"That may be the scariest thing I ever heard," Lucy said.
"There's nothing wrong with having money," Stanley Hsu told her. "There may be something wrong with what you do with it. If you have a lot of money, you can do a lot of good." He quickly held up a hand. "And yes, you can do a lot of harm, too. I know that. The . . . gentleman you met also knows it."
"That's nice." Lucy sighed. "I wish I had the chance to find out what I could do with a lot of money," she said wistfully. There were times when she wished she had the chance to find out what she could do with even a little money. She kept quiet about that. She was afraid she would sound sorry for herself.
By the way Stanley Hsu smiled, he guessed some of what she wasn't saying. He said, "Don't worry. Mr. Lee will keep his promise." He made a face. The name had slipped out. Lucy didn't see the trouble—it was a common one in Chinatown. Stanley Hsu went on, "Your job is safe as long as you do it well. If you don't, no one can help you. But I don't think that will be a problem, will it?"
"I can do what they've given me to do. It isn't very hard," Lucy said. That covered what the jeweler had said, or at least what she'd heard in what he said. If she hadn't heard quite everything. . . well, maybe he hadn't intended her to hear quite everything. She said her good-byes and hurried home.
Her father had got there ahead of her. He didn't usually do that. He and her mother were both worried about her. "It's all right," she said. "I was just checking on something with Mr. Hsu."
"Oh?" Both her parents said it at the same time and in the same tone of voice. They knew she'd had some trouble at the factory. Still sounding worried, her mother asked, "And how did it go?"
"Fine, I think," Lucy said. "Another man was there, someone Mr. Hsu listens to." That got her mother and father's attention. Anyone the jeweler paid attention to had to be a big shot. She went on, "He promised Mrs. Cho wouldn't bother me any more."
"Good. That's very good," Mother said. She and Father were suddenly all smiles.
Lucy didn't say anything about the way she'd had to prod Mr. Lee to get what was right. She'd got it. How she'd got it would only worry her parents. Thinking back on how she'd got it, though, made her smile, too.
Paul scratched the marmalade cat under the chin and by the side of its jaw. Purring, it closed its eyes and gave him a kitty smile. "You like that, don't you?" he said. "I thought so. You're not the only cat I know that does."
The cat pushed its face into his hand. It purred louder than ever. He wondered how such a friendly beast had turned into a stray. Then he laughed. It was hardly a stray any more. It was his cat, the Curious Notions cat.
He straightened. The cat twined itself between his legs. Whenever he looked around in this San Francisco, the skyline jolted him. The biggest reason for the jolt was that there wasn't much of a skyline. No high-rise hotels and office towers, no Transamerica Tower looking like an SST sticking up from the ground, not much of anything. In the home timeline, they built tall and did everything they could to quakeproof what they built. They could do a lot, too. Here . . .
Here, they couldn't do nearly so much. They couldn't afford nearly so much, either. And so they'd kept the laws the San Francisco and Los Angeles of the home timeline had given up, the laws that said a building couldn't be taller than so many stories. It made for a much duller-looking city. It also made for a city that couldn't hold as much or accomplish as much as the one he'd grown up in.
If San Francisco were a German city . . . The Kaiser's architects and engineers knew plenty about building skyscrapers. Berlin and Munich and Hamburg and Breslau soared up to the heavens. But the Germans weren't interested in building in the United States. They weren't interested in having American builders learn their tricks, either. They took secrecy seriously, and they were good at it.
After Paul shook his head at the sorry skyline, his gaze dropped to the sidewalk again. He wondered who was watching him. Who was watching the shop? He couldn't pick out anybody on the street. He wished he could. He suspected both the Germans and the Tongs were keeping an eye on everything he and his father did. He wanted to be able to watch the watchers, too. That might help keep him safe.
No matter what he wanted, he wasn't going to get it. The only familiar faces were those of other shopkeepers and neighbors. If the Feldgendarmerie or the Chinese had hired some of them to spy, he'd never know till too late. If they hadn't, if they used other people, they moved them in and out too often to let him spot them.
