Curious Notions ct-2 Read online

  Paul wasn't in love with Lucy. The more he tried telling his father so, though, the less Dad would believe him. He could see that coming like a rash. He just gave back a shrug of his own and went outside.

  "Mrowr?" the marmalade cat said. It rolled on its back on the sidewalk and stuck its feet in the air and glanced at him with its head cocked at a silly angle and generally looked ridiculous. He laughed. He couldn't help it. He bent down and rubbed the cat's belly and scratched the velvety skin just above its nose. An angry breath escaped him. Dad hadn't even wanted him making friends with a cat here.

  How could you not want to make friends with a cat like this, though? It purred like far-off thunder, and then even louder, like thunder that wasn't so far off. It scrambled to its feet and stropped itself against his leg. It shoved its face into his hand and purred louder still. He petted it some more. He didn't even have any goodies to give it right now. It was just being friendly. When he got to his feet and walked down the street, it followed him like a German shepherd.

  He wished he hadn't thought of that particular breed of dog. It made him think of Germans, of Feldgendarmerie men. (The Feldgen-darmerie didn't use German shepherds, though. They used Alsatians, which were bigger and meaner.) He looked down at the cat. It kept trotting along, half a pace to his left and half a pace behind him.

  Finally, when it spotted a squirrel that might have strayed too far from a tree, it peeled off. Even then, though, it looked back over its shoulder once before starting to stalk. It might have been saying, Sorry, friend, but this is business.

  Or maybe I'm really starting to imagine things, Paul thought. He didn't stay around to see whether the cat caught the squirrel. He wished it luck. As far as he was concerned, squirrels were nothing but rats with fluffy tails. But what he most wanted to do just then was get as far away from Curious Notions and his father as he could. He kept on walking.

  Five minutes later, he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering if he'd made a mistake. The cat was the only thing he'd find in this alternate that he could like without worrying whether he'd get in trouble or it would get him in trouble.

  Clerks in the front office at the shoe factory complained about their hours. They grumbled about how hard they had to work. Listening to them, Lucy didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. They had no idea how well off they were. If they went back to the machines, they'd find out in a hurry.

  She wondered if they would give her trouble because she'd escaped from the factory floor. People were often mean like that. The clerks here didn't seem to be, though. Oh, she got some of the jobs nobody else much wanted, and she did all the coffeemaking the first couple of weeks she was there. But that sort of thing happened to anybody who was new anywhere. Lucy didn't let it worry her.

  Maybe because she didn't, she got on pretty well with the other girls and women. As they got to know her, they treated her like one of themselves. They gossiped with her, they borrowed dimes from her, they didn't mind when she borrowed pens from them. She was . . . part of the gang.

  This is too easy, she kept saying to herself. Something will go wrong. And something did, though it had nothing to do with the other clerks—or she didn't think it did, anyhow.

  While she was eating lunch one day, somebody left an envelope on her desk. She didn't think much of it when she came back. People here left one another notes all the time. But when she opened the envelope, it didn't hold a note. One of Stanley Hsu's business cards fell on her desk. When she turned it over, she found he'd written, Please come to my shop tomorrow at eight. We have a lot to talk about, don't we?

  "No," Lucy whispered. "I don't think we have anything to talk about." She tore the card into tiny pieces and dropped them in her wastebasket.

  That didn't make her forget, however much she wished it could. It didn't mean she didn't go see the jeweler, either. Had she been alone in the world, she might have tried ignoring him. But she wasn't. Whatever he and her friends did, they wouldn't do just to her. The rest of her family made such lovely, tempting targets.

  When she told her mother and father she'd got the note, they only nodded. It didn't surprise them. To her relief, they didn't tell her to do whatever Stanley Hsu wanted. She didn't think she could have stood it if they'd said that.

  Her mother did say, "Be careful. These people mean business."

  Lucy nodded. "I know that. I knew it as soon as they got me the promotion. Mr. Simmons is a tough man. Nobody can stand him, but he's tough. And he looked scared to death while he was talking to me."

