Conquistador (11 page)

“I did,” Tully said. “Guy I know on the Oakland PD—don't worry, strictly unofficial.”

“What did he say?” Tom asked.

“That RM and M is so clean it squeaks,” Tully said. “Pays all its city taxes, even ones it could get out of. Contributes to all the right charities, and has since the late 1940s. Gives the city libraries and fire engines. Does everything but help little old ladies across the street. Makes big donations to local politicians, but spreads them around so it doesn't look funny if they get favors; mostly they insist on being left strictly alone.”

Tom remembered an elegant drawing room on Nob Hill, and a bewildered bitterness hiding behind good breeding. He pushed it aside, summoned logic and went on: “That fits with Adrienne being on the side of the angels,” he said. “Granted, she probably wants information from us, too, but that's natural.”

Tully nodded, seeming oddly reluctant. “We don't want a civilian getting under our feet,” he said. “Far be it from me to ruin your pickup line, Kemosabe—”

Tom snorted. “We
do
want access,” he pointed out. “We do
not
want RM and M pulling strings here in Sacramento to get us told to do something else. We—”

“OK, OK,” Tully said, grinning. “Guess it's been a long time, huh?”

“I had a nice dinner with a nice young lady. Not impossibly younger. We talked about our families and our lives. . . .”

“. . . and I do envy you that,” she'd said at one point in the evening, after he'd described a winter hunting trip he'd taken with his father and brother just before he joined the army back in the nineties.

“Envy me what?” Tom replied. “Growing up on our farm, or getting away to the Upper Peninsula?”

“Neither. I spent a lot of my childhood in the country too. And I'm California born and bred; I don't like snow unless it stays on ski slopes where it belongs—my ancestors were all either Southerners or Italians. What I envy you is being so close to your father.”

“You weren't?”

Adrienne propped her chin on a palm and looked past him. “I'm afraid not. My family was . . . is . . . sort of conservative. And I was a tomboy to start with, then a wild handful as a teenager, always in and out of trouble, and all my brothers and sisters—”

“How many?” Tom asked curiously.

“I'm the youngest of six: John, Robert, Lamar, Charles, Cynthia, and me. John—John Rolfe the Seventh—is forty-three.”

Tom nodded, hiding his surprise; with a brother and a sister, he'd had more siblings than most even in a deep-rural part of the northern plains.

She
must
have been born in the eighties,
he thought.
She's definitely younger than me, and I'd say at least four, five years younger, Gen-Y. Well, statistically there have to have been
some
upper-crust Bay Area WASPs who had families that size in the post-baby-boom era, but it's certainly unusual.

It wasn't as if they were some variety of weird fundamentalist; she'd also mentioned that her family were Episcopalians.

She went on: “As I said, I was the youngest, and the rest were always much more . . . dutiful. My father's no fool, but he's, mmmmm, shockable, let's say; and I just couldn't resist shocking him and Mother, and everyone else who looked so smug—nobody's more judgmental than a fifteen-year-old full of herself. Things went from bad to worse.”

“I know what you mean,” he said. “I was lucky; Lars and I had the usual head-butting you do with your father, but it was mostly good-natured. I've seen how things can get out of hand.”

“And Mother was worse than Dad, if anything; she kept trying to be so
understanding,
when she was obviously yearning to throttle me. If it weren't for Grandmother—my mother's mother—and Great-aunt Chloe, I think I'd have gone nuts.”

“What's your grandmother like?” he asked.

“Was, I'm afraid. She was Italian—a contessa, no less, a war bride—although she always insisted on being called a Tuscan and claimed that everything south of Sienna was ‘baptized Arabs.' Her family lived up in the hills east of Florence, because they'd lost their
palazzo
in town and pretty well everything else but a couple of olive groves and heirlooms; she met Rob Fitzmorton—he was my paternal grandfather's cousin—when Uncle Rob drove a tank-destroyer into their courtyard.”

“That's romantic enough,” Tom said.

“Well, Uncle Rob always thought so. I suspect the K-rations may have had something to do with it. They were probably literally starving then, what with the war. Living on olives and bread and what rabbits they could shoot, at least; and serving them on Renaissance silverware.”

Tom chuckled. “Sounds like an interesting old lady.”

She smiled fondly. “She was absolutely dreadful, a monster, a snob to the core, and callous as a cat to anyone she didn't like. She could flay the skin off you with an arched eyebrow and four words. And the way she treated anyone who worked for her was a scandal. People were even more frightened of her than of the Old Man, because he was hard but fair. The Contessa Francesca Cammachia di Montevarchi; she usually didn't bother adding the ‘Fitzmorton' unless she was signing a check. Everyone called her Contessa Perdita, or the Diamond Contessa.”

His brows rose. “You liked her, though?”

“I adored her; she made me feel like a fairy changeling. She told me once that all my brothers and sisters were tainted by bourgeois respectability, but that she saw from an early age that I had inherited something of her soul and could be productively corrupted by spoiling and indulgence. Even when she was old—in my first memories of her she must have been about sixty—she always wore these lovely clothes, appropriate but so chic and soigné, drove Italian sports cars on our dirt roads . . . I remember her perfume, and those stunning diamonds came out at the slightest excuse. She saw it as her mission to civilize a bunch of Saxon barbarians—meaning the Fitzmortons, her husband's family, and us Rolfes—who had all sorts of boring virtues like industry and determination but lacked the aristocratic ones like savoir faire, style and ruthless selfishness.”

“So she accepted you the way you were? That must have been a relief.”

“Lord, no! But she didn't disapprove of the same things my parents did. Looking back, a few people did accept me as I was—Ralph, for example. . . .”

