“Randi, it’s just a key.”
“You don’t know where that key’s been.”
“Where would it have been? It’s a key.”
“Just do it.”
Brian grinned. “Oh, now I get it, Miss Germaphobe. You’ve brought me along to do all your dirty work for you: pressing buttons, unlocking doors … I hope you don’t expect me to flush your toilet for you.”
I shook my head. “True germaphobes wash their hands compulsively and avoid contact with all surfaces. I wash my hands as needed and only avoid contact with surfaces that might be contaminated. I’m just cautious.”
“Sounds pretty cautious to me.” He unlocked the door and held it open for me. I peeked inside: beige wallpaper, two lumpy looking twin beds with off-white chenille covers separated by a bedside table, a dresser on which was mounted a WebTV, and an armchair drawn up close to a window looking out onto the roof of the adjacent building. It was like something from the early twentieth century, circa the Great Depression. “Oooh,” crooned Brian. “Now this is what I call classy.”
“Mom is so going to hear about this.” I crossed over to the first bed and tossed my carry-on onto it. I unzipped it and rummaged around for the two sets of I-spex. Brian could be counted on to be distracted by gear. Anything bright and shiny and technological drew him – he was like a techno-crow in that respect. I handed him a set.
He exhaled slowly. “Are these what I think?”
I nodded.
“I-spex. You brought me I-spex? I’ve heard about them, of course. Too cool.” He turned them over and over in his hands, admiring them.
“Let’s get something to eat,” I said. “Otherwise I’m going to keel over.”
He slid the I-spex carefully into one of his vest pockets and buttoned it. “If you ate like I do,” he said, “this wouldn’t happen to you. I never feel hungry.”
“But you eat constantly,” I objected. “You never don’t eat.”
“That’s because I’m a grazer.”
“That’s because you’re a swarm of locusts. If I ate like you, I’d look like a manatee.”
He smiled slyly. “Hate to tell you, cuz, but you sort of do anyway.”
I punched him in the ribs. “I do not. Take that back.”
I continued to pummel him as he cried, “Uncle! Uncle! You don’t look like a manatee. Well, you do actually. A really small, skinny little manatee. Ouch!” He fled to the hall, waving his hands in mock submission. I started after him, then remembered the lo p’an. A-Ma had told me to take it with me to Moose Jaw, and here I was in Moose Jaw. “Dump your stuff in your room,” I called out. “I’ll be with you in a sec.” Returning to the bed, I dug around in my carry-on for a moment before locating the cherrywood case containing the geomancer’s compass. I tucked it into my knapsack alongside my travel pack of wipes and re-secured the strap on my trusty Zypad armband – the latest thing in wearable technology; never leave home without it. Then I remembered the key A-Ma had given me, the old-fashioned black one; I slipped that into the knapsack as well.
We ate at Nicky’s, a little Italian restaurant next door to the hotel with red checkered tablecloths and a not very happy waitress who was, maybe, eighteen. She was probably bummed out about the fact that she had no eyebrows. I know I would be.
“What’s your name?” Brian asked. Because that’s what he did: made human contact. Whether whatever human he was making contact with wanted to or not.
The waitress did not. She pointed sullenly to her nameplate.
Brian looked at me.
“Svetlana,” I read.
“What?” Svetlana asked me, her face slack and her forehead a big blank. “Can’t he read?”
“Bingo,” I said.
“No tip for Svetlana,” Brian whispered cheerfully as she trudged off. “What’s with the eyebrows, anyway? Was she attacked by rabid tweezers?”
“Maybe she lost them in a fire,” I whispered back.
While we waited for our order to arrive – a Caesar salad with shrimp for me (low carb) and, for Brian, spaghetti and meatballs (high carb; I wasn’t Aubrey’s impressionable little cousin for nothing) – I told him about my conversation with A-Ma. I mean, I had to tell him sometime.
“Before I tell you what A-Ma told me, you’ve got to promise you won’t interrupt me every two seconds,” I told him. “Because that’s what you usually do.”
“Interrupt you every two seconds?”
“Yes. It’s very annoying.”
