All the Pomp of Earthly Majesty

by Michael G. Williams

  Donaldina permitted one corner of her mouth to curl with amusement, then turned to keep running. “The girls have many nicknames for me, I’m told. Let us hope that one doesn’t stick, yes?” In the distance, from inside the building they had just left, they heard the report of a large-caliber handgun. It seemed the Tong had abandoned their goal of remaining discreet. This was by no means the first time Donaldina faced the threat of violence at the hands of the gangs, but she worried for the charges in her care. Her voice was low and urgent as she issued orders. “Keep moving. Do not stop or look back.” They dashed around a large chimney and another set of skylights but stopped abruptly when one of the Tong’s highbinders, his ponytail perched atop his head, his tie loose and the collar of his shirt unbuttoned, appeared atop the ladder they had used earlier to climb onto the roof of this building. The man leered evilly and reached into his jacket to produce a Colt .45 revolver.

  Donaldina fell flat, as did the young women assisting in her mission. The Chinese girl on her back rolled to the side, then scrambled to her feet and dashed in the other direction, toward the front of the building, away from the gunman. “Wait!” Donaldina’s voice thundered the command. The man’s Colt answered her. A brick atop a chimney exploded.

  The girl was fine. The brick was nowhere near her.

  It was directly over Donaldina’s head.

  The roar from Theodora—her assistant with the ladder setup—was deep and angry and animalistic. Theodora was not a girl of subtle words and acquiescence. Her early life on a Montana farm required strength and persistence, not ladylike manners. She dropped the wound-up ladder mechanism and shot to standing. The boo how doy grimaced and hesitated: take another shot at Donaldina or defend himself against a coming attack? He swung the barrel around to aim it at Theodora, but the second of hesitation was a moment too many. He fired a bullet where she had been rather than where she went. Donaldina hoped no one elsewhere was harmed by the stray shot, but she admired Theodora’s agility and speed as the girl’s boot connected with one of the legs of the hatchet man’s ladder and it spun, dangled, then fell away with him atop it. A long scream echoed up from the street and was cut off.

  “Are you alright, mistress?” The other girl, Eva Marie, helped Donaldina stand. “Did he hit you?”

  “No, I’m uninjured. Now where did the girl go?”

  On the other side of the roof, they watched the girl they’d just liberated clamber over the ledge and drop. They ran to the spot, looked down, and watched her disappear through a door on a balcony perhaps ten feet below.

  Donaldina’s mind raced.

  Theodora ran up behind them. “Ma’am, you’ll be glad to know that bastard—apologies—appears alive. Fell in some garbage. Broke his fall.”

  “You sound as though you regret that, Theodora.” Donaldina was not amused. She did not run the Mission Home to make gangsters of her girls. She ran it to save them from gangsters like the man who’d shot at them moments ago. “You shall examine your heart closely for signs you may have taken joy in a sin.” Donaldina nodded at the balcony below them and her more immediate concerns. “The girl we came to save certainly seems to possess a will of her own.”

  “Are we going after her, mistress?” Eva Marie’s bright eyes sparkled.

  Donaldina considered: perhaps Theodora was not the only one here who relished adventure. Eva Marie seemed to do the same and, as she peeked over the edge of the roof again to make sure no one peeked back, Donaldina let herself admit she, too, savored moments like these. But now was not the time to relax in self-contemplation. “We are, yes,” Donaldina said. “But we’re to be very careful. I believe the Tongs have laid us a trap tonight. I should like to know more in order to guard against it next time.”

  Chinatown, San Francisco, Tonight

  Norton marveled again at the tingle of magical forces running through and all about him as the witches worked their magic. Madge chalked a circle around him in pale dust, then another circle outside of that. Iria withdrew a long dagger from their backpack and began to chant in the jagged syllables of ancient Hittite, sounding to Norton’s ear like the brittle shards of shattered pottery.

  Iria turned, eyes closed, to face south again, toward the Bay, and their words shifted to what the witches told him was ancient Egyptian: the wind, the earth, the fire, the Nile, time.

