“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 subflexive 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 comer. 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.

  Seven

  “I have news,” Lucy Woo’s father said over dinner, and then, “Pass the mushrooms and broccoli, please.”

  The bowl sat in front of Lucy. She sent it down the table. When Father served himself and didn’t say anything more, she asked, “What is the news?”

  He looked at her for a moment before answering. Then, his voice oddly flat, he said, “They’ve closed Curious Notions.”

  “What? Paul Comes and his father?” Lucy couldn’t believe it. “Why would they do that? They had to be making money hand over fist.”

  Father shook his head. “I don’t think the people who ran it closed it. I think they had it closed for them.” He sat very straight in his chair and looked stem and serious. When people in the United States did something like that, they always meant the Germans. “Everything was gone. You could look in the window and see that. And the neighbors say the wagons were there the other day.”

  “How terrible!” Lucy said. “Can we do anything for them?”

  Normally, that would have been a dumb question. If the Feldgendarmerie took you away, odds were you were gone for good. But not always. Father was here mixing vegetables and rice to prove that. Mother said, “Maybe you can do something, Lucy. You’re the one who knows the Triad people.”

  “Lucy thinks that Paul fellow is cute,” Michael said.

  Lucy was reminded—not for the first time—what horrible, poisonous creatures little brothers were. She sent Michael a glare that should have knocked him flat. He was tough as a weed, though. As far as she was concerned, the resemblance didn’t end there. “Why don’t you talk about things you know about—if you know anything?” she hissed.

  Michael stuck out his tongue at her. “You do, too!” he jeered. “Nyah, nyah!”

  “That will be enough of that,” Mother said. “That will be enough of that from both of you, in fact.” She pointed a finger at Lucy. Lucy didn’t think that was fair. Her brother had started it. She hadn’t given him half the trouble he’d given her.

  Besides, he was wrong … wasn’t he? Lucy liked Paul pretty well. He was interesting—a lot more interesting than anybody at the shoe factory, not that that said much. She liked him, yes. But did she like him? She hadn’t even thought about it. She wondered why not.

  He’s strange. The answer formed in her mind as soon as the question did. She’d said as much to Peggy. He was very strange—nice, but strange. Thirty-third Avenue? Not likely! Maybe that silly idea she’d had about different worlds wasn’t so silly after all. If anything could make her wonder, it was how strange Paul Gomes was.

  Then she shook her head. No, it wasn’t just Paul. The things Curious Notions sold—had sold—didn’t come from any place she knew, either. Her father would have agreed with that. Where did they come from, then?

  The same place as Paul, obviously. But where was that?

  “Do you think the Triads would do anything?” her father asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy answered. “They might. They were sure interested in anything that had to do with Curious Notions.”

  Her father drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I was in the Germans’ jail. I don’t like to think about anybody going in there. If you can get them out, you should.”

  “I’ll try,” Lucy said. “I don’t know if the Triads will listen to me. Even if they do, I don’t know what kind of price they’ll ask.”

  “There usually is a price,” Father agreed.

  “Always,” Mother said softly.

  Lucy had already seen that. Stanley Hsu took the idea for granted. To him, it was just the way the world worked. The jeweler had helped her—for the price of a question. Getting people away from the Feldgendarmerie was bound to cost more. How much more? And in what coin? Lucy could only go and find out. If it wasn’t the sort of price she thought she ought to pay … then the German secret police would hang on to Paul and his father.

  “I’ll do what I think I can, that’s all,” Lucy said. Her mother and father both nodded. If Michael made small, disgusted noises … Well, she didn’t have to pay any attention to him. She didn’t have to, and she didn’t.

  Paul wished he’d fled back to the home timeline when he had the chance. Maybe the two hundred dollars in his pocket had kept him from going down to the subbasement and calling for a transposition chamber. Maybe—he hoped more likely—his first thought had been rescuing Dad all by himself.

  If so, it only went to show that thinking twice was a good idea. When he first came back to the building that housed Curious Notions, there weren’t any Feldgendarmerie men or American police or men from the Tongs inside. (Perhaps the people who’d taken his father thought a kid wasn’t worth bothering with. In that case, their first thoughts weren’t so hot, either.)

  They thought twice before Paul did. Curious Notions was shut up tight now. He couldn’t get to the subbasement even if he wanted to. There’d be traps inside, just in case he was dumb enough to try.

  He’d taken a room in a grimy old hotel in the Tenderloin District: a dollar a night or five dollars a week. The brick building was so rundown, he wondered if it dated from before the 1906 earthquake. But it wasn’t quite that ancient. One of the bricks above the front door had a date carved into it: 1927. It was so very dirty and worn, he needed several days to notice it.

