Ahua sat face-to-face with Cully and started strong.
“I understand that your mother was familiar with the subterranean rooms that were uncovered by the bomb. I’m told that she lived down there for quite some time, possibly years.”
Cully leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs. “I see that Oklahomans gossip as efficiently as always.”
“You might call it gossip. I call it cooperating with the ongoing investigation of a very serious crime. You honestly weren’t going to tell us what you knew about the Chinese community that lived underground here for most of the early twentieth century?”
“I don’t remember anybody asking me.”
“An agent spoke with you immediately after the bombing, before we found the stairway. Even then, we wouldn’t have known to go back and talk to you, because you didn’t tell us that your mother was Chinese.”
Cully uncrossed his legs. Still leaning back in his chair, he placed both palms flat on his thighs. “Nobody asked me that, either, which is a real good thing. I don’t think it’s appropriate for law enforcement to pry into people’s racial or ethnic backgrounds. Bad things happen when they take those things into account.”
When it came to revealing his emotions, Ahua only had one tell that he knew about. When he was angry, he talked a little faster and a little louder than his usual quiet and reasonable speech patterns. He was angry now, so he was fighting that tell. “Look at me, Mantooth. I am black and I am Nigerian. Are you seriously suggesting that I would discriminate against you for being a minority? Or a double-minority? Or a quintuple minority? Don’t you understand that I know what it’s like?”
“I’m older than you. If you’ll pardon my French, I’ve seen some shit. I keep my personal business to myself. Always have. I don’t break any laws. If you or any other officer of the law asks me questions, I will answer them honestly, but I am not going to come to you and spill my guts. I’m just not. Why don’t we move on past what I didn’t tell you, because you didn’t ask me to tell you? Then we can get to the part where I answer the questions you do ask. Because I have a real nice penthouse up there waiting for me and I’d like to get back to it.”
Ahua drew a deep breath between his pursed lips. “Let’s start with your mother’s experience living down there. What did she tell you about it?”
“She said that it was dark and cold, but she also said that it wasn’t so bad, most of the time. She didn’t mind sleeping in a little room along with her parents and her sisters, with just a curtain for the front wall and dirt for the back wall and thin wallboard for the other two, because she didn’t know any other way to live. I do remember her saying that there weren’t many children down there nor women. Most Chinese immigrants in the early days were men who came here planning to earn some money and go back home to get married. When the money didn’t pan out, they were stuck in this country, alone with no money. Nobody to marry, either.”
“Yet your grandfather somehow beat the odds and found a wife. Presumably. He found a mother for his children, at the very least,” Ahua said.
“I like to think he beat those odds with his extreme charm and good looks, and I like to think that those things are hereditary.”
And now Cully was trying to use his undeniable charm to divert their attention from the family history he clearly didn’t want to discuss.
Ahua wasn’t having it. He kept pushing. “Do you know what brought your Chinese grandmother here? Your mother’s mother? It would have taken an extraordinarily brave woman to cross the Pacific from China in those days.”
“Ah, but I think you’re assuming something that might not be true. I never knew my grandmother, but I’m thinking maybe she wasn’t Chinese. I’ve got good reason to believe that my grandfather was Chinese, because his last name was Chen and my mother considered herself Chinese. Her first language was Cantonese and she never shifted to Creek, like my aunts and uncles did when they got tired of talking English. But her mother? My grandfather’s wife? She could’ve been white or black for all I know but, looking at me, wouldn’t you guess that maybe my Chinese grandfather married a Native American woman? Most people, when they look at me, they just assume I’m all Creek. So maybe I’m three-quarters. If my grandfather did marry a Native American woman, then he must’ve been some kind of man to get her to move underground just to be with him.”
Cully’s voice grew soft. “My mother said that she felt safe underground in a way that she never had, before or since.”
Ahua knew that he should just let him talk, but he found himself speaking anyway. “Because everybody looked like her down there?”
“Pretty much. And they spoke her language. I think her family was happy in their snug little hole, until the diphtheria came.”
Ahua thought of hundreds of people living underground, packed into small spaces. A disease like diphtheria, spread by coughing and sneezing, would rip through them like a wildfire.
“My mother said that she and her parents survived, but her sisters didn’t. She didn’t like to think about them, so we only talked about their deaths once. I couldn’t even bring myself to ask her how many sisters she lost. Or how old they were. Or how sick she was. I don’t like to talk about it, either, so I hope this is the only time we have to do that. All the old stories say that there was a cemetery somewhere underground, three levels below the surface. That’s a long way, so maybe not or maybe so, but I have to wonder whether my aunts’ graves are down there still.”
