Perhaps Adrienne saw something in his face. “Let’s say the, ah, families in our crowd were sort of behind the times,” she said. “Still are…”
This wasn’t a conversation he could imagine having in, say, Ironwood, the small town where his high school had been located; too much Lutheran primness lingered there. Nothing out of the ordinary for California, though, and it was enjoyable to be doing the mutual-exploration thing again. Particularly when you liked the personality revealed, and thought it was true in reverse too.
“Sorry about you and your parents, though,” he said sincerely. You appreciate having a solid family in childhood more when you get to know people who didn’t.
“Oh, we get along well enough now. When Aunt Chloe died—”
“I am sorry,” he said, and meant it. Impulsively, he put his hand on hers.
She returned the grip for an instant; he felt the touch of her fingers for minutes after their hands parted.
“—she died, and she left me Seven Oaks, asking me to take care of the estate. That shocked me silly. I’d taken her for granted, and assumed that she’d just go on and on like the mountains and the seasons and the Old Man. You know how it is, the first time you realize death is real, that someone you loved is gone, you’ll never get the chance to say the things you were planning on… and you realize that you’re going to die someday too?”
“Yes,” he said somberly. “I remember it when my mother died. As if you’re hatching from an egg, and you don’t much like what you’ve found outside.”
“Exactly. There I was, eighteen—it was nine years ago next May twenty-first—and I suddenly realized that the people I’d spent all my adolescence rebelling against would be gone someday. So I decided to buckle down and make some use of the circumstances I’d been handed.”
“Like your work with the Pacific Open Landscapes League?” he said.
She smiled. “Yes, that and other things to do with the family business. Here I had an opportunity not one in a hundred million of the human race had, to do something significant for my family and my… country, my people, and why was I wasting time—time that I suddenly realized I’d never get back? Aunt Chloe thought I was competent to look after her things, and the contessa had told me someone of good blood shouldn’t care what the smelly peasants thought. I decided to go out and do something with the talents and the chances I’d been handed.”
“Bravo,” Tom said softly.
“I even manage to get on well with my parents now, except that they keep nagging me to get married and produce grandchildren; at least, Mother does.”
“Don’t your brothers and sisters have any?”
“Every one, three or more each,” Adrienne said. “But evidently there’s never enough.”
Tom shook his head. “My family sounds a lot duller than yours,” he said.
She cocked her head to one side. “Restful, not dull. Incidentally, fair warning: What I’ve told you is all true, but it’s incomplete. But as we native-born Californios say, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. How do you feel about me?”
She laughed at his sudden alarm, and went on: “No, really, what I’d like to know is why you went into the Fish and Game Department after you left the army.”
“Well, I’d gotten to like California while I was stationed here. Yes, it’s been mucked up beyond belief, but even what’s left of it is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. So…”
And the whole rest of the evening we talked about my family and my work, he realized, coming back to himself and the present with a slight wince. She’d been very interested in the details of this bizarre poaching-smuggling case and the disaster in LA; he hadn’t mentioned anything about the SOU’s sources, or the Bureau’s, of course. RM&M wouldn’t need that to do their own internal housekeeping.
He hoped he hadn’t been the stereotypical male after all.
Roy was grinning sardonically, and Tom realized that he’d drifted off into a reminiscent daydream for a good minute by the clock.
“So, you talked family?” Roy asked. “That gave you the dazed look and the sappy grin? Or the sheer careerist joy of finding a good source for this little investigation of ours?”
Well, the fact that the evening ended with one short kiss, one long passionate kiss, and a murmured “I like you a lot, but we should get to know each other better,” and a date to go running together may have something to do with that.
“And we talked about things we’ve done or would like to do,” he went on aloud. “She says she makes a good venison ragout—and she actually likes hunting.”
“Bambi? She shot Bambi?” Roy said. “And ate the poor little fucker?”
“I didn’t notice you turning down those venison chops last Christmas.”
“It doesn’t count if it comes in boxes. Everyone born in civilized urban surroundings knows that there are magical warehouses where neatly wrapped steaks and chops and roasts appear, probably through some miracle of super-science. Better watch it; remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”
Tom shrugged. “Maybe I need to work on my divorce technique. I haven’t had as much practice at them as you,” he said, with malice aforethought.
Roy winced. He was currently in the middle of his very messy second.
“Anyway, we’re scarcely engaged yet. A date to go running is not part of the wedding ceremony. She’s on the side of the angels. RM and M has put a lot of money into conservation. She’s just a nice, smart”—very rich, very sophisticated, very beautiful—“girl, Roy.”
Hmmm. Although she seemed entranced with the food at the Maharani’s. I wonder why? If there’s one place in the world you can get good East Indian food, it’s Berkeley—probably better there than in Bombay. Maharani’s is nice, but it isn’t world-class.
“OK, I’ll leave your love life out of things… for now. Anything on the LA bust from the city cops or Fart, Barf and Itch? I want to hear how the forensics turned out.”
“I’m expecting something from the San Diego Zoo—”
The phone rang, and Roy left for his own cubicle with a wave. Whistling quietly under his breath, Tom reached for the telephone.
“Yes, this is Mr. Christiansen… Hi, Manuel? Anything yet on the bird?”
There was a long silence, which wasn’t like Manuel Carminez; he loved explaining things about his specialty. With a lurch of fear, Tom went on: “Look, it didn’t die or anything, did it? Not smoke inhalation, or stress shock?”
“No,” the voice on the other end said; it belonged to a biologist at the San Diego Zoo’s captive-breeding program. “The problem is that bird is too healthy. Among other things.”
“How so?” Tom said, pulling a pad towards him and poising a pen.
“To begin with, it isn’t a condor from California.”
The pen hung fire. “I could have sworn—”
“Oh, it’s a Gymnogyps californianus, all right—young adult male. The thing is, Tom… you know how you find a California condor in the wild?”
“I’ll bite.”
“It’s the bird with the four ornithologists standing around it in a circle. We captured the last wild one for the breeding program back in ’eighty-seven, at which point there were exactly twenty-seven in the entire world. There are barely two hundred twenty total today, with eighty in the wild. Not only is every single one accounted for, but we have tissue samples and DNA of every single one alive and every single one that’s died in the last thirty years.”