Curious Notions ct-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "I don't know anything about that. I don't care anything about that," Lucy answered with a shrug. "I do know my father taught me never to buy a pig in a poke. Maybe somebody should have taught you the same thing, Mr. Hsu." She walked out of the shop, wondering if he'd chase after her. He didn't. Nobody bothered her all the way home.

  When Paul Gomes stepped out of Curious Notions, he found that marmalade cat waiting for him. "Meow?" it said. He had no trouble translating from cat to English. Where's my handout? the beast wanted to know.

  "Here you go." Paul tossed a dried anchovy on the sidewalk. They sold them in sacks at Fisherman's Wharf. Some people used them for bait. Paul supposed he wasn't the only one who used them for kitty treats.

  The cat nosed this one, daintily bit it in half, and then ate each half in turn. Then it proved it was honest in its own fashion. It rubbed up against Paul's leg, purred like distant thunder, and let him scratch it behind the ears and under the chin. Some cats—a lot of cats, in fact—seemed to think they got handouts by divine right. This one knew better. If it didn't earn its treats, it did without.

  Dad would have said it was just baiting the hook for Paul. Dad had said that, in fact, said it often enough to make a bore of himself. Maybe he was even right. Paul didn't much care. He was more inclined to keep on feeding the cat because his father had made a bore of himself than he would have been if Dad had just let it alone.

  He tossed the marmalade tabby another dried anchovy. Its purr got even louder and deeper. He didn't do that every day. When he did, the cat made sure it showed it was grateful. Before too long, he planned on letting it into the shop. That would really give Dad something to complain about.

  As it had before, the cat neatly bit the anchovy in half before starting on it. It made the tail end disappear. But then, instead of going on to the head end, it disappeared itself—it made a small, startled noise and ran around the corner.

  "What the—?" Paul didn't think he'd scared the cat. He straightened up, turned around . . . and almost bumped into a short, stocky, neatly dressed Asian man standing behind him. "Excuse me," he said.

  The man smiled and nodded. The nod was polite enough, but the smile never reached his eyes. They were as hard and dark and shiny as obsidian. "You're Paul, aren't you?" he said. "You work here." He nodded again, this time toward the front window of Curious Notions.

  "That's right," Paul said. "Can I do something for you, Mr., uh . ..?"

  "You don't need to know my name," the man said. "You need to know we've got our eyes on you, and on your father, too. You can't go anywhere unless we know about it. You can't do anything unless we know about it. And if you want to tell the Kaiser's hounds about us, go ahead. We don't exist, you see."

  What was that supposed to mean? It sounded like something out of a twentieth-century spy thriller. Carefully, Paul said, "If you won't tell me who you are, I don't think we want anything to do with you."

  "It isn't your choice," the man said. "It's ours, and you need to understand that."

  "You can't tell me what to do," Paul said. And he was right, right in a way no one who lived in this alternate could be. No matter what kind of problems he and his father-had, the transposition chamber could take them away where nobody from here could follow. Knowing that made everything that went on here seem not so very important. It needed more than a two-bit punk to make Paul sit up and take notice.

  Something in his voice must have told the Asian man as much. He sent Paul a perfectly filthy look—he expected people to take him seriously. "We can do all kinds of things," he growled. "You wouldn't want an accident to happen around here, would you? You wouldn't like it very much if it did."

  Paul put his hand in the pocket of his jeans. All he had in there was a set of keys, but it was a big, lumpy set. Through the denim, who could be sure what it was? "We aren't the only ones who can have accidents," he said in his own best tough-guy voice. "You want to remember that, you and your 'nameless' friends. You don't think I can find out who they are?"

  That was pure bluff, too, but it rocked the older man. "I don't know what you can do with your lousy gadgets," he said. "But you'd better not mess with us, because you don't know what you're messing with. We've got connections you can't touch, no matter how smart you think you are."

  "I don't care if your stinking connections go back all the way to China," Paul snapped. The Asian man's lips skinned back from his teeth in what was anything but a smile. Paul realized he'd landed another hit, even if he didn't quite know how. He'd just meant it as a figure of speech. He grinned a grin that said he knew more than he was letting on. He was—literally—lying through his teeth, but this fellow didn't have to know that.