Ahua was trying to figure out when this epidemic would have happened. If Cully was born in the mid-forties, his mother had probably been born around 1920 and her sisters were probably dead by 1930 or so. He was pretty sure that the diphtheria vaccine was developed about that time. It made him physically ill to think of all those people in their tiny living quarters, dying of a disease that could have been prevented and filling up that mythical cemetery, three levels down.
“I’m very sorry for your family’s loss,” Ahua said with his usual kindness. Any reasonable person could understand why Cully might not want to talk about something so painful, and Ahua was eminently reasonable.
“Do you know where exactly your mother lived? Is it possible that we’re going to be able to access that area from the staircase leading under the Gershwin?”
Cully looked a little more relaxed, too, so his next words could have been confrontational, but they didn’t feel that way to Ahua. They just felt matter-of-fact. “Agent, you know a lot more than I do about what you’ve seen down there. Doesn’t matter, though, because I’m not going to be any help. My mother told me there were several entrances, but she only showed me one. It was in the basement of a building near the corner of Robinson and Sheridan, and the building’s not there now. I walked over and checked it myself this morning. Maybe that entrance originally connected with the area you’ve explored, but I just can’t say.”
“Did your mother ever tell you about anything like this?”
He called up a photo of the painted room that was taken before it was vandalized. Cully’s face made a single tell-tale twitch, but he was an actor. He regained control.
“No, but it’s lovely. It does remind me of some drawings of my grandfather’s that I saw when I was a kid. They’re gone now. Everything from my childhood is gone.” He looked at it more closely. “Lots of people draw trees and people. This could have been my grandfather’s work or it could have been done by somebody he knew. Or they could have both been imitating art that was famous where they came from. There’s no way to know, is there?”
Ahua looked at him closely, hoping to see that momentary reaction again, but he saw nothing. And he said nothing but, “Guess not.” He clicked the mouse and another photo appeared, then another, all of them showing the colorful work of a talented but untrained artist. He was careful to avoid the photo that showed the three bodies.
This time, Cully’s reaction was just as momentary, but it was even more obvious to Ahua that he wasn’t playing it straight when he said, “Nope. My mother never mentioned a room like that. And she would’ve, if she’d ever seen it. Like I said, her father was an artist, and I think she would have been one, too, if she hadn’t spent her short life taking care of my father and me. She just loved color. If my mother knew about this room, she would have told me.”
Ahua let the silence hang. An accomplished actor like Cully surely knew that the agent was making an opening for him to speak and, hopefully, say more than he intended. Cully took the bait anyway.
“I’ll tell you something else,” he continued. “It’s a big thing to buy that much paint. And in so many colors. It doesn’t make sense to me that people who were living in holes because they couldn’t afford anything else would spend that kind of money on painting pictures.”
“You make a good point,” Ahua said.
Cully’s eyes hadn’t left the computer screen. “Here’s what I think. I think the place where my mother lived is ninety or a hundred years gone, and I think it should stay that way. Somebody crawled down there sometime later and painted those pictures. From where I sit, that person is as bad as a vandal disturbing graves. The past is dead, Agent Ahua, and I think you should let it rest.”
He rose. “I’ve told you what my mother told me about the Chinese underground and how people lived down there. Am I free to go?”
“Not yet. Does the name Angela mean anything to you?”
Cully was prepared for this question, because his response was almost too calm. He didn’t flinch. His eyes didn’t blink. His voice stayed even. He just said, “We were two unhappy boarding school kids. We had that in common, and we mistook our shared misery for love. We ran away together but we didn’t make it a week before she left me.”
“What happened when you split? Did you argue?”
“Agent Ahua, we argued every day that we were together. I couldn’t abide her drug-taking, and she couldn’t abide me nagging her about it. I hung around for a few days after she took off, because I felt bad about leaving a young woman alone in the world. When I was sure she wasn’t coming back, I moved on.”
“Did you file a missing persons report?”
“I was on the run and underage. I did not. If, in the course of this investigation, you are able to find out what happened to her, I would appreciate it if you’d let me know. It would ease my mind after many years of worry. Am I free to go now?”
Ahua nodded and watched silently as Cully left. The older man still moved with a practiced grace, but the swagger was gone. Time creeps up on everybody, even movie stars. The man knew something.
Cully knew something about poor people living in terrible conditions sometime around the Great Depression. And he knew something about some paintings that were probably made a long time after that. He knew something about a woman named Angela who had been missing for fifty or so years. But what those things had to do with a missing professor and a fatal bombing, Ahua couldn’t say.