Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Tonight Jesse didn’t turn or flee, just took the lantern in the icy fingers of his right hand and gripped his pistol with the icy fingers of his left. The coppery stink of shed blood was obvious to him now. It was what had made the horses skittish: They snorted and shuffled at every move he made, which convinced him that there was no one else here—no one living—except himself.

  And he still needed a vehicle and an animal or two to draw it. So he pressed on until he found Aunt Abbie’s carriage, parked at the back. He was about to call in Elizabeth so she could help him put a horse in its traces when a faint odor caused him to pause and open the carriage door.

  A body tumbled out and folded at his feet.

  The smell of blood became overwhelming. The horses in their stalls rolled their eyes and began to rear and kick.

  Jesse brought the light of the lantern to bear on the corpse’s face.

  The dead man was Sonny Lau, though he wasn’t easy to recognize. His throat had been cut and his tongue pulled out through the bloody gap.

  16

  Elizabeth stood with Mercy and Theo at the stable doors like a good soldier, keeping an eye on passing strangers. Jesse was taking too long, though she could hear him moving down the straw-littered length of what was essentially a large barn, accompanied by the various unintelligible noises made by horses in their stalls. She glanced inward when a flicker of light caught her eyes. He must have found a lamp. Then a span of silence, more motion, ultimately a muffled thump.

  Then Jesse was back at the entrance, beckoning her and the two runners inside.

  He closed the doors behind them. She could see by the glow of the lamp that his face was clenched into an expression of shock and rage so intense she had to suppress an urge to back away. “What happened?”

  He took her aside and answered her question in a monotone. He had found three corpses, he said: two men dead of knife wounds and Sonny Lau mutilated in the cab of their carriage. Sonny had been killed in the signature style of Roscoe Candy: “It’s his calling card,” Jesse said.

  Anger boiled off of him like the reek of an overdriven motor. Although, Elizabeth thought, the metallic tang in the air probably had some other source. Reluctantly, she acknowledged the stink of spilled blood. “So what do we do?”

  “We can’t use the carriage, it’s a charnel house, but we can steal another of these rigs. Help me harness the horses, and then—”

  He trailed off. “What?”

  “I don’t suppose you can drive one of these? Or maybe Theo—if he knows the way to the docks—”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Think about what happened. We left Sonny at the trinket shop. Sonny might have followed us, but why would he? My guess is that Candy’s men caught him not long after he talked to us. Maybe they were watching him the whole time.”

  “Why would they be watching Sonny Lau?”

  “Candy might have known that Sonny had a connection to Madame Chao’s. And if Candy’s men were watching Sonny, they would have raised a red flag if he met with an out-of-towner matching my description.”

  “We saw Sonny twice today, and nobody stopped us.”

  “By the time Roscoe got wind of it we were probably already headed for the Royal.”

  Elizabeth pictured Sonny Lau as she had last seen him, an arrogant young Asian guy dressed like a riverboat gambler, and tried not to imagine how he must look now, butchered gangland-style by Roscoe Candy. “What do you think he told them?”

  “As little as possible. Sonny would have put up a fight. But he’s only human, Elizabeth. In the end, he probably told them whatever they wanted to know.”

  “Including the room number at the Royal.”

  “But when they came looking for us, the room was empty. So they would have asked Sonny a few more questions.”

  “Why here?”

  “This is the closest livery stable to the hotel. Candy might have been lying in wait for us. But he’s not a patient man by nature.”

  “You think he killed the stable hands, then Sonny?”

  “Probably the other way around—killed Sonny on an impulse, then killed the witnesses. Leaving Sonny in the carriage was a message, aimed right at me. Candy wants revenge. He doesn’t care about Mercy Kemp or the City of Futurity.”

  Elizabeth stared at him as the implications began to sink in. “They asked Sonny why you were in town. They asked how you contacted him. They would have asked—”

  “About Phoebe.”

  “He wouldn’t have given her up, would he? His sister lives in the house, too.”

  “We don’t know what Sonny might have said. He might have given up Phoebe to protect his sister. And they left his body for me to find, because Candy knows the first thing I’ll do is go to Phoebe. They set a trap, Elizabeth. And I don’t have any choice but to walk into it.”

  “But we have to deliver the runners to Kemp’s boat.”

  Jesse said nothing.

  “Tonight,” she said.

  “I’ll take a horse of my own. You can take the runners to the dock. They’re not resisting. Hire a cab.”

  “But you won’t get paid.”

  Jesse gave her a scornful look.

  “Anyway,” she pressed, “if Candy’s at your aunt’s house he’ll have his troops with him. You can’t take him on alone.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “You don’t have to. I’m a veteran. I’ve been trained. I can handle weapons.”

  She had his full attention now. He put his hands on her shoulders. Big hands, but cold. “There’s no time for this. I thank you, Elizabeth. But you have a daughter to go home to.”

  “Even if I miss the boat, Kemp won’t leave me behind.”

  “Won’t he?”

  “Not if we have his daughter.”

  Jesse was slow to answer. “You can’t—”

  “Yes I fucking can,” she said, realizing she meant it.

