Curious Notions

Four

Everybody talked about the midnight knock on the door. It was such a cliche—and held so much truth—the Imperial German censors had given up trying to stop that talk. It showed up in books, in movies, in radio plays, and even—for those who had the money— on TV.

The knock that woke Lucy Woo and her family didn't come at midnight. It came at ten after three, as she saw when she stared at the alarm clock on the nightstand. That was even worse. It meant she had a good fighting chance of losing the rest of the night's sleep. Of course, when people came knocking at midnight—or at ten after three—they weren't likely to care whether you lost sleep or not.

Yawning, more than a little punchy, she staggered out of bed. The pounding at the door went on and on. It would wake the neighbors, too. They wouldn't be happy about that. Lucy yawned again. She had bigger worries than the neighbors right now.

Her mother turned on a lamp in the living room. They both blinked at the sudden explosion of light. Then Mother did something Lucy admired forever. She went to the door and asked, "Who is it?"

That question had only one possible answer. But that Mother had had the nerve to ask it... ! The pounding stopped. A gruff male voice said, "The Feldgendarmerie of Imperial Germany. Open at once, in the name of the Kaiser!"

They would kick the door down, or maybe shoot through it, if Mother gave them any more trouble. She had to know that as well as Lucy did. She opened the door. But she couldn't help asking, "What's so important that it won't wait till morning?"

This time, she got an answer she didn't expect. The Feldgen-darmerie men, all of them over six feet tall, shoved a much shorter man into the living room. "Father!" Lucy squealed.

"Hello, sweetheart," Charlie Woo said. He hugged Mother first, then Lucy, then her brother, who came running up in his pajamas. "I'm home."

"You would do well not to make the Kaiser's government suspect you," the big Feldgendarmerie man said. "Next time, you may not be so lucky."

"But I didn't do anything," Lucy's father said.

"If you had not done anything, we would not have arrested you." The German sounded as sure as if he'd said the sun would come up in the morning. "Just because we cannot prove it does not prove a thing." He also sounded sure he made sense. Lucy almost called him on it. But the weak didn't challenge the strong. America had been under the Kaiser's thumb for a long time. That was one lesson everybody in the country had learned, and learned well.

Without another word, the Feldgendarmerie men turned and strode off. Their jackboots thudded on the bare boards of the hallway. They slammed the door to the stairs behind them. Even so, Lucy could hear them clumping all the way down to the ground floor.

"Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" Michael squealed. Her mother closed the door so his noise wouldn't bother the neighbors quite so much. Lucy didn't care if it bothered them. She joined right in. The Kaiser's secret police didn't let somebody go every day.

Paul kept his promise, she thought in surprise. She couldn't come up with any other reason the Feldgendarmerie would have released Father. / owe him an apology. I ought to do something for him to keep things balanced, but I have no idea what I could do.

Her mother's thoughts were running on different lines. "Let me get you something to eat," she said to Father. "What did they do to you while they had you?"

"Not as much as I was afraid they would." Father looked tired and he needed a shave, but Lucy didn't see any bruises or cuts on him. He stood there in the middle of the front room as if he couldn't believe he was free. As Lucy's mother disappeared into the kitchen, he went on, "They spent a lot of time yelling at me and asking questions, but that was all. They didn't try any strongarm stuff." He sounded as if he couldn't believe it, either. The Feldgendarmerie wasn't known for being kind and gentle.

"Here." Mother came out with a bowl of cold noodles and a steaming cup of tea she'd made in what seemed like nothing flat.

"Oh, my," Father said. By the way he dug into the noodles, the Germans hadn't fed him much while they held him. He ate standing up, as if he didn't want to waste time going over to the couch or a chair. When he finished, he made a small ceremony of handing the bowl back to Mother. "Thank you, dear. That was wonderful." He sipped the tea and smiled. Just making the corners of his mouth go up took effort. Lucy could see that. But Father managed.

After Mother took the bowl into the kitchen, she came back and herded Michael into bed again. She didn't try to make Lucy go. That was a good thing, because Lucy didn't intend to. She knew she'd be even more tired than usual when she got home from work tonight, but so what? If this wasn't a special time, what was?

Besides, there were questions she wanted to ask Father. The first one was, "What do you know about Curious Notions?"

