Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  Agent Liu had gotten up from her station and come to peer at the photos with them. Ahua hadn’t asked her to join them, but he didn’t ask her to leave, either.

  Liu didn’t seem to be big on keeping silent and thinking. For an FBI agent, she seemed almost chatty. “You know,” she said, “that staircase has gotta be more than seventy years old. I guess those stairs could even be older than the hotel, in theory, if it was built on the site of an older building with a basement.”

  “Could be. Or it could have been dug after the building was built. This hotel’s been here since before the Depression and that was a long time ago,” Faye said. “I don’t know why you’d dig a hole through the floor of an existing building and build a staircase to…somewhere…but it’s as likely as any other theory. Or unlikely. There are a lot of unlikely stories about underground Oklahoma City.”

  Nobody bit at the bait Faye was dangling. It was hard to make a dramatic revelation when the people around her didn’t respond to conversational cues.

  Liu caught her eye, so Faye thought that maybe one person in the command center had heard of the crackpot theory she was about to parrot.

  “Why would someone want to get into one building’s basement from the first floor of its next-door neighbor?” Ahua asked.

  “Maybe the two buildings were owned by the same person and he saved money by building a single basement?” Faye offered. Then she decided to go for the gusto and blurt out her implausible theory. “Another possible explanation involves one of Oklahoma City’s oldest urban legends. And this legend has the advantage of being true.”

  Ahua was watching her silently as she spoke. It suddenly struck her that it must be very hard to be married to someone who controlled information so well. His expression gave her the oddest feeling that he already knew what she was going to say. The feeling was especially odd because what she was about to say was something flat-out weird. “In the early twentieth century, a community of perhaps two hundred people lived underground in this part of the city.”

  One of the agents working at a computer station at the other end of the command center snickered. “Like moles?”

  “No,” Faye said. “Like people who lived in basements because they were Chinese and they had trouble getting landlords to rent them apartments with amenities like…you know…daylight. Not to mention that they were working for people who wouldn’t pay them enough to afford anything but a cold bare room in somebody else’s basement. Still, they were hardworking people. And enterprising. They found a way to do better for themselves.”

  “By living underground?” the disbelieving agent asked.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” Liu asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Historians think that they started out by simply enlarging their basement apartments, digging out into the surrounding dirt,” Faye explained. “Eventually, their burrows starting encroaching on each other and became tunnels. Then they enlarged the tunnels and made rooms that were really pretty big, according to eyewitnesses, when you consider that they were carved out of dirt. We have government records that say this is true.”

  Liu asked. “I’ve heard of the Chinese underground all my life. Most of us in the local Chinese community know about it. It’s a small community. When we have urban legends, everybody knows them. Still, I didn’t know there were actual documents saying that it was real, other than stories told by people like my grandparents.”

  “Yep,” Faye said. “The health department went down there in 1921 and wrote a report that said two hundred were living down there in very clean conditions.”

  Ahua didn’t react.

  “It’s true,” Faye insisted. “We have the health department report from 1921, and we have newspaper photos taken of the space in 1969, years after it was abandoned.”

  “I believe you,” Ahua said. “I’m not from the Chinese community, but I was a nerdy little kid living here in 1969. I’d forgotten all about it until you and Liu started talking, but I remember seeing a picture of a mysterious underground staircase in the paper. It looked like this one, but they’re not the same. I guess that makes sense. There must have been more entrances to a space that big.”

  Smiling like a man with a secret, he clicked the mouse and another photo covered the screen.

  It was a closeup of the top two brick stairs. A handful of papers, yellowed and blotched with water stains, lay flung against the side walls of the stairwell. Attracted by their obvious age, Faye took a step closer, as if by doing that she could reach down and pick up a sheet.

  Squinting at the screen, Liu too moved nearer. “That’s Chinese script. Cantonese.”

  Faye didn’t read Cantonese, so she stepped aside and let Liu study the pictographs.

  “My friend Stacy Wong is going to have a coronary when she sees this,” Faye said. She reached in her pocket for her phone, so she could take a picture of the picture and remembered, again, that she hadn’t seen it since the blast. “Stacy teaches in the university down in Norman, not an hour from here, but she may be in town by now. She’s a speaker at the conference I’m supposed to be attending tomorrow.”

  Faye figured that the odds of the conference taking place approached zero, so her trip to Oklahoma might have been for nothing. “Stacy’s official specialty is the history of the petroleum industry in Oklahoma,” she said, “but she’s got a private historical obsession and Oklahoma City’s underground Chinatown is it.”

  Ahua said, “I’ll want you to get an interview with Dr. Wong, Bigbee. Her knowledge sounds useful.”

  “I’ve never met Stacy Wong in person,” Faye said, “but I’m looking forward to it. She and I have been internet buddies for a long time. Stacy’s not the only one obsessed with Oklahoma’s underground Chinatown. We’ve both done a deep dive into the available information, and it has been really fun to compare notes with her.”

  “Don’t all academics have those non-academic private obsessions?” Liu asked. “I think they crop up right after somebody hangs the title ‘PhD’ on them.”