  "Better him than us," her father said. But he didn't say, Better the people at Curious Notions than us. He might have been thinking it—he probably was thinking it—but he didn't say it. Lucy was grateful for that.

  Even coming back to it a second time, Lucy almost walked right past the jewelry shop. Fog rolled in as light faded from the sky. She hoped it wouldn't be too thick when she came out. She couldn't do anything about it, though. She couldn't do anything about going inside, either. In she went.

  As it had before, the jewelry dazzled her. This time, she made herself look at what price tags there were. A lot of the pieces cost more than she made in a year, even with her new job and new salary. And the ones without the price tags? Well, they had to go up from there.

  Stanley Hsu waited politely while she looked around. He was polite almost to a fault. He used good manners as a shield, so nothing would stick to him and so he wouldn't reveal his true self. If he'd shown more temper, Lucy would have had a better idea where she stood.

  At last, he said, "I hope everything is going well for you?"

  "You would know about that, wouldn't you? Lucy said.

  He didn't tell her yes or no, not straight out. He just smiled, showing off very white teeth. "I was delighted to hear you had a new position."

  "What did your friends tell Mr. Simmons to get him to do that?" Lucy asked.

  "Nothing much." With a graceful flick of the hand, Stanley Hsu brushed the question aside. "He turned out to be a sensible man. He did the sensible thing."

  What would have happened to him if he hadn't been . . . sensible? Would he have lost a finger? An eye? A leg? Both eyes? Would his mother have had a sad accident? Would his wife? His son?

  What will happen to me if I'm not. . . sensible? The thought was snowstorms and icicles inside Lucy. She said, "You're going to tell me what you want from me now, aren't you?"

  "I understand you do not care to do anything that might cause problems for the people at Curious Notions. I even understand why, I think." Stanley Hsu's nod was sober, considered, calculating. "Your reasons do you credit."

  "That doesn't mean you care about them, does it?" Lucy asked. The jeweler didn't brush that aside, but he also didn't answer. Not answering, here, was the same as answering. Harshly, Lucy said it again: "Tell me what you want from me."

  "One simple question will do," Stanley Hsu replied.

  "What is it?" she asked suspiciously. Stanley Hsu told her. She tried not to show how surprised she was. That wasn't what she'd expected at all. She said, "That's it?"

  The jeweler nodded. "That's it." He held up his right hand, as if taking an oath. "So help me, that's it. And that's all. Tell me exactly what Paul Gomes or his father says when you ask it. I want to know just the words they use. Do that, and you will meet your half of our bargain."

  Lucy hadn't made the bargain. Stanley Hsu and the Triads had forced it on her. But if this would satisfy them . . . "You're sure?" she asked, suspicious still.

  He held up his hand again. "So help me, I'm sure."

  "What will you do if you don't like the answer?"

  "Whatever seems necessary," he replied with a shrug. "But it won't have anything to do with you, whatever it is."

  Things weren't that simple. Lucy could see as much. She could also see that Stanley Hsu's friends would do whatever they were going to do if she didn't get them their answer. That helped clear her conscience. "All right," she said. "I'll ask it."


  "Yes, ma'am." Paul tried to sound enthusiastic about a stereo system that would have been a hopeless antique in the home timeline. "This one will make your records sound better than they ever have before." Even talking about records made him feel as if he'd fallen back into the dim, dark days of the twentieth century.

  "That's nice," said the woman who was admiring the stereo. "And it will also be something most of my neighbors don't have, won't it?"

  "Oh, yes." Paul tried to exude sincerity. "This is our very latest model."

  She smiled at him. Her teeth had braces on them. That was much much less common and more expensive here than in the home timeline. Her dress was of a turquoise silk that glowed under the lights in the shop. She wore a wedding ring with a fat diamond in it, too. She was old—about his father's age—and kind of dumpy, but she had money. Maybe she was a nob of Nob Hill. Paul had always liked the sound of that.

