“A group of Russian ‘entrepreneurs.’ Based out of the Balkans or possibly Turkey, we think; things aren’t quite so wild and hairy in Russia proper these days, not like it was in the nineties, and the ’Stans are getting downright respectable.”
“Amazing how much respect GPS-guided weapons can instill,” Tom said. “Not to mention the nasty example of what happened to Iraq. How did you find out?”
“Well, the Vietnamese gentlemen seemed to be under the impression that the Russians were having some sort of internal power struggle, which resulted in their customers getting ripped off. We got an anonymous-concerned-citizen tip by a very excited young man, fingering them. Voice analysis pegged him as born here but brought up in a Vietnamese-speaking household, and we’re working that angle.”
“Wonderful!” Tom enthused. “And the Russians?”
“Them we can move on faster; we know where they live. You doing anything later this week? Like to take a trip to beautiful San Francisco?”
He felt a sudden twinge. Adrienne will probably be leaving town next week. Duty was going to get in the way of his social life again; that had been the proximate cause of his divorce, too.
“Can do,” he said. “You’ve got my cell-phone number.”
And as compensation, he might well be on the track of the people responsible for the condor, along with a good deal else.
And I want to meet them, he thought, as he scooped up the file and set out for his supervisor’s office. I want that very much indeed.
Giovanni Colletta turned the swivel chair and looked up at his father’s picture, where it hung behind his desk. It showed him in this very chair and room, seated with chin propped on thumb and forefinger.
The portrait had been painted in late middle age, which was how he himself best remembered Salvatore Colletta: streaks of gray through the sleek, slicked-back raven hair, lines grooved from the hooded eyes to the corners of an unsmiling mouth, the somber elegance of dark suit and cream silk tie, ruby stickpin, discreetly gleaming gold cuff links, snowy linen, on a body that stayed slender and tough into his sixties. Until the cancer racked him to a shadow and he lost his last battle, murmuring a final confession to a priest who turned pasty-pale as he bent his ear to the wrinkled mouth.
Hard to believe that I’m getting to be that old myself, the Prime of the Collettas—the Colletta—thought. He’d been the third child but the first son, born in the Commonwealth in the 1950s. Minchia! I’m a grandfather and fifty-nine this September.
The painter had been very good, and fearless. The eyes of Salvatore Colletta reminded his son of Byzantine mosaics he’d seen on trips FirstSide, in the ancient churches of Ravenna—the eyes of the empress Theodora the Great. Dark, fathomless, knowing, somber with unacknowledged sins—although he could hear the wolf-yelp of laughter the first Colletta would have given, and the playful-serious cuff across the side of the head.
Hey, I got eyes on me like a Greek buttana, eh? Show your father some respect, kid!
Giovanni’s mouth quirked. Salvatore Colletta had insisted that his son study the arts and graces and learning of a galantuomo, a gentleman, a real civile—despite the fact that he’d been the scion of a long line of laborers and sardine fishermen in a grim little village near Messina, and had himself grown up catch-as-catch-can on the shrill crowded streets of Manhattan’s Little Italy in the twenties and thirties. That education had given Giovanni Colletta a vocabulary and perspective his father could never have imagined, but he’d never been absolutely sure that he’d kept the razor-keen aggression and cold realism that had made the Collettas second only to the Rolfes here in this new land. He could only hope he had, for on that the survival of his blood depended.
“But I certainly inherited the ambition,” he murmured to the terrible old man whom he’d loved and feared and hated every day of his life, long after he became a man himself. “And everything we do is for the Family, Poppa.”
As if to underscore the fact, his youngest daughter burst into the office, throwing a laughing word over her shoulder to the friends who giggled and chattered without. His smile grew broader, half from delight at seeing her, free-striding and tanned and beautiful in her tennis whites, sky-colored eyes sparkling as she twirled her racket, hair the color of dark amber honey held back by a silken headband. The other half was from the amusement….
Well, Poppa, you wanted me to be a civile, and you wanted a tall, slim, blond wife who was a “real lady.”
The woman Salvatore Colletta married had been a junker’s daughter from east of the Elbe, whose surviving family had had very good reasons for jumping at a one-way passage through the Gate in 1946—reasons beyond the Russians overrunning their ancestral estates, and having to do with certain political decisions they’d made in the 1930s. The von Traupitz family soon discovered equally good reasons for a matrimonial alliance with one of the founders and overlords of New Virginia.
Between your social ambitions and your taste in women, Poppa, you certainly made something different out of the legitimate line of the Collettas! Of course, Giovanni had helped the process along. Marianne’s mother had been a yellow-haired daughter of the Fitzmortons.
“Daddy!” she said, giving him an enthusiastic hug as he came around the broad desk to greet her.
“Picciridda mia,” he replied fondly.
“Oh, Daddy, I’m too old to be called ‘little one’ anymore,” she said, holding him at arm’s length, and tactfully not mentioning that she was his height to an inch. “I’m a grown-up young lady now. Which you’d know if you would only get out of this office more, instead of sitting here all the time playing spider-in-the-web. I hardly see you at all, even when I’m at home!”
“I’d just cast a damper on that great drooling tribe of wellborn young men who follow you around,” he said, smiling at her fondly. “You should pick one to be your prince, little heartbreaker, and give me more grandchildren.”
“I would, if only I could find one like you, Daddy,” she said, smiling at him.
His heart melted with love—and not a little with admiration for the skill she used to manipulate him.
“And what is it you want to wheedle out of your father this time?” he said.
At nineteen, Marianne Colletta had the family’s diamond-hard concentration on getting what she wanted, but was still working on the subtlety that often went with it, and the knowledge of what she wanted above all. She wrinkled her small straight nose at him.
“Well, can’t I come to see my own father just for the fun of it? There’s nothing right now… it’s not important, I suppose… but I could use another maid….”
He sighed and shook a finger. “Young lady, you’ve got a perfectly good maid, what’s her name, Toto, and a secretary, not to mention all the staff running ’round to your whim here, or at the town house when you’re living in Rolfeston—”
“Well, yes, but it’s a lot of work, and Totochin’s going back to that horrible place with all the X’s in the name when her contract’s up next year, I just couldn’t persuade her to stay. I really need one who can learn enough to be useful before Totochin goes home, and it looks so silly to have only one to run errands and carry things and everything when I’m in town, and a Settler maid is just horribly unfashionable. I’m going to be working at the Gate computer center after the spring semester, too, so I’ll be so busy with that, and then there’s all the parties and—”