured it, trying to match Russell's upper-class British drawl: “He's very
young,
and he's very
tall,
and he's very
strong,
and he's very
handsome,
and he's very
stupid.
”

That was unjust; he knew his partner had plenty upstairs. He was just very . . .

Straightforward, that's it,
Tully thought.
Straightforward. And he certainly stands out in a crowd.

Before he left he spent some time with Adrienne's computer; she had it set up in the living room, which gave him a lovely view of the morning fog and then the town as he sat sipping coffee and tapping his way through some public files, sampling a few chat rooms and getting a feel for how to shift data around. He had to admit Nostradamus was organized with systematic clarity: research, TV, e-mail, auctions, catalog buying, music and everything else in one neat package. It still felt odd, compared to surfing the Net: as if you'd moved from Castle Gormenghast to a utility apartment—no matter how tidy and well laid out it was, you were still going to be disappointed at the lack of crannies and dungeons and attics full of junk and sheer size. After half an hour or so he printed up some maps, stuck them into the pocket of his jeans, fastened the holster of the Glock to the small of his back under a light jacket—it was yellow, with green suede elbow patches; he was very fond of it and glad Adrienne's cleanup squad had brought it along—then went outside. The East Bay wasn't as chilly in summertime as San Francisco, but a jacket wouldn't be completely out of place.

“Time to soak up some atmosphere,” he said to himself, and patted the gun for reassurance.

Not that he anticipated any firefights; but the weapon itself was a sign he had the trust of some powerful people here in this miniature pirate kingdom.
Everything in miniature except the planet,
he thought.
Well, that ought to make things easier.
There couldn't be more than a few dozen decision-making individuals involved in whatever machinations were going on.
Have to watch my step, though,
he reminded himself.
Remember that these people aren't mine, even though they speak the same language and wear the same clothes.