Her expression made Jesse suspect he had not entirely avoided sentimentality. “You know,” she said, speaking softly but startling him nonetheless, “it’s going to burn.”
“What?”
“San Francisco. All these buildings, Jesse. All of them. First an earthquake, then the fire.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
“When?”
“In 1906. April, I think, but I’m not absolutely sure. I should have Googled it when I was back home. But if you’re still here, twenty-nine years from now? Take a spring vacation.”
He looked away. There was a Kearneyite handbill plastered to the brick wall beside him, one of many such he had seen this afternoon. It advertised tonight’s mass meeting at the sandlots. Beside it was another handbill, written in Chinese letters. He couldn’t read it, but he recognized it as a chung hong—an announcement of impending war. “We might not have to wait thirty years,” he said, “to see it burn.”
* * *
Back at the trinket shop, the owner waved Jesse and Elizabeth through the beaded curtain to the room where Sonny Lau was already waiting. Sonny’s expression was somber, and Jesse wondered whether he ought to expect bad news.
Sonny said, “Do you have the pistol?”
Elizabeth took the Taser from the calico bag. The Taser was an awkward weapon and not a lethal one—both drawbacks, in Jesse’s opinion. It would incapacitate a man briefly but make an enemy of him for life. But he didn’t share these reservations with Sonny, whose eyes widened at the sight of the thing. It had a suitably intimidating appearance: black and yellow, fang-toothed, ready to spit venom.
Sonny weighed the Taser in his hands as Jesse explained how to operate it. It required no ammunition, he said, but what he did not say was that it would need recharging, which would be impractical for another half century or so. Sonny said, “I’m instructed by my employer to make the exchange if the weapon seems authentic.”
“It’s authentic, all right. They don’t come any more authentic than this one.”
“All right,” Sonny said. “If you say so.”
“So you can tell me where to find Theo Stromberg?”
“Little Tom traced the package containing the pistol to its source, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Elizabeth spoke up: “How do you trace a package in this day and age?”
“Bribery,” Sonny said, giving her his by now familiar look of bewildered condescension, “and the threat of violence. How else?”
“Where is he, then?” Jesse asked.
“Little Tom was surprised to discover that the package had been sent by a man living in a hotel on Montgomery Street south of Market. Not the worst hotel in the city by a long stretch, but nothing like the best. The man has been living there for more than a year, along with a woman he calls his wife.”
“Did Tom or any of his men approach him?”
“My employer kept this knowledge to himself. At first he assigned men to watch the hotel, hoping to learn something more revealing. But the man and his wife spend most of their time in each other’s company. They leave the hotel for meals, or to take long aimless walks, or to attend the theater. The man often mails letters, though he never seems to receive any. He pays his rent promptly. Little Tom saw no advantage and much risk in attempting to contact him. Does that sound like the man you’re looking for?”
“Close enough. All we need is an address.”
Sonny Lau passed over a folded slip of paper, and Jesse put it in his pocket.
The business was done. Sonny tucked the Taser into a leather carry-all. “I’d lay low for a while after this, if I were you. Little Tom asked a lot of questions.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Only as much as I had to. I told him someone I knew had been hired by the City of Futurity to hunt for a fugitive. That you had approached me and asked me to negotiate this exchange. I invented a name for you. But curiosity has been aroused. I may have been followed here. You ought to know that.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Or so Jesse hoped. “I thank you for taking the risk.”
“There’s always risk. Risk is unimportant, as long as the house won’t be endangered.” The house on California Street, Sonny meant: Phoebe and Aunt Abbie and Randal and Soo Yee.
“Good,” Jesse said, standing.
“You’re happy with what I brought you?”
The address on the paper might be fraudulent, though Jesse doubted Little Tom would stoop to hustling a City agent. Or it could be a trap. Roscoe Candy had business connections with the See Yups, though they didn’t love him. But if anyone could be trusted, it was Sonny Lau. “I’m in your debt.”
They shook hands then, more as old friends than to seal the bargain, but Sonny still looked troubled. Jesse said, “Are you in danger?”
“No more than any of us. Today the highbinders are tying up their queues and sharpening their hatchets. Try to be somewhere else after dark.”
The handshake ended. Sonny turned to Elizabeth and made a curt bow. “Pleased to have made your acquaintance.”
“Likewise,” Elizabeth said.
* * *
Jesse left the carriage at a livery stable on Market and walked with Elizabeth to the address they had been given. It was a three-story hotel on Montgomery near Market, just as Sonny Lau had said: not the plush Grand Hotel, which had impressed a younger Jesse as probably the finest hotel in all creation, or the even plusher Palace, which had been constructed in his absence. The Royal, as it was called, was older, less elegant, not exactly shabby but as close as it could get to that description while justifying the price of its rooms. The lobby smelled of oiled wood and boiled cabbage, halfway between a church and a cookhouse. The clerk behind the desk was a bald man with a vast gray beard and pitiless eyes. He looked at Jesse and Elizabeth, and at the calico travel bag in Jesse’s hand, and seemed to find their presence in his domain plausible if not entirely convincing. “A room for you and your lady, sir?”
The price he quoted seemed high, but renting a room was the easiest way to gain access to the upper floors, and in any case it was Kemp’s money they were spending, not their own. Jesse didn’t want to put his true name on the register, so he signed as “John Comstock and Wife.” He was aware of the tension in Elizabeth’s body as she waited, the way she scanned the empty lobby as if it might at any moment fill up with hostile forces, wary as a lioness closing in on her prey.
“So do we knock on the door?” she asked as they climbed the stairs, having waved off a disappointed elderly bellboy. According to Sonny’s information, the room in which Theo and Mercy were staying was on the third floor. Number 316. “Or do we knock the door down?”
“Might as well knock first,” Jesse said. “See where it goes from there. Assuming anybody’s home.”
At the third-floor landing he took a pistol from the travel bag and made sure it was loaded and ready to fire. Elizabeth did the same, keeping the weapon in her hand but concealing it against the billow of her day dress. Outside the door marked 316, Jesse put the bag on the floor within easy reach. He glanced at Elizabeth, who nodded her readiness. Now we come to the cusp of the thing, Jesse thought. He kept the pistol in his left hand and knocked on the door with the knuckles of his right. Four sharp raps.
Long seconds passed. Then the latch rattled and the door opened inward, revealing a young woman. Mercy Kemp. She fit the description and matched all the pictures in the dossier. She was tall, like so many of these twenty-first-century women. She wore a pale yellow dress of no particular distinction. Her blond hair was shorter than most women wore it. Her face was flawlessly symmetrical and her skin was almost supernaturally unblemished. “Yes?”
Jesse said, “Miss Mercy Kemp?”
“You must be from the City.” She turned away and called out, “Theo! They’re here.”
* * *