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you. If you don't tell me, they might find someone else to ask you. Whoever
that is, he won't be so friendly."
"I think I've already met somebody like that," Paul said. As a matter of fact,
he was sure he had. And making sure growers in the Central Valley didn't sell
to Curious Notions hadn't been friendly, not even a little bit.
"I'm not surprised," Lucy said. "You've made people notice you. What you've
got here makes people notice you. If you're not. . . big enough, getting
noticed like that can be awfully dangerous."
By themselves, Paul and his father weren't anything much. When you added in
what they could call on from the home timeline, it was a different story. But
the home timeline had only limited access here. This was the Kaiser's home
ground and also that of the Chinese who'd grown curious about Curious Notions.
That made things a lot harder.
Even so, Paul said, "We can take care of ourselves." And if we can't, he
thought, we can scoot back to the home timeline. Let's see anybody bother us
there.
"I hope so." Lucy's tone of voice couldn't mean anything but, You've got to be
kidding.
"We can." Paul knew getting angry was silly, but he couldn't help it.
"I hope so." Now Lucy did sound as if she meant it, which surprised him. She
went on, "I don't think you're really from here. I've never met anybody from
here who's anything like you. You don't even talk quite the way I do."
What was she reacting to? That he didn't come from an occupied country and did
act like a free man? That was probably part of it. People in these United
States had been downtrodden for 140 years. They were cowed. The Germans made
sure they were cowed. Paul wasn't. His United States was free, and the
strongest country in the world. He didn't need to worry about any opinion but
his own. It had to show.
As for the way he talked . . . English here wasn't much different from the way
it was in the home timeline.
San Francisco didn't have any special accent, the way Boston or New York City
or New Orleans did.
Maybe it was a matter of style, not one of word choice or vowel sounds at all.
"I grew up on Thirty-third Avenue, south of Golden Gate Park," he said after a
pause only a little longer than it should have been. And that was also both
true and untrue. Thirty-third Avenue, yes, but not in this alternate.
Lucy shook her head. "I don't believe it. That's a tough part of town. You'd
be different if you came from there."
Paul muttered something under his breath. It wasn't a tough part of town in
the home timeline. It had been, back in the early days of the twenty-first
century, but the neighborhood had changed the other way as time went by.
"Well, I did," he said out loud. "Believe it or not. I don't care."
"One of these days, maybe you'll tell me the truth," Lucy said. "Till then . .
." She nodded to him, turned around, and walked out of the store.
How bad did I mess that up? Paul wondered. He did some more muttering. By the
way things looked, by the way they felt, he couldn't have messed it up worse
if he'd tried for a week.
Lucy didn't want to go back to Stanley Hsu's shop. She didn't know what to
make of the answer Paul had given her. She was afraid the jeweler would know.
If he did, what kind of advantage would that give him over the people who ran
Curious Notions?
She thought about making up a story. But what could she say? She didn't know
what kind of lie the jeweler might believe. Besides, she'd made a deal with
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him. Once she told him what Paul had said, he'd leave her alone.
"Hello, Miss Woo," he said when she walked into his shop. She might have been
a German countess by the way he treated her. "I was hoping I might see you
soon."
Everything he said had a hidden meaning. Was he just telling her he was glad
she'd dropped by? Or was he saying he'd had her followed and knew she'd gone
to Curious Notions? She couldn't be sure. She couldn't be sure of anything
with him.
He smiled, and went right on smiling. For all that smile had to do with what
he felt, it might have been a
Halloween mask. But she couldn't see past it. It hid whatever was really
there.
"What have you got to tell me?" he asked.
"I went to Curious Notions and asked Paul Gomes the question you told me to,"
she said.
"Good. Very good." Stanley Hsu leaned forward across the counter. He might
have been a hunting dog taking a scent. "And what did he say?"
"He said he was from right here in San Francisco. He said he was raised on
Thirty-third Avenue south of
Golden Gate Park," Lucy answered.
"Did he?" Whatever the jeweler thought of that, he kept to himself. Yes, he
used his smile as a mask, but it was a good one. "Do you believe him?"
"I don't know," Lucy answered slowly. "He didn't sound like he was lying, but
everybody knows what the
Sunset District is like. He doesn't act like somebody who comes from there. He
acts like somebody rich, somebody who doesn't have to worry about anything. He
almost acts like a German like he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants
to do it."
"Interesting." Stanley Hsu nodded. "We didn't make a mistake when we got that
clerk's job for you, did we?
You're plenty clever enough to do it. If you had a better education, you could
do much more than that. I'm sure of it."
Lucy didn't say anything. She was lucky to have got as much schooling as she
had. Most of her childhood friends had gone to work even before she did. If
your family needed money, what were you going to do?
Whatever you had to.
"Why did you want to know what he'd say to that question?" she asked.
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