Curious Notions ct-2 Read online

  Lucy thought her shift at the shoe factory would never end. She often felt that way, but it was especially bad tonight. At last, the whistle blew. She got to her feet, stretched, and headed for the clock to time out. She stuck the card in the slot, got it stamped, put it back in its place on the wall, and left the building.

  When she waited at the bus stop down at the corner instead of just walking home, Mildred asked her, "Where are you going?" Any time you broke routine, people noticed. They wondered why.

  "I've got to meet somebody about Father," Lucy answered. That satisfied the older woman. She probably thought Lucy meant a lawyer or somebody like that, but what she thought wasn't Lucy's worry.

  The nickel that went into the fare box was. She hated to spend money. Her family never had enough of it. She didn't know anybody who did, either. But she couldn't walk to the park, not if she wanted to get there by half past six.

  The Japanese garden there was one of her favorite spots. Gardeners kept it beautifully landscaped. When it wasn't too crowded with tourists, it was one of the most peaceful places she knew. The big bronze Buddha, green with age, stared out tranquilly over the flowers and ferns and shrubs. And there was the bridge across the stream. It was no ordinary bridge, but a great arc of a circle. You had to climb it to get to the top.

  Lucy climbed it for a reason, not just for the fun of it. She could see farther from there than from any other spot in the garden, and Paul Gomes hadn't told her exactly where he wanted to meet. The Japanese garden didn't seem very big . . . till you were in it.

  She met him, all right—he was climbing up the other side. She reached the top before he did. "Hello, there," she said.

  "Hello, yourself," he answered, scrambling up to stand beside her on the brown-painted planking. "I came up here to look for you."

  "I did the same thing," Lucy said. In a strange way, that pleased her. But such pleasures were just that—small. She stabbed out a forefinger. "What do you know about Father?"

  "I don't know anything," Paul said. Lucy wanted to hit him, or to push him over the rail into the stream. That would surprise the colorful carp swimming down below. He went on, "I do know I've got an American police captain and an assistant district attorney asking the Germans questions about him."

  "Talk is cheap," Lucy said. "We want him back. We miss him. We need him." Had Paul really done anything at all? Or was he just talking to make her feel better? She couldn't tell, and not knowing was a torture in itself.

  He said, "I did find out your father's okay. They're holding him, yeah, but they haven't hurt him or anything."

  "That's good," Lucy said. Again, she wondered if she could believe him. She wanted to. She wanted to very badly. That only made her more suspicious. Angrily, she demanded, "How do you know?"

  "Captain Horvath found out for me," Paul answered. Now Lucy took him seriously. Everybody in Chinatown knew, or knew of, Fatty Horvath. Paul Gomes went on, "It's about even money whether the Germans come after my father and me next."

  "You?" Lucy stared. Up there on top of that funny bridge, the idea seemed even more ridiculous than it would have somewhere else. "Why would they want to come after you? With the stuff Curious Notions has, you must be the goose that laid the golden eggs for them."

  "Yeah, right," Paul said tightly. Lucy hadn't heard that slang phrase before, but she had no trouble figuring out what it meant. Her cheeks got hot. Paul added, "You remember what happened to the goose that laid the golden eggs, don't you?"

  Till Paul reminded her, Lucy hadn't remembered. Now she did. They'd killed the goose, trying to figure out where the eggs came from. She said, "Is that why you people named my father? To get the Feldgendarmerie off your own necks?"

  Paul nodded. He looked out across the garden, not at her. "That's right," he said, and then, after a small but noticeable pause, "I'm sorry."

  By the way he said those last two words, they were an enormous gift to Lucy—a gift she probably didn't deserve. But he had said them. And, by the look on his face, he knew he couldn't take them back. Lucy said, "Sorry doesn't do anything. You talked to this lawyer fellow, and you talked to Fatty Horvath. But what happens if they can't get Father loose?"

  "What do you want us to do then?" Paul asked. "Bust him out of jail?"