  As Iria slipped the tip of the knife into the epidermis of reality, their chant shifting to the third and final stage, repeating the Nile, time, the Nile, time, over and over, Madge thrust a hand into her bag and pulled out two things: a tube of long matches and a brooch about the size of a dollar coin. “Take this with you.” She grabbed Norton’s wrist and placed it in his hand. “It was my great-grandmother’s. She came to Chinatown with this when her father brought her over at the end of his trip to China. It’s…” Madge shrugged. “It’s a good luck charm.”

  Norton held it up: a pale green stone, milky, polished to a smooth luster and set in a simple silver backing, its framed edge worked to look like twisted rope. “Jade?”

  Madge smiled faintly. “A gift fit for a king. Or an emperor.”

  Iria’s voice spoke the final word—time, though the vowel was oddly stretched, as though Iria were saying tem instead, like a member of the British aristocracy—and the gate crackled open behind Norton’s back. “I shall return it, on my honor as sov—”

  Iria, eyes glazed, reached out and pushed Norton’s shoulder, and he fell backward through history.

  The Tenderloin, San Francisco, Tonight

  Etta waited in the darkness for two long hours—but then, she’d waited many times for her prey to come or go as necessary to the scheme at hand. Every footfall in the narrow hall outside made her ears twitch. Every blare of an infernal horn from outside made her look in the direction of the window she sat beside in the dark. The room these witches shared was small, with absolutely nowhere to hide. But Etta knew places like this: boarding houses, she might have called them. The demon told her they have a fancier name now, the sort of name a rich person calls something when they don’t want to say what it is: a flophouse or a slum. Etta had run a boarding house before. She expected they still operated basically the same and, therefore, she could take out a tenant or two without anyone noticing or much caring if by chance they did. These were not homes, in Etta’s mind, so much as places where a person kept their luggage while they waited for the rest of their life to show up and claim it.

  San Francisco had changed, though. She could tell herself it hadn’t. She could, if she worked at it, cling to the ways it had stayed the same. After all, San Francisco remained home to the very rich and the very poor, and they stood on the same street corners waiting to cross. The city reeked of money and of the want for it, and that money pooled together, one raindrop of greed after another, until a torrent washed away many people’s dreams on its way to gratify others. It remained a place where a person could show up full of big ideas and have them all stolen and still be grateful for the experience. San Francisco was a place where advantages were taken. Etta had no illusions about the nature of the world. She was one of the people who would take those advantages herself every chance she got.

  And at the same time, the San Francisco she had known was altogether obliterated. Light was everywhere, and utterly unremarkable. The glowing wonders she’d gone to the Expo to behold in her own time—the night Mammon came to her and made her this offer—had become commonplace. Every building stood as a lighthouse, and every corner bathed its passersby with warm signs telling them when it was safe or not to proceed. The Barbary Coast, the red-light district of Broadway, the singsong calls of women plying their trade and the runny joy of sailors spending their pay—the city had been washed clean of the joys in life that bit. It still had teeth. But where San Francisco once used them to draw blood, it now only ever bared them to smile for the flash of the tourist’s photo.

  Those damnable lights. Sitting in her targets’ room, waiting for them, was probably the first moment
of real darkness Etta had experienced in this era. How did these people do it? How did they sleep, with rooms full of things that lit up and glowed and buzzed and jumped?

  Another thing that had changed, of course, was that horses were no more, which she would never understand. A good horse was not just a mode of transport. It was a companion in times when otherwise one would be alone. Etta cared absolutely nothing about the changes in clothing; people seemed to wear whatever they wanted, however ugly, but she deeply felt the absence of horses. A car was a special thing where—when—she came from, but it didn’t give a damn about you, and, anyway, here they were common as dirt. A horse could be a real friend. Etta missed horses, she realized, more than anything else about her native time.

  Etta heard another pair of footsteps on the paper-thin carpet in the hall beyond the room’s door. They sounded small and light. Mammon had told her one of the targets was a Chinese girl. Those could easily be the soft tread of her prey.