  “Why would you take such a risk?”

  “Because Kemp was wrong, he’s always been wrong, this isn’t a fucking diorama—it’s real, you’re real, Phoebe is real, this is a real place, and I’m in it, I’m right here, I’m real, too, and I can help.” And you can’t stop me, she added silently.

  Jesse just stared. His hands tightened on her shoulders, as if he was about to push her away.

  But he didn’t. “In that case,” he said, “we’re wasting time. Get Mercy and Theo into a carriage. Any carriage but the one we came in. And don’t forget the weapons. I expect we’ll need them.”

  * * *

  Two panting horses pulled the stolen rig up the slope of Nob Hill.

  The people who lived here called it California Street Hill. But it was Nob Hill to the people who lived south of Market, Jesse had said, and Nob Hill was the name that would stick. The angle of the grade and the finite strength of the horses made their progress agonizingly slow, which meant Elizabeth had time to glance over her shoulder from time to time. California Street offered a comprehensive view of the business district, the rattletrap neighborhoods south of it, and all of the Chinese quarter. Which was burning.

  Elizabeth counted at least five individual fires. “It looks like the mobs went after the Chinese theaters,” Jesse said. “Some of those shows go on for days, in installments. A lot of people inside.”

  Fire bells rang out a continuous clangor. In places the flames had turned whole streets incandescent, like hostile zones on a digital grid. “Will it spread?”

  “It might.”

  “Will it come up here?”

  “Most likely not. At least not tonight. I guess none of this was in your history books?”

  Not exactly, no. This version of 1877 had come undocked from history and was drifting into uncharted space. Elizabeth’s guess about what came next was no better than Jesse’s.

  She sat with Jesse on the driver’s bench of the carriage. Mercy and Theo were enclosed in the cab, if “cab” was the correct name for the passenger box of the vehicle. When Aunt Abbi
e’s house came within sight Jesse tugged the reins, looking for a place he could stop without either blocking traffic from the burning city or revealing himself to any hostile forces watching out for his approach.

  Abbie Hauser’s late husband, for all his wealth, had not built the finest house on California Street. That prize would have gone to a building farther up the hill, the mansion of someone named Leland Stanford, an Addams Family spook house inflated to the size of an aircraft carrier. Abbie’s house was more human in scale but just as baroque, a quarry’s worth of stone folded into tesseracts of Italianate complexity. “Okay,” Elizabeth said, “what now?”

  Jesse gazed at the house a few moments more. “You see the lights in the second-floor windows, south side?”

  “So?”

  “Most of those rooms haven’t been used since Abbie was widowed. Phoebe and I used to play hide-and-seek in them. They were never lit up at night.”

  “Abbie or Phoebe might have gone up there to see the fires.”

  “They would have more likely gone to the widow’s walk,” Jesse said, meaning the balcony surrounding a stone turret at the highest part of the house.

  “So what conclusion are you drawing?”

  “I’m betting Candy and his men are already inside.”

  He said this in a flat voice, but Elizabeth knew him well enough to hear the envelope of rage around the words. “So it’s basically a hostage situation. We have to find a way to get Abbie and Phoebe out without getting them killed.”

  Jesse nodded, but he counted off on his fingers: “Phoebe. Abbie. Soo Yee. And the hired man, Randal, if he was present when Candy’s hatchetmen moved in.”

  “We don’t know how many men Candy has.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been trained in counterterrorism and hostage-rescue operations,” Elizabeth said, which was sort of true. She had received basic infantry training, though her SIGINT work meant she’d spent most of her tour of duty behind a monitor. And when she joined the nominally civilian company that provided security to the City of Futurity she had gone through a truncated version of the FBI’s Quantico training, including simulated responses to simulated attacks in a grid of fake doors and walls representing a generic urban environment. “We need a plan,” she said, already conducting a mental inventory of the contents of their traveling bag: four flash-bang grenades, four automatic pistols with spare clips, one unsold Taser, a sheath of plastic pull-tie wrist restraints—plus a radio, their essential link to August Kemp. Thin pickings, but better than nothing.

  “I’ll go in and kill Candy and his men,” Jesse said.

  “That’s—not a real plan.”

  “I disagree.”

  “So what am I supposed to do, wait in the carriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Waste of resources, Jesse. If you go in by yourself, that means I have to go in on my own after you get killed. If we do this together—”

  “You’re a soldier, I understand that, and I’m thankful for your help. But I know the house better than you do. I can get close without revealing myself.”

  “So, without revealing yourself, can you find out roughly how many men Candy has and where they’re situated with respect to the hostages?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then do that. Scout the house, come back here, and we’ll make a plan that uses what we have to maximal effect.”

  “One thing we don’t have is time.”

  “So keep an eye on your watch. If you’re not back here in thirty minutes I’ll assume you’re dead or captured.”

  “And what if I am?”

  “I’ll act accordingly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She wasn’t sure what it meant, to be honest. “Let’s try to avoid finding out, okay?”

  He stared at her. Then he nodded and took out his pocket watch. “Thirty minutes?”

  “Starting now.”