“That’s because I have ADHD,” Brian defended himself. “As in, not great at paying attention.”
“Well, it’s really rude.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So you’re not going to interrupt me?”
He nodded.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
I took a deep breath. “OK,” I said. “I’m going to start at the beginning.”
“A very good place to start. Which is?”
“Which is, I’d always thought the Lius were from Vancouver, but it turns out we’re from Moose Jaw.”
“I thought we were from Quongdong Province.”
“Well, originally. But more recently. Once we came to Canada.”
“Hence the us-being-in-Moose Jaw thing?”
I nodded. “Hence the us-being-in-Moose Jaw thing.” So far, so good.
“Which is why The Grandfather’s brother is buried here as opposed to in Vancouver? The one whose grave we’re supposed to sweep. Old Uncle Fu Manchu.”
“Qianfu,” I corrected him. “And yes.”
“But why now? It’s August. Qingming is usually at the start of April.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it hasn’t been swept in a really long time and A-Ma thought sooner was better than later.”
Brian reflected on this. “That’s cool. Can we set off firecrackers?”
I steeled myself. “There’s more.”
“See? I knew you were holding out.” He grinned and leaned over the table toward me, his dark eyes button bright, his crazy hair exploding from his head in gelled spikes. He looked like a demented Halloween pumpkin.
I took the plunge. “Qianfu was murdered,” I said. “Beaten to death.”
“Here? In Moose Jaw?”
I nodded.
Brian considered this. “Cool.”
“Not cool,” I retorted. “He was our great-great-etcetera uncle.”
“OK, you’re right. Not cool. But interesting. Definitely interesting. Was it your basic hate crime? You know, a couple of good old boys on a Saturday night looking for some good, clean, angry, redneck fun?”
I sighed. “No, as a matter of fact. He was messing around with a white girl. They worked in the same restaurant.”
“I hope she was better looking than Svetlana,” Brian whispered, as the waitress emerged from the kitchen with our food, a steaming heap of spaghetti festooned with meatballs and a bowl of romaine drenched in dressing and dotted with small pink shrimps and brown croutons.
“Hey, Svetlana!” he called out. “What do they call you for short? Svet or Lana?”
“My name is Svetlana.” Svetlana looked angry, but that might have been the no eyebrows.
“Well, I’m going to call you Svet,” Brian decided. “Or Svetty. Like Betty. That’s kind of cute, don’t you think? Svetty. May we please have a refill on the bread, Svetty?” He held out the empty bread basket. The last time I’d looked, it had been full. That was the danger of eating with Brian. Food disappeared as if by magic – magicians use sleight of hand; Brian relies on sleight of mouth. And he’s good.
Svetlana snatched the bread basket from him and stomped back to the kitchen.
Brian turned back to me. “So old Uncle Fu Manchu was murdered because of some girl.”
“Old Uncle Qianfu.”
“Like I said. Old Uncle Fu Manchu.”
I started to correct him once again, then thought, why bother? With Brian you have to pick your battles; this was one I wasn’t going
to win.
“Yum,” said Brian, unrolling his napkin with a flourish and tucking it under his chin. He picked up his knife and fork and smiled at his heap of spaghetti the way a shark might smile at an unwary swimmer. (That is, if sharks smile. At the thought of sharks I shuddered. Must not think of sharks, I told myself.) He began to catapult meatballs into his mouth with lightning speed.
“So Qianfu was buried and, seven years later, the family dug him up.” I picked up my own fork and scrutinized it for cleanliness. I don’t trust restaurant cutlery.
“Uh-hum?” Through his mouthful of chewed beef, I could just make out something that sounded like “Good meatballs.”
“Because apparently that’s what they did in those days,” I continued. “They scraped off whatever … I don’t know…stuff was left on the bones and put them in a burial urn and shipped them back to China.”
“Wow.” Brian was so impressed that he stopped eating for a nanosecond. “That’s fairly gross.”
