“Don’t freak out. Do you mind if I sit?”
“No! Please. I mean, of course.” He added, “I looked for you last night.”
She was dressed twentieth-century-civilian style, denim trousers and a white shirt, no Velcro bustle, no City jacket. Apart from that, she hadn’t changed much since she had pulled her gun on Jesse’s would-be assailant in the back room of Onslow’s curiosity shop. Her hair had grown out a little. Six months, he thought. Three months back in her own time, three more here, doing City work far from Jesse’s runner hunts. He had almost despaired of seeing her again.
She was carrying a plate, which she set down in front of herself. Pineapple wedges and a crescent roll. “Yeah,” she said, settling into the chair opposite him, “the desk guy mentioned it, but I was in a meeting with Kemp’s people until late. All this trouble, which I guess you’re reading about.”
Getting down to business pretty quickly, but Elizabeth had never been one for small talk. She seemed to want to pretend she had never been away. He tried to accommodate her. “The papers love a scandal. Are the Blackwell letters really so ominous?”
“Potentially very bad for us, sure. Whoever mailed those letters—some fucking runner, according to Kemp—is making it hard to conduct business. Did you see the crowd in front of the Grand last night? The only good news is, they weren’t carrying torches.”
“So the letters are truthful?”
“I haven’t seen them, but it sounds like it. And that’s the problem. Do you think we’d be welcome here if the average person knew even the stuff you know about us? There’s a reason we’re careful about what we say. The past is another country, and there’s no guarantee of cordial diplomatic relations.”
“So Kemp chose to hide the unsettling details. I understand, but maybe it was a mistake. People will think you’re ashamed of what you are, now that the truth’s out.”
“We don’t have anything to apologize for. We don’t have to apologize for our superior hygiene or our flashy technology, and we sure as hell don’t have to apologize because we come from a place where women can vote and black people can hold political office and LGBT people can walk down the street with their heads held high.”
Jesse nodded. He had learned about these things when he first came to the City, in a training course aimed at preventing local hires from inadvertently insulting visitors—and, not incidentally, weeding out any employees who were too well-bred or bigoted to endorse a principle of tolerance. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it won’t win you friends.”
“Tell me about it. Maybe we have Walt Whitman or Robert Ingersoll on our side. Otherwise, we’re being denounced from every pulpit in the country and in most of these ink-smeared tabloids you guys call newspapers. Which is why Kemp’s been so careful about holding this stuff back until the last year, preferably until the end of the last year—this is exactly what we hoped to avoid.”
A lot of ‘we’ and ‘you’ in these statements, Jesse thought. “The letters are premature.”
“The letters are deliberate sabotage. Obviously the work of a runner trying to stir up trouble.”
“A political radical.”
Elizabeth’s look became guarded. “Probably.”
“Someone who imagines he has a moral obligation to intervene in our history,” Jesse said, thinking of Weismann.
“Someone who hates what Kemp is doing. Someone who wants to warn African-Americans and Indians and so forth about what’s coming.”
“And what exactly is coming?”
“Well, like the compromise Congress enacted to let Hayes take office. The end of Reconstruction. Southern blacks turned into sharecroppers, handed over to chain gangs, worked to death in iron mines or turpentine camps. Legal apartheid that won’t be dismantled until the 1950s. Native Americans pushed onto dwindling reservations or killed outright, because ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’—you know who said that? Philip Sheridan, buddy of U. S. Grant and major general in the old Army of the Potomac, soon to be general of the army.” A tourist at a nearby table turned his head, and Elizabeth lowered her voice. “I could go on.”
“I guess that’s all true,” Jesse said, “if you say so, but how are these letters supposed to help?”
“Probably whoever wrote them thinks they’ll give some courage to the victims, by saying out loud that this stuff is wrong and that history won’t look kindly on it. Failing that, they’ll discredit the City and cast doubt on Kemp’s official history.”
“Seems like a slender victory.”
“They’re only letters. The world’s cheapest weapon. But we don’t know what else the writer might have in mind.”
Jesse thought again of Weismann, whose idealism required the murder of an Austro-Hungarian customs clerk. I’m more radical than some, but I’m not the only one. “Elizabeth?”
She took a bite from a pineapple wedge. “What?”
“It’s good to see you again.”
“You too, Jesse.”
At least she had used his name. “How are things back where you come from?”
“More or less okay.”
“Your daughter Gabriella is doing well?”
“She’s fine. I mean, she’s healthy and she remembered me. I guess that counts as fine.” It sounded a degree short of fine. Jesse remembered a word he had learned from his employers at the City: suboptimal. “How about you?”
“I recovered from the blow to the head I received at Onslow’s.”
“I know. I kept tabs, even from the other side of the Mirror.”
“Since then, I’ve been busy.” Riding the fence. Hunting runners.
“Busy is good, right?”
“It helps. Seeing you again is good.”
She checked her watch. “Speaking of busy, I’m doing a ride-along with the Manhattan tour in about fifteen minutes—”
“A ride-along?”
The Manhattan tour was part of the so-called Springtime in New York package: dozens of tourists packed into a big horse-drawn omnibus and paraded up Broadway to Longacre Square and around the city’s more respectable streets. “Kemp was thinking of canceling it. We have to guarantee the safety of the visitors, but that’s hard to do if there are racist mobs following us everywhere.”
“Is it as bad as that?”
“Not yet, and Kemp’s letting the tour go ahead, but he’s laying on extra security. Including me. And I need to check a weapon out of the armory, so…”
“Will I see you tonight?”
She hesitated longer than Jesse liked. “You know, what happened between us back at Futurity Station … that’s not something I can jump back into. I thought about it a lot when I was home. What happened between us can never be anything but temporary. Do you understand?”
“I guess I understand it well enough.”
“But we can have dinner tonight if you want. Maybe they haven’t told you yet, but Kemp’s reassigning you to his personal security detail. Along with me. And we’ll be leaving New York before long.”
The news rang in his head like a bell, too loud to make sense of, but what he said was, “Partners again?”
“Kind of.”
“Back at the City?”
“No. They’re sending us to San Francisco.”
The summons to Kemp’s penthouse lodgings came that afternoon, by way of Jesse’s pager. He rode the elevator to the top floor of the Electric Grand, standing next to a tourist couple who were arguing, in the lazy way of the long married, over who was currently president of the United States. “Grant,” the man said, “I’m pretty sure it’s Grant, his picture was in the brochure,” while his wife insisted, “But that was last year. There was an election, I think it’s Hayes? Does Hayes ring a bell?”