“The printable ones,” Jesse said stiffly.
“And I committed them to memory,” Phoebe said. Elizabeth was chastened by how hard the girl was working to make her feel better. “Smartphone. Video game. Cool and uncool. Elizabeth?”
“Yes?”
Phoebe’s smile curved under her scarf, up into the papery white scar tissue there. “I think you’re cool,” she said. “I think you’re awesome.”
15
In the morning Jesse prepared to venture into the lower part of the city. He left the buggy he had arrived in with the servant Randal and arranged to borrow Aunt Abbie’s more spacious carriage and two horses from the stables.
He had slept apart from Elizabeth even though it might have been their last night together. It couldn’t be helped—Aunt Abbie’s views on courtship were modern but not infinitely elastic—and he wasn’t sure Elizabeth would have wanted his company in any case. The news that Kemp had sent the last train east had unnerved her. She was worried about getting caught on the wrong side of the Mirror. It was a reasonable fear, but it had made her sullen and temperamental. When he asked whether she had slept well, she said, “Not really. Nice bed and all, but this mansion? The wallpaper, those creepy little bronze statues everywhere? It looks like every haunted house in every horror movie that ever came out of Hollywood.”
Jesse couldn’t imagine a home as spacious and well-appointed as Aunt Abbie’s ever seeming haunted, a word he associated with séances and European castles, though Elizabeth might have a point about the statuary—he remembered his own uneasy fascination with the miniature bronze of the Capitoline Wolf on the table at the top of the stairs.
He hoped Elizabeth’s judgment hadn’t been affected by recent events. In truth, he wasn’t sure how helpful her presence would be. She was a deft hand with a pistol, he had learned that from experience, but they might need to go places where a woman would be unwelcome or outrageously conspicuous. But nor could he proceed without her. Kemp had sent her on this mission for many reasons, not the least of which was to make sure Jesse persisted in it.
Jesse told his aunt and his sister he’d be back to see them soon. Probably he would. But first he had to find Miss Mercy Kemp and deliver her to her wealthy father. And after that—unless he wanted to live the rest of his life in abject fear—he would have to come to terms with Mr. Roscoe Candy.
Only then could he consider the future. Not the City future, not the flying-machine future. His own future.
Should he have one.
He had arranged to meet Sonny Lau at noon in a trinket shop off Dupont Street.
Jesse adjusted his slouch hat to shade his face, but he felt vulnerable and exposed holding the reins as the carriage rattled down California Street. After four years at the City of Futurity, the streets of San Francisco seemed both utterly strange and intimately familiar. As they approached Chinatown he half expected to see his younger self darting through the crowds, all the red-painted doorways once again known to him, the cellar cigar-rollers, the eating houses with smoked ducks and pigs’ heads hanging in their windows, the houses where you could buy a bit’s worth of twice-laid opium, the noisy Chinese theaters, the gambling houses with their spring-lock doors: a foreign land that was simultaneously his native land. San Francisco defied geography the way the City of Futurity defied time.
Editorial writers liked to play up its squalor, but by daylight the Chinese quarter was safe enough to walk through and attracted plenty of white tourists. Jesse braked the rig at a curb not far from the trinket shop where he was supposed to meet Sonny. He wished now that they had arranged to meet at a place where Jesse was less likely to be recognized—Cliff House, say, or Woodward’s Gardens. But the trinket shop was busy and there were enough tourists in it to make the presence of another white man and woman unremarkable. The proprietor, an old man with a queue that dangled below his waist, nodded at Jesse, exchanged a few words with his equally ancient wife in what Jesse recognized as Dupont Gai dialect, then disappeared behind a beaded curtain. Moments later the curtain parted again, just long enough for Sonny Lau to beckon Jesse and Elizabeth inside.
Beyond the curtain was a small room furnished with a simple table and a few scuffed chairs. Sonny was courteous enough to pull out one of those chairs for Elizabeth, though he gave her the same puzzled look he had given her yesterday. “I talked to Little Tom,” he said.
His See Yup boss. “About the pistols?”
“Yes. He owns one. And he knows where it came from. Each of the heads of the Six Companies received one, along with a letter saying the Companies need to unite because we’re going to be attacked by Kearneyite mobs and the police.”
This was the connection Jesse had come to the city hoping to discover. His hope had rested on three established facts. The first fact was that Theo Stromberg was physically present in San Francisco. The second fact was that Theo liked to send Glocks to parties he considered oppressed and endangered. The third fact was that San Francisco’s Chinese population fell into that category. Kearneyites and others had been stirring up mob warfare against the Chinese for years. So, Jesse had reasoned, there was at least a chance Theo had sent weapons to the Six Companies.
But none of that would matter if Theo had been careful enough to cover his tracks. “Is that all?”
“You think Little Tom would waste his time talking to me if there wasn’t more to it? I told him there’s a man from the City who wants to find out who mailed the guns.”
“You mentioned me?”
“Not by name, but I had to tell him something. Little Tom is curious by nature, and the pistol aroused his curiosity as soon as it came into his hands. Like you, he wanted to know where it came from.”
“And did he find out?”
“Yes.”
“He knows how to find Theo Stromberg?”
“Yes. And it didn’t take him long to make a connection between Theo Stromberg and those letters the newspapers have been publishing. But that was as far as he took it. Little Tom doesn’t see anything to be gained by involving himself in the business of the City of Futurity.”
“I don’t care about Little Tom. It’s Theo we want. Can you give us a street address?”
“Make an offer.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you want this man, offer us something in return.”
“What’s the going price for that kind of information?”
“Make an offer, I’ll take it to Little Tom, and if it’s acceptable he’ll tell you what you want to know.”
“I can’t dicker at one remove. I don’t know anything about Company bosses or what they want. The only Chinamen I know are highbinders and sing-song girls—no offense.”
Elizabeth spoke up: “This Little Tom, does he like his Glock?”
Sonny gave her a condescending stare. “I believe he does.”
“Would he like another one? Suppose we offered him another pistol from the future, a different kind. You think he might take that in trade?”
“You have such a thing?”
“Yes.”
Sonny Lau looked at Jesse. Jesse thought about the contents of the calico travel bag and guessed she was talking about a Taser. Jesse had taken Taser training when he was hired as City security. It was an unimpressive weapon, in his opinion. “Tell Little Tom we’ll give him an X3 handheld electroshock weapon in exchange for the whereabouts of Mr. Theo Stromberg. Tell him it’s the only X3 in the state of California.”