Curious Notions ct-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Nobody in the home timeline would listen to a kid complaining about his old man.

  But Paul couldn't let it go without saying something. All he could think of was, "I sure hope you're right."

  "I'm not worried," his father said. That didn't reassure Paul as much as Dad might have liked. His father hardly ever worried. He was always sure he was right. And he was right a lot of the time. Even Paul had to admit that. But he wasn't right as often as he thought he was.

  A customer did come in. Paul and his father stopped sniping at each other. They sold the local a fancy tape deck. People in this alternate thought it was fancy, anyway. It was a long way behind the state of the art in the home timeline. Everything there was digital, and had been for most of a hundred years.

  Inspector Weidenreich didn't show up at Curious Notions that day. Dad looked smug. Paul ignored him. Twenty minutes before they closed, he walked around the corner to buy a couple of hot dogs at Louie's, where he went a lot of the time. Everybody here called them franks or wieners, but they were hot dogs, all right. When he came back to the store, a skinny marmalade cat meowed at him. He tossed it a chunk of hot dog. It sniffed suspiciously at the meat, then gobbled it up.

  "They're as bad as beggars on two legs," his father said when he went inside. "Now it'll expect a handout every time."

  "Well, so what?" Paul answered. "Maybe I'll adopt it for as long as I'm here."

  "Just so you don't try to bring it back to the home timeline," Dad said. "For all I know, it may be a boy. It'd make Crosstime Traffic have kittens either way, though." He gestured. "Take those upstairs, will you? We're supposed to look like we're a business. We can't do that if you're standing there feeding your face."

  From what Paul had seen, at least half the shopkeepers in this alternate's San Francisco ate while they were open. If they didn't, they wouldn't be able to eat at all. Again, though, life was too short to argue. He started toward the stairway.

  The bell over the front door rang before he'd taken more than three steps. He looked back over his shoulder, then stopped. There stood Lucy Woo, a large, closed basket in her hand. "Hello," Paul said.

  She nodded shyly. "Hello. I wanted to thank you—I wanted to thank both of you—for helping to get my father away from the Feld-gendarmerie." She nodded again, this time to Paul's father. She plainly worked hard at being polite.

  Dad nodded back, even though he hadn't had thing one to do with getting Lucy's father out of jail. "It was nothing," he said. Considering what he'd done—considering that he'd got her father into trouble in the first place—that was true enough for him.

  "We were glad to do it," Paul said. He had been, anyway.

  She hefted the basket. "I brought you something. I hope you enjoy it."

  "You didn't have to do that!" Paul exclaimed. She'd told him where she worked. He had a pretty good idea of how much she'd make. If it was ten dollars a week, he would have been amazed. She couldn't afford much in the way of presents.

  With dignity, she said, "I think I did. You did something special for my family and me. This is the least we can do to show we're grateful."

  Paul realized he couldn't turn down the present, whatever it was. That would be a deadly insult. His father had figured out the same thing a couple of steps ahead of him. "Thank you very much, Miss Woo," Dad said. "This is really kind of you." He did everything but go over and kiss her hand. Dad could be charming when he wanted to, sure enough—charming to everybody but Paul.

  Lucy came into the shop and set the basket on the counter. "Open it, please," she said.

  Dad waved to Paul. He might have been saying, This is your fault—you take care of it. Had they been by themselves, Paul would have had some things to say about that. He couldn't say them with Lucy there. He flipped back the basket's hinged lid, hoping she hadn't had to buy the container with the present.

  The biggest lobster he'd ever seen stared back at him. It had to weigh at least five pounds—maybe closer to ten. Rubber bands held its claws closed. It was still wiggling a little; it had come out of the sea very recently. "I got it at Fisherman's Wharf," Lucy said. "Throw it in a big pot of water and it will be wonderful."

  How many benjamins would a lobster this size cost in the home timeline? Lots—Paul was sure ofthat. They thought in terms of dollars here. It had to cost two or three, maybe even five. Five dollars in the home timeline was a handful of little aluminum coins, worth next to nothing. Five dollars here . . . Five dollars here was a good part of a week's pay for Lucy.