But the spies were there, whether he saw them or not. He was sure of it. That wasn't a logical feeling, though logic also said they'd be around. He felt it with the pit of his stomach, with the hair at the back of his neck. It was the feeling you got when somebody stared at you from behind. Your body could tell, even if your head couldn't.
Shaking his head again, he went inside. The cat scooted in, too. It was doing that more and more often. It knew which side its bread was buttered on. Paul's father saw it. He said, "You're the one who cleans up after that fuzzy freeloader."
"I know," Paul said patiently. After a few seconds, he added, "I think we should get out of here—just disappear."
"Crosstime Traffic wouldn't like it," his father said.
"Would they like somebody grabbing us and squeezing us?" Paul asked. "That's what's going to happen. Don't you feel it, too, Dad? If Elliott couldn't, he really was blind."
"If I started worrying whenever I felt something, I'd be looking over my shoulder every minute of every day. That's no way to live," his father said. "Besides, we need to be in place to keep an eye on things here."
"There are others in this alternate to do that," Paul said. "They aren't being watched like we are, either."
"There aren't that many others in this alternate. There aren't that many in any one alternate. The home timeline is spread too thin," Dad said. Paul wished he could argue about that. But he knew how true it was. His father went on, "Besides, how do you know they aren't being watched, too?"
Paul grunted. He didn't know that. Crosstime Traffic people traded. They had to—Crosstime Traffic wasn't in business for its health. And when you traded, you drew notice. Maybe the Feld-gendarmerie was keeping an eye on other people in this alternate who sold odd and interesting goods. How could you know till they dropped on you—if they did? You couldn't.
Dad added, "Besides, if we pull out and it turns out we didn't need to, we get a black mark on our records."
There it was. Paul knew the real reason as soon as he heard it. Dad wasn't just worrying about this alternate. He was worrying about the home timeline, too. That was all very well, within limits. But. . . "What happens if we need to pull out and we don't?" Paul asked, and answered his own question: "You know what happens." He made a horrible noise, the kind of noise a man getting strangled might make.
His father waved that away. "You're seeing shadows where there aren't any. Everything's going to be fine. I've even got some
new produce suppliers lined up."
"Terrific," Paul said. "How long before they get scared off?" His father turned away. He didn't want to listen. He hardly ever
did. Maybe he was right. He often was. Paul hoped so. He'd never
wished so strongly that he himself were wrong.
When the Triads spoke, the people at the shoe factory listened. Lucy's supervisor stopped asking her if she was happy. Instead, Mrs. Cho praised her whenever she did anything well. Before long, Mrs. Cho was praising her even when she didn't do things especially well. That only annoyed Lucy. She didn't want praise she hadn't earned. But she couldn't see any way to tell the supervisor that.
She supposed praise she hadn't earned was better than blame she hadn't. At least it couldn't land her in trouble. Even so, she would sooner have done without it.
What she liked most about the new job wasn't the work itself. She hadn't minded the sewing machine that much. Putting up with Hank Simmons had been a pain, but you could have a bad boss wherever you worked. No, the nice part of the clerk's job
was the Saturday half-holiday.
Lucy had got used to working six days a week. The first couple of weeks after she got her new job, she hardly knew what to do with the extra time off. Before long, though, she started spending her Saturday afternoons at the zoo. She met Peggy Ma there when her friend could get free, too. Otherwise, she headed over by herself.
The zoo was way on the west side of the city, jammed in between the Pacific and Lake Merced. She rode the bus to get there. It went through the Sunset District, where Paul Gomes had said he was from. Most of the people who got on in that part of town were either drunks or crooks or plainly tough in a way Paul wasn't. Lucy couldn't believe he'd grown up on Thirty-third Avenue. The way he'd said it, though, she couldn't believe he was lying, either.
She didn't know what to think.
Like so much of San Francisco, the zoo had seen better days, better years, a better century. It was built in the dim and vanished 1930s. The time seemed as distant to Lucy as the days of ancient Egypt. Nobody had been able to tell the United States what to do back then. When the economy fell off a cliff, the President said, Well, build things! And people did.
