That made Lucy squeak in surprise. "What about the Germans?" she asked.
"What about 'em?" Sammy Wong said. He walked to the door and opened it. Lucy and Paul followed him.
Feldgendarmerie men sprawled in the corridor. They weren't dead—their chests were going up and down. But they'd passed out as fast as Lucy and Paul had. One of them had held a cup of coffee. He'd spilled it on himself, and all over the floor.
More Germans had dropped in their tracks, all through the jail. "How did you do this?" Lucy asked.
Sammy Wong gave her a smile that was anything but friendly. "I'm magic."
She was tempted to believe him. She was also tempted to kick him for not telling her what she wanted to know. Paul suffered from that disease, too. But this Sammy Wong didn't suffer from it—he reveled in it. He hustled her and Paul along as if every second counted. And every second probably did.
The guards outside the jail hadn't been flattened by the magic, or whatever it was. When one of them asked Wong, "Was ist hier los?" he answered in fluent German. It wasn't the bits and pieces of the language that most Americans picked up. He spoke German like a German—like a high-ranking German, in fact. He pulled papers from his pocket to back up his words. When he finished, all the guards came to attention and clicked their heels. "Jawohl!" they chorused. Wong led Paul and Lucy down the stairs and down the street.
"What did you tell them?" Lucy whispered once they were out of earshot.
He looked at her. "That I was the Kaiser's cousin, and I wanted to play hopscotch with the two of you."
She did try to kick him then. He sprang out of the way—he might have been good at hopscotch. Paul said, "He told them he was going to use us for bargaining chips to try to trap some of the men from the Tongs."
Lucy hadn't known Paul understood German that well. It didn't surprise her. By that time, nothing much would have surprised her.
Had Sammy Wong really turned out to be the Kaiser's cousin, she would just have nodded and filed the news away, like a folder back in the office.
Would she ever see the office again? How could she, when she'd just broken out of the Feldgendarmerie jail? The Germans and their American stooges were going to start turning San Francisco upside down and inside out.
"What happens now?" she asked, still in a very small voice.
"Now we have to get Dad out of his mess," Paul said.
"And then we have to get out of here," Wong added.
Paul's we plainly included Lucy. Wong's we, even more plainly, didn't. Lucy called him on it: "What happens to me now? What happens to my family?"
He scowled. Instead of answering her, he rounded on Paul. "We ought to leave her in the lurch. You know it bloody well, too." He sounded as furious—and as sure he was right—as anyone Lucy had ever heard.
Paul didn't even blink. "Go ahead," he said calmly. "But if you leave her, you leave me, too."
"Wait!" Lucy exclaimed.
He shook his head. "I'm not waiting for anybody. We've been through too much together. I'm not going to let anything bad happen to you if I can stop it."
"You blockhead." Sammy Wong still sounded savage. "Half of what's happened here—more than half—is your own stupid fault."
"Some of it is, yeah. I made plenty of mistakes," Paul said with a shrug. "More than half? No way, Jose"." Lucy had no trouble figuring out what that meant, but nobody in this San Francisco would have said it. Paul went on, "I'll tell you what the real trouble is— what we were selling. It was too good. It got us noticed."
Wong said something about what they'd been selling that should have made the sidewalk catch fire. "Elliott didn't have any trouble," he finished.
Paul ignored the bad language. "No. You're wrong," he said, replying to the older man's last sentence. "Elliott didn't see any trouble. We had it from day one. That means it was here waiting for us ahead of time."
"Any old excuse in a storm," Sammy Wong jeered.
"Okay, think like that. Go ahead. But we can find out." Paul turned to Lucy. "How long has your dad been wondering about Curious Notions and what it sold?"
"Quite a while now," she answered. "At least two or three years. Maybe longer—I'm not real sure."
"You see?" Paul said to Sammy Wong.
"I see somebody who got himself in trouble and who's looking for a way out," Wong said.
"I got myself into some of this trouble, yeah, but not all of it," Paul said. "And the trouble between the Tongs and the Germans has been here since ... for longer than we've been alive."
Sammy Wong didn't notice that he'd changed course there. Lucy did. He'd probably been about to say something like since before we got here. But if he did say that, it would give away that he and Wong had come from a different world. He might also have given away that Lucy already knew they were from that other world.
"When we get home—" Wong didn't just change course. He broke off, and went back to nasty muttering in English and Chinese.
He led Lucy and Paul south, away from Market Street—off to an area not too far from where Lucy worked. Paul said, "Where are we going? This isn't the way back to the Palace Hotel."
Lucy started howling laughter. She couldn't help it. It poured out of her, peal after peal, till she couldn't even walk any more. She stood there, doubled over, tears running down her cheeks. Paul and Sammy Wong stared at her as if she'd lost her mind. So did people walking by on the street. "You were . . ." she started, and then had to stop, because another spasm seized her. Finally, she got it out: "You were staying ... at the .. . Palace Hotel?"
"Yeah, we were." Paul reached out. She had to lean on his arm to straighten up. He still looked puzzled, and almost angry, too. "What about it? You scared me half to death there."
"When you disappeared—I guess that's when Mr. Wong found you—the Triads were trying to figure out where you'd gone." Lucy spoke carefully. Her ribs and stomach hurt from laughing too much. "Your father didn't know, either. When he and Stanley Hsu were talking, he got rude and said he thought you were staying at the Palace. Oh, my." She wiped her streaming eyes on her sleeve.
Paul thought about it. Then he said, "I guess maybe you had to be there."
"I guess maybe you did," Sammy Wong said. "Come on. In here." Here was a not very fancy house in a not very fancy neighborhood. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a tiny living room, and an even tinier kitchen. Wong sighed. "I'll sleep on the sofa. I didn't expect to have more than one person along." He sent Paul one more sour stare.
"Life is full of surprises," was all Paul said.
"If you sit tight, that'll sure be one," Wong snapped. Paul turned a dull red.
"We're all on the same side here—I think," Lucy said. "Can we try to get along till we figure out what we ought to do next?" She had no idea what that would be. She had to hope Paul and Sammy Wong did. They'd better, she thought. They can do almost anything. But when it comes to knowing what they should do, they're no better than anybody else—worse than some people. The thought was oddly cheering.
"You make good sense," Paul said. "You usually do, I think." "Thank you," Lucy said. She looked toward Sammy Wong. The other man from that other Sunset District still seemed anything but happy, but he nodded. That made Lucy feel a little better. If only she'd had the faintest notion where they were going from here, she would have felt better yet.
Somebody shook Paul awake in the middle of the night. A bright light shone in his face. Panic threatened to grab hold of him. But it wasn't the Feldgendarmerie. It was Sammy Wong in a flannel nightshirt. In its own way, that was almost as scary a sight as a big, beefy German in a trench coat.
"Listen, kid, we've got to talk," Wong said in a voice that brooked no argument.