  Quietly, Paul said, "This is too much. You didn't need to."

  "For helping my father?" Lucy shook her head. "It's not enough. I wish I could do more."

  "Thank you very much," Dad said. "My son is right, I think— this wasn't anything you needed to do. But it was very kind of you anyhow. If you like, we will put it in the icebox today and cook it tomorrow. That way, you and your family can come over and share it with us."

  Paul wished he'd come up with that. Yes, his father could be smooth when he wanted to, no doubt about it. He just didn't waste any smoothness on Paul.

  But Lucy Woo drew herself up straight with pride. She still wasn't very tall, but she carried herself like a duchess. "No, thank you," she replied. "The lobster is for you. Taking any of it away wouldn't be right."

  Arguing with her would have been a waste of breath. Even Paul could see that. She'd done what she thought she was supposed to do, and she wouldn't let anything or anybody change her mind. Paul's father managed to be gracious about it: "All right, then. Thanks again. But we'll think of you when we eat it."

  "Think of my father, too, please." With a stiff little nod, Lucy turned and left Curious Notions. Neither Paul nor his father tried to take the last word from her.

  The four and a half dollars Lucy had spent on the lobster for Paul Gomes and his father left a hole in the family budget. She didn't care, and neither did her mother or her father. Some debts were too important to stay unpaid. And, with Father back, the Woos would make up the money sooner or later.

  Work went on. Work always went on. She couldn't get away from it. Hardly anyone in this whole downtrodden country could. Plenty of people put in more than her sixty hours a week, and made less money for their time. As these things went, her family had been pretty lucky till Father fell foul of the Feldgendarmerie.

  Lucy wanted to walk past Curious Notions to find out if she could smell the cooking lobster. She made herself stay away. She'd given the gift. Paul and his father had accepted it. It was theirs now. What they did with it was their business.

  Three days after she gave it to them, she was walking home from work when a Chinese man in his late twenties coming the other way bumped into her. "I'm very sorry," he said.

  "It's all right—no harm done," Lucy told him.

  "Please accept m apologies." He pulled a little leather case from the hip pocket of his jeans. "Here is my card. If I can do anything for you, you only need to ask. Sorry again to bother you." He tipped his wide-brimmed hat and hurried away.

  STANLEY HSU, FINE JEWELRY, the card said. The address, on John Street, was only a couple of blocks from her father's shop. The card also had several Chinese characters Lucy couldn't read.

  And it had a note, written in neat, small hand. Please come tomorrow evening at eight o'clock. Very important! Lucy stared at that. As far as she could see, it could mean only one thing. Stanley Hsu hadn't run into her by accident. He'd wanted it to look like an accident to anyone who happened to see it, but it wasn't. He'd done it just so he could give her this card.

  "Why?" Lucy said out loud. Then she wanted to clap both hands over her mouth, but she didn't. She felt like a fool, ruining the secrecy he'd worked so hard to keep. But the question that had burst from her still needed answering. Why did Stanley Hsu want her to come to his shop, and why did he need to keep it a secret?

  Lucy put the card in her handbag. She tried to forget it the rest of the way home. She didn't remember the note till after supper. (Supp
er was only rice and vegetables. The lobster would take its toll on the budget for weeks—but the gift needed giving.) Then she took the card out of the purse and showed it to her mother and father.

  Her father scratched his head. "I've heard of Stanley Hsu, though I don't think I've ever said more than a couple of words to him. He has a good business. But why would he want to talk to you? Why would he give you the message that way?"

  Her mother pointed to the Chinese characters on the card. "I think it has to do with the Triads," she said.

  'The Triads?" Lucy and her father both stared. She asked, "Are they real?"

  Back in the old days, the days before the Germans conquered the United States, the Triads had been very important in Chinese San Francisco. Outsiders usually called them Tongs. They were social clubs, but they were much more than social clubs, too. They helped poor members. They loaned money—often at poisonous interest rates, sometimes not, depending on who was getting it. They bought and sold things. Not everything they bought and sold was legal. Sometimes they fought among themselves. People still talked about the Tong Wars. And they'd had connections that reached all the way back to China.

