He gave one of the newsboys a nickel. The kid handed him a Chronicle and three cents. Paul waved away the change, saying, "Keep it."
"Thank you, sir." The newsboy really was grateful. Three cents would buy something here: gum or candy or something like that. Back in the home timeline, Paul couldn't think of anything you could get for three dollars. This alternate hadn't known inflation, the way his world had.
It hadn't known a lot of things. He walked along reading the paper. It went on and on about what the Kaiser was doing, and the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and the King of England, and the King of Portugal, and even the Emperor of Brazil. It said that the latest rebellion in India had been put down. When crowds refused to break up, the story went on, it became necessary to open fire with machine guns. Native casualties were heavy. Only three white men were hurt, none seriously.
In the home timeline, that sort of attitude had pretty much disappeared after the Second World War. It was alive and well in this alternate.
An okay place to visit, if you've got money, Paul thought. You can be comfortable enough. It's not like Agrippan Rome, say, where they still think bad air causes disease. Even so, I wouldn't want to live here.
Lucy knew something was wrong even before she went in the door after her day's work at the shoe factory. Just the way Mother was yelling at Michael told her that. Her mother sounded not just angry but afraid.
"What's going on?" Lucy asked when she went inside.
"Your father hasn't come home from work," Mother answered in a flat voice that tried to hide fear but couldn't.
"He's working late," Lucy said. Father sometimes did that, though he usually brought work home with him when it was past closing time.
But Mother shook her head. "No. Old man Lin said the Germans were in the shop this afternoon."
Ice ran up Lucy's back. "Why?" she exclaimed. "He hasn't done anything to get the Germans mad at him. All he does is fix radios and record players and toasters and things. What's wrong with that?"
"Nothing," her mother answered. "You know it, and I know it, too. But if the Germans don't know it. . ."
She didn't go on. She didn't need to go on. The Germans could do whatever they pleased. A lot of the time, they stayed in the background while U.S. officials did their dirty work for them. But when they wanted to, they came out in force.
What Lucy couldn't understand was why they would want to
here. She loved her father, but she knew he was an ordinary man. He ran an ordinary little business. Once a month or so, he would play cards with some friends, and sometimes he'd have a little too much to drink before he came home. If the Germans started arresting everybody in San Francisco who did things like that, they'd empty the place in a hurry.
She couldn't put all that into words. What she did say was, "They must be crazy." She spun a finger by the side of her head.
"I should hope so," Mother answered. "I just don't know if that will do Father any good, though." The fear came out in the open. People dreaded the Germans exactly because they could do whatever they wanted. They didn't need to be right. They could ruin your life just as easily if they were wrong.
No sooner had that thought crossed Lucy's mind than someone knocked on the door. It wasn't a cheerful, hello-there-here's-your-friend kind of knock. No. This was an open-right-now-or-I'll-kick-in-the-door knock. Whoever knocked like that would be wearing boots to kick better, too.
Bam! Bam! Bam! There it was again, echoing up and down the hallway. "What do we do?" Michael squeaked.
"We answer it," Mother said. "What else can we do?"
Lucy right behind her, she opened the door. Four enormous German Feldgendarmerie men stood in the hallway. They all wore identical green trench coats—and, sure enough, polished black jackboots. One of them had had his fist raised to knock some more. He lowered it.
"You are the Woos?" he asked in good if accented English. Then, because there were lots of Woos in Chinatown, he added, "This is the home of Charles Woo, the repairer of electrical goods?"
"That's right," Mother said. "Where is he? What have you done with him?" She didn't say, What have you done to him? Lucy admired her for that. She went on, "Why do you want to know?"
"Charles Woo has been detained for interrogation. If he is innocent, nothing will come of it." The secret policeman didn't sound as if he thought that was likely. He turned to his pals and spoke a few words of German.
Figuring out what the phrase meant didn't turn out to be hard. The Feldgendarmerie men went ahead and turned the place inside out. They threw things on the floor. They opened anything that might be hollow. They didn't care what they smashed. They even took pictures off the wall and looked behind them.
"What do you want?" Mother wailed as one of the Germans flung clothes out of drawers, "We haven't done anything!"
"Ha! Now tell me another one," the Feldgendarmerie man said. "Nobody's ever done anything, not in all the history of the world. But things keep getting done anyway. Maybe it's a miracle, eh?" He laughed some more.
"But we haven't!" Lucy exclaimed. "What do you think we've done?"
"Oh, yes. You don't know. Of course you don't." The big man's mocking tone filled Lucy with despair. He wasn't going to believe the Woos, no matter what they told him. He went on, "I suppose you'll say you haven't had anything to do with that Curious Notions outfit, too."
Lucy looked at her mother. Mother looked as surprised as she felt. "But we haven't!" they both said at the same time.
Sure enough, the man from the Feldgendarmerie didn't believe them. "A likely story! And isn't your husband one of their big suppliers? Of course he is." He liked that of course. He already knew all the answers.
"He is notl" Lucy shouted. She was too angry now to be scared.
Besides, she had the feeling she couldn't make things much worse than they were already. "He was just talking the other night about how he doesn't know where the place gets what it sells, because everything they have is so strange."
"How neat. A built-in alibi. Very clever. But it won't work," the secret policeman said. "And do you know why it won't work? Because the people at Curious Notions have already admitted your father's part in the scheme. So if you deny it, you must be lying, eh?"
Now the look Lucy and her mother shared was one of horror. "No, they're the liars!" Lucy said. She tried to imagine why the people at Curious Notions would tell that kind of lie. What did they have against her father? He wasn't competition. He didn't sell what they did. He couldn't even fix what they sold. It made no sense.
"Don't you worry," the German said cheerfully. "We'll get some answers out of him, even if we don't get them out of you." He spoke to his own men: "Well? What about it?"
They shrugged. "Doesn't look like anything, boss."
"You see?" Lucy's mother said. "We're innocent. We haven't done anything, and neither has my husband."
"No, that is not how it seems to me," the Feldgendarmerie man answered. "I will tell you how it seems to me. It seems like this. We have found no evidence—-ja, this is true. But does this mean you are not guilty? That I find very unlikely. So it must mean you are very clever. You think you have outwitted us. For the time being, you may even be right. We shall see, though, what further questioning of Herr Charles Woo will bring."
"You're nuts!" Lucy burst out. "Can't you see that no evidence means we haven't done anything?"
"Everyone has done something." The Feldgendarmerie man spoke with great assurance. "My job is finding out what it might be."
A slow, happy smile crossed his face. "I am very good at my job, too."