Conquistador

INTERLUDE

The flicker of the campfire cast unrestful red light on the faces of the five men who sat about it; a battered camp coffeepot bubbled away on three stones in the midst of the coals and low red flames, sending its good smell drifting along with the clean hot scent of burning oak wood, the tule elk steaks they’d grilled, and the briny smell of the bay not far to the west. An occasional pop sent red sparks drifting slowly skyward, up toward the shimmer of firelight on the leaves of the big coast live oak whose massive branches writhed above them, and toward the stars that frosted the sky in an arch above. Their simple campsite stood on the fringe of the circle of light, three army-surplus tents and a few bales and boxes; horses snorted nearby, stamping and pulling at their tethers as something big grunted and pushed its way through a thicket. Faint and far beyond that was the chanting of the Ohlone Indians in their village, where a shaman held a ceremony to decide the meaning of the strangers with their wonderful gifts and terrible weapons.

Closer to the fire was a neat stack of small tough canvas sacks, crimped tightly shut. There were ten of them, and each held an even hundred pounds of gold in nuggets and dust.

“Now, would any of you have believed a word of it before you saw it with your own eyes?” John Rolfe said.

He looked around as they shook their heads. His cousins Robert and Alan, Aunt Antonia’s sons, alike as two peas in a pod, tall, lean young men just turned twenty-one, their long faces much like his but with the dirty-blond hair and blue eyes showing the Fitzmorton coloring of their father. They were just out of the service too. Rob had been running a tank-destroyer company in Italy, and Alan had been a B-17 pilot based out of England; they’d just finished picking flak shrapnel out of his butt. Then there was Andy O’Brien, the big beefy freckle-faced Boston Irishman who’d been top sergeant in Rolfe’s unit—not to mention a notable shot even in a division known as the Deadeyes; and Salvatore Colletta, small and smart and with the best poker face Rolfe had ever come across. He’d been Rolfe’s personal radioman, as well as an artist with a Thompson. He had a tommy gun lying against the log at his back, and his dark, thin features were utterly expressionless as he leaned forward to light his cigarette from a splinter. His cheeks hollowed as he inhaled, showing blue-black stubble; Salvatore was in his early twenties too, but the big black eyes were ancient in the thin Sicilian face.

“But are you sure this isn’t our California, a long time ago?” O’Brien asked uneasily. “And we could all go… pop, like a soap bubble, if we changed the things that made us.”

Rolfe shook his head. “The first time I came through, I carved numbers on rocks in places I could locate on both sides—boulders, cliff faces—carved them deep enough to last for thousands of years. There’s no trace of them back on our side of the Gate, where we know it’s 1946. I’m still going to get some astronomers to look at pictures of the night sky—the stars change with time, you know—but I’m pretty certain this is the same time as back there in California, the spring of 1946. It’s just a world where somehow white men never showed up. A different past, a different history, but the moon and sun are exactly the same, and the shape of the land, and the plants and animals—everything except what men have done.”

“That gives us a monopoly, then,” Rob Fitzmorton said, and went on with a dreamy smile: “There’s an awful lot of gold in them thar hills. Francesca is going to be pretty damned happy.”

“We can’t just go back and turn the gold into money,” Rolfe went on. “Salvo? Fill them in.”

“Yeah, you got that right, Cap’n,” Colletta said; it sounded more like youse got dat roit, in a hard nasal big-city accent straight from the corner of Hester and Baxter in Manhattan. “For starters, that figghi’e’bottana Roosevelt, he made it against the law to own gold, back before the war.”

O’Brien blinked in surprise. “What can we do with it, then?”

His voice was South Boston; not unlike the Italian’s, but with a hint of a brogue in it now and then, and the odd stretched New England-style vowel.

Colletta chuckled and shrugged. “Nah, maybe—just maybe—I might know some guys who’ve got, like, a flexible attitude about that sort of stupid rule, for a reasonable little cut. Guys who got relatives in Los Angeles. Maybe the cap’n was thinking of that when he invites me on this little hunting trip.”

His eye caught his ex-commander’s, and they gave an imperceptible nod of perfect mutual understanding.

“Risky, though,” Rob Fitzmorton said. “Not that I’ve got any objection to getting rich, and y’all can take that to the bank. Jail I could do without.”

Rolfe reached out with a bandanna around his hand and poured more of the strong black coffee into his mug. There was something chill in his eyes, and his smile showed an edge of teeth.

“You’re thinking small,” he said. “All of you.”