  “We know we’re supposed to have a specialty,” Faye said, “but we want to have all the specialties. I guess we’re just afraid of missing out.”

  Liu walked even closer to the photo, bringing the Cantonese script right up to her eyes.

  “Can you read it?” Ahua asked.

  “A little,” she said. “It’s a flyer advertising a laundry, which tracks with what we know about the underground community.”

  “Tell me what you know. Both of you,” Ahua said.

  “In the late sixties,” Faye said, “there was a lot of urban renewal going on in downtown Oklahoma City. They were getting ready to build a convention center, not far from here.”

  “I was a kid, but I remember when they put in the convention center,” Ahua said.

  “I wasn’t born yet,” Liu said, “but I’ve heard all about it from my family. Some of my ancestors go back to the 1800s in Oklahoma City.”

  “Lucky you. My ancestors are of no use to us here,” Ahua said. “They’re all in Nigeria, except for my mother and father. They came to the U.S. before I was born, but we didn’t move to Oklahoma City until I was five, after my father finished his surgical residency in Chicago. I do remember those newspaper pictures, though. I distinctly remember a photo of an old oil stove that people had used to cook and stay warm.”

  Bigbee held up his phone. On its face was a black-and-white photo from a 1960s-era newspaper. A man in a suit held a flashlight to illuminate an iron cookstove, its oven door hanging open. Faye had studied the photo on her own phone so many times that she didn’t need to look at it to know the details it showed.

  “That’s the exact picture,” Ahua said. “The internet is amazing.”

  Faye waved her hand at the brand-new photo of the laundry flyers. “Maybe they used the stove to heat water for washing clothes.”r />
  “Maybe,” Ahua said. “I also remember a picture that showed papers tacked to the wall that looked a lot like the one you’re holding. The newspaper said that those flyers advertised a gambling hall.”

  Faye remembered that photo, too.

  Liu was scrolling through her phone for more pictures. “My grandparents said that there were huge rooms down there and tiny cells where people slept, one after another after another.”

  “Where’s that stairway?” Ahua asked. “The one that they found in the sixties. Could it be a back door into this crime scene? Did the bomber use it to access the hotel lobby?”

  Faye shook her head. “There’s no way to know where those stairs were. Just a few days after the developers found the entrance in 1969, city leaders decided to go ahead with construction. They built over the only known entrance to underground Chinatown.”

  Ahua looked stricken. “I’m really glad nobody told me that when I was a kid. The underground city was as real to me as Jurassic Park was to my kids.”

  “The Chinese underground community was real,” Liu said. “The rooms where they lived were real. Growing up, I knew people who had actually been down there, even lived down there.”

  “They’re still real,” Faye said. “Stacy and I talk about this all the time. All the city did was seal one entrance, but there were others. We know that from eyewitness testimony. The city wouldn’t have expended the time and expense to fill the tunnels in, not when they had a convention center to build. The underground rooms are still down there. They have to be.”

  “No wonder you said Dr. Wong would have a coronary when she saw this,” Ahua said.

  “May I send her a picture and ask her to come take a look?” Faye asked.

  “I can’t let you send anybody a picture, but you can call Dr. Wong and tell her I have some questions for her. Tell her to hurry. I don’t want to be just another idiot destroying history while I’m cracking this case.”

  * * *

  Cully Mantooth supposed that the FBI had gotten all the information from him that they thought they were going to get, so he had been released. He had nowhere to go, since they still hadn’t released his hotel suite to him, but there were worse problems to have on a day when he might have been maimed or killed by a bomb. He was perfectly happy to homestead the sidewalk bench where he sat, watching people walk by and admiring the well-preserved historic structures and modern buildings of this city that had once been his home. It was also a vantage point for trying to see what was happening at the Gershwin down the street.

  Every now and then, a passer-by recognized him and gave him a smile, but now one of them had worked up the nerve to come ask for an autograph. His pleasant interlude was officially over. A small crowd began to gather.

  It was strange for Cully to realize that these people were happy to see him, excited even. When he was a kid growing up in Oklahoma City, he’d never felt that anybody was happy to see him.

  No, that wasn’t true. His mother was always happy to see him, every day of their life together. It was the happiness of a quiet woman who had been taught to keep her emotions to herself, but it showed in her eyes and in her gentle touch. His father was never a talkative man, either, but he’d lavished time on his only child and he had laughed a lot. From where Cully sat, he’d say that was good enough. He’d never had any reason to doubt his father’s love.

  Cully’s father had started teaching him to play the flute when his fingers were barely big enough to cover the holes. When the time came, he had taught him to make flutes, too. Only a person with a finely tuned sense of musical pitch and a real knack for working with wood could make a flute with good intonation and a pleasing tone. Cully had inherited both from his father, not to mention the ability to sit down at a piano and play any tune he’d ever heard. He was also a fearsome sight-reader, because his dad had hired the church pianist to make sure his son learned to play the music inside him and then write it down for everybody else.