  "You'll be sorry, kid," the Asian man said. "You think you're smart and you think you're tough, but you don't know how much trouble you're in."

  Paul took a step toward him. "I know how much trouble you're going to be in if you don't get lost."

  "Oh, I'll go. But you haven't seen the last of me. You may wish you had." The man hurried down the street, turned the corner, and was gone.

  Exit villain, sneering, Paul thought. But he didn't even know if the Asian man was a villain, or anything else about him. All he knew was that the fellow knew too much about Curious Notions.

  He waited to see if either the man or the marmalade cat would come back. When neither did, he went back into the shop. He waited till a lull with no customers, then told his father what the Asian man had said. Dad, for a wonder, heard him out. When he finished, his father said, "That doesn't sound so good."

  "I didn't think so, either," Paul said.

  His father pointed a finger at him. "I bet it's got something to do with that Lucy What's-her-name. I told you that would end up causing trouble."

  "You—" Paul stopped. He wanted to say his father didn't know what he was talking about. He wanted to, but found he couldn't. What Dad had said made altogether too much sense.

  Five

  Hank Simmons prowled through the shoe factory. He was looking for trouble. Lucy had seen him like this before. He would lash out at anybody who got out of line. If no one got out of line, he would lash out anyway. He was the foreman. What could the workers do to him? Nothing—and didn't he know it?

  He peered at the basket by Lucy's sewing machine. His bald, shiny head gleamed under the fluorescent lights. The basket was nearly full. Even as the foreman watched, Lucy sewed on another instep strap and tossed in another shoe. Simmons only grunted. Even if he was looking for trouble, he couldn't find any here. Lucy went on working, doing her best to pretend he wasn't there.

  Finally, muttering, he went on to Mildred's machine. She tried to ignore him, too. He picked a shoe out of her basket and held it about three inches in front of his nose. Then, angrily, he threw it back in. "You call that workmanship?" he demanded.

  "Yes, Mr. Simmons." Mildred didn't get mad. No—she didn't show she got mad. There was a difference. "That's what I call it."

  "Well, I don't," the foreman said loudly. "Those straps'll fall apart in nothing flat. Woo here can do it right. Why can't you? She didn't start that long ago, and you've been here since dirt."

  Lucy knew Mildred was faster and neater on the sewing machine than she was herself. Mildred had to know it, too. But if she said what she was bound to be thinking, Hank Simmons would throw her out on her ear. All she did say was, "I'll try to do better, sir."

  "I’l try to do better, sir,'" the foreman echoed mockingly. "You'd better do better, or you're in big trouble. You hear me, sister? Big trouble."

  Without even waiting for an answer, he stomped off to terrorize somebody else. Mildred muttered under her breath. Lucy couldn't make out everything she said. That was a shame, because what she could understand sounded highly educational. "If I was his sister, I'd break every mirror in the house," was some of the mildest of it. It got warmer from there.

  Before long, Lucy was giggling helplessly. Mildred sent her a look that should have sliced through solid steel. So
mehow, it only made her giggle harder.

  "Yeah, go ahead," Mildred said in a low voice. "You can laugh. He didn't land on you like a sack of manure."

  "Not this time," Lucy answered. "You think he hasn't, though?" She stopped, because steam was still coming out of the older woman's ears. Lucy made herself quit giggling. She said the only thing she could: "I'm sorry, Mildred."

  Mildred tried to stay angry. Lucy could see that. However hard she tried, she started laughing a few seconds after Lucy stopped. "I don't know why I let him get to me," she said. "He is just a sack of manure. But when he's there telling lies right to my face, I want to take him and sew his lips shut, that's what I want to do."

  Lucy had thought she was over the giggles. That started them all over again. She and Mildred both howled. So did several of the women around them who'd heard.

  Naturally, the foreman came storming back. "What's this?" he shouted. "What's this? What's going on here?"

  "Nothing, Mr. Simmons," Mildred said sweetly. It was a good thing she answered, because Lucy couldn't talk right then. She kept imagining Hank Simmons under the sewing machine. Too bad it was only make-believe.

