Sometimes she felt ashamed of herself for worrying. Paul was the one with things to worry about now. The Germans held his father. They seemed to have stopped caring about hers. They weren't after her. They sure were after him. She had a job. He was, she supposed, looking for one. If he wasn't, she didn't know what he'd do for money.
She also had somewhere to go home to. The Feldgendarmerie were keeping an eye on his home. For all she knew, the Kaiser's secret police were standing between him and whatever brighter Sunset District he came from.
Lucy snapped her fingers in annoyance. She'd meant to ask him about that the last time she saw him. The visit to Stanley Hsu's must have distracted her. She laughed, not that it was very funny. Here she'd gone all her life without having anything to do with the Triads. She'd hardly even believed in them, any more than she believed in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. They turned out to be real, all right. And how had she found out? Because of somebody who wasn't even Chinese. That was funny, in a strange sort of way.
Stanley Hsu didn't think so, though. He took this whole business as seriously as life and death. What did he think Paul could tell him? How much difference would it make to whoever in China was trying to stand up against the Germans? And what difference would that make to the United States?
Lucy had no idea what living in a free country was like. How could she, when she'd never done it? (For that matter, her great-grandparents hadn't, either.) She didn't think about living in a free country now, not really. She did hope that, if China somehow came out on top, it would be an easier master than Germany was. That was as far as her ambition went. She couldn't get excited about politics. She'd never had any politics to get excited about.
When she walked into the apartment, her brother bounced up and down. "You've got mail!" Michael squeaked. "You've got mail! Open it!"
"Hush," she told him. She couldn't help being a little excited herself, though. She didn't get mail all that often. The advertising mail that came to the family mostly had her parents' names on it. That kind of junk went straight into the trash, anyhow.
She didn't recognize the handwriting on the envelope or the name in the return address. But the return address itself was on Thirty-third Avenue. Lucy found herself smiling. She knew who'd sent it. Paul had to have figured she would.
The letter inside was chatty. It might have come from a tourist, not somebody who'd grown up in San Francisco. He talked about the sights he'd seen: the twistiest street in the world, the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, the big bronze statue of Wilhelm IV in front of City Hall, and the museum and Japanese garden in Golden Gate Park.
Japanese garden came at the front of one line. Saturday came at the front of the next one. At three o'clock came at the front of the one below that. Paul hadn't used a secret code, not really. He'd just hoped Lucy would be awake and alert and figure out what was gong on. She was pretty sure she had. She was also pretty sure no Feld-gendarmerie man could.
Paul had signed the letter with the same name he'd used on the envelope. The Germans wouldn't know who that was, either, if they'd read the letter. Paul had to believe they would. They might think he was a school friend or someone she worked with.
"Who is this guy it's from?" Michael wanted to know.
"None of your business, brat," Lucy said sweetly.
"I'm gonna tell," Michael said, and then, much louder, "Mommy!" But Mother backed Lucy. Her mail was her business. Mother didn't say anything about the brat. She didn't always seem to realize Michael was one—she was, after all, his mother, too. But he had been snooping, and so she didn't get mad at Lucy.
Saturday afternoon came around much too slowly. When Lucy first got the extra half day off, she'd thought it was the biggest luxury in the world. Now she took it for granted. Things often seemed to work out like that, too. It was a little disappointing—but having to work the whole day would have been a lot worse.
She took the Fulton Street bus to Golden Gate Park and walked to the Japanese garden. She was way early, but she didn't care. Whether she was seeing somebody or not, it was a nice place to spend an afternoon. Everything was in its place, all the plants perfectly pruned. It was beautiful. And it smelled green and growing, too. She didn't notice missing that when she was away from it, but it was very nice when she found it.
She'd just stooped to take a closer look at some ferns growing by the base of a pine tree when someone behind her said, "Hello, there."
Lucy jumped up and turned. "Hello, yourself," she managed.
Paul was smiling, but he stood too straight and moved in quick jerks. He might have been a wire stretched too tight for too long. "You're early," he said.
