There were rare exceptions. In the weeks before he set off to retrieve Mrs. Standridge, Jesse had been sent after a runner named Weismann who had been frequenting saloons in the Germantown district of New York City. Weismann was a man in his fifties, older than most runners, grim-faced and morbidly serious, and according to the City’s hired detectives he had been haunting these dives for the purpose of suborning a murder.
Jesse tracked him to a barroom near the Stadt Theater, where he went to Weismann’s table and introduced himself as a City agent. Weismann merely nodded. “All right,” he said. “Sit down, Mr. Cullum. I won’t go back to the City with you, but I can buy you a beer.”
“Thank you,” Jesse said, sitting. The saloon was a basement establishment, lit with old nautical lanterns that did little more than insult the darkness, and the sawdust scattered on the floor reeked of hops and urine. “But you might want to change your mind about what you’ve been doing lately.”
Weismann had been drinking, not enough to make him properly drunk but enough to put a hitch in his motions. He turned his head to Jesse as if the hinges of his neck needing oiling. “And what is it you think I’ve been doing?”
“Endangering yourself, for one thing.”
“Endangering myself how?”
“By approaching immigrants who have criminal connections and attempting to arrange the killing of a man in Austria-Hungary, cash on delivery of evidence that the man in question is dead.”
To his credit, Weismann didn’t try to deny it. “It’s not a risk-free enterprise, true.”
“Such men are more likely to steal your money than trust you as an employer. You ought to have figured that out by now.”
“I know what I’m doing. I don’t threaten easily, and I don’t carry cash.”
“Maybe so. But you’ve been discovered, and you have to stop, so you might as well go home. Free ticket to the City, Mr. Weismann, and no questions asked. It’s a generous offer.”
“What makes you think I have to stop?”
“Suborning a murder is against the law even in the Bowery. We have witnesses who will go to the police if you don’t give it up.”
Weismann nodded, still neither surprised nor intimidated. “I guess Kemp can afford to buy himself some Tammany justice, if that’s what he really wants. But I don’t see any police here—do you?”
“There’s the door,” Jesse said. “You can walk out and go into hiding, and I have no power to stop you. But there won’t be any murder. We’ve seen to that.”
For a moment it seemed as if Weismann might actually call Jesse’s bluff, stand up and leave the saloon without looking back. Then his eyes took on a harder focus. “You’re a local hire, obviously. How much did they tell you about the man I want killed?”
“He’s a customs agent in a town called Braunau am Inn. An innocent man. Whose offspring will commit monstrous crimes, if history unfolds in our world as it did in yours.”
“A man who’ll be the father of a monster. I’d rather kill the monster himself, but he won’t be born for twelve more years. Given that, it doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. One innocent life against the death of many millions. If killing him is a sin, no one has to go to hell for it but me. So I cordially invite you to fuck off and leave me to my business.”
“But it won’t work,” Jesse said patiently. “Kemp wrote to the Austrian officials to warn them. And even in Austria, August Kemp’s name rings bells.” An Austrian envoy had been among a delegation of European dignitaries who had toured the City of Futurity last year, with only a little less fanfare than President Grant himself. A more querulous, contrarian group of people Jesse had never encountered. But they had been as impressed by the City as all the other visitors. An English lord had fainted aboard the helicopter. “They’ll intercept your man, if you succeed in hiring one, before he can get close to his target.”
“Maybe,” Weismann said. “Maybe not.”
“And Kemp did something else. Something you might approve of.”
“I doubt it.”
“When he warned the Austrians about your hired killer, he warned them about the target at the same time—including enough detail about this man’s philandering that the customs service will likely fire him to head off a scandal. They were also warned that he was a potential danger to his household servant, one Klara Pölzl.”
“So?”
“Well, think about it. You’re trying to prevent an act of conception by killing this”—Jesse recalled the name from his briefing—“Alois Hitler. But the conception can’t happen if Alois never marries Klara. And even if he does marry her, the circumstances of their marriage will be altered. Bluntly speaking, the fucking will happen differently, producing a different result.”
“It’s possible,” Weismann admitted. “I’ve thought of that myself. And maybe Kemp’s right. But he could be wrong. Alois Hitler is a genetic gun, cocked and loaded and aimed at six million human beings. It’s not enough to just hope the gun misfires.”
It was becoming clear to Jesse that Weismann wouldn’t be talked out of his project, perhaps for good reasons. Many millions dead, up there in the unimaginable future. Something the educational dioramas at the City neglected to mention. “All right,” Jesse said.
“What?”
“All right. I’m not going to pull a pistol on you and drag you back to Illinois by main force. Do what you think is best. Will you answer a question, though, before I leave you to it?”
Weismann shrugged suspiciously.
“According to the City, there are more worlds and histories than can ever be counted. A world next door to this one and a world next door to that, and so on, like grains of sand on a beach. And there’s an Alois Hitler in each of them. At best, you can only kill one. What’s the point?”
“That sounds like something August Kemp would say. But it’s a bullshit argument. This world has a twin, one Planck second away in Hilbert space. And that world has a twin. And so on. Hall of mirrors. But each one is as real as any other, and they’re interconnected. If I stick a pistol in your mouth and blow your brains out, that act is reflected in every domain of Hilbert space that follows from it.”
“But there’s the 1877 in your history books, where you didn’t blow my brains out.”
“And that’s also real and unchangeable. So there are Hilbert vectors where you live, Hilbert vectors where you die. Does that make it okay if I kill you now?”
“No. That does not make it okay.”
“Because right now, right here, for moral and ethical purposes, there’s only one of you. You’re not a shadow or a reflection or a possibility. You’re as real as I am. And this world is real. Back home, back in what you call the future, some of us understand that. We think Kemp is doing something immoral by turning this version of 1877 into a tourist attraction, as if it were some colonial backwater where you can lie in the sun and drink mai tais while the natives die of cholera. Some of us refuse to look the other way while Kemp monetizes an entire fucking universe.” Weismann drained the stein that had been sitting in front of him. “Maybe I’m more radical than some, but I’m not the only one. I’m just willing to make a bigger sacrifice.”
“Shall I say that to Kemp?”
Weismann stood up, his chair teetering behind him. “Tell August Kemp to bend over and fuck himself,” he said. “Or, better yet, ask him who invented the Mirror.”
* * *
A week later, the City’s Pinkerton men reported that Weismann had bought passage to Hamburg on the steamship Frisia. If you want a thing done right, Jesse supposed, better to do it yourself. He wasn’t sure whether he should hope for the success of Weismann’s project. One relatively innocent life in exchange for millions sounded reasonable, but it was a hard bargain for poor old Alois. Maybe, if Weismann got close enough, he could effect a compromise by shooting off the man’s balls instead of killing him.