  After the Germans took over, they'd tried to put down the Triads. They'd made them illegal. The Americans had done that, too, but the Feldgendarmerie went after the Triads harder than American police ever had. They'd executed Triad leaders, or men they said were Triad leaders. Whatever the Triads did these days—if they did anything—they did quietly, in an underground way.

  "They're real, all right," Lucy's mother said. Reluctantly, her father nodded. Her mother went on, "They're just. . . careful. They have to be."

  "I never heard that Stanley Hsu was connected to them," her father said.

  "If you heard things like that, the Kaiser's men would hear them, too," her mother answered. That made some sense, but only some. Such logic, if it was logic, could justify almost anything. Mother went on, "Besides, if it's not Triad business, what could it be?"

  "But why would the Triads care about me?" Lucy asked.

  Her mother hesitated. She had a hard time seeing an answer to that. So did Lucy—a very hard time. But her father snapped his fingers. "Curious Notions!" he said. "It has to be Curious Notions."

  "Why?" Lucy said. "The people there aren't Chinese. They don't have anything to do with us—or they didn't, till the Germans arrested you."

  "That's all true, honey," Charlie Woo said. "But something else is true, too—something I've talked about before. The people at Curious Notions sell things nobody else can match. Nobody. You think that doesn't make other people curious? It makes me curious, let me tell you. But I can't do anything about it. The Triads can."

  "So you think I should go, then?" Lucy said.

  "Oh, yes!" Her father and mother both spoke at the same time. Their voices both rose in a peculiar way.

  They're frightened, Lucy realized. They're scared of what might happen if I don't go. How much did they know about the Triads? How much of what they knew had they kept to themselves? Quite a bit, it looked like.

  "All right," she said. "I'll go." Her parents let out identical sighs of relief.

  She wished Stanley Hsu hadn't picked a time after supper. To get to his shop by eight o'clock, she had to gulp down her noodles and vegetables and dash out the door. That left her mother stuck with the dishes. Mother didn't say a word. If that didn't prove how important she thought going was, nothing ever would.

  Twilight deepened as Lucy walked over to John Street. She would have to come home in the dark. She didn't like that, either. The air was cool and moist. The streetlights that worked had halos around them. She thought the night would be foggy. Sometimes tourists came to San Francisco thinking that, since it was California, of course it would be dry and hot. They often got a nasty surprise.

  Lucy almost went right past Stanley Hsu's shop. It was only half a storefront wide, and had his name on the door in the tiniest of letters. The door also held those Chinese characters. Did they really have something to do with the Triads? Lucy only shrugged. She couldn't tell, not to save her life. But she'd find out, or thought she would.

  She opened the door. It had a bell set above it, just like the one in her father's shop—and the one in Curious Notions, come to that. The familiar clink made her a little less nervous. Stanley Hsu smiled at her from behind the counter. "Welcome," he said. "Look around a little, if you care to."

  'Thank you," Lucy answered. His card said FINE JEWELRY, and it wasn't kidding. Strings of pearls gleamed, as if by moonlight. Carved jade and ivory stood on glass shelves. Gold shone everywhere. Diamonds glittered. Rubies and sapphires and emeralds glowed: tiny explosions of deep, rich color. There were hardly any price tags. If you needed to ask, you couldn't afford it. Even so ... Wistfully, she said, "It's beautiful."

  "You are too kind," the jeweler murmured with a smile that looked modest but was really full of pride.

  "What do you want with me?" Lucy didn't feel like beating around the bush. "Why did you pick such a strange way of asking me to come here?"

  "I have to be careful," he said, which didn't tell her anything. After a moment's pause, he added, "You never can tell who may be watching, or when."

  "The Feldgendarmerie, you mean?" Lucy asked.

  "Yes, the Feldgendarmerie." Stanley Hsu nodded. "And maybe others." He made a pagoda of his fingertips. "Would you be kind enough to tell me what you know of the people who run the business called Curious Notions?"