I shrugged, trying to be nonchalant. “A-Ma said they didn’t like the thought of being buried in Canada. They wanted their bones to lie in the ancestral graveyard – in their village back in China.” I wiped the tines of my fork carefully with my napkin, then laid it down and eyed my salad. “This is so not the sort of conversation you want to have over lunch.” I took a deep breath. Down, boy, I instructed my stomach. “So anyway, there Qianfu is, in this Death House … that was what A-Ma called it.” (This in response to Brian’s incredulous glance.) “To make a long story short, the Death House catches on fire, the local fire brigade arrives on the scene, and do they freak?”
“Let me guess. They freak.”
“They totally freak. A bunch of dug-up bones lying around,” I said. “And then, post-freak, they insist on holding the body as, I don’t know, evidence or something, and by the time the court rules that The Grandfather can have it back, it’s disappeared.”
Brian put his fork down and stared at me. “What do you mean, disappeared?”
“Disappeared, as in vanished. As in, somebody must have buried it, only no one knows where. Or at least no one’s talking.”
“So this grave that we’re supposed to be honoring … we don’t know where it is.”
“Right.”
“And we are supposed to … what?”
“Find it.”
He considered this. “And this was … how many years ago did all this happen?”
“One hundred and six.”
“So basically he could be pretty much anywhere?”
I nodded. “Yep. Probably somewhere around here, but yes, he could be anywhere.”
Brian pushed his plate away, his lips painted with an orange clown’s mouth from the spaghetti sauce. “And we’re doing this why?”
“It’s complicated.”
He eyed my salad hungrily.
“Don’t even think about it,” I warned him, picking up my fork and encircling my salad with my left arm. I began wolfing it down. “How can you eat so much?” I complained between mouthfuls. “Didn’t Auntie Ev ever tell you to chew?”
“Nobody chews spaghetti,” he countered. “You slurp spaghetti. Now, give me the goods, Randi. What’s really going on here?”
“How do you expect me to talk while I’m eating?”
“So, eat. Go on. Mangia. Mangia. Chew that cud. I’m going to entertain myself by looking at the tunnel tour brochure.” He patted himself down until he found the pocket into which he had crammed the brochure.
“What’s the point?” I asked flippantly. “It’s not like you can read it.” The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I wished I had never said them.
The effect on Brian was like a slap in the face. He flinched. “I’m looking at the pictures,” he said in a subdued voice.
“Look,” I said quickly, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Never mind. It’s OK. Fugetaboutit. It’s not like it’s not true.” He gestured in the direction of my salad. “I mean it, eat.” Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Svet! Oh, Svetty! Where’s my bread?”
Svetlana rumbled out of the kitchen, full bread basket in hand and looking annoyed.
“Excellent!” said Brian. “I thought you might have died.”
She slouched over to the table, thumped down the bread basket, and made a beeline back to the kitchen. Brian helped himself to a piece of bread and used it to mop up his plate as he examined the brochure. “This is weird,” he said after a moment.
“What?”
“Why is there a picture of a Chinese dude on this brochure? The gangster I understand, that’s Al Capone, but why this guy?”
I leaned forward to peer at the brochure. Sure enough, featured on its front flap was a sinister-looking man in a fedora and below him, against a red backdrop, a kind of line drawing, or maybe it was a woodcut, of a Chinese man wearing a jacket with a mandarin collar and a traditional Chinese hat, the kind that looks like a flowerpot. Under the top photo were the words “Gangster Underground.” Below the line drawing were the words “Below Gold Mountain.” The words “Gold Mountain” were in fancy Chinese-style letters.
“Give it here,” I said.
He handed the brochure over.
“ ‘SEE the past come alive in Canada’s most famous system of tunnels,’ ” I read. “ ‘Go under the streets of modern-day Moose Jaw to discover what life was like during Al Capone’s bootlegging heyday in the thrilling, live-action Gangster Underground tour. Then discover the hardships experienced by early Chinese immigrants to Moose Jaw in the moving Below Gold Mountain tour.’ ” I looked at Brian. “Chinese immigrants … like The Grandfather’s family? A-Ma never mentioned anything like that.”
“This we’ve got to see,” concluded Brian.
For once, I had to agree with him.