"I like it here," Lucy said. "Besides, so are you."
"I like it here, too." Even his smile seemed brittle, as if it might break if she tapped it too hard. "I'm glad you worked out what I was saying in the letter. I'm glad you knew it was me."
"Who else?" she answered. "I don't get a whole lot of letters, especially from people I've never heard of. I know you couldn't put your own name on it, but you didn't really need to."
"Okay," he said. "Shall we walk around and look at things?"
"Sure." They strolled the narrow, twisting paths. Most of the people who came to the garden seemed to be from out of town. Some of them were from out of the country. Several spoke German. Any American recognized the rulers' language—and recognized it as a signal to get out of the way, to make sure you weren't noticed.
Whatever Sunset District Paul came from, he reacted the way Lucy would have. He went down a path that took both of them away from those guttural consonants and flat vowels. After a while, his voice as casual as he could make it, he asked, "So—have you heard anything from Stanley?"
Lucy needed a moment to think of the jeweler by his first name. Paul was smart to talk about him that way, though. Plenty of people were called Stanley. Even so, she had to shake her head. "No," he said. "Nothing. You?"
"Also nada," he answered.
She cocked her head to one side. She could see what that had to mean, but it wasn't English—not to her, anyway. All her doubts and curiosity came flooding forward. "Where are you from?" she asked.
"I told you before," Paul said. "From here. From San Francisco. From the Sunset District. From Thirty-third Avenue."
"I know what you told me," Lucy said. "I believe all of those except that you're from here. You can't be from here—you just cant." She started talking about all the strange things Curious Notions had, and about Paul's own strangeness (especially if he was supposed to come out of the Sunset District), and about her own thoughts about how maybe there were other worlds. The longer she went on, the more foolish she felt. It all seemed so silly, to say nothing of unlikely.
That was what she thought till she turned and looked at Paul's face. He'd gone white as skimmed milk. His voice shook when he asked, "Who told you about this? Who else has heard about it?"
She'd thought of a lot of questions he might ask, but not those. "Nobody," she said. "Not from me, anyhow."
"What does that mean?" He didn't sound shaky any more. He sounded hard and dangerous. "Is anybody else saying that kind of thing?"
If she'd said no, what would he have done? Knocked her over the head with a rock and dragged her into the bushes? She wouldn't have been surprised. He looked so intense, he frightened her. But she answered, "The people from the Triads wonder about you, too. They don't see how you can be from here, either."
Paul went even paler. Watching him, Lucy began to realize her crazy idea might not be so crazy after all. "Oh, great. Just. . . great," he said, and she could make a pretty good guess about what he hadn't quite said. He wouldn't have got so upset if she were crazy. He needed a little while to gather himself. Once he did, he went on, "Listen, you've got to promise me something. You've got to, Lucy, you hear me?"
"I hear you," she said. "I'm not going to promise anything till I know what it is."
He nodded jerkily. "Okay," he said, though it seemed an
ything but okay to him. "You've got to promise me not to talk about this business with anybody. Anybody at all. Ever. You don't know how much trouble it could cause."
"I think maybe I do," she said.
But Paul said, "If you think so, you're wrong. Americans here thought they knew what atomic bombs could do, too. It turned out they didn't. They didn't even come close. This would be like that, too, only worse—maybe thousands of times worse."
Americans here. What other Americans were there? But as soon as Lucy asked herself the question, she saw the answer. There were Americans of whatever sort Paul was. Were there other kinds besides his? Were there . .. thousands of other kinds besides his?
Lucy looked around. The Japanese garden seemed to press in on her. She knew that wasn't real, but it felt real. All of a sudden, this whole world seemed nothing more than a single grain of sand on the beach. And how many other grains, almost but not quite like it, lay there on the beach beside it? Thousands? Millions? What came after millions?
Quietly, Paul asked, "Do you see?" What must her face have been showing?
"I think maybe I do," she said again, and now maybe she did, or began to. "That's . . . the biggest thing I ever tried to imagine in my whole life."
