I’ll bite you if I can, Lucy thought. Shouting defiance at the Germans wasn’t smart, though. All she said was, “I haven’t done anything.”

  That set the Feldgendarmerie men laughing again. “The next person I hear who says, ‘Oh, yes, I did what you say I did,’ will be the first. If you listen to the ones we grab, they are so innocent it’s a miracle God doesn’t carry them off to heaven.” Now his laugh took on a sinister ring. “God takes care of the innocent—and we take care of the rest. Come with us, if you please.”

  Mrs. Cho began, “Lucy is a very good worker and a very nice girl. She—”

  With a wave of his submachine gun, the secret policeman cut her off. “If she is as sweet as you say, we won’t keep her long. If.” He bore down heavily on the word, then gestured with the weapon again. This time, he used it to point toward the door. Helplessly, Lucy went.

  She wondered if they would put handcuffs on her. They didn’t bother. That almost made her angry. They didn’t think she was dangerous enough to worry about. It felt like an insult. The only trouble was, they were right.

  They bundled her into an enormous car. It had to be enormous to hold all of them and her as well. It roared down the street. The driver leaned on the horn. That special scream meant everybody had to clear a path for the German car. People on foot and on bicycles and in other cars got out of the way in a hurry.

  “I didn’t do anything. I really didn’t,” Lucy quavered.

  “Ha!” said the secret policeman who seemed to do the talking for this bunch. “You know Lawrence Gomes and his son. Don’t try to tell me any different, or you’ll be sorry. We got what we needed out of the older one. Now we’re finding out what the younger one knows.”

  Lucy tried not to flinch in dismay. Paul, in the hands of the Feldgendarmerie ? She didn’t want to believe it. She tried not to believe it. Maybe this fellow was lying to make her sing. That seemed the sort of thing the secret police would do.

  But then she remembered that Paul was missing. His father and Stanley Hsu didn’t know where he was. One logical reason they wouldn’t was if he was in some Feldgendarmerie jail.

  Maybe this one, Lucy thought as the car pulled up in front of a building with the red, white, and black German flag floating above it. The door opened. Three of the Feldgendarmerie men got out. “Now you,” said the fellow who did the talking. Lucy obeyed. What else could she do? The rest of the secret policemen piled out behind her.

  They could have safely brought a criminal mastermind into jail with that kind of firepower. For a terrified sixteen-year-old girl, it was overkill. They used it anyhow. Up the steps she went. One of the spike-helmeted guards at the top opened the thick, heavy door. In Lucy went. It closed behind her with a soft thud. She wondered if she would ever come out again.

  Not for the first time, Paul wondered if the Germans were afraid of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. That was the only reason he could see that they weren’t tearing chunks off of him. So far, the questioning had been on the mild side, as Feldgendarmerie questioning went. Of course, he had no guarantee it would stay that way.

  The cell was about three meters on a side. The cot in one comer had its legs sunk into the concrete of the floor. It wasn’t going anywhere. Aside from the cot, the cell held a toilet and a cold-water sink. That was it. The secret policemen hadn’t given Paul a chance to shave. His beard, four days old now, was starting to itch.

  He was starting to itch all over, in fact. With the best will in the world, you couldn’t stay clean with only a cold-water sink and no soap. Maybe the Feldgendarmerie men thought he’d lose heart if he got dirty and scruffy. If he did, he intended to do his best not to let them know it.

  Maybe they thought he’d lose heart if he got hungry, too. They fed him twice a day. It was slop. People in the home timeline complained about the lousy food prisoners got. Sometimes they wrote letters to the newspapers. They started e-mail campaigns on the Net. They staged public protests. If they’d had to eat these nasty stews, they would have decided what prisoners in the home timeline got wasn’t so bad after all. This was better than starving, but not by much.

  Worst of all was the boredom. Nobody else was in a cell Paul could see. Everything was quiet except for the clump of guards’ boots against the floor. Paul could pace up and down or he could lie on the cot and grow moss. No TV. No radio. No nothing. Those horrible meals soon became the high points of his day. That was a really scary thought.