  "I'll take it," she said. Only after she decided that did she bother to ask, "How much does it cost?"

  "Like I told you, this is our very top-of-the-line model," Paul answered. "It's $499.95." Not even five benjamins, he thought. But it wasn't the same thing. Five benjamins, in the home timeline, meant a burger and fries and a soda at Burger King. Some people here didn't make five hundred dollars a year.

  She reached into her purse. She reached into her wallet. Out came five hundred-dollar bills. She was as casual with them as if they were benjamins back home. "Here you are," she said grandly. "Let me get my chauffeur. He'll carry it to the Mercedes."

  She threw that right in Paul's face. It was supposed to hit him even harder than the cash. Hardly any Americans in this alternate could afford a fancy German car. She wasn't just rich, then. She was very rich. And she had connections, too, or she would have had to get along with a Cadillac or an Imperial.

  The chauffeur was a big, beefy man. Paul held the door open for him. He lugged the stereo system down the street to the car. The Mercedes was a big one. Somehow, Paul wasn't surprised. The trunk swallowed the system. The chauffeur closed it with a thud. He opened the rear door for his boss, then got in himself and drove away.

  Paul was glad to put the money in the register. He wanted to rub his hands on his jeans even after he got rid of it. It didn't feel clean to him. What had that woman or her husband done to earn it? Did he really want to know?

  He made a sour face when the bell chimed again a minute later. Someone else who had more money than he or she knew what to do with and wanted a new toy to impress the neighbors? But then Paul found himself smiling. "Hello, Lucy," he said. "How are you?"

  "I'm doing pretty well, thank you." She strolled up and down the aisles. "So many wonderful things here."

  She didn't sound as if she wished she could afford them, though Paul knew she couldn't. He remembered that her father worked with this alternate's electronics. Maybe that helped her see how much better this stuff was, even if it would have been junk in the home timeline.

  "We try to stock the best," Paul said—which was true, if you compared it to the state of the art here.

  Lucy Woo nodded. "And you do." Now she smiled at him. "Did I tell you I got a promotion? Now I'm a clerk—they took me off my sewing machine."

  "That's terrific! Congratulations!" Paul said. "Did you get a raise, too, I hope?"

  "Oh, yes. A nice one," she said. "And I only have to work half a day on Saturday."

  "Wonderful!" Paul worked hard to sound happy for her. The hours people here put in would have been illegal back home. Working half a day on Saturday on top of long hours Monday through Friday was no bargain, not to him. But it was better than what she'd had before. Paul tried to change the subject: "I hope your father is doing all right?"

  "Yes, he's fine now. The Germans haven't been back." Lucy seemed to intend those two sentences as two halves of the same thought. She waved again. "He does wonder where you come by some of these things."

  "We make them ourselves, in the basement." Paul laughed. Of course Lucy's dad would wonder where Curious Notions got the gadgets from the home timeline. Paul couldn't very well tell Lucy or her father or anyone else from this alternate.

  Lucy smiled a little—just enough to show she knew he was joking. She walked up to the counter, leaned one elbow on it, and said, "Tell me something, would you please?" She studied him like a birdwatcher eyeing a brand-new warbler.

  "What is it?" Paul asked cautiously.

  "Where are you really from?"

  "Right here. San Francisco." That was the answer he had to give. It was not true and true at the same time. The lively city he lived in wasn't much like this sad, sorry place. But then he had a question of his own: "Why do you want to know?" That was an urgent question, an important question. Did she think he was from somewhere else in these conquered United States? Or did she think he was from somewhere else altogether? She wasn't supposed to think that, not even when it was so. Especially not when it was so.

  She said, "It's not just me. There are . . . people who want to know about you. If you don't tell me, they might find someone else to ask you. Whoever that is, he won't be so friendly."

  "I think I've already met somebody like that," Paul said. As a matter of fact, he was sure he had. And making sure growers in the Central Valley didn't sell to Curious Notions hadn't been friendly, not even a little bit.