  The room itself had seen endless coats of paint. The last one, a sad beige, had been a long time before. It was faded and peeling and filthy. The room had a sink and toilet and tub, a tiny table with two chairs, and a hot plate for cooking. The smell of cheap grease had soaked into the paint. A lot of people on the way down who hadn’t quite hit bottom yet had lived here. That fit Paul to a T right now.

  There was no thermostat on the wall. Heat came from a cast-iron steam radiator in a corner. It bubbled and clunked and, every once in a while, dripped a little rusty water on the cheap green carpet. The size of the rust stain there said it had been doing that for a long time.

  Several locks and dead bolts did their best to make sure the door stayed closed and intruders stayed out. When the desk clerk handed Paul half a dozen keys, he’d eyed them in dismay. What dismayed him even more was that they might not be enough. You didn’t use hardware like that where it wasn’t needed.

  After he got a good look at some of the people who lived in the hotel, he wished the door had twice as many locks on it. If they weren’t the people his parents had warned him about, he’d never seen anybody who was. He didn’t want to think about what they did for a living. More than a few of them didn’t do anything visible for a living. They seemed proud of doing nothing, too.

  And they figured Paul was in the same boat they were. He didn’t do anything visible, either. If anything, that won him respect in the Tenderloin. A ferret-faced little man with a scar on one cheek grinned as they passed each other on the stairs in the middle of the morning. “Beats working, don’t it?” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” Paul answered with a silly nod. He knew he should have said, Yeah, out of the side of his mouth. But the man with the scar just nodded back and kept going up the stairs.

  In this alternate, German college students still dueled with sabers. They got scars like that. Students at a few American colleges imitated the Germans. Paul would have bet a thousand benjamins against a dollar that this fellow hadn’t been anywhere close to a college, except maybe to break into a dorm. He’d probably got his scar in a real knife fight. Paul wondered what had happened to the man he’d been fighting. Better not to know, maybe.

  Getting away from the hotel and back to his neighborhood was a relief. Curious Notions wasn’t in the best part of town, either. Compared to where he was staying now, though, it looked like paradise.

  He ducked into Louie’s, the hamburger and frankfurter place where he’d bought a lot of lunches. There was no McDonald’s or Burger King or Jack in the Box in this alternate. All the hamburger joints and frankfurter stands and pizza parlors here were mom-and-pops. Behind the counter at Louie’s stood … Louie. He was a Greek with slicked-back hair under a white cap that looked like the one Boy Scouts wore in the home timeline.

  He did a double take when Paul walked in. Nobody else was in the little restaurant. It got busy at lunch and dinner. In between times, no. “What are you doin’ here, kid?” Louie rasped in a voice rough from too many cigarettes. “You outa your mind or somethin’?”

  “I’m trying to find out about Dad,” Paul said.

  “You’ll find out, all right,” the cook said. “You’ll keep him company in the calaboose, that’s how you’ll find out. Feldgendarmerie wants you bad, sonny. You’re hotter’n a two-dollar pistol on Saturday night.” He swiped a wet rag across the counter.

  “It was the Germans who got him, then?” Paul asked.

  “Who did you expect? Santa Claus and the elves?” Louie lit another Camel. Paul tried not to flinch. Smoking in restaurants had been illegal for a hundred years in the home timeline. Smoking itself wasn’t illegal there, but people who smoked did it in the privacy of their own homes. Smoking in public was as nasty as picking your nose in public. Paul had never seen Louie do that. But he smoked like a chimney.

  Paul said, “I don’t know. I wondered if the Chinese had anything to do with it.”

  “Oh. On account of the competition, you mean?” Louie probably had a grade-school education at best, but he was no dope. He shook his head. “Nah, wasn’t them. This was official. Besides, they don’t like the Kaiser more than they don’t like your old man, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.” Paul nodded.

  “But you gotta get lost,” Louie said. “There’s a reward out for you—two hundred and fifty bucks.” That was a lot of money in this alternate. Louie went on, “Some of the clowns around here, they’d turn in their mother for a buck ninety-five.”

  He was probably right. Paul knew that, no matter how much he wished it weren’t so. Trying to sound tough, he said, “I’ll be okay.”

  “Yeah, sure you will. And pigs have wings.” Louie waggled his eyebrows and rolled his eyes. “Go on. Get lost. No, hang on.” He held up a hand, like a cop stopping traffic. This, that, and the other thing went into a paper bag. When it was bulging, he thrust it at Paul. “Now get lost—and if the cops come around, I never seen you.”

  The bag held burgers, fries, and some of the honey-soaked baklava that was a labor of love at Louie’s. “You’re a lifesaver,” Paul exclaimed. “Here, wait, though. I can pay you for this stuff.”

  Louie turned his back. “Like I said, I don’t see you. I don’t hear you, neither. And I’ll tell the … Feldgendarmerie the same.” Paul didn’t know what the Greek word in front of Feldgendarmerie meant. It wasn’t a compliment, though. He was sure of that.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I won’t forget this.”