Curious Notions

Six

As a customer closed the door behind him, Paul suddenly said, "Hey, Dad, let's take the afternoon off."

"What?" His father frowned. "Close on Sunday afternoon? You know how much money you want to throw away?"

"For once, I don't care," Paul answered. "Let's go somewhere. When I'm here these days, I've always got the feeling somebody's watching me."

"I think you're worrying too much," Dad said.

"I don't," Paul said. "All the growers who don't want to sell to us, those questions Lucy Woo was asking, and Inspector Weidenreich, too. .. It's too much, Dad. I feel like I'm in the crosshairs all the time."

"No need to start getting nervous till they start planting microphones," Dad said with the sort of calm that annoyed Paul instead of making him feel better. His father went on, "They haven't done that yet. Our bug sniffers would have picked it up if they had. Will you tell me I'm wrong?"

"No." Paul shook his head. He couldn't, and he knew it. "I still want to get out of here, though. There's a big soccer game at Kezar Stadium. Can we go?"

Dad yawned. Paul understood that. In the home timeline, soccer was still a minor sport in the United States. People noticed it at World Cup time, then forgot about it for another four years. Things were different here. Whether you backed the Seals or the Missions said a lot about where you lived, how much money you made, and what you did for a living. When the two teams met, it was almost like a civil war in the city.

But then Dad said, "Well, why not? A lot of people who might be customers will go the the game instead."

"Yeah," Paul said, and no more. Better to let his father talk himself into going.

Kezar Stadium was in Golden Gate Park. It was a shabby old oval. It had been built back before Germany beat the USA. No-body'd spent a whole lot of money on it since. But as long as it didn't fall down, they'd keep playing games in it.

Seals backers wore orange and black. They carried trumpets to make noise for their heroes. Missions fans wore brown or tan. They brought drums, all kinds of drums, into the stadium. Both sets of fanatics sneered at ordinary people like Paul and his father who didn't dress up.

The stadium crawled with cops, on foot and on horseback. About every other year, a Seals-Missions match caused a riot, cops or no cops. Oddly, though, Paul felt safer here than he did at Curious Notions. The police here weren't worried about him. All they cared about were rowdies. If police back near Curious Notions noticed him, they were liable to run him in for questioning about the business. He didn't want to have to worry about that for a while.

The trumpets roared and brayed when the Seals—also in orange and black—ran out onto the soccer pitch. Paul's father clapped for the Seals. The people who rooted for them were mostly the ones who were better off. Paul cheered for the Missions. Drums thundered when they came out. More people backed them, but the ones who pulled for the Seals could have bought and sold the Missions fans.

Back and forth across the pitch the two teams ran. They didn't like each other any better than their backers did. The play was often rough. The referee did what he could to keep things on the up and up, but he couldn't be everywhere at once. And players on both sides hammed it up for all they were worth whenever there was anything close to a foul. That didn't make the ref's job any easier.

When the Missions scored first, the drums made the stadium shake. People in brown danced in the aisles. The Seals fans sat there in glum silence. Paul thought the Missions got another goal a few minutes later. The referee waved it off, saying they were offside. Boos rained down on him. Only a few bottles came flying out of the stands, though.

Just before halftime, the Seals tied the match. The bicycle kick their forward scored with was so pretty, even the Missions fans couldn't boo. The trumpets wailed. Most of the people who blew them could only make noise with them—they couldn't really play. They made a lot of noise. Paul's head began to throb.

In the second half, the Seals scored again. Their rooters looked smug, as if they'd expected nothing less. They were the sort of people who would have been Yankee fans in the home timeline. It was like rooting for Microsoft.

Minutes leaked off the clock. The Missions fans pounded on their drums. They shouted at their team to do something—to do anything. They lost more often than they won, on the soccer pitch as well as in life. With about ten minutes left in the match, though, the Missions banged home another goal.

It ended in a 2-2 tie. Soccer here saved overtime for championship games. This one wasn't. The draw sent everyone home . . . not too unhappy. Drums thumped and trumpets wailed as people filed out of the stadium.

"That wasn't bad," Paul said.

"Not too," his father agreed. The lines for eastbound buses were long. People filled up one bus at a time. The ones who couldn't get on waited for the next bus to pull up. They were more patient about waiting in line here than they were in the home timeline. They needed to be, too—they had to do it far more often.