"Only what I told you before," he answered. "That's what I told the Germans, too. If I knew more, I would've sung like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. You'd better believe I would, sweetie. I don't owe those people at Curious Notions a thing. If they're in trouble with the Kaiser's men, it's their lookout."

"Um," Lucy said, and then, "Urn," again, and finally, "I think maybe you do, Father."

"What do you mean?"

Lucy told him about her visits to the strange store and about her talks with the Gomeses, especially Paul. She finished, "He said he'd talk to officials who'd squeeze the Germans. The Feldgendarmerie doesn't turn people loose very often, so I guess maybe he did."

Charlie Woo scratched his head. He yawned. Lucy wondered how very tired he was. "I guess maybe he did, too," he said slowly. "That means he knows officials who can squeeze the Germans. He knows them well enough to get favors out of them. It's just an ordinary-looking little shop, though. How do the people who run it get that kind of pull?" By the way he sounded, he wished he had that kind of pull himself.

"The shop looks ordinary, but they don't sell ordinary things there," Lucy said. "You told me that, and I've seen it for myself, too."

"No, they don't," her father agreed. "They're . . . curious, the things those people sell—and the people, too, it sounds like." He yawned again, so wide that Lucy could see his tonsils. Then he finished his tea at a gulp. "I'm going to bed." He shook his head. "No. I'm going to take a bath, and then I'll go to bed."

That was just what he did, too. Lucy also went back to bed. She didn't go back to sleep, though. She hadn't thought she'd be able to. Yes, she'd be a zombie by the time she got home from work. "So what?" she said after tossing and turning for an hour. She got up again and got dressed. "So what? Father's home. Who cares about anything else?"

Paul's father said, "Well, I hope you're happy. They sprung that fellow from Chinatown." He didn't sound any too happy about it.

"Did they? That's great." Paul was plenty pleased for both of them. He had good reason to be pleased, too: "Nice to know people will come through for you once in a while."

"Maybe." Dad still seemed gloomy. "Trouble is, if you do pull strings like that, you get noticed. The locals will wonder why you did it. They'll wonder about this Charlie Woo—and they'll wonder about us. We don't want them wondering about us."

The shop had no customers in it, so they could talk freely. Paul hesitated when a man put his hand on the doorknob. But then the man got a look at the prices in the display window. He jerked his hand away as if the brass knob were red-hot.

Paul had seen that reaction before. He smiled as the almost-customer hurried off down the street. "If we don't want to draw any notice, we shouldn't sell most of the stuff we carry," he said. "We should stick to things just like the ones this alternate makes for itself."

They'd had this argument before. His father made the usual countermove: "But if we do that, we won't make so much money here. If we don't make money, how are we going to buy the produce? That's what we're really here for, that and making sure the locals don't start trying to go crosstime."

"How can we stop them if they do start making those experiments?" Paul asked.

"I don't know if we can," his father said, sending a sour look his way. "What we want to do, I guess, is make sure the idea never occurs to them in the first place."

"How?" Paul asked again.

"I already told you—one thing we need to do is keep them from noticing us," Dad said.

"Wait a minute. There's a hole in that," Paul said. "If we don't want them to notice us, we don't sell stuff that's any different from what they already make here. If they really get serious about finding out where what we've got comes from, isn't that a problem?"

"It hasn't been so far," his father said. "Curious Notions has been doing business here for years, and we haven't had much trouble." He made money-counting motions with his hands. Paul knew what that meant. If a local had got curious about the shop, Crosstime Traffic people had paid him enough to make him lose his curiosity. Why not? It wasn't as if it were real money from the home timeline.

That might have worked well in the past. No—that had worked well in the past. But could you count on it to keep working forever? Paul had his doubts. He said, "I wouldn't want to try bribing that Inspector Weidenreich. He looks like he's after any old excuse to bust us."

"There are ways around people like that," Dad said. He didn't say what those ways were, though. Maybe they were secret. Maybe he thought Paul already knew them. And maybe he was making it all up and didn't know them himself.

Paul wondered if asking that was worthwhile. Regretfully, he decided it wasn't. Either Dad would ignore him or he'd start a fight. And if he started a fight, it would be one Paul couldn't hope to win. He wouldn't convince his father. Making Dad change his mind was like wearing away Mount Everest with a feather. You could try, yeah, but you wouldn't get anywhere. Dad was that stubborn. (Paul's own stubbornness didn't even cross his mind.)

