“Sorry, but I gotta shine this in your eye.”
Faye wasn’t sure how long she’d been waiting on this city sidewalk to see the paramedic who was checking her pupils. It had been an hour, maybe two, because others had needed help far more than Faye.
At first, the medical personnel had struggled in the chaos of rubberneckers. Even after the first responders had moved bystanders out of the way and established a perimeter to control access to the site, and even after an impressive convoy of FBI vehicles had sped to the scene, there had been the problem of locating survivors. Many of them had picked themselves up off the floor, running blindly as far and as fast as their injuries would allow. Now they had to be found before they could be treated or interviewed as witnesses. Some of them had evaded medical personnel completely until they were located by the FBI agents sweeping the area around the Gershwin Hotel, looking for accomplices. Or for additional bombs set, God forbid, to blow up the survivors as they fled. Considering all the confusion, Faye thought that an hour or two was probably an appropriate amount of time for someone with no obvious injuries to wait for emergency services.
Nevertheless, however long Faye’s wait had been, she should have waited longer. Cully was pushing seventy. He should have been checked out before her.
She opened her mouth to say so, then she saw Cully’s solicitous face looming over her. He came from a generation that did things differently. The psyche of a man of his age was tattooed with the chivalrous notion of “Ladies first.” Cully would have died before he got between a woman and emergency medical care. He would literally have lain on the ground and bled out before he let that happen.
Faye had her own brand of chivalry and it told her to stuff the desire to say, “Did you notice how old this man is? Look at him first!”
Faye eyeballed Cully herself. He was walking without a limp, so at least he hadn’t broken a hip. His eyes were focused and their pupils weren’t dilated. He made sense when he talked. She remembered him lifting her from the rubble-strewn carpet with two strong hands. Maybe he was okay.
Cully saw her scrutinizing him and waved away her concern. “I’ve probably got some bruises, but everything works,” he said, and he demonstrated it by breaking into a jig. Faye was pretty sure she’d seen him dance a jig in Beyond A Golden Sky, distracting the bad guys while his buddy got away. She was also pretty sure that Beyond A Golden Sky had been filmed before she was born.
Cully didn’t dance long. He was obviously favoring a knee and he was breathing a little hard when he was done, but just those few steps had succeeded in attracting a few dozen people. They stood just on the other side of the crime scene tape that separated the witnesses and victims from the curious bystanders. They stared, murmuring, “Is that…? I think it is!” Most of them were of retirement age, but not all. Cully’s fame had filtered into the next generation, and the next. Faye thought that Oklahoma City was probably a hotbed of Western movie fans, and this made her wonder why it had been so long since Cully visited his childhood