Conquistador Page 7

  “So, who are you lobbying for, Ms. Rolfe?” he asked. “And how does it tie into what happened in LA?”

  “Adrienne, or Adri. The Pacific Open Landscapes League,” she said.

  “Call me Tom, Adri….” Pacific Open Landscapes League? “Ah,” he said, snapping his fingers as it rang a bell. “Agricultural land easements?”

  Some conservation groups bought up development easements on open land or farmland threatened by urban sprawl; the owner sold the right to subdivide the land, while keeping title and possession. Subsequent heirs or buyers were under the same restrictions. It had become quite popular lately, mainly because it was completely voluntary and more effective than zoning or land-use controls. A few thousand well-placed acres of easements could stop a tendril of sprawl cold, protecting far larger areas beyond.

  “We do a lot of that,” she said. “God knows, with nearly fifty million people in California, it’s needed.”

  He winced inwardly at that, the way he did whenever the figure came up. Ouch. That was the basic fact that made so much of his work like trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom. The number of people got bigger every year; the state didn’t.

  “And we’re pushing for more habitat protection, and trying for some stricter laws on trafficking in endangered species,” she said.

  “God speed your work,” he said. “But LA?”

  She leaned back against a concrete planter and crossed her arms, which did interesting things to her cleavage. “Well, if you’ve been investigating what happened there, Mr…. Tom… you’ll know there was some possibility of a link to one of our subsidiaries.”

  “Our?” he said, lifting a brow.

  “The league is the outfit I work for,” she said. “But it’s pretty well one of the Rolfe family’s good works. We’re all, mmmm, not exactly Greens… conservationists. Have been for a long, long while, since my grandfather’s time. He joined the Sierra Club in the 1940s; he was a country boy, and a hunter. The suggestion that some of our companies have been used to smuggle endangered-animal products… well, it has my father and grandfather both absolutely livid, let me tell you. But it’s also unfortunately possible, since we do so much import-export work; a big organization, thousands of employees. They have the usual corporate security at work on it, but they asked me to look into it as well, as someone they can trust absolutely. I’ve done investigative work before—a lobbyist is uniquely well placed to find out who’s leaning on who to get environmental set-asides and exemptions.”

  Tom nodded again. “Looks like we’re on the same side,” he said cautiously. Or you’re trying to scam me; but it fits better than a megacorp risking bad PR on penny-ante smuggling.

  “When did you get into town?” he went on.

  “Late yesterday,” she said. Then she smiled at him, the green eyes narrowing. “And by the way, no, I didn’t have any plans for dinner tonight. Which is what you were about to ask, right?”

  “Right.” He felt his face flush even more, but laughed good-naturedly. “Mind-reader. Ahem. Adrienne, would you like to have dinner tonight?”

  “I’d love to, Tom. Say about seven-thirty?”

  “Right.”

  Now was the awkward question of where. She was undoubtedly the sort who simply went where they liked and didn’t have to worry about prices. Wardens at his level made a decent middle-class income, but he did have to think about where he went and how often. Otherwise he could come up empty at the end of the month.

  “How about something Oriental?” Adrienne said, looking around and tossing the empty water container into a trash basket. “I always… that is, I really like that.”

  Tom nodded. Inwardly he was blinking in bemusement; coming from the Bay Area to Sacramento and going out to eat Chinese or Japanese or Thai was like… well, as his grandmother had been fond of saying, that was like taking herring to Bergen, only in reverse. Even now Sacramento was basically a glorified Valley cow-town.

  Still, I’d cheerfully eat gray toadburgers at McDonald’s with you, Ms. Rolfe. “Let’s see… Does that include Indian?”

  “East Indian, you mean? Love it.”

  Hmm, he thought. Doesn’t everyone mean East Indian nowadays? You could get a serious rebuke at his job for not using “Native American” for what people used to call Indians, and what Tully privately referred to as “Premature Siberian-Americans.” Probably you don’t have to be as cautious when your family owns the business.

  “How about the Maharani, then?” he said aloud.

  Her smile went wider. “I bow to the superior experience of my native guide,” she said. “And now… back to Grayson’s.”

  Tom found his second wind remarkably easily. He whistled in the shower, and felt even better when Adrienne was waiting to exchange addresses and phone numbers. She was staying at a B-and-B spot, Amber House; the sort of place that had about twelve rooms, each with a name, a private two-person-size Jacuzzi and an Italian marble bathroom. That was only eight blocks east of the capitol, within walking distance of downtown, and it explained what she’d been doing at a private health club—unlike similarly priced hotels, it wouldn’t include exercise facilities.

  Down, boy, he thought. Just because you’ve met a beautiful woman who shares your hobbies, seems to think like you, and seems to be interested in you, doesn’t mean the millennium has arrived. For one thing, she’s seriously rich. That can create problems. For another, there’s something slightly funny about her. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s there. Maybe RM&M is legitimate. On the other hand, maybe not, and she’s their Mata Hari.

  That nagged him all the way back to his modest apartment. He could have afforded a house, but he thought of the one-bedroom as his contribution to slowing down the paving of California, and besides that, he was saving for a small place up in the Sierras. The comfortable bachelor shabbiness suddenly looked a little different as he walked in, although it had contented him since the divorce.

  The “shabby” suddenly overwhelms the “comfortable,” he thought.

  He phoned in the reservations, then flipped on the computer. He had indulged in a good optical cable-modem connection; it saved a lot of time. Whistling between his teeth, he leaned forward with his strong fingers moving over the keyboard and mousepad.