He wouldn't be able to persuade Crosstime Traffic that Dad was doing anything wrong, either. He already knew that. Dad wasn't going against Crosstime Traffic policies or guidelines. He was just following them in what Paul didn't think was the best possible way.

Nobody in the home timeline would listen to a kid complaining about his old man.

But Paul couldn't let it go without saying something. All he could think of was, "I sure hope you're right."

"I'm not worried," his father said. That didn't reassure Paul as much as Dad might have liked. His father hardly ever worried. He was always sure he was right. And he was right a lot of the time. Even Paul had to admit that. But he wasn't right as often as he thought he was.

A customer did come in. Paul and his father stopped sniping at each other. They sold the local a fancy tape deck. People in this alternate thought it was fancy, anyway. It was a long way behind the state of the art in the home timeline. Everything there was digital, and had been for most of a hundred years.

Inspector Weidenreich didn't show up at Curious Notions that day. Dad looked smug. Paul ignored him. Twenty minutes before they closed, he walked around the corner to buy a couple of hot dogs at Louie's, where he went a lot of the time. Everybody here called them franks or wieners, but they were hot dogs, all right. When he came back to the store, a skinny marmalade cat meowed at him. He tossed it a chunk of hot dog. It sniffed suspiciously at the meat, then gobbled it up.

"They're as bad as beggars on two legs," his father said when he went inside. "Now it'll expect a handout every time."

"Well, so what?" Paul answered. "Maybe I'll adopt it for as long as I'm here."

"Just so you don't try to bring it back to the home timeline," Dad said. "For all I know, it may be a boy. It'd make Crosstime Traffic have kittens either way, though." He gestured. "Take those upstairs, will you? We're supposed to look like we're a business. We can't do that if you're standing there feeding your face."

From what Paul had seen, at least half the shopkeepers in this alternate's San Francisco ate while they were open. If they didn't, they wouldn't be able to eat at all. Again, though, life was too short to argue. He started toward the stairway.

The bell over the front door rang before he'd taken more than three steps. He looked back over his shoulder, then stopped. There stood Lucy Woo, a large, closed basket in her hand. "Hello," Paul said.

She nodded shyly. "Hello. I wanted to thank you—I wanted to thank both of you—for helping to get my father away from the Feld-gendarmerie." She nodded again, this time to Paul's father. She plainly worked hard at being polite.

Dad nodded back, even though he hadn't had thing one to do with getting Lucy's father out of jail. "It was nothing," he said. Considering what he'd done—considering that he'd got her father into trouble in the first place—that was true enough for him.

"We were glad to do it," Paul said. He had been, anyway.

She hefted the basket. "I brought you something. I hope you enjoy it."

"You didn't have to do that!" Paul exclaimed. She'd told him where she worked. He had a pretty good idea of how much she'd make. If it was ten dollars a week, he would have been amazed. She couldn't afford much in the way of presents.

With dignity, she said, "I think I did. You did something special for my family and me. This is the least we can do to show we're grateful."

Paul realized he couldn't turn down the present, whatever it was. That would be a deadly insult. His father had figured out the same thing a couple of steps ahead of him. "Thank you very much, Miss Woo," Dad said. "This is really kind of you." He did everything but go over and kiss her hand. Dad could be charming when he wanted to, sure enough—charming to everybody but Paul.

Lucy came into the shop and set the basket on the counter. "Open it, please," she said.

Dad waved to Paul. He might have been saying, This is your fault—you take care of it. Had they been by themselves, Paul would have had some things to say about that. He couldn't say them with Lucy there. He flipped back the basket's hinged lid, hoping she hadn't had to buy the container with the present.

The biggest lobster he'd ever seen stared back at him. It had to weigh at least five pounds—maybe closer to ten. Rubber bands held its claws closed. It was still wiggling a little; it had come out of the sea very recently. "I got it at Fisherman's Wharf," Lucy said. "Throw it in a big pot of water and it will be wonderful."

How many benjamins would a lobster this size cost in the home timeline? Lots—Paul was sure ofthat. They thought in terms of dollars here. It had to cost two or three, maybe even five. Five dollars in the home timeline was a handful of little aluminum coins, worth next to nothing. Five dollars here . . . Five dollars here was a good part of a week's pay for Lucy.

