"It's not quite so simple, I'm afraid," Wong answered. "I can get you away, and him, too—that's no problem." Paul stirred. It looked like a problem to him. Before he could say anything, the older man went on, "Getting you people away isn't the only reason I'm here, though. I'm here to try to make sure the Tongs and the Germans don't get their hands on the crosstime secret. That's number one."
"Nice to know I'm excess baggage," Paul said.
Sammy Wong grinned at him. "You're high-quality excess baggage, anyhow."
"Thanks a lot."
The Chinese man nodded, as if to say, Sure. Any time. Maybe he didn't notice the sarcasm. Maybe he did, but didn't want Paul to know he did. That struck Paul as more likely. It also made him want to strike Sammy Wong, preferably with a blunt instrument.
Instead, he went back to his room next door. It was fancy enough—no two ways about that. The carpet was thick enough for his shoes to disappear when he stepped down on it. The TV had a big screen—though the color wasn't as good as it would have been in the home timeline, and the picture was grainier.
No matter how big the TV was, it didn't show much he wanted to see. Newsmen going on about how wonderful the Kaiser was and how everything the Germans did was perfect weren't his idea of excitement. Quiz shows with excitable hosts were just as idiotic here as they were in the home timeline. Comedies struck him as anything but funny. Either the jokes were dumb or they were based on things you had to be from this world to get—or both.
That left sports. Soccer wasn't his cup of tea for killing time on TV. They played baseball and basketball here, too, but he also couldn't get thrilled about teams that weren't his own and players he'd never heard of.
He was, in a word, bored. In two words, very bored.
He even started to hate room service. The food was always good. But it always came from the same menu. You could tell it always came out of the same kitchen. No matter what he ordered, it seemed. . . familiar. A hamburger and greasy French fries from some mom-and-pop—Louie's, say—would have tasted like heaven.
Every time he looked out the window, the skyline reminded him that this wasn't his San Francisco. For the USA in this alternate, it was a first-rate city. But this USA was a second-rate country, and this San Francisco felt second-rate to him. The town he was used to bounced. This one . . . lurched.
Paul thought about asking Sammy Wong for permission to go out, just for a little while. He thought about it—and then he laughed at himself. He knew what the man from Crosstime Traffic would say. Wong would say no, that was what. He might say more than just no—he might say it so it sounded louder and more impressive than just no—but no was what it would boil down to.
And Paul didn't feel like hearing no. When he had to stop himself from kicking in the TV instead of just turning it off, he decided he had to get outside for a little while. Only for a little while, he told himself. Seeing more of the world than he could from his window, eating a hamburger from a place where he'd never been—he did know he shouldn't go back to Louie's or anywhere else in the neighborhood of Curious Notions—struck him as the most wonderful thing in the world.
Part of him knew that what he was thinking about wasn't the greatest idea in the world. The longer he stayed in the Palace Hotel, the less he cared about that part. Was he an animal in a cage? If he was, why hadn't Sammy Wong taken him to the zoo?
He knew why. In the zoo, people would look at him. Wong wanted to put him on ice and keep him on ice. Paul understood his reasons well enough. They made good sense. But their making sense wasn't enough to keep him from climbing the walls.
Only for a little while. The more that handful of words echoed inside his head, the better they sounded. After one last bowl of cioppino that tasted just like the other four bowls of cio'ppino he'd ordered, only for a little while sounded too good to resist.
Paul waited till after midnight. He wanted his keeper (that was how he was thinking of Sammy Wong by now) to be asleep. And he wanted the streets of San Francisco to be nice and quiet. If nobody was around when he took his little jaunt, nothing could go wrong.
He shut his door as quietly as he could. He walked down the hall to the elevator. A real, live elevator operator ran it. "Lobby," Paul said, and tipped him a nickel when he got out. The doorman didn't seem to think anything of someone heading out in the wee small hours. He opened the door with one hand while lifting his top hat from his head with the other.
