Curious notions, p.14
Curious Notions, page 14
Paul wished he knew what was going on inside the Feldgendarmerie jail. How hard were the Kaiser’s men squeezing Dad? What was he saying? Paul had no way to find out. The people at Curious Notions had made friends with some San Francisco cops. That often came in handy. Paul didn’t want to test it now. The Americans might feel they had to turn him in to the German masters. One mistake like that would be his last.
He would have liked to stay in his hotel room all the time. But he couldn’t. For one thing, he’d go stir-crazy cooped up in there with nothing to do. For another, who would do anything for his father if he stayed? Dad could be a pain in the neck sometimes—even a lot of the time. But he was family. He would do whatever he could for Paul. Paul had to do the same for him.
And besides, the sooner Dad was out, the less chance he’d spill the secret of crosstime travel. That would be very bad, not just for him, and not just for Crosstime Traffic, either. It would be bad for who could say how many different alternates.
Paul did venture out every so often, then. Whenever he did, he wished he had eyes in the back of his head till he got out of the Tenderloin District. Then, as soon as he came close to Curious Notions, he started wishing for them all over again. He wasn’t just watching for cops and crooks there. Anybody who’d ever known him in this San Francisco might betray him.
He wished he dared go into the shop. Had the Feldgendarmerie discovered the underground room in which the transposition chamber appeared? That could be bad enough all by itself. But the Germans might still have people there waiting to scoop him up. If they didn’t, they might have sensors to let them know he was there. Their best gadgets weren’t as good as the ones from the home timeline, but they didn’t have to be. Paul had no gadgets of his own right now.
Sighing, shaking his head, he turned the corner—and almost walked into a San Francisco policeman. “Sorry,” the cop said politely, tipping his hat. He had a face like the map of Ireland. Then his green eyes narrowed. “The Gomes kid! What are you doing here? Have you lost all of your mind?”
“Hello, Andy.” Paul got ready to run like the devil. Andy O’Connell’s belly stuck out over his belt. He’d eaten a lot of donuts and burgers and chop suey in his years on the beat. He couldn’t run any faster than a dump truck. But he had a big pistol strapped to his hip. If he pulled it out and started shooting, he didn’t need to run fast.
He kept staring at Paul. “The Kaiser’s bully boys want to lock you up and lose the key. You know that?” He didn’t make any move for the gun, or for his handcuffs, or for Paul.
“Yeah, I know that. But I don’t know why,” Paul said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“The bulletin says ‘suspicion of subversion,’” the policeman told him. “That’s what the Germans say when they want somebody and don’t want to talk about why. They don’t even want us to know why they want you.” He spat on the sidewalk to show what he thought of that.
Hope flowered in Paul. He’d always thought Andy O’Connell was a pretty decent guy. He hadn’t trusted him far enough to take a chance on him, but now he didn’t seem to have much choice. “Is Dad okay?” he asked. “Do you know?”
“I haven’t heard that he’s not, but I don’t know if I would,” the cop answered. “You want I should ask around a little? I can do it so it doesn’t look funny.”
“Would you?” Paul said eagerly. “That’d be great.”
“Do my best,” O’Connell said. “Meantime, you should make like a tree, and leaf. Find a hole. Jump in. Cover it up over you. The Feldgendarmerie wants you, sonny. They want you bad.”
“Now tell me one I didn’t know,” Paul said.
The Irishman eyed him with real curiosity. “What the devil did you do?” He held up a hand before Paul could answer. “Don’t tell me again you didn’t do anything. Nobody every did anything, not since the world was new. I’ll ask it a different way. What do the Kaiser’s boys think you did? If I know that, it’ll help me ask the right questions.”
No doubt that was true. But anything even close to the truth would be dangerous to Paul. He said, “I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. All I know is, they grabbed Dad while I wasn’t home.” That last was the truth, but only a tiny part of it.
“Uh-huh.” As cops will, O’Connell had developed a fine-tuned sense of what was so and what wasn’t. He didn’t come right out and call Paul a liar, but he didn’t believe him, either. He shrugged broad shoulders. “Well, like I said, I’ll see what I can do. Meantime, you get lost.”
“I intend to,” Paul said.
“You better,” the policeman told him. “There’s a reward out for you—you know that?”
Paul nodded. “Somebody told me.” He didn’t want to name Louie. Anybody who knew anything about him could end up in trouble because of it.
“You’re lucky it wasn’t somebody who turned you in instead,” O’Connell said. “Believe you me, kid, you don’t know how lucky you are.”
“Some luck,” Paul said. “If I were really lucky, the Germans wouldn’t be after me.” Andy O’Connell just shooed him away. He might have been saying he’d already wasted too much time on him. Paul left. He walked for several minutes before he realized he’d been as lucky with the cop as he had with the short-order cook.
Eight
Whenever Lucy went out these days, she kept looking around to see if she could spot Paul. He’d turned up a lot when she wasn’t looking for him. Now that she was, she never got a glimpse of him. Things often seemed to work out like that.
She wondered if he had any clothes besides the ones he was wearing. Once she saw somebody who looked a lot like him in an orange-and-black Seals shirt. She was glad when that turned out to be a stranger. She thought of Paul as a Missions rooter, the way she was. She didn’t know whether she was right. They’d never talked about it. But she would have been disappointed to find out he backed the team the rich and famous cheered for.
Work just went on from day to day. She’d learned the things she needed to know to be a good clerk. Now the job was just routine, the way her time at the sewing machine had been. Her supervisor couldn’t complain. She did everything that needed doing, and did it well.
Even though she did it well, she wondered what she had to look forward to. Another fifty years of this? That was probably what she would have had if she’d stayed at the sewing machine. She hadn’t thought about it so much then. She wondered why not. The work had been a lot harder.
Maybe that was part of the answer. She’d been so busy at the sewing machine, she hadn’t had a chance to think about anything. This job made her think, at least some. And it had slow times when she couldn’t help thinking. She almost wished it didn’t. She would have had more peace of mind.
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 Feldgendarmerie 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 can’t.” 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 anything 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.”