  After lunch, Simmons called her away from her machine. Everybody stared at her. She wondered what she'd done. Simmons hardly ever let people stop working—she couldn't remember the last time, in fact. He'd found out somebody's mother was in an accident one morning, and he didn't tell the poor woman till lunch.

  He took Lucy into the office and closed the door behind them. The walls were covered with pinup photos, big, small, and in-between. Simmons lit a cigarette. The smoke was especially nasty in the small, cramped space. He tapped ash into an ashtray on his desk that was already overflowing with butts.

  From behind that smoke screen, he studied her as if she were a puzzle piece that didn't fit where he thought it should. He's going to make me say something first, Lucy realized. "What is it, Mr. Simmons?" she asked—the safest question she could think of.

  "Fellow came in and wanted to talk about you earlier today," Simmons answered. "Not a big fellow, but important-looking. Important-sounding, too." He was impressed, no matter how he tried to hide it. "Fellow with connections," he added. "He made that real plain—real plain."

  Till then, Lucy hadn't had any idea who this man might be. Now she did—or, if not who he was, what those connections were. She nodded back to the foreman. "I see," she said, as if she'd been sure all along.

  "Why didn't you say you knew people with clout like that?" Hank Simmons stubbed out the cigarette and nervously lit another one. "Why didn't you tell me? You think I couldn't have fixed you up with a better job before this? I'm no dummy, Miss Woo. I know which side my bread's buttered on. You'd better believe I do."

  Lucy blinked. He'd never called her Miss Woo before. She had to tell him something. "It was necessary," she said—let Simmons figure out what that meant.

  He said, "Well, it sure isn't necessary now. This fellow made that real plain—real plain." He repeated the phrase again, this time with a kind of shudder. Then he asked, "You read and write, don't you?"

  "Oh, yes," Lucy said, wondering why he cared.

  He told her: "Okay, then. Starting tomorrow—no, starting right now—I'm taking you off your machine. You're a file clerk, as of today. Pay's fifteen dollars a week, and you get a half day off on Saturday. Go to the front office. Ask for Mrs. Cho. She knows you're coming. She'll show you what to do."

  "Mrs. Cho," Lucy echoed in something not far from a daze. She got out of Hank Simmons' smelly office as fast as she could. The Triads, she thought dizzily. It must be the Triads. Had the "fellow with connections" said he'd murder Simmons if Lucy didn't get promoted? Or had he said he'd burn down the factory and everybody inside it? Whatever he'd said, it had done the trick.

  Mrs. Cho was expecting Lucy. She showed her the paperwork that needed doing. It wasn't very hard. It was ridiculously easy, as a matter of fact. Lucy had dreamt of a job like this. She hadn't dreamt she could get one, though. And at almost twice the pay! And with a half-holiday on Saturday! It seemed too good to be true.

  That brought her up short. Maybe it was too good to be true. The Triads hadn't got her this job because they were nice. They'd done it because they still wanted her help with Curious Notions. As soon as she thought it through, that seemed pretty plain.

  And, as soon as she thought it through, it raised another question. What if she didn't help Stanley Hsu and his friends? They'd proved they could do things for her to get their way. What would they do to her if they didn't?

  Paul's father often got on the telephone before he opened up Curious Notions. Farmers in the Central Valley had curious notions about when they were supposed to rise and shine. They were always up by the time Dad started calling them.

  Usually, he talked about setting up deliveries or haggled over prices. This morning, he sounded angry at the world. "What do you mean you can't bring in those almonds, Mr. Triandos? We had a deal."

  Chris Triandos had been selling almonds to people from the home timeline for years. Why shouldn't he? They paid better prices than anybody in this alternate would.

  Dad paused to listen. The longer he listened, the madder he got. Paul could tell. His father didn't drum his fingers on the night-stand like that when he was in a good mood. At last, Mr. Triandos must have stopped talking. Dad burst out, "What do you mean, a little bird told you not to?"

  Chris Triandos answered. Paul couldn't make out what he was saying, but he sounded excited. He always liked to talk. Paul had seen that whenever he brought almonds up to San Francisco.

