The Gilded Age

6

Absinthe at the Poodle Dog

“Jar me, I’ll charge ‘em two bits a glass for that dago wine,” Jessie Malone tells herself as her rockaway and pair trot smartly down Market Street. “Make ‘em pay, darlin’. Make ‘em pay.”

And why not? What is she, after all these years? Still the wee sad orphan, that’s what, a-cryin’ herself to sleep. Mum and Pater cold in their graves when she and her sweet innocent Rachael started out on their own. Started out at Lily Lake where they swam like mermaids so long ago.

Columbus Day turned out to be a very fine day for the eminent judge with a mustache like a walrus and a gut to match—the one who hears tenderloin matters and a long-time railbird—to touch her for twenty gold eagles. Twenty gold eagles! Half her winnings at Ingleside Racetrack. Jessie’s got a nose for the nags, there’s no more to her luck than that, though naturally every now and then she hears a tip at the Mansion when a nobbler’s fixing a race and booze loosens somebody’s lip. But how in hell did the good judge know she’s banked a hundred thousand dollars of her hard-earned cash at Wells Fargo Bank? And what kind of polite conversation is that?

“Good afternoon, Miss Malone, aren’t you the lucky one today,” his honor the railbird said, miraculously meeting up with her as she was collecting her winnings at the cashier’s window. “Why, I’ll bet you’re going to add some pocket change to that Wells Fargo account of yours. Eh, a hundred thousand big ‘uns, I’ll be dadblamed. That’s quite a bundle for a little lady like you.”

“And every penny of it, Your Honor, earned a-workin’ my fingers to the bone.”

“Or on the flat of your back, eh? Oh, I do beg your pardon,” his honor said when she sucked in her breath so sharply that her liver ached. “I do beg your pardon, but could you spare twenty eagles of your good luck for your dear old Samuel?”

As if dear old Samuel doesn’t get his in the usual way—a brown leather purse delivered on the fifteenth of the month. Gold, of course, a boy from the American Messenger Service.

Hmph! But as rude as he was, could she say no? His honor spoke to her discreetly. Not a soul witnessed their exchange. And she might very well find herself before his honor’s bench—next week, perhaps—if the bulls decide to raid the Parisian Mansion on one trumped-up rap or another. Why, his honor wouldn’t know her from Adam then. Or from the Serpent.

If that doesn’t get her in the neck. Still hopping mad, Jessie skillfully navigates the rockaway through the jostling evening traffic among reckless hacks and drunken cabbies. Her matched geldings—chestnuts the color of rose gold—trot like a dream, attentive to her every command. She’s also got an excellent hand with the steeds, won’t let some whiskeyed lunk drive ‘em. She always drives herself. The rockaway is a very fine vehicle paneled in finest cherrywood, piped and upholstered in chestnut leather. She always wears gloves of chestnut pigskin when she drives, and a throw of chestnut cashmere wrapped over her lap. The whole getup costs a pretty penny to maintain, plus she has to take a cab to and from Harwell’s Livery over in Cow Hollow where she garages the rockaway and stables her horses. But it’s worth it, even if she only goes driving five or six times a month. She holds her head as high as a duchess as she passes the diamond broker and that wife of his. The wife glares. That hateful look them Snob Hill ladies always give her.

“Pull your eyes back in your sockets, missus,” Jessie mutters.

But a tiny corner of her heart always stings when she sees the wives’ faces. Is she forever to be shut out of polite society? Will she never feel respectable?

“If you was more of a slut and less of a shrew, your old man wouldn’t come around to me,” she mutters as the diamond broker’s carriage passes by. The sting sharpens. “Would you like to know how he likes it? With two bouncing blonds at the same time, that’s how.”

Jessie takes great pains to accommodate the diamond broker. That’s why her earrings glitter brighter than the stones on that wife of his. Hmph! That eases the sting a bit. Miss Jessie Malone’s diamonds is bigger and brighter than the diamond broker’s wife’s. Miss Jessie Malone drives her own rockaway and pair.

But there, a sight catches her eye. Lordy, ain’t that Mr. Watkins? On the corner of Market Street and Eddy? Despite the usual crowd of bigwigs and bulls, bruisers and tools promenading along the Cocktail Route, she could never miss Mr. Watkins’s fine cut, his bearing, his refined form into which his spiritual essence has been so purely poured. She always feels a stab of anxious affection at the sight of Daniel, as though he might disappear if she blinks.

With an awful jolt, she also sees the tangle of thugs, three of ‘em, fists flyin’, and Daniel reelin’, while a scrawny bespectacled coolie kicks and thrusts and punches at the thugs in a most peculiar way.

Sure and a peculiar way Jessie has seen before. There’s a name for it—juju something. Ain’t that what Mr. Yakamora called the taut poses and deft moves he once showed her in the parlor of the Parisian Mansion? Mr. Yakamora is a porcelain importer over in the Fillmore. He always asks for plump blonds, though of course he reveres his petite dark wife who waits patiently for him in Tokyo while he scrapes together his fortune in America. The wife has waited eleven years. Or at least eleven years is as long as Jessie has been servicing the needs of her dear friend Mr. Yakamora.

Yep, juju something, a style of hand-to-hand combat from the Far East. Jessie recognizes the movements, despite the shadows cast over the fracas. The coolie whirls and dives, yelling.

Yelling in a high, womanly voice. Say. Hasn’t Jessie heard that voice before?

Jessie cracks her horsewhip as Daniel rises, stumbling, the back of his head bleeding, swings at a thug, and misses. The other thugs tear at his fine clothes. His face is flushed, his collar askew, his bowler pushed up on his sweaty forehead. He throws another punch and staggers. Blood trickles down his face, too.

“Mr. Watkins!” she cries.

Jessie clucks to the geldings, cuts through traffic. A gift from an attaché to the ambassador, the geldings were. And last autumn it was, a party for some poxy barons who’d invested in certain municipal bonds and dropped load at the opera. It was a swell party, too, plenty of champagne and whiskey. She made a bundle that night. And though she had the girls douche with mercuric cyanide afterwards, Rosa and Dolores came down with the pox only too soon. Jessie had to turn them out to her Morton Alley cribs. A shame, but the biz is the biz. And now the geldings are all hers.

Jessie pulls up to the curb, reaches in the glove box. She finds the silver flask of Jamaican brandy, bites off a nip to steady her nerves. Then she seizes her horsewhip, stands unsteadily, and cracks the whip but good over the thugs’ noggins. The geldings rear. “Whoa!” she cries, pulling them up and falling on her bustle onto the driver’s seat. She lands another lashing, this time across the thugs’ backs.

“That’s from Mr. Harvey!” cries the thug in the slouch hat, landing one last punch across Daniel’s kidneys. Jessie winces. She can practically feel the blow in her liver. “Keep yer friggin’ mitts off his joint!” Dodging the scrawny coolie, the thugs turn and flee.