At last, Paul and his father dropped their nickels into the fare box. All the seats were already taken. They stood in the aisle and hung on to the rail when the bus lurched into motion.

It didn't stay very crowded for long. After it left Kezar Stadium, more people got off than got on. Paul and his father got to sit down about three stops before the one where they would leave. Paul thought that was pretty funny.

Curious Notions was a block and a half from the bus stop. Somebody in an upstairs apartment was singing the Missions' fight song. Paul winced. Whoever the singer was, his enthusiasm couldn't make up for lack of talent. Dad put his hands over his ears for a minute.

When they got to the shop, the door stood open a crack. They looked at each other. Each of them said, "You forgot to lock it." They both shook their heads. "Uh-oh," Paul said. Dad's hand dove into his pocket. Owning a gun was a serious crime in this world. That didn't stop anybody from doing it. It did give the Germans an excuse for making sentences longer when they decided they needed to.

Dad went in first. Paul stayed close behind him. His eyes went up and down the aisles. He knew the stock well. Nothing seemed to be missing. When he said so, though, his father looked through him and asked, "How do you know what people were looking for?"

Nobody was in the back room. Nothing there had been stolen, either. Paul began to breathe a little easier. And whoever the burglar was, he hadn't found the secret stairway down to the subbase-ment. That had its own alarm.

"Not too bad," Paul said.

"Not yet," his father answered. "We haven't been up to the apartment."

"Why would anybody want to take stuff out of there with all the goodies down below?"

"To find out who we are," Dad said. "I told you—we didn't know why we had a break-in. I think we've found out it wasn't ordinary thieves."

"Oh." Paul shut up, feeling foolish.

His father had the pistol out as they went up the stairs. Nobody was in the apartment, either. But that was where the thief had been snooping, all right. It looked as if a tornado had gone through it. All the drawers were spilled on the floor. So were the clothes from the closets. So were the medicine cabinets in the bathroom. Even the pillows had been slit open.

Paul called the burglars the nastiest name he could think of. His father nodded. "Yes, but which set?" he asked. "The Kaiser's chums, or your Lucy's friends?"

"She's not my Lucy, and I don't think they're her friends," Paul said.

"No? Would they be bothering us if you hadn't got friendly with her?"

"They might," Paul answered. "You were the one who gave her father's name to the Germans, after all."

Dad waved that away. Paul might have known he would. His father was good at ignoring things he didn't want to hear. He said, "They must have noticed us before that." He'd just shot his own argument about Lucy in the foot, but he ignored that, too. He might well have been right about people noticing them before. Paul remembered that Lucy had said her father wondered where Curious Notions got its goods. But was it certain, the way Dad said? Paul didn't think so.

He asked, "Did they get anything that proves we're not from here?"

"We'd better find out, hadn't we?" His father didn't sound happy at all. The rules said you weren't supposed to leave the locals any clues you came from a different timeline. But when you got comfortable somewhere, did you always pay attention to the rules? Curious Notions' merchandise bent them as far as they would go. And Paul was pretty sure he'd been careless. He would have bet his father had, too. Dad always thought he had the answers. Sometimes he did. Sometimes . ..

They cleaned up the mess the burglars had left. Not much was missing. They both saw that right away. It too said the thieves had been after information, not money or other valuables. And no ordinary burglar would have knocked everything out of the medicine chest in the bathroom. Paul and his father were all right there. All their razors and soap and toothbrushes and toothpaste and such came from this alternate.

"I think we're okay," Dad said at last. He started to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Paul asked.

"It's not like we're going to call the cops," his father answered. "That'd just give them the excuse to tear this place to pieces, too."

"Oh," Paul said, and then, "Yeah." And then he started laughing, too. He didn't like that very much, but it was pretty funny.

Lucy's new boss, Mrs. Cho, was a lot nicer than Hank Simmons had ever been. She never complained about the work Lucy did—Lucy made sure she never had reason to complain. But she did start to ask questions like, "Are you sure you're happy here, dear?"

"I'm just fine," Lucy answered the first time she heard that.

When Mrs. Cho began asking it three or four times a day, though, Lucy began to suspect a trend. The second she did something to give her supervisor an excuse, she'd be back at her sewing machine. Either that, or Mrs. Cho would just up and fire her.