  He plainly meant it for a joke. But Lucy found herself nodding. "Yes. That seems fair, doesn't it? He's in there on account of you." She studied him carefully. She didn't think she'd ever looked at anyone like that before. And she found herself nodding again. "I think maybe you can, too. With all those strange things you sell in that shop, who knows what else you've got in there?"

  Now Paul's eyes snapped back to her. What was on his face was shock—shock and maybe fear to go with it. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said slowly.

  The way he said it convinced Lucy he was lying. "Oh, don't I? What would happen if the Germans really tore that place apart? What would they find? How much trouble would you people be in?"

  Paul turned white. Lucy had heard people talk about that, but she'd never seen it herself till now. She knew she'd made a hit. She just didn't know where. He hung on to the rail for a moment to steady himself. "We wouldn't be," he answered. "We'd jump in a hole and pull it in after us."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Lucy asked. "There's nowhere in the world the Germans can't come after you. Well, maybe the middle of China, but you wouldn't fit in there very well."

  He only shrugged. He didn't say anything more. By his sour, unhappy smile, he'd already said too much. Somehow, though, Lucy didn't think he'd been bragging or just plain lying. If he said he had a way to get free of the Germans, he probably did. But she couldn't imagine what it was.

  "Who are you, Paul Gomes?" But that wasn't the right question. Lucy realized as much as soon as she asked it. What she really wanted to know was, What are you? On the other hand, she didn't get an answer even to the question she asked.

  "You know what you are, Paul?" his father said. "You're an idiot." Paul gave back a sour smile. "I love you, too, Dad." "An idiot," his father repeated, relishing the word. "You think this local girl is cute, so you're ready to move heaven and earth to get her out of a scrape. If that doesn't make you an idiot, kindly tell me what would."

  Do I think Lucy Woo is cute? Paul wondered. He shrugged. He probably did. She wasn't gorgeous or anything, but she wasn't bad. Is that why I'm trying to help her, though? That was a different question. He shook his head. Not a chance. He said, "You're the one who got her into this scrape, remember. You can't just treat the locals like a bunch of movie characters. If something bad happens to them, it happens. They're people, too, same as we are."

  "Very pretty," his father said. "You'd win points for your high-school debating team. But I need to remind you of something. This alternate is also full of people who want to nail our hides to the wall. It's full of people who want to squeeze our secrets out of us. Keeping them from doing that is more important than anything else we do here. If we don't, if we mess up, we could ruin Crosstime Traffic and put the home timeline in a lot of danger. Next to keeping our secrets, what happens to the locals doesn't matter, not for beans. Have you got that?"

  If Paul didn't have it, that wasn't because they'd ignored it in training. They'd hammered away at it, in fact. The home timeline came first. Nothing else counted next to keeping the home timeline safe and secret. In the training sessions, that seemed to make a lot of sense. Here in this alternate, this might-have-been San Francisco, the differences between us and them felt a lot smaller.

  "It's not as simple as you make it sound, Dad," Paul said.

  His father rolled his eyes. "The devil it's not," he said. "You're behind the counter. That Weidenreich comes in and starts grilling you. If you don't give him some kind of answer, what's he going to do? Haul you off to jail and start ripping answers out of you, that's what. So, Mr. Not-As-Simple, what do you tell him?" He folded his arms across his chest and waited.

  Paul opened his mouth. Then he
closed it again. He didn't know what to say. He knew what the Feldgendarmerie often did to people who didn't care to talk. The Germans in this alternate had the same sort of attitude as Crosstime Traffic wanted its people to show. They came first, and everybody else could look out for himself.

  "Well?" Dad wasn't shy about rubbing it in. Dad wasn't shy about anything. That made him good at running this operation. But there were too many times when it made him a real pain to be around.

  "Well, all right, we had to tell the inspector something. I can see that," Paul said at last. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix the damage. If we do it so we don't get noticed, where's the harm?"

  His father looked at him—looked through him, really. "Okay," he said. "If we don't tip our hand, it's not so bad. But that's not the way you were acting. You sounded more like you wanted to charge right out there, slay the dragon, and rescue the fair maiden. And that's not a good idea—not, you hear me?"

