Her mother's thoughts were running on different lines. "Let me get you something to eat," she said to Father. "What did they do to you while they had you?"
"Not as much as I was afraid they would." Father looked tired and he needed a shave, but Lucy didn't see any bruises or cuts on him. He stood there in the middle of the front room as if he couldn't believe he was free. As Lucy's mother disappeared into the kitchen, he went on, "They spent a lot of time yelling at me and asking questions, but that was all. They didn't try any strongarm stuff." He sounded as if he couldn't believe it, either. The Feldgendarmerie wasn't known for being kind and gentle.
"Here." Mother came out with a bowl of cold noodles and a steaming cup of tea she'd made in what seemed like nothing flat.
"Oh, my," Father said. By the way he dug into the noodles, the Germans hadn't fed him much while they held him. He ate standing up, as if he didn't want to waste time going over to the couch or a chair. When he finished, he made a small ceremony of handing the bowl back to Mother. "Thank you, dear. That was wonderful." He sipped the tea and smiled. Just making the corners of his mouth go up took effort. Lucy could see that. But Father managed.
After Mother took the bowl into the kitchen, she came back and herded Michael into bed again. She didn't try to make Lucy go. That was a good thing, because Lucy didn't intend to. She knew she'd be even more tired than usual when she got home from work tonight, but so what? If this wasn't a special time, what was?
Besides, there were questions she wanted to ask Father. The first one was, "What do you know about Curious Notions?"
"Only what I told you before," he answered. "That's what I told the Germans, too. If I knew more, I would've sung like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. You'd better believe I would, sweetie. I don't owe those people at Curious Notions a thing. If they're in trouble with the Kaiser's men, it's their lookout."
"Um," Lucy said, and then, "Urn," again, and finally, "I think maybe you do, Father."
"What do you mean?"
Lucy told him about her visits to the strange store and about her talks with the Gomeses, especially Paul. She finished, "He said he'd talk to officials who'd squeeze the Germans. The Feldgendarmerie doesn't turn people loose very often, so I guess maybe he did."
Charlie Woo scratched his head. He yawned. Lucy wondered how very tired he was. "I guess maybe he did, too," he said slowly. "That means he knows officials who can squeeze the Germans. He knows them well enough to get favors out of them. It's just an ordinary-looking little shop, though. How do the people who run it get that kind of pull?" By the way he sounded, he wished he had that kind of pull himself.
"The shop looks ordinary, but they don't sell ordinary things there," Lucy said. "You told me that, and I've seen it for myself, too."
"No, they don't," her father agreed. "They're . . . curious, the things those people sell—and the people, too, it sounds like." He yawned again, so wide that Lucy could see his tonsils. Then he finished his tea at a gulp. "I'm going to bed." He shook his head. "No. I'm going to take a bath, and then I'll go to bed."
That was just what he did, too. Lucy also went back to bed. She didn't go back to sleep, though. She hadn't thought she'd be able to. Yes, she'd be a zombie by the time she got home from work. "So what?" she said after tossing and turning for an hour. She got up again and got dressed. "So what? Father's home. Who cares about anything else?"
Paul's father said, "Well, I hope you're happy. They sprung that fellow from Chinatown." He didn't sound any too happy about it.
"Did they? That's great." Paul was plenty pleased for both of them. He had good reason to be pleased, too: "Nice to know people will come through for you once in a while."
"Maybe." Dad still seemed gloomy. "Trouble is, if you do pull strings like that, you get noticed. The locals will wonder why you did it. They'll wonder about this Charlie Woo—and they'll wonder about us. We don't want them wondering about us."
The shop had no customers in it, so they could talk freely. Paul hesitated when a man put his hand on the doorknob. But then the man got a look at the prices in the display window. He jerked his hand away as if the brass knob were red-hot.
Paul had seen that reaction before. He smiled as the almost-customer hurried off down the street. "If we don't want to draw any notice, we shouldn't sell most of the stuff we carry," he said. "We should stick to things just like the ones this alternate makes for itself."
They'd had this argument before. His father made the usual countermove: "But if we do that, we won't make so much money here. If we don't make money, how are we going to buy the produce? That's what we're really here for, that and making sure the locals don't start trying to go crosstime."
"How can we stop them if they do start making those experiments?" Paul asked.
"I don't know if we can," his father said, sending a sour look his way. "What we want to do, I guess, is make sure the idea never occurs to them in the first place."
"How?" Paul asked again.
"I already told you—one thing we need to do is keep them from noticing us," Dad said.
"Wait a minute. There's a hole in that," Paul said. "If we don't want them to notice us, we don't sell stuff that's any different from what they already make here. If they really get serious about finding out where what we've got comes from, isn't that a problem?"
"It hasn't been so far," his father said. "Curious Notions has been doing business here for years, and we haven't had much trouble." He made money-counting motions with his hands. Paul knew what that meant. If a local had got curious about the shop, Crosstime Traffic people had paid him enough to make him lose his curiosity. Why not? It wasn't as if it were real money from the home timeline.
That might have worked well in the past. No—that had worked well in the past. But could you count on it to keep working forever? Paul had his doubts. He said, "I wouldn't want to try bribing that Inspector Weidenreich. He looks like he's after any old excuse to bust us."
"There are ways around people like that," Dad said. He didn't say what those ways were, though. Maybe they were secret. Maybe he thought Paul already knew them. And maybe he was making it all up and didn't know them himself.
Paul wondered if asking that was worthwhile. Regretfully, he decided it wasn't. Either Dad would ignore him or he'd start a fight. And if he started a fight, it would be one Paul couldn't hope to win. He wouldn't convince his father. Making Dad change his mind was like wearing away Mount Everest with a feather. You could try, yeah, but you wouldn't get anywhere. Dad was that stubborn. (Paul's own stubbornness didn't even cross his mind.)
He wouldn't be able to persuade Crosstime Traffic that Dad was doing anything wrong, either. He already knew that. Dad wasn't going against Crosstime Traffic policies or guidelines. He was just following them in what Paul didn't think was the best possible way.
Nobody in the home timeline would listen to a kid complaining about his old man.
But Paul couldn't let it go without saying something. All he could think of was, "I sure hope you're right."
"I'm not worried," his father said. That didn't reassure Paul as much as Dad might have liked. His father hardly ever worried. He was always sure he was right. And he was right a lot of the time. Even Paul had to admit that. But he wasn't right as often as he thought he was.
A customer did come in. Paul and his father stopped sniping at each other. They sold the local a fancy tape deck. People in this alternate thought it was fancy, anyway. It was a long way behind the state of the art in the home timeline. Everything there was digital, and had been for most of a hundred years.
Inspector Weidenreich didn't show up at Curious Notions that day. Dad looked smug. Paul ignored him. Twenty minutes before they closed, he walked around the corner to buy a couple of hot dogs at Louie's, where he went a lot of the time. Everybody here called them franks or wieners, but they were hot dogs, all right. When he came back to the store, a skinny marmalade cat meowed at him. He tossed it a chunk of hot dog. It sniffed suspiciously at the meat, then gobbled it up.