Quietly, Paul said, "This is too much. You didn't need to."

"For helping my father?" Lucy shook her head. "It's not enough. I wish I could do more."

"Thank you very much," Dad said. "My son is right, I think— this wasn't anything you needed to do. But it was very kind of you anyhow. If you like, we will put it in the icebox today and cook it tomorrow. That way, you and your family can come over and share it with us."

Paul wished he'd come up with that. Yes, his father could be smooth when he wanted to, no doubt about it. He just didn't waste any smoothness on Paul.

But Lucy Woo drew herself up straight with pride. She still wasn't very tall, but she carried herself like a duchess. "No, thank you," she replied. "The lobster is for you. Taking any of it away wouldn't be right."

Arguing with her would have been a waste of breath. Even Paul could see that. She'd done what she thought she was supposed to do, and she wouldn't let anything or anybody change her mind. Paul's father managed to be gracious about it: "All right, then. Thanks again. But we'll think of you when we eat it."

"Think of my father, too, please." With a stiff little nod, Lucy turned and left Curious Notions. Neither Paul nor his father tried to take the last word from her.

The four and a half dollars Lucy had spent on the lobster for Paul Gomes and his father left a hole in the family budget. She didn't care, and neither did her mother or her father. Some debts were too important to stay unpaid. And, with Father back, the Woos would make up the money sooner or later.

Work went on. Work always went on. She couldn't get away from it. Hardly anyone in this whole downtrodden country could. Plenty of people put in more than her sixty hours a week, and made less money for their time. As these things went, her family had been pretty lucky till Father fell foul of the Feldgendarmerie.

Lucy wanted to walk past Curious Notions to find out if she could smell the cooking lobster. She made herself stay away. She'd given the gift. Paul and his father had accepted it. It was theirs now. What they did with it was their business.

Three days after she gave it to them, she was walking home from work when a Chinese man in his late twenties coming the other way bumped into her. "I'm very sorry," he said.

"It's all right—no harm done," Lucy told him.

"Please accept m apologies." He pulled a little leather case from the hip pocket of his jeans. "Here is my card. If I can do anything for you, you only need to ask. Sorry again to bother you." He tipped his wide-brimmed hat and hurried away.

STANLEY HSU, FINE JEWELRY, the card said. The address, on John Street, was only a couple of blocks from her father's shop. The card also had several Chinese characters Lucy couldn't read.

And it had a note, written in neat, small hand. Please come tomorrow evening at eight o'clock. Very important! Lucy stared at that. As far as she could see, it could mean only one thing. Stanley Hsu hadn't run into her by accident. He'd wanted it to look like an accident to anyone who happened to see it, but it wasn't. He'd done it just so he could give her this card.

"Why?" Lucy said out loud. Then she wanted to clap both hands over her mouth, but she didn't. She felt like a fool, ruining the secrecy he'd worked so hard to keep. But the question that had burst from her still needed answering. Why did Stanley Hsu want her to come to his shop, and why did he need to keep it a secret?

Lucy put the card in her handbag. She tried to forget it the rest of the way home. She didn't remember the note till after supper. (Supper was only rice and vegetables. The lobster would take its toll on the budget for weeks—but the gift needed giving.) Then she took the card out of the purse and showed it to her mother and father.

Her father scratched his head. "I've heard of Stanley Hsu, though I don't think I've ever said more than a couple of words to him. He has a good business. But why would he want to talk to you? Why would he give you the message that way?"

Her mother pointed to the Chinese characters on the card. "I think it has to do with the Triads," she said.

'The Triads?" Lucy and her father both stared. She asked, "Are they real?"

Back in the old days, the days before the Germans conquered the United States, the Triads had been very important in Chinese San Francisco. Outsiders usually called them Tongs. They were social clubs, but they were much more than social clubs, too. They helped poor members. They loaned money—often at poisonous interest rates, sometimes not, depending on who was getting it. They bought and sold things. Not everything they bought and sold was legal. Sometimes they fought among themselves. People still talked about the Tong Wars. And they'd had connections that reached all the way back to China.

After the Germans took over, they'd tried to put down the Triads. They'd made them illegal. The Americans had done that, too, but the Feldgendarmerie went after the Triads harder than American police ever had. They'd executed Triad leaders, or men they said were Triad leaders. Whatever the Triads did these days—if they did anything—they did quietly, in an underground way.