It was chilly. It was foggy. Paul's breath came out in clouds. The street lights might have been ghosts of themselves. He stuck his hands in his pockets and ambled along. He could have been anybody out there, anybody at all. It felt wonderful.
Most of the shops and restaurants were closed. He did get that hamburger, though, at a place full of tough-looking men and the women who kept them company. Nobody gave him a second glance. He ate fast and got out, coughing from the cigarette smoke that hung in the air. People here smoked a lot more than they did in the home timeline. Maybe they didn't know how dangerous it was. Maybe they just didn't care.
He heard a soft clicking on the sidewalk behind him. Stray dog, he thought. A moment later, the dog came up beside him. It was almost the size of a Shetland pony. The instant he recognized it as an Alsatian, he realized it wasn't a stray. And he realized he was in trouble.
A hard hand fell on his shoulder. "You are Paul Gomes," a German-accented voice said. "Come wiuh me at once. You are under arrest."
Eleven
Somebody on one of the other shifts had lost a worker's folder. Lucy poked through all the logical places it might be. When it didn't turn up in any of them, she had to start thinking about illogical places. She checked the file for fired employees. It wasn't there. She checked the file for deceased employees—and there it was.
She couldn't imagine why anyone would have put it there. The woman whose file it was remained very much alive. Lucy worked a few stations away from her, and still saw her every day. But how things could get misfiled no longer surprised Lucy. She'd seen worse than this. She pulled out the file—at least it was in the right place alphabetically—and took it to Mrs. Cho.
"Here you are," she said, not without pride.
Her supervisor checked the name, then smiled. "Oh, good. I was afraid it was gone forever. That would have been a nuisance. Where did you find it?"
"Somebody put it in with the dead ones," Lucy answered.
Mrs. Cho laughed. "Haven't run into that for a while." The laugh and the smile that went with it vanished as if they'd never been. "If I knew who, I can think of a folder that would belong in the fired file."
She wasn't kidding. Lucy could tell. Mrs. Cho put up with inexperience and fumbling around. You had to, or every new worker would drive you nuts. But she would not stand for incompetence from people who should have known better. If they didn't shape up to suit her, they were gone. Sometimes she didn't even give them the chance to shape up. One mistake of the wrong kind was plenty.
"What now, Mrs. Cho?" Lucy had learned she should always look for something to do. It didn't have to be important. As long as it made her look busy, that was fine. The one thing the people over her couldn't stand was to see her sitting around and twiddling her thumbs.
Before her supervisor could answer, the front door flew open. It swung through an arc of 180 degrees and slammed into the wall. Half a dozen big men in trench coats and high-crowned caps that made them look even bigger charged into the room. Three of them carried pistols. The other three had submachine guns. "Hands high!" one of them shouted.
People dropped what they were doing—literally. Papers cascaded down onto the floor and splashed across it. Several clerks screamed. Everyone's fingers pointed straight toward the ceiling. All the other people in the big room looked as scared as Lucy felt.
"What is the meaning of this?" Mrs. Cho tried to sound as tough with the Feldgendarmerie men—they couldn't be anything else—as she did with the people who worked for her. She didn't have much luck. Her voice wobbled and s
queaked.
"We ask the questions," said the German who'd ordered hands raised. "Where is"—he paused to check a paper he pulled from his pocket—"Lucy Woo?"
Even before he spoke her name, Lucy knew it was coming. She had not a prayer of running or hiding. Every eye turned toward her. In a very small voice, she said, "Here I am."
The secret policeman looked at her. He looked at his five strapping friends. He was as big as any of them. Lucy barely came up to his shoulder. He started to laugh. "They sent lions after a mouse," he said.
I'll bite you if I can, Lucy thought. Shouting defiance at the Germans wasn't smart, though. All she said was, "I haven't done anything."
That set the Feldgendarmerie men laughing again. "The next person I hear who says, 'Oh, yes, I did what you say I did,' will be the first. If you listen to the ones we grab, they are so innocent it's a miracle God doesn't carry them off to heaven." Now his laugh took on a sinister ring. "God takes care of the innocent—and we take care of the rest. Come with us, if you please."
