"Interesting." Stanley Hsu nodded. "We didn't make a mistake when we got that clerk's job for you, did we? You're plenty clever enough to do it. If you had a better education, you could do much more than that. I'm sure of it."
Lucy didn't say anything. She was lucky to have got as much schooling as she had. Most of her childhood friends had gone to work even before she did. If your family needed money, what were you going to do? Whatever you had to.
"Why did you want to know what he'd say to that question?" she asked.
"Because I was curious." But that was no answer, and Stanley Hsu seemed to realize it wasn't. He tried again: "Because I think you're right, and he doesn't belong to San Francisco. The things he sells don't belong to San Francisco, either. They hardly seem to belong to this world at all."
What was that supposed to mean? "They don't come from Mars," Lucy said. The Germans had sent unmanned probes to Mars. It was cold and almost airless and good for nothing—certainly not worth having people go there.
"No, they don't," Stanley Hsu agreed. "But they don't come from any country on Earth, either—not even from Germany. The Feldgendarmerie wouldn't be so interested in Curious Notions if it just smuggled German goods. They don't know where those people are getting them, either."
"Paul said he and his father make them in the basement," Lucy said.
"Heh." Stanley Hsu made a noise that sounded like a laugh but wasn't. For the first time, he looked angry. "He was playing with you. He plays with us. He plays with the Feldgendarmerie, too. What will it take before he sees that this is not a game?"
"I don't understand," Lucy said.
"Maybe a man will laugh at the Triads if he does not know them well," the jeweler said. "I can see that, especially if the man is not Chinese. But who in his right mind laughs at the Feldgendarmerie? No one. The Kaiser's secret police are no laughing matter. The whole world knows it. / take the Feldgendarmerie seriously, and I have strong friends on my side. Do the people from Curious Notions? It doesn't seem so, not to me."
It didn't seem so to Lucy, either. She said, "Maybe that's why I had trouble believing Paul when he said he came from San Francisco. If he did, he'd be more like everybody else."
"Just so," Stanley Hsu said. "He would be more like everybody else, and the things Curious Notions sells would be more like what you could buy from everybody else. Since they are not. . ." He didn't go on. .
"Well, what, in that case?" Lucy asked.
For a moment, Stanley Hsu looked just as confused as she felt. "I don't know," he admitted. "But you have to understand that while I am a captain, I am not a general. Other people will hear what you've said, and they will decide what to do next. Once they decide, they will tell me what to do, and I will do it."
He took Lucy by surprise. He gave her orders as if he had every right to do it. So there were people who gave him orders the same way? She hadn't imagined that. He'd seemed a very big fish to her. But she was getting the idea that this new ocean in which she found herself was a much larger and much more dangerous place than she'd ever even dreamt of.
Six
As a customer closed the door behind him, Paul suddenly said, "Hey, Dad, let's take the afternoon off."
"What?" His father frowned. "Close on Sunday afternoon? You know how much money you want to throw away?"
"For once, I don't care," Paul answered. "Let's go somewhere. When I'm here these days, I've always got the feeling somebody's watching me."
"I think you're worrying too much," Dad said.
"I don't," Paul said. "All the growers who don't want to sell to us, those questions Lucy Woo was asking, and Inspector Weidenreich, too. .. It's too much, Dad. I feel like I'm in the crosshairs all the time."
"No need to start getting nervous till they start planting microphones," Dad said with the sort of calm that annoyed Paul instead of making him feel better. His father went on, "They haven't done that yet. Our bug sniffers would have picked it up if they had. Will you tell me I'm wrong?"
"No." Paul shook his head. He couldn't, and he knew it. "I still want to get out of here, though. There's a big soccer game at Kezar Stadium. Can we go?"
Dad yawned. Paul understood that. In the home timeline, soccer was still a minor sport in the United States. People noticed it at World Cup time, then forgot about it for another four years. Things were different here. Whether you backed the Seals or the Missions said a lot about where you lived, how much money you made, and what you did for a living. When the two teams met, it was almost like a civil war in the city.