It wasn't fair. She'd made a bargain with Stanley Hsu, and she'd kept her end of it. He and his friends were supposed to do the same thing. One evening after work, she stopped at his jewelry store on the way home. He was speaking Chinese with another man in an expensive suit when she walked in. They both fell silent. Lucy got the idea they hadn't been talking about diamonds or jade.

"Hello, Miss Woo," the jeweler said, very little warmth in his voice. "I didn't expect to see you here today."

"I did what you wanted," Lucy said. "I did just what you told me to do. Now it looks like I'm liable to lose my job. That wasn't part of the deal we made."

The stranger in the fancy suit gave her the nastiest smile she'd ever seen. "And what are you going to do about it?" By the way he talked, she might have been a spoiled mushroom he'd found in his salad.

Later, she realized he was trying to scare her. At the moment, all he did was make her mad. "What will I do?" she echoed. "I'll tell you what. I'll tell all my friends and neighbors that you can't trust the Triads, that's what. They make deals and then they go back on them."

"I don't think you want to do that," the man said.

"I don't think you want to make me do that," Lucy retorted. "If you break your word, how are you any better than the Germans?"

He stared at her. How big a big shot was he? When was the last time anybody had stood up to him? Unless Lucy missed her guess, it was a long, long time ago.

Stanley Hsu said something in Chinese. The man in the expensive suit answered in the same language. The harsh rattle of syllables meant nothing to Lucy. Her parents didn't speak Chinese, either. Her mother said her mother's mother and father had sometimes used it when they didn't want Granny to know what was going on. For most people in San Francisco's Chinatown these days, it was a closed book. But not for these two, obviously.

After a little back-and-forth in the old language, Stanley Hsu switched to English: "She's right, and you know it."

His—friend?—gave Lucy another Waiter! Look what I found in my salad! look. "She ought to get what she deserves for talking to me like that," he snapped, also in English.

"She ought to get what she deserves for meeting her end of the bargain," the jeweler said.

"She didn't tell us anything we didn't know already," the well-dressed man snorted.

"She asked the question we told her to ask. If she didn't get the answers we thought she might. . . well, that's information, too," Stanley Hsu said.

The other man said something in Chinese. Lucy had no idea what it meant. She thought she could make a pretty good guess, though. He glared at her again. "You're nothing but a nuisance. You know that?"

"Easy enough for you to say so. You're not worried about your job. You're not worried about going hungry." Lucy saw he had on a wedding ring. "Does your wife wear shoes I helped to make? How many pairs of them has she got? You make me want to throw something at you. You've got all that money, and you look down your nose at me because I don't." Her nose stung and her eyes watered, but she would have jumped off a cliff before she gave him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

He stared at her once more, this time as if he hadn't seen her before. Maybe he hadn't, not really. Slowly, he said, "You've got more nerve than you know what to do with."

Lucy only shrugged. What she wanted to do was find something large and hard and hit him over the head with it. Stanley Hsu spoke to him: "You go on and on about accounting. Keeping this bargain will be a lot cheaper than breaking it."

Fury filled Lucy. The man with the fancy suit had wanted to break a promise because breaking it saved money? He deserved getting clobbered, in that case. Then she realized Stanley Hsu was on her side. He thought it was funny that she was giving the other man a hard time.

"I—" The man in the expensive clothes stopped short. He'd just figured out the same thing Lucy had. It took him a little longer, but not much. "All right. All right." By the way he said it, it wasn't even close to all right, but he couldn't do anything about it. "We'll leave that alone then. You think you're so smart." He added something else in Chinese that sounded hot, then stormed out of the shop.

Stanley Hsu eyed Lucy. "Do you have any idea who that was?"

She shrugged. "Not really. He's somebody who can afford a nice suit." As far as she was concerned, that was a point against the man who'd just left, not a point for him.

"He's—" The jeweler shook his head. "You don't need to know his name. What you don't know, you can't tell. But he's important— he's very important—in the Triads. I would never have the nerve to talk to him like that." Lucy thought he was done, but after a moment he went on, "And you're right—he can afford a nice suit. He can buy and sell me, I'll tell you that."

Lucy had looked at the prices in the shop. She'd looked at the pieces that didn't have prices, too, the really expensive ones. Stanley Hsu had more money than she'd ever dreamt of. To imagine someone could buy and sell him the way he could buy and sell the Woo family . ..

"That may be the scariest thing I ever heard," Lucy said.