The coolie hoists Daniel to his feet, slings his arm across one shoulder, and staggers to the rockaway. “Help me, Miss Malone,” he says in a ragged voice, his fedora knocked askew, his queue unraveling.

“What in tarnation?” Jessie leaps down, seizes Daniel’s other shoulder. Together she and the coolie boost him into the back seat of the rockaway where he collapses with a curse and a groan. The coolie takes off his fedora, wipes sweat from his smooth, pale forehead.

“Jar me,” Jessie whispers, staring. “Missy? Zhu? Is that you?” For a moment, the person standing before her, heaving for breath, is a puzzle. A riddle that don’t make sense. Well, tan her hide, it is Zhu! “What in the blue blazes do you think you’re doing, gadding about dressed like that? You could get arrested.”

“For impersonating a man, I know.” Zhu shrugs and smooths back her hair, yanking the fedora over her head. “Sorry, Miss Malone, but I had some business to attend to.” She laughs softly at Jessie’s astonishment.

“Don’t you dare laugh at me.” Jessie shakes her finger at her. “How dare you gad about in peasant’s rags? You, my servant, my bookkeeper, my trusted. . . .oh, I don’t know what to call you! What will people think to see you?”

“It’s no reflection on you or the business,” the chit says, climbing into the backseat with Daniel.

“Like hell it ain’t!”

“No one saw me, Miss Malone. Can we get out of here? Please?”

Jessie clucks to the geldings who canter off, magnificently terrified.

She’s so rattled, it’s all she can do to drive and the nighttime traffic is a fiddler’s bitch. She pulls up at a traffic jam on Montgomery. Looks like an accident, the tangle of a beer wagon and the beery driver of a cab. The horse screaming in pain, how Jessie hates that. The passenger in the cab is climbing out, pushing up his sleeves, spoiling for fisticuffs.

As she steadies the geldings, waiting to pass by, Jessie glances back.

It isn’t just that Zhu is skinny. The girl is muscular and angular, built like some creature other than a woman. She doesn’t slouch her shoulders, doesn’t bat her eyes. She has no hips to speak of in those denim trousers. She’s so slim, Jessie often frets about her health. She is bold and forthright, almost intimidating in her directness, and nothing much intimidates the Queen of the Underworld. She holds her head up, doesn’t simper or defer. She moves and acts unlike any girl or woman—rich or poor, lady or whore--Jessie has ever met before.

“I’m still a-waitin’ your explanation, missy.”

“I bought some clothes.”

“Those ain’t clothes. You got perfectly fine clothes. I bought you the mauve silk myself.”

“Which I love. Thank you, Miss Malone.”

“Then why the coolie’s getup?”

“So I can walk around Chinatown without being noticed.”

“Jar me.” As astonished as she is, Jessie is ever practical, and what Zhu says actually makes sense.

Zhu peers out the window at the street corner where Jessie whipped the thugs. “Daniel’s got trouble.”

“Hmph! I daresay Mr. Watkins has got more trouble than you or I know.” Jessie clears her throat. “I saw you fightin’ with them thugs. How the devil did you learn to do that?”

“I’m trained in the martial arts, Miss Malone,” she says matter-of-factly. “Where and When I come from, I served as a soldier for years.”

“A soldier!” Jessie guffaws. Scrawny little Zhu, a soldier? Jessie owns a magnificent painting of the mythical Amazon, her thick loins girded with a leopard skin, her curls bound up in a leather thong, her left breast shockingly amputated so that she may more accurately aim her bow and arrow at the enemy horde. The Amazon clutches her weapon in gleaming curvaceous arms. Zhu, an Amazon? “You ain’t no soldier, missy.”

“But I am.”

“Where? When?”

“In China.” Zhu gives Jessie such a penetrating look that a chill goes up Jessie’s spine and coils at the back of her neck. “In a time far from your Now.” She bends over Daniel’s sprawled form, pulls out a handkerchief, and dabs at a cut on his jaw, a wound on his head.

Then she does something truly lunatic. Jessie has seen this sort of thing before, a hardcore rummy who talks to the air, his brain gone soft with drink. Not a pretty sight. But Zhu doesn’t touch a drop, as Jessie well knows. They had a little spat about that at breakfast this morning.

“Muse,” Zhu mutters to no one in particular. “Check our coordinates. Advise regarding evasive action.”

A tiny voice—like the whisper of a spirit from the Summerland—hovers over Zhu. “Assailants are regrouping, Z. Wong,” the spirit’s voice says.

“Muse,” Zhu says in a warning tone, “you will comm in subaudio, please.”

“Advise immediate evacuation of this sector,” the spirit says even louder.

The collision is cleared, the injured horse unhitched and led away, and traffic slowly moves forward.

“We need to get out of here, Miss Malone,” Zhu commands.

“Jar me,” Jessie moans, her pulse pounding in her throat. “What did I just hear?”

“Don’t worry about it. That’s just Muse.”

“Your muse, did you say?”

“Yeah, exactly. My. . . .my guardian angel.”

Jessie gasps. An Amazon with a guardian angel is living right under her own roof? She must consult with Madame De Cassin at once! “Mother of God,” she mutters and crosses herself, a gesture she has neither made nor meant in over thirty years. She means it now.

Zhu hooks a hand over her shoulder. “Jessie, please! Get off Market Street. Go now!”

The Queen of the Underworld knows how to move fast. “Hah!” she cries to the geldings, turns a sharp left at Montgomery, trots up Post. She reaches into the glove box, pulls out the vial of smelling salts, tosses the vial over her shoulder to Zhu. “Give him a good whiff. That’ll bring him right around.”

Daniel mutters, “Father.” His voice is slurred and furious. “Cared more about your gold than her, damn you. Damn you!”

“Ssh,” Zhu murmurs. “We’ll talk about it later. You’ve got to sober up, Daniel. Pull yourself together.” Her voice is that of a sweetheart, pleading.

Jessie arches her eyebrow. Sure and there’s no mistaking that throb in a woman’s voice, that trill of passion, of unreasonable devotion. A sweetheart! Have they been carrying on right under her nose? She don’t much like that notion. Zhu is her servant. She has no right to fraternize with the boarders. She has no right to do anything save what Jessie permits or directs her to do. What if they argue and Daniel, with his business and his cash-flow restored, winds up leaving? No, she’ll have a word with Zhu.

Besides, a love affair between them rubs Jessie the wrong way. If it ain’t true courtship leading to marriage, a man should pay for it. That’s Jessie’s rule. She is not at all pleased that Daniel has not availed himself of her girls’ charms. His aloofness is an insult. No, he’s the kind of man who prefers to play with hearts, taking advantage of waifs and strays the likes of Zhu Wong who was ruined by love before. It’s a damn shame. Daniel, in Jessie’s estimation, is less moral than her johns. Family or sport, that’s the only choice a man ought to make. And if it’s sport, darlin’, he must pay.

