Curious Notions ct-2

by Harry Turtledove

  How far did the Tongs reach here? Down into the Central Valley, certainly. Across the sea to China, probably. How much could they do against the power of the Kaiser? Not enough to overthrow it, plainly. But enough to give it a hard time in and near San Francisco? It sure looked that way.

  Around the last corner. Heading for home, or the closest thing Paul had to a home in this alternate. The marmalade cat came out of Curious Notions and trotted over to rub up against him. He was bending down to pet it before he realized the front door shouldn't have been open like that. He straightened and started to run towards it.

  Somebody shouted, "Get out of here, fool, before they grab you, too!"

  That was bound to be good advice. Paul hurried into Curious Notions anyhow. The shelves were bare. Whoever they were, they'd carted off all the merchandise.

  "Dad?" Paul called, hoping against hope.

  No reply. Only silence. He went up the stairs two at a time. He knew he could be walking into a trap, but he did it anyhow. His father wasn't up there. Luckily for him, neither was anyone else. They had torn the apartment over the shop to pieces again. Paul's stomach felt as if it had jumped out a fifth-story window. What was he going to do now?

  The answer formed on the heels of the question. He was going to get out before they came back and grabbed him, too. First, escape. Everything else could come later—if there was a later.

  Seven

  "I have news," Lucy Woo's father said over dinner, and then, "Pass the mushrooms and broccoli, please."

  The bowl sat in front of Lucy. She sent it down the table. When Father served himself and didn't say anything more, she asked, "What is the news?"

  He looked at her for a moment before answering. Then, his voice oddly flat, he said, "They've closed Curious Notions."

  "What? Paul Gomes and his father?" Lucy couldn't believe it. "Why would they do that? They had to be making money hand over fist."

  Father shook his head. "I don't think the people who ran it closed it. I think they had it closed for them." He sat very straight in his chair and looked stern and serious. When people in the United States did something like that, they always meant the Germans. "Everything was gone. You could look in the window and see that. And the neighbors say the wagons were there the other day."

  "How terrible!" Lucy said. "Can we do anything for them?"

  Normally, that would have been a dumb question. J£ the Feld-gendarmerie took you away, odds were you were gone for good. But not always. Father was here mixing vegetables and rice to prove that. Mother said, "Maybe you can do something, Lucy. You're the one who knows the Triad people."

  "Lucy thinks that Paul fellow is cute," Michael said.

  Lucy was reminded—not for the first time—what horrible, poisonous creatures little brothers were. She sent Michael a glare that should have knocked him flat. He was tough as a weed, though. As far as she was concerned, the resemblance didn't end there. "Why don't you talk about things you know about—if you know anything?" she hissed.

  Michael stuck out his tongue at her. "You do, too!" he jeered. "Nyah, nyah!"

  "That will be enough of that," Mother said. "That will be enough of that from both of you, in fact." She pointed a finger at Lucy. Lucy didn't think that was fair. Her brother had started it. She hadn't given him half the trouble he'd given her.

  Besides, he was wrong . . . wasn't he? Lucy liked Paul pretty well. He was interesting—a lot more interesting than anybody at the shoe factory, not that that said much. She liked him, yes. But did she like him? She hadn't even thought about it. She wondered why not.

  He's strange. The answer formed in her mind as soon as the question did. She'd said as much to Peggy. He was very strange— nice, but strange. Thirty-third Avenue? Not likely! Maybe that silly idea she'd had about different worlds wasn't so silly after all. If anything could make her wonder, it was how strange Paul Gomes was.

  Then she shook her head. No, it wasn't just Paul. The things Curious Notions sold—had sold—didn't come from any place she knew, either. Her father would have agreed with that. Where did they come from, then?

  The same place as Paul, obviously. But where was that?

  "Do you think the Triads would do anything?" her father asked.

  "I don't know," Lucy answered. "They might. They were sure interested in anything that had to do with Curious Notions."

  Her father drummed his fingers on the desktop. "I was in the Germans' jail. I don't like to think about anybody going in there. If you can get them out, you should."