  And then there were the times that weren’t so boring. Those usually came in the middle of the night. He wondered if the Feldgendarmerie had watched too many old movies. They couldn’t wake him up by shining a bright light in his face, because they never turned off the lights. But they did make a habit of waking him out of a deep sleep.

  The door to the cell would fly open. “Raus!” they would shout. “Prisoner Gomes, come with us at once!” Paul was a sound sleeper. If they hadn’t screamed his own name at him, he would have had trouble remembering who he was when he first woke up. They wanted him groggy and stupid when they questioned him. They had ways of getting what they wanted, too.

  They’d slam him down into a hard chair in a dark room. Then they’d shine the bright light at him. They’d throw questions at him. Where did Curious Notions get its goods. What happened to all the produce it bought? What did he know about the Tongs? (Except they called them Oriental subversive organizations—regardless of the alternate, cops talked like that.)

  Paul told them as little as he could. He pleaded ignorance. He was just a kid—how could he know anything important? They were walking around the edges of the crosstime secret. Unlike the people from the Tongs, who were looking for allies wherever they could find them, the Feldgendarmerie men didn’t quite seem to know they were on the edge of it.

  Or maybe they were just holding back. Bright lights and shouted questions were as far as they’d gone up till now. They hadn’t tried hot things or pointed things or sharp things. They hadn’t tried electricity. They hadn’t tried drugs.

  Good luck is where you find it, Paul thought after one of those sessions. Even as it was, he felt his brain had been turned inside out. But it could have been worse, and he knew it.

  Once, the German asking the questions told Paul, “This is not what your father says to be the case.”

  “Why don’t you ask him about it, then?” Paul answered. As far as he knew, he had told the truth here. The Feldgendarmerie man wanted to know the prices he’d been paying for Central Valley produce. That seemed harmless enough.

  “I am asking you,” the German said. Did his voice lack some of its usual snap? Paul thought so.

  He said, “That’s how I remember it. If Dad knows something I don’t, it’s news to me. Maybe he’s the one who remembers wrong. Like I say, you can ask him about it.”

  “We have transcripts of what he said,” the German replied. “He … is not available for questioning right now.”

  “Why not? What did you do to him?” Paul enjoyed being able to ask questions instead of answering them. He knew the Tongs had got his father out of jail. He didn’t know how they’d done it, but Sammy Wong had assured him that they had. He wondered if the man on the other side of the bright light would admit it.

  He should have known better. The German said, “That is none of your business, and of no concern to you.”

  “He’s my father,” Pal protested. “Of course it’s of concern to me. You’ve got a lot of nerve, telling me my own father is none of my business. What did you do to him? Did you make him disappear?”

  Did you make him disappear? was a polite way to ask, Did you kill him? Plenty of people “disappeared” from German jails. Paul happened to know Dad hadn’t, or not that way. But the man questioning him didn’t know he knew. If Paul could yank the fellow’s chain, he would. Why not? The Feldgendarmerie man had sure been doing his best to yank his.

  The German muttered something in his own language. Paul understood German. He thought the man said, Miserable kid. That made him feel better than he had since the Feldgendarmerie nabbed him. The secret policeman went back to English: “Your father has not disappeared. Not in the way you mean.”

  “Oh, yeah? Prove it,” Paul said. “Let me see him. Then maybe I’ll believe you.”

  More mutters in German. This time, Paul couldn’t make out what they were. Then the secret policeman spoke to his pals in the room: “Take him back to his cell. He’s being very uncooperative.”

  One of the other Feldgendarmerie men spoke in German: “You ought to use the wire and the thumbscrews. The punk would sing like a nightingale then.”

  Paul didn’t want them to know he could follow their language. Keeping a blank look on his face was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. They could torture him whenever they wanted to. What would stop them? Not a thing.

  But the man doing the questioning said, “Nein. Not yet, anyhow. Things are more … delicate than you realize, Horst.” That also came in German. Not showing relief was as hard as not showing fear. Paul didn’t know why things were delicate, but he was sure glad they were.