  Yes, the Pacific Open Landscapes League was a legit operation, headquartered in Berkeley, which was no surprise—the People’s Republic was exactly the place for this sort of endeavor. Donors were listed, and included the usual assortment of individuals and companies who wanted to show concern, a desire to buy respectability, a lust for good PR, or all of the above. Amounts weren’t specified, but a Google search had turned up evidence that this was a seriously well-heeled outfit, with annual expenditures well up into seven figures, although they didn’t have a mass membership like the Sierra Club et al. And Adrienne Rolfe was right there on their Web site, under “Investigation and Appraisals Division.”

  So she was a troubleshooter and fixer; awfully young for it, and he would have expected someone with a law degree. Hers was in history, with some wildlife-centered biology courses.

  Aha! he thought; Charles Rolfe was there on the board of directors. Nepotism raising its—in this case—very attractive head. Nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. It looked as if the Rolfes had been spending a lot of money on a cause he thoroughly approved of, for generations.

  Hmmm. Let’s see: small permanent staff, about twenty; headquarters in a converted Victorian; doesn’t go for headlines. Genteel as hell, all very well-bred. OK, looks good… let’s try cross-checking.

  The founder of the league was still alive and on the board but retired; he must be pushing ninety by now; that would be the grandfather she mentioned.

  Tom winced slightly. He’d be delighted if the evening ended in Ms. Rolfe’s bed, but…

  But, dammit, I really like her. She seems… real. And if she’s that rich, it could be a serious, serious barrier to anything serious. I’m tired of one-month girlfriends
and relationships that go nowhere. A man wasn’t meant to live alone.

  He shook himself, noted the time and scrambled to dress. The first rule of a first date was simply to relax, enjoy yourself and not think too much about what might happen down the road—that was the surest way to start giving off “needy” vibrations, which women detected and shunned the way submarines did the sound of a destroyer’s propellers.

  Time to go.

  “You’re indecently cheerful today,” a voice said as Tom Christiansen hung up his jacket and flipped on the computer in his cubicle. “You get lucky, or what?”

  Tom laughed. Roy Tully was a good sort, even if he had a fair bit of little-guy complex. He might feel a need to prove himself, but as far as Tom was concerned he already had. The short man in the high-waisted pants stood in the entrance of the cubicle, his tie a particularly vile yellow-and-green checked number, grinning and holding a Styrofoam cup of the usual execrable coffee in each hand.

  The office was coming to its usual institutional-bland life, a structured world where status was marked by the size of your cubicle or—for the very successful—a corner office with a view and a real desk. Tom had never wanted one of those; the money was nice, but if you got to that level, you had to stay in the office most of the time. He sipped at the coffee, made a face at it and said, “No, actually, I didn’t get lucky. But I don’t give a damn. I did have a very nice evening with a very pleasant young woman I met at the gym.”

  His mind went back to the parking lot of Maharani’s. Adrienne had been stunning in gym clothes; the effect in a short black dress gathered with a gold-link belt, a little simple makeup and a silver-and-turquoise pin holding one fall of her bronze-colored hair over the left ear had reduced him to stuttering idiocy for an instant. Luckily it had passed….

  “So, what’s the broad like?”

  “Broad? Roy, nobody says ‘broad’ anymore. You spend too many nights watching old movies on your DVD player.”

  “Okay, what’s the young woman like?”

  Tom gave a brief description. Roy groaned theatrically.

  “What I wouldn’t give to be built like a Greek god chick magnet, and get all the goddamned action—”

  “Like a Norski god, not one of those Greek swishes; Baldur, I think—Asa-Thor was a redhead, and Tyr had a hand missing. When I get back to Aasgard, you can be one of the dwarf thralls. And get your mind out of the gutter, lest I smite thee with a lawsuit alleging the creation of a hostile work environment.”

  Tully leered. Tom went on: “And her name is Adrienne… Adrienne Rolfe.”

  With perfect timing, he’d caught his partner in the middle of a sip. Tully choked, staggering about the cubicle; Tom thumped him helpfully on the back.

  “You’re not serious!” Tully managed at last.

  “Eminently serious,” Tom said. “Yes, she knew who I was—it’s not really a secret, after the way the fire got into the papers. She’s working for the Pacific Open Landscapes League—”

  “I know the outfit,” Tully said, his voice serious and his eyes level. “Didn’t know they were tied in with the Rolfes.”

  “I looked that up myself, just before we had dinner. They’re good guys.”

  “The league is, yeah,” Tully conceded. “That doesn’t mean the Rolfes are, necessarily.”

  “Not necessarily,” Tom said. “But it’s the way to bet. You were going to tell me about their setup in Oakland?”

  “Yeah,” Tully replied. “Let me call up my notes on your screen, and a skyview… OK, it’s here.” His finger traced an area of several blocks. “Used to be a rundown residential neighborhood in West Oakland not too far from the docks. A lot of what’s around it still is—they say crime’s down, but Kemosabe, I felt plenty nervous around there! Anyway, it was rezoned after 1946, and now it’s a big warehouse complex—they’ve got their own sidings to their own docks. Pretty massive, and their rent-a-cops are on the job, let me tell you. No in or out without clearance; but there’s a lot of traffic. Cargo containers, mostly, but trucks with loose cargo too. Anything could get lost in that shuffle.”

  “There you are,” Tom said. “You said it could be an inside job—some ring or group inside using the company for smuggling. That’s what Adrienne thinks, too, and she wants the perps as bad as we do. God knows that sort of thing happens all the time with drugs… which, incidentally, we should check on too, you betcha.”

  “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 k
ept 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 Krations 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.”