Coming through the lobby of the Excelsior with the bag draped over his shoulder made him feel like some kind of criminal St. Nicholas. The night clerk gave him a hard stare but said nothing. Upstairs, Elizabeth was waiting for him. “Where’d you go?”
He came inside and closed the door. “Onslow’s back room.”
“You broke in?”
He nodded.
“Uh-huh,” Elizabeth said. She stared at the bag. “So what’s that? I hope to hell it’s not full of Oakleys.”
“I wish it was. It wouldn’t be so cursed heavy.” He emptied the bag on the bed. He didn’t know what a Glock automatic pistol weighed, but he guessed about two pounds. And here were twenty of them.
6
The woman’s name was Zaina Baumgartner, her title was “events manager,” and her job was to arrange stage and screen presentations in both towers of the City—show business, in other words.
Jesse had not known many show people, certainly none from the twenty-first century. He wondered if Baumgartner was a representative example. She was tall and almost unnaturally thin, her gestures were nervous, and she seemed to regard Elizabeth and Jesse as lesser creatures bent on distracting her from the more important things in life. Elizabeth’s first words on stepping into Baumgartner’s Tower One office were, “We need to ask you a few questions.” Baumgartner said, “But I have a screening.”
Four days had passed since Jesse and Elizabeth had arrived back at the City. They had delivered their bag of automatic pistols to the security chief, Barton, whose reaction was a wide-eyed “Holy shit!” Since then Barton had been holding daily conferences with Elizabeth in his office. Jesse had not been invited to these sessions, but Elizabeth had apparently agreed to retain him as her partner: She had called him to accompany her to this meeting with Baumgartner, the purpose of which she declined to explain.
“This is urgent,” Elizabeth said.
Which didn’t stop Baumgartner from walking out of her own office. “The screening is scheduled for five minutes ago. It’s the new version of Manned Flight. All the department heads are waiting! Follow me.”
So they hustled to keep up with Ms. Baumgartner as she made for the elevators. “Gearing up for the final year,” she said. “It’s going to be just ridiculously busy. The film we’re screening now is an improved version of the one we’ve been showing to local guests since the City opened for business. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Starting in January we’re booking major talent, local and home. Mr. Kemp wants a Cirque du Soleil show that will perform for both towers. You cannot imagine the complexity! And we’re trying to book local celebrities as well. Maybe a lecture by Mark Twain—”
Jesse said, “Twain? The ‘Jumping Frog’ writer?”
Baumgartner seemed to notice him for the first time. “You’re local yourself, are you not?” She asked Elizabeth, “Should I be discussing this with him?”
“He’s been vetted.”
“Well, then, yes, Twain. Why, do you know him?”
“Not personally.” Twain, aka Sam Clemens, had acquired a certain reputation in Virginia City and San Francisco, not exclusively literary. Clemens had vanished from San Francisco for a few months after a friend of his killed a bartender by breaking a bottle over his head. Nor had Jesse been much impressed by the frog piece when it appeared in The Californian. It was just another mining-camp story, as far as he could tell. But it had been well received, and if City people wanted to see him, then Twain must be destined for a sterling literary career. Unless the City destroyed that career by the very act of announcing it.
“Well, it’s difficult,” Baumgartner declared, bounding off the elevator as the doors opened on the theatrical level. “I’m sure you can imagine!”
Elizabeth said without much real hope in her voice, “We have just a few questions—”
“They’ll wait, won’t they? You can sit at the back of the theater and we’ll talk after the presentation, how about that? Then you’ll have all my attention—I promise.”
Elizabeth shrugged. They filed into the cinema behind Baumgartner, who abandoned them in the back row and headed for the stage. There were only a few people in the seats down front, some of whom Jesse recognized as bosses from the City’s entertainment division. Baumgartner took up a handheld microphone and addressed them from in front of the enormous screen. She told them how difficult it had been to design an introduction to cinema for audiences of the 1870s: “Motion pictures were first shown to the public in the 1890s, and when those people saw a moving train on the screen some of them actually ran away from it. So it’s always been a question of introducing locals to movies in a way they can easily assimilate. That’s why we have a five-night sequence, where the first night is a lecture and some brief examples—it conditions them, so what comes after isn’t so alarming. And that’s only the first hurdle! Think of all the cinematic conventions these people have never absorbed, things like continuity, cross-cutting, close-ups. The version of Manned Flight you’re about to see builds on everything we’ve learned about presenting movies to an unsophisticated audience. It’s simple, it’s relatively short, and by modern standards it’s fairly static. But it’s also viewer-friendly and gauged to impress naïve viewers without frightening them.”
Jesse could only guess what all this meant. Not long after he was hired by the City, he and the other local employees had been given a special screening of the various films offered to paying guests. The shows had impressed him mightily, but she was right about how difficult they had been to understand.
“And Manned Flight is only the first of our enhancements to the film program. Next month we’ll be introducing revised versions of Cities of Tomorrow and Wonders of Science.”
All guaranteed not to provoke undue terror in their audiences. Baumgartner stopped talking and took a seat; the lights dimmed; the movie began. Jesse watched with interest. The scenes of gleaming airships darting among the clouds were as astonishing as they were unsettling, but he liked the animated sequences best: cartoon illustrations of the early years of aviation, featuring mustachioed men of the relatively near future and their comical adventures with flying machines. The sons of our generation, he thought. Sons and daughters: apparently there would be women among the pioneers of aviation.
Elizabeth sat close to him in the darkness, the blue cotton cloth of her City trousers pressed against his thigh. It was a pleasant feeling, which he tried to ignore. City women had a free-and-easy demeanor that did not mean they were either free or easy. That was one of the mistakes local men too often made when they were hired for City work, and it was a fatal one: A single unwelcome advance could put you out the door. Likewise uttering racial or national insults, even if you didn’t recognize them as such. Jesse was fortunate in that regard: His time at Madame Chao’s had taught him how to speak placatingly to people of all extractions, from Samoan sailors to Dupont Gai hatchetmen. Watch your mouth and keep your hands to yourself was the first and firmest rule. And the last thing he wanted to do was insult Elizabeth DePaul, who was, after all, a married woman, even if her husband was currently in prison. But still, sitting thigh-to-thigh with her in the flickering shadows of Manned Flight, he couldn’t avoid the truth that he liked her. He liked her very much, in complicated ways.
Jesse had slept well for five consecutive nights since his return from Futurity Station. He felt freer and less worried, which might be a danger in itself: He couldn’t afford to let down his guard, especially in light of what Heddie Finch had said about the monster Roscoe Candy. Impossible as it seemed, Candy still lived. That was very bad news. Worse, Heddie knew where Jesse could be found, and Heddie had left town the day after she spotted him. Was it possible the news of Jesse’s whereabouts might reach the ears of Roscoe Candy? If so, might Candy come looking for him—or worse, for Jesse’s sister, Phoebe?