“I’ve never played it.”
“They got fiber-optic cables strung through the Mirror so we can watch in real time. Red Sox versus the Orioles. Hey, Castro, you’re a baseball geek. Do they have baseball here in 1876?”
“Sure,” Castro said. “But different leagues and shit. Teams like, you know, the White Stockings or the Red Caps. Knickerbocker rules. No night games.”
“No instant replays,” Dekker said. “Right, chief?”
Jesse shrugged.
“So how do you like Tower One?”
“I haven’t seen much more of it than this table.”
“I bet you wish you could see the real thing, though. Step through the Mirror into the glorious future, am I right?”
No, you are not right, Jesse thought. For one thing, it never happened. A wealthy local could buy a ticket to Tower Two for a peek at things to come, but that was as far as he’d get. A few local hires found their way into Tower One, usually as entertainers or servants. But cross the Mirror into their world? No one had ever managed such a feat—as far as Jesse knew, no one had ever tried. “I don’t give it much thought.”
“Bullshit,” Dekker said.
“Excuse me?”
“Bullshit you don’t give it much thought. I never met a local who didn’t lie awake wondering about it.”
“Like wetbacks,” Castro said. “Sneak into the twenty-first century, get a job at Swift or Tyson.”
“Mirrorbacks,” Dekker said, laughing. “Except we have a perfect fence. Sorry, bro, but this is as close as you’ll ever get to the World of the Future.”
“My name’s not bro.”
“I don’t really give a shit about your name.”
Jesse stood up.
“Whoa,” Dekker said. “You’re pretty big for a local, but you don’t want to be getting in my face here.”
Jesse put out his open right hand. “My name’s Jesse Cullum.”
Dekker was clearly startled. It took him a moment to comprehend that he was being offered a handshake. Then his grin came back. He accepted the offer. Enthusiastically. More than enthusiastically. Jesse felt as if he’d put his hand into a laundry mangle, but he managed not to show it. He squeezed Dekker’s hand in return. “Elizabeth,” Jesse said, “do you think I’d lose my job if I knocked Mr. Dekker down?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“In that case, Mr. Dekker, I’ll just ask you to excuse us. Ms. DePaul and I have business to conduct elsewhere.”
Dekker’s grin had become an outright sneer. His friend Castro was trying not to laugh.
Elizabeth stood up. “He’s right, Dekker. We have to go. You can compare dicks some other time.”
Dekker released Jesse’s nearly lifeless hand and leaned toward Jesse’s ear. “We’ll see who gets knocked down.”
“At your pleasure,” Jesse said. “Chief.”
“And by the way, your partner? It’s not ‘Ms. DePaul.’ It’s Mrs. DePaul. She’s married, didn’t she tell you that?”
“Dekker, you’re such an asswipe,” Mrs. DePaul said.
* * *
They took a staff elevator from the commissary level. As soon as the doors closed, Elizabeth said, “Dekker never fails to mention my husband.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Because my husband’s in prison. Five years on a trafficking charge.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s still none of my business.”
“Dekker likes to use it against me, like it’s some big secret or something.”
“Your husband’s crimes, whatever they may have been, surely don’t reflect on you.”
“Why did you offer to shake his hand, by the way? Dekker’s completely steroidal. He could have broken bones.”
“It seemed like the gentlemanly thing.”
“You might want to save that behavior for actual gentlemen.”
The elevator stopped at one of the guest levels. A half dozen women in identical cuirass bodices and ruffled skirts stepped inside, probably waitresses or barmaids. Locals, by the sound of their voices. Jesse knew that such employees were well paid, often hired away from places like Thompson’s Restaurant in Chicago or Delmonico’s in New York City. “Afternoon, ladies,” he said.
Some of them giggled, not especially politely. They scorned his western vowels, he guessed, or the way he carried himself. “You’re a long way from Tower Two,” a redheaded one said.
About a thousand yards. But she was right. It was a long thousand yards.
“Is it true,” the woman asked, “General Grant’s visiting?”
“Yes, ma’am, he is. I saw him myself.”
“Enjoying a taste of the future. Where women and niggers can vote and gal-boys can marry each other.” She winked at Jesse. “You may be an old hand in Tower Two, but you’re just a pie-eater over here. Be careful till you get your bearings.”
The waitresses left the elevator at another level.
“Is that true?” Jesse asked.
“Which part?”
“Who can vote and all. Where you come from.”
“Women vote. African-Americans vote. And you don’t have to be straight to get married.”
“Straight?”
“Heterosexual. Boy-girl.”
Jesse was still pondering that when they reached the administration floor.
* * *
Something about Elizabeth DePaul made Jesse think of horses.
Not in an insulting way. She wasn’t big or ugly, though she wasn’t small, nor was she pretty in the polished manner of the waitresses he had encountered in the elevator. But she had the dignity of a well-bred horse. A certain horsey implacability. Brown eyes that seemed to express a cynicism born of bitter experience. And beneath that, a pride that was neither false nor self-flattering. He had seen that combination of traits before, in some of the Tenderloin women among whom he had grown up, and he had learned to recognize it even in the faces of strangers, especially the strangers who eked out a living in the streets south of Broadway and north of Market. It was a survivor’s look. Such people were useful and dangerous, often in equal parts.
And she was a soldier. According to the dioramas of Tower Two, the twenty-first century was a land of marvels. But, by inference, it was also a world that contained wars. And prisons, if Elizabeth was to be believed; and prisoners; and prisoners’ wives.
Like the commissary, the administration level of Tower One was a replica of the same level in Tower Two: the same tiled floors and subdivided offices, the same gentle sound of tapped keyboards and cool air hissing from concealed ducts. Clerical workers looked up as Jesse and Elizabeth passed, and a few of them were startled enough to look twice, though they were too well trained to stare. What exactly was it, Jesse wondered, that made him so conspicuously a local? He felt like a belled cat.
He followed Elizabeth to the office where August Kemp and the Tower One security administrator were waiting. It was a big office, and it housed a big desk, and several plush chairs and a sofa. The window was like the window in Tower Two, except that it looked east. Outside, ominous clouds tumbled across the sky. Far below, in a sward of mottled green, the City’s captive buffalo huddled in anticipation of rain.
Both men stood up as Elizabeth and Jesse entered. The man behind the desk was the Tower One security chief, Elizabeth’s boss. He was a dark-skinned man of middle age with a hawkish face and fiercely observant eyes, and his name was Barton. “Please sit,” he said crisply.
Jesse and Elizabeth stationed themselves on the sofa. August Kemp remained standing.
Kemp was not what Jesse had expected. In Jesse’s experience wealthy men tended to wear their authority in plain sight, an expectation of obedience as conspicuous as a Sunday hat. August Kemp was the right age for such a man: hard to tell with future people, but Jesse pegged him at fifty years or more by the grain of his skin. But he was lean as a whippet hound and tan as a cowherd, and his clothes seemed not only informal but unserious: denim trousers and a shirt on which pictures of tropical fruit were printed. His white hair was abundant, and he wore it loosely. His teeth were conspicuously perfect. He displayed them in a broad smile.