But then Dad said, "Well, why not? A lot of people who might be customers will go the the game instead."
"Yeah," Paul said, and no more. Better to let his father talk himself into going.
Kezar Stadium was in Golden Gate Park. It was a shabby old oval. It had been built back before Germany beat the USA. No-body'd spent a whole lot of money on it since. But as long as it didn't fall down, they'd keep playing games in it.
Seals backers wore orange and black. They carried trumpets to make noise for their heroes. Missions fans wore brown or tan. They brought drums, all kinds of drums, into the stadium. Both sets of fanatics sneered at ordinary people like Paul and his father who didn't dress up.
The stadium crawled with cops, on foot and on horseback. About every other year, a Seals-Missions match caused a riot, cops or no cops. Oddly, though, Paul felt safer here than he did at Curious Notions. The police here weren't worried about him. All they cared about were rowdies. If police back near Curious Notions noticed him, they were liable to run him in for questioning about the business. He didn't want to have to worry about that for a while.
The trumpets roared and brayed when the Seals—also in orange and black—ran out onto the soccer pitch. Paul's father clapped for the Seals. The people who rooted for them were mostly the ones who were better off. Paul cheered for the Missions. Drums thundered when they came out. More people backed them, but the ones who pulled for the Seals could have bought and sold the Missions fans.
Back and forth across the pitch the two teams ran. They didn't like each other any better than their backers did. The play was often rough. The referee did what he could to keep things on the up and up, but he couldn't be everywhere at once. And players on both sides hammed it up for all they were worth whenever there was anything close to a foul. That didn't make the ref's job any easier.
When the Missions scored first, the drums made the stadium shake. People in brown danced in the aisles. The Seals fans sat there in glum silence. Paul thought the Missions got another goal a few minutes later. The referee waved it off, saying they were offside. Boos rained down on him. Only a few bottles came flying out of the stands, though.
Just before halftime, the Seals tied the match. The bicycle kick their forward scored with was so pretty, even the Missions fans couldn't boo. The trumpets wailed. Most of the people who blew them could only make noise with them—they couldn't really play. They made a lot of noise. Paul's head began to throb.
In the second half, the Seals scored again. Their rooters looked smug, as if they'd expected nothing less. They were the sort of people who would have been Yankee fans in the home timeline. It was like rooting for Microsoft.
Minutes leaked off the clock. The Missions fans pounded on their drums. They shouted at their team to do something—to do anything. They lost more often than they won, on the soccer pitch as well as in life. With about ten minutes left in the match, though, the Missions banged home another goal.
It ended in a 2-2 tie. Soccer here saved overtime for championship games. This one wasn't. The draw sent everyone home . . . not too unhappy. Drums thumped and trumpets wailed as people filed out of the stadium.
"That wasn't bad," Paul said.
"Not too," his father agreed. The lines for eastbound buses were long. People filled up one bus at a time. The ones who couldn't get on waited for the next bus to pull up. They were more patient about waiting in line here than they were in the home timeline.
They needed to be, too—they had to do it far more often.
At last, Paul and his father dropped their nickels into the fare box. All the seats were already taken. They stood in the aisle and hung on to the rail when the bus lurched into motion.
It didn't stay very crowded for long. After it left Kezar Stadium, more people got off than got on. Paul and his father got to sit down about three stops before the one where they would leave. Paul thought that was pretty funny.
Curious Notions was a block and a half from the bus stop. Somebody in an upstairs apartment was singing the Missions' fight song. Paul winced. Whoever the singer was, his enthusiasm couldn't make up for lack of talent. Dad put his hands over his ears for a minute.
When they got to the shop, the door stood open a crack. They looked at each other. Each of them said, "You forgot to lock it." They both shook their heads. "Uh-oh," Paul said. Dad's hand dove into his pocket. Owning a gun was a serious crime in this world. That didn't stop anybody from doing it. It did give the Germans an excuse for making sentences longer when they decided they needed to.