As it turned out, the next Below Gold Mountain tour wasn’t for another hour. The next Gangster Underground tour, however, was due to start in fifteen minutes. “C’mon,” said Brian. “How else are we going to kill the time?” To which I had no good answer, so we bought tickets to both tours and, following the directions of the woman in the box office, crossed the street to another building and climbed a set of stairs to a second-story lobby where we took our place amid a jumble of tourists.
I stood off to one side, wishing I had a respirator mask. You don’t know. Somebody in that group might be coming down with some deadly flu or Ebola fever or something.
Not Brian. He was making the rounds, shaking everybody’s germ-encrusted hands, introducing himself first to a retired couple from Cornwall, Ontario, driving an RV across Canada; then to two American couples power-shopping north of the 49th; and finally to the stressed-out parents of this really annoying brood from Brandon, Manitoba: two scowling tweenies chanting, “We want to shop. We want to shop,” and their bratty four-year-old brother who was busy barreling around the lobby like a wood beetle on amphetamines, bumping into people and displays and shrieking, “Pow. Bam.” He had green snot dripping from his nose. I made a mental note to stay far, far away from that kid.
“And what are you doing here in Moose Jaw?” one of the Americans was asking Brian.
I jerked to sudden life. “Oh, we’re just passing through,” I said quickly, raising my voice to cover the distance between them and me, and at the same time shooting a warning glance at Brian. I hadn’t even begun to sort through the legal implications of our assignment. A-Ma had seemed to think we could just disinter Qianfu’s bones ourselves once they had been located, but surely it couldn’t be that simple. You don’t go around digging up people at will. There had to be some kind of legal process we’d have to go through – warrants obtained, permissions granted. We needed to play our cards close to our chest, for the moment at least, not go blabbing about our mission to strangers.
At that moment a pretty woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a black-and-red flapper dress, a red cloche hat, and a feather boa, burst from a set of double doors at the far end
of the lobby. Her makeup was sufficiently theatrical to carry across the distance of the room: emerald-green eye shadow, scarlet lips, even a painted-on mole. She struck a coquettish pose, one hand on cocked hip, the other brandishing a silver cigarette holder, and cried, “Howdy, fellow bootleggers! Welcome to Moose Jaw … or Little Chicago, as we like to call it. My name is Miss Marilla and I’m the proprietress of Miss Marilla’s Speakeasy, one of Moose Jaw’s finest.”
I suppressed a groan, shut my eyes, and hugged myself tight. According to the brochure, Below Gold Mountain had been recently updated to include mixed reality. Gangster Underground, however, remained low-tech; animatronics was its only claim to sophistication. This was going to be so lame.
“Cool,” Brian whispered in my ear. “It’s interactive.”
“I hate interactive,” I muttered.
“Not me.”
“What are you doing standing around?” Miss Marilla cried. “Come on in.”
We filed through the double doors into a room meant to reproduce a 1920s bar, complete with a mustachioed bartender wearing a velvet vest and a wine-stained white apron, a piano player pounding out a ragtime tune, and what looked like some drunken dude sitting slouched at one of the several tables.
The tweenies eyed the drunk at the table. “Oooh,” they said.
“Oh, don’t worry about Pete,” Miss Marilla assured them. “He’s not going to bother nobody, least not today. Piano player, can you give it a rest while I get these here valuable customers looked after?”
The piano player stopped mid-note; he was animatronic. As for Pete, the snotty-nosed kid came up to him and gave him a solid thwack on the arm. Why do some little boys do things like that? It’s like they’re barbarians or something.
“Nigel!” His mother yanked him away.
“Ma!”
No reaction from the drunk, however; probably a dummy.
Miss Marilla introduced the bartender, Aloysius. He stopped wiping the wooden surface of his bar and smiled crookedly at the group. “Welcome to Moose Jaw, folks. As you can see, we’re a pretty hopping burg, and I’m going to fill you in on our secret. But it’s got to be our little secret, so mum’s the word.” I had to admit he was a pretty good actor. He and Miss Marilla both. Maybe this attraction wasn’t as cheesy as I had thought.
The Geomancer's Compass Page 7