"There's nothing wrong with having money," Stanley Hsu told her. "There may be something wrong with what you do with it. If you have a lot of money, you can do a lot of good." He quickly held up a hand. "And yes, you can do a lot of harm, too. I know that. The . . . gentleman you met also knows it."

"That's nice." Lucy sighed. "I wish I had the chance to find out what I could do with a lot of money," she said wistfully. There were times when she wished she had the chance to find out what she could do with even a little money. She kept quiet about that. She was afraid she would sound sorry for herself.

By the way Stanley Hsu smiled, he guessed some of what she wasn't saying. He said, "Don't worry. Mr. Lee will keep his promise." He made a face. The name had slipped out. Lucy didn't see the trouble—it was a common one in Chinatown. Stanley Hsu went on, "Your job is safe as long as you do it well. If you don't, no one can help you. But I don't think that will be a problem, will it?"

"I can do what they've given me to do. It isn't very hard," Lucy said. That covered what the jeweler had said, or at least what she'd heard in what he said. If she hadn't heard quite everything. . . well, maybe he hadn't intended her to hear quite everything. She said her good-byes and hurried home.

Her father had got there ahead of her. He didn't usually do that. He and her mother were both worried about her. "It's all right," she said. "I was just checking on something with Mr. Hsu."

"Oh?" Both her parents said it at the same time and in the same tone of voice. They knew she'd had some trouble at the factory. Still sounding worried, her mother asked, "And how did it go?"

"Fine, I think," Lucy said. "Another man was there, someone Mr. Hsu listens to." That got her mother and father's attention. Anyone the jeweler paid attention to had to be a big shot. She went on, "He promised Mrs. Cho wouldn't bother me any more."

"Good. That's very good," Mother said. She and Father were suddenly all smiles.

Lucy didn't say anything about the way she'd had to prod Mr. Lee to get what was right. She'd got it. How she'd got it would only worry her parents. Thinking back on how she'd got it, though, made her smile, too.

Paul scratched the marmalade cat under the chin and by the side of its jaw. Purring, it closed its eyes and gave him a kitty smile. "You like that, don't you?" he said. "I thought so. You're not the only cat I know that does."

The cat pushed its face into his hand. It purred louder than ever. He wondered how such a friendly beast had turned into a stray. Then he laughed. It was hardly a stray any more. It was his cat, the Curious Notions cat.

He straightened. The cat twined itself between his legs. Whenever he looked around in this San Francisco, the skyline jolted him. The biggest reason for the jolt was that there wasn't much of a skyline. No high-rise hotels and office towers, no Transamerica Tower looking like an SST sticking up from the ground, not much of anything. In the home timeline, they built tall and did everything they could to quakeproof what they built. They could do a lot, too. Here . . .

Here, they couldn't do nearly so much. They couldn't afford nearly so much, either. And so they'd kept the laws the San Francisco and Los Angeles of the home timeline had given up, the laws that said a building couldn't be taller than so many stories. It made for a much duller-looking city. It also made for a city that couldn't hold as much or accomplish as much as the one he'd grown up in.

If San Francisco were a German city . . . The Kaiser's architects and engineers knew plenty about building skyscrapers. Berlin and Munich and Hamburg and Breslau soared up to the heavens. But the Germans weren't interested in building in the United States. They weren't interested in having American builders learn their tricks, either. They took secrecy seriously, and they were good at it.

After Paul shook his head at the sorry skyline, his gaze dropped to the sidewalk again. He wondered who was watching him. Who was watching the shop? He couldn't pick out anybody on the street. He wished he could. He suspected both the Germans and the Tongs were keeping an eye on everything he and his father did. He wanted to be able to watch the watchers, too. That might help keep him safe.

No matter what he wanted, he wasn't going to get it. The only familiar faces were those of other shopkeepers and neighbors. If the Feldgendarmerie or the Chinese had hired some of them to spy, he'd never know till too late. If they hadn't, if they used other people, they moved them in and out too often to let him spot them.

But the spies were there, whether he saw them or not. He was sure of it. That wasn't a logical feeling, though logic also said they'd be around. He felt it with the pit of his stomach, with the hair at the back of his neck. It was the feeling you got when somebody stared at you from behind. Your body could tell, even if your head couldn't.

Shaking his head again, he went inside. The cat scooted in, too. It was doing that more and more often. It knew which side its bread was buttered on. Paul's father saw it. He said, "You're the one who cleans up after that fuzzy freeloader."

