Only then could he consider the future. Not the City future, not the flying-machine future. His own future.
Should he have one.
* * *
He had arranged to meet Sonny Lau at noon in a trinket shop off Dupont Street.
Jesse adjusted his slouch hat to shade his face, but he felt vulnerable and exposed holding the reins as the carriage rattled down California Street. After four years at the City of Futurity, the streets of San Francisco seemed both utterly strange and intimately familiar. As they approached Chinatown he half expected to see his younger self darting through the crowds, all the red-painted doorways once again known to him, the cellar cigar-rollers, the eating houses with smoked ducks and pigs’ heads hanging in their windows, the houses where you could buy a bit’s worth of twice-laid opium, the noisy Chinese theaters, the gambling houses with their spring-lock doors: a foreign land that was simultaneously his native land. San Francisco defied geography the way the City of Futurity defied time.
Editorial writers liked to play up its squalor, but by daylight the Chinese quarter was safe enough to walk through and attracted plenty of white tourists. Jesse braked the rig at a curb not far from the trinket shop where he was supposed to meet Sonny. He wished now that they had arranged to meet at a place where Jesse was less likely to be recognized—Cliff House, say, or Woodward’s Gardens. But the trinket shop was busy and there were enough tourists in it to make the presence of another white man and woman unremarkable. The proprietor, an old man with a queue that dangled below his waist, nodded at Jesse, exchanged a few words with his equally ancient wife in what Jesse recognized as Dupont Gai dialect, then disappeared behind a beaded curtain. Moments later the curtain parted again, just long enough for Sonny Lau to beckon Jesse and Elizabeth inside.
Beyond the curtain was a small room furnished with a simple table and a few scuffed chairs. Sonny was courteous enough to pull out one of those chairs for Elizabeth, though he gave her the same puzzled look he had given her yesterday. “I talked to Little Tom,” he said.
His See Yup boss. “About the pistols?”
“Yes. He owns one. And he knows where it came from. Each of the heads of the Six Companies received one, along with a letter saying the Companies need to unite because we’re going to be attacked by Kearneyite mobs and the police.”
This was the connection Jesse had come to the city hoping to discover. His hope had rested on three established facts. The first fact was that Theo Stromberg was physically present in San Francisco. The second fact was that Theo liked to send Glocks to parties he considered oppressed and endangered. The third fact was that San Francisco’s Chinese population fell into that category. Kearneyites and others had been stirring up mob warfare against the Chinese for years. So, Jesse had reasoned, there was at least a chance Theo had sent weapons to the Six Companies.
But none of that would matter if Theo had been careful enough to cover his tracks. “Is that all?”
“You think Little Tom would waste his time talking to me if there wasn’t more to it? I told him there’s a man from the City who wants to find out who mailed the guns.”
“You mentioned me?”
“Not by name, but I had to tell him something. Little Tom is curious by nature, and the pistol aroused his curiosity as soon as it came into his hands. Like you, he wanted to know where it came from.”
“And did he find out?”
“Yes.”
“He knows how to find Theo Stromberg?”
“Yes. And it didn’t take him long to make a connection between Theo Stromberg and those letters the newspapers have been publishing. But that was as far as he took it. Little Tom doesn’t see anything to be gained by involving himself in the business of the City of Futurity.”
“I don’t care about Little Tom. It’s Theo we want. Can you give us a street address?”
“Make an offer.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you want this man, offer us something in return.”
“What’s the going price for that kind of information?”
“Make an offer, I’ll take it to Little Tom, and if it’s acceptable he’ll tell you what you want to know.”
“I can’t dicker at one remove. I don’t know anything about Company bosses or what they want. The only Chinamen I know are highbinders and sing-song girls—no offense.”
Elizabeth spoke up: “This Little Tom, does he like his Glock?”
Sonny gave her a condescending stare. “I believe he does.”
“Would he like another one? Suppose we offered him another pistol from the future, a different kind. You think he might take that in trade?”
“You have such a thing?”
“Yes.”
Sonny Lau looked at Jesse. Jesse thought about the contents of the calico travel bag and guessed she was talking about a Taser. Jesse had taken Taser training when he was hired as City security. It was an unimpressive weapon, in his opinion. “Tell Little Tom we’ll give him an X3 handheld electroshock weapon in exchange for the whereabouts of Mr. Theo Stromberg. Tell him it’s the only X3 in the state of California.”
Sonny looked skeptical. “Is there really such a pistol?”
“Yes.”
“When can you bring it?”
“Whenever he’s willing to make the exchange. The sooner the better, from our point of view.”
“Better for us, too. All this talk about mobs, it’s not just talk. Last night there was a big crowd at the sandlots, screaming about burning down Chinatown. Tonight it might be more than talk. Meet me back here, two hours.”
* * *
Jesse’s pocket watch had been given to him by August Kemp especially for this job. The watch looked like any other cheap pocket watch, but its inner workings were digital, meaning the watch didn’t tell time so much as calculate it. It was more reliable than a conventional watch, but it ticked just as loudly, for the sake of verisimilitude. Jesse took note of the time as he left the trinket shop. Two hours. He wondered if Sonny owned a reliable watch.
Elizabeth climbed aboard the carriage, still struggling against the bulk of her counterfeit dress, and Jesse drove them from Dupont Street to a place near Market, a nameless alley next to a draper’s warehouse. The alley wasn’t much wider than the carriage itself, but it was usefully private. Brick walls blocked the sunlight and kept the air cool, as if the morning’s fog had lingered in the shadows. It was a place where no one would see them, a place where they could speak freely. He said, “It’s like that double exposure you told me about.”
“What?”
“You once told me about a double exposure—two photographs developed on one paper.”
“I know what a double exposure is. What about it?”
“All this neighborhood seems like a double exposure to me. Familiar but strange. Do you take my meaning? But maybe it isn’t the neighborhood. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the double exposure. That boy who lived in a Tenderloin parlor house, and whatever the City of Futurity made of me.”
“We’re both double exposures, in that case.”
“Are we?”
“That’s what the City does to you. Last time I was home, back in North Carolina, it felt like I was the one out of place. I mean, God knows I don’t belong here—no offense—but it was like I didn’t belong there, either.”
“What you said at the table last night, about the future—is it really so bad?”
“I was just tired of Abbie looking at me like I’m the ambassador from Utopia. I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“But is it as bad as you said?”
“I don’t know. It depends. Not necessarily. But it’s definitely not paradise.”
“I figured that out quite a while ago. If the world you come from was paradise, you wouldn’t be such a cool hand with a pistol.” He tried to think of a way to speak his thoughts that wouldn’t seem sentimental or maudlin or offensive. “So you’re not the ambassador from Utopia, and Dupont Street sure as hell isn’t paradise lost. But I’m glad you could see a little of the place where I grew up. We’re what the world makes us, Elizabeth. Two cities made me, Futurity and San Francisco. And it pleases me that you exist in both of them.”