Lucy found herself nodding. Her father had said pretty much the same thing. He hadn't put it the same way—Stanley Hsu talked like a man with a fancy education. But when you boiled it down, there wasn't much difference. Lucy nodded once more, this time to the jeweler. "I'm with you so far."
"Good." Again, Stanley Hsu sounded as if he meant it. That made Lucy want to like him, want to trust him. She knew neither might be a good idea, but she wanted to anyway. He said, "As far as we know, they sell only toys: radios and televisions and phonographs and portable music players. But those are all better—much better—than what comes out of Berlin. What sort of serious things do they have, if their toys are so fine?"
What did he mean by serious things? Calculating machines? Weapons? What else would matter to people trying to shake off the Germans? Lucy told the truth: "I don't know about any ofthat."
"I didn't think you did," Stanley Hsu replied. "But who would have a better chance of finding out than you do?"
Lucy turned and started for the door. Over her shoulder, she said, "I'm sorry you've wasted your time, Mr. Hsu. I'm not going to spy on them, and that's that."
"Don't you want your country to be free?" the jeweler demanded.
"If you're asking this kind of thing from me, would you make it free?" Lucy asked in turn. "Or would you just turn it into China's cat's-paw instead of Germany's?"
Stanley Hsu looked astonished. At first, Lucy thought that was because she'd had the nerve to ask him the question. Then she realized he'd never asked it of himself. People—she didn't know who— had told him things, and he'd believed them. Was he suddenly wondering whether he should have?
"You are a remarkable girl. . . uh, young woman," he said after a long, long pause.
"I don't know anything about that. I don't care anything about that," Lucy answered with a shrug. "I do know my father taught me never to buy a pig in a poke. Maybe somebody should have taught you the same thing, Mr. Hsu." She walked out of the shop, wondering if he'd chase after her. He didn't. Nobody bothered her all the way home.
When Paul Gomes stepped out of Curious Notions, he found that marmalade cat waiting for him. "Meow?" it said. He had no trouble translating from cat to English. Where's my handout? the beast wanted to know.
"Here you go." Paul tossed a dried anchovy on the sidewalk. They sold them in sacks at Fisherman's Wharf. Some people used them for bait. Paul supposed he wasn't the only one who used them for kitty treats.
The cat nosed this one, daintily bit it in half, and then ate each half in turn. Then it proved it was honest in its own fashion. It rubbed up against Paul's leg, purred like distant thunder, and let him scratch it behind the ears and under the chin. Some cats—a lot of cats, in fact—seemed to think they got handouts by divine right. This one knew better. If it didn't earn its treats, it did without.
Dad would have said it was just baiting the hook for Paul. Dad had said that, in fact, said it often enough to make a bore of himself. Maybe he was even right. Paul didn't much care. He was more inclined to keep on feeding the cat because his father had made a bore of himself than he would have been if Dad had just let it alone.
He tossed the marmalade tabby another dried anchovy. Its purr got even louder and deeper. He didn't do that every day. When he did, the cat made sure it showed it was grateful. Before too long, he planned on letting it into the shop. That would really give Dad something to complain about.
As it had before, the cat neatly bit the anchovy in half before starting on it. It made the tail end disappear. But then, instead of going on to the head end, it disappeared itself—it made a small, startled noise and ran around the corner.
"What the—?" Paul didn't think he'd scared the cat. He straightened up, turned around . . . and almost bumped into a short, stocky, neatly dressed Asian man standing behind him. "Excuse me," he said.
The man smiled and nodded. The nod was polite enough, but the smile never reached his eyes. They were as hard and dark and shiny as obsidian. "You're Paul, aren't you?" he said. "You work here." He nodded again, this time toward the front window of Curious Notions.
"That's right," Paul said. "Can I do something for you, Mr., uh . ..?"
"You don't need to know my name," the man said. "You need to know we've got our eyes on you, and on your father, too. You can't go anywhere unless we know about it. You can't do anything unless we know about it. And if you want to tell the Kaiser's hounds about us, go ahead. We don't exist, you see."
What was that supposed to mean? It sounded like something out of a twentieth-century spy thriller. Carefully, Paul said, "If you won't tell me who you are, I don't think we want anything to do with you."
"It isn't your choice," the man said. "It's ours, and you need to understand that."
"You can't tell me what to do," Paul said. And he was right, right in a way no one who lived in this alternate could be. No matter what kind of problems he and his father-had, the transposition chamber could take them away where nobody from here could follow. Knowing that made everything that went on here seem not so very important. It needed more than a two-bit punk to make Paul sit up and take notice.
Something in his voice must have told the Asian man as much. He sent Paul a perfectly filthy look—he expected people to take him seriously. "We can do all kinds of things," he growled. "You wouldn't want an accident to happen around here, would you? You wouldn't like it very much if it did."
Paul put his hand in the pocket of his jeans. All he had in there was a set of keys, but it was a big, lumpy set. Through the denim, who could be sure what it was? "We aren't the only ones who can have accidents," he said in his own best tough-guy voice. "You want to remember that, you and your 'nameless' friends. You don't think I can find out who they are?"
That was pure bluff, too, but it rocked the older man. "I don't know what you can do with your lousy gadgets," he said. "But you'd better not mess with us, because you don't know what you're messing with. We've got connections you can't touch, no matter how smart you think you are."
"I don't care if your stinking connections go back all the way to China," Paul snapped. The Asian man's lips skinned back from his teeth in what was anything but a smile. Paul realized he'd landed another hit, even if he didn't quite know how. He'd just meant it as a figure of speech. He grinned a grin that said he knew more than he was letting on. He was—literally—lying through his teeth, but this fellow didn't have to know that.
"You'll be sorry, kid," the Asian man said. "You think you're smart and you think you're tough, but you don't know how much trouble you're in."
Paul took a step toward him. "I know how much trouble you're going to be in if you don't get lost."
"Oh, I'll go. But you haven't seen the last of me. You may wish you had." The man hurried down the street, turned the corner, and was gone.
Exit villain, sneering, Paul thought. But he didn't even know if the Asian man was a villain, or anything else about him. All he knew was that the fellow knew too much about Curious Notions.
He waited to see if either the man or the marmalade cat would come back. When neither did, he went back into the shop. He waited till a lull with no customers, then told his father what the Asian man had said. Dad, for a wonder, heard him out. When he finished, his father said, "That doesn't sound so good."
"I didn't think so, either," Paul said.
His father pointed a finger at him. "I bet it's got something to do with that Lucy What's-her-name. I told you that would end up causing trouble."
"You—" Paul stopped. He wanted to say his father didn't know what he was talking about. He wanted to, but found he couldn't. What Dad had said made altogether too much sense.