  "I'm not surprised," Lucy said. "You've made people notice you. What you've got here makes people notice you. If you're not. . . big enough, getting noticed like that can be awfully dangerous."

  By themselves, Paul and his father weren't anything much. When you added in what they could call on from the home timeline, it was a different story. But the home timeline had only limited access here. This was the Kaiser's home ground—and also that of the Chinese who'd grown curious about Curious Notions. That made things a lot harder.

  Even so, Paul said, "We can take care of ourselves." And if we can't, he thought, we can scoot back to the home timeline. Let's see anybody bother us there.

  "I hope so." Lucy's tone of voice couldn't mean anything but, You've got to be kidding.

  "We can." Paul knew getting angry was silly, but he couldn't help it.

  "I hope so." Now Lucy did sound as if she meant it, which surprised him. She went on, "I don't think you're really from here. I've never met anybody from here who's anything like you. You don't even talk quite the way I do."

  What was she reacting to? That he didn't come from an occupied country and did act like a free man? That was probably part of it. People in these United States had been downtrodden for 140 years. They were cowed. The Germans made sure they were cowed. Paul wasn't. His United States was free, and the strongest country in the world. He didn't need to worry about any opinion but his own. It had to show.

  As for the way he talked . . . English here wasn't much different from the way it was in the home timeline. San Francisco didn't have any special accent, the way Boston or New York City or New Orleans did. Maybe it was a matter of style, not one of word choice or vowel sounds at all.

  "I grew up on Thirty-third Avenue, south of Golden Gate Park," he said after a pause only a little longer than it should have been. And that was also both true and untrue. Thirty-third Avenue, yes, but not in this alternate.

  Lucy shook her head. "I don't believe it. That's a tough part of town. You'd be different if you came from there."

  Paul muttered something under his breath. It wasn't a tough part of town in the home timeline. It had been, back in the early days of the twenty-first century, but the neighborhood had changed the other way as time went by.

  "Well, I did," he said out loud. "Believe it or not. I don't care."

  "One of these days, maybe you'll tell me the truth," Lucy said. "Till then . . ." She nodded to him, turned around, and walked out of the store.

  How bad did I mess that up? Paul wondered. He did some more muttering. By the way things looked, by the way they felt, he couldn't have messed it up worse if he'd tried for a week.

 
; Lucy didn't want to go back to Stanley Hsu's shop. She didn't know what to make of the answer Paul had given her. She was afraid the jeweler would know. If he did, what kind of advantage would that give him over the people who ran Curious Notions?

  She thought about making up a story. But what could she say? She didn't know what kind of lie the jeweler might believe. Besides, she'd made a deal with him. Once she told him what Paul had said, he'd leave her alone.

  "Hello, Miss Woo," he said when she walked into his shop. She might have been a German countess by the way he treated her. "I was hoping I might see you soon."

  Everything he said had a hidden meaning. Was he just telling her he was glad she'd dropped by? Or was he saying he'd had her followed and knew she'd gone to Curious Notions? She couldn't be sure. She couldn't be sure of anything with him.

  He smiled, and went right on smiling. For all that smile had to do with what he felt, it might have been a Halloween mask. But she couldn't see past it. It hid whatever was really there.

  "What have you got to tell me?" he asked.

  "I went to Curious Notions and asked Paul Gomes the question you told me to," she said.

  "Good. Very good." Stanley Hsu leaned forward across the counter. He might have been a hunting dog taking a scent. "And what did he say?"

  "He said he was from right here in San Francisco. He said he was raised on Thirty-third Avenue south of Golden Gate Park," Lucy answered.

  "Did he?" Whatever the jeweler thought of that, he kept to himself. Yes, he used his smile as a mask, but it was a good one. "Do you believe him?"

  "I don't know," Lucy answered slowly. "He didn't sound like he was lying, but everybody knows what the Sunset District is like. He doesn't act like somebody who comes from there. He acts like somebody rich, somebody who doesn't have to worry about anything. He almost acts like a German—like he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants to do it."