Dad went in first. Paul stayed close behind him. His eyes went up and down the aisles. He knew the stock well. Nothing seemed to be missing. When he said so, though, his father looked through him and asked, "How do you know what people were looking for?"
Nobody was in the back room. Nothing there had been stolen, either. Paul began to breathe a little easier. And whoever the burglar was, he hadn't found the secret stairway down to the subbase-ment. That had its own alarm.
"Not too bad," Paul said.
"Not yet," his father answered. "We haven't been up to the apartment."
"Why would anybody want to take stuff out of there with all the goodies down below?"
"To find out who we are," Dad said. "I told you—we didn't know why we had a break-in. I think we've found out it wasn't ordinary thieves."
"Oh." Paul shut up, feeling foolish.
His father had the pistol out as they went up the stairs. Nobody was in the apartment, either. But that was where the thief had been snooping, all right. It looked as if a tornado had gone through it. All the drawers were spilled on the floor. So were the clothes from the closets. So were the medicine cabinets in the bathroom. Even the pillows had been slit open.
Paul called the burglars the nastiest name he could think of. His father nodded. "Yes, but which set?" he asked. "The Kaiser's chums, or your Lucy's friends?"
"She's not my Lucy, and I don't think they're her friends," Paul said.
"No? Would they be bothering us if you hadn't got friendly with her?"
"They might," Paul answered. "You were the one who gave her father's name to the Germans, after all."
Dad waved that away. Paul might have known he would. His father was good at ignoring things he didn't want to hear. He said, "They must have noticed us before that." He'd just shot his own argument about Lucy in the foot, but he ignored that, too. He might well have been right about people noticing them before. Paul remembered that Lucy had said her father wondered where Curious Notions got its goods. But was it certain, the way Dad said? Paul didn't think so.
He asked, "Did they get anything that proves we're not from here?"
"We'd better find out, hadn't we?" His father didn't sound happy at all. The rules said you weren't supposed to leave the locals any clues you came from a different timeline. But when you got comfortable somewhere, did you always pay attention to the rules? Curious Notions' merchandise bent them as far as they would go. And Paul was pretty sure he'd been careless. He would have bet his father had, too. Dad always thought he had the answers. Sometimes he did. Sometimes . ..
They cleaned up the mess the burglars had left. Not much was missing. They both saw that right away. It too said the thieves had been after information, not money or other valuables. And no ordinary burglar would have knocked everything out of the medicine chest in the bathroom. Paul and his father were all right there. All their razors and soap and toothbrushes and toothpaste and such came from this alternate.
"I think we're okay," Dad said at last. He started to laugh.
"What's so funny?" Paul asked.
"It's not like we're going to call the cops," his father answered. "That'd just give them the excuse to tear this place to pieces, too."
"Oh," Paul said, and then, "Yeah." And then he started laughing, too. He didn't like that very much, but it was pretty funny.
Lucy's new boss, Mrs. Cho, was a lot nicer than Hank Simmons had ever been. She never complained about the work Lucy did—Lucy made sure she never had reason to complain. But she did start to ask questions like, "Are you sure you're happy here, dear?"
"I'm just fine," Lucy answered the first time she heard that.
When Mrs. Cho began asking it three or four times a day, though, Lucy began to suspect a trend. The second she did something to give her supervisor an excuse, she'd be back at her sewing machine. Either that, or Mrs. Cho would just up and fire her.
It wasn't fair. She'd made a bargain with Stanley Hsu, and she'd kept her end of it. He and his friends were supposed to do the same thing. One evening after work, she stopped at his jewelry store on the way home. He was speaking Chinese with another man in an expensive suit when she walked in. They both fell silent. Lucy got the idea they hadn't been talking about diamonds or jade.
"Hello, Miss Woo," the jeweler said, very little warmth in his voice. "I didn't expect to see you here today."
