And she'd know the whole crosstime secret, not just most of it. That wouldn't do, either.
Could things get better here? Could the United States be free again, after close to a century and a half of getting its nose rubbed in the dirt? Could the Chinese help? Would they help, or would they just want to be top dogs instead of the Germans? Those were all good questions. Paul had answers to none of them.
He wondered what Lucy thought. Everything kept coming back to her. That was . .. interesting. He hadn't realized she'd got so far under his skin. He'd never kissed her, never even held her hand. She wasn't under his skin like that, exactly. But he liked her. More than that, he admired her. She had problems bigger than any he'd ever imagined—till now, anyhow. She didn't even know how big some of them were, because they were the problems of this whole alternate. No matter how big and how tough they were, she carried on. She didn't complain or make a fuss. She just did what she needed to do. He admired that, too.
What about me? Paul wondered. What do I need to do? How do I need to do it? Lucy seemed to know without even thinking about it. Paul had an idea of what he needed to do: get Dad out of jail and get back to the home timeline. How? That was a different question.
He also didn't know what he ought to do now that he could do it without leaving the Tongs any the wiser. He realized he should have thought that out before escaping his followers. Now he was all dressed up with no place to go. And if he had to get free of them again, it wouldn't be so easy. They'd know he could, so they'd keep a tighter watch on him.
Maybe I ought to go back. Maybe I ought to pretend I didn't know they weren't keeping an eye on me. Paul shook his head. He couldn't stand that. He had managed to get away. Not doing something with his new-found freedom seemed a criminal waste.
Casually, his hands in his pockets, he ambled in the direction of Curious Notions. Who could say what might turn up? If he didn't go and take a look around, he'd never find out.
"Lucy, where is Frances Klingerman's personnel folder?" Mrs. Cho asked.
"Isn't it in the maternity file?" Lucy asked. The sewing-machine operator had had a baby boy a week earlier.
"Oh," Mrs. Cho said. "Let me check there." She did, and then nodded. "Yes, I have it. Thank you."
"You're welcome," Lucy said. She made a face behind her supervisor's back. Mrs. Cho knew everything there was to know about the shoe factory's paperwork. She understood company policy and rules and regulations in a way Lucy wouldn't for years and years. Most of the time, she knew where all the folders were, and which papers lurked in each one.
But she didn't know Frances Klingerman had had a baby. She didn't have the faintest idea who Frances Klingerman was. To her, the woman was jut a name on a label on a manila folder. Lucy had worked a few machines away from the new mother. She knew her husband stayed out at night in saloons, and sometimes came home drunk and mean. She knew how the little girl the Klingermans already had was starting to lose her baby teeth. She knew Frances liked to eat sandwiches with really smelly cheese in them for lunch.
Frances Klingerman was a person to her. The woman was nothing but her folder to Mrs. Cho. That seemed wrong to Lucy. What seemed even wronger was that Mrs. Cho could fire Frances Klinger-man or demote her or cut her pay without ever finding out who she was.
Then, all of a sudden, Lucy shivered. If she stayed in the personnel office till she was as old as her supervisor, wouldn't she learn all the ropes? Wouldn't she find out everything there was to know about policies and rules and regulations? Wouldn't she stop thinking about the people who actually made the shoes—stop thinking of them as people? Wouldn't they just turn into ... folders for her? Wouldn't she turn into Mrs. Cho?
She'd never had a scarier thought.
What can I do about it? How can I help it? Like a trapped animal, she looked around the office. Where was the way out? How could she help becoming what her supervisor already was?
Did they have offices like this in the world Paul came from? If they'd figured out how to make the Sunset District a nice place, wouldn't they also know how to turn work into something people could stand or even enjoy? She sighed. They sure hadn't done that here.
Enjoy it or not, she kept going till the end of the day. Every time she took care of something without even thinking about it, she worried. Am I turning into Mrs. Cho? She hoped not. She wouldn't have had to wonder about anything like that if she'd stayed at her sewing machine. Nothing could have made her turn into somebody like Hank Simmons.