Mrs. Cho began, "Lucy is a very good worker and a very nice girl. She—"
With a wave of his submachine gun, the secret policeman cut her off. "If she is as sweet as you say, we won't keep her long. If" He bore down heavily on the word, then gestured with the weapon again. This time, he used it to point toward the door. Helplessly, Lucy went.
She wondered if they would put handcuffs on her. They didn't bother. That almost made her angry. They didn't think she was dangerous enough to worry about. It felt like an insult. The only trouble was, they were right.
They bundled her into an enormous car. It had to be enormous to hold all of them and her as well. It roared down the street. The driver leaned on the horn. That special scream meant everybody had to clear a path for the German car. People on foot and on bicycles and in other cars got out of the way in a hurry.
"I didn't do anything. I really didn't," Lucy quavered.
"Ha!" said the secret policeman who seemed to do the talking for this bunch. "You know Lawrence Gomes and his son. Don't try to tell me any different, or you'll be sorry. We got what we needed out of the older one. Now we're finding out what the younger one knows."
Lucy tried not to flinch in dismay. Paul, in the hands of the Feld-gendarmerie? She didn't want to believe it. She tried not to believe it. Maybe this fellow was lying to make her sing. That seemed the sort of thing the secret police would do.
But then she remembered that Paul was missing. His father and Stanley Hsu didn't know where he was. One logical reason they wouldn't was if he was in some Feldgendarmerie jail.
Maybe this one, Lucy thought as the car pulled up in front of a building with the red, white, and black German flag floating above it. The door opened. Three of the Feldgendarmerie men got out. "Now you," said the fellow who did the talking. Lucy obeyed. What else could she do? The rest of the secret policemen piled out behind her.
They could have safely brought a criminal mastermind into jail with that kind of firepower. For a terrified sixteen-year-old girl, it was overkill. They used it anyhow. Up the steps she went. One of the spike-helmeted guards at the top opened the thick, heavy door. In Lucy went. It closed behind her with a soft thud. She wondered if she would ever come out again.
Not for the first time, Paul wondered if the Germans were afraid of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. That was the only reason he could see that they weren't tearing chunks off of him. So far, the questioning had been on the mild side, as Feldgendarmerie questioning went. Of course, he had no guarantee it would stay that way.
The cell was about three meters on a side. The cot in one corner had its legs sunk into the concrete of the floor. It wasn't going anywhere. Aside from the cot, the cell held a toilet and a cold-water sink. That was it. The secret policemen hadn't given Paul a chance to shave. His beard, four days old now, was starting to itch.
He was starting to itch all over, in fact. With the best will in the world, you couldn't stay clean with only a cold-water sink and no soap. Maybe the Feldgendarmerie men thought he'd lose heart if he got dirty and scruffy. If he did, he intended to do his best not to let them know it.
Maybe they thought he'd lose heart if he got hungry, too. They fed him twice a day. It was slop. People in the home timeline complained about the lousy food prisoners got. Sometimes they wrote letters to the newspapers. They started e-mail campaigns on the Net. They staged public protests. If they'd had to eat these nasty stews, they would have decided what prisoners in the home timeline got wasn't so bad after all. This was better than starving, but not by much.
Worst of all was the boredom. Nobody else was in a cell Paul could see. Everything was quiet except for the clump of guards' boots against the floor. Paul could pace up and down or he could lie on the cot and grow moss. No TV. No radio. No nothing. Those horrible meals soon became the high points of his day. That was a really scary thought.
And then there were the times that weren't so boring. Those usually came in the middle of the night. He wondered if the Feldgendarmerie had watched too many old movies. They couldn't wake him up by shining a bright light in his face, because they never turned off the lights. But they did make a habit of waking him out of a deep sleep.