  Etta perked up. She drew a breath and held it.

  A key in the door.

  The knob turned. It was old, sturdy. Etta admired that about it. As flophouses go, she had seen much worse than this. Hell, she ran one worse than this.

  The girl stepped halfway in.

  The light from the hall fell across half of Etta’s face.

  “Come all the way in.” Etta’s tone was low and commanding. “Close the door behind you. And don’t cry out or you’ll die.”

  Chinatown, San Francisco, 1912

  Donaldina, Eva Marie, and Theodora each dropped a few feet onto the balcony on the front of the building. They still heard no widespread cry of alarm, but Donaldina was certain people were watching them from somewhere. If this was a trap, it would have more teeth than the one boo how doy with a gun. And if it wasn’t, she couldn’t imagine why the girl she had rescued would run away.

  Through the doors, she saw the room of someone of significant standing: a water closet at one end, a bed in the Chinese style, and a large wardrobe. Beside it stood a Western-style dresser with a half dozen brushes carefully arranged on its surface and a light pointed to shine on someone if they were to sit in front of the mirror.

  The girl they had rescued was nowhere to be seen. But the balcony doors stood open, and Donaldina stepped through them. That girl had to be saved. The rescue of such girls had become Donaldina’s entire purpose for being. The report she had received was very clear: this girl was a slave and wished to be otherwise. Donaldina knew the lure of old abuse, the certainty that even if it was awful, at least it was predictable. At least it was familiar. She couldn’t let this girl run back into the arms of her original captors. To do so would be to validate the worst of their excesses and cruelty.

  Donaldina gestured for Eva Marie and Theodora to step in behind her. They did so, the former’s feet light, the latter’s tread firm but cautious. Donaldina paused, listening. Scrabbling sounded from the next room, then the click of a door latch popping open. The three of them dashed through the archway in time to see the long, dark hair of the girl as she disappeared through an open doorway and down a hall. They could hear the girl’s bare feet slap the wood and tile of the open staircase descending into the unknown floors below.

  Donaldina moved to give chase, but Eva Marie stopped her with a hand on her elbow.

  “Mistress, wait!” Eva Marie pointed with her other hand at the floor under the door frame, and the glinting wire strung across it at a height of a few inches: low enough to go unseen, but high enough to catch on the boot of anyone running through it.

  “Good eye, girl.” Donaldina leaned forward and craned her long neck, studying the trap. It might be a nuisance, an alarm, or something much deadlier: a shotgun on a string, a bomb, any number of fatal devices. Donaldina leaned back, glanced around the room again, and reached her spindly, praying mantis arm for the dresser and the closest hairbrush. She hefted the brush once, tossed it into the air, caught it again, and then, with an underhand pitch, chucked it through the doorway and against the railing opposite the door.

  No shots rang out. No warnings were called. Donaldina nodded at the other two, and they stepped carefully over the wire and resumed their chase. She wanted to pause, to see what the trap would have triggered, but there was no time. There was a girl who needed saving, who maybe didn’t yet want to be saved.

  Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, Tonight

  Mammon sat in one of the Franciscan Crab Restaurant’s wide, high-backed booths by the windows. Upholstered in red, with white-painted wood, the booth overlooked San Francisco Bay. If he craned his neck, he could see the Golden Gate and the bridge across it. “Golden Gate” didn’t refer only to the bridge, of course. They named the bridge after the Golden Gate Strait separating the Bay from the Pacific. John C. Frémont, explorer, army officer, and politician, dubbed it that before anyone even knew there was gold. Eventually he died destitute, the victim of bad investments in failing railroads. The memory of it made Mammon smile.

  A pair of binoculars lay on the foot-deep sill of the window at the interior end of the restaurant booth. With them, Mammon could have zoomed in on half a dozen major landmarks: the bridge, Fort Point, Alcatraz, Treasure Island, and on and on. A narrow metal chain leashed the binoculars to an eye hook screwed into the wood. Mammon recognized the intent of such a delicate security device: to keep people from walking off with the binoculars while suggesting anyone who might abscond with them would surely do so purely by accident. Anything sturdier would suggest intent, and being pre-suspected of theft tends to put people off the fun of a night out.