Zhu hands back the smelling salts. “He’s too far gone for that. You would not believe the booze he’s poured down his throat in the past few hours.”

“Oh, indeed I would, missy,” Jessie says, pulling the rockaway over to a curb and reining in the geldings. “Mr. Watkins is the adventurous type. Likes to try every hooch in every joint, that’s his game. He really ought to stick to champagne. Champagne is good for the ticker. Look at me, solid as a rock. A steady diet of champagne, that’s what I say.”

“No more goddamn champagne,” Daniel mutters.

“Come on, then,” Jessie says, heaving herself down from the driver’s seat and hitching the geldings to a post. “Haul him out.” She’s gotten more drunken men up on their feet after a carouse than she can shake a stick at. “Let’s walk him around. Maybe he’ll chuck it up. He’ll feel much better then.”

“Wait, I’ve got something else,” Zhu says. “Under the Tenets, I’m not supposed to share our technology with you people, but hey I’m already a criminal, so what the hell.” She searches her pockets.

What can she mean? A criminal for impersonating a man or a criminal for something else? From her tone of voice, Jessie believes she means something else and watches her curiously, struck again at her oddness. Like a little man she is, though in fact Zhu is taller than a lot of men Jessie knows. Why does she seem so mannish? Perhaps it’s her wiry strength, yet with the quick feminine grace of a cat. Feminine? What does feminine mean? Odd as Zhu is, Jessie finds her intriguing in a way that her own girls with their lace and their lushness and their simpering ways cannot match. Jessie isn’t sure what Zhu is. Like something out of that nutty novel, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Some fantastic person out of a fantastic world, familiar yet vastly strange.

Zhu takes out a vial of liver pills. Or at least it looks a vial of liver pills to Jessie, pressing her hand to her side with a little groan. Zhu taps one out and breaks the pill over Daniel’s face. What on earth? A mist spreads, like when you step on an old puffball mushroom in the woods, dispersing fairy powder with your toe. The mist floats gently over Daniel’s face, his slack mouth.

Now he bolts up like a man dosed with strychnine, his cheeks blazing red. His eyes gleam like a wild creature’s, the snarl of his drunkenness lingering. A spasm twists his face, a face that Jessie has grown a bit too fond of. Some deep, nameless anxiety wells in her as she watches him burst into this unnatural wakefulness.

She feels that strange disquiet, too, watching Zhu with him, coaxing him, comforting him. Seeing them in the backseat together, knowing that Zhu loves him before she herself may know it, fills Jessie with fear. She can smell it beneath her patchouli, a sharp stink of fear. This woman and this man plunge toward some catastrophe they cannot see.

But why? And how? And what?

“What in hell did you just do to me?” Daniel pushes Zhu’s hands away. “Witches, that’s what you are, the both of you. The madam and the mistress. Harpies!”

“Watch your trap, Mr. Watkins,” Jessie says.

“Women! You’re all the same. You want me for your slave, your lapdog, your pet pony. I’ll have none of it. Prince Albert is right. The procreative process is merely a necessary evil for the civilized man. What you do, Miss Malone, is pander to the lowest animal instinct of which man is capable. It is beneath me, madam.”

“Oh, you’ll come around one day, Mr. Watkins. Your little gentleman friend won’t respect your tired old morality. He’ll want his due soon enough.”

“You know nothing, madam, of my morality or my cock. That’s the one decent thing Rochelle did for me, besides dancing the cancan and not dosing me with the pox. She made my destiny clear.”

Zhu studies him in her peculiar way, as if her very eyes are taking photographs. “And what is your destiny, Daniel?’

“To be your master, and you my slave,” he says, sweat trickling down his face. He shoves her off the seat. “Go on, slave. Kneel before me. Worship me.”

Jessie is sure Zhu will jump out of the rockaway and flee as nimbly as she jumped in, but she does no such thing. She kneels before him on the rockaway’s floor, her face dazed, her shoulders shuddering as if some evil thing possesses her.

“Damn it, missy, he’s jagged,” Jessie cries and reaches for the horsewhip. Can she threaten him or is he beyond threats? She’s never seen a man in such a state! Pie-eyed and wobbly, yet dangerously alert. White-knuckled with the violence alcohol unleashes in men, yet quick with the capability of sobriety. “What did you do to him? What was that mist?”

“It was just a neurobic. A stimulant from my Now. Didn’t help him much, though, did it?” she murmurs gazing up at him, as if she could move him by her will alone.

You cannot move men by your will alone! Jessie wants to shout. She suddenly recalls that he packs a derringer. And a Congress knife.

“What can I do for you, Daniel? What would you have me do?” She lays her cheek on his knee.

He starts as if she has slapped him, and the ugly spell is broken, his eyes slick with contrition though his mouth is still hard. He rubs his forehead, squeezes his eyes shut, and growls to Jessie, “Give me your flask, madam.”

“No, no, he’s had enough,” Zhu protests, but Jessie gladly hands over the flask of rum. Better to have the man drunk again than to encourage this dreadful mood.

He gulps the liquor, grimaces.

Jessie is aware that she’s trembling. As if the three of them have leapt over some hurdle, barely clearing some invisible edge.

“I want sport,” he says petulantly like a bad little boy. “I want to see some sport fitting for a man.”

“We should go home,” Zhu says. “You promised me we would after your last drink. Haven’t we seen enough violence for one night?”

”Sure and perhaps our Mr. Watkins is still excited after your run-in on Eddy Street. Sure and he wants more.”

Zhu turns to her, disgusted and outraged. “Don’t encourage him!”

Daniel tips the flask again, rum restoring his smile. “You’re completely right, Miss Malone. I want more.” He gallantly helps Zhu back onto the seat beside him and solicitously smooths her tunic. “Don’t be cross with me, my angel, but truly I’m not tired. Indeed, I’m rather bored with this evening. Miss Malone, I’ve heard that some gentlemen hold jousting tourneys at night. Quite the devil’s work. Is it far?”

“They joust,” Jessie says, “at the top of Telegraph Hill.”

Daniel grins. “By God, then, let’s see some real blood tonight.”

* * *

They clatter north up Kearny, the uneasy street where Chinatown meets the Barbary Coast, past the shooting galleries and fan-tan parlors, opium dens in basements beneath laundries and produce markets, the Chinese brothels catering to white men, the cribs where the Chinese men go. Past the bustling intersection of Broadway and Dupont.

Jessie turns into the Latin Quarter where Italian and French, Portuguese and Spanish, Mexican and Peruvian crowd chaotically together. The rich in row houses or pink stucco villas angling up the steep slopes of Telegraph Hill, the poor in shacks along the waterfront where the bagnios offer Mexican girls who net the fishermen’s trade.

Tonight the quarter spills onto the streets and narrow alleys in celebration of Columbus Day. Red wine and oregano scent the air. Everything is open late, the markets and shops, fish and vegetable stalls, noodle and sausage factories, cheese makers and wine presses, bakeries and pensions.

