Conquistador (50 page)

“How did you produce grades for Stanford?” he said.

“Oh, we fake 'em,” she said. “Phony private school FirstSide . . . well, it's actually a real one, but we slip an extra notional student in now and then for when someone goes to a university there. We endowed it and pick the head-masters, of course. Paying full tuition at the university also helps; they don't check as hard.”

“Why
did
you go to Stanford?” he asked. “Why not, ah, University of New Virginia?”

“I started there, but UNV's still small,” she said. “Particularly the humanities departments, and I wanted to study history.” A wry laugh. “Not that that's the only difference; you're
not
going to find many postmodernist professors of postcolonial studies at UNV, thank God.”

He digested that while they cruised past the town hall. The white walls, square tower and big arched courtyard entrance reminded him strongly of Santa Barbara's post office; then they turned down a street with palms on both sides and two-story adobe buildings behind a continuous arcade roof supported on columns made from varnished black-walnut trunks. The streetlights were black cast-iron pillars with fanciful detailing, and the sidewalks colored brick in geometric patterns.

“I've got to do some business here,” she said, taking an empty parking place; there were, he noted, no meters. “Care to come along?”

He nodded. One of the buildings had rounded corners and tall glass windows along both street-side walls, now swung wide under the arcade overhang. A tilework sign over the open doors read FOUQUET'S. Adrienne walked into the entranceway and halted.

The interior was a single great room, with a roof spanned by exposed wooden beams; one end held a pool table, and there was a flat-film TV screen over the big counter with its top of polished stone and revolving seats on stainless-steel pillars. Elsewhere there were long tables, made of the inevitable giant slabs of redwood, here topped with harder varieties in a sort of parquet arrangement, plus booths along the walls. People bustled about, coming and going; the air was full of the smell of frying food and some sort of plangent country-style music and chattering voices. The waiters behind the counter or circulating with trays were dressed in white, with white fore-and-aft caps and aprons.

Tom blinked.
It's the half-familiar that gets you,
he thought.
This is the closest thing I've ever seen to a real old-style soda joint, the kind in Roy's movies. It's not a revival or deliberately retro, either. It's just . . . what it is.

The crowd within must have numbered a hundred or so, none of them over twenty or younger than early adolescence. Some of the girls were wearing those Catholic-school-uniform arrangements he'd seen in Rolfeston, with white shirts and ties (often loosened), pleated knee-length skirts, and knee socks. Most of the rest were in summery cotton dresses, with a minority in slacks or jeans; none of the girls had short hair, or the boys long, and there were a fair number of pigtails tied with ribbon. The boys were more varied; fewer of them were dressed in their version of the school uniform, which included khaki shorts, and some wore suits. It took him a moment to realize something about the ones in overalls.

That isn't a fashion statement,
he thought.
Those are their
clothes.

A giggling clutch of sixteen-year-old females in a booth near the door were looking at Tom out of the corners of their eyes; in the next a boy and girl were actually sipping from the same malt with two straws, something he'd never seen outside a book of Norman Rockwell prints. A dozen or more of the older boys and a couple of girls were smoking, but casually, not as if it was an act of defiance; another clutch argued amiably around the jukebox—which was the latest digital model with flash memory storage.

It took him a moment to estimate the ages of individuals accurately, too; after a second look he realized his first estimates for most were at least a year too high.

Not that they're baby-faced. In fact, they look pretty fit,
he thought.
There's a couple of lard-butts and some pimple-faces, but not many for the size of the group.

It was something indefinable about the eyes. . . .

“I thought I'd find a good big crowd,” Adrienne said to him as they stood in the doorway. “When I was a teenager, townie kids always used to hang out here after church in summertime. School year ends on June fifteenth, by the way—the day you got here.”

Then she put two fingers in her mouth and whistled piercingly, followed by a shout: “Hey, kids!”

Silence fell raggedly, and someone turned the music down in the ensuing quiet. Then there were exclamations; it reminded Tom a little of the way a rave crowd responded to a popular deejay, but not quite so open.

