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on himself, and all over the floor.
More Germans had dropped in their tracks, all through the jail. "How did you do this?" Lucy asked.
Sammy Wong gave her a smile that was anything but friendly. "I'm magic."
She was tempted to believe him. She was also tempted to kick him for not telling her what she wanted to
know. Paul suffered from that disease, too. But this Sammy Wong didn't suffer from it he reveled in it.
He hustled her and Paul along as if every second counted. And every second probably did.
The guards outside the jail hadn't been flattened by the magic, or whatever it was. When one of them asked
Wong, "Was ist hier los?" he answered in fluent German. It wasn't the bits and pieces of the language that
most Americans picked up. He spoke German like a German like a high-ranking German, in fact. He
pulled papers from his pocket to back up his words. When he finished, all the guards came to attention and
clicked their heels. "Jawohl!" they chorused. Wong led Paul and Lucy down the stairs and down the street.
"What did you tell them?" Lucy whispered once they were out of earshot.
He looked at her. "That I was the Kaiser's cousin, and I wanted to play hopscotch with the two of you."
She did try to kick him then. He sprang out of the way he might have been good at hopscotch. Paul said,
"He told them he was going to use us for bargaining chips to try to trap some of the men from the Tongs."
Lucy hadn't known Paul understood German that well. It didn't surprise her. By that time, nothing much
would have surprised her.
Had Sammy Wong really turned out to be the Kaiser's cousin, she would just have nodded and filed the
news away, like a folder back in the office.
Would she ever see the office again? How could she, when she'd just broken out of the Feldgendarmerie
jail? The Germans and their American stooges were going to start turning San Francisco upside down and
inside out.
"What happens now?" she asked, still in a very small voice.
"Now we have to get Dad out of his mess," Paul said.
"And then we have to get out of here," Wong added.
Paul's we plainly included Lucy. Wong's we, even more plainly, didn't. Lucy called him on it: "What
happens to me now? What happens to my family?"
He scowled. Instead of answering her, he rounded on Paul. "We ought to leave her in the lurch. You know
it bloody well, too." He sounded as furious and as sure he was right as anyone Lucy had ever heard.
Paul didn't even blink. "Go ahead," he said calmly. "But if you leave her, you leave me, too."
"Wait!" Lucy exclaimed.
He shook his head. "I'm not waiting for anybody. We've been through too much together. I'm not going to
let anything bad happen to you if I can stop it."
"You blockhead." Sammy Wong still sounded savage. "Half of what's happened here more than half is
your own stupid fault."
"Some of it is, yeah. I made plenty of mistakes," Paul said with a shrug. "More than half? No way, Jose"."
Lucy had no trouble figuring out what that meant, but nobody in this San Francisco would have said it. Paul
went on, "I'll tell you what the real trouble is what we were selling. It was too good. It got us noticed."
Wong said something about what they'd been selling that should have made the sidewalk catch fire. "Elliott
didn't have any trouble," he finished.
Paul ignored the bad language. "No. You're wrong," he said, replying to the older man's last sentence.
"Elliott didn't see any trouble. We had it from day one. That means it was here waiting for us ahead of
time."
"Any old excuse in a storm," Sammy Wong jeered.
"Okay, think like that. Go ahead. But we can find out." Paul turned to Lucy. "How long has your dad been
wondering about Curious Notions and what it sold?"
"Quite a while now," she answered. "At least two or three years. Maybe longer I'm not real sure."
"You see?" Paul said to Sammy Wong.
"I see somebody who got himself in trouble and who's looking for a way out," Wong said.
"I got myself into some of this trouble, yeah, but not all of it," Paul said. "And the trouble between the Tongs
and the Germans has been here since ... for longer than we've been alive."
Sammy Wong didn't notice that he'd changed course there. Lucy did. He'd probably been about to say
something like since before we got here. But if he did say that, it would give away that he and Wong had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]