In the backseat of the rockaway, Daniel sits bolt upright, silent now, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and flicking half-smoked butts onto the street. Zhu perches on the far side of the seat, keeping her distance. She carefully tucks strands of hair into her queue or under her fedora, and straightens her trousers. The tinted spectacles hide her eyes. What a masquerade! Jessie clucks her tongue as Zhu composes her face, transforming herself into a pale, shadowy person of indeterminate gender.

“Say, Rosita! Can I hitch up here for a while?” Jessie waves to the noodle-maker she knows, a nice widow whose husband—known for his appetite and his cruelty—dropped dead at the Mansion last winter. Ticker up and went, butter still on his chin, one hell of a bruise on Li’l Lucy’s rump. “Well, he won’t trouble none of us no more,” Rosita had said when she came to collect his corpse. She had opened her purse. “What he owe you?”

Now Rosita seizes a gelding’s bridle and leads the pair into the narrow courtyard behind her warehouse. “Ciao, bella.”

“Two hours, tops,” Jessie says and slips her two bits. “Take good care of my boys, and there’ll be more of that later.”

“Sure, sure.” Rosita loves horses. Jessie trusts her.

Then she, Zhu, and Daniel stroll through the festive crowd to Greenwich Street. Tracks of the Telegraph Hill Railroad Company go up to the silvery half-moon rising in the crystalline night sky. A neat little cable car rumbles down the track and stops for a load of passengers. They climb aboard, and the cable car groans and clanks and sways up the torturous grade, zigzagging slowly up and up and up.

At last the cable car breaches the crest and lumbers onto level ground. They disembark at the tiny shingled station perched at the very edge of the precipice and walk across the dusty brown grass. Daniel is green from the ride, Jessie is feeling none too frisky herself, but Zhu’s gaze is riveted on the spectacle before them.

San Franciscans call it the German Castle, this hulking medieval turreted monstrosity at the top of Telegraph Hill where Mr. Duncan C. Ross presides as king of the broadsword contest. The Bear flag flaps from the western turret and four American flags decorate the eastern tower. Feeble gaslight does little to illuminate the men milling about the grounds deeply drunk, whooping, tipping flasks, jostling one another in giddy anticipation.

A slender little woman in a beribboned, tightly corseted dress and a wide hat with a veil drawn over her face wanders about the crowd, her gloved hand poised demurely at her throat. The helpless little thing approaches a man in the rough, ill-fitting suit of a laborer, his collar unbuttoned for air, his straw boater pushed back on his sweaty forehead. She engages him in conversation, touching him hesitantly at elbow and wrist. The rough man sways on his feet, fascinated and charmed, his mouth hanging open that this frail lady would speak to him. Then she suddenly collapses into his arms. He catches her, clearing a space for her in the crowd. She awakes just as suddenly, clutching him, her hands darting boldly over his body. The rough man blushes. She lurches to her feet and swiftly escapes, pushing through the crowd, which grows larger and noisier as the contestants mount their horses in a paddock on the eastern slope of the hill.

“There’s your little sweetheart,” Jessie teases Daniel.

“Who?” Daniel peers through the gloom.

“Fanny Spiggot, the faintin’ pickpocket. Ah well, the biz is the biz, and this is a fine night for it. Miss Spiggot probably started out as a poor girl like me with no family or husband.” Jessie salutes the dip. “Get what you can, darlin’. Make ‘em pay.”

Daniel sputters. “I’ll have a word with her! Where is she?”

“Gone,” Jessie says and pushes impatiently toward the field of combat illuminated by much brighter gaslights. “Look, they’re starting!”

A huge muscular man canters onto the field on a husky dapple-gray stallion. He wears a Prussian helmet crowned by a gleaming spike, a blue military jacket hung with a vest of chain mail, breeches, and black leather boots. His face is obscured by a fencing mask, but Jessie spies his bushy black mustache and eyebrows, his bared teeth. To thunderous applause and cheers, he circles the field, brandishing a cavalry saber.

“Ross, Ross, Ross,” roars the crowd.

Mr. Duncan C. Ross promenades, cutting the air with his saber. Jessie can hear the weapon whistle through the air as he canters past. Once enlisted with the Royal Scots Greys, Ross sweats out a living in San Francisco as a professional wrestler and an instructor of swordsmanship. Every week in the summer and the balmy days of autumn, he takes on challengers at the German Castle.

“Twenty on Duncan bloody Ross!”

“Fifty on Ross by ten!”

Fists full of silver and gold, gamblers furiously place bets with the croupier below the western tower. The croupier sits at a rickety table, his quill pen savagely scribbling odds and point spreads on a ledger, four bruisers packing pistols standing guard around him.

Now another tremendous rider gallops onto the field on a lithe black horse. Slighter in build but no less charismatic, he wheels and rears his horse. His fencing mask cannot conceal his bright gold beard. Gold hair protrudes from the rim of the helmet fitting over his ears to his jawbone like the gear of an ancient gladiator. A vest of solid armor is strapped over his gray padded jacket and festooned with burgundy braid and gold epaulets.

“Walsh, Walsh, Walsh!” shout the contender’s partisans.

Jessie can feel the blood lust coursing through her veins, though it’s awfully barbaric. Better that men should spend their hard-earned cash on the sport of love. Still, the excitement infects her, too.

“That’s Charlie Walsh! He’s my favorite!” she shouts in Zhu’s ear. “Ain’t he a daisy? He rode with General Sherman in Atlanta. They say he won a dozen duels by sword in Mexico.”

Walsh whips out his saber. He and Ross rein in their horses at the opposite ends of the field.

“The points is dull, that’s what I heard,” Jessie says. “But the edges is razor-sharp.”

A referee clad in a scarlet vest and top hat steps into the center of the field. “Gentlemen!” he shouts above the din of the crowd. “The rules are these! Each contestant will approach the other at full gallop and endeavor to strike his opponent’s armor! A proper blow to the armor scores one point. A blow to the helmet is disregarded! Striking a man below his armor or striking his horse is penalized by minus one point. He who scores one and twenty points is the victor!” The referee raises a whistle to his lips. “Ready! Steady! Go!”

They charge! The horses gallop, hooves thundering across the grass. The contestants raise their swords. In less than an instant, they cross paths in a whirlwind of dust. A tremendous clang, as metal meets metal, and the horses gallop to opposite ends, where boys leap up and seized their lathered bridles. The crowd shouts its lungs out, and a knot of men scramble back as Ross’s stallion lashes out with a hind hoof.

“Zero up!” shouts the referee.

The crowd groans. Gamblers scramble to the croupier, placing new bets.

The contestants wheel their horses.

“Ready! Steady! Go!”