  "I hear you, Dad. I always hear you," Paul said wearily.

  "Yeah, you hear me. But do you listen?"

  Instead of answering, Paul turned away. Neither one of them was going to change the other's mind. Paul already knew the only way to reach his father was to hit him over the head with a two-by-four. Dad still hadn't quite figured out that Paul was just as stubborn. It didn't show so much in Paul, because he was quieter about it. But if he saw something he thought needed doing, he'd do it, and he wouldn't let anything or anybody—his father included—get in his way.

  Or maybe Dad had figured out more than Paul thought. He said, "Look, son, what you do on your own is fine, as long as nobody can trace it back to Crosstime Traffic. This is one of those alternates we want to keep quarantined. The Germans here hold down everybody else's technology. We have to hold theirs down. We don't want them thinking about transposition chambers."

  He wasn't wrong about that. An Imperial Germany that could rampage across the alternates was the last thing Paul wanted to see. But Imperial Germany already oppressed the Americans in this world. For people from the home timeline to oppress them, too, added insult to injury.

  When Paul said as much, his father only shrugged. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," he said. He seemed to think answering one cliche' with another meant winning the argument. Paul gave it up. He would do what he would do. If Dad turned out not to like it, he was welcome to try to do something better.

  Lucy waited for several days to see if her father would come home. When he didn't, she decided to visit Curious Notions again. She was tired after a long day at the shoe factory. She didn't even know if the shop would be open when she got there. She only knew she had to try.

  Curious Notions hadn't closed. But when Lucy looked in the front window, she saw Paul Gomes wasn't there. That was his father writing something behind the counter. The big, black, bushy mustache he wore did nothing to cut the resemblance.

  A bell rang when Lucy opened the door. The man who looked like Paul put down his pen and nodded to her. "Hello. How can I help you today?" He sounded pleasant enough. "We have some things here you won't find anywhere else, at prices most people can afford."

  Maybe the people he usually dealt with could afford those prices. Lucy couldn't come close. She said, "I'm Lucy Woo. Do you have my father? What kind of price do I have to pay to get him back?"

  The man's face changed. Not even that big mustache could hide his frown. "I think maybe you'd better come back another time," he said, and all of a sudden he didn't sound nearly so pleasant.

  "Why? So you can have the Feldgendarmerie waiting for me?" Lucy pronounced the hard g and the guttural r's without a bobble. Feldgendarmerie was a German word most Americans used too often to get it wrong.

  "No." The man shook his head. "So you can talk to my son. He's the one who's taking care of that."

  Taking care of it how? Lucy wondered. Really trying to get Father out? Or just pretending till I give up and go away? She said, "I've already talked with Paul. He said he'd help. He hasn't yet."

  Paul's father shook his head. "That isn't true. He's done stuff, all right. He's done more than I would have, as a matter of fact. It just hasn't paid off yet. Do you see the difference?"

  Lucy would have expected to think he was lying. Oddly, though, she found herself believing him. She wondered why. Probably because he looked so disgusted when he talked about what Paul had done. She would have bet anything she owned that he wouldn't have done it himself.

  She said, "When do you think it will pay off?"

  "I don't know." Paul's father sounded disgusted, too. No, he wouldn't have lifted a finger to help Charlie Woo. When he saw his answer didn't satisfy Lucy, he let out a long, put-upon sigh. "If I had to make a guess, I'd say things would start happening in maybe another week or so. But I'm only guessing. I'm not promising."

  "Another week?" Lucy said in dismay.

  "It's not such a long time," Paul's father said.

  He wasn't sixteen. He didn't have a father locked up in a German jail. But, again, Lucy didn't think he was trying to pull the wool over her eyes with his guess. He meant it, even if he didn't have the faintest idea how hard it was on her. Reluctantly, she nodded. "A week," she said. "But if he's not out by then . . ."

  Paul's father leaned across the counter toward her. His face didn't change. His voice didn't change, either, unless it got a little softer. But when he said, "You don't want to threaten me, Miss Woo. You really don't want to threaten me. Have you got that?" she nodded before she even thought about it. She'd always known the Germans could do dreadful things. What American didn't know that? Could Paul Gomes' father be just as dreadful, or maybe worse? Right then, she didn't doubt it. He smiled, seeing that he'd made her afraid. "Anything else?"