  Mammon wasn’t dining alone, of course. Throughout his observations, he half-listened to an earnest young white man describing his idea for some startup or another. The kid wanted Mammon to buy him out and become the silent partner. The kid dreamt of exploiting a few dozen coders for eighteen months then laying them off the week before a public offering. The kid wasn’t saying that last part, but Mammon knew the type. He could run this kid’s business from over his shoulder with nothing more than an occasional email, drive up the kid’s costs, pump money into the venture, lease him the office space from Mammon’s own holdings, push Cuckoo rentals as “preferred housing” for the saps who signed on, then pull the plug and watch everyone’s dreams run into a gutter while Mammon scooped up the rights to the intellectual property and any cash on hand. In the process, he could also have the pleasure of watching this kid’s failed shit-stain app blossom into three dozen badly stung ex-employees convinced they could do it better if they found the right angel investor to get them going.

  Mammon’s smile grew wider. I think this must be why humans have gardens. It doesn’t always matter how it grows. It’s good for the soul just to get out there and do the work. He turned to the kid and put up a hand. “You’ve got a great pitch.” Of course, he’d barely noticed a word of it, but one butters one’s bread. “I’m in. If you could get me the details, I’ll have my—”

  There was a sound like wrapping paper being torn open by anxious children on Christmas morning: anticipation and greed fueling the hurried rush to see if Santa brought it, whatever it might be. The Franciscan wasn’t very busy that night, and Mammon was a regular, so they knew to seat him away from other guests and let him negotiate in peace. He appreciated that about the place. They weren’t just a good restaurant on an incredible piece of real estate: they unwittingly bent over backward to serve the monster who would try to take it from them someday.

  A second Mammon stepped up to the end of the booth as the paper-crinkling turned into the roar of an ocean, shockingly loud, then stopped as though someone had turned off a switch. Visually, the new Mammon didn’t so much approach from elsewhere as simply arrive, little bits of him flying in from nowhere and assembling themselves into his familiar form, like confetti flying backward into the cannon or seeds racing home in reverse to the dandelion stalk in one’s hand. The new Mammon was dressed identically: green sport jacket with gold and silver trim, multiple gold rings, t
hick neck, greasy smile. Mammon was tacky the way only rich people can get away with. He could afford to pay people to say he looked good, and the best way to make sure others realized it about him was to present himself conspicuously badly. There were, in the modern era, certain colors one associated with his highest priorities. He felt entirely certain he would appear dressed this way as long as people thought of dollars and cents.

  Junior Businessman breathed through his wide-open mouth and gawped at the new Mammon before them.

  “Well.” Mammon regarded himself. “Can I just say, you look great.”

  New Mammon favored him with a shining smile. “Of course I do. So do you.”

  “Thanks!” Mammon’s appreciation was enthusiastic and transparently a put-on. He could have thanked a bird for shitting on his shoulder in exactly the same tone of voice. “Glad as I am to see you looking well, I have to wonder what matter is so serious it occasions something this unusual.”

  The kid gaped at them, owlishly bouncing his eyes from one to another. Mammon was happy to let the kid wonder whatever he wondered. His piss-ant corporation was just another way to kill some time.

  “This whole keys to the city thing. We’ve taken a downturn on it.” New Mammon lifted one shoulder as he spoke. “That’s the way these things go sometimes, sure. You have to lose a few tricks to win at bridge. But where I’m coming from, we’re about to lose the game. Thought I might come back and give you a heads-up.”

  “The game?” The kid’s voice was barely audible.

  Mammon noted the kid’s voice squeaked, like something right out of the triumphant revenge scene in a teen comedy. Mammon sighed a little. He would always regret letting movies wind up in L.A. He nodded to his future self. “How can I help?”