Again they thunder across the turf, kicking up clods of dirt. This time, Walsh doesn’t raise his saber, but holds it down on his thigh. A lump rises in Jessie’s throat. What in tarnation is he doing? As he passes Ross, he ducks away from Ross’s flashing saber, which Ross, taken aback at the lack of resistance, aims poorly. Walsh turns at the waist as Ross gallops past and clips him smartly across his shoulder blades.

Men cheer, others boo. When Walsh wheels at the opposite end of the field, Jessie spies blood leaking through his breeches in a bright red line.

“One point for Sergeant Walsh! One penalty for Mr. Ross!” shouts the referee.

The tumult grows louder, and a fracas breaks out at the croupier’s table. “Cheatin’! That’s cheatin’, he can’t friggin’ hit ‘im from behind!” The armed guards hustle the protesting gambler away, toss him out into the crowd.

The contestants rein in their horses, whirl, and pause. A boy offers Sergeant Walsh a rag, but Walsh waves the rag away, sneering behind the fencing mask. Ah, darlin’, Jessie thinks, her heart pounding in her breast. Be careful.

“Ready, steady, go!”

Jessie shouts as they charge again. “Get him! Get him! Get him, Walsh!”

Ross brandishes his saber at shoulder level, yelling, “Face me, you bastard!” He whacks Walsh as he gallops past, striking him full across the chest

In the instant of passing, an enraged Walsh whips his saber up and heavily down again.

Ross roars in agony, plummets off his stallion. When the dust clears, Jessie can see that his Prussian helmet is split in two. A mob descends on the fallen man.

“Did you see that?” Zhu shouts. “Did you see what he did to his helmet? His skull must be shattered!”

Jessie seizes her hand, and the two women push toward the wounded man. “Step aside!” Jessie shouts. “I know a thing or two about injuries. Clear the way. Stand aside, I say!”

Indeed she does know a thing or two about the healing arts, as any madam must if she’s to stay in the biz. She’s seen enough fisticuffs to fill a book.

“Die, die, die!” chants a contingency of the crowd, guffawing, spitting, slapping shoulders. Certain gamblers will win a very nice premium should Ross go to his ultimate defeat.

Another contingency, red-faced with rage, throw off their topcoats, fumble with cuff links and buttons, roll up sleeves. “We’ll not hear your taunts!” the gang yells, advancing through the shadows.

The crowd reluctantly lets Jessie and Zhu through. Jessie kneels next to Duncan Ross. A skin-and-bones fellow with tobacco-stained hands weeps as he cradles Ross’s bloody head.

“’Ere, it’s that scarlet woman,” says another fellow standing over them both. A rat of a man, with pink eyes and a pointed face beneath his cheap bowler, he’d be a crib customer, Jessie thinks. She would never let a rat like this into the Parisian Mansion. “Don’t let ‘er touch ‘im. She’s likely to give ‘im the pox.”

“And who in hell are you?” She restrains herself from spitting in the rat’s eye.

“We’re ‘is trainers, chit,” the rat says, “and you’ll do well to leave ‘im alone.”

“Take your hands away, you lunk, and let me have a look,” Jessie commands. Zhu kneels beside her.

Duncan Ross’s proud head is drenched in blood, nearly making Jessie retch from the stink of life leaving the body. She smooths back his black hair, smooths away the blood, working her fingers down in the tear in his scalp till she can feel the cracked wound. A jagged edge is etched across his very skull, each portion of bone canting away from the other.

“Jar me,” she whispers. “It’s hopeless. He’s a-goin’ to meet his Maker.”

But Zhu gently places her hand over Jessie’s, works her fingers down, and feels the wound for herself. Suddenly she’s got a knife in her other hand. She bears the blade down on poor Duncan Ross’s head.

“What the devil are you doing?” Jessie whispers. What will the mob do to them both if they find a strange Chinese woman, dressed as a coolie, hastening the demise of their champion?

“Ssh, don’t worry,” Zhu says with a slight smile. Clicking a little knob on the hilt of the knife, she firmly and swiftly presses the blade across the wound as though slicing a melon.

Jessie’s stomach clenches. But Mr. Ross’s skull does not split open. Zhu withdraws the knife and runs her fingers through his scalp. “Feel now.”

Jessie runs her fingers through the black hair again, searching for that awful edge of ragged bone. But there’s nothing. His skull is smooth and whole again. Blood flows only from the scalp wound, which should heal all right if it doesn’t turn rotten.

Jessie turns to Zhu, openmouthed. Her heartbeat throbs in her stomach beneath the stays of her corset. “What is that thing? What did you just do?”

Zhu tucks the knife into a pocket in her tunic. “It’s just my mollie knife.”

“That’s just a miracle! Let me see it. A mollie knife? But what is it? Where did you get it?”

But Zhu shakes her head and stands, helping Jessie to her feet. Daniel sways over them, barely keeping his balance. Still, Jessie can see from his puzzled look that he witnessed it all. He frowns. The crowd begins to twitter and honk, inarticulate beasts on the verge of panic, a weird sound the like of which Jessie has never heard before. The start of a melee, of a riot. She’s read about the union strikes in Philadelphia and Chicago, how when violence starts, the crowd changes into some great ravening monster without reason or sensibility.

“The bulls are here,” Daniel says. “Ladies, let us make our departure.”

A squad of blue-suited, red-faced, cursing policemen scramble over the ridge by the cable car, wiping dirt off their hands as they gain the summit. They hoist out billy clubs.

Jessie seizes one of Daniel’s hands, Zhu seizes the other, and they steer toward the opposite side of the jousting field, beyond the grounds of the German Castle to the far perimeter of Telegraph Hill where the slope angles down into velvety darkness and crude shacks cling to the cliff. Contractors have ruthlessly quarried the hill, blasting granite and shale from beneath the very feet of settlers perched on their fine precipice and carting away the rock to pave the city streets.

Other spectators scramble and careen down the rugged hillside, too. No one wants to get pinched. In the dim light, Jessie spies Fanny Spiggott clinging to the arm of a solicitous gentleman. How many treasures will Miss Spiggott’s nimble fingers free from the topcoat and vest of her gallant before they reach the bottom of the hill?

“But I’m wearin’ fine shoes!” Jessie protests as Daniel guides her down the rocky slope. Zhu deftly scales the slope in her flat sandals, loping from to grade to grade like a mountain goat. She offers Jessie a steadying hand, but Jessie declines.

“I’ll take the low road, thank you, missy.” A blue funk settles over her soul.

Why? Because Zhu Wong is a Chinese girl, a chit, a wench. With unusual qualifications and talents, it’s true. A smart kid, perhaps even a trusted ally. But she’s Jessie’s servant, for pity’s sake. Jessie’s possession, bound by a contract under which the creature must serve without question. In short, she’s not a person. Not a person the way Daniel J. Watkins is a person. Certainly not a person with a station in life.

Yet this person—this Zhu Wong—has done something Miss Jessie Malone has never been able to do herself.