"I know," Paul said patiently. After a few seconds, he added, "I think we should get out of here—just disappear."

"Crosstime Traffic wouldn't like it," his father said.

"Would they like somebody grabbing us and squeezing us?" Paul asked. "That's what's going to happen. Don't you feel it, too, Dad? If Elliott couldn't, he really was blind."

"If I started worrying whenever I felt something, I'd be looking over my shoulder every minute of every day. That's no way to live," his father said. "Besides, we need to be in place to keep an eye on things here."

"There are others in this alternate to do that," Paul said. "They aren't being watched like we are, either."

"There aren't that many others in this alternate. There aren't that many in any one alternate. The home timeline is spread too thin," Dad said. Paul wished he could argue about that. But he knew how true it was. His father went on, "Besides, how do you know they aren't being watched, too?"

Paul grunted. He didn't know that. Crosstime Traffic people traded. They had to—Crosstime Traffic wasn't in business for its health. And when you traded, you drew notice. Maybe the Feld-gendarmerie was keeping an eye on other people in this alternate who sold odd and interesting goods. How could you know till they dropped on you—if they did? You couldn't.

Dad added, "Besides, if we pull out and it turns out we didn't need to, we get a black mark on our records."

There it was. Paul knew the real reason as soon as he heard it. Dad wasn't just worrying about this alternate. He was worrying about the home timeline, too. That was all very well, within limits. But. . . "What happens if we need to pull out and we don't?" Paul asked, and answered his own question: "You know what happens." He made a horrible noise, the kind of noise a man getting strangled might make.

His father waved that away. "You're seeing shadows where there aren't any. Everything's going to be fine. I've even got some

new produce suppliers lined up."

"Terrific," Paul said. "How long before they get scared off?" His father turned away. He didn't want to listen. He hardly ever

did. Maybe he was right. He often was. Paul hoped so. He'd never

wished so strongly that he himself were wrong.

When the Triads spoke, the people at the shoe factory listened. Lucy's supervisor stopped asking her if she was happy. Instead, Mrs. Cho praised her whenever she did anything well. Before long, Mrs. Cho was praising her even when she didn't do things especially well. That only annoyed Lucy. She didn't want praise she hadn't earned. But she couldn't see any way to tell the supervisor that.

She supposed praise she hadn't earned was better than blame she hadn't. At least it couldn't land her in trouble. Even so, she would sooner have done without it.

What she liked most about the new job wasn't the work itself. She hadn't minded the sewing machine that much. Putting up with Hank Simmons had been a pain, but you could have a bad boss wherever you worked. No, the nice part of the clerk's job was the Saturday half-holiday.

Lucy had got used to working six days a week. The first couple of weeks after she got her new job, she hardly knew what to do with the extra time off. Before long, though, she started spending her Saturday afternoons at the zoo. She met Peggy Ma there when her friend could get free, too. Otherwise, she headed over by herself.

The zoo was way on the west side of the city, jammed in between the Pacific and Lake Merced. She rode the bus to get there. It went through the Sunset District, where Paul Gomes had said he was from. Most of the people who got on in that part of town were either drunks or crooks or plainly tough in a way Paul wasn't. Lucy couldn't believe he'd grown up on Thirty-third Avenue. The way he'd said it, though, she couldn't believe he was lying, either.

She didn't know what to think.

Like so much of San Francisco, the zoo had seen better days, better years, a better century. It was built in the dim and vanished 1930s. The time seemed as distant to Lucy as the days of ancient Egypt. Nobody had been able to tell the United States what to do back then. When the economy fell off a cliff, the President said, Well, build things! And people did.

Maybe it helped. It didn't help enough, though. When the USA and Germany fought twenty years later, the Kaiser's side wiped the floor with Uncle Sam. Nobody'd spent much money on the zoo since. The concrete animal enclosures were crumbling. Some of them were empty. But the zoo still had lions and tigers and bears. It had camels and zebras and hippos and elephants. It had monkeys doing gymnastics and acting like clowns. It had a reptile house full of iguanas and turtles and cold-eyed snakes and mean-looking crocodiles.

Lucy loved watching the animals. She always had, ever since she was little. Some of them didn't look as if they ought to live on Earth at all. If a hippo wasn't the most ridiculous thing in the world, what was? Everyone once in a while, Lucy wondered about that a little. When a hippo yawned, its tusks didn't look ridiculous at all. They looked ready for trouble.