Maybe it helped. It didn't help enough, though. When the USA and Germany fought twenty years later, the Kaiser's side wiped the floor with Uncle Sam. Nobody'd spent much money on the zoo since. The concrete animal enclosures were crumbling. Some of them were empty. But the zoo still had lions and tigers and bears. It had camels and zebras and hippos and elephants. It had monkeys doing gymnastics and acting like clowns. It had a reptile house full of iguanas and turtles and cold-eyed snakes and mean-looking crocodiles.
Lucy loved watching the animals. She always had, ever since she was little. Some of them didn't look as if they ought to live on Earth at all. If a hippo wasn't the most ridiculous thing in the world, what was? Everyone once in a while, Lucy wondered about that a little. When a hippo yawned, its tusks didn't look ridiculous at all. They looked ready for trouble.
Ivy and other plants crawled all over the enclosures and up the slopes behind them. Ivy was a perfect plant for San Francisco. Winters hardly ever got below freezing, so the stuff never died back. It just grew and grew and grew.
Gulls wheeled overhead. Other birds hopped and flew in and out of the ivy: little brown sparrows, screeching jays with heads of blue so dark it was almost black, hummingbirds whose backs were rusty and green. The hummingbirds mostly ignored the others— except the jays, which they didn't like. But they went after one another like fighter planes. They zoomed and darted and made angry buzzing noises. Once Lucy saw two of them collide in midair with a sound like a fist smacking into an open hand. She'd had to pay a quarter to get in, but they put on their show for free.
She wondered why they quarreled so much. What did hummingbirds have to fight about? Bugs? Nectar? Lady hummingbirds? Whatever it was, it didn't seem like enough. They should have just been pretty and peaceful.
She laughed. To a hummingbird, the things she worried about would have seemed silly, too. Money? The Triads? Curious Notions? No, none of them would have made any sense to a bad-tempered little bird.
Sometimes she wished they didn't make any sense to her, either. Some of them didn't, in fact. And those were the ones she wished she knew more about! A hummingbird wouldn't have understood that at all. Lucy didn't fully herself.
One sunny afternoon, she splurged on a wiener. Her mother would click her tongue between her teeth at the dime gone forever. Lucy sniffed. Didn't her raise entitle her to a little fun? She knew what Mother would say. She'd say Father's time in jail had cost so much, they still had to watch every penny—to say nothing of dimes.
Lucy found herself telling Peggy a little about Paul Gomes. "I like him," she said, "but he's so strange."
"Boys can be like that," Peggy said, which wasn't the kind of sympathy Lucy wanted. Peggy had a boyfriend, and thought Lucy needed one, too. Lucy wasn't so sure. Didn't she have troubles enough? She didn't think she liked Paul that way, anyhow . . . and she decided she'd probably made a mistake saying anything at all to Peggy.
While her friend gave her advice she didn't much want, she finished the wiener. That, she enjoyed. If you couldn't even have a wiener once in a while, what kind of a life was that? But she knew what kind of life that was. It was the kind people only a little un-luckier than she was had to live. It was the kind she would have had to live, too, if the Feldgendarmerie hadn't let Father out of jail.
That they had still amazed her. What kind of connections did Paul and his father have? Lucy would have tried to learn that for the Triads in a minute. He'd mentioned Fatty Horvath and that city lawyer. Who else? Could Stanley Hsu and his friends have got Father out? Maybe. Some of them were important people. But would they have bothered? She doubted it—not from what she'd seen of Mr. Lee.
"Thirty-third Avenue," Lucy muttered.
"What?" Peggy said.
"Nothing." Lucy couldn't, wouldn't, believe Paul had grown up in the heart of the Sunset District. He would have been a different person. He would have been a different kind of person. If he'd grown up in the Sunset District, it was a different Sunset District from the one she'd always known.
She laughed at herself. That was absurd, and she knew it. How could there be more than one Sunset District? It was like imagining more than one San Francisco. Lucy laughed again. If she could imagine any San Francisco at all, what would it be like? It would be a place where people could make more than eight dollars a week— more than fifteen dollars a week, too. It would be a place where Feldgendarmerie men with Alsatians couldn't poke their noses in wherever and whenever they wanted to. It would be a place where the gadgets Curious Notions sold weren't anything special. It would be a place where anybody—everybody—could afford gadgets like that.