Save someone’s life.

* * *

Jessie releases Daniel’s hand and stumbles behind Zhu the rest of the way down to Green Street, leaving the cries of the coppers and the melee behind. They trudge back to the noodle factory and collect her rockaway and pair from Rosita. The good widow has watered and rubbed the geldings down, and is feeding them carrots and apples. Jessie pays the hitching fee and tips her a double eagle.

“Absinthe! I must have absinthe!” Daniel declares. “Jousting and mountain climbing have left me quite parched.”

“Daniel,” Zhu says sharply, “you are out of control.”

Jessie laughs. Now there’s an odd expression.

But Daniel only says, “Don’t go temperance on me, miss, I warn you.”

“I’ll give you another neurobic, even though the Tenets say I’m not supposed to. I just want to go home. I want to go to bed.” Zhu tries out a flirtatious look, but she’s better at slugging thugs and working medical miracles than she is at flirting with men. Jessie will have to coach her. The coolie getup doesn’t help at all.

“’By God, what is a ‘neurobic’? What, pray tell, are ‘the Tenets’ you keep talking about? And what on earth did you do to poor Duncan Ross’s skull? It is all quite brain-wracking. Absinthe, I say! Nothing else will do.”

“A word of advice, missy,” Jessie says as she heaves herself into the driver’s seat. Zhu and Daniel climb in the backseat. Jessie clucks to the geldings, and they plunge into the night. “You cannot tell a man like Mr. Watkins what he can and cannot do. Ain’t that so, sir?”

“Quite so, madam,” Daniel says expansively, evidently cheered by the jousting tourney. “By God, my Queen of the Underworld, where can I get absinthe in this burg? And not some damn cocktail. A proper bottle of Pernod Fils.”

Zhu huffs and groans and sighs, but Jessie pays her no mind. “I know just the place, Mr. Watkins. We’ll cut and run to the Poodle Dog. Good ol’ Pierre stocks the Green Fairy. Sure and I’ll try a taste myself.”

“Jessie,” Zhu says, “you know that pain in your side? Your kidneys could be quitting on you. Absinthe is the last thing you need.”

“Missy, my kidneys ain’t quit on me in forty years.”

“That’s just great. Between the absinthol, thujone, and ethanol, you’ll wind up with lesions on your brain. You, too, Daniel. Did you know that wormwood oil is highly toxic? It could kill you with just one sip.”

“Jar me, missy,” Jessie says, turning to glance at her. “What mumbo-jumbo will you dream up next?”

“Eat, drink, and be merry,” Daniel declares, “for tomorrow we die, and that’s that.” Jessie savors the good strong scent of his cigarette. “Miss Malone, my mistress has been lecturing me all night about responsibility. Responsibility and the future. Why, I do believe our Zhu is a preacher, a chemist, a physician, and a prestidigitator, all in one.” He says to Zhu, his voice tight, “Now, about poor Duncan’s skull?’

“It’s just my molecular knife,” Zhu says, flashing the thing, then tucking it back in her pocket. “The mollie knife induces molecular recombination in physical objects, that’s all.”

“Ah, did you hear that, Miss Malone? ‘Molecular recombination’?”

“Must be some newfangled gizmo from Boston I ain’t heard about yet.” After all that mountain climbing, she’s thirsty as a fish, too, and hungry enough to eat a bear. The rockaway passes a messenger boy idling on the corner. “Whoa!” she calls to her geldings, and calls to the boy, “You! C’mere!” She scrawls out a note to Daphne:

SERVE RED WINE AT MIDNIGHT

FOUR BITS A GLASS

MISS MALONE

She hands the note to the boy and pays him a bit. “Take this to the door maid at the Parisian Mansion and be quick about it if you know what’s good for you.”

“Yes, ma’am!” the boy says and darts away like a wild creature.

Daphne had better stick around the Mansion till Jessie makes her appearance or she’ll be out of an easy job, starting tomorrow. Jessie turns the rockaway downtown, back to the glittering boom and bluster of the Cocktail Route. Beneath the golden gaslight, the nighttime crowd celebrates Columbus Day with increasing glee. A quartet of aspiring young tenors and baritones offer ballads for coins to be tossed into a neat row of upturned top hats.

“They ain’t half bad,” Jessie calls over her shoulder to Zhu and Daniel and tosses her contribution across the macadam. “They may make it to the Tivoli Opera House sure and if they don’t kick the bucket first.”

“Tomorrow we die,” Daniel says.

“Tomorrow we live,” Zhu says. “We’ve got to.”

Down they go into the hubbub of the city. A kinetoscope booth catches Daniel’s attention. Zhu leans out and stares at a couple of bespectacled communists shouting the philosophy of Karl Marx at a restless crowd of roughnecks. The Salvation Army bangs a bass drum next to a pitch man selling Kickapoo tonic beneath a showy flare.

Jessie turns into Bush at Kearny, finds the little turnaround alley, and hitches her geldings at the back door of the Poodle Dog. Drivers and their hacks linger on the pavement, watching the crowd, smoking, joking. Two soiled doves dally among the drivers, their straw boaters tilted over their spit curls, and titter like lunatic school girls. Even in the gaslight Jessie can see the ravages of smallpox on their faces. There but for the grace of God. Has Jessie ever seen them before? So many scarred women flock to the Parisian Mansion looking for work, and so many are turned away, that she can’t remember all the ravaged faces.

“Evening, Miss Malone,” calls Finney.

“Hey, Jess,” calls a bold new boy.

“Old Pierre don’t allow no Chinks in his establishment,” says another driver when they disembark.

Jessie is at a loss because of course the Poodle Dog is a class joint. But Daniel chimes in, “He’s my manservant. He’s square,” and they all slip in the back door.

Ah, the Dog. How well Jessie knows this place. The scarlet and gilt, the shimmering crystal and silver. How the Dog once used her, and how she’s used the Dog herself over these many long years. Through the back door and up the stairwell they climb. There are three floors to the Poodle Dog like them rings a-goin’ down to hell, but here they go up. Jessie cannot resist. She peeks out through the fringed scarlet curtains at the first floor.

She spies the wink of diamond dog-collars on cashmere-clogged throats, closely covered wrists, chastely laced hands. The Parrot sisters, those Flood girls, parties of ladies from Rincon Hill, and the Smart Set from South Park dine with doddering great-uncles and creaky old grandfathers. That is the company who dines on the world-class French cuisine on the first floor.

Zhu peers over her shoulder. “More recreational eating?”

Jessie laughs at her odd words. The luscious scent of lobster in sweet cream infuses the room, and solicitous waiters glide across the floor, inquiring what the ladies want. Sure and the Smart Set is a well-larded crowd. Jessie touches her corseted waist. Even with her joie de vivre, she can be proud of her figure. She’s got her stuffing in all the right places. She’ll fit into Mr. Worth’s new Parisian dresses if it kills her. Plenty of the Smart Set are the daughters of ladies who plied Jessie’s trade in the good ol’ days of this very same fine establishment. The Gold Rush days before Mr. Ned Greenway started keeping track of who came from where and how and why.