  Lucy took a deep breath. It wasn't as if she hadn't expected the question. All the same, she needed a real effort to shake her head the way she'd planned. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hsu, but I don't think I want to do that."

  "Oh?" Stanley Hsu didn't lose his smile or his manners. "Perhaps you would be good enough to explain why not?"

  "They helped my family," Lucy said simply. "I'm not going to do anything that would get them in trouble. If that's why you asked me to come, I'd better leave."

  "Please wait." If he'd made it sound like an order, she would have got out of there as fast as she could, but he didn't. She didn't think he would do anything nasty if she stayed, and so, warily, she did. He let out a long sigh. "It could be dangerous to me to reveal too many of my affairs to you. It could also be dangerous to you to hear too much."

  "It's already dangerous for me," Lucy said. "For my father, too."

  The jeweler dipped his head. It was almost a bow. "That is true. I cannot deny it. All right. I will tell you . . . something. I will not tell you everything, though."

  "Well, of course not. You'd be crazy if you did," Lucy said.

  Stanley Hsu took a deep breath of his own. "How would you like to see the United States a free country once more, out from under the Kaiser's thumb?"

  Again, the question didn't startle Lucy all that much. But it was treason, nothing else but. Stanley Hsu had taken her into his confidence, sure enough. If she told the Feldgendarmerie he'd asked her that, he was a dead man. She said, "I don't know. Is it even possible? Wouldn't the Germans squash us flat if we tried? They've done it before. They have so many things we don't."

  "They have a higher technology than we do," Stanley Hsu said, which was a fancier way of repeating Lucy's comment. He went on,

  "They have the highest technology in the world, and they work hard to keep it that way. There are some places in... There are some places that are trying to catch up, but they haven't yet."

  "Some places in China?" Lucy asked. "Some places with connections to San Francisco?" She didn't ask if he was one of those connections. That seemed plain enough as things were.

  He gave her another smile, which did surprise her. "Since you've already figured that out on your own, you save me from a lot of troublesome explanation." She hadn't figured it out on her own—her mother had helped a lot. But she didn't have to say so to Stanley Hsu. Smiling still, he continued, "Yes, what you say is true. Because China is so far away from Germany, the Kaiser can't keep an eye on everything that goes on there. But
now I have to come back to the people at Curious Notions. I am sorry, but I do."

  "Why?" Lucy asked bluntly.

  "Because, by what they sell, they can get hold of things made with a technology higher than Germany knows anything about," Stanley Hsu answered. "We want to know where. We want to know how."

  Lucy found herself nodding. Her father had said pretty much the same thing. He hadn't put it the same way—Stanley Hsu talked like a man with a fancy education. But when you boiled it down, there wasn't much difference. Lucy nodded once more, this time to the jeweler. "I'm with you so far."

  "Good." Again, Stanley Hsu sounded as if he meant it. That made Lucy want to like him, want to trust him. She knew neither might be a good idea, but she wanted to anyway. He said, "As far as we know, they sell only toys: radios and televisions and phonographs and portable music players. But those are all better—much better—than what comes out of Berlin. What sort of serious things do they have, if their toys are so fine?"

  What did he mean by serious things? Calculating machines? Weapons? What else would matter to people trying to shake off the Germans? Lucy told the truth: "I don't know about any ofthat."

  "I didn't think you did," Stanley Hsu replied. "But who would have a better chance of finding out than you do?"

  Lucy turned and started for the door. Over her shoulder, she said, "I'm sorry you've wasted your time, Mr. Hsu. I'm not going to spy on them, and that's that."

  "Don't you want your country to be free?" the jeweler demanded.

  "If you're asking this kind of thing from me, would you make it free?" Lucy asked in turn. "Or would you just turn it into China's cat's-paw instead of Germany's?"

  Stanley Hsu looked astonished. At first, Lucy thought that was because she'd had the nerve to ask him the question. Then she realized he'd never asked it of himself. People—she didn't know who— had told him things, and he'd believed them. Was he suddenly wondering whether he should have?

  "You are a remarkable girl. . . uh, young woman," he said after a long, long pause.