  The Feldgendarmerie men hauled him back to the cell. The door clanged shut. Compared to the bright light glaring into his face, those empty cells across from his didn’t look so bad. He wondered what was going on outside the jail. By now, Sammy Wong would know he was missing. Wong would probably know why, too. Would Dad? Would Lucy? What were they doing to get him out? Were they doing anything? Or were they saying, Serves you right for being dumb and leaving him in here till he rotted?

  They wouldn’t do that. Would they? With nothing but bars as far as his eye could see, Paul began to wonder. Maybe this view wasn’t that much better than the one in the room where they questioned him after all.

  Lucy was both sick of answering questions and surprised the Germans hadn’t done anything but ask them. Oh, they’d yelled and shone bright lights in her face and told her they would do horrible things if she didn’t come clean. They’d told her that, yes, but they hadn’t done them.

  In her bare cell, Lucy shook her head. They hadn’t done them up till now. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t. They were Germans, after all. Was there anything they wouldn’t do?

  At least the people at work knew what had happened to her. For one thing, that probably meant her folks would find out about it. For another, it might mean she’d get her job back if the Feldgendarmerie ever let her out of jail. Mrs. Cho would know why she wasn’t coming in now. She’d know Lucy wasn’t out somewhere goofing off and having a good time.

  That made her laugh. No, she wasn’t having a good time at all.

  When they took her away for another round of questioning, they started yelling at her again. “You must know more than you admit about Curious Notions! You must!” shouted the man behind the lamp. She’d never seen his face. “They named your father a supplier! Why would they do that?”

  To get you out of their hair, Lucy thought. And look how well that worked! She said, “We don’t have anything to do with them as far as business goes.” Then she remembered something Paul told her in Golden Gate Park. “If you don’t believe me, you can ask Captain Horvath. He knows we are what we say we are.”

  She wasn’t sure how much weight a mere San Francisco cop carried with the Feldgendarmerie. But a police captain wasn’t mere, was he, even if he was only an American? Fatty Horvath had a good reputation in Chinatown. And he had done something to get Lucy’s father out of a mess a lot like this one.

  “Horvath? Who is this Captain Horvath?” the Feldgendarmerie man behind the lamp demanded. Lucy’s heart sank.

  But one of the other Germans in the room said, “Amerikanischer Polizeikapitän.” Lucy could figure out what that meant. The Feldgendarmerie man went on in his own language. Lucy recognized more words here and there, but not enough to let her figure out what he was saying. Was he telling the fellow behind the lamp that Horvath was a big wheel, or that he was full of hot air? Lucy’s nails bit into her palms in frustration. She couldn’t tell.

  Her questioner said, “Tell us more of this Paul Gomes. Tell us everything you know. Tell us in great detail.”

  Fright flared in Lucy. Did the Kaiser’s men have Paul? It seemed much too likely. She said, “Well, I don’t have much to tell you. I’ve only met him a few times.” She wished she could say she didn’t know him at all, but they wouldn’t believe that. “He seemed like a pretty nice person. He wouldn’t shine a light in my face and yell at me.” That wasn’t much in the way of defiance, but it was all she had in her.

  It didn’t impress the Feldgendarmerie man. “My job is not to be nice. My job is to get answers. And I will get answers. I do not care if Paul Gomes is nice or not. I want to know what you know about him. Believe me, I have ways to get what I want. Talking freely is better and easier.”

  She did believe him. She was just glad he hadn’t done anything worse than shine a light in her face and yell at her. If she didn’t give him some of what he wanted, he was liable to. She wondered what she could say that might satisfy him without hurting Paul. “Well, he told me he’s from the Sunset District,” she said.

  “This we already knew. We have checked his school records,” said the man behind the lamp.

  You don’t know as much as you think you do, Lucy thought. Paul probably came from the Sunset District, all right, but not from this Sunset District. If the secret policeman understood San Francisco, he would have seen that right away. Somebody like Paul just couldn’t come from a place like that. But if he had records there good enough to fool the Feldgendarmerie … That said something about how well his people were organized, and how many of them there were.