  "I'll try," Lucy said. "I don't know if the Triads will listen to me. Even if they do, I don't know what kind of price they'll ask."

  "There usually is a price," Father agreed.

  "Always," Mother said softly.

  Lucy had already seen that. Stanley Hsu took the idea for granted. To him, it was just the way the world worked. The jeweler had helped her—for the price of a question. Getting people away from the Feld-gendarmerie was bound to cost more. How much more? And in what coin? Lucy could only go and find out. If it wasn't the sort of price she thought she ought to pay... then the German secret police would hang on to Paul and his father.

  "I'll do what I think I can, that's all," Lucy said. Her mother and father both nodded. If Michael made small, disgusted noises . . . Well, she didn't have to pay any attention to him. She didn't have to, and she didn't.

  Paul wished he'd fled back to the home timeline when he had the chance. Maybe the two hundred dollars in his pocket had kept him from going down to the subbasement and calling for a transposition chamber. Maybe—he hoped more likely—his first thought had been rescuing Dad all by himself.

  If so, it only went to show that thinking twice was a good idea. When he first came back to the building that housed Curious Notions, there weren't any Feldgendarmerie men or American police or men from the Tongs inside. (Perhaps the people who'd taken his father thought a kid wasn't worth bothering with. In that case, their first thoughts weren't so hot, either.)

  They thought twice before Paul did. Curious Notions was shut up tight now. He couldn't get to the subbasement even if he wanted to. There'd be traps inside, just in case he was dumb enough to try.

  He'd taken a room in a grimy old hotel in the Tenderloin District: a dollar a night or five dollars a week. The brick building was so rundown, he wondered if it dated from before the 1906 earthquake. But it wasn't quite that ancient. One of the bricks above the front door had a date carved into it: 1927. It was so very dirty and worn, he needed several days to notice it.

  The room itself had seen endless coats of paint. The last one, a sad beige, had been a long time before. It was faded and peeling and filthy. The room had a sink and toilet and tub, a tiny table with two chairs, and a hot plate for cooking. The smell of cheap grease had soaked into the paint. A lot of people on the way down who hadn't quite hit bottom yet had lived here. That fit Paul to a T right now.

  There was no thermostat on the wall. Heat came from a cast-iron steam radiator in a corner. It bubbled and clunked and, every once in a while, dripped a little rusty water on the cheap green carpet. The size of the rust stain there said it had been doing that for a long time.

  Several locks and dead bolts did their best to make sure the door stayed closed and intruders stayed out. When the desk clerk handed Paul half a dozen keys, he'd eyed them in dismay. What dismayed him even more was that they might not be enough. You didn't use hardware like that where it wasn't needed.

  After he got a good look at some of the people who lived in the hotel, he wished the door had twice as many locks on it. If they weren't the people his parents had warned him about, he'd never seen anybody who was. He didn't want to think about what they did for a living. More than a few of them didn't do anything visible for a living. They seemed proud of doing nothing, too.

  And they figured Paul was in the same boat they were. He didn't do anything visible, either. If anything, that won him respect in the Tenderloin. A ferret-faced little man with a
scar on one cheek grinned as they passed each other on the stairs in the middle of the morning. "Beats working, don't it?" he said.

  "Uh-huh," Paul answered with a silly nod. He knew he should have said, Yeah, out of the side of his mouth. But the man with the scar just nodded back and kept going up the stairs.

  In this alternate, German college students still dueled with sabers. They got scars like that. Students at a few American colleges imitated the Germans. Paul would have bet a thousand benjamins against a dollar that this fellow hadn't been anywhere close to a college, except maybe to break into a dorm. He'd probably got his scar in a real knife fight. Paul wondered what had happened to the man he'd been fighting. Better not to know, maybe.

  Getting away from the hotel and back to his neighborhood was a relief. Curious Notions wasn't in the best part of town, either. Compared to where he was staying now, though, it looked like paradise.

