Sonny looked skeptical. “Is there really such a pistol?”
“Yes.”
“When can you bring it?”
“Whenever he’s willing to make the exchange. The sooner the better, from our point of view.”
“Better for us, too. All this talk about mobs, it’s not just talk. Last night there was a big crowd at the sandlots, screaming about burning down Chinatown. Tonight it might be more than talk. Meet me back here, two hours.”
Jesse’s pocket watch had been given to him by August Kemp especially for this job. The watch looked like any other cheap pocket watch, but its inner workings were digital, meaning the watch didn’t tell time so much as calculate it. It was more reliable than a conventional watch, but it ticked just as loudly, for the sake of verisimilitude. Jesse took note of the time as he left the trinket shop. Two hours. He wondered if Sonny owned a reliable watch.
Elizabeth climbed aboard the carriage, still struggling against the bulk of her counterfeit dress, and Jesse drove them from Dupont Street to a place near Market, a nameless alley next to a draper’s warehouse. The alley wasn’t much wider than the carriage itself, but it was usefully private. Brick walls blocked the sunlight and kept the air cool, as if the morning’s fog had lingered in the shadows. It was a place where no one would see them, a place where they could speak freely. He said, “It’s like that double exposure you told me about.”
“What?”
“You once told me about a double exposure—two photographs developed on one paper.”
“I know what a double exposure is. What about it?”
“All this neighborhood seems like a double exposure to me. Familiar but strange. Do you take my meaning? But maybe it isn’t the neighborhood. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the double exposure. That boy who lived in a Tenderloin parlor house, and whatever the City of Futurity made of me.”
“We’re both double exposures, in that case.”
“Are we?”
“That’s what the City does to you. Last time I was home, back in North Carolina, it felt like I was the one out of place. I mean, God knows I don’t belong here—no offense—but it was like I didn’t belong there, either.”
“What you said at the table last night, about the future—is it really so bad?”
“I was just tired of Abbie looking at me like I’m the ambassador from Utopia. I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“But is it as bad as you said?”
“I don’t know. It depends. Not necessarily. But it’s definitely not paradise.”
“I figured that out quite a while ago. If the world you come from was paradise, you wouldn’t be such a cool hand with a pistol.” He tried to think of a way to speak his thoughts that wouldn’t seem sentimental or maudlin or offensive. “So you’re not the ambassador from Utopia, and Dupont Street sure as hell isn’t paradise lost. But I’m glad you could see a little of the place where I grew up. We’re what the world makes us, Elizabeth. Two cities made me, Futurity and San Francisco. And it pleases me that you exist in both of them.”
Her expression made Jesse suspect he had not entirely avoided sentimentality. “You know,” she said, speaking softly but startling him nonetheless, “it’s going to burn.”
“What?”
“San Francisco. All these buildings, Jesse. All of them. First an earthquake, then the fire.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
“When?”
“In 1906. April, I think, but I’m not absolutely sure. I should have Googled it when I was back home. But if you’re still here, twenty-nine years from now? Take a spring vacation.”
He looked away. There was a Kearneyite handbill plastered to the brick wall beside him, one of many such he had seen this afternoon. It advertised tonight’s mass meeting at the sandlots. Beside it was another handbill, written in Chinese letters. He couldn’t read it, but he recognized it as a chung hong—an announcement of impending war. “We might not have to wait thirty years,” he said, “to see it burn.”
Back at the trinket shop, the owner waved Jesse and Elizabeth through the beaded curtain to the room where Sonny Lau was already waiting. Sonny’s expression was somber, and Jesse wondered whether he ought to expect bad news.
Sonny said, “Do you have the pistol?”
Elizabeth took the Taser from the calico bag. The Taser was an awkward weapon and not a lethal one—both drawbacks, in Jesse’s opinion. It would incapacitate a man briefly but make an enemy of him for life. But he didn’t share these reservations with Sonny, whose eyes widened at the sight of the thing. It had a suitably intimidating appearance: black and yellow, fang-toothed, ready to spit venom.
Sonny weighed the Taser in his hands as Jesse explained how to operate it. It required no ammunition, he said, but what he did not say was that it would need recharging, which would be impractical for another half century or so. Sonny said, “I’m instructed by my employer to make the exchange if the weapon seems authentic.”
“It’s authentic, all right. They don’t come any more authentic than this one.”
“All right,” Sonny said. “If you say so.”
“So you can tell me where to find Theo Stromberg?”
“Little Tom traced the package containing the pistol to its source, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Elizabeth spoke up: “How do you trace a package in this day and age?”
“Bribery,” Sonny said, giving her his by now familiar look of bewildered condescension, “and the threat of violence. How else?”
“Where is he, then?” Jesse asked.
“Little Tom was surprised to discover that the package had been sent by a man living in a hotel on Montgomery Street south of Market. Not the worst hotel in the city by a long stretch, but nothing like the best. The man has been living there for more than a year, along with a woman he calls his wife.”
“Did Tom or any of his men approach him?”
“My employer kept this knowledge to himself. At first he assigned men to watch the hotel, hoping to learn something more revealing. But the man and his wife spend most of their time in each other’s company. They leave the hotel for meals, or to take long aimless walks, or to attend the theater. The man often mails letters, though he never seems to receive any. He pays his rent promptly. Little Tom saw no advantage and much risk in attempting to contact him. Does that sound like the man you’re looking for?”
“Close enough. All we need is an address.”
Sonny Lau passed over a folded slip of paper, and Jesse put it in his pocket.
The business was done. Sonny tucked the Taser into a leather carry-all. “I’d lay low for a while after this, if I were you. Little Tom asked a lot of questions.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Only as much as I had to. I told him someone I knew had been hired by the City of Futurity to hunt for a fugitive. That you had approached me and asked me to negotiate this exchange. I invented a name for you. But curiosity has been aroused. I may have been followed here. You ought to know that.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Or so Jesse hoped. “I thank you for taking the risk.”
“There’s always risk. Risk is unimportant, as long as the house won’t be endangered.” The house on California Street, Sonny meant: Phoebe and Aunt Abbie and Randal and Soo Yee.
“Good,” Jesse said, standing.
“You’re happy with what I brought you?”
The address on the paper might be fraudulent, though Jesse doubted Little Tom would stoop to hustling a City agent. Or it could be a trap. Roscoe Candy had business connections with the See Yups, though they didn’t love him. But if anyone could be trusted, it was Sonny Lau. “I’m in your debt.”