“Hi!” he heard over and over. Variations on “It's Miss Rolfe—Adrienne!”

A pair of boys in their late teens with platinum-and-gold thumb rings waved in a more casual manner from a corner where they held court with their girlfriends and a gaggle of hangers-on, and Adrienne nodded back to them.

“How was the prom?” she said to the room at large.

More enthusiasm, and she lifted hands for quiet. Into it, she said: “OK, I'm back. Look, I need a dozen or so people for the Seven Oaks harvest. Five days, twenty bucks, and the usual trimmings on Saturday. Who's interested?”

The ensuing babble took some time to quiet down. After it had, she went on: “Nobody under fourteen, nobody without the letter from the parents—and it had better be dated, kids; I remember all the tricks—and bring a sleeping bag, swimsuit and enough working clothes. And a good pair of gloves. Don't waste my time if you don't qualify, OK? Truck'll be at the school gate tomorrow morning at six sharp.”

Eager hands shot up; Adrienne pointed at one after the other, until she reached the number she needed. “Oh, all right—you too, Eddie and Sally. But that's it. No! It's a business proposition, not a public holiday—I'm asking for work, not your votes. 'Bye!”

“That seemed popular,” Tom said as they turned away.

Adrienne chuckled. “Farm work's high-status here.”

“
That's
a switch.”

High-status, instead of being the only occupation in which specialists with degrees and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment are considered ignorant yokels,
he thought. That had been one reason he didn't envy his elder brother Lars too bitterly. Plus he'd been able to understand what getting caught in a cost-price scissors meant even when he was eighteen.

She went on: “Also, four dollars a day is top-notch summer job money for kids; wages double in harvesttime—it'll keep them in sodas and pretzels and beer and movies for quite a while. And I've got a reputation as being less of a, ummm, nosy-parker chaperon than most at the party afterward,” she said. “Of course, I've got to watch that things don't go too far, or the parents wouldn't sign off.”

They walked half a block southward in the pleasant shade of the streetside arcade; that covered half the herringbone-brick sidewalk, and the roadside maples and oaks and elms the rest. People drove by, or walked, or rode bicycles and a few Segways; a lot of the latter three types stopped to exchange a word or two.

“Our next stop likes to work Sundays,” Adrienne said. “An anticlerical.”

Then the covered arcade ended, and the shops and eateries; they were into the fringe of the factory area. Gates of some pale-colored varnished wood split a high blank wall, stucco over stone. Sounds of hammering and clattering came from within, and occasionally the whir of a power tool. Adrienne pressed the button. Someone opened a small eye-level slot with a clack before the main doors swung wide.

The man inside was in his early seventies but still tough and lean, only a little stooped; the hand he extended to Adrienne was strong but gnarled, callused and scarred with the marks of a carpenter or metalworker. He had a floppy black beret on his head, bushy white eyebrows over bright blue eyes, a cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth, and rough baggy overalls below; the
bleu de travail
Tom had seen in old movies. Like the overalled boys in the soda parlor, he wore it without self-consciousness.

Of course,
Tom thought with a prickle of eeriness.
He's not just capital-F French; he left before looking like this died out. And on
this
side of the Gate, he'd have no reason to change. Nobody to mock or nag him into it.
The trickle of books and movies wouldn't be enough, particularly if certain people took care to see it wasn't.

“Ah, Mademoiselle Rolfe,” the Frenchman said. “Bonjour; it is a pleasure to see you safe home once more.”

“Pour moi aussi, Marcelle,”
she said in reply.
“Ça va?”

The old man waggled a hand.
“Comme ci, comme ca,”
he said, and went on in accented English: “My liver is not a young man's, but then what can one do? The rest of me is not a young man's, either. But come in, come in.”

“
Je vous presente mon ami,
M Thomas Christiansen,” Adrienne said as they walked into an open concrete-floored courtyard. “Tom, M Marcelle Boissinot; proprietor of the best
tonnellerie,
cooperage, in the Rolfe Domain. Christiansen is newly arrived in the Commonwealth; perhaps you saw the article in the newspaper this morning?”