Ivy and other plants crawled all over the enclosures and up the slopes behind them. Ivy was a perfect plant for San Francisco. Winters hardly ever got below freezing, so the stuff never died back. It just grew and grew and grew.

Gulls wheeled overhead. Other birds hopped and flew in and out of the ivy: little brown sparrows, screeching jays with heads of blue so dark it was almost black, hummingbirds whose backs were rusty and green. The hummingbirds mostly ignored the others— except the jays, which they didn't like. But they went after one another like fighter planes. They zoomed and darted and made angry buzzing noises. Once Lucy saw two of them collide in midair with a sound like a fist smacking into an open hand. She'd had to pay a quarter to get in, but they put on their show for free.

She wondered why they quarreled so much. What did hummingbirds have to fight about? Bugs? Nectar? Lady hummingbirds? Whatever it was, it didn't seem like enough. They should have just been pretty and peaceful.

She laughed. To a hummingbird, the things she worried about would have seemed silly, too. Money? The Triads? Curious Notions? No, none of them would have made any sense to a bad-tempered little bird.

Sometimes she wished they didn't make any sense to her, either. Some of them didn't, in fact. And those were the ones she wished she knew more about! A hummingbird wouldn't have understood that at all. Lucy didn't fully herself.

One sunny afternoon, she splurged on a wiener. Her mother would click her tongue between her teeth at the dime gone forever. Lucy sniffed. Didn't her raise entitle her to a little fun? She knew what Mother would say. She'd say Father's time in jail had cost so much, they still had to watch every penny—to say nothing of dimes.

Lucy found herself telling Peggy a little about Paul Gomes. "I like him," she said, "but he's so strange."

"Boys can be like that," Peggy said, which wasn't the kind of sympathy Lucy wanted. Peggy had a boyfriend, and thought Lucy needed one, too. Lucy wasn't so sure. Didn't she have troubles enough? She didn't think she liked Paul that way, anyhow . . . and she decided she'd probably made a mistake saying anything at all to Peggy.

While her friend gave her advice she didn't much want, she finished the wiener. That, she enjoyed. If you couldn't even have a wiener once in a while, what kind of a life was that? But she knew what kind of life that was. It was the kind people only a little un-luckier than she was had to live. It was the kind she would have had to live, too, if the Feldgendarmerie hadn't let Father out of jail.

That they had still amazed her. What kind of connections did Paul and his father have? Lucy would have tried to learn that for the Triads in a minute. He'd mentioned Fatty Horvath and that city lawyer. Who else? Could Stanley Hsu and his friends have got Father out? Maybe. Some of them were important people. But would they have bothered? She doubted it—not from what she'd seen of Mr. Lee.

"Thirty-third Avenue," Lucy muttered.

"What?" Peggy said.

"Nothing." Lucy couldn't, wouldn't, believe Paul had grown up in the heart of the Sunset District. He would have been a different person. He would have been a different kind of person. If he'd grown up in the Sunset District, it was a different Sunset District from the one she'd always known.

She laughed at herself. That was absurd, and she knew it. How could there be more than one Sunset District? It was like imagining more than one San Francisco. Lucy laughed again. If she could imagine any San Francisco at all, what would it be like? It would be a place where people could make more than eight dollars a week— more than fifteen dollars a week, too. It would be a place where Feldgendarmerie men with Alsatians couldn't poke their noses in wherever and whenever they wanted to. It would be a place where the gadgets Curious Notions sold weren't anything special. It would be a place where anybody—everybody—could afford gadgets like that.

What kind of Sunset District would a San Francisco like that have? One nicer than the tough, grimy horror that held Thirty-third Avenue here? One that was nice enough to have turned out somebody like Paul Gomes?

Lucy laughed one more time. You're crazy, she said to herself. A sparrow hopping around by her feet looked up at her. It didn't think she was crazy. It just wanted a piece of her bun. She tossed down a few crumbs. The little bird got one. More sparrows and pigeons nabbed the rest.

But even though Lucy kept laughing, she kept thinking hard, too. Another San Francisco made more sense the longer she looked at the idea. It would explain how she'd felt Paul was telling the truth and lying at the same time when he said he'd grown up here. It would also explain how Curious Notions got curious things. Simple—they just came from that other San Francisco.

