Conquistador (41 page)

Tom gave her a considering look. “You didn't come across as . . . different,” he said. “I'd think that being raised here would be harder to hide. At first I just thought you were a bit weird because your family was rich.”

“Well, thanks,” she said dryly, and then shrugged. “I visited FirstSide a lot, and spent a couple of years at Stanford. And I had special training in blending in over there; I can understand how modern America operates. The Old Man doesn't give a damn what FirstSiders think, though, and neither do most people in the Commonwealth. This is another country, and we do things differently here.”

“Not to mention that here, you Rolfes are kings and your word is law.”

“There's that. This isn't a dictatorship, but it isn't a democracy either. Sort of like a reasonably law-abiding and benevolent feudal oligarchy.” Her glance sharpened. “And we—myself included—intend to keep it that way, against
all
threats.”

Adrienne's apartment building was off the main square, halfway along the length of Lee Street's passage at the lower edge of the Berkeley hills, and nestled in the first rolling upswell; it was a two-story block built around a courtyard with a small swimming pool and a fountain, the whole thing rather like the French Quarter in New Orleans. Tom felt himself stumbling with fatigue as they climbed to the bedrooms. It wasn't even any particular effort to decline an unspoken invitation and fall into one of the beds in the guest room. He woke for a moment then, just on the verge of sleep, to hear Tully say: “You know, Kemosabe, sometimes you're too stubborn for—”

“Shut the fuck up, Tonto.”

The Mermaid Café had been busy all day, and Ralph Barnes was mildly contented with the take once he'd added the cash to the amounts paid by direct debit—he'd make payroll and expenses and a bit over, so far this year. He dropped the last of the bundled bills into the strongbox, followed by coins that he poured into the appropriate tray by denomination. A few were gold ten-dollar pieces, about the size of a dime; at this time of year, he got a lot of boat crews from the fishing craft working the salmon run up Carquinez Strait. Twenty hungry men per boat could work up quite a tab, even at the extremely reasonable prices he charged for steaks, chops, lavish salads, first-rate burgers and pretty damned good home-brewed beer.

He flicked a gold coin up toward the ceiling, watched it spin in the lamp-light, and then snatched it out of the air with one thick-fingered, hairy-backed hand. He might be pushing fifty, he might be putting on weight despite the hard work—
hell,
he thought, looking down at his belly,
face it, I'm getting fat
—but his reflexes were still pretty good. The coin bore a California condor in flight on one side, with John Rolfe's straight-nosed profile on the other and the Latin motto he'd given the country he founded:
Carpe diem et omnia mundi.

“Seize the day. And everything else you can lay your hands on, you fascist bastard,” he said in a growl. “It's no wonder you made a giant vulture the national bird. Why not the skull and crossbones for the flag?”

A knock came on the door, followed by: “Hey, Dad?”

He looked up. His eldest son was in his twenties, a close match to his father's blunt-featured stockiness; the black hair and hazel eyes were his mother's coloring.

“We've got a customer, Dad,” Sam Barnes said nervously.

“So?” Ralph said.

So why aren't you taking care of it?
he didn't say. That would reduce the boy—young man—to stuttering.

Sam was a good kid, but he was a lot more respectful of authority and his elders than his father had been at that age; Ralph wasted a moment on a mental sigh for the Bay Area in the sixties. If what he heard on the news was true, the current generation FirstSide didn't care about anything but money. Certainly the music they were making over there was pretty well crap these days; disco had been bad, and it was all downhill since then except for Al Stewart and that Enya chick. Of course, what you heard on the news wasn't necessarily true, and that was truer here than on FirstSide.

The really disappointing thing was that the Stones were still touring, when they'd promised not to.

“Ah . . . it's someone from the Thirty Families, Dad: I saw her ring. A girl, seventeen or so—a real pretty girl. She's, ummm, upset. I think I've seen her here before, but not since I came back from the militia. She said she wanted to talk to you.”

Fucking draft,
Ralph thought, but absently.

His eldest had been away for most of the past two years, doing his national service—with fairly frequent visits back home, since the Commonwealth wasn't that big. You were more likely to end up doing construction work than fighting, anyway.

“Yeah, I'll take care of it, Sam,” he said.
Can't be anyone else.
There weren't many teenagers from the Families who knew him well; he was a suspicious character, after all.

The office was an adobe cubicle with a sloped tile roof supported on Douglas fir beams; it had been the bedroom-living room-storage back when he started building the place. You went out the back door to a covered porch and across the courtyard to the long low block that held the kitchens. He did, slapped some sandwiches together, and drew two mugs of beer before he went out onto the front-side patio with its trestle tables and benches and umbrellas—all furled now. The patio had been laid out around a coastal live oak with a trunk four men couldn't have joined hands around. Leaves rustled in the great gnarled limbs above, and in the eucalyptus grove that he'd planted between the patio and the road; they had a spicy, medicinal scent that mixed well with the remnants of cooking. It was dimly lit and slightly chilly, and the stars overhead were very bright; a new moon rode like a silver ship toward the west.

Ralph deliberately let the screen door clatter a little as it shut. That gave the girl at the far table time to scrub an arm across her face and get composed.

