you that, didn’t I?” She looks worried.
Of course she did. His little lunatic says she likes disappearing in a crowd. What sane woman would ever want that? Perhaps H.G. Wells could make some hay of it, but Daniel would have liked to titillate the Smart Set by squiring the notorious madam on one arm, his lovely Chinese mistress on the other. Jessie as Jessie, very well, but Zhu costumed as a royal concubine clad in jade satin. Now that would have been something.
But Zhu got her way. She usually does, laughs one of his voices.
Daniel abandons the pole and squeezes onto the bench beside her. “I am deeply unhappy with your crude charade, miss.”
“I’m deeply unhappy with your cocaine habit, Daniel. I’m deeply unhappy with your drinking.”
He claps his hand to his forehead. “For the thousandth time, I am cured of the drink.”
His irritation spirals quickly down into anger. She is as plain as a pretzel except for one small detail he notices for the first time in the gaslight of California Street. He spots it at once. So does Jessie, seated beside Zhu.
“What on earth have you got there?” he says.
“Say, missy,” Jessie says.
Pinned to Zhu’s collar is the most charming bauble Daniel has ever seen, rendered in the Art Nouveau style with dazzling genius. A golden butterfly with diamonds and bits of multicolored glass. A nude woman poses at the center, a lovely slim thing like a dancer. He’s mesmerized by her languid little face, and he reaches to touch the brooch at the same time as Jessie, his hand colliding with hers.
Zhu shields her collar from them both, holding her hands over the treasure.
“Sure and what is that?” Jessie says, prying one of Zhu’s hands away.
“It’s called an aurelia,” Zhu says.
“Where’d you get it?”
“You like it?”
“It’s blowed in the glass. But it hardly suits your costume. Here, let me wear it,” Jessie wheedles. “Look, I gotta a little vacant spot on the neckline of my dress.”
“Nope. I can’t let it out of my sight.”
“Hmph! You can look at me all night. Oh, do let me have it.”
“Why? The diamonds aren’t much and the rest is just glass.”
“Why?” Jessie says. “You are forever asking why. Why why why?”
“Why?” Zhu says.
“Because she’s a nude and I gotta have it.”
“How about you, Daniel?” Zhu says. “You like it, too?”
“It’s corking,” he says and means it. “Quite decadent.”
“Decadent how?” she says urgently, as if his answer will prove something to her.
“Well, there she is”—he touches a fingertip to the tiny golden woman—“a woman borne away by an insect. The lowest creature on earth, though of course a butterfly is beautiful.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I’d say that the aurelia is Woman herself swept away by the brute force of destiny.” For a moment the cable car is silent except for the deep metallic humming of the cables churning beneath them. “That is all.” He needs another spoonful of Mortimer’s private mix for more inspiration. “Oh, and she looks just like you, miss.”
“No, she doesn’t!” Zhu looks horrified. “She’s white, Caucasian. A Gibson girl.”
“I beg to differ. She is golden, just like you. Look at the slant of her eyes, her slender figure. She is you.”
“Where’d you get it?” Jessie asks again.
“In a totally unexpected place. I’m thinking Chiron knew that from the start,” Zhu replies. “So that means the aurelia must be an enigma. A time enigma.”
“Who is Chiron?” Daniel demands, enraged. She belongs to him. “Where is this Chiron?”
“Not where, when. The red-haired man Chiron,” she says to Jessie, who nods. Jessie has heard about this man, apparently. “From six hundred years in the future.”
* * *
The cable car grinds to a halt at the crest of California Street, finding level ground at the peak of Nob Hill. Daniel helps Jessie down, but Zhu leaps off on her own, as spry as a boy. Daniel stands breathlessly and looks around. These astonishing mansions of the fabled rich—from mining, railroads, banking, sugar, so much money Daniel’s teeth ache—are really only town houses, and half the time the houses are empty. The original builders or the builders’ heirs are off to New York, Europe, or their country villas down the peninsula with acres of lawns for privacy. Not much privacy atop Snob Hill. These mansions rub elbows with each other and everyone else passing by on the street.
Daniel crosses the street to the Hopkins mansion. They say old man Hopkins never lived here at all, though he poured a fortune into the monstrous construction. Part