Tom could follow basic French, if not speak it beyond things like
defilade fire
or
mines;
he'd done a little work with the Legion, but he was glad that the conversation had shifted to his mother tongue. The old man gave him a hard, dry handshake.

“An infinite pleasure, but I had no time for papers,” he said. Then, shrewdly: “Monsieur is a hunter, but once also a hunter of men,
n'est pas?”

“U.S. Army Rangers,” he said.
Here's
one
person at least who didn't read my biography, by Jesus.
“Up until a couple of years ago.”

“Ah!” The pale eyes glittered, and Tom felt a sudden unease. “Then monsieur has also been a slayer of
les salarabes. Bon!
”

He turned and shouted over his shoulder, speaking rapidly in a quacking guttural-nasal dialect Tom couldn't begin to identify except that it was French of a sort.

Open-sided workshops and storerooms surrounded the courtyard, with ten or so men working. A couple of them looked like sons and grandsons of Marcelle; the rest could have been anybody, and their chatter was mostly in English, with a word or phrase of French here or there. There was a strong smell of seasoned timber in the air, and of sawdust and fire and hot wood. Long planks of blond oak were stacked crisscross up to the high rafters along the inside walls of the workshops, and a businesslike clutter of barrel staves and blanks, iron hoops and tools stood against walls and on workbenches. Several younger men were assembling chest-high wine barrels on the open courtyard, each splayed cylinder of smooth curve-sided oak boards resting open side down over a low hot fire of scraps. Tom watched with interest as one man bent the heat-softened wood to shape with a rope and winch, while another slipped an iron hoop over the top and drove it down to its place with quick, skilled strokes of mallet and wedge.

“Always a pleasure to watch men work who know what they're doing,” Tom said sincerely.

As he spoke, a youngster came out with a tray and three glasses of white wine. The old man lifted his. “Death to
les salarabes!
” he said.

Tom touched his lips to the wine but didn't drink; the word meant
wog filth,
roughly, and he'd worked with plenty of good-guy Arabs—and Kurds and Afghans and Kazakhs—during the war, ones who hated the loony killers as much as he did. Or more, having a more immediate grudge.

Marcelle Boissinot's eyes were fixed on something in the distant past, and he was smiling, a remarkably cruel expression. He took another sip of his wine, and murmured under his breath,
“Vive la vin, vive la guerre, vive le sacre legionnaire . . .”

Then he shook himself slightly, and turned politely to his guest, looking up the tall blond length of him. “Monsieur is perhaps of German extraction? In Algeria, I served with some Germans in the First REP—I enlisted claiming to be a Walloon, of course—and they were formidable fighting men.”

“I'm Norwegian-American,” he said. “But I agree; we operated with some German special-forces units.”

“But this reminds me,” Marcelle said to Adrienne. “Of a certainty, you have heard the scandal?”

“Scandal?” she said, arching her brows.

“On the afternoon news; the elopement.”

“Who?” she asked curiously.

“Siegfried von Traupitz,” he said. “A sudden marriage before a magistrate. In Santa Barbara, most naturally.”

Adrienne whistled. “The von Traupitz heir?”

In an aside to Tom: “Santa Barbara is Commission territory, like Rolfeston—common ground, not part of any domain. The justices of the peace there are elected neutrals who have to take anyone who comes; and it's a holiday resort, a lot of honeymooners go there.”

To the cooper, she went on: “Who with? Tell me instantly, Marcelle!”

The ex-Frenchman's grin turned enormous, and the cigarette worked at the corner of his mouth.

“With the child of another Prime,” he said, stretching out the delicious tension as she considered and rejected the limited pool of young women it could be. “With . . . Rebecca Pearlmutter!”

“With
Rebecca?
” Adrienne gasped. Then she gave a peal of laughter that set all the men within earshot grinning in sympathy—and stealing glances at her face, which lit with an inner glow. At rest, her face was beautiful; when she laughed, it went several notches up from there. Tom wrenched his attention away from her to her words.