Jesse moved more confidently now that he was inside the house.
He managed to navigate the spiral staircase from the upper room of the turret without causing the risers to groan or squeal. The room below was a circular space furnished only with a few small oval windows. The door to the second-floor corridor had been left slightly ajar, admitting a faint wedge of light. He peered through the gap.
The corridor was vacant. Gaslights blazed in their sconces, their glow reflected in yellow highlights on the brass-and-copper fittings of five bedroom doors and the walnut side table that decorated the landing above the grand staircase. The two doors nearest the landing were Phoebe’s and Aunt Abbie’s bedrooms. All these doors were closed, and everything looked normal enough, except that a vase on the side table had been overturned, spilling water and wilted violets at the base of the brass miniature of the Capitoline Wolf. And he heard the sound of voices from somewhere below. Men’s voices, with the burl of smoke and meanness in them.
He had to face a stark possibility: that Abbie and Phoebe and Soo Yee and Randal might already be dead. Roscoe Candy had known the murder of Sonny Lau would draw Jesse to the house. He had come here with his men, bullied his way inside, and cowed the occupants. He might then have abused and violated the women or simply killed the hostages outright. It would have been characteristic behavior. On the other hand, Candy might have wanted to keep the captives alive as leverage in case something went wrong. Or—perhaps most likely—Candy might have decided to postpone the brutalization and murder until he could force Jesse to watch.
Jesse didn’t bother consulting his watch. He guessed his allotted time must be nearly up, but he had hardly learned anything useful yet. And retreating the way he had come would only waste more vital minutes. He needed to do something practical.
As he was deliberating he heard footsteps ascending the staircase. A man came up to the landing, one of Candy’s henchmen, some ex–placer-miner past his prime, it looked like, with a bandolier of bullets across his chest as if he were playing a Mexican rebel in a music-hall review. The man’s movements were slow and approximate: He might have been drinking. Maybe all these men had been drinking. Jesse hoped so. But if that was the case, they must have brought their own liquor. Aunt Abbie ran a dry household.
The bandit knocked twice at the door of Phoebe’s room. It opened, and another man peered out.
“You can go on down and get something to eat,” the bandit said, “but you’d best hurry. The old woman’s larder is none too generous. Any of them giving you trouble?”
A question that quickened Jesse’s pulse.
The other man responded with a mumble that sounded like a no. What was happening here, Jesse realized, was a changing of the guard. The hostages, maybe all of them, maybe just some, were alive and were being held in Phoebe’s room.
Suddenly the bandit gestured down the hall at the turret rooms—at Jesse himself, as it seemed. “Wheeler seen anything from his perch?”
He was talking about the lookout on the widow’s walk. Wheeler must be the name of the man Jesse had killed. “If he did, he didn’t tell me about it.”
“Somebody ought to take him a chicken leg.”
“Wheeler can go hungry for all of me.”
The guard who had been relieved headed down the stairs for his meal as the bandit stepped into Phoebe’s room and pulled the door shut behind him. Jesse waited until the only sound he could hear was a steady murmur from below. Then he left the turret room and moved down the corridor, just as if it were 1870 and he was sneaking back from some nighttime mischief. When he came to the landing he peered out as far as he dared but saw no one in the entrance hall below. It sounded as if Candy and his men had occupied the front parlor and made it their headquarters.
He turned back to the side table where Aunt Abbie’s flower vase lay on its side next to the bronze miniature, the one Elizabeth had called “creepy,” the Capitoline Wolf, from a story about Romulus and Remus, the mythical twin founders of Rome, who were supposedly protected and suckled by a she-wolf. It was the suckling the sculpture depicted. Two cherubic infants with their faces upturned to the wolf’s wine-sack-like dugs. Either a very big wolf, Jesse thought, or very small infants. The bronze was heavy. Jesse picked it up by the wolf’s blunt muzzle and raised it over his head. With his right hand he knocked at Phoebe’s door, not quite loudly enough to be heard downstairs.
The bandit opened the door and put his head out. He began a word that might have been “What,” but the final consonant had not yet emerged before Jesse brought down the Capitoline Wolf on the man’s head. This was followed by gasps from inside the room, but the reaction was fortunately muted. Jesse caught the bandit’s body as it fell and lowered it to the floor, pushing it inside so he could close the door behind him. The Capitoline Wolf was still in his hand, the wolf’s dugs flecked with blood. He was ready to use it a second time if necessary, but the bandit’s head was clearly broken. After a sort of guttural hiccup, the man stopped breathing.
That was the second of Candy’s men Jesse had put away. He looked up from the body to the hostages. There was no need to count them. Phoebe, Abbie, Soo Yee, and the hired man, Randal. Of these, all were alive except Randal.
Randal had been shot very neatly through the heart, and at close range, judging by the blood and spent-powder stains on his vest. The three women appeared unhurt, apart from a purpling bruise on Abbie’s cheek. Soo Yee was in a bad way, trembling and clutching at the hem of the comforter where she sat on Phoebe’s bed, but she seemed not to have been physically abused. Phoebe was also obviously frightened, and her scarf had been taken from her, so that her scars stood out against her pale skin like the crenellations of a desert landscape, but her good eye was furiously alert. “Thank you,” she whispered.
None of them rushed to embrace him, perhaps because of the bloody Capitoline Wolf in his hand, and that was good, because as much as he wanted to stay here, he could not. Not without making a hostage of himself. Nor was it practical to take these women out of the bedroom. There was no plausible way out except down the stairs and through the gauntlet of Candy’s soldiers, which was, as the City people liked to say, “not doable.”
But he might be able to pick off a few more thugs before initiating a full-blown shootout. So he put the Capitoline Wolf on the floor and nudged it into a corner, pulled the corpse of the bandit to a less conspicuous position behind the bed, put a finger to his lips to emphasize the need for quiet, and asked a single question: “How many?”
“I think ten men altogether,” Abbie whispered. Phoebe closed her eyes as if counting the assailants in her mind, then nodded in agreement.
“All right,” Jesse said. “Wait for me.”
Then he slipped back into the hallway and headed for his hiding place in the turret room. He was halfway there when gunfire broke out downstairs.
The deadline came.
The deadline passed.
Five more minutes followed it into oblivion.
No sign of Jesse.
Elizabeth was alone. Profoundly alone, existentially alone, as alone as she had ever been in her life: She had no backup, the Mirror was half a continent away, and not even August Kemp could find her unless she radioed him her location. Which she was not prepared to do, at least until this problem was resolved. By her calculation, the City boat that was supposed to carry her and the runners back to Oakland had probably just docked. Within minutes Kemp would get a they’re-not-here call from the foot of Market Street. And several varieties of hell would then break loose.