A snatch of poetry came to him: breathless upon a peak in Darien. And hadn’t Francis Drake touched land near here, as he took the Golden Hind around the world? The thought went down like a jolt of fine bourbon, and the heat in his gut was better than that. They’d filled his dreams as a boy, the conquistadors and sea dogs, the buccaneers like Morgan, the frontiersmen and adventurers like Andy Jackson and Crockett and Boone who’d carved states out of wilderness…. And no stingy monarch in Madrid or London to take the plunder and the glory, not this time. No Washington to answer to, either.

He indicated the canvas sacks. “That’s a little over half a million there, for a month’s work and travel time. That isn’t rich. That’s seed money; what we need to fit out the next expedition and hire the help. Then there’s no limit to what we could do. Centuries from now, there could be statues of us here, and generations learning our names in school—a new world waiting for us, the way it did for our ancestors.”

“We’ll be like the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock, then?” O’Brien said, and chuckled at the scowls of the three Virginians. “In a manner of speaking, Captain.”

Salvatore’s voice kindled. “Yeah! We’re the only people here on… on… what in hell, the Other Side…

“I’m going to call it New Virginia,” Rolfe cut in. “The Commonwealth of New Virginia.”

“Right, Cap’n, we’re the only ones in New Virginia who aren’t bare-assed Injuns walking around with bones through their noses and gourds on their ciollas. To hell with just getting rich. This place is our oyster. And we get filthy stinking rich,” Colletta said.

Rolfe nodded. So did his cousins, which didn’t surprise him; he’d known both the Fitzmorton boys since they were in short pants, and the families had been related since about the time the first John Rolfe discovered Virginia was a good place to grow tobacco. Both were newly married with children on the way, and the family rumor mill said Rob’s war bride was an impoverished Italian aristocrat with expensive tastes, at that.

Their father was a not-very-successful country lawyer; Rolfe’s had been career army, until TB retired him to a miserly pension and a hopeless battle to support a son and two daughters on that and the remnant of the ancestral acres. Which were just about enough for a big kitchen garden, a cow and a tumble-down house two centuries old and three quarters boarded-up, with a few cannonballs from McClellan’s gunboats still embedded in the brickwork. They were all men whose families had spent the last three-quarters of a century going downhill in a world less and less suited to their sort. The great days of the First Families of Virginia had been nostalgic memory before the War For Southron Independence, and since Appomattox they’d mostly been too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash, as the saying went, living on a thin gruel of memory spiced with glory.

This other-side California had a number of advantages over the James River swamps in Chief Powhatan’s time, besides the climate. It really did have gold, and he could look up the exact location on a map before digging. The climate was better and the Indians less formidable, too. His hand caressed the Garand resting across his knees.

“Yeah, Cap’n, this place is our oyster if we can keep doggo about it,” Salvatore went on. “Uncle Sam gets his sticky hands on that Gate, they’ll stamp it Ultra Top Burn Before Reading Secret, and we’ll get a pat on the fanny if we’re lucky. Only ones who’ll make anything off it are the ones who can already afford a congressman or three of their own.”

O’Brien looked around at the darkling wilderness, full of mysterious night sounds and the distant chanting of the Indians; he wasn’t a hunter or country-bred, like the three Virginians, and unlike Colletta he hadn’t adapted well.

“My family got off the boat in South Boston and stayed right there,” he said. “That was in the first famine. I can’t see myself being the bold pioneer, Captain. I’m a city boy. I like pavement under my feet and a good bar on the corner, and working with machinery, not cows.”

“The pioneers didn’t have a big city right at their backs. Just a hop, skip and a jump away, whenever they needed something, with gold by the ton to pay for it,” Rolfe said, jerking his chin back over his shoulder.

They’d rigged up a shelter of poles and tarpaulins to hide the silvery surface of the Gate on this side; it was hideously conspicuous at night, a beacon across the countryside. The Indians were terrified of it, and of the men and strange beasts who’d come out of it. Rolfe snorted at the memory of what it had been like smuggling horses into his basement without attracting attention, not to mention building the ramp without anyone suspecting. And getting his cousin-once-removed, Louisa—she was Aunt Antonia’s husband’s brother’s daughter—to house-sit for him, with no questions asked. Her bribe had come with a ring, which was fair. She was a good kid, no Ava Gardner but pretty enough. Smart, too, and she’d hung around him since they were both toddlers. His mother had been dropping hints about grandchildren since the day he got out of the hospital, and anyway, he’d never planned on being the last Rolfe.