  What had he inherited from his mother? If he were to be honest with himself, probably everything else. He was quiet, for sure. He was a good enough actor to smile and be affable with strangers who never seemed to notice how rarely he laughed. Like his mother, he was capable of a deep and abiding love that didn’t show unless you looked really closely. Like her, he could make a killer pot of yan du xian, though he had never learned her secret for frying chicken feet. But perhaps he was most like her in his sense of otherness. In the tiny Chinese community of Oklahoma City, having a Creek father made him feel set apart.

  There were plenty of Creeks in Oklahoma, so his father’s world was assuredly not tiny. It was made of what seemed like a million old friends and distant cousins. Cully knew a lot of them, and he liked most of them, but he couldn’t be a registered member of the Muscogee Creek tribe without the requisite paperwork. And his Chinese mother was a complication in the Creek nation’s matrilineal culture. Not that the paperwork and the matrilineal thing were the be-all and end-all of being Creek. And not that there weren’t a lot of Creeks, with and without the paperwork, who had ancestors from Europe and Africa and probably China, too. Despite those things, Cully felt set apart.

  Maybe Cully’s alienation came from inside him and not from the Creek and Chinese communities that were, in truth, very loving toward him. Somehow, all that love never stanched his feeling that he was different, deep-down, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Outside the walls of his childhood home, he’d been a community of one. His father had seen this and he’d tried to fix it, but sending him to a Creek boarding school had been a really bad idea. Cully had made trouble there for a few years, then he’d run away to California at the first opportunity.

  And now here he stood, surrounded by people who wanted his autograph and didn’t seem to care whether he preferred chicken feet or fry bread. Each of them returned his smile, and he’d wager that none of them noticed that he never laughed.

  Chapter Five

  Evil must be obliterated.

  I learned those words at my father’s knee. I was taught to use them in prayer and in worship, but I never found them particularly useful in the day-to-day world. At least not until now.

  Certainly, I have seen evil. Ever since childhood, I have known it for what it was, but what can a child do against utter darkness?

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  To successfully strike out against evil requires an adult’s ability to plan. It requires an adult understanding of the world as it is, and it requires an adult’s craving for a different world, one that makes sense.

  Like most things in this flawed and nonsensical world, it requires cold, hard cash.

  Still, I have done it. I acquired the cash. I formulated the plan. I implemented the plan, manipulating a doomed man into believing that he was going to take down the freaking IRS with a wholly inadequate bomb. I successfully implemented every step of my plan, even to the point of wandering around underground.

  All along, I pretended to get my orders from some unnamed commander. Lonnie never bothered to hide the fact that he thought I was stupid, when he was the most demonstrably stupid person in his own life. And now, at the end, he came close to killing innocent people because he failed to follow through on the single task I gave him to do. Now I am burdened with cleaning up the mess he left behind and making certain that no clues remain to lead the FBI to me or to the innocents I must protect.

  Despite these concerns, I must pause for a moment and allow myself some self-praise. I have obliterated the evil that has shadowed my entire life.

  And yet there is still evil. I sit, even now, with a newspaper draped across my lap like an apron, and its pages are drenched with evil. The faces of refugees, some of them children and all of them hungry, look out of its pages. Wounded civilians limp across those pages. Beside them are wounded soldiers with very young faces who deserve to be at home with t
heir families. I see photos of mass murderers, corrupt government officials, petty thieves, and I don’t know how to obliterate them all. I have only ever known how to obliterate the one evil man, and I have done it. I have nothing left but emptiness.

  Now what?

  Chapter Six

  Joe Wolf Mantooth didn’t know where his wife was, and he was beside himself. He’d been hours east of Oklahoma City when he heard about the bombing. He hadn’t known what to do when she didn’t answer her phone, so he had gotten in his dad’s truck and drove. Hours had passed since then and all he’d heard from Faye was a text from a strange number. She’d said that she was okay but that she’d lost her phone when the bomb went off and that’s why she’d borrowed his cousin Cully’s phone. She’d said that she was having trouble getting a call out, probably because the cell system was clogged up with people trying to find each other, but she thought maybe a text would go through.

  And it had, but only after a delay that meant that Faye wasn’t standing next to Cully and his phone when Joe was finally able to read and answer it. All he’d gotten was a return text from Cully.

  Hello, Cousin Joe. I still can’t get a call out, so here’s a text. Faye looks just fine and the paramedics agree, but it’ll be a while before I can get your message to her. The FBI has decided that they need an archaeologist on their team. I have no idea why, but I would think that being with the FBI would be the safest place to be.

  This sounded to Joe like Faye had been way too close to the bomb for comfort. And also, he wasn’t sure how much he trusted the FBI with his wife’s safety.

  He didn’t know exactly where his wife had been when the bomb blew, but he knew where she’d woken up that morning. She’d taken advantage of their business trip to Oklahoma to visit her friend Alba Callahan, driving from Joe’s dad’s house into the city the evening before and sleeping in Alba’s guest room. Unfortunately, Joe didn’t have Alba’s number.