The door to the cell would fly open. "Raus!" they would shout. "Prisoner Gomes, come with us at once!" Paul was a sound sleeper. If they hadn't screamed his own name at him, he would have had trouble remembering who he was when he first woke up. They wanted him groggy and stupid when they questioned him. They had ways of getting what they wanted, too.
They'd slam him down into a hard chair in a dark room. Then they'd shine the bright light at him. They'd throw questions at him. Where did Curious Notions get its goods. What happened to all the produce it bought? What did he know about the Tongs? (Except they called them Oriental subversive organizations—regardless of the alternate, cops talked like that.)
Paul told them as little as he could. He pleaded ignorance. He was just a kid—how could he know anything important? They were walking around the edges of the crosstime secret. Unlike the people from the Tongs, who were looking for allies wherever they could find them, the Feldgendarmerie men didn't quite seem to know they were on the edge of it.
Or maybe they were just holding back. Bright lights and shouted questions were as far as they'd gone up till now. They hadn't tried hot things or pointed things or sharp things. They hadn't tried electricity. They hadn't tried drugs.
Good luck is where you find it, Paul thought after one of those sessions. Even as it was, he felt his brain had been turned inside out. But it could have been worse, and he knew it.
Once, the German asking the questions told Paul, "This is not what your father says to be the case."
"Why don't you ask him about it, then?" Paul answered. As far as he knew, he had told the truth here. The Feldgendarmerie man wanted to know the prices he'd been paying for Central Valley produce. That seemed harmless enough.
"I am asking you," the German said. Did his voice lack some of its usual snap? Paul thought so.
He said, "That's how I remember it. If Dad knows something I don't, it's news to me. Maybe he's the one who remembers wrong. Like I say, you can ask him about it."
"We have transcripts of what he said," the German replied. "He ... is not available for questioning right now."
"Why not? What did you do to him?" Paul enjoyed being able to ask questions instead of answering them. He knew the Tongs had got his father out of jail. He didn't know how they'd done it, but Sammy Wong had assured him that they had. He wondered if the man on the other side of the bright light would admit it.
He should have known better. The German said, "That is none of your business, and of no concern to you."
"He's my father," Pal protested. "Of course it's of concern to me. You've got a lot of nerve, telling me my own father is none of my business. What did you do to him? Did you make him disappear?"
Did you make him disappear? was a polite way to ask, Did you
kill him? Plenty of people "disappeared" from German jails. Paul happened to know Dad hadn't, or not that way. But the man questioning him didn't know he knew. If Paul could yank the fellow's chain, he would. Why not? The Feldgendarmerie man had sure been doing his best to yank his.
The German muttered something in his own language. Paul understood German. He thought the man said, Miserable kid. That made him feel better than he had since the Feldgendarmerie nabbed him. The secret policeman went back to English: "Your father has not disappeared. Not in the way you mean."
"Oh, yeah? Prove it," Paul said. "Let me see him. Then maybe I'll believe you."
More mutters in German. This time, Paul couldn't make out what they were. Then the secret policeman spoke to his pals in the room: "Take him back to his cell. He's being very uncooperative."
One of the other Feldgendarmerie men spoke in German: "You ought to use the wire and the thumbscrews. The punk would sing like a nightingale then."
Paul didn't want them to know he could follow their language. Keeping a blank look on his face was one of the hardest things he'd ever done. They could torture him whenever they wanted to. What would stop them? Not a thing.
But the man doing the questioning said, "Nein. Not yet, anyhow. Things are more . . . delicate than you realize, Horst." That also came in German. Not showing relief was as hard as not showing fear. Paul didn't know why things were delicate, but he was sure glad they were.
The Feldgendarmerie men hauled him back to the cell. The door clanged shut. Compared to the bright light glaring into his face, those empty cells across from his didn't look so bad. He wondered what was going on outside the jail. By now, Sammy Wong would know he was missing. Wong would probably know why, too. Would Dad? Would Lucy? What were they doing to get him out? Were they doing anything? Or were they saying, Serves you right for being dumb and leaving him in here till he rotted?
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