“Just briefly.”
“Late last summer I was standing at my window when a lightning-rod salesman came down the road. A lightning-rod salesman! You won’t understand this, but it was exciting to me—it was like something out of those old stories I loved so much. He was pulling a cart with his name painted on the side in bright red circus writing: PROFESSOR ELECTRO. A crowd of children following after him. A perfect day for it, too, sullen and hot, storm clouds swelling on the horizon. So I ran down to see him—I couldn’t help myself. But you know what Professor Electro was? Professor Electro was an old Jew with yellow eyes and a smelly blue Union jacket, hardly more than a beggar—so drunk or demented he could barely mumble his pitch, and the children were mocking him obscenely, and he looked as if he had endured so much serial humiliation that he would have been grateful if a bolt of lightning had struck him dead on the spot.”
“Disappointing,” Jesse said, though he couldn’t imagine what else she had expected from an itinerant peddler.
Mrs. Standridge turned in her chair and looked at Jesse as if he were the one who had disappointed her. “The point is, I accept your offer. Yes, you can escort me back to the City. The sooner the better.”
Jesse had been hunting runners for the first few months of 1877.
His bosses at the City had given him the assignment, ostensibly as a reward for his work with Elizabeth, also as a way to make profitable use of his skills and to get him away from Tower Two, where he was still viewed with suspicion. As it turned out, he liked the work. In those few months he had seen more of the country than he had ever expected to, and the constant travel was usefully distracting. It tired him out and helped him sleep.
“Runners” were people from the future who booked passage on one of the City’s excursions and jumped ship, generally with the aim of staying permanently in this century. Such people couldn’t be compelled to return—the City had no such legal authority in the America of 1877—but they could be offered a last chance at a ticket home without sanction, if they could be found. Most runners were like Mrs. Standridge, imaginative individuals acting out of romantic illusions; most, like Mrs. Standridge, were happy to accept a reprieve from the reality they had been forced to confront. That was true even of the less idealistic runners, the ones who planned to make a fortune by “inventing” some device they had read about in a history book or investing in a commercial stock they knew would improve. As a rule, the practical aspects of the question confounded them. Or they came to understand that the money they had hoped to earn wouldn’t buy them, in this century, anything they really wanted.
There were rare exceptions. In the weeks before he set off to retrieve Mrs. Standridge, Jesse had been sent after a runner named Weismann who had been frequenting saloons in the Germantown district of New York City. Weismann was a man in his fifties, older than most runners, grim-faced and morbidly serious, and according to the City’s hired detectives he had been haunting these dives for the purpose of suborning a murder.
Jesse tracked him to a barroom near the Stadt Theater, where he went to Weismann’s table and introduced himself as a City agent. Weismann merely nodded. “All right,” he said. “Sit down, Mr. Cullum. I won’t go back to the City with you, but I can buy you a beer.”
“Thank you,” Jesse said, sitting. The saloon was a basement establishment, lit with old nautical lanterns that did little more than insult the darkness, and the sawdust scattered on the floor reeked of hops and urine. “But you might want to change your mind about what you’ve been doing lately.”
Weismann had been drinking, not enough to make him properly drunk but enough to put a hitch in his motions. He turned his head to Jesse as if the hinges of his neck needing oiling. “And what is it you think I’ve been doing?”
“Endangering yourself, for one thing.”
“Endangering myself how?”
“By approaching immigrants who have criminal connections and attempting to arrange the killing of a man in Austria-Hungary, cash on delivery of evidence that the man in question is dead.”
To his credit, Weismann didn’t try to deny it. “It’s not a risk-free enterprise, true.”
“Such men are more likely to steal your money than trust you as an employer. You ought to have figured that out by now.”
“I know what I’m doing. I don’t threaten easily, and I don’t carry cash.”
“Maybe so. But you’ve been discovered, and you have to stop, so you might as well go home. Free ticket to the City, Mr. Weismann, and no questions asked. It’s a generous offer.”
“What makes you think I have to stop?”
“Suborning a murder is against the law even in the Bowery. We have witnesses who will go to the police if you don’t give it up.”
Weismann nodded, still neither surprised nor intimidated. “I guess Kemp can afford to buy himself some Tammany justice, if that’s what he really wants. But I don’t see any police here—do you?”
“There’s the door,” Jesse said. “You can walk out and go into hiding, and I have no power to stop you. But there won’t be any murder. We’ve seen to that.”
For a moment it seemed as if Weismann might actually call Jesse’s bluff, stand up and leave the saloon without looking back. Then his eyes took on a harder focus. “You’re a local hire, obviously. How much did they tell you about the man I want killed?”
“He’s a customs agent in a town called Braunau am Inn. An innocent man. Whose offspring will commit monstrous crimes, if history unfolds in our world as it did in yours.”
“A man who’ll be the father of a monster. I’d rather kill the monster himself, but he won’t be born for twelve more years. Given that, it doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. One innocent life against the death of many millions. If killing him is a sin, no one has to go to hell for it but me. So I cordially invite you to fuck off and leave me to my business.”
“But it won’t work,” Jesse said patiently. “Kemp wrote to the Austrian officials to warn them. And even in Austria, August Kemp’s name rings bells.” An Austrian envoy had been among a delegation of European dignitaries who had toured the City of Futurity last year, with only a little less fanfare than President Grant himself. A more querulous, contrarian group of people Jesse had never encountered. But they had been as impressed by the City as all the other visitors. An English lord had fainted aboard the helicopter. “They’ll intercept your man, if you succeed in hiring one, before he can get close to his target.”
“Maybe,” Weismann said. “Maybe not.”
“And Kemp did something else. Something you might approve of.”
“I doubt it.”
“When he warned the Austrians about your hired killer, he warned them about the target at the same time—including enough detail about this man’s philandering that the customs service will likely fire him to head off a scandal. They were also warned that he was a potential danger to his household servant, one Klara Pölzl.”