"Yeah, well, now that you've done it, try to imagine forgetting about it, okay?" Paul said. "Please? It's important. You don't know how important it is."
That was true enough. How could she know such a thing? But she said, "Maybe you ought to tell me, then. I'm stuck in the middle of this, aren't I?"
"I wish you weren't. I wish there weren't any middle to be stuck in," Paul told her. She believed that. If there weren't any middle for her to be stuck in, he wouldn't have been in trouble, either.
If. If. If. Was that how all the separate worlds were different? A different if in each one? She almost asked him. Seeing if he could go any paler than he was already might have been fun. She had more urgent things to worry about, though. "Well, there is a middle, and I'm in it, just like you," she said. "The real question is, how do we get out of it?"
"Good question. Real good question. I wish I had a real good answer," he said. "By now, my people will know something's wrong. But they can't do anything about it, not while the Feldgendarmerie is sitting in Curious Notions."
"That's where you go back and forth?" Lucy asked.
Paul nodded, then looked as if he wished he hadn't "Don't ask me stuff like that," he said. "Don't ask me anything. The less you know, the less they can get out of you."
Lucy wondered what sort of they he had in mind. The Kaiser's men? The Triads? Everybody in this whole world? The last seemed the most likely. He really was a stranger here. "You know how to get in touch with me," Lucy said. "How do I get in touch with you if I need to?"
"You shouldn't," he said. "If you find out where I'm staying, other people will, too. You're okay. Other people?" He shook his head. "You know about the kinds of other people who want to talk to me."
She did, too. She didn't care for his answer, but she saw it made sense. He had a way of doing that. She said, "I think I'd better go. There are a lot of things I need to sort out now." She wondered if she'd be able to go to sleep tonight. She didn't see how.
Her face must have given her away again. Paul laughed—not so much because he thought it was funny, she judged, but because he didn't know what else to do. "I wish you wouldn't," he said. Then he let out another laugh. "I may as well wish for the sun not to come up tomorrow, too. I can see that."
"I can't help it," Lucy said. "This is important. You told me so yourself."
"Me and my big mouth," he muttered. But then he waved her away. "Now you know what you always wanted to. I hope you're not sorry later on."
How could I be? Lucy didn't say it out loud. It was another one of those questions where she could already see the answer.
Paul sat at the edge of his lumpy mattress, staring down at the worn carpet. Every once in a while, he would shake his head. He'd just broken every rule drilled into him in Crosstime Traffic training. Somebody in this alternate knew it was an alternate, and he'd admitted as much.
Try as he would, though, he didn't see what else he could have done. Lucy had already figured most of it out on her own. That was bad enough. But she'd also said the guys from the Tongs weren't far behind her. She couldn't do anything about what she knew (except take it to the Germans, but she wouldn't do that). They . . . might be able to. Paul didn't know enough to be sure.
He also didn't know whether he dared visit Stanley Hsu's jewelry store again. If he showed up there, would the jeweler and his pals grab him and start trying to pull what he knew out of him? If he didn't show up there, wouldn't Stanley Hsu forget about getting his father out of jail? He was too likely to be wrong—dreadfully wrong—whether he chose to go or to stay away.
Before long, he had the problem solved for him. He was walking up O'Farrell Street when a Chinese man a couple of years older than he was fell into step beside him. "You're Mr. Gomes, aren't you?" the fellow asked in a friendly voice.
Paul hesitated. If he admitted it... If he denied it...
Whether he admitted it or denied it turned out not to matter. Three more Chinese men fell in around him. "Why don't you come along with us, Mr. Gomes?" said the one who'd spoken before. Why don't you come along with us so we don't stomp the stuffing out of you? hung in the air. The fellow still sounded friendly. Why wouldn't he? He held all the good cards.
Or did he? "What if I yell for a cop?" Paul said.
All four Chinese men smiled. They were four of the chilliest smiles he'd ever seen. "Go right ahead," said the one who did the talking. "Be our guest."