  He ducked into Louie's, the hamburger and frankfurter place where he'd bought a lot of lunches. There was no McDonald's or Burger King or Jack in the Box in this alternate. All the hamburger joints and frankfurter stands and pizza parlors here were mom-and-pops. Behind the counter at Louie's stood ... Louie. He was a Greek with slicked-back hair under a white cap that looked like the one Boy Scouts wore in the home timeline.

  He did a double take when Paul walked in. Nobody else was in the little restaurant. It got busy at lunch and dinner. In between times, no. "What are you doin' here, kid?" Louie rasped in a voice rough from too many cigarettes. "You outa your mind or somethin'?"

  "I'm trying to find out about Dad," Paul said.

  "You'll find out, all right," the cook said. "You'll keep him company in the calaboose, that's how you'll find out. Feldgendarmerie wants you bad, sonny. You're hotter'n a two-dollar pistol on Saturday night." He swiped a wet rag across the counter.

  "It was the Germans who got him, then?" Paul asked.

  "Who did you expect? Santa Claus and the elves?" Louie lit another Camel. Paul tried not to flinch. Smoking in restaurants had been illegal for a hundred years in the home timeline. Smoking itself wasn't illegal there, but people who smoked did it in the privacy of their own homes. Smoking in public was as nasty as picking your nose in public. Paul had never seen Louie do that. But he smoked like a chimney.

  Paul said, "I don't know. I wondered if the Chinese had anything to do with it."

  "Oh. On account of the competition, you mean?" Louie probably had a grade-school education at best, but he was no dope. He shook his head. "Nah, wasn't them. This was official. Besides, they don't like the Kaiser more than they don't like your old man, you know what I mean?"

  "Yeah." Paul nodded.

  "But you gotta get lost," Louie said. "There's a reward out for you—two hundred and fifty bucks." That was a lot of money in this alternate. Louie went on, "Some of the clowns around here, they'd turn in their mother for a buck ninety-five."

  He was probably right. Paul knew that, no matter how much he wished it weren't so. Trying to sound tough, he said, "I'll be okay."

  "Yeah, sure you will. And pigs have wings." Louie waggled his eyebrows and rolled his eyes. "Go on. Get lost. No, hang on." He held up a hand, like a cop stopping traffic. This, that, and the other thing went into a paper bag. When it was bulging, he thrust it at Paul. "Now get lost—and if the cops come around, I never seen you."

  The bag held burgers, fries, and some of the honey-soaked baklava that was a labor of love at Louie's. "You're a lifesaver," Paul exclaimed. "Here, wait, though. I can pay you for this stuff."

  Louie turned his back. "Like I said, I don't see you. I don't hear you, neither. And I'll tell the . . . Feldgendarmerie the same." Paul didn't know what the Greek word in front of Feldgendarmerie meant. It wasn't a compliment, though. He was sure of that.

  "Thanks," he said. "I won't forget this."

  "Ghosts. Who'd figure a lousy Frisco burger joint had ghosts in it?" Louie wouldn't turn around.

  Paul gave up. He hurried out of Louie's place and out of the neighborhood. Nobody came after him. No policeman's whistle screeched. The bag was heavy with food. He went over to Union Square, not far away. The Victory Monument stood here, as it did in the home timeline. The breakpoint between the two worlds came after the Spanish-American War. In this alternate, that was almost the last glory the USA had won. Pigeons perched on the bronze figure representing naval power atop the tall column in the center of the square. Considering what the birds did to that figure, maybe they stood for air power.

  Like so much of this San Francisco, the square looked sad and run down. The grass needed watering and mowing. The wind swirled dust and wastepaper around the base of the Victory Monument. No-body'd painted the park benches in a long, long time. When Paul sat down on one of them, the planks creaked and shifted. He wondered if it would hold his weight, and got ready to jump in a hurry.

  He gulped down one of the big, juicy hamburgers—heavy on the onions—and some fries and a chunk of baklava. By the time he got done, he felt as if he'd swallowed a bowling ball. The bag still had a lot of food in it. When Louie gave, he gave with both hands. Paul knew what he'd do for supper tonight.

  He wished he knew what to do after supper. The closest people from the home timeline he knew of were in Germany. Getting hold of them would have been easy ... if he could have gone into Curious Notions.

