“Because of my size, he made me his apprentice. By the age of thirteen I was working the door at Madame Chao’s on weeknights. I took some knocks.” Some of which had nearly killed him. “I saw my father bloodied more than once and sometimes badly hurt. But coming to California kept him away from Manassas and Shiloh, which was the whole purpose of it.”
Not that it had saved him, in the end.
“Do you think less of him for that?”
Jesse was puzzled by the question. “Think less of him for what?”
“Dodging the war. Not doing his bit for the Union. Or the Confederacy or whatever.”
“His sentiments were Union, but he lived in New Orleans. He was smart to get away.”
“As opposed to cowardly.”
“What would you have had him do, Elizabeth? Abandon me and Phoebe in a New Orleans parlor house and head north to enlist?”
“Who’s Phoebe?”
He had spoken without thinking. “My sister,” he admitted.
“Younger, older?”
“Younger.”
Phoebe had been just two years old when they began the journey to California. She had slept through the storms as blissfully as if the swells were God’s way of rocking her cradle. Briefly, Jesse had hated her for it.
“What about your mother?”
“She died delivering me, just as Phoebe’s mother died delivering Phoebe.”
Elizabeth blanched.
Jesse said, “I suppose women never die in childbirth, where you come from.”
“Not the way yours do.”
“And you’ll hand it over to us next year, I suppose, the medical knowledge that protects your mothers and infants.”
“I guess so.”
“And I guess we thank you. Though I can’t help wondering how many women and children must have died while you waited.”
That sounded harsher than he meant it to. Jesse regretted the words, but Elizabeth didn’t answer, and he saw by the tilt of her head that she was listening to the sounds coming through the open window: passing carriages, the chiming of the railway station’s big clock. Top of the hour. A stilling of voices. High noon. Right about now, down at the bottom of Lookout Street in the Stadium of Tomorrow, the barker would be finishing his spiel about the wonders of the future, the sailor in the lookout tower would be aiming his theatrical telescope at the southern horizon.
Elizabeth caught Jesse’s eye, acknowledging a shared secret. She had talked to Vijay, the helicopter pilot. Vijay had agreed to fly a different route today, west and south of Futurity Station. The customers on Marcus Frane’s sun-beaten bleachers might catch a glimpse of a dark speck moving against the horizon, but that was all they would see.
“Now we wait,” Jesse said.
Frane’s response came in the form of an anonymous note delivered after sunset to the front desk of the Excelsior:
The man you want is Isaac Connaught he drives a coach from the city he is Onslows man.
“Awesome,” Elizabeth said. “Nice work. With any luck we can head back to the City tomorrow. I’ll call Barton and let him know.”
“Do that,” Jesse said. “I’m going out.”
“Going out for what?”
“Some business of my own.”
“What business?”
“Do you trust me?”
“I don’t know. Should I?”
“I’ll be back by midnight,” Jesse said.
He made his way to the brothel where he had met Heddie Finch the night before, dodging the drunks who loitered outside the saloons. He knocked at the door and made it a point to smile when the doorman opened up.
My old job, Jesse thought. He knew it was important to state his business as succinctly as possible. “I’m not a customer,” he said. “I’ve come to see Heddie Finch.”
The doorman was untypically short for his calling, but he made up for it with his enormous width. He looked like a boulder balanced on a pair of bowling pins. “She ain’t here.”
“That’s all right. I just want to talk, but I’ll pay the going rate if I have to. I’m an old acquaintance of hers.”
“Good for you. But she still ain’t here. Plenty of other girls, though. Come in and take your pick, or move along—one or the other.”
Jesse was inclined to believe the man. “Will she be back tomorrow night?”
“She won’t be back at all. She left town. What’s one buggy old whore to you, anyway?”
“Left town?”
“That’s what I said.”
“For where?”
“I ain’t her keeper. She took what little she owns and headed for the train station in a hurry. It ain’t unusual for these gals to pick up and leave, if they think they can get away with it.”
Heddie had always been flighty and easily scared. But never without good reason.
Jesse thought: Am I the reason?
“Now move along, lummox, you’re blocking the door.”
Jesse moved along. He needed to think about Heddie’s hasty departure, but he didn’t want to let the question distract him. He had another task to attend to.
He found the alley that ran parallel to Lookout on the west side. The alley was unlit and fouled with trash and the occasional dead animal, but there was moonlight enough for Jesse to pick his way north, counting buildings, until he reached the back door of Onslow’s shop. No light came from inside. The door itself was heavy and was secured with a rusty padlock. Jesse had no key, but he had the boot at the end of his left leg. It took three vigorous kicks to lift the hasp from the doorframe.
He waited to see whether anyone would respond to the noise, but no one did. The building was dark and seemed to be empty. He took two steps inside and counted to ten, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and even then he could see little more than a few ghostly outlines. He was in a room walled with shelves. A bulky presence in front of him was probably a table. He put his hands out before him and took another step. The shape of the table became more distinct. Cautiously, he swept his arm across the surface of it and found what he hoped had been left there: a finger-loop oil lamp. He pulled off the shade and took a book of City matches from his pocket, little paper lucifers attached to a sandpaper striking board. The lamp was nearly empty of oil, but there was enough in the font to support a small flame.
In the fresh light Jesse scanned the room, which seemed to be where Onslow kept his stock. The shelves were bounteously full. Jesse admired the novelty and variety of what he saw. Then he found a burlap bag abandoned in a corner, and began methodically to fill it.
Coming through the lobby of the Excelsior with the bag draped over his shoulder made him feel like some kind of criminal St. Nicholas. The night clerk gave him a hard stare but said nothing. Upstairs, Elizabeth was waiting for him. “Where’d you go?”
He came inside and closed the door. “Onslow’s back room.”
“You broke in?”
He nodded.
“Uh-huh,” Elizabeth said. She stared at the bag. “So what’s that? I hope to hell it’s not full of Oakleys.”
“I wish it was. It wouldn’t be so cursed heavy.” He emptied the bag on the bed. He didn’t know what a Glock automatic pistol weighed, but he guessed about two pounds. And here were twenty of them.
6
The woman’s name was Zaina Baumgartner, her title was “events manager,” and her job was to arrange stage and screen presentations in both towers of the City—show business, in other words.
Jesse had not known many show people, certainly none from the twenty-first century. He wondered if Baumgartner was a representative example. She was tall and almost unnaturally thin, her gestures were nervous, and she seemed to regard Elizabeth and Jesse as lesser creatures bent on distracting her from the more important things in life. Elizabeth’s first words on stepping into Baumgartner’s Tower One office were, “We need to ask you a few questions.” Baumgartner said, “But I have a screening.”