He needed a second and a half, tops, to decide that wasn't a good idea. If he yelled for a cop, the Chinese guys might maim him before the policeman could do a thing. Even if they didn't, the cop was liable to hang on to him and find out who he was. As soon as the cop did find out, he was very likely to turn Paul over to the Feldgen-darmerie for the reward. Falling into the Tongs' hands might be bad. Falling into the Germans' hands would be bad. The difference was small, but it was real.
When he didn't yell, his—escorts?—smiled again. "I thought you had some brains," the talking one said.
"Do I?" Paul asked bitterly. The men surrounding him didn't answer. They just kept smiling. In a movie, he could have broken away or knocked all of them flat.
Here on the dirty, sadly shabby streets of San Francisco, one against four looked like bad odds. He asked, "Where are you taking me?"
"You'll see," said the man who'd asked his name. Paul wanted to kick him just for that. He would have bet it was what he'd get for an answer. Then the fellow added, "It isn't far."
"Thanks a lot," Paul said. The Chinese man grinned at him. He knows what I'm thinking, Paul realized. He knows, and he's enjoying it.
For whatever it was worth, he told the truth. The Chinese men herded Paul to a noodle shop a few blocks away. They were good at what they did. They didn't look as if they were herding him. By the way they acted, they might have been his buddies. They'd plainly had plenty of practice at their game. He wondered where they'd got it. That might have been one more thing he was better off not knowing.
In the shop sat Stanley Hsu and another, older, man in what passed for a sharp suit in this alternate. Stanley Hsu stood up in greeting. The older man, who had what seemed like a permanent sour look on his face, didn't. The jeweler said, "I hope you'll let us buy you lunch while we talk."
"Do I have a choice?" Paul asked.
"There are always choices," Stanley Hsu answered. Paul didn't like the sound of that. Stanley Hsu went on, "Why don't you sit down? We'll eat lunch, we'll talk, and we'll see what some of the choices are."
Paul glanced at the rugged young men who'd brought him to the noodle shop. "Is one of the choices making them disappear?"
Stanley Hsu looked to the older man. That told Paul something about who bossed whom. The older man jerked a thumb at the door. The four escorts trooped out
without a backward glance. The older man pointed to a chair. Paul sat down.
Stanley Hsu's eyes went to the older man again. The fellow's frown got deeper as he thought for a moment. Then he nodded. The jeweler said, "This is Mr. Lee—Bob Lee."
"Hello," Paul said. That let him stay polite without saying he was glad to meet Bob Lee. Was the Chinese man named for the Confederate general? That would have been funny. Paul wanted to see what he could get out of the men from the Tongs. He asked, "How is my father? Do you know?"
Once more, Stanley Hsu looked toward Bob Lee. The sour look didn't leave Lee's face as he answered, "The Germans are treating him pretty well. They're treating him very well, in fact. We don't know what that means."
One thing it might mean was that Paul's father was telling the Feldgendarmerie men what they wanted to hear—or maybe what they needed to hear. But would he do that? Paul hoped not, anyway.
After enough .. . persuasion, anybody might say anything. You couldn't blame someone for that. Before, though? Before was a different story.
The man behind the counter brought everyone at the table big bowls of noodles piled high with shrimp and scallops and crab meat and three or four kinds of mushrooms and even more kinds of vegetables. Nobody had asked Paul if that was what he wanted, but it looked good. The man gave Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee chopsticks. He started to hand Paul a fork. "I can use chopsticks, too," Paul said.
The man blinked, but handed him a pair. Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee looked at each other. Lee rattled off a few words in Chinese. If they didn't mean, This I gotta see, Paul would have been amazed.
/'// show 'em, he thought. He'd been using chopsticks in Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants since he was a little kid. He dug in. He might not have been quite so neat as the two Chinese men with him, but he had no trouble. The food disappeared. It tasted as good as it looked.
He'd got halfway down the bowl before he noticed the jeweler and the older man staring at him. That was when he realized showing he could use chopsticks might have been a mistake. "You weren't kidding," Stanley Hsu said.
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