"They're real, all right," Lucy's mother said. Reluctantly, her father nodded. Her mother went on, "They're just. . . careful. They have to be."

"I never heard that Stanley Hsu was connected to them," her father said.

"If you heard things like that, the Kaiser's men would hear them, too," her mother answered. That made some sense, but only some. Such logic, if it was logic, could justify almost anything. Mother went on, "Besides, if it's not Triad business, what could it be?"

"But why would the Triads care about me?" Lucy asked.

Her mother hesitated. She had a hard time seeing an answer to that. So did Lucy—a very hard time. But her father snapped his fingers. "Curious Notions!" he said. "It has to be Curious Notions."

"Why?" Lucy said. "The people there aren't Chinese. They don't have anything to do with us—or they didn't, till the Germans arrested you."

"That's all true, honey," Charlie Woo said. "But something else is true, too—something I've talked about before. The people at Curious Notions sell things nobody else can match. Nobody. You think that doesn't make other people curious? It makes me curious, let me tell you. But I can't do anything about it. The Triads can."

"So you think I should go, then?" Lucy said.

"Oh, yes!" Her father and mother both spoke at the same time. Their voices both rose in a peculiar way.

They're frightened, Lucy realized. They're scared of what might happen if I don't go. How much did they know about the Triads? How much of what they knew had they kept to themselves? Quite a bit, it looked like.

"All right," she said. "I'll go." Her parents let out identical sighs of relief.

She wished Stanley Hsu hadn't picked a time after supper. To get to his shop by eight o'clock, she had to gulp down her noodles and vegetables and dash out the door. That left her mother stuck with the dishes. Mother didn't say a word. If that didn't prove how important she thought going was, nothing ever would.

Twilight deepened as Lucy walked over to John Street. She would have to come home in the dark. She didn't like that, either. The air was cool and moist. The streetlights that worked had halos around them. She thought the night would be foggy. Sometimes tourists came to San Francisco thinking that, since it was California, of course it would be dry and hot. They often got a nasty surprise.

Lucy almost went right past Stanley Hsu's shop. It was only half a storefront wide, and had his name on the door in the tiniest of letters. The door also held those Chinese characters. Did they really have something to do with the Triads? Lucy only shrugged. She couldn't tell, not to save her life. But she'd find out, or thought she would.

She opened the door. It had a bell set above it, just like the one in her father's shop—and the one in Curious Notions, come to that. The familiar clink made her a little less nervous. Stanley Hsu smiled at her from behind the counter. "Welcome," he said. "Look around a little, if you care to."

'Thank you," Lucy answered. His card said FINE JEWELRY, and it wasn't kidding. Strings of pearls gleamed, as if by moonlight. Carved jade and ivory stood on glass shelves. Gold shone everywhere. Diamonds glittered. Rubies and sapphires and emeralds glowed: tiny explosions of deep, rich color. There were hardly any price tags. If you needed to ask, you couldn't afford it. Even so ... Wistfully, she said, "It's beautiful."

"You are too kind," the jeweler murmured with a smile that looked modest but was really full of pride.

"What do you want with me?" Lucy didn't feel like beating around the bush. "Why did you pick such a strange way of asking me to come here?"

"I have to be careful," he said, which didn't tell her anything. After a moment's pause, he added, "You never can tell who may be watching, or when."

"The Feldgendarmerie, you mean?" Lucy asked.

"Yes, the Feldgendarmerie." Stanley Hsu nodded. "And maybe others." He made a pagoda of his fingertips. "Would you be kind enough to tell me what you know of the people who run the business called Curious Notions?"

Lucy took a deep breath. It wasn't as if she hadn't expected the question. All the same, she needed a real effort to shake her head the way she'd planned. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hsu, but I don't think I want to do that."

"Oh?" Stanley Hsu didn't lose his smile or his manners. "Perhaps you would be good enough to explain why not?"

"They helped my family," Lucy said simply. "I'm not going to do anything that would get them in trouble. If that's why you asked me to come, I'd better leave."

"Please wait." If he'd made it sound like an order, she would have got out of there as fast as she could, but he didn't. She didn't think he would do anything nasty if she stayed, and so, warily, she did. He let out a long sigh. "It could be dangerous to me to reveal too many of my affairs to you. It could also be dangerous to you to hear too much."

