"Excuse me," Stanley Hsu said, and disappeared into the noodle shop's back room. Paul heard him talking on the telephone, sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese. He came out again and sat back down. "We can check on that. If you are lying to us, you will be sorry."
"So much for enjoying my lunch," Paul said. Both Chinese men laughed. Paul didn't think that was funny, either.
He'd finished eating by the time the phone rang. The owner called Stanley Hsu into the back room once more. Again, Paul listened to him talking. The jeweler slammed the phone down. He was scowling when he returned to the table. He pointed a finger at Paul. "Your records at the high school are where they ought to be. You got very good grades."
"See?" Paul said triumphantly. "Uh, and thank you."
"Do not thank me," Stanley Hsu said. "Your picture is not in last year's annual, or the one from the year before, or from the year before that, or the year before that. Your name is not in any of those annuals. Records are easy to fix. We know about that." Bob Lee nodded, as if to say he knew it very well indeed. Stanley Hsu went on, "Fixing records does not make things turn true. We want the truth now, please."
Urk, Paul thought. The men from the Tongs were right. Slipping a false record into a file wasn't very hard. That probably would have been enough to keep the Germans happy. It wasn't enough for these men. They knew San Francisco better than the occupiers ever could.
"Well?" Stanley Hsu said.
"Well, what?" Paul answered. "I thought we had a bargain. Get my father out, and then we talk. You don't have any business pressing me till you take care of your half."
"You have gall. I've already seen that," the jeweler said. "How much good it will do you may be another question."
Bob Lee was blunter: "Times have changed since we made that silly bargain. We need the truth from you—no more nonsense."
"The Feldgendarmerie would tell me the same thing," Paul said.
Stanley Hsu looked pained. Bob Lee only shrugged. "And what would you tell the Feldgendarmerie if they got their hands on you?" he asked. He answered his own question: "You'd tell them whatever they wanted you to tell them, that's what."
"And how is that any different from what you want me to do?" Paul asked.
Lee didn't seem to care. He just wanted answers. How he got them, what he did to get them, didn't matter to him. Stanley Hsu saw the point Paul was making. Whether he agreed with it was probably a different story. But he did see it. He spoke in Chinese. Bob Lee answered with several crackling sentences in the same language. The jeweler said something else. Lee threw his hands in the air as he replied. You must be out of your mind, he was saying, or something much like that.
"You've made yourself . . . hard to find," Stanley Hsu said, in English and to Paul. "How do we know you'll keep your half of the deal? Tell us where you are staying—"
"Show us where you are staying," Bob Lee broke in. "We have already seen you can come up with lies that seem like the truth."
"Yes—show us where you are staying," Stanley Hsu agreed. "That would be better. Then the bargain will be safe."
Letting them know where he lived was the last thing Paul wanted to do. They would have a hold on him then. And he was sure they would keep an eye on him 24/7 after that. But he didn't see what choice he had. This was what he got for being alone in a world not his own.
With a sigh, he gave them the address of the cheap hotel where he was staying. They both made faces. Bob Lee said, "I wouldn't go into that part of town on a bet."
"I haven't had any trouble—except from your people," Paul said.
That didn't impress the Chinese men. Stanley Hsu spoke in Chinese to the man who ran the noodle shop. That fellow dipped his head and hurried out of the place. When he came back, he had with him the four young men who'd brought Paul there. Stanley Hsu smiled and said, "They will make sure nothing happens to you on your way back to your room."
"Right," Paul said tightly. They'd make sure he was staying where he said he was. But he was stuck. He could see that. He got to his feet and nodded to the jeweler and Bob Lee. "Thanks so much for lunch." He almost hoped they would get angry. They didn't. They just laughed.
"Let's go," said the young man who'd done all the talking. Paul went. The four of them stayed around him all the way back to that lousy hotel. He was less sorry to have them along in the Tenderloin than he would have been a lot of other places in San Francisco. People here went on and on about how bad the Sunset District was. And it was bad, especially compared to the same part of town in the home timeline. But a sea gull flying over the Tenderloin was liable to get its pocket picked.
If Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee were telling the truth, nothing much had happened to Dad yet. Maybe the Feldgendarmerie men knew what a valuable prisoner they had. Maybe they didn't want to do anything to spoil their chances of getting the answers they wanted. Paul hoped that was what was going on.
Maybe Dad was talking just enough to keep the Germans happy, and no more. Paul tried to do that with the men from the Tongs. Paul hadn't fallen off the tightrope yet, but he'd sure wobbled in the noodle shop. If they pushed him a little more .. .
He chuckled, which made his escorts give him a funny look. They didn't ask him to explain. That was a relief. He'd wobbled in the noodle shop, yes. But Lucy Woo had pushed him right off the rope and into space. She'd figured out where he had to be from. Stanley Hsu and Bob Lee had all the evidence in front of their noses— more evidence than Lucy'd had. They knew he hadn't gone to Bay High here. If they saw all of what that meant, though, they hadn't shown it to Paul.
He stopped in front of his hotel. "Thanks for bringing me back," he said. He wouldn't thank them for taking him away.
They all nodded. They all waited on the sidewalk while Paul trudged up the grimy concrete steps and into the lobby. In the home timeline, most hotels had doors so you could see out. The door to this place could have turned a charging tank to scrap metal. That kind of door was common in this alternate's Tenderloin.
The desk clerk looked up when Paul came in. As soon as the fellow recognized him, he went back to his book. It wasn't quite a comic book, but it had lots of gaudy pictures. The clerk's lips moved as he read. The pages didn't hold many words, but he didn't turn them very often.
OUT OF ORDER, said the sign on the elevator. It had been there a long time. Paul's lips moved when he read it anyway. He wasn't quite silent. The clerk kept his nose in his story even so. Paul went to the stairs and climbed to his room. The stairway smelled of stale tobacco and even staler food. Somebody going down passed him. They looked away from each other, as if neither wanted to admit he had to live here.
Paul carefully locked all the locks on his door after he went inside. You never could tell, not in this part of town. He walked over to the window and looked down at the sidewalk through the dirty glass. The four young Chinese men were still there. One of them looked up. Paul drew back in a hurry. He didn't want them seeing him, though he couldn't have said why. What difference did it make? They already knew where he was.
He felt almost as imprisoned as his father was. That was partly because the men from the Tongs knew he was here, but only partly. Being stuck in this alternate seemed as bad as being in jail. And he feared it might be a life sentence.
Someone from another world! Lucy had never thought that about anyone but her brother before. This was different. Michael was just a nuisance. He didn't really come from anywhere else. Lucy remembered when he was born. She'd been little then, but she remembered. Paul truly was from . . . somewhere else.
That didn't mean he wasn't a nuisance, too. Lucy's life had got very complicated since she met him. Not many of the complications were much fun, either. She had a better job now, but her father had gone to jail and might never have come out again. And she'd had to start dealing with the Triads. She remembered how she hadn't even been sure they were real. Real? They were powerful, more powerful than she'd ever dreamt. They had connections that reached all the way across the Pacific. And they had connections that reached all through San Francisco.