She felt even more tired than usual when she started for home. Putting one-foot in front of the other took work. But she kept going. She wondered how Paul was doing. Next to the worries he had, hers were small potatoes.
Thinking about Paul also made her think about Curious Notions. She wondered if Feldgendarmerie men still lurked inside.
She also wondered if the Triads had come by to grab whatever they could. How much would the Germans have left? Was there stuff inside the Germans didn't know about? Was it stuff Paul might have told the Triads about?
It won't hurt to take a look, Lucy told herself. Nobody will pay any attention to me if I just walk by. Vm only another face. For that matter, Vm only another Chinese face. The Feldgendarmerie will think I look like every other Chinese girl in San Francisco.
Talking yourself into doing something dangerous and foolish could be amazingly easy. Lucy didn't worry about that till later— which only went to show how easy it was.
Almost before she knew it, she was walking up the street toward Curious Notions. Paul would have told her she was dumb. Her father would have told her she was dumb. Even Michael would have told her she was dumb. She didn't want to think about what her mother would have told her. She walked up the street anyhow.
And she turned out not to be the only one drawn like a moth to the flame. Paul stood across the street from Curious Notions, leaning against a telephone pole. He seemed casual enough, till she saw his face. He eyed the shop he and his father had run the way a hungry dog eyed at a steak.
He eyed Curious Notions—and didn't even notice the two big, beefy cops sneaking up behind him. The cops looked like something out of a bad movie. They were so obvious, people should have been pointing at them or running away from them. And people were.
Everybody except Paul, whose attention was elsewhere.
"Look out!" Lucy yelled. "They're after you!"
Paul jumped a foot in the air. When he came down, he took off as if he had wings on his shoes.
"Stop!" one of the policemen yelled.
"Stop in the name of the law!" the other one added. They both pounded after him. They didn't draw their guns. Lucy thought that was interesting. They wanted him, all right, but they wanted him alive.
She put her head down and kept walking. The policemen hadn't noticed who she was. They'd been watching Paul as hard as he'd been watching Curious Notions. They had no idea who'd shouted the warning.
One of them blew a whistle—Tweeeeet! The long, shrill blast of sound did nothing to slow Paul down. The cop blew again anyway— Tweeeeet! Paul scooted around a corner. Big black shoes thumping on the pavement, the policemen gave chase. He was speedier than Lucy had thought he would be. The two cops weren't going to catch him unless he fell down and sprained his ankle—or unless they started shooting.
Before long, Lucy heard sirens. More policemen were coming. She hoped Paul would get away. She couldn't do anything more for him right now. It was only luck that she'd been able to do what she had. She walked faster. Some helpful soul was liable to tell the cops what the girl who'd shouted out that warning looked like. Better if she wasn't there when that happened.
When she got back to the apartment, she told her mother what she'd done. That turned out to be a mistake. Lucy should have seen it coming, but she hadn't. "That boy has caused nothing but trouble," Mother said. "You shouldn't have anything to do with him."
"I don't have anything to do with him, not like that," Lucy said.
"A good thing,
too." Mother pointed to a big pile of shrimp on the counter. "You can peel those out of their shells."
"Okay." Lucy didn't want to quarrel about Paul. And, while peeling shrimp was work, eating shrimp was pure pleasure. She pointed to them, too. "Where did they come from? They're always so expensive."
"Your father did some work for Charlie Antonelli, the shrimper up at Fisherman's Wharf. Mr. Antonelli paid him back with shrimp instead of money."
"Father should work for him more often," Lucy said, and her mother laughed. Maybe she wasn't going to nag about Paul. Lucy hoped not, anyway.
Mother had boiled the shrimp. They were a lovely white and orangeish pink, not the greenish color they had when they were fresh. Most of the shell, along with their little legs, came off easily. Lucy used her fingernail to take out the black vein along each shrimp's back. She got meat under it, but she didn't care.