"It's already dangerous for me," Lucy said. "For my father, too."

The jeweler dipped his head. It was almost a bow. "That is true. I cannot deny it. All right. I will tell you . . . something. I will not tell you everything, though."

"Well, of course not. You'd be crazy if you did," Lucy said.

Stanley Hsu took a deep breath of his own. "How would you like to see the United States a free country once more, out from under the Kaiser's thumb?"

Again, the question didn't startle Lucy all that much. But it was treason, nothing else but. Stanley Hsu had taken her into his confidence, sure enough. If she told the Feldgendarmerie he'd asked her that, he was a dead man. She said, "I don't know. Is it even possible? Wouldn't the Germans squash us flat if we tried? They've done it before. They have so many things we don't."

"They have a higher technology than we do," Stanley Hsu said, which was a fancier way of repeating Lucy's comment. He went on,

"They have the highest technology in the world, and they work hard to keep it that way. There are some places in... There are some places that are trying to catch up, but they haven't yet."

"Some places in China?" Lucy asked. "Some places with connections to San Francisco?" She didn't ask if he was one of those connections. That seemed plain enough as things were.

He gave her another smile, which did surprise her. "Since you've already figured that out on your own, you save me from a lot of troublesome explanation." She hadn't figured it out on her own—her mother had helped a lot. But she didn't have to say so to Stanley Hsu. Smiling still, he continued, "Yes, what you say is true. Because China is so far away from Germany, the Kaiser can't keep an eye on everything that goes on there. But now I have to come back to the people at Curious Notions. I am sorry, but I do."

"Why?" Lucy asked bluntly.

"Because, by what they sell, they can get hold of things made with a technology higher than Germany knows anything about," Stanley Hsu answered. "We want to know where. We want to know how."

Lucy found herself nodding. Her father had said pretty much the same thing. He hadn't put it the same way—Stanley Hsu talked like a man with a fancy education. But when you boiled it down, there wasn't much difference. Lucy nodded once more, this time to the jeweler. "I'm with you so far."

"Good." Again, Stanley Hsu sounded as if he meant it. That made Lucy want to like him, want to trust him. She knew neither might be a good idea, but she wanted to anyway. He said, "As far as we know, they sell only toys: radios and televisions and phonographs and portable music players. But those are all better—much better—than what comes out of Berlin. What sort of serious things do they have, if their toys are so fine?"

What did he mean by serious things? Calculating machines? Weapons? What else would matter to people trying to shake off the Germans? Lucy told the truth: "I don't know about any ofthat."

"I didn't think you did," Stanley Hsu replied. "But who would have a better chance of finding out than you do?"

Lucy turned and started for the door. Over her shoulder, she said, "I'm sorry you've wasted your time, Mr. Hsu. I'm not going to spy on them, and that's that."

"Don't you want your country to be free?" the jeweler demanded.

"If you're asking this kind of thing from me, would you make it free?" Lucy asked in turn. "Or would you just turn it into China's cat's-paw instead of Germany's?"

Stanley Hsu looked astonished. At first, Lucy thought that was because she'd had the nerve to ask him the question. Then she realized he'd never asked it of himself. People—she didn't know who— had told him things, and he'd believed them. Was he suddenly wondering whether he should have?

"You are a remarkable girl. . . uh, young woman," he said after a long, long pause.

"I don't know anything about that. I don't care anything about that," Lucy answered with a shrug. "I do know my father taught me never to buy a pig in a poke. Maybe somebody should have taught you the same thing, Mr. Hsu." She walked out of the shop, wondering if he'd chase after her. He didn't. Nobody bothered her all the way home.

When Paul Gomes stepped out of Curious Notions, he found that marmalade cat waiting for him. "Meow?" it said. He had no trouble translating from cat to English. Where's my handout? the beast wanted to know.

"Here you go." Paul tossed a dried anchovy on the sidewalk. They sold them in sacks at Fisherman's Wharf. Some people used them for bait. Paul supposed he wasn't the only one who used them for kitty treats.

The cat nosed this one, daintily bit it in half, and then ate each half in turn. Then it proved it was honest in its own fashion. It rubbed up against Paul's leg, purred like distant thunder, and let him scratch it behind the ears and under the chin. Some cats—a lot of cats, in fact—seemed to think they got handouts by divine right. This one knew better. If it didn't earn its treats, it did without.

