People dropped what they were doing—literally. Papers cascaded down onto the floor and splashed across it. Several clerks screamed. Everyone's fingers pointed straight toward the ceiling. All the other people in the big room looked as scared as Lucy felt.
"What is the meaning of this?" Mrs. Cho tried to sound as tough with the Feldgendarmerie men—they couldn't be anything else—as she did with the people who worked for her. She didn't have much luck. Her voice wobbled and squeaked.
"We ask the questions," said the German who'd ordered hands raised. "Where is"—he paused to check a paper he pulled from his pocket—"Lucy Woo?"
Even before he spoke her name, Lucy knew it was coming. She had not a prayer of running or hiding. Every eye turned toward her. In a very small voice, she said, "Here I am."
The secret policeman looked at her. He looked at his five strapping friends. He was as big as any of them. Lucy barely came up to his shoulder. He started to laugh. "They sent lions after a mouse," he said.
I'll bite you if I can, Lucy thought. Shouting defiance at the Germans wasn't smart, though. All she said was, "I haven't done anything."
That set the Feldgendarmerie men laughing again. "The next person I hear who says, 'Oh, yes, I did what you say I did,' will be the first. If you listen to the ones we grab, they are so innocent it's a miracle God doesn't carry them off to heaven." Now his laugh took on a sinister ring. "God takes care of the innocent—and we take care of the rest. Come with us, if you please."
Mrs. Cho began, "Lucy is a very good worker and a very nice girl. She—"
With a wave of his submachine gun, the secret policeman cut her off. "If she is as sweet as you say, we won't keep her long. If" He bore down heavily on the word, then gestured with the weapon again. This time, he used it to point toward the door. Helplessly, Lucy went.
She wondered if they would put handcuffs on her. They didn't bother. That almost made her angry. They didn't think she was dangerous enough to worry about. It felt like an insult. The only trouble was, they were right.
They bundled her into an enormous car. It had to be enormous to hold all of them and her as well. It roared down the street. The driver leaned on the horn. That special scream meant everybody had to clear a path for the German car. People on foot and on bicycles and in other cars got out of the way in a hurry.
"I didn't do anything. I really didn't," Lucy quavered.
"Ha!" said the secret policeman who seemed to do the talking for this bunch. "You know Lawrence Gomes and his son. Don't try to tell me any different, or you'll be sorry. We got what we needed out of the older one. Now we're finding out what the younger one knows."
Lucy tried not to flinch in dismay. Paul, in the hands of the Feld-gendarmerie? She didn't want to believe it. She tried not to believe it. Maybe this fellow was lying to make her sing. That seemed the sort of thing the secret police would do.
But then she remembered that Paul was missing. His father and Stanley Hsu didn't know where he was. One logical reason they wouldn't was if he was in some Feldgendarmerie jail.
Maybe this one, Lucy thought as the car pulled up in front of a building with the red, white, and black German flag floating above it. The door opened. Three of the Feldgendarmerie men got out. "Now you," said the fellow who did the talking. Lucy obeyed. What else could she do? The rest of the secret policemen piled out behind her.
They could have safely brought a criminal mastermind into jail with that kind of firepower. For a terrified sixteen-year-old girl, it was overkill. They used it anyhow. Up the steps she went. One of the spike-helmeted guards at the top opened the thick, heavy door. In Lucy went. It closed behind her with a soft thud. She wondered if she would ever come out again.
Not for the first time, Paul wondered if the Germans were afraid of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. That was the only reason he could see that they weren't tearing chunks off of him. So far, the questioning had been on the mild side, as Feldgendarmerie questioning went. Of course, he had no guarantee it would stay that way.
The cell was about three meters on a side. The cot in one corner had its legs sunk into the concrete of the floor. It wasn't going anywhere. Aside from the cot, the cell held a toilet and a cold-water sink. That was it. The secret policemen hadn't given Paul a chance to shave. His beard, four days old now, was starting to itch.
He was starting to itch all over, in fact. With the best will in the world, you couldn't stay clean with only a cold-water sink and no soap. Maybe the Feldgendarmerie men thought he'd lose heart if he got dirty and scruffy. If he did, he intended to do his best not to let them know it.
Maybe they thought he'd lose heart if he got hungry, too. They fed him twice a day. It was slop. People in the home timeline complained about the lousy food prisoners got. Sometimes they wrote letters to the newspapers. They started e-mail campaigns on the Net. They staged public protests. If they'd had to eat these nasty stews, they would have decided what prisoners in the home timeline got wasn't so bad after all. This was better than starving, but not by much.
Worst of all was the boredom. Nobody else was in a cell Paul could see. Everything was quiet except for the clump of guards' boots against the floor. Paul could pace up and down or he could lie on the cot and grow moss. No TV. No radio. No nothing. Those horrible meals soon became the high points of his day. That was a really scary thought.
And then there were the times that weren't so boring. Those usually came in the middle of the night. He wondered if the Feldgendarmerie had watched too many old movies. They couldn't wake him up by shining a bright light in his face, because they never turned off the lights. But they did make a habit of waking him out of a deep sleep.
The door to the cell would fly open. "Raus!" they would shout. "Prisoner Gomes, come with us at once!" Paul was a sound sleeper. If they hadn't screamed his own name at him, he would have had trouble remembering who he was when he first woke up. They wanted him groggy and stupid when they questioned him. They had ways of getting what they wanted, too.
They'd slam him down into a hard chair in a dark room. Then they'd shine the bright light at him. They'd throw questions at him. Where did Curious Notions get its goods. What happened to all the produce it bought? What did he know about the Tongs? (Except they called them Oriental subversive organizations—regardless of the alternate, cops talked like that.)
Paul told them as little as he could. He pleaded ignorance. He was just a kid—how could he know anything important? They were walking around the edges of the crosstime secret. Unlike the people from the Tongs, who were looking for allies wherever they could find them, the Feldgendarmerie men didn't quite seem to know they were on the edge of it.
Or maybe they were just holding back. Bright lights and shouted questions were as far as they'd gone up till now. They hadn't tried hot things or pointed things or sharp things. They hadn't tried electricity. They hadn't tried drugs.
Good luck is where you find it, Paul thought after one of those sessions. Even as it was, he felt his brain had been turned inside out. But it could have been worse, and he knew it.
Once, the German asking the questions told Paul, "This is not what your father says to be the case."
"Why don't you ask him about it, then?" Paul answered. As far as he knew, he had told the truth here. The Feldgendarmerie man wanted to know the prices he'd been paying for Central Valley produce. That seemed harmless enough.
"I am asking you," the German said. Did his voice lack some of its usual snap? Paul thought so.
He said, "That's how I remember it. If Dad knows something I don't, it's news to me. Maybe he's the one who remembers wrong. Like I say, you can ask him about it."