  "What are they going to do if you bring in the shipment anyway?" Dad asked when the farmer ran down. "Burn down your house and poison your dog?" He meant it for a joke—a sarcastic joke, but a joke just the same. Mr. Triandos said something else. Whatever it was, it was short and not very sweet. Dad flinched when he heard it. "Oh. They did?" The next sound from the other end of the line was a click. "Hello?" Dad said. "Hello?" Then he said something else, something that wasn't even close to hello. He hung up, too.

  "Somebody doesn't like Mr. Triandos?" Paul said.

  His father shook his head. "No. Somebody doesn't like us. They told him bad things would happen if he did any more business with us. They made him believe it, too." He scratched at his mustache. "I bet he's not going to be the only one, either."

  "Who doesn't like us?" Paul asked. "Who really doesn't like us, I mean?"

  "Could be the Kaiser's merry men—but I don't think it is," his father answered. "If the Germans wanted to put on the squeeze, they'd grab one of us and use him to make the other one talk. Or maybe they'd grab both of us and just start smashing. If you're in charge, you don't have to waste time getting cute. So what does that leave? The way it looks to me, it leaves lovely Lucy's little pals."

  Paul wished he could tell his father he was nuts. After the unpleasant visit he'd had outside the store, he knew too well he couldn't. "What do we do now?" he asked in a small voice.

  "Good question," Dad said. "What the people with Chinese connections don't seem to get is that we're here in this alternate for more than one reason. We're not going to dry up and blow away even if nobody sells us produce. We've got to keep an eye on the Kaiser's crew, too—make sure they don't get any bright ideas about alternates."

  "Will Crosstime Traffic leave us here if we can't bring in the produce?" Paul asked.

  "A lot of alternates, they wouldn't. They'd pull us out so fast, it'd make your head swim," his father answered. "Not this one, though. Like I say, they have other reasons to worry about this one."

  "Maybe," Paul said. "But they won't be worrying about stuff like that here in San Francisco. They'll be worrying about it in Berlin, or wherever the Germans do their fancy research."

  His father only shrugged. "We're here. Till they tell us to leave, we're going to stay. And as long as we're gong to stay, we'd better not let the locals push us around so much that we can't do business."

  Paul
wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. "What have you got in mind?"

  "Don't know yet." Dad shrugged again. "It'd be nice if we could get the Kaiser's men and the Tongs fighting each other, though. That way, they'd stop jumping up and down about us."

  "Define 'nice,'" Paul said. "We're not far from Chinatown. If there is an uprising, or if the Germans go in there to clean house, we're still liable to get stuck in the middle."

  One more shrug from Dad. "In that case, we go down to the sub-basement and back to the home timeline. Then the locals can do whatever they want. After things calm down, we come back and start looking around again."

  When he said we, he didn't necessarily mean Paul and himself. If the Germans—or the Chinese—were after them in particular, Crosstime Traffic could send in somebody else, somebody the locals wouldn't know. But whoever showed up in this alternate would make a living selling odd things. And whoever showed up would want to buy produce, too. If the Tongs—or the Feldgendarmerie—figured that out, they could make life harder for people from the home timeline.

  The other side of the coin was, people from the home timeline often looked down their noses at locals. There were so many things crosstime traders couldn't tell people in the alternates they visited. There were good reasons why they couldn't tell them those things, too. Paul made a sour face. Dad had rammed that down his throat not so long ago. All the same, it seemed unfair a lot of the time.

  Dad grunted when Paul told him as much. "You wouldn't say so if you didn't like that Lucy Woo."

  He'd made that crack before, too. It wasn't true, or not the way he meant it. Paul didn't try to argue. Dad wouldn't have listened to him if he did. Dad was a lot better at talking than listening. If Paul had tried to argue, Dad would have said he was just doing it because of Crosstime Traffic rules. They banned what they called fraternizing, which meant getting too friendly with the locals.

  Crosstime Traffic had its reasons, too. In spite of the rules, people from the home timeline did fall in love with locals every once in a while. Those romances hardly ever had happy endings. They were often a bigger danger to the secret of crosstime travel than the Feld-gendarmerie and the Tongs put together.