Dad would have said it was just baiting the hook for Paul. Dad had said that, in fact, said it often enough to make a bore of himself. Maybe he was even right. Paul didn't much care. He was more inclined to keep on feeding the cat because his father had made a bore of himself than he would have been if Dad had just let it alone.

He tossed the marmalade tabby another dried anchovy. Its purr got even louder and deeper. He didn't do that every day. When he did, the cat made sure it showed it was grateful. Before too long, he planned on letting it into the shop. That would really give Dad something to complain about.

As it had before, the cat neatly bit the anchovy in half before starting on it. It made the tail end disappear. But then, instead of going on to the head end, it disappeared itself—it made a small, startled noise and ran around the corner.

"What the—?" Paul didn't think he'd scared the cat. He straightened up, turned around . . . and almost bumped into a short, stocky, neatly dressed Asian man standing behind him. "Excuse me," he said.

The man smiled and nodded. The nod was polite enough, but the smile never reached his eyes. They were as hard and dark and shiny as obsidian. "You're Paul, aren't you?" he said. "You work here." He nodded again, this time toward the front window of Curious Notions.

"That's right," Paul said. "Can I do something for you, Mr., uh . ..?"

"You don't need to know my name," the man said. "You need to know we've got our eyes on you, and on your father, too. You can't go anywhere unless we know about it. You can't do anything unless we know about it. And if you want to tell the Kaiser's hounds about us, go ahead. We don't exist, you see."

What was that supposed to mean? It sounded like something out of a twentieth-century spy thriller. Carefully, Paul said, "If you won't tell me who you are, I don't think we want anything to do with you."

"It isn't your choice," the man said. "It's ours, and you need to understand that."

"You can't tell me what to do," Paul said. And he was right, right in a way no one who lived in this alternate could be. No matter what kind of problems he and his father-had, the transposition chamber could take them away where nobody from here could follow. Knowing that made everything that went on here seem not so very important. It needed more than a two-bit punk to make Paul sit up and take notice.

Something in his voice must have told the Asian man as much. He sent Paul a perfectly filthy look—he expected people to take him seriously. "We can do all kinds of things," he growled. "You wouldn't want an accident to happen around here, would you? You wouldn't like it very much if it did."

Paul put his hand in the pocket of his jeans. All he had in there was a set of keys, but it was a big, lumpy set. Through the denim, who could be sure what it was? "We aren't the only ones who can have accidents," he said in his own best tough-guy voice. "You want to remember that, you and your 'nameless' friends. You don't think I can find out who they are?"

That was pure bluff, too, but it rocked the older man. "I don't know what you can do with your lousy gadgets," he said. "But you'd better not mess with us, because you don't know what you're messing with. We've got connections you can't touch, no matter how smart you think you are."

"I don't care if your stinking connections go back all the way to China," Paul snapped. The Asian man's lips skinned back from his teeth in what was anything but a smile. Paul realized he'd landed another hit, even if he didn't quite know how. He'd just meant it as a figure of speech. He grinned a grin that said he knew more than he was letting on. He was—literally—lying through his teeth, but this fellow didn't have to know that.

"You'll be sorry, kid," the Asian man said. "You think you're smart and you think you're tough, but you don't know how much trouble you're in."

Paul took a step toward him. "I know how much trouble you're going to be in if you don't get lost."

"Oh, I'll go. But you haven't seen the last of me. You may wish you had." The man hurried down the street, turned the corner, and was gone.

Exit villain, sneering, Paul thought. But he didn't even know if the Asian man was a villain, or anything else about him. All he knew was that the fellow knew too much about Curious Notions.

He waited to see if either the man or the marmalade cat would come back. When neither did, he went back into the shop. He waited till a lull with no customers, then told his father what the Asian man had said. Dad, for a wonder, heard him out. When he finished, his father said, "That doesn't sound so good."

"I didn't think so, either," Paul said.

His father pointed a finger at him. "I bet it's got something to do with that Lucy What's-her-name. I told you that would end up causing trouble."

"You—" Paul stopped. He wanted to say his father didn't know what he was talking about. He wanted to, but found he couldn't. What Dad had said made altogether too much sense.