The golden city on lots of hills, she thought. Had the Triads had the same idea? Was that why Stanley Hsu had told her to ask Paul where he was from? The notion would explain everything except how Paul and his father and everything in Curious Notions got to this San Francisco, to everyday, ordinary San Francisco. Magic. It would have to be magic. She didn't exactly disbelieve in magic. Plenty of magicians and fortune-tellers in Chinatown said they could make you healthy, happy, wealthy, and wise—for a price, of course. Of course.

But if magic really worked the way people said it did, how come everybody wasn't healthy, happy, wealthy, and wise? How come so many magicians and fortunetellers weren't healthy, happy, wealthy, and wise?

See? You're being silly, Lucy told herself. But was she really?

Sure as sure, the Triads couldn't believe anything connected with Curious Notions really belonged to this world, either.

If not by magic, though, how had Paul Gomes got here? Lucy imagined an airplane flying from that other San Francisco, wherever it was, to this one. That did it. Shaking her head, she turned to Peggy. "Let's go home," she said. When she got ideas that silly, it was time to call it a day.

Heading for the produce market with two hundred dollars in his pockets, Paul felt rich. That was pretty funny, when you got right down to it. In the home timeline, two benjamins would buy him a burger, but not the fries and the soda to go with it. Here, he could live for months on two hundred dollars—not that he'd call it living.

So many things even the richest man in this alternate couldn't have. Nobody here had ever heard of neobiotics, let alone subflex-ive fasartas. Poor devils, he thought with mild sympathy.

Paul wasn't someone who liked making noise for the sake of making noise. He had to be noisy at the produce market. If he'd kept quiet, nobody would have noticed him. Farmers and customers shouted at one another. Their fingers flashed in price signals—and other gestures. Half of what they yelled singed Paul's ears.

Sellers liked him because he was willing to go high. Buyers swore at him for bumping up prices. But he didn't get the deals he thought he'd clinched. The Tongs must have got there ahead of him. As soon as sellers found out who he was, they didn't want to deal with him any more.

"Beat it, kid," one of them said, not unkindly. "I'm gonna have to unload my scallions on somebody else."

"Why?" Paul demanded. "You won't come close to getting my price, and you know it."

"Maybe not." The farmer shrugged. He lit a cigarette, which disgusted Paul almost as much as wearing furs. "I'll tell you this, though—whatever price I do get for 'em, I'll be in one piece to spend it." He blew three smoke rings, one right after another. That fascinated Paul and grossed him out at the same time.

He said the only thing he thought might help: "How would they know?"

"Kid, they'd know." The fellow with the scallions had no doubts at all. He was probably right, too, even if Paul didn't want to admit it.

Paul left the produce market much less cheerful than he'd gone there. What good was his money if he couldn't use it? No good at all. He might as well have been trying to pass benjamins in this alternate.

What would his father say when he came back with all the money and without any deals for produce? Dad wouldn't be very happy. That was putting it mildly. Paul shrugged. If Dad thought he could buy, he was welcome to try it himself. Paul didn't think he'd have any better luck. The farmers didn't want to deal with the people from Curious Notions. Paul shook his head. No, that wasn't it. The farmers were scared to deal with the people from Curious Notions. There was a difference, a big difference.

How far did the Tongs reach here? Down into the Central Valley, certainly. Across the sea to China, probably. How much could they do against the power of the Kaiser? Not enough to overthrow it, plainly. But enough to give it a hard time in and near San Francisco? It sure looked that way.

Around the last corner. Heading for home, or the closest thing Paul had to a home in this alternate. The marmalade cat came out of Curious Notions and trotted over to rub up against him. He was bending down to pet it before he realized the front door shouldn't have been open like that. He straightened and started to run towards it.

Somebody shouted, "Get out of here, fool, before they grab you, too!"

That was bound to be good advice. Paul hurried into Curious Notions anyhow. The shelves were bare. Whoever they were, they'd carted off all the merchandise.

"Dad?" Paul called, hoping against hope.

No reply. Only silence. He went up the stairs two at a time. He knew he could be walking into a trap, but he did it anyhow. His father wasn't up there. Luckily for him, neither was anyone else. They had torn the apartment over the shop to pieces again. Paul's stomach felt as if it had jumped out a fifth-story window. What was he going to do now?

The answer formed on the heels of the question. He was going to get out before they came back and grabbed him, too. First, escape. Everything else could come later—if there was a later.