Bakelite and brass device as out of the past as the rest of the furnishings. He depressed a switch and spoke into a conical mouthpiece.

Jimmy realized that what was coming up his legs was not the after-effects of the shake but a low, regular vibration in the floor itself, as if there was a generator in the next room. Whoever’s place this was, you got the idea they were off the Pacific Gas and Electric grid.

Angel leaned in a little closer to Jimmy. “Let’s just see if we can get the kid and go. I don’t get this.”

There was another shudder, the floor shifting under them.

“Sit, please,” Whitehead came closer and said. “You’ll be more comfortable.”

There was a smell, a new scent, heavier than the sickly sweet perfume of the two men, the marker of the Sailors of the north. This was a thicker smell, a pungency that rode a little lower in the air. Diesel.

In the same moment Jimmy put a name to it, there was a sense of movement. And the floor under their feet became the deck, the walls around them the bulkheads, the doors hatches.

They had cast off.

Les Paul played on.

“I exhausted part of my youth in Los Angeles,” Whitehead began as he stepped toward a wing chair in the center of the room. He sat and crossed his legs at the knee. The nobody who’d ushered them in, aboard, crossed to his master’s side with a silver tray, a snifter of something golden. Nothing was offered to Jimmy and Angel.

Jimmy dropped down onto one of the couches, stretched out his arms along the top of the back, right at home. He looked up at the dark recesses of the rumbling chamber.

“Great gears turn,” Jimmy said.

It was sufficient to make Whitehead turn his black eyes toward his impudent guest.

“What does that mean, anyway?” Jimmy said, trying to sound like a teenager.

Whitehead ignored the distraction, the question. Angel was still standing.

“Sit, please,” Whitehead said. And then, after the comma, “Mr. Figueroa.”

Angel picked a chair.

The pitch of the vibration changed. Things stilled for a moment; then there was a stronger tremble, and the room’s equilibrium shifted. The rocking was polite.

Whitehead began again, said his first line again, “I exhausted part of my youth in Los Angeles,” with just the hint of irritation at having to repeat it. It made it seem as rehearsed as it was, as thought-out. It made what came next feel like a politician’s stump speech. Too repeated, probably not true. “I had been in the Brotherhood—we still called it that then—two or three years. San Francisco was exhausted for me. Gratefully, I say only temporarily.” He wasn’t drinking his drink, hadn’t even lifted it to his nose to admire, just palmed it like the prop it was.

Jimmy wished he had it. He thought of a line to interject into the proceedings, to throw the other off balance, but decided instead to rear back on the couch, be cool. Let the man empty his bucket.

“I was alone. On the train, of course.” Whitehead looked at Angel. “The Coast Daylight. Of course, this was before the Coast Starlight, years before.” He waited. When Angel nodded, Whitehead’s eyes released him.

“I remember coming into Union Station at sunset. I remember the sound of it, the echo. I came outside, into that very striking Los Angeles sunset panorama. Spectacular. I was met at the station by a man, an actor whose name you would recognize, who of course was a Sailor, too. I admit I was a little starstruck. I had seen so many of his movies. And not all of them on the late show, I have to admit. He was waiting, parked at the curb in—”

Jimmy held up a finger, pointed at the air. “Jefferson Airplane,” he said. Les Paul was working allusions to a few classics into the set.

Whitehead put some steel in his voice. “I met Red Steadman that trip, that very night, as a matter of fact,” he said.

The name wiped the joke off Jimmy’s face. Walter E. C. “Red” Steadman was the leader of the Sailors to the south. He and Jimmy had had their clashes over the years. The young man and the old man. If they had made any kind of peace, it was an uneasy one.

Whitehead enjoyed the moment. And the next even more. “Of course, I was something of an emissary. Steadman wasn’t receiving me, Wayne Whitehead, but rather the one I represented, whose card I carried in my