"Lucy thinks that Paul fellow is cute," Michael said.
Lucy was reminded—not for the first time—what horrible, poisonous creatures little brothers were. She sent Michael a glare that should have knocked him flat. He was tough as a weed, though. As far as she was concerned, the resemblance didn't end there. "Why don't you talk about things you know about—if you know anything?" she hissed.
Michael stuck out his tongue at her. "You do, too!" he jeered. "Nyah, nyah!"
"That will be enough of that," Mother said. "That will be enough of that from both of you, in fact." She pointed a finger at Lucy. Lucy didn't think that was fair. Her brother had started it. She hadn't given him half the trouble he'd given her.
Besides, he was wrong . . . wasn't he? Lucy liked Paul pretty well. He was interesting—a lot more interesting than anybody at the shoe factory, not that that said much. She liked him, yes. But did she like him? She hadn't even thought about it. She wondered why not.
He's strange. The answer formed in her mind as soon as the question did. She'd said as much to Peggy. He was very strange— nice, but strange. Thirty-third Avenue? Not likely! Maybe that silly idea she'd had about different worlds wasn't so silly after all. If anything could make her wonder, it was how strange Paul Gomes was.
Then she shook her head. No, it wasn't just Paul. The things Curious Notions sold—had sold—didn't come from any place she knew, either. Her father would have agreed with that. Where did they come from, then?
The same place as Paul, obviously. But where was that?
"Do you think the Triads would do anything?" her father asked.
"I don't know," Lucy answered. "They might. They were sure interested in anything that had to do with Curious Notions."
Her father drummed his fingers on the desktop. "I was in the Germans' jail. I don't like to think about anybody going in there. If you can get them out, you should."
"I'll try," Lucy said. "I don't know if the Triads will listen to me. Even if they do, I don't know what kind of price they'll ask."
"There usually is a price," Father agreed.
"Always," Mother said softly.
Lucy had already seen that. Stanley Hsu took the idea for granted. To him, it was just the way the world worked. The jeweler had helped her—for the price of a question. Getting people away from the Feld-gendarmerie was bound to cost more. How much more? And in what coin? Lucy could only go and find out. If it wasn't the sort of price she thought she ought to pay... then the German secret police would hang on to Paul and his father.
"I'll do what I think I can, that's all," Lucy said. Her mother and father both nodded. If Michael made small, disgusted noises . . . Well, she didn't have to pay any attention to him. She didn't have to, and she didn't.
Paul wished he'd fled back to the home timeline when he had the chance. Maybe the two hundred dollars in his pocket had kept him from going down to the subbasement and calling for a transposition chamber. Maybe—he hoped more likely—his first thought had been rescuing Dad all by himself.
If so, it only went to show that thinking twice was a good idea. When he first came back to the building that housed Curious Notions, there weren't any Feldgendarmerie men or American police or men from the Tongs inside. (Perhaps the people who'd taken his father thought a kid wasn't worth bothering with. In that case, their first thoughts weren't so hot, either.)
They thought twice before Paul did. Curious Notions was shut up tight now. He couldn't get to the subbasement even if he wanted to. There'd be traps inside, just in case he was dumb enough to try.
He'd taken a room in a grimy old hotel in the Tenderloin District: a dollar a night or five dollars a week. The brick building was so rundown, he wondered if it dated from before the 1906 earthquake. But it wasn't quite that ancient. One of the bricks above the front door had a date carved into it: 1927. It was so very dirty and worn, he needed several days to notice it.
The room itself had seen endless coats of paint. The last one, a sad beige, had been a long time before. It was faded and peeling and filthy. The room had a sink and toilet and tub, a tiny table with two chairs, and a hot plate for cooking. The smell of cheap grease had soaked into the paint. A lot of people on the way down who hadn't quite hit bottom yet had lived here. That fit Paul to a T right now.
There was no thermostat on the wall. Heat came from a cast-iron steam radiator in a corner. It bubbled and clunked and, every once in a while, dripped a little rusty water on the cheap green carpet. The size of the rust stain there said it had been doing that for a long time.
Several locks and dead bolts did their best to make sure the door stayed closed and intruders stayed out. When the desk clerk handed Paul half a dozen keys, he'd eyed them in dismay. What dismayed him even more was that they might not be enough. You didn't use hardware like that where it wasn't needed.
After he got a good look at some of the people who lived in the hotel, he wished the door had twice as many locks on it. If they weren't the people his parents had warned him about, he'd never seen anybody who was. He didn't want to think about what they did for a living. More than a few of them didn't do anything visible for a living. They seemed proud of doing nothing, too.
And they figured Paul was in the same boat they were. He didn't do anything visible, either. If anything, that won him respect in the Tenderloin. A ferret-faced little man with a scar on one cheek grinned as they passed each other on the stairs in the middle of the morning. "Beats working, don't it?" he said.
"Uh-huh," Paul answered with a silly nod. He knew he should have said, Yeah, out of the side of his mouth. But the man with the scar just nodded back and kept going up the stairs.
In this alternate, German college students still dueled with sabers. They got scars like that. Students at a few American colleges imitated the Germans. Paul would have bet a thousand benjamins against a dollar that this fellow hadn't been anywhere close to a college, except maybe to break into a dorm. He'd probably got his scar in a real knife fight. Paul wondered what had happened to the man he'd been fighting. Better not to know, maybe.
Getting away from the hotel and back to his neighborhood was a relief. Curious Notions wasn't in the best part of town, either. Compared to where he was staying now, though, it looked like paradise.
He ducked into Louie's, the hamburger and frankfurter place where he'd bought a lot of lunches. There was no McDonald's or Burger King or Jack in the Box in this alternate. All the hamburger joints and frankfurter stands and pizza parlors here were mom-and-pops. Behind the counter at Louie's stood ... Louie. He was a Greek with slicked-back hair under a white cap that looked like the one Boy Scouts wore in the home timeline.
He did a double take when Paul walked in. Nobody else was in the little restaurant. It got busy at lunch and dinner. In between times, no. "What are you doin' here, kid?" Louie rasped in a voice rough from too many cigarettes. "You outa your mind or somethin'?"
"I'm trying to find out about Dad," Paul said.
"You'll find out, all right," the cook said. "You'll keep him company in the calaboose, that's how you'll find out. Feldgendarmerie wants you bad, sonny. You're hotter'n a two-dollar pistol on Saturday night." He swiped a wet rag across the counter.
"It was the Germans who got him, then?" Paul asked.
"Who did you expect? Santa Claus and the elves?" Louie lit another Camel. Paul tried not to flinch. Smoking in restaurants had been illegal for a hundred years in the home timeline. Smoking itself wasn't illegal there, but people who smoked did it in the privacy of their own homes. Smoking in public was as nasty as picking your nose in public. Paul had never seen Louie do that. But he smoked like a chimney.