It didn't stay very crowded for long. After it left Kezar Stadium, more people got off than got on. Paul and his father got to sit down about three stops before the one where they would leave. Paul thought that was pretty funny.
Curious Notions was a block and a half from the bus stop. Somebody in an upstairs apartment was singing the Missions' fight song. Paul winced. Whoever the singer was, his enthusiasm couldn't make up for lack of talent. Dad put his hands over his ears for a minute.
When they got to the shop, the door stood open a crack. They looked at each other. Each of them said, "You forgot to lock it." They both shook their heads. "Uh-oh," Paul said. Dad's hand dove into his pocket. Owning a gun was a serious crime in this world. That didn't stop anybody from doing it. It did give the Germans an excuse for making sentences longer when they decided they needed to.
Dad went in first. Paul stayed close behind him. His eyes went up and down the aisles. He knew the stock well. Nothing seemed to be missing. When he said so, though, his father looked through him and asked, "How do you know what people were looking for?"
Nobody was in the back room. Nothing there had been stolen, either. Paul began to breathe a little easier. And whoever the burglar was, he hadn't found the secret stairway down to the subbase-ment. That had its own alarm.
"Not too bad," Paul said.
"Not yet," his father answered. "We haven't been up to the apartment."
"Why would anybody want to take stuff out of there with all the goodies down below?"
"To find out who we are," Dad said. "I told you—we didn't know why we had a break-in. I think we've found out it wasn't ordinary thieves."
"Oh." Paul shut up, feeling foolish.
His father had the pistol out as they went up the stairs. Nobody was in the apartment, either. But that was where the thief had been snooping, all right. It looked as if a tornado had gone through it. All the drawers were spilled on the floor. So were the clothes from the closets. So were the medicine cabinets in the bathroom. Even the pillows had been slit open.
Paul called the burglars the nastiest name he could think of. His father nodded. "Yes, but which set?" he asked. "The Kaiser's chums, or your Lucy's friends?"
"She's not my Lucy, and I don't think they're her friends," Paul said.
"No? Would they be bothering us if you hadn't got friendly with her?"
"They might," Paul answered. "You were the one who gave her father's name to the Germans, after all."
Dad waved that away. Paul might have known he would. His father was good at ignoring things he didn't want to hear. He said, "They must have noticed us before that." He'd just shot his own argument about Lucy in the foot, but he ignored that, too. He might well have been right about people noticing them before. Paul remembered that Lucy had said her father wondered where Curious Notions got its goods. But was it certain, the way Dad said? Paul didn't think so.
He asked, "Did they get anything that proves we're not from here?"
"We'd better find out, hadn't we?" His father didn't sound happy at all. The rules said you weren't supposed to leave the locals any clues you came from a different timeline. But when you got comfortable somewhere, did you always pay attention to the rules? Curious Notions' merchandise bent them as far as they would go. And Paul was pretty sure he'd been careless. He would have bet his father had, too. Dad always thought he had the answers. Sometimes he did. Sometimes . ..
They cleaned up the mess the burglars had left. Not much was missing. They both saw that right away. It too said the thieves had been after information, not money or other valuables. And no ordinary burglar would have knocked everything out of the medicine chest in the bathroom. Paul and his father were all right there. All their razors and soap and toothbrushes and toothpaste and such came from this alternate.
"I think we're okay," Dad said at last. He started to laugh.
"What's so funny?" Paul asked.
"It's not like we're going to call the cops," his father answered. "That'd just give them the excuse to tear this place to pieces, too."
"Oh," Paul said, and then, "Yeah." And then he started laughing, too. He didn't like that very much, but it was pretty funny.
Lucy's new boss, Mrs. Cho, was a lot nicer than Hank Simmons had ever been. She never complained about the work Lucy did—Lucy made sure she never had reason to complain. But she did start to ask questions like, "Are you sure you're happy here, dear?"
"I'm just fine," Lucy answered the first time she heard that.
When Mrs. Cho began asking it three or four times a day, though, Lucy began to suspect a trend. The second she did something to give her supervisor an excuse, she'd be back at her sewing machine. Either that, or Mrs. Cho would just up and fire her.
It wasn't fair. She'd made a bargain with Stanley Hsu, and she'd kept her end of it. He and his friends were supposed to do the same thing. One evening after work, she stopped at his jewelry store on the way home. He was speaking Chinese with another man in an expensive suit when she walked in. They both fell silent. Lucy got the idea they hadn't been talking about diamonds or jade.
"Hello, Miss Woo," the jeweler said, very little warmth in his voice. "I didn't expect to see you here today."
"I did what you wanted," Lucy said. "I did just what you told me to do. Now it looks like I'm liable to lose my job. That wasn't part of the deal we made."
The stranger in the fancy suit gave her the nastiest smile she'd ever seen. "And what are you going to do about it?" By the way he talked, she might have been a spoiled mushroom he'd found in his salad.
Later, she realized he was trying to scare her. At the moment, all he did was make her mad. "What will I do?" she echoed. "I'll tell you what. I'll tell all my friends and neighbors that you can't trust the Triads, that's what. They make deals and then they go back on them."
"I don't think you want to do that," the man said.
"I don't think you want to make me do that," Lucy retorted. "If you break your word, how are you any better than the Germans?"
He stared at her. How big a big shot was he? When was the last time anybody had stood up to him? Unless Lucy missed her guess, it was a long, long time ago.
Stanley Hsu said something in Chinese. The man in the expensive suit answered in the same language. The harsh rattle of syllables meant nothing to Lucy. Her parents didn't speak Chinese, either. Her mother said her mother's mother and father had sometimes used it when they didn't want Granny to know what was going on. For most people in San Francisco's Chinatown these days, it was a closed book. But not for these two, obviously.
After a little back-and-forth in the old language, Stanley Hsu switched to English: "She's right, and you know it."
His—friend?—gave Lucy another Waiter! Look what I found in my salad! look. "She ought to get what she deserves for talking to me like that," he snapped, also in English.
"She ought to get what she deserves for meeting her end of the bargain," the jeweler said.
"She didn't tell us anything we didn't know already," the well-dressed man snorted.
"She asked the question we told her to ask. If she didn't get the answers we thought she might. . . well, that's information, too," Stanley Hsu said.
The other man said something in Chinese. Lucy had no idea what it meant. She thought she could make a pretty good guess, though. He glared at her again. "You're nothing but a nuisance. You know that?"
"Easy enough for you to say so. You're not worried about your job. You're not worried about going hungry." Lucy saw he had on a wedding ring. "Does your wife wear shoes I helped to make? How many pairs of them has she got? You make me want to throw something at you. You've got all that money, and you look down your nose at me because I don't." Her nose stung and her eyes watered, but she would have jumped off a cliff before she gave him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.