The tail was separate. Sometimes you could peel that off, too, and leave the meat on the shrimp. Sometimes the tail broke off, with the little bit of meat still inside. Lucy would crack the tails with her fingers and get the extra meat out. When she did, she'd pop it into her mouth. That was the bonus the person who peeled the shrimp got.
Michael came into the kitchen when the job was almost done. "Can I help?" he asked.
"Mother told me to do it," Lucy said, and she ate the meat out of another shrimp tail right in front of his nose.
"Mommy!" Michael said—the magic word.
"Let him have a few to do, Lucy," Mother said. Michael looked so smug, Lucy wanted to drop a shrimp down the back of his shirt. If Mother hadn't been standing there watching, she might have done it. But then who could guess what her little brother would do to her to get even?
Michael didn't just eat the meat out of the tails. He ate a couple of whole shrimp, which was cheating. When Lucy told on him—and she did—Mother only wagged a finger at him. She had an indulgent little smile on her face. Michael could get away with stuff where Lucy couldn't because he was a boy. It wasn't fair, which didn't mean it wasn't true.
Supper was wonderful. They all had as much shrimp as they wanted. "Hooray for Mr. Antonelli!" Lucy said. Not even Michael argued with that. Lucy asked her father, "What did you do for him?"
"I put a radio direction-finder in his boat," Father answered. "I hate to say it, but it's a lot better than an ordinary compass."
"Why do you hate to say it?" Michael asked.
"Because Chinese people invented the compass, a long time ago," Father said. He made a sour face. "The direction-finder is a German gadget. It's a good one, though. It does just what it's supposed to do."
"How did you get hold of a German gadget to put on Mr. An-tonelli's boat?" Lucy asked. Michael looked angry, maybe because she'd beaten him to the question.
"Well, sometimes you get to know people who will sell you things if the price is right, and who won't ask a lot of questions about what you want to do with them." Father winked. "The Germans are just like any other people. Some of them will do things like that. For this, though, it would have been too expensive. Getting my hands on the drawings was more complicated, but a lot cheaper. Then I made it myself. All the parts are right off the shelf. That's one of the things I like about it."
"Wow," Lucy said.
Father only shrugged. He was a modest man. If he'd been less modest, he might have had more money. "It's not that hard," he said. "Anything ordinary people use, I can deal with and not have too much trouble." He cocked his head to one side. "That was what drove me crazy about your friends from Curious Notions. Some of the things they had . . . Well, they worked. I saw them work. I'm still not always sure about how or why, but they did."
I know why they were strange. I know why they were different. Lucy wanted to tell her father. She wanted to, but she didn't. Letting him know would make him happy—if he believed her and didn't think she'd gone crazy. But letting him know could endanger Paul. The Feldgendarmerie had already grabbed Father once. They might come back. They might not just throw him in jail this time, either.
Lucy didn't like keeping secrets from her family. She wasn't keeping Paul's secret only from her family, though. She was keeping it from the whole world.
One of the things Paul had learned in Crosstime Traffic training was to act as normal as he could. That wasn't always easy, but it was good advice. As soon as he got away from the first two San Francisco policemen, he stopped running. People stared at someone dashing down the sidewalk. They remembered him. Some of them would give him away if the cops came by a little later on.
But somebody sauntering along the street without a care in the world . . . Who noticed somebody like that? He might be on his way home from work, or off to visit a friend, or maybe just heading to the grocery store around the corner. Whatever he was doing, there were hundreds more just like him.
A police car drove up the street past Paul. Its red dome lights spun and blinked. Its bell clanged. The cops inside had to be on the lookout for him, and for nobody but him. They didn't give him a second glance. The car shot past and was gone.
For once, coming into the Tenderloin was a relief. Policemen who came here had more criminals than him to worry about. He wouldn't even have minded running into the young men from the Tongs. They wouldn't give him to the Feldgendarmerie.
