Now that the conversation had passed on to mutually congratulatory masculine bullshit and reminiscences, Elizabeth gave herself permission to leave the room. She took the bag of tech gear with her, after putting the Glock back inside.
Abbie Hauser’s mansion was big but Elizabeth got the feeling that a lot of the rooms had been closed off and abandoned. There were, as far as she could tell, two live-in servants, Soo Yee and a middle-aged black man, Randal, who had put in a brief appearance after driving Soo Yee to town and back. A staff of two was probably picayune stuff by Nob Hill standards. Abbie and Phoebe were in the kitchen helping Soo Yee fix the evening meal, something that probably didn’t happen in the tonier households.
Elizabeth retreated to the entrance hall, where she took the clunky two-way radio from the bag and pushed the button to connect her to August Kemp. He must have been waiting for the call, because there was no hesitation, just a flat electronic beep followed almost instantly by his voice: “Elizabeth? Where are you?”
“Somewhere up Nob Hill, actually.”
“You have something to tell me?”
“Just that we’re making progress.”
“What’s that mean?”
“We have a lead.”
“You found Mercy?”
“Not yet, but we have a line on somebody who’s been distributing Glocks, presumably Theo Stromberg.”
“Do you know whether Mercy’s with him?”
“We’re working on that assumption, but we don’t know for sure.”
“How soon can you find out?”
“It depends on our informant. I doubt we’ll find out much more until tomorrow.” Which might be absurdly optimistic, but she wasn’t sure Kemp could bear the weight of the truth right now.
What followed was a pause so lengthy she began to suspect the radio was defective. “The thing is,” Kemp finally said, “there have been some developments. Major upheaval. Rail strikes everywhere, malcontents greasing the tracks and fucking with signal lights. The Chicago yard workers are coming out in sympathy. Worse, Hayes has mobilized federal troops to arrest me and occupy the City.”
“Can they do that?”
“Not before we evacuate. We can hold them off. But it’s making everything a lot more difficult. Pretty much every editorial writer in the Union blames us for instigating a labor revolt and a race war, thanks in large part to Theo fucking Stromberg. I had to send the last City train back to Chicago this afternoon.”
“You—what?”
“Don’t worry. I have other means of extracting us when the time comes.”
Suddenly all Elizabeth could think about was Gabriella. A thousand miles of physical distance and a century and a half of Hilbert space stood between Elizabeth and her daughter, a divide deeper than any of those misty Sierra Nevada canyons they had crossed on the way here. Now Kemp was telling her he had torched the only bridge. “Other means?”
“Look, obviously I have no intention of being stranded. I’ll get you home, Elizabeth. You and Mercy both. I promise. But first, you have to find Mercy.”
Elizabeth mulled over the news while Jesse said good-bye to Sonny Lau. The tong man left with barely a glance at her, probably confused about the role a badly dressed white woman might have to play in this game of guns and threats. She was a little confused about it herself.
She wanted to tell Jesse what Kemp had said, but they were called to dinner before she could speak to him privately. It was a lengthy meal—Soo Yee served each course with great ceremony, and Jesse made a point of praising everything—but to Elizabeth it just seemed like Something Soup followed by rounds of Boiled Something. Other means, she kept thinking. Soo Yee turned up the gaslights as daylight faded (here was something else that made Elizabeth feel uneasy, all these little fires burning in their sconces like promissory notes of disaster), and Abbie began to talk about the future. Or, as she pronounced it, The Future, the words spoken reverently, as if she were talking about a sacred grotto in some Greek myth. “I think some people resent the City of Futurity because they feel chastised by it, especially since those rogue letters have been published. But I wonder if that’s fair. If there is such a thing as moral progress, the future will inevitably seem to admonish us for our sins.”
The remark was meant to be flattering, or at least to communicate Abbie’s open-mindedness, but it sounded too much like the kind of high-minded bullshit August Kemp’s copywriters produced for the press back home. “I’m not admonishing anybody,” Elizabeth said.
“No, Elizabeth, of course not. All I mean to say is that, for instance, concerning the rights of women—”
“Okay, stop. I mean, there’s some truth in what you’re saying. I can vote, which is great, and we don’t get yellow fever and we don’t hang people for stealing horses, but the idea that what I have waiting for me back home is some kind of Utopia? No. Sorry.” This wasn’t how polite conversation was supposed to go, but Elizabeth felt as if she had lost the ability to steer the words, much less stop them. She flashed on all the times when her friend Chanelle had come over to the house, Friday nights when Gabriella was still in her crib, how they would share a couple of glasses of wine or even a joint (furtively, in the bathroom, with the ventilator fan turned up to carry away the smoke) and complain about Elizabeth’s jailed husband or Chanelle’s troubles as a Walmart sub-manager, letting the indignation boil over until it turned into laughter or tears. “It’s true I was a soldier, but you have no idea what it means being a woman in the armed forces, the kind of crap you put up with on a daily basis, and sometimes worse than crap, sometimes very much worse, and good fucking luck if you try to complain about it. I’m a veteran and a single mom, and the reason I’m here isn’t because I enjoy outdoor plumbing and coal smoke. It’s because this is the only job that’ll pay the rent on my falling-apart house and buy groceries for me and Gabriella and maybe leave enough after taxes that I can think about moving as far as possible from my crazy ex before he gets out of prison. Which is something else we have a lot of—prisons—though you won’t hear Kemp boasting about it. We also have wars, not big scary wars but little wars that go on for years and years and never seem to accomplish anything. Wars without victory, whatever victory would amount to. And good luck if you come home needing help, because the VA hospitals—they, uh—”
Jesse and his aunt Abbie were staring. So was Phoebe. Even Soo Yee had gone stock-still in the servants’ doorway. Elizabeth’s urge to talk evaporated as suddenly as it had come.
“I’m sorry,” she finished. “I mean, if I used offensive language.”
Silence followed, one of those weighty silences that accompany a weapons-grade breach of etiquette, until Phoebe spoke up: “Jesse said in his letters that even the best people of the future are freer with their language than we’re accustomed to. He made it sound quite comical, the way he described it.”
“Yeah, well, maybe not so comical at the dinner table. I apologize. It’s been a long day.”
“He often wrote about the unusual words he heard at the City of Futurity. Didn’t you, Jesse?”