Elizabeth wasn’t sure how to answer that. Jesse might have stirred up a hornets’ nest by bartering with the tongs. But it was hard to imagine hired killers storming the Royal Hotel. “I guess we can sit tight.”
“Stay by the radio and be ready to move when you get the word. How far are you from the docks?”
“Jesse would know better than I do, all this horse traffic, but maybe half an hour, three-quarters of an hour?”
“Okay, noted. As for Jesse, tell him he’ll be paid when you deliver Mercy to the boat. He doesn’t need to come across the bay with her. Once I have my daughter back, his work is done. And that’s the last you’ll see of him. Understood?”
“Understood,” she said, hating him for making her say it.
Jesse didn’t like the idea of waiting in the hotel for orders from Kemp. This was a place known to his enemies, and every instinct he had learned as a bouncer’s boy told him to keep moving and stick to the shadows.
But orders were orders. He was only hired help, and he would be hired help for a few hours more, until Kemp, or someone from the City, paid him off with a bag of double eagles and a handshake. Then he would be his own man again. And Elizabeth would go home to her daughter. And the rest of his life, which seemed to Jesse like an ominous void waiting to be filled, could begin.
In the meantime there was nothing to do but sit at the window of the hotel room and watch the sun creep down behind a billboard advertising Kopp’s Pills for Cough and Grippe. It was the time of day when San Francisco’s respectable citizens began heading for their comfortable homes and lockable doors, while everyone else—that is to say, the city’s majority—prepared to conduct the kind of business that thrives after dark. Elizabeth, seated across the room from Theo and Mercy and cradling her pistol in her lap, seemed not to want to talk. But Jesse was bored and saw no reason to suppress his curiosity about the two runners. He’d talked to many runners in the course of his work, and he didn’t despise them as a class. So when Theo ventured to ask a question—“How exactly did you find us?”—Jesse said, “The City tracked you to San Francisco. There must have been postmarks on some of those letters you sent.”
“That’s not surprising. And we weren’t exactly hiding. But how’d you track us to the Royal?”
“Talked to one of the Six Companies. They like to know the whereabouts of the people they do business with.”
“Okay, I get that, but how did you connect us to the Six Companies?”
“The weapons you’ve been giving away tend to end up in the hands of people with grievances. Hereabouts, that’s one of two groups—Chinamen and wage workers. I happen to know some people in Chinatown, so that’s where we started. If that didn’t pan out I would have talked to the Kearneyites.”
“What if I hadn’t given pistols to either group?”
“Then we wouldn’t have found you so quick, and you wouldn’t be going home.”
“Well,” Theo said in his piping voice, “you’re wrong on two counts. One, I would never put a weapon in the hands of the Kearneyites. Denis Kearney talks a lot about the working man, but he’s a fucking racist. The way it worked out where I come from, Kearneyite mobs attacked the Chinese and a lot of innocent people got killed. It seems likely to happen here just the same. Second, I have no desire to stay behind after the Mirror closes. If that’s what August Kemp thinks, he has no idea what I’m all about.”
“He thinks you’ll face legal trouble if you go home.”
“He can bring charges, sure, but on fairly trivial grounds—transporting dangerous goods, trespassing on City property. The weapons I arranged to smuggle through the Mirror were legally purchased, and there’s no law about what I can do with them on this side. I mean, Kemp imported weapons, too, in the hands of his security people. They say a local was killed by City agents at Futurity Station last year. Is Kemp going to answer for that? No—not back home, not in a court of law. Given that, does he really want to initiate a lawsuit that’ll put my testimony into the public record? I hope he does, but I doubt he’s that stupid.”
Jesse didn’t react when Theo mentioned the man killed at Futurity Station. Nor did Elizabeth. But it raised a question. He said, “Some of those Glocks ended up in the wrong hands, didn’t they?”
The glow of moral certainty vanished from Theo’s face. “Not everyone in my supply chain was reliable. I had to work with locals and low-level City employees. The guns were never supposed to be more than symbolic. One pistol, one clip, a dramatic way of proving to the people I wrote to that the warnings I sent them really came from the future. But more weapons came across than I ever intended.”
“A piece or two got sold that shouldn’t have, in other words.”
“Apparently.”
“Private buyers.”
“I suppose so.”
“Including the man who tried to shoot Ulysses S. Grant. Which is another reason you might be eager to get out of 1877.”
Theo didn’t have an answer for that.
Out on the street, the shadows had grown and merged. The air was still, the sky the color of blue ink. A horse car rattled up Montgomery. From time to time, passing men glanced up at the hotel. Jesse said to Elizabeth, “Too many people know this room number. We already rented a room upstairs—we should go there.”
He was afraid she might accuse him of paranoia, a twenty-first-century word for unreasonable fear (and apparently a common malady in that world). But she nodded curtly. “Good thought.”
Mercy Kemp looked at her bag. “I can finish packing—”
Jesse said, “You won’t need all that, and we’ll travel lighter without it.”
She gave it a moment’s thought and shrugged. Sensible attitude, Jesse thought. Moments later they were in a nearly identical room one floor up. According to his pocket watch, another hour had passed without further word from August Kemp.
It seemed to Jesse that Mercy had a little of her father about her. It was nothing obvious, just her quick brown eyes, a sort of economy of motion, a hint of the elder Kemp’s natural authority. Jesse knew she was a woman who had once been made to feel special and permitted to expect obedience from others, but there was something chastened in her, too—a humility she must have learned, not inherited. He asked how she had come to join Theo in the adventures that had landed her in a hotel south of Market.
She shrugged. “I believe in the cause.”
It sounded like a well-rehearsed answer to a foolish question. “The cause of bankrupting your father?”
“The cause of letting people know what he’s doing here and stopping him from doing it again.”
“By ‘here,’ you mean San Francisco?”
“I mean your whole world.”
“And what’s he doing to it, in your opinion?”
“Exploiting it, corrupting it, deceiving it, and abandoning it as soon as he’s extracted enough gold to turn a profit.”
“He might say he’s given as much as he’s taken.”
“I’m sure he would. But that would be a lie.”
“Do you hate your father, Ms. Kemp? Did he raise you badly?”
“That’s a People magazine kind of question.” She gave him an impatient look, then sighed and said, “I don’t hate my father. I mean, he wasn’t around a lot, so maybe I have some issues. But that’s not why I joined the movement, and it’s not why I’m here.”