“Hey, princess,” he said softly. “Sorta late, ain't it? Been a long while since you dropped by.”

Adrienne Rolfe looked at him and smiled. Her shoulders slumped a little in relief, although her face was still streaked by tears. They'd been friends for quite a while; he'd always had a sympathetic spot for a teenage rebel, and she was smart to boot; he'd tutored her a little in physics.

“Not many places a girl can go to get a drink and a sandwich at night around here,” she said.

Ralph laughed as he set the tray down and swung onto the bench across the table from her. That was an understatement. There were a couple of lights in the hills behind him, farmers in the valleys leading southward from the strait, and the ferryman's house down by its pier on the water, and that was pretty well it, short of the radio beacon on Mount Diablo. The ferry didn't run all night, either—either Adrienne had come down from Napa by the last run, or up from Rolfeston.

He took a sip of the beer and waited, his fingers idly tracing the initials someone had—probably with immense effort—carved into the tough canyon oak of the table's surface. Adrienne ate a bite of the sandwich in a halfhearted fashion, then set it down and blurted: “Aunt Chloe's dead.”

He reached out awkwardly and patted her hand. “Bummer,” he said. “Total bummer. She was a good sort.”

Getting her as an occasional customer certainly helped me get the café off to a good start,
he thought.
For someone in the Families, she
was
a good sort.

In a noblesse-oblige sort of way. She'd certainly helped save Adrienne from her parents, which counted as a good deed any way you looked at it. He listened, making occasional sympathetic noises as the girl talked about the swift illness—some form of rapid-spreading marrow cancer. Apparently there hadn't been much pain, which was proof of some substantially good karma on Chloe's part; he'd had relatives go from cancer in ways that a benevolent God wouldn't have inflicted on Nixon.

Well, maybe on Hitler,
he thought.

“And she left it to me,” Adrienne said, choking back a sob.

“Left what, princess?” he asked.

He hadn't known Chloe well—nodding-acquaintance level; she
was
one of the Thirty Families, and a Rolfe collateral, at that—but everyone knew
about
her. Her habit of taking in strays, in particular; he'd have been surprised if she
hadn't
left the girl something. Enough to be independent of her parents; her father, Charles Rolfe, in particular was uptight beyond belief, a serious pickle-up-the-ass type of establishment authoritarian. Chloe hadn't liked him either; their feuding was legendary, and he thought it was partly to twist his scrotum that she'd let Adrienne take lessons with the disreputable and borderline-subversive Ralph Barnes. And Chloe hadn't had any kids of her own.

“Left me Seven Oaks,” she said. “
Everything,
her share of the Family trust money as well as the land. Not even when I'm of age, but right
now.
There's some lawyers, but they've only got a—what do they call it—a watching brief.” She raised her tear-streaked face. “What . . . what the hell am I going to
do
with it, Ralph? I never imagined—”

“Whoa!” he said in surprise. Then, more slowly: “Do you want it?”

“Yeah,” she said frankly. “I mean, Seven Oaks is where I've spent most of my time since the blowup with Dad; it's more home than Rolfe Manor. The folks there are my friends. But how'm I supposed to handle all the, oh, the decisions, and keeping things going—”

“Hey!” he said sharply. “What did I tell you?”

“Ah . . . ‘You can try and maybe fail, or not try and
always
fail,' ” she said, and managed a grin. “Yeah. You know, you and Granddad think a lot alike about some things.”

“Now you're getting
nasty,
” he mock-growled. “And remember, you don't have to do everything yourself,” he said. “Listen . . .”

When they'd finished talking he got her another beer, which made her sleepy. “Sam!” he yelled over his shoulder as she yawned and stretched.

The young man stuck his head out of the kitchen entranceway, with a crock of olives still balanced on one shoulder. He
was
a good kid—no head for math or the sciences, but smart and steady. And polite, although he couldn't hide a certain gleam at the sight—Adrienne was wearing a pretty tight sweater. His own approval was purely avuncular, or so he told himself.

“Tell Jeanne to get one of the rooms made up, would you, Sam?” he said.

It wouldn't be the first time he'd put Adrienne up—first time in a while, though, since she left home for good and Chloe took her in.
Christ, she was carrying a doll first time I saw her. Where do the years go?
He shook his head at the thought and went back to his office. Not quite his bedtime, and his mind was too wired for sleep anyway; he poured himself a quick bourbon and water to help himself unwind—at times like this he still missed pot—and sat down with a scientific journal from FirstSide to pass the time, and a CD starting with “Spanish Train” in the background.

There was a very interesting article on superstring theory by a Russian named Sergi Lermontov. After a few minutes, Ralph put down his drink, turned off the music and began to take notes. They were in his personal code, and they'd have to go into the concealed file, but it was just the sort of mental effort he needed to work off some tension.

The smell of coffee brewing woke Tom Christiansen, and the sound of voices. This time there was no bewilderment; he remembered exactly where he was. It was the day after their arrival; he and Tully had been laid out most of Saturday with shock and leftover symptoms from the puke gas. Adrienne had tactfully found business elsewhere until the evening, returning with an excellent pizza and retiring early.