"I did what you wanted," Lucy said. "I did just what you told me to do. Now it looks like I'm liable to lose my job. That wasn't part of the deal we made."
The stranger in the fancy suit gave her the nastiest smile she'd ever seen. "And what are you going to do about it?" By the way he talked, she might have been a spoiled mushroom he'd found in his salad.
Later, she realized he was trying to scare her. At the moment, all he did was make her mad. "What will I do?" she echoed. "I'll tell you what. I'll tell all my friends and neighbors that you can't trust the Triads, that's what. They make deals and then they go back on them."
"I don't think you want to do that," the man said.
"I don't think you want to make me do that," Lucy retorted. "If you break your word, how are you any better than the Germans?"
He stared at her. How big a big shot was he? When was the last time anybody had stood up to him? Unless Lucy missed her guess, it was a long, long time ago.
Stanley Hsu said something in Chinese. The man in the expensive suit answered in the same language. The harsh rattle of syllables meant nothing to Lucy. Her parents didn't speak Chinese, either. Her mother said her mother's mother and father had sometimes used it when they didn't want Granny to know what was going on. For most people in San Francisco's Chinatown these days, it was a closed book. But not for these two, obviously.
After a little back-and-forth in the old language, Stanley Hsu switched to English: "She's right, and you know it."
His—friend?—gave Lucy another Waiter! Look what I found in my salad! look. "She ought to get what she deserves for talking to me like that," he snapped, also in English.
"She ought to get what she deserves for meeting her end of the bargain," the jeweler said.
"She didn't tell us anything we didn't know already," the well-dressed man snorted.
"She asked the question we told her to ask. If she didn't get the answers we thought she might. . . well, that's information, too," Stanley Hsu said.
The other man said something in Chinese. Lucy had no idea what it meant. She thought she could make a pretty good guess, though. He glared at her again. "You're nothing but a nuisance. You know that?"
"Easy enough for you to say so. You're not worried about your job. You're not worried about going hungry." Lucy saw he had on a wedding ring. "Does your wife wear shoes I helped to make? How many pairs of them has she got? You make me want to throw something at you. You've got all that money, and you look down your nose at me because I don't." Her nose stung and her eyes watered, but
she would have jumped off a cliff before she gave him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
He stared at her once more, this time as if he hadn't seen her before. Maybe he hadn't, not really. Slowly, he said, "You've got more nerve than you know what to do with."
Lucy only shrugged. What she wanted to do was find something large and hard and hit him over the head with it. Stanley Hsu spoke to him: "You go on and on about accounting. Keeping this bargain will be a lot cheaper than breaking it."
Fury filled Lucy. The man with the fancy suit had wanted to break a promise because breaking it saved money? He deserved getting clobbered, in that case. Then she realized Stanley Hsu was on her side. He thought it was funny that she was giving the other man a hard time.
"I—" The man in the expensive clothes stopped short. He'd just figured out the same thing Lucy had. It took him a little longer, but not much. "All right. All right." By the way he said it, it wasn't even close to all right, but he couldn't do anything about it. "We'll leave that alone then. You think you're so smart." He added something else in Chinese that sounded hot, then stormed out of the shop.
Stanley Hsu eyed Lucy. "Do you have any idea who that was?"
She shrugged. "Not really. He's somebody who can afford a nice suit." As far as she was concerned, that was a point against the man who'd just left, not a point for him.
"He's—" The jeweler shook his head. "You don't need to know his name. What you don't know, you can't tell. But he's important— he's very important—in the Triads. I would never have the nerve to talk to him like that." Lucy thought he was done, but after a moment he went on, "And you're right—he can afford a nice suit. He can buy and sell me, I'll tell you that."
Lucy had looked at the prices in the shop. She'd looked at the pieces that didn't have prices, too, the really expensive ones. Stanley Hsu had more money than she'd ever dreamt of. To imagine someone could buy and sell him the way he could buy and sell the Woo family . ..
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