She lay on the bench, breathed in and out sharply three times, and put her gloved hands on the checked grip section of the bar. Tom stood at her head and kept his hands between hers, palm-up but not quite touching the metal rod, ready to grab it if she lost control. She didn’t; instead she lifted the weight smoothly out of the rests, paused for a moment, then lowered it slowly until the bar almost touched her chest. A quicker lift, and then again the slow descent as the breath went out. Tom admired the technique, and admired what the effort did to the woman’s flat stomach and extremely unflat bosom as the pectoral muscles pushed her breasts against the thin sweat-wet fabric. He was careful to keep his face to a neutral alertness; that was polite, which he’d been raised to be, and besides which you didn’t take any chances when people were using free weights. Far too easy to break a bone or rip a tendon if something went wrong.
When she was finished they went outside, walking around the brick patio-garden behind that linked the buildings to the outdoor handball courts. It was late afternoon, bright and dry and hot, but only in the mid-eighties, not bad for a Sacramento summer, and the breathing was a lot better than it had been in LA.
“I’m going to run for a few miles,” she said. “Care to join me? Good to have someone around who knows the place.”
“Delighted,” he said. The pool can wait; and we can have our little talk. Damn, but I’ll be disappointed if this turns out to be all business. “I’d suggest heading for the State Capitol.”
“I like the park there,” she agreed.
They turned onto the street in front of Grayson’s, crossed H Street, and went down Ninth past his HQ at the Fish and Game Department headquarters. Traffic was light, and there weren’t many pedestrians to annoy, or too much in the way of detectable pollution to suck into their lungs; one of the most startling things he remembered about his trips to LA was driving in from the airport and seeing someone jogging beside the freeway. With the air dense enough to mine for building blocks, if you had a ripsaw handy.
He let her set the pace, which was as fast as he’d have chosen, and must be a little more intense for her—she was around five-nine, six inches shorter than he, and while they were both long-legged in proportion to their torsos, there was a good deal more of him to be in proportion to. She ran well, too: lightly, with the weight coming down on the ball of the foot and pushing smoothly off bent knees in a way that made no jarring thuds and put minimal stress on the joints. After a few minutes he found himself breathing a little harder than he’d intended. That, and dodging people, limited the conversation until they reached the capitol; he learned that she “lived in Berkeley, or the family place up near Rutherford,” that her grandfather had come from a small town near Williamsburg, Virginia, that she’d gone to Stanford and that she’d never been married. That gave him a moment’s worry, until he recalled the unmistakable glance he’d gotten in the gym; he wasn’t what they used to call a lady-killer, but he knew what the female version of the oh-that’s-nice once-over look felt like on the receiving end.
It didn’t always come to much, women being less enslaved to their eyeballs than men, but you couldn’t mistake it.
They halted for a moment to catch their breath before the huge wedding-cake pile of the State Capitol, gleaming with white stone. The arched entranceways supported an upper platform fronted by six great Corinthian columns; the architrave above was decorated with a central Athena, flanked by allegorical figures of Justice, Agriculture, Industry and Education. One level up to either side were mounted Indians fighting a grizzly bear on the left and a wild bull on the right; to his eye, the Indians always looked as if they were about to lose. A drum-shaped segment rose above that, with more columns all around, and then a circular wall pierced by tall arched windows and engaged false columns supporting a golden dome. He liked it; it looked just the way a state capitol building erected in the exuberantly self-confident 1870s should.
“If that had been built anytime recently, it would be a glass shoebox,” she said.
“Ah, a fellow provincial reactionary with no taste.” He chuckled. “Of course, it could have looked like a collection of frozen intestines or a chemical plant instead, in this progressive age.”
They turned left; the park around the capitol building covered forty acres. It was more crowded than the streets had been, with in-line skaters, brown-bag picnics, children chasing dogs and the odd derelict; but there was also a welcome shade from an assortment of trees brought from all over the world, and green lawns. They stretched themselves a little more, and he lost himself in the simple enjoyment of breath and muscle, feeling his body like an engine of living springs and rubber. They stopped halfway around to buy bottled water from a vendor. Tom was surprised to see her grimace a little at the first drink; it was perfectly ordinary plastic-bottle stuff, probably exactly the same as the variety that came out of taps, but not bad. He drank down his half in five long swallows. They stood under a tree whose foliage involved long tendrils hanging down with seedpods on the end, and now they were really sweating. He could feel his skin shedding heat as the dry air sucked at the wetness running on it, and was acutely conscious of the clean female smell of hers.
“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.”