“I guess so.”
“What they wouldn’t share were those private moments. And it was the very thing they refused to share that I began to crave—I craved it the way some men crave the fucking. I didn’t just want what those women sold, though it would be a lie to say I didn’t want it. I wanted the kind of intimacy a woman can’t be paid or forced to give.”
Elizabeth’s face had grown somber. “And did you get it?”
“No. Nor did I expect to. But I think it’s why—”
“Why what?”
“Why all this”—the darkened train compartment, the frankness of their bodies—“feels like such a gift.”
Elizabeth was silent, and Jesse was afraid he had embarrassed or insulted her. It was the first time he had tried to talk about these things, and he had done it clumsily. But the women he had known best were all whores or widows or working girls. Apart from his aunt Abbie, who lived on Nob Hill, there had been no Boston matrons in his social circle. He was about to apologize when she said, “Those girls—”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have talked about them.”
“No, it’s the way you talk about them. Jesse … are any of those girls still alive?”
Elizabeth had a disconcerting talent for hearing all the words he was careful not to speak. He said, “A few of them survived.”
“We should talk about that.”
Maybe so. It was a subject Jesse wasn’t eager to discuss—Roscoe Candy and Madame Chao’s whores and what had happened to his sister—in part because he could hardly bear the thought of dragging Elizabeth into the sordid history of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. But there were things she needed to know, and maybe this was the best place to discuss them, here on a sleek train barreling through a desert night.
But the window had turned more blue than black, a horizon had begun to emerge from the darkness. The high Laramie plains. Purple mountains ahead, fruited plains behind. And before Jesse could frame a word, their pagers, buried under mounds of hastily discarded clothing, began to chime, and the train began to slow, and Elizabeth scrambled to dress herself.
11
“Change of plans,” Kemp said. “I’m ordering a full evacuation, beginning right now.”
The sun had just risen over the long Wyoming plains, visible through the bulletproof windows of the train as he and Elizabeth hurried forward to Kemp’s private car. Blue sky and brown earth, each streaked with red. But he could see none of that now, because Kemp’s car was windowless. It was a single undivided chamber, its walls lined with electrical devices and display screens. Jesse knew the train was connected by radio to the City and to the City’s outposts in San Francisco and New York, and he guessed Kemp had received some bad news by way of these machines. All of Kemp’s traveling security crew had crowded into the car, some twenty people, most in uniform, most with automatic pistols strapped to their hips. Most were male, and tall, and Jesse had to crane his head to see Kemp through a forest of shaved heads and black duck-billed caps.
“We’re putting the train on a siding at the nearest depot,” Kemp said. “We’ve got another train returning with a tour group from San Francisco. This afternoon we’ll be transferring passengers from our train to the eastbound train, and I need you to help with that. I don’t want any kind of panic breaking out. Anybody asks what’s up, you can say it’s some kind of legal dispute with Union Pacific. We’re printing up explanatory handouts—everybody will be getting a full refund, no questions asked. If people grumble I want you to be gracious about it, but we need everybody on the train back to Illinois by sundown. Any questions?”
One large and obvious one, Jesse thought. But no one was bold enough to ask it.
“Okay,” Kemp said. “We’re also recovering some gear from this depot, so we’ll need able bodies to lift and carry. Chavez and Epstein have already been briefed on all this and they’ll be forming you into teams. From here you head on over to the common room at the depot for duty assignments. Clear?” The security crew began filing toward the exit. Kemp said, “Jesse and Elizabeth, please stick around.”
When the car was empty but for the three of them, Kemp slumped into a chair. He looked exhausted, as if he had been awake all night. So had Jesse, of course, but for less onerous reasons. Elizabeth said, “We can lift and carry with the rest of them.”
“That’s not what you’re here for. Only the tourists are going back to the City. An evacuation takes time and work. We’re still bound for San Francisco.”
Jesse said, “Do you want to tell us why this is happening?”
“It’s not a secret, or at least it won’t be much longer. The papers published another fucking Blackwell letter. This one claims we arrived in 1873 with a fortune in counterfeit financial instruments, and it says we used these instruments as collateral to acquire two failing banks, the Union Trust Company and E. W. Clark. It says everything we’ve done since, building hotels, improving railroads, acquiring property, we did with what was basically fraudulent money.”
“Is that true?”
Kemp gave Jesse a long stare. “As a demonstration of the degree to which I trust you, I will tell you the answer is, to a certain extent, yes. The question I would ask is, so what? There’s nothing we’ve done I can’t defend. But I won’t be given the chance. In a few hours, everybody with deposits at Clark or Union Trust will be lining up to cash in their accounts. We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t trigger another financial crisis. And we won’t be forgiven for that. Coming on top of everything else, this is pretty much the definition of a nonrecoverable clusterfuck. And it gets worse.”
“Hard to see how.”
“Rail workers in Buffalo went on strike a couple of days ago—they pulled switch lights, greased the tracks, and fought a pitched battle with state militia. A police raid on the home of a ringleader turned up dozens of Glocks and a stash of ammunition. At least one Glock was used in an ambush that killed fifteen soldiers.”
“Onslow’s guns?”
“Probably purchased through the Chicago connection. But the City is being blamed for it.”
“So we’re going to San Francisco to speed up the evacuation?”
“Yeah, but I want you two for something more specific. We need to recover a couple of runners.”
“Is one of them the author of the Blackwell letters?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. One of the people I want you to find is the asshole who’s writing these letters, but that damage is done—at this point, I don’t care about stopping him. He can live or die on this side of the Mirror as far as I’m concerned. But he has someone with him. Someone who’s under his influence.” Kemp looked like he was about to lapse into another broody silence. “It’s my daughter,” he said. “I need you to help me find my daughter.”
The depot where they stopped had been built to supply water and fuel for City trains exclusively, and the City people had driven their spur line far enough into the hinterlands of Wyoming that few curiosity-seekers were likely to follow. The land here was spectacularly empty and, Jesse thought, beautiful. A high rolling plain, some of it sandstone-red, much of it a calico print of green buffalo grass and yellow wildflowers. Astride the horizon was a tumbled mountain range, hazy as a faded daguerreotype, and the air was cold even in the sharp spring sunlight, as if it had dallied over glaciers on its journey from the west.