  “Tell me more,” the German said. “Tell me quickly. Do not sit there making up your lies.”

  “I’m not lying. I just told you the truth. You said so.” Lucy tried to sound angry instead of scared. It wasn’t easy, not when she was scared. She tried again: “I know Captain Horvath likes him, and some other important Americans.” In fact, she didn’t know they liked him. But she did know the people at Curious Notions had influence on them. That was as good as the other.

  No matter how good it was, it didn’t impress the Feldgendarmerie man. “Important Americans?” he jeered. “There are no important Americans.” He had a nasty laugh. “There will never be any important Americans.”

  One of the other men spoke to him in German again. They went back and forth for a couple of minutes. Lucy wondered what they were talking about. Her, probably. Doing it in a language she couldn’t understand was rude. Somehow, she didn’t think that would worry them.

  Her questioner returned to English: “A while ago, Polizeikapitän Horvath and some others urged us to let your father go. Is this not so? Did they not do it because of Paul Gomes and his father?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Lucy said, which was technically true. She hadn’t asked Captain Horvath or anyone else why he’d asked the Germans to let her father go. She added, “I thought you let him go because you couldn’t show he’d done anything wrong.”

  The Feldgendarmerie man laughed again, even more nastily than before. “That is not enough reason to let anyone go. Believe me, it is not. The guilty are often good at covering their tracks.”

  “If you go on like that, you can show anybody’s guilty of anything,” Lucy said.

  “You begin to understand,” her questioner said. What she began to understand was how much trouble she was in, or could be in. The Feldgendarmerie man went on, “Did you not tell one Margaret Ma at the zoological garden that you are fond of Paul Gomes? Is this not why you seek to cover up for him?”

  Lucy needed a second to remember that Margaret was the name Peggy came from. She’d never called her friend anything but Peggy as long as they’d known each other. Had she said that to Peggy? She couldn’t remember. But if Peggy had told the secret police what she thought they wanted to hear, who could blame her? Anything to make them go away.

  “Well? Speak!” the Feldgendarmerie man snapped.

  That made Lucy want to go Woof! She didn’t think it would be a good idea. “I do like him, but not like that,” she said, which was more or less true. Paul fascinated her, but more as a puzzle than as anything past a friend. So she told herself, anyhow. She went on, “And I’m not trying to cover up for him. But if you ask me about things where I don’t know anything, how can I tell you anything?”

  “Ha! A likely story,” the German jeered. Then he spoke in his own language to the other Feldgendarmerie officers in the room. They hauled Lucy out of her chair with arrogant, effortless strength and took her down the hall. Back into her cell she went. The door slammed shut. They must have closed it extra hard. The clang of metal on metal sounded dreadfully final.

  Paul blinked and narrowed his eyes against the glare of the lamp. The Kaiser’s men let him get away with that much. If he tried to turn away from the bright light, they jerked him back towards it. They got less gentle each time, too. He’d given up. They were liable to tear his head off if they got the chance.

  “Sssso,” said the man behind the lamp, the one whose face he’d never seen. He stretched the word out into a long, snakelike hiss. “You are acquainted with a certain Lucy Woo, is that not true?”

  Alarm trickled through Paul. “I’ve met her,” he answered cautiously. “I can’t say that I know her real well.” Like so much of what he said in this alternate, that was truth and lie mixed together. He hadn’t met her all that often, and he didn’t know her all that well, not the way he knew his friends in the home timeline. But what he did know, he liked. She had brains and she had spirit. And she was cute: not spectacular, but cute.

  “This is also what she says of you,” the Feldgendarmerie man told him.

  Did that mean they had her? Did it mean the German wanted him to think they had her? Or did it just mean they’d asked her some questions? One thing it had to mean was that the German wanted to see how excited he’d get. He shouldn’t get excited, then, or shouldn’t show it if he did. All he said was, “Well, there you are.”