  Dumb, Paul. You were really dumb. He made a fist and slammed it down on the bench. That was true, but did him no good. How do I fix things?

  "Don't be dumb," he said. Saying it was easy. Doing it? Doing it looked anything but.

  Every so often, Lucy walked by Curious Notions on the way home from work. She didn't know why. The place stayed closed. But she did think walking by was safe enough. She was just one face on the street, and she never stopped. She didn't even turn her head as she walked past. She just flicked her eyes to the right and kept on going. Plenty of people in the United States had learned that look-without-seeming-to glance. Not showing what you had in mind was often a good idea.

  Once she happened to see somebody coming out of the place. It was neither Paul Gomes nor his father. They weren't the only ones who'd run the shop, though. Lucy paused. She pretended to think about buying a Chronicle. In fact, she gave the stranger a quick once-over.

  She needed about three seconds to decide he was a German. Probably a Feldgendarmerie man, she thought. His denim and big belt buckle and broad-brimmed hat were what an American would have worn. The way he walked wasn't even close to American, though. He didn't slouch along the way most men did. He marched.

  Lucy could almost hear the trumpets and tubas and drums behind him.

  And the way he looked around . . . Americans had known for well over a hundred years that they weren't masters in their own homeland. They acted like it. They had to act like it—the ones who didn't ended up in trouble or dead. A few of those lessons went a long way, especially when the Germans weren't shy about dishing them out. This fellow looked at the world as if he owned it. For all practical purposes, he did. People on the street scrambled to get out of his way. Lucy wasn't the only one who could figure out what he was.

  His cold, self-satisfied gaze fell on her. He had a face that ached for a slap, but who could deliver it? By the time he looked away, she was staring hard at the newspaper. He didn't notice that she'd been eyeing him. On down the street past her he went. That invisible, inaudible oompah band still seemed to hover behind him.

  Lucy sighed. With people like that coming out of Curious Notions, Paul and his father had to be in a Feldgendarmerie jail. And I do have to see Stanley Hsu. She sighed again. She'd put if off as long as she could, and even a little longer than that. She didn't want to have anything to do with the Triads. But fair was fair. She knew what she needed to do if she wanted to be able to go on looking at herself in the mirror.

  Maybe the jeweler would laugh at her. Maybe he'd ask an impossible price—she knew what she wanted wouldn't come cheap. Maybe the Triads would do their best and
fail. They weren't top dogs—the Kaiser's men were. Lucy wouldn't feel ashamed if the Triads failed. They were her best hope. Trying her hardest to help the people who'd helped her was what counted.

  She started up the street toward Stanley Hsu's shop. It was only a few blocks—but it felt like a long, long way. She didn't want to make a fool of herself. She shrugged. If I do, I do, that's all, she thought. It wouldn't be the first time. It wouldn't be the last. Everybody was a fool now and again. Acting the fool was part of living. The trick—or one trick, anyhow—was trying not to make a fool of yourself the same way twice.

  "Lucy! Is that you?"

  The voice came from in back of her. She whirled. "Hello!" she said. "What are you doing here? I thought you were . .. somewhere else." Blurting out his name or that she'd thought he was in jail wouldn't do. That might be the quickest way to land him there.

  His face twisted. "Just dumb luck that I'm not... somewhere else." He understood what she meant, all right. He went on, "Happened I wasn't home when we had, uh, visitors." He came up to her. "It's good to see you. It's good to see anybody with a friendly face."

  "I'm glad to see you, too," Lucy answered. "I didn't know if I would."

  "Luck, like I told you," Paul said. "Ah, you ought to know that there's a price on my head. I look like a desperate criminal, don't I?"

  He looked tired and worried and on edge. Lucy would have felt the same way. She asked, "What are you going to do now?"

  "Try to stay out of trouble myself. Try to get Dad out," he answered. "I don't know what else I can do right now. Things at Curious Notions didn't exactly work out the way I wish they would have." He hesitated. "I was thinking about asking the Tongs for help, but I'm not sure how to go about it."