  "No, I don't think so." Lucy gathered herself. She couldn't just slink out of the shop, no matter how much her feet wanted to do exactly that. She made herself look Paul's father straight in the face. "I wasn't kidding about what I said. If my father doesn't come home, there will be trouble."

  She'd surprised him. She could tell he hadn't thought she'd have the nerve to answer back. He said, "Go on. Get out. It's closing time here."

  Now she did leave. She left with her back straight, and she didn't look behind her. She thought about slamming the door as she went out, but she didn't do that, either. She wouldn't let Paul's father see he'd upset her. He had to know he had, but she refused to let him see it. That felt very important to her just then.

  An American cop in a baggy uniform of cheap blue cloth nodded to her. He looked tired—maybe a little hungover, too. His shoes needed shining. He had bad teeth. He was just a man doing a job, trying to get along as best he could. Lucy didn't have anything against that. She was trying to do the same thing herself.

  She walked on. A couple of blocks closer to her home, she saw a German officer. His field-gray uniform fit perfectly. His jackboots were polished black mirrors. He strode along as if he owned the sidewalk—and didn't he? People scrambled to get out of his way. If they hadn't, he made you think, he would have walked right through them. He was proud to be what he was. How many Americans were proud these days? What did Americans have to be proud of? Not bloody much.

  From behind the German, someone yelled, "Go home, you stinking—!" He finished with great sincerity and even greater fury.

  The officer whirled. His Luger was in his hand even before the motion stopped. But dozens of people were walking along back there. Who'd cursed him? How was he supposed to tell?

  And now, with his back turned in a different direction, somebody else told him where to go and how to get there. He spun again—he was quick as a cat. That quickness did him no good at all. As soon as he faced a new direction, another American in back of him called him a vile name.

  Most people would have figured that out faster than he did. He kept jerking this way and that, like a puppet with four or five people fighting over the strings. He finally got the idea. He threw his hands in the air and stuck the pistol ba
ck in its holster. "Have your sport, American pigdogs!" he shouted in accented English. "You think you are iurmy, ja? See how funny you are when it comes time to pay taxes! Until then, bark as you please!" He tramped on.

  It was a good comeback. Even Lucy, who despised him, knew as much. It would have been better if he'd thought of it sooner, but how much could you expect from an officer? The Germans had got where they were at least as much by being stubborn as by being quick.

  I’ll be stubborn, too, Lucy thought. If it works for them, it can work for me. She sighed. The Germans also had money and soldiers and scientists going for them. What did she have? Stubbornness, and that was about it.

  When she got home, her brother set up a chant: "Lucy's back! Lucy's back! Lucy's back!"

  Her mother came running out of the kitchen to give her a hug. "Thank heavens!" she exclaimed. "I was afraid the Feldgendarmerie had taken you away, too."

  Lucy shook her head. "It didn't have anything to do with the Feldgendarmerie. I stopped at Curious Notions to see if they were doing what Paul Gomes said they would." She made an unhappy face. "I still don't know if they are or not. His father told me to wait another week, and I guess I will. But I'm not going to wait any more than that, and you'd better believe it."

  "You'd better be careful, so you don't end up in trouble," Mother said. "What can you do, anyway? You're only a girl."

  "I don't know what I can do," Lucy said. "Get them in trouble, maybe, or more trouble than they're already in, because I think they're in some. But I think they are trying to do something for Father, too, and nobody else is, and they're doing it on account of me even if I am just a girl." She took a deep breath. She hadn't quite expected all of that to come out at once, but there it was.

  Her mother looked startled, too. She didn't say anything, not right away. She just squeezed Lucy again, harder than ever. She didn't seem to want to let her go. When she did, Lucy was amazed to see tears gleaming in her eyes. "At your age, you think you can do anything," she said. "And sometimes you're right—and sometimes you're not. But you won't believe you're not, not yet you won't."