“Is that what they come here for?”
“Some, sure. People come here for all kinds of reasons. Curiosity, bragging rights, boredom, who knows. If people want to think of 1877 as unspoiled America, Kemp is happy to let them. But reality tends to get in the way. Little things, like the horseshit in the streets. Or big things, like child labor and people dying of tuberculosis and yellow fever. Speaking of yellow fever, you might want to stay away from New Orleans next year.”
“Next year?”
“More than twenty thousand dead in the Mississippi River Valley. At least, that’s what happened where I come from. I looked it up on Wikipedia.”
In the depot’s rail yard, trainmen in orange vests supervised the noisy coupling and decoupling of passenger cars. The eastbound train grew longer; the train that would carry Kemp and his crew to San Francisco grew shorter.
Jesse considered the compound’s bunker, now stripped of electronic gear and machinery. “What happens to this place when the Mirror closes?”
“It becomes the property of Union Pacific, like every other spur line and microwave repeater along the line.”
“Is Kemp wealthy enough to just throw these things away?”
“It’s a concrete box and a steel tower, basically. And he’s not really throwing them away. The railroad is supposed to pay him a transfer fee when they take possession.”
“In gold, I suppose.”
“Gold’s negotiable, even in the future.”
“Unlike counterfeit specie.”
“Well, maybe that’s the real business of the City,” Elizabeth said. “Turning paper into gold.”
The long train full of tourists left the yard at sunset, stirring up whirlwinds of dust. Kemp ordered the westbound voyagers aboard the shorter train as soon as the engine had brought its boiler up to pressure, and Jesse followed Elizabeth aboard as the air grew cool and a legion of stars took possession of the sky.
* * *
The next day, as the train rolled through the western wilderness, Jesse resolved to tell Elizabeth about the killer Roscoe Candy.
There was plenty of time for talk. August Kemp had retreated to his private car, ostensibly to work his radio but also, Jesse suspected, to get enough liquor inside him to render the prospect of losing his daughter more bearable. Kemp wasn’t an obvious drinker, but he showed signs of being a sly and careful one. As Jesse’s father had been.
“Your father was a drunk?” Elizabeth asked.
They sat alone in an empty passenger car, in the plush seats ordinarily reserved for the paying customers. The valley of the Humboldt had given way to alkali desert, which had yielded in turn to the elevations of the Sierra Nevada: rock cuts and tunnels that plunged the train into momentary darkness, lakes that trapped sunlight in lenses of blue water.
All that, Jesse thought, and the weight of what lay ahead. “My father was a lot of things. He was a big man, he was a brawler when he needed to be, but he was an educated man. He taught me to read and made sure I practiced the skill. But he drank, yes. He tried not to let it make him weak, but it was wearing him down by the time of his last encounter with Roscoe Candy.”
Elizabeth said, “Tell me about Roscoe Candy.”
“He’s—a criminal.”
“Maybe you can expand on that?”
“In a way, there’s nothing unusual about Candy. Nobody knows for certain where he came from, but he was working the placer mines before he ever grew a beard. In that kind of life, there are only two ways of getting ahead: luck or intimidation. Roscoe took the second road. He had a talent for it. People were afraid of him from an early age. Afraid of his fearlessness, afraid of his henchmen, afraid of the knives he started to carry. By the time he turned twenty-five he owned a pair of hydraulic mines up around Placerville, deeded to him by the previous owner under suspicious circumstances. But Roscoe wasn’t content to lay back and let the money roll in. He was ambitious. He came into San Francisco with a fearsome reputation and a fat bankroll. Such men often gamble or drink their money away. Roscoe didn’t have those vices, at least not to excess. His real interest wasn’t the money, it was the power he gained from it. He used to say money beat a pistol any day, for the purpose of making a fool dance.” Jesse took a sip of water from a bottle he had bought in the dining car. DASANI, it said on the label. “Are there people like that where you come from?”
“Violent narcissistic assholes? Oh yeah.”
“What do you do about them?”
“Lock them up, if they get out of hand.”
“I don’t doubt Roscoe Candy should have been locked up. Maybe in Boston or New York he would have been—unless they elected him mayor instead—but San Francisco’s not that kind of town. It was built on a principle of lawlessness.”
“Wild frontier gold-rush town, I get it.”
“In San Francisco, for all practical purposes, the only law is the difference between what you can get away with and what you can enforce. Roscoe Candy learned pretty soon that he was too coarse in his manners to gain leverage with the opera-house crowd, but he could rule quite neatly in other kingdoms. He used his cash to buy himself into the whore business. Pretty soon half the bawdy houses and cooch dens on Jackson Street were either owned by Roscoe or paying tribute to him. He came up against plenty of rough men in the process, and he used them without mercy. His vanquished enemies usually turned up in the back alleys of the Tenderloin with their throats cut and their tongues pulled out through the slit.”
“Sicilian necktie,” Elizabeth said, grimacing.
“Roscoe’s no Sicilian. They say his father was a Polish forty-niner with a bad leg.”
“It’s just a name for it.”
Jesse looked out the window as the train traversed a mountain pass. Below, narrow valleys of ponderosa pine and brown chaparral. Above, a sky like blue vitreous enamel. “At Madame Chao’s we bought protection from a Dupont Street tong. Real protection, not just extortion. They protected us from Roscoe Candy.”
“Didn’t your father do that?”
“Roscoe wasn’t afraid of my father. My father could wrestle a rowdy sailor out the door any night of the week, but he wasn’t an army. But Roscoe was afraid of the Six Companies. So when Roscoe started making moves on the cooch trade, the tongs sent a man to Madame Chao’s to keep an eye on things. I say ‘man’—his name was Sonny Lau, and he was a boy not much older than myself, but he was already a seasoned boo how doy.”
“Boo how doy?”
“A highbinder. A hatchetman. Do you understand? He carried a hatchet with its handle sawed short, hidden up his sleeve when he wore Chinese clothes—though Sonny knew how to dress American when he wanted to. Roscoe Candy respected those Dupont Gai knife men, because he was a knife man himself. Sonny’s tong was part of the See Yup Company, a faction called the Moon of Peace and Contentment Society, which did business on Dupont and Jackson, small-time gambling and opium dens mainly, though they operated one of the better Chinese theaters. As long as Moon of Peace and Contentment was looking after us, Roscoe kept his distance.”
“So what went wrong?”
“Well, Madame Chao wasn’t your run-of-the-mill bordello keeper. Among the Chinese in San Francisco, I doubt there’s even one female for ten men. A lot of those women came over as slaves, basically. Not Madame Chao. Madame Chao fought her way across half the known world before she got to California, at least according to the stories she liked to tell. She wasn’t from the same part of China as all those Canton men. She spoke a fancier brand of Chinese. The girls in her bordello were half-breeds, and she catered almost entirely to the white trade—the tong leaders treated her with a mix of respect and contempt, and she felt exactly the same about them. So whenever Roscoe started to make trouble, Moon of Peace and Contentment would raise the price of protection. And Madame Chao wasn’t shy about complaining. But from the tong’s point of view, Madame Chao was no bargain even when she paid in full. Much as they hated Roscoe Candy, there was always a risk involved in taking on a white man, especially a white man like Roscoe. And eventually Roscoe realized it would be easier to strike a deal with the See Yups than to fight them.”