What kind of Sunset District would a San Francisco like that have? One nicer than the tough, grimy horror that held Thirty-third Avenue here? One that was nice enough to have turned out somebody like Paul Gomes?
Lucy laughed one more time. You're crazy, she said to herself. A sparrow hopping around by her feet looked up at her. It didn't think she was crazy. It just wanted a piece of her bun. She tossed down a few crumbs. The little bird got one. More sparrows and pigeons nabbed the rest.
But even though Lucy kept laughing, she kept thinking hard, too. Another San Francisco made more sense the longer she looked at the idea. It would explain how she'd felt Paul was telling the truth and lying at the same time when he said he'd grown up here. It would also explain how Curious Notions got curious things. Simple—they just came from that other San Francisco.
The golden city on lots of hills, she thought. Had the Triads had the same idea? Was that why Stanley Hsu had told her to ask Paul where he was from? The notion would explain everything except how Paul and his father and everything in Curious Notions got to this San Francisco, to everyday, ordinary San Francisco. Magic. It would have to be magic. She didn't exactly disbelieve in magic. Plenty of magicians and fortune-tellers in Chinatown said they could make you healthy, happy, wealthy, and wise—for a price, of course. Of course.
But if magic really worked the way people said it did, how come everybody wasn't healthy, happy, wealthy, and wise? How come so many magicians and fortunetellers weren't healthy, happy, wealthy, and wise?
See? You're being silly, Lucy told herself. But was she really?
Sure as sure, the Triads couldn't believe anything connected with Curious Notions really belonged to this world, either.
If not by magic, though, how had Paul Gomes got here? Lucy imagined an airplane flying from that other San Francisco, wherever it was, to this one. That did it. Shaking her head, she turned to Peggy. "Let's go home," she said. When she got ideas that silly, it was time to call it a day.
Heading for the produce market with two hundred dollars in his pockets, Paul felt rich. That was pretty funny, when you got right down to it. In the home timeline, two benjamins would buy him a burger, but not the fries and the soda to go with it. Here, he c
ould live for months on two hundred dollars—not that he'd call it living.
So many things even the richest man in this alternate couldn't have. Nobody here had ever heard of neobiotics, let alone subflex-ive fasartas. Poor devils, he thought with mild sympathy.
Paul wasn't someone who liked making noise for the sake of making noise. He had to be noisy at the produce market. If he'd kept quiet, nobody would have noticed him. Farmers and customers shouted at one another. Their fingers flashed in price signals—and other gestures. Half of what they yelled singed Paul's ears.
Sellers liked him because he was willing to go high. Buyers swore at him for bumping up prices. But he didn't get the deals he thought he'd clinched. The Tongs must have got there ahead of him. As soon as sellers found out who he was, they didn't want to deal with him any more.
"Beat it, kid," one of them said, not unkindly. "I'm gonna have to unload my scallions on somebody else."
"Why?" Paul demanded. "You won't come close to getting my price, and you know it."
"Maybe not." The farmer shrugged. He lit a cigarette, which disgusted Paul almost as much as wearing furs. "I'll tell you this, though—whatever price I do get for 'em, I'll be in one piece to spend it." He blew three smoke rings, one right after another. That fascinated Paul and grossed him out at the same time.
He said the only thing he thought might help: "How would they know?"
"Kid, they'd know." The fellow with the scallions had no doubts at all. He was probably right, too, even if Paul didn't want to admit it.
Paul left the produce market much less cheerful than he'd gone there. What good was his money if he couldn't use it? No good at all. He might as well have been trying to pass benjamins in this alternate.
What would his father say when he came back with all the money and without any deals for produce? Dad wouldn't be very happy. That was putting it mildly. Paul shrugged. If Dad thought he could buy, he was welcome to try it himself. Paul didn't think he'd have any better luck. The farmers didn't want to deal with the people from Curious Notions. Paul shook his head. No, that wasn't it. The farmers were scared to deal with the people from Curious Notions. There was a difference, a big difference.
Curious Notions ct-2 Page 11