Tom flipped back to the beginning and looked at who RM&M had done business with in its early days.
He transferred some data into his PDA. “All right, we’ll split up and tackle it from both ends. I’ll take this angle; we could use some firsthand background on RM and M in its early days. You go sniff around that complex of theirs in Oakland. It’s a little odd, a company this big still doing the physical with warehouses and such rather than outsourcing.”
“Will do, Kemosabe,” Tully said. “Be careful.”
“Aren’t I always?”
“No,” Tully answered bluntly. “You forget that stepping on toes can get you kicked in the balls. We’re talking a really big, well-established California firm here. They’re bound to have pull. Enough to get an investigation quashed, unless it’s damn well grounded. I’d want to have something pretty solid before we go see our esteemed boss, and rock-solid before he goes public. Otherwise we’re likely to end up in California’s Siberia.”
Tom watched him head for the BART station, then thought silently for a half hour or so; intently motionless, so much so that a couple of pigeons walked over his shoes, and a beat cop almost rousted him for sleeping on the benches—the SFPD were fanatics about that, since the big cleanups.
“Time to spend some shoe leather,” he said to himself. “See how the facts jibe with the speculation.”
“Ms. Sorenson?” Tom said.
The house was in the lower part of Nob Hill, part of a row of beautifully restored Edwardian residences with Tiffany stained-glass fanlights over the doors—not quite the sort of home the silver kings and railroad barons had built from the plunder of the Comstock Lode and the Union Pacific, but certainly the upper management of a century or so ago. Then he realized this particular one wasn’t restored: it had just been well kept all that time.
“I am Susan Sorenson,” the owner said. “Mr. Christiansen?”
She was in her late seventies, but slender and what they used to call well preserved, with a burnished overall sheen, quietly expensive clothes, and a rope of thick silver hair falling down her back. Her eyes were pale blue and very clear; the Persian cat sitting at her feet was almost eerily similar…. When she invited him in, the house was similar too—perfectly polished antiques, some contemporary pieces, Isfahan carpets and a faint smell of lavender sachet. He perched uneasily on a settee, and accepted a Sevres china cup of extremely good coffee from a Filipino maid. There were a couple of family portraits on the sideboard: his hostess at various ages—she’d been quite a red-haired fox—and herself with friends, and a man who was probably her father. No husband or children, he noted.
Her smile was charming. “Now, Mr. Christiansen, you said you were interested in the history of my father’s company, Sierra Consultants?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “There’s surprisingly little in the public record. In fact, most of what I could find was in the course of looking into another firm—Rolfe Mining and Minerals.”
The older woman’s lips tightened slightly; in anger, he was pretty sure, although she was so achingly well-bred that reading her expression was difficult. Roughly equivalent to throwing things and using the F-word in an ordinary person, I think.
“Them”, she said. “Perhaps it’s unjust, but I blame them for the way Sierra went downhill.”
“I understand your father did a number of contracts for Rolfe in the 1950s,” he said.
“After a while, we did scarcely anything else!” she said. “I was working as my father’s executive assistant about then, you understand. Beginning in about 1950.”
“Ah,” Tom said, thinking furiously. “They gave your father’s firm a great deal of business, then?”
“Yes. By the mid-1950s it was most of the cash flow, and almost all of it before the end in 1962.”
“And this damaged the company?”
The woman sighed. “I know that it sounds strange… but the work Rolfe had my father do wasn’t… wasn’t real somehow.”
She stood and walked to an ebony sideboard, handing Tom a picture. “This was my father.”
The man in the faded photograph was in his mid-thirties, ruggedly handsome, dressed in riding boots and jodhpurs and an open-necked shirt, a broad-brimmed hat in one hand and a .45 holstered at his waist. The background showed sun-faded rocky slopes and brush; it might have been anywhere in the tropics, or even one of the ’Stans.
Sort of like Indiana Jones, he thought, as she resumed her place in the chair across the table. Roy Tully had a taste for old movies and TV series; Tom occasionally sampled his vast collection.
No, he realized suddenly, it’s the kind of guy Indiana Jones was modeled on. Civil engineer, archaeologist, someone who went out to the hot-and-dangerous places.
“My father was… he traveled everywhere as a young man. The Caribbean, China, South America—that picture was taken in Bolivia in the 1930s, only a year after I was born, Mr. Christiansen. He built things. Bridges, dams, irrigation projects, support structures for mining operations. Sometimes he had to fight off bandits—Jivaro headhunters, once, in Peru. He was in the army engineers in Europe in 1918, and during the war—World War Two, that is—he was all over the Pacific.”
“What did he do for RM and M?” Tom asked softly.
Living history, he thought: He was talking to someone whose father had fought in both the world wars, something he’d grown up thinking of as dusty antiquity.
“Nothing serious,” she said. “Nothing real.”
Tom leaned forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees and his eyebrows arched. There was an art to questioning, and a large part of it was encouraging without interrupting. Most people vastly preferred talking to listening, and a sympathetic and interested ear made them pour out surprising revelations.
“Consulting—after the war, he did feasibility studies for a great many projects here in California, and abroad. Then Rolfe came—oh, he was a charmer when he wanted to be, and he thought women should fall all over him. Which,” she added with a sniff, “many did. And he… he wanted feasibility studies too. He was willing to pay for them, pay extravagantly and in cash. But none of them were ever actually built. None of them were for his overseas operations, the gold mines and alluvial diamond projects we heard about. They were fantasies.”
“Fantasies?” Tom prompted gently.
“Fantasies about projects here in California! About waterworks that had already been built, or… or geothermal generators in hot springs north of the Napa Valley, or mines in places where all the ore had been taken out a century ago! Replicas of the Palace of Fine Arts, of all foolish things. Or flood control in areas like Sacramento, where all the work was already done when my grandfather arrived in California from Sweden! My father was used to doing real work, and seeing what came of it. I’m convinced that the… the futility of it all drove him to retirement, and to dying before his time.”
The elderly woman was a little flushed, and sat down. Tom made soothing noises and poured her another cup of the coffee, admiring the graceful way she picked up her cup and saucer; he was an ignore-the-handle-and-grab-the-mug type himself.
“Could you give me any details?” he said. Something extremely odd is going on here.
Sighing, she shook her head. “That was another thing. Rolfe always required—ordered—that every scrap of paper be handed over when a study was completed, with nothing for our records but the bare minimum of financial data for the tax people. But I remember….”