  * * *

  Jesse understood that the urgency of his task and his fear of failing at it might interfere with clear thinking. So for the purposes of this scouting expedition he tried to pretend he was still the fifteen-year-old who had taught himself the secrets of the house well enough to come and go at will, undetected.

  The house had seemed huge to him back then, the very definition of a rich man’s palace. Today he knew better. Mr. Hauser had never been quite as rich as he appeared to be, and the house on California Street was a modest one compared to the grandiose stone piles other millionaires had erected before or since. Nevertheless, the construction reflected the Comstock Lode money that had fueled it: It was big, boastful, smug in its complexity. It was not unusual for California Street nobs to surround their properties with walls, often for no other purpose than to spite a neighbor by blocking his view—Hauser’s silver-mining wealth had probably been great enough to allow for such extravagances, but his Bostonian sense of propriety had kept him from indulging it to its fullest extent. As a result Aunt Abbie’s mansion possessed only a handful of spare bedrooms and no more than a half dozen common rooms serving as library, parlor, study, dining room, etcetera. There was a small section set aside for servants’ quarters, not much used now that the employed staff was reduced to Randal and Soo Yee. It was also down to Hauser’s comparative modesty that the stone wall surrounding the house on three sides was only a little taller than Jesse’s head. It had never presented much of an obstacle to him, even when he was an inch or two shorter. And he knew all the least conspicuous angles by which to approach and scale it.

  He came up and over on the north side of the property, landing in a patch of overgrown moonshadow that had once been Aunt Abbie’s azalea bed, with the family’s small greenhouse situated between him and the mansion. He crouched there for a while, in case he had been seen. The half moon hanging over the house cast a light that was both useful and dangerous.

  No one came to chase him, so he moved slowly and more or less silently along the base of the wall until he could see the front of the house. Two carriages stood in the drive. They were flashy and expensive-looking, just the kind of conveyances Roscoe Candy favored. How many men could he have brought with him in these two vehicles? Not more than ten, Jesse thought, probably fewer, but he made ten his provisional assessment. Say ten criminals including Candy himself, which—if Abbie, Phoebe, Soo Yee, and Randal were all present—made fourteen people in the house. Ten villains and four hostages. (Assuming Candy kept the hostages alive, a traitorous fraction of his thoughts reminded him.)

  Where exactly were the hostages? To answer that question he would have to get inside the house. He checked his pocket watch, but in the pale moonlight it was all but unreadable. He guessed at least five of his allotted thirty minutes had passed, and he wished he’d held out for forty.

  Years ago, when he had first taught himself to sneak in and out of this house, Aunt Abbie had been a sterner presence in his life. It had been no secret that she thought of her niece and nephew as half savages, raised amid corruption by a drunkard. Jesse’s habit of roaming the streets at will had been anathema to her, as her Bostonian sense of propriety had been to him. Prevented from leaving by the customary exists, he had been obliged to resort to other means.

  He had been younger then, and less well fed. The years he had spent as an employee of the City of Futurity had put weight and muscle on him, not that he had been small to begin with. He doubted he could shinny up a drainpipe without tearing it free of its moorings. But there were many ways inside, some of which involved the kind of climbing that turned his strength into an asset. The easiest of these was the one that looked most difficult: by way of the high turret of the house.

  Mr. Hauser had hired a prominent San Francisco architect to design his home, which was to say he had hired someone who combined the skills and sensibilities of a stonemason and a lunatic. Aunt Abbie once told him the building’s “elements” had been copied from European architectural history, including the turret, a miniature tower that projected from the secon
d story and poked its cap above the highest roof. The turret housed two circular rooms, one above the other, and the uppermost of the rooms opened onto a narrow balcony, the widow’s walk, that formed a half circle where the turret projected from the flat stone walls.

  The turret looked as unassailable as the medieval towers it was meant to emulate. But looks were deceptive. The turret route had been Jesse’s most reliable way in and out when he wanted to go undetected, precisely because everyone assumed it was unclimbable. In fact the route was perfectly simple: from the top of the greenhouse to the crenellated stone wall, where gaps in the masonry made for natural foot- and handholds, to the gently sloping roof of the stables, to the angle where that roof met the innermost point of the widow’s walk, then up and over the railing and through the door. No harder now than it had ever been, but there was a complication: It seemed that Roscoe Candy had posted a guard on the widow’s walk.

  Jesse spent a couple of minutes watching as the guard did a lazy tour of the walk and stopped to light a cigar. A stupid move, but the behavior of Candy’s men had always reflected their leader’s cockiness. The flare of the man’s match showed a bearded face, a slouched hat. As soon as the guard turned to walk the other way, Jesse crossed the exposed patch of lawn to the corner where the greenhouse met the wall of the mansion, deep enough under the contours of the turret to conceal him from sight. The greenhouse was a low structure, barely tall enough to stand up in, once used to winter perennials but now empty. It was an arrangement of iron struts supporting sheets of leaded glass; the trick, he had learned, was to put your weight where the struts were. Jesse stood on his toes and reached until he got a grip on the outer edge of the greenhouse roof; then he used the adjoining wall to help lever himself up.