“Ralph?” he asked.
A boyfriend?
He tried to keep a quick flush of hostile interest out of his voice, and by the slight quirk of one elegant red-blond eyebrow, didn't quite manage it.

“Ralph was one of Aunt Chloe's odd friends; he ran—runs—a burger joint near, ah, near Martinez.” That was a town west of the Delta, on the Carquinez Strait. “Sort of a sixties type, you might say.”

“I wouldn't think your grandmother would approve of him, then,” Tom said with a grin.

“And you'd be
soooo
right,” Adrienne said. “ ‘A sweaty, shaggy peasant,' and I quote.”

“Your grandmother had a rough edge to her tongue,” Tom observed.

“More like an edge lined with razors. She told
me
I had no dress sense and was far too fond of things like riding horses; a little was good for the posture, but too much was rustic, and shooting animals was just too, too boring. But she'd sweep me off when things got too impossible at home, off through . . . off to San Francisco, which she reluctantly granted was a real city, if provincial compared to Florence.”

“Took you to the zoo and suchlike?” Tom prompted.
She can't have been all bad, if she took that much trouble for a grandchild.

“Usually she'd take me to the ballet and the galleries and the best theater and restaurants, and sit up talking with me till all hours while we ate these amazing chocolates, and let me sleep till noon, and then take me to have my hair and nails done. Mind you, I knew from the time I was eight that she'd drop me in an instant if I started being more boring than amusing. She found my mother terminally dull—overshadowed her completely from infancy; it must have been like growing up as a minor moon attendant on a star—and she detested my father as a prig . . . well, Dad
is
a prig, I grant, or at least very stuffy.”

“And your great-aunt Chloe?” Tom said, watching the play of emotion on the sculpted face, trying to imagine her as a sullen rebellious teenager.

The warm affection that showed when she spoke of her grandmother made her face more human; there was often a slight edge of coldness to her expression, something that you didn't notice until it melted away. His own grandmother had been as different from this exotic contessa creature as it was possible to imagine, a Norski farm wife as tough as an old root, short-spoken and direct. He could remember her birch syrup, though. . . .

“Oh, Aunt Chloe was completely different. Everybody loved her, and she took in strays of the oddest sorts. She took
me
in, and put up with me when I was a perfect little beast. And she was the best listener I ever met—although you're not bad in that respect yourself, Tom.”

He blushed. “Well, I try not to do the stereotypical thing; you know, the man who natters on about himself whenever he meets a woman, as if his life was necessarily interesting just because it's his.”

“I think yours
is
interesting,” she said. “Not to mention your work.”

“Nine-tenths paperwork, I'm afraid,” he said. “Wait a minute—your aunt took you in, you said?”

“Great-aunt. Took me in informally; I more or less ran away from home for a while. Things got extremely messy. My parents wanted me put in therapy; committed and tranked out, in other words. Chloe wouldn't hear of it, and the Old Man—her brother, my father's father—backed her up, and of course what he said went. Looking back on it, I blush with shame at the way I treated her and everyone else at Seven Oaks—that was her place in the country—but I was monstrously preoccupied with my own grievances, real and imagined. At that point my parents pretty well washed their hands of me; the consensus was that I was either a psychopath, a dangerous juvenile delinquent—I got caught smoking weed at a wild party with people making out in the darker corners—or a lesbian degenerate—possibly all three, though not necessarily at the same time. I
am
crazy, of course, and you can outgrow juvenile delinquency like spots. . . .”

“Two out of three isn't bad.” Tom grinned. “Tried to get me worrying there for a moment, didn't you?”

Her gaze came back to his, and a mischievous twinkle lit the green eyes. She ate a forkful of the curried lamb, made an appreciative noise, took a sip of her red zinfandel, then chuckled and went on: “And alas, I turned out to be incorrigibly straight. I mean, have you ever tried to have a romantic relationship with a girl?”

This time his shout of laughter turned heads. He turned it down, and saw that she was chuckling helplessly too; it was a husky, wholehearted sound, with nothing of a giggle in it, and he liked that. His ex-wife had had an unfortunate tendency to giggle, and what could be charming at eighteen turned into a fingernails-on-slate torment later.

“Well, yah, you betcha, I
have
tried that, repeatedly,” Tom said. “Not always successfully, but I keep at it. A dirty job that somebody has to do.”

“Ms. Malaprop strikes again; but seriously, from my viewpoint it was like attempting a nice hot shower in lukewarm chicken soup. While trying to live on nothing but chocolate éclairs. God have mercy.” She sighed. “It would have been so
convenient,
though. Women don't
always
think you've invited them to run your life just because you sleep with them.”

“Neither do all men, not these days,” Tom said, a little defensively. Silently:
I guess I don't know the Bay Area as well as I thought. Sensitive Guys in Touch with Their Feelings Who Understand Her Need for Personal Space are a dime a dozen there, aren't they? And the family in a tizzy in the nineties because she smoked a joint, or there were kids necking at a party? This whole saga—the big, sprawling, intermarried families and crazy rich grand-mothers and country houses with names and fathers obsessed with proper behavior and such . . . sounds sort of Southern Gothic, or even European, and Old European at that, Faulkner or Chekhov with a few Californian touches. Maybe things get really different up beyond the last thin layers of the middle classes? Because I'd swear she's telling the truth.

Perhaps Adrienne saw something in his face. “Let's say the, ah, families in our crowd were sort of behind the times,” she said. “Still are . . .”

This wasn't a conversation he could imagine having in, say, Ironwood, the small town where his high school had been located; too much Lutheran primness lingered there. Nothing out of the ordinary for California, though, and it was enjoyable to be doing the mutual-exploration thing again. Particularly when you liked the personality revealed, and thought it was true in reverse too.