Paul hesitated. If he admitted it... If he denied it...
Whether he admitted it or denied it turned out not to matter. Three more Chinese men fell in around him. "Why don't you come along with us, Mr. Gomes?" said the one who'd spoken before. Why don't you come along with us so we don't stomp the stuffing out of you? hung in the air. The fellow still sounded friendly. Why wouldn't he? He held all the good cards.
Or did he? "What if I yell for a cop?" Paul said.
All four Chinese men smiled. They were four of the chilliest smiles he'd ever seen. "Go right ahead," said the one who did the talking. "Be our guest."
He needed a second and a half, tops, to decide that wasn't a good idea. If he yelled for a cop, the Chinese guys might maim him before the policeman could do a thing. Even if they didn't, the cop was liable to hang on to him and find out who he was. As soon as the cop did find out, he was very likely to turn Paul over to the Feldgen-darmerie for the reward. Falling into the Tongs' hands might be bad. Falling into the Germans' hands would be bad. The difference was small, but it was real.
When he didn't yell, his—escorts?—smiled again. "I thought you had some brains," the talking one said.
"Do I?" Paul asked bitterly. The men surrounding him didn't answer. They just kept smiling. In a movie, he could have broken away or knocked all of them flat.
Here on the dirty, sadly shabby streets of San Francisco, one against four looked like bad odds. He asked, "Where are you taking me?"
"You'll see," said the man who'd asked his name. Paul wanted to kick him just for that. He would have bet it was what he'd get for an answer. Then the fellow added, "It isn't far."
"Thanks a lot," Paul said. The Chinese man grinned at him. He knows what I'm thinking, Paul realized. He knows, and he's enjoying it.
For whatever it was worth, he told the truth. The Chinese men herded Paul to a noodle shop a few blocks away. They were good at what they did. They didn't look as if they were herding him. By the way they acted, they might have been his buddies. They'd plainly had plenty of practice at their game. He wondered where they'd got it. That might have been one more thing he was better off not knowing.
In the shop sat Stanley Hsu and another, older, man in what passed for a sharp suit in this alternate. Stanley Hsu stood up in greeting. The older man, who had what seemed like a permanent sour look on his face, didn't. The jeweler said, "I hope you'll let us buy you lunch while we talk."
"Do I have a choice?" Paul asked.
"There are always choices," Stanley Hsu answered. Paul didn't like the sound of that. Stanley Hsu went on, "Why don't you sit down? We'll eat lunch, we'll talk, and we'll see what some of the choices are."
Paul glanced at the rugged young men who'd brought him to the noodle shop. "Is one of the choices making them disappear?"
Stanley Hsu looked to the older man. That told Paul something about who bossed whom. The older man jerked a thumb at the door. The four escorts trooped out without a backward glance. The older man pointed to a chair. Paul sat down.
Stanley Hsu's eyes went to the older man again. The fellow's frown got deeper as he thought for a moment. Then he nodded. The jeweler said, "This is Mr. Lee—Bob Lee."
"Hello," Paul said. That let him stay polite without saying he was glad to meet Bob Lee. Was the Chinese man named for the Confederate general? That would have been funny. Paul wanted to see what he could get out of the men from the Tongs. He asked, "How is my father? Do you know?"
Once more, Stanley Hsu looked toward Bob Lee. The sour look didn't leave Lee's face as he answered, "The Germans are treating him pretty well. They're treating him very well, in fact. We don't know what that means."
One thing it might mean was that Paul's father was telling the Feldgendarmerie men what they wanted to hear—or maybe what they needed to hear. But would he do that? Paul hoped not, anyway.
After enough .. . persuasion, anybody might say anything. You couldn't blame someone for that. Before, though? Before was a different story.
The man behind the counter brought everyone at the table big bowls of noodles piled high with shrimp and scallops and crab meat and three or four kinds of mushrooms and even more kinds of vegetables. Nobody had asked Paul if that was what he wanted, but it looked good. The man gave Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee chopsticks. He started to hand Paul a fork. "I can use chopsticks, too," Paul said.
The man blinked, but handed him a pair. Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee looked at each other. Lee rattled off a few words in Chinese. If they didn't mean, This I gotta see, Paul would have been amazed.
/'// show 'em, he thought. He'd been using chopsticks in Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants since he was a little kid. He dug in. He might not have been quite so neat as the two Chinese men with him, but he had no trouble. The food disappeared. It tasted as good as it looked.
He'd got halfway down the bowl before he noticed the jeweler and the older man staring at him. That was when he realized showing he could use chopsticks might have been a mistake. "You weren't kidding," Stanley Hsu said.
Paul swallowed a mouthful. "Should I have been?"
"I don't know," the jeweler said. "I can't remember the last time I saw . . . someone who wasn't Chinese—or Japanese, I suppose— who could handle chopsticks like that."
"I never have," Bob Lee said flatly. "Never."
This was an alternate. They did things differently here. Not all the things they did differently were obvious. People who weren't Asian went to Chinese restaurants here. Paul had seen that. But evidently they ate with knife and fork when they did. Who would notice something like that. . . till it tripped him up?
"They aren't that hard to learn," Paul said.
Stanley Hsu looked down at the chopsticks in his own hand. "Maybe not," he said, but he didn't sound as if he believed it.
Bob Lee rattled off several sentences in Chinese. Stanley Hsu answered in the same language. They went back and forth for a couple of minutes, though they didn't forget their food. Finally, Bob Lee went back to English: "I think they are easy to learn, too. But I am old enough to be your father—almost old enough to be your grandfather—and I have never seen Americans or Germans take to them the way you do. You have your tools, we have ours— and not everyone in Chinatown uses chopsticks, either."
"You're Americans, too, aren't you?" Paul said.
Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee looked at each other yet again. "Yes and no," the jeweler said after a moment. "We are American, yes, but we are also something different."
"Something more," Lee added. He might have said, Something better. He didn't quite, but he might have.
Thoughtfully, Stanley Hsu said, "Young Mr. Gomes also seems to be something more, if not in the same way we are. The way he eats argues for that, don't you think?"
Paul wished he'd never heard of chopsticks. He would have thrown them down and gone back to the fork had he thought it would do any good. Since he thought it would only make things worse, he went on eating the way he'd started. He'd lost his appetite for the seafood, which was a shame.
"Where are you from, anyhow?" Stanley Hsu asked him. His tone was just like Lucy's when she'd asked him the same question.
He gave the jeweler the same answer he'd given Lucy, too: "Me? Thirty-third Avenue, in the Sunset District."
Stanley Hsu's head and Bob Lee's went back and forth in exactly the same rhythm: left, right, left, right, left. It would have got a laugh on a TV sitcom. Sitting here where they could do whatever they wanted to him, Paul didn't think they were funny at all. Lee said, "You could be from a lot of different places, Mr. Gomes. Wherever you are from, though, that isn't it."
"But it is," Paul said. And it was ... in a way. "I fool around in Pine Lake Park. I just graduated from Bay High."