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Work went on. Work always went on. She couldn't get away from it. Hardly
anyone in this whole downtrodden country could. Plenty of people put in more
than her sixty hours a week, and made less money for their time. As these
things went, her family had been pretty lucky till Father fell foul of the
Feldgendarmerie.
Lucy wanted to walk past Curious Notions to find out if she could smell the
cooking lobster. She made herself stay away. She'd given the gift. Paul and
his father had accepted it. It was theirs now. What they did with it was their
business.
Three days after she gave it to them, she was walking home from work when a
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Chinese man in his late twenties coming the other way bumped into her. "I'm
very sorry," he said.
"It's all right no harm done," Lucy told him.
"Please accept m apologies." He pulled a little leather case from the hip
pocket of his jeans. "Here is my card. If I can do anything for you, you only
need to ask. Sorry again to bother you." He tipped his wide-brimmed hat and
hurried away.
STANLEY HSU, FINE JEWELRY, the card said. The address, on John Street, was
only a couple of blocks from her father's shop. The card also had several
Chinese characters Lucy couldn't read.
And it had a note, written in neat, small hand. Please come tomorrow evening
at eight o'clock. Very important! Lucy stared at that. As far as she could
see, it could mean only one thing. Stanley Hsu hadn't run into her by
accident. He'd wanted it to look like an accident to anyone who happened to
see it, but it wasn't. He'd done it just so he could give her this card.
"Why?" Lucy said out loud. Then she wanted to clap both hands over her mouth,
but she didn't. She felt like a fool, ruining the secrecy he'd worked so hard
to keep. But the question that had burst from her still needed answering. Why
did Stanley Hsu want her to come to his shop, and why did he need to keep it a
secret?
Lucy put the card in her handbag. She tried to forget it the rest of the way
home. She didn't remember the note till after supper. (Supper was only rice
and vegetables. The lobster would take its toll on the budget for weeks but
the gift needed giving.) Then she took the card out of the purse and showed it
to her mother and father.
Her father scratched his head. "I've heard of Stanley Hsu, though I don't
think I've ever said more than a couple of words to him. He has a good
business. But why would he want to talk to you? Why would he
give you the message that way?"
Her mother pointed to the Chinese characters on the card. "I think it has to
do with the Triads," she said.
'The Triads?" Lucy and her father both stared. She asked, "Are they real?"
Back in the old days, the days before the Germans conquered the United States,
the Triads had been very important in Chinese San Francisco. Outsiders usually
called them Tongs. They were social clubs, but they were much more than social
clubs, too. They helped poor members. They loaned money often at poisonous
interest rates, sometimes not, depending on who was getting it. They bought
and sold things. Not everything they bought and sold was legal. Sometimes they
fought among themselves. People still talked about the Tong Wars. And they'd
had connections that reached all the way back to China.
After the Germans took over, they'd tried to put down the Triads. They'd made
them illegal. The Americans had done that, too, but the Feldgendarmerie went
after the Triads harder than American police ever had.
They'd executed Triad leaders, or men they said were Triad leaders. Whatever
the Triads did these days if they did anything they did quietly, in an
underground way.
"They're real, all right," Lucy's mother said. Reluctantly, her father nodded.
Her mother went on, "They're just. . . careful. They have to be."
"I never heard that Stanley Hsu was connected to them," her father said.
"If you heard things like that, the Kaiser's men would hear them, too," her
mother answered. That made some sense, but only some. Such logic, if it was
logic, could justify almost anything. Mother went on, "Besides, if it's not
Triad business, what could it be?"
"But why would the Triads care about me?" Lucy asked.
Her mother hesitated. She had a hard time seeing an answer to that. So did
Lucy a very hard time. But her father snapped his fingers. "Curious Notions!"
he said. "It has to be Curious Notions."
"Why?" Lucy said. "The people there aren't Chinese. They don't have anything
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to do with us or they didn't, till the Germans arrested you."
"That's all true, honey," Charlie Woo said. "But something else is true,
too something I've talked about before. The people at Curious Notions sell
things nobody else can match. Nobody. You think that doesn't make other people
curious? It makes me curious, let me tell you. But I can't do anything about
it. The
Triads can."
"So you think I should go, then?" Lucy said.
"Oh, yes!" Her father and mother both spoke at the same time. Their voices
both rose in a peculiar way.
They're frightened, Lucy realized. They're scared of what might happen if I
don't go. How much did they know about the Triads? How much of what they knew
had they kept to themselves? Quite a bit, it looked like.
"All right," she said. "I'll go." Her parents let out identical sighs of
relief.
She wished Stanley Hsu hadn't picked a time after supper. To get to his shop
by eight o'clock, she had to gulp down her noodles and vegetables and dash out
the door. That left her mother stuck with the dishes.
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