“With the Gate, we can bring in anything—anyone—we want,” he said. “We’ll have to buy the house in Oakland; buy up the block and the neighborhood, come to that, get it rezoned. Start a company; trading to the Philippines, say, or Siam, and investing in some old mines there, to cover the gold—you can buy fake customs stamps cheap in Manila, or anything else for that matter. And… as I said, we need organization. That means someone has to provide the leadership. I think I’m the best man for the job. Anyone disagree?”

His cousins shook their heads.

So did O’Brien, grinning broadly and exaggerating the brogue a little: “You got me through Leyte and Okinawa alive, Captain,” he said. “I’ll keep backing you the now. You’re still the Old Man.” He shook his head in wonderment: “Mother O’Brien’s little boy a lord! Mary and Patrick, you know, I like the sound of it!” Softly: “She’ll be off her knees and washing no more floors on Beacon Hill the way she did to feed the six of us before the war, and that’s the truth.”

Colletta turned up his hands with a smile of melting sincerity that made Rolfe suspicious….

But Salvo’s trustworthy enough. You just have to watch him, and remember he’s always figuring an angle.

That could be valuable; Colletta had been the best scrounger and fixer in Company B, plus he could charm a snake out of its skin when he decided to, plus he had a way with languages. And… most men had to get worked up to kill; O’Brien, for instance, who was a wild man once his blood was running hot, but squeamish otherwise. The little wop was a stone killer; dispassionately skillful, like a farmer’s wife picking a chicken and wringing its neck. That could be very useful.

“OK, Cap’n, you’re the padrone, no argument,” the small, dark man said, with a massively expressive shrug. “There’s enough here for everyone to be a boss—but we need a boss of bosses, yeah. Capo di tutti capo,” he went on, smiling at something that passed the other men by. “Yeah, or we’ll lose it all to the thieves and politicians and police and the rest of them minchioni. We need a boss, and we need to keep our mouths shut.”

“Right,” Rolfe said easily. “The first thing is to turn that gold into money and put it somewhere safe; Tangier, maybe, or Switzerland. Then we can start buying up the land… we should incorporate, too….”

Unexpectedly, O’Brien spoke up: “We need to get Sol Pearlmutter in on this, Captain.”

Rolfe raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t think you liked him, Andy,” he said.

That was an understatement. They’d circled and sniffed and growled all the way through training and deployment, and nearly killed each other just before Leyte, when O’Brien made top sergeant—Rolfe had had to sweat blood and crack heads to keep it covered up, not wanting to lose two of his best men to the stockade just before they went into action. And while they’d settled down to work together well enough together after that, it had still been…

What’s that journalese term? Rolfe thought. When two countries hated each other’s guts and didn’t quite dare to fight, the newspapers said the atmosphere at diplomatic meetings was… correct. The two men had been correct toward each other, in an icy fashion, after he’d threatened to bounce them out to other outfits, where they’d be strangers.

Pearlmutter was offensively smart, unbelievably well-read, and the only Jew in the outfit; he could also argue up down and black white, and loved doing it. Nobody could figure why he wasn’t a technician or company clerk or at least in the Air Corps, but he’d been worth his weight in gold.

“I don’t like Sol,” the young man from South Boston said. “A mouthy Jew he is, and too clever by half. But the little Hebe is clever, and he’s got balls enough for a big man too; I saw that with my own two eyes—remember Shuri?”

Rolfe and Colletta both nodded automatically. Disarming that fiendishly ingenious set of interlinked booby traps while the Japanese mortar shells dropped all around them had required a cold sort of courage. There were men alive today who’d have bled to death if Pearlmutter hadn’t cleared the way for the stretcher party, with nothing but a bayonet, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver and an ability to outguess the Nip sapper who laid the trap.

O’Brien went on: “He’s studying to be a lawyer, not run a shop like his old man—got into Harvard, I hear, where they like the Chosen People less than they do a mick, and not much better than they like a nigger. We could use a smart Jew with steady nerves, if we’re playing for stakes like these. I don’t think he’ll dislike the pot of gold any more than meself, either.”

Colletta gave a cold, thin smile. “And if we ever need to shut that flapping mouth of his, well…” He patted the Chicago typewriter by his side.

“Good idea, Andy,” Rolfe said. “First thing tomorrow, Rob, Alan and I will take the gold back to the First Side”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder—“and start work. Andy, Salvo, you’ll look after the camp here for a while, until we can get someone in to spell you. Salvo, you write up those names—of the men I need to contact and anything I need to know about them—and keep working on the chief’s daughter. Pick up some more of their lingo.”

The New Yorker laughed and kissed the tips of his bunched fingers. “Hey, Cap’n, dat ain’t woikin’!”

O’Brien nodded and sneezed.