She climbs the stairwell to the second floor, Zhu and Daniel following, and peers through another lush fringe hanging over the doorway.

“By God, is that not your Mr. Heald?” Daniel says.

The second floor of the Poodle Dog is well attended by Snob Hill gentlemen and other renowned worthies of impeccable credentials. Well attended also by the beauties of the city, the ones known as homewreckers. Jessie glances curiously at Zhu, who in her coolie’s rags is a far cry from these bejeweled ladies. Yet this is the set Zhu ought to belong to--the mistresses. In the mauve silk, which sets off her golden complexion, dark hair, and remarkable green eyes, and a few gold baubles, Zhu would look just dandy here.

They are actresses, singers, or dancers. Some are beautiful, some beautiful and smart, some smart enough to make themselves beautiful. A mistress in Jessie’s world makes her way in life as the devoted companion of a wealthy gentleman, one gentleman at a time. Which does not mean, of course, that these same gentlemen do not take their ease in Jessie’s parlor. Jessie has fended off more jealous mistresses than wives at the Parisian Mansion’s front door, though only a wife had the gumption to show up with a horsewhip and demonstrate its use when her husband stumbled outside.

Jessie studies Mr. Heald and his dining companion, a petite Frenchwoman who sings passably well. Sure and her red hair is a dye job and her dress is two seasons old.

“My diamonds is bigger,” she sniffs.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Malone,” Zhu says, catching everything with those eyes of hers.

“Missy, I could never live at the beck and call of the likes of Mr. Heald, and that is what a mistress must do.” She looks back and forth between Zhu and Daniel, arching her eyebrows. “Mr. Heald is merely my dear friend. I am my own mistress.”

“Good evening, Miss Malone,” says a feminine voice.

Jessie turns to find his honor the railbird attempting to hurry past her as he climbs the stairwell with Maisy, one of Jessie’s ripe blonds at the Mansion. Maisy giggles and waves.

“Why, good evening, Your Honor. Looks like my twenty double eagles will come a-flyin’ back to my own little hands, won’t they, darlin’?”

His honor’s mouth drops open. He wasn’t expecting to pay that much for his evening’s pleasure. He also wasn’t expecting to run into Jessie Malone en route to the third floor of the Poodle Dog. Well, he knows the price now, don’t he?

Jessie climbs the stairs behind the happy couple, mightily pleased at Maisy’s swinging hips. The unctuous old doorman greets them at the top of the stairs and ushers them down a hushed hallway past a score of closed doors, to the next available private suite.

“Is this satisfactory, Miss Malone?” says the doorman with an arch look. He’s uncertain what to make of her latest ménage a trois. Sure and she’s met the old fart at the top of the stairs all the many long years she’s been escorting guests to the third floor of the Poodle Dog. His arch look annoys her.

Jessie surveys the suite—the red velvet carpet and plush chairs, a divan, the small gilt dining tables, a silver bucket with champagne on melting ice. The paintings have gone dull over the years. Seascapes and mountains. Hmph!

“It’ll have to do.” She hands the doorman a measly tip. “Bring us Pierre’s frog legs sauté sec, cracked crab, and a bottle of Pernod Fils with the works.”

“Yes, madam.”

She plumps down on the divan and pats the cushion beside her, smiling at Daniel. He sits, his eyes glittering with anticipation, and Jessie sighs. He cares nothing about their midnight tryst. Cares nothing for his mistress, if that’s what Zhu has become. He only cares about partaking of Pernod Fils. Jessie seldom pities any man, but she pities Daniel now.

“If your mama could see you, Mr. Watkins.”

Daniel regards her coolly. “Absinthe is my mother, Miss Malone. The mother of my happiness. She is the Green Fairy. She is holy water, the sacred herb.”

“The brain lesions will make you mad,” Zhu reminds them both, “if you don’t keel over from a stroke first.”

“She has green eyes, a cloak of forest green, and opalescent skin. She is ma mere.” Daniel seizes Zhu’s wrist, pulls her down onto his lap. “She is the mistress I love best. Her eyes are greener than yours. Jealous?”

Someone knocks on the door, and Zhu leaps up, opens it. A waiter enters with a trolley bearing the dark green bottle, its neck wrapped in silver foil, a carafe of sparkling water, a dish of sugar cubes, and three bell-shaped glasses. There are three absinthe spoons of polished silver, their flat bowls punched out in lovely filigrees.

Jessie sniffs disapprovingly, recalling how this little ceremony goes. She also recalls why she never serves absinthe at the Mansion. Zhu’s protests ring only too true. Madness, indeed. It’s a devilish drink. All the same, she’ll take a taste. Just a wee taste.

Daniel seizes the trolley and shoos the waiter out. His hands shake with excitement as he sets out the bottle, the carafe, and the sugar cubes just so. He pours out absinthe and places the spoons over the mouth of each glass. But before he proceeds, he shoots Zhu a dark look. “First let’s have a closer look at the knife of yours while I’m still sane and sober.”

“Yeah, what did she call it? A mollie knife. I want to see it, too,” Jessie says.

“Sorry, I can’t do that,” Zhu murmurs.

Daniel seizes her, reaches in her tunic pocket, finds what he’s looking for. Zhu staggers back, frowning, but makes no move to reclaim the knife. She shrugs with a haughty, disdainful look.

“Say, you don’t have to roughhouse her, mister,” Jessie says but she joins him, peering down at the miraculous knife.

It’s about the same size and shape as Daniel’s Congress knife, except for the sapphire knob protruding from the hilt. Daniel takes a sugar cube, takes the mollie knife, and cuts the cube in half. Then he pushes in the knob on the hilt, imitating Zhu’s work on Duncan Ross’s skull, and guides the blade back over the cut. The sugar cube mends itself whole.

“Jar me,” Jessie exclaims. “Like I said, it’s a miracle!”

She and Daniel exchange astonished glances. She turns to Zhu, but the chit sits wearily on the divan, shaking her head. She plucks the knife from Daniel’s fingers.

“Don’t look so sour,” Jessie tells her. “Mr. Edison would give his right arm for that.”

“By God, how true,” Daniel says, that glitter in his eye brighter. “I would give my right arm for that. How is it done?”

Ah, well. The gentleman does care for something other than pickling his brain. Jessie turns to Zhu expectantly. “How is the trick done?”

“Matter is made up of molecules. Molecules are made up of atoms connected together by bonds. When you cut something, you break the bonds. The mollie knife merely rearranges the electrons, forming ions. The ions are attracted to each other and reform the bonds. Molecular recombination, like I said. It’s not so difficult, really.”

