She grinned, and the two men chuckled.
“After the Old Man, Uncle Sol was the smartest man I ever met,” she said. “And Granddad always said Uncle Sol had more sheer wattage, he was just less practical. When they played chess, it was like mountains colliding. New Brooklyn is the second-largest town in the Commonwealth now, a big seaport and manufacturing center with fifteen thousand people, and it all belongs to the Pearlmutters and their affiliates. They make almost as much off it as they do off their cut from the Gate and the Commission’s properties. Not to mention they donated the land for the University of New Virginia, which is about where Stanford sits FirstSide. Uncle Sol always said knowledge isn’t just power; it’s also wealth.”
Henry Villers nodded. “No flies on that dude; I met him once just before he died, old but still sharp as a razor. He also said only dumb krauts like the von Traupitzes would think you could get rich here growing wheat. Anyway, nobody’s afraid of us; most people don’t even see any of us more than once a year, which means only a few get upset about us. I think our Supreme Honky is content to let us vanish like a handful of soot in a snowstorm and pat himself on the back about what a goddam humanitarian realist he is. Motherfucker. If there were twenty-seven thousand black folk here, or even twenty-seven hundred, it’d be a different story.”
You betcha, Tom thought. Point scored. You can’t have much racism when there aren’t any other races to practice it on, so to speak.
“Adrienne,” Henry went on, “put me in touch with Ralph when I got shanghaied here.” He raised his stein to her. “For which I thank you.”
“De nada,” she said. “Now, Ralph’s story…”
The older man told it, then concluded: “So the bastard gave me this land and a loan to get started, yeah. And I love my wife and my kids and grandkids, and I’ve had a pretty good life here. But it ain’t the life I’d have chosen, and if he thinks all this charity-from-on-high makes up for that, he’s got another think coming.”
Tom finished his hamburger. It had been about as he’d expected: delicious, the meat leanly flavorful but juicy and basted with just a touch of fiery sauce; tangy onions and tomatoes tasting of the earth; home-made garlic mayonnaise; all on a kaiser-style bun warm from the beehive-shaped earth oven on the other side of the patio with bits of caramelized onion in the crust, and a spear of pickle on the side that crunched nicely. Quite possibly the best hamburger he’d ever tasted, even including the ones his own father used to make at Fourth of July barbecues. The fries had been done in olive oil, and they weren’t formed from extruded powdered potato painted with beef fat.
“OK,” Tom said. “Now”—he looked questioningly at Adrienne, who was wiping her fingers on a checked cloth napkin. She nodded—“if you wouldn’t mind a hypothetical question, would this Commonwealth be better or worse if the Collettas were running it? Instead of the Rolfes and their supporters.”
Ralph Barnes choked on his last swallow of beer. Henry Villers thumped him on the back, but there was a gray anxiety in the glance he shot Adrienne. She made a soothing gesture.
“Let’s consider that a hypothetical hypothetical, for now,” she said.
Ralph nodded vigorously. “Oh, hell, that’s no contest. Yeah, the Old Man’s a throat-cutting pirate,” he said. “And unlike a lotta people here, I don’t use ‘pirate’ as a compliment. Sorry, princess, but I’m not going to start shading it at this late date. Yeah, he’s a nasty piece of work. But he’s smart, and he’s consistent, and he was willing to stop when he got what he wanted. He makes the rules to suit himself, but then he keeps ’em, usually. And you can trust his promises. The Collettas… old man Salvatore had about as much of the milk of human kindness as a lizard does; he and Otto von Traupitz were neck and neck in the Sheer Absolute Fucking Evil sweepstakes, in their different ways. Giovanni tries to live up to the old bastard. Neither of them ever heard of the concept ‘where to stop.’ And they’d change the rules whenever it gave ’em a moment’s advantage. Plus, personally, I’d be a dead man if they took over. I dissed his dad to his face. Giovanni don’t forget.”
“Ditto, ditto,” Henry said. “Those Collettas would have had me on an auction block. Not that they’re prejudiced. They’d do it to anybody they could. Not to mention their friends the Batyushkovs, who are prejudiced ’gainst us black-asses, as they so charmingly put it, and the von Traupitzes, who’d probably render me down for soap. Me for starters.”
Barnes frowned and thought for a moment. “Don’t get me wrong, Warden Tom. If there was a chance for a revolution here, I’d be out on the barricades in a minute, and I’d dance around the guillotine when they chopped the heads off the whole rotten gang—present company excepted.”
“God, that’s big of you, Ralph,” Adrienne said, chuckling.
Barnes scowled and waved the interjection aside. “There’s a lot here I don’t like. But it could get a hell of a lot worse. And I’ve got my kids and grandkids to think about. They were born here and it’s their home.”
He looked at Adrienne. “This hypothetical… it ain’t totally hypothetical?” She nodded. “Then anything I can do, princess, you just ask.”
She put her hand on his and squeezed; he returned the pressure.
“And say…” He frowned. “One thing. The Collettas’re close with the Batyushkovs these days, right? Well, there’s something I ran across a while ago. You know Sergei Ilyanovich Batyushkov?”
“The geneticist?” Adrienne asked. “The Batyushkov Prime’s nephew?”
“Well, for starters, he ain’t a geneticist. He’s a theoretical physicist,” Barnes said. “I read some articles by him a while ago. And yeah, he was called Sergei… but the last name wasn’t Batyushkov. Sergei Lermontov, Ph.D.”
“I’m definitely going to be less conspicuous without Tom along,” Roy Tully said to himself as he finished washing the breakfast dishes. “I love the big guy like a brother, but…”
What had Anna Russell said about Siegfried, the hero of the Ring Cycle? He murmured it, trying to match Russell’s upper-class British drawclass="underline" “He’s very young, and he’s very tall, and he’s very strong, and he’s very handsome, and he’s very stupid.”
That was unjust; he knew his partner had plenty upstairs. He was just very…
Straightforward, that’s it, Tully thought. Straightforward. And he certainly stands out in a crowd.
Before he left he spent some time with Adrienne’s computer; she had it set up in the living room, which gave him a lovely view of the morning fog and then the town as he sat sipping coffee and tapping his way through some public files, sampling a few chat rooms and getting a feel for how to shift data around. He had to admit Nostradamus was organized with systematic clarity: research, TV, e-mail, auctions, catalog buying, music and everything else in one neat package. It still felt odd, compared to surfing the Net: as if you’d moved from Castle Gormenghast to a utility apartment—no matter how tidy and well laid out it was, you were still going to be disappointed at the lack of crannies and dungeons and attics full of junk and sheer size. After half an hour or so he printed up some maps, stuck them into the pocket of his jeans, fastened the holster of the Glock to the small of his back under a light jacket—it was yellow, with green suede elbow patches; he was very fond of it and glad Adrienne’s cleanup squad had brought it along—then went outside. The East Bay wasn’t as chilly in summertime as San Francisco, but a jacket wouldn’t be completely out of place.