“Could you get Henry over here?” Adrienne said. “I think Tom would like to meet him.”
“Aha,” Barnes said. “You want to get the Bitch-and-Moan squad together, hey? Show him the revolutionary element—right on! Sure, we ain’t too busy right now.” He turned and shouted: “Hey, Henry! Over here—two of the usual, and some beer!”
The man who came bearing the tray was younger than the innkeeper; in his late thirties, of medium height, lean and fit. He was also the first black Tom had seen this side of the Gate—light brown in fact, but unmistakably of that mixed breed miscalled African-American, with regular blunt features and inch-long, wiry, tight-kinked hair.
“You the one who bellowed like an ox with a hernia, beloved ol’ massa?” he said, setting the tray down. It held four pint steins of beer, moisture beading on the thick glass, two hamburgers and a basket of chunky-looking French fries.
“Show some respect for your father-in-law and set your worthless cop ass down on the bench,” Ralph replied genially.
Tom coughed and took a drink of his beer; then he stopped and savored it as it deserved while Henry joined the party, sitting beside the older man across from Tom and Adrienne.
“Not bad,” Tom said, putting his mug down. “Well hopped, and a nice sharp taste… some local microbrewery?”
“We brew it ourselves,” Ralph said.
“I brew it ourselves,” Henry said, and offered his hand. “Henry Villers. Ex-Oakland PD. Welcome, fellow Involuntary. I’m the Black Settler of this little transdimensional Rhodesia.” He jerked a thumb at Ralph. “He’s Zorro, but don’t tell anyone; if they found out, they might stop him branding big Z’s on the Thirty’s asses with a red-hot iron.”
“It’s a sword, man—how many times do I have to tell you? Zorro uses a sword.”
“I sell them the hops,” Adrienne cut in. “Also the meat for these hamburgers.”
Tom shook the black man’s hand, smiling. “How’d you end up here?” he said.
The other three burst into laughter, and he looked at them curiously.
“That’s not… usually considered a tactful question here, Tom,” Adrienne said gently. “Commonwealth etiquette. A lot of people are sort of, ah, sensitive about what they or their ancestors did back FirstSide. The way some Aussies don’t like the word ‘convict,’ only it’s a lot fresher here.”
“No problemo,” the black man said. “Me, I got here ’cause I was smart. I cunningly went undercover as an RM and M warehouse employee. In the outer circle, of course, the ones they keep as camouflage. Everyone in Oakland said that RM and M was the greatest thing since grits, but in my prodigious wisdom, I knew they were a bunch of evil honky despots down deep. I could tell from the way the company executives looked at me, on their rare visits—which somehow always included the same secluded set of warehouses in the old section. And wasn’t I right?”
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.”