“Then let us drink to molecular recombination, ladies,” Daniel says. He balances a sugar cube in the bowl of an absinthe spoon, drizzles water over the cube. The cube dissolves and sugar water drips into the glass, turning the green liquor murky. “After the first glass of the Green Fairy, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. And after the third, you see things as they really are, which is the most terrible thing in the world.” Daniel sips, and his eyes turn as murky as the liquor. “Oscar Wilde said that. Something like that. Cheers.”

Jessie pours water over her own sugar cube and baptizes Zhu’s cube, too. “To your health, missy.”

“I’ll pass,” Zhu says.

Jessie sips. Gah, what a taste! Like chewing on the forbidden herbs in her painting of a celestial mountaintop, the goat-footed satyrs taking liberties with winged nymphs. She peers at the green liquid in her glass, evil and pungent. They say mad monks brew the stuff. Absinthe careens into her blood, and the gaslight glows like molten gold. The eyes of her companions deepen, and their faces take on a strange nobility.

“Re-form the bonds,” Jessie says. “That’s downright romantic, missy. Ain’t that romantic, Mr. Watkins?’

But Daniel’s mood has shifted again, and now he glares at Zhu over his glass. “You’re lying again. You’re making up stories like Mr. Wells and his time machine.”

“I don’t lie,” Zhu says. “That’s one thing I never do, Daniel.”

The waiter knocks and brings in another trolley with covered dishes, shell crackers, long-stemmed forks, bowls of melted butter. He whips the covers off the dishes, revealing steaming scarlet crabs and lovely slender frog’s legs drowning in a pool of white sauce.

Jessie assembles a plate for Daniel, hoping to appease him. Drink ought to cheer a man, not make him violent and mean, though so often that is the result. “Now, Mr. Watkins. Our Zhu did a wonderful thing tonight. She saved a man’s life.”

“We don’t know what the hell she did. Perhaps Duncan Ross will wind up a lunatic with blood on his brain.” He pours himself another round. “If the mollie knife is real, where can I purchase one?”

“You can’t,” Zhu says with a wistful smile and pushes her glass away.

“What about the Montgomery Ward catalog?” Jessie says, taking another tiny sip. The walls of the suite soften into lovely pink clouds, and she notices a moth swirling and circling in the glow of the gaslight. Like a little angel it is, a tiny woman with golden wings. She jolts with alarm. Champagne never makes her see visions! “Montgomery Ward’s got everything.”

“I’ve never seen a mollie knife in the Montgomery Ward catalog,” Daniel says. “Or in Sears, Roebuck.”

“Not even Sears, Roebuck stocks a mollie knife,” Zhu says with a laugh.

“Then where did you steal yours?” he demands.

“See here, Daniel,” Zhu says, flushing, her words spilling out in a rush. “I don’t lie and I don’t steal. The Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications gave me the knife for the Gilded Age Project. I am a Daughter of Compassion, and I’ve had just about enough of both of you today. Columbus Day, red wine, and man’s conquest.” She glares back at him. “You should be grateful I agreed to t-port to this spacetime.”

“Spacetime,” Daniel says. “You said that word before. What the devil do you mean?”

“Why, all of space and time, which are a whole. One doesn’t exist without the other.”

“You see, Miss Malone?” Daniel says to her, smirking. “You women are all confused. There is space. Then there is time. The one has nothing to do with the other.”

“Each is the other, Daniel,” Zhu insists. “There is only One Day that exists always.”

“Yet you keep talking about ‘our Now’ and ‘your Now,’” Daniel points out.

“That’s right,” Jessie chimes in. “She mentioned ‘her Now’ to me, too.”

Zhu sighs. “They told me I’m not supposed to do that, either.”

Jessie loves a good spoof, but the sip of absinthe and all this strange talk are spinning her head around. Still, she saw the mollie knife work with her own eyes. And what about that little voice, that spirit she hears talking to Zhu? “All right, then, why did you agree to. . . .t-port to our Now?” She laughs at herself. How quickly she picks up trade talk. “To this spacetime?”

Zhu sighs again. “I’m not so sure myself, anymore.”

“Oh, come now, miss,” Daniel says. “You were doing so well. Surely you can dream something up.”

Zhu turns to him angrily. “The girl I’m supposed to rescue is in jeopardy. More jeopardy than anyone knew. I must get her to the safety of the mission. I must.” She takes off her fedora and her spectacles, runs her hand over her brow, smoothing back stray hair. “Look. It’s like this. I’m not supposed to reveal my true identity under Tenet Five of the Grandmother Principle.”

“Ah,” Jessie says with a wink at Daniel. “And what is your true identity?”

“I’m Zhu Wong, all right, but I’m from 2495,” she answers somberly.

“Are you sure?” Jessie teases. “You’re not from, say, a million years in the future like the girl in Mr. Wells’s Time Machine?”

“Miss Malone, I’m not making this up. I’m really from six hundred years in your future. So is the mollie knife, if you must know.”

“Well, that’s settled,” Jessie says, cracking open a crab claw and picking out the delicate meat. “You’ll have to wait a wee while to purchase your mollie knife, Mr. Watkins.”

But Daniel is more taken with the chit’s story than he ought to be. “How,” he says, furrowing his brow, “can you really be from six hundred years in the future? The future doesn’t exist yet.”

“But it does,” she says. “Look, I’m no expert on this. But, as I understand it, spacetime isn’t a line, it’s a whole. For every moment in the past, there is a future. The future always is, just as the past always is. Then it gets more complicated.” She sips water right out of the carafe. “What cosmicist theory has always suggested, and what the technology of t-porting has proven, is that reality doesn’t always exist the same. That the probable nature of reality on the quantum level applies to everything. So that each moment has probabilities that collapse into or out of the timeline.”

“That’s quite a tall tale,” Daniel says. But his smirk has vanished.

“I know,” Zhu says miserably. “The fact that I’m here in your Now is constantly affecting what happens. What happens in the past affects the future and, ever since tachyportation got invented in the future, the future also affects the past.”

Daniel is shaking his head, but suddenly Jessie stops teasing. Something in Zhu’s words strikes a chord in her heart. “I do believe I see what you mean, missy. It’s like when you remember something, and then you learn something new about what happened or you feel something new, understand something new about it, and suddenly the memory ain’t the same anymore. It’s as if the whole world, the whole past, has changed because of what you thought of today.”

Zhu gazes at her. “I’ll remember you said that, Miss Malone.”

“Like me and Rachael,” Jessie rambles on. “My sweet innocent Rachael, long ago.” Sorrow wells in her heart, and she dabs at the tears welling in her eyes. “I thought she was wicked, but now I understand she was just young. Young and innocent.” No more of the Green Fairy for the Queen of the Underworld. She checks her pocket watch. Lordy! It’s after midnight. She’s got to make her appearance at the Parisian Mansion. “If only I could see things as I wish they were.”

“I think I’m starting to see things as they are not,” Daniel says.

Zhu frowns. “Me, too.”