What they might do to him themselves was an interesting question. They couldn't be happy with him for giving them the slip. He might have made a good-sized mistake of several different flavors by showing he could get away.
But he didn't see any of his watchers when he got to the cheap hotel where he was staying. Had they fanned out all over San Francisco looking for him? If they had, they wouldn't be very happy to find out he'd returned right under their noses. No, he probably hadn't been very smart to show what he could do. He couldn't stand being watched all the time, though.
Too late to worry about it now. He went up the worn, grimy steps and into the worn, grimy lobby. The desk clerk sent him an incurious glance, then went back to his picture-filled story.
Paul clumped up the stairs to his room. The elevator, he was convinced, would never be repaired. And when were the walls of the stairway last painted? They were a very peculiar color, halfway between dirt and fog. It was a color that had given up on itself a long time ago.
The carpet in the hallway wasn't as old as that sad, sorry paint, but Paul would have bet it was older than he was. The locks and dead bolts on his door, on the other hand, were shiny new. He took out his assortment of keys and worked them one by one. At last, with all of them unlocked, he turned the knob and went into his room. He let out a sigh of relief. This wasn't much of a home. Such as it was, it was his castle.
Bob Lee sat on the edge of the bed.
Paul's jaw dropped. "What are you doing here?" he demanded. "How did you get in?" He still had the key ring in his hand. It felt useless for anything except perhaps throwing at the intruder.
"Gomes, you are a lot of trouble," Lee said.
That didn't answer either of Paul's questions. Paul got the idea the Chinese man wasn't going to tell him anything more, either. "Get out," he said. "Get out or I'll. . ."
Lee laughed in his face. "You'll what? Call the police? Go ahead. I'll give you a nickel for the phone. Throw me out? You can try." A small automatic pistol appeared in his right hand. One second, it wasn't there. The next, it was. The man from the Tongs looked as if he knew what to do with it.
As steadily as he could, Paul said, "Shoot me and you'll never find out any of the answers you want."
"Not from you, maybe." Bob Lee shrugged. "I know where someone else who's got them is stashed." He had a smile only a reptile could love. But the pistol vanished as fast as it had appeared. "You have some explaining to do. How did you get away from my ... associates? They said you must have used some of your special tricks, because they were watching you all the time."
Now Paul laughed. Bob Lee's eyebrows rose a millimeter or two. Paul said, "If I had as many special tricks as you
think I do, would I be in the mess I'm in?"
"Who knows?" Lee's voice was hard and flat. "Anyone can have things go wrong—anyone at all. Now answer my question. How did you get away?"
Paul thought about jumping him. Then he thought better of it. He said, "No special tricks, not like you mean," and told what he'd done at the cafe.
The man from the Tongs studied him. At last, Lee gave a reluctant nod. "Okay. I believe you. I think you caught them napping. I don't think you'll catch them napping again. You'd better not, or I'll have some new associates." He didn't say what would happen to the ones who'd been watching Paul. Paul didn't think they would just get a lecture.
He said, "What are you going to do with what you get from my dad and me? I can tell you, it won't be as much as you think it is. We don't work miracles."
"Close enough," Bob Lee said. "Some of the things you were selling . . ." He eyed Paul like an eagle eyeing a rabbit. After a moment, he went on, "What will we do? Some people have been in the driver's seat here for a long time. Now, maybe it's the turn of some other people." He didn't quite point a thumb at his own chest, but he might as well have.
"How will you be better than the Germans?" Paul asked. "Will you be better than the Germans?"
For a split second, naked surprise showed on Lee's face. Plainly, being better than the Germans had never occurred to him. It probably hadn't occurred to anyone else in the San Francisco Tongs or back in China, either. All they thought about was being on top. Paul wasn't surprised. He couldn't say he wasn't disappointed.
At last, Lee answered, "We won't be the Kaiser. We won't be the Feldgendarmerie. Is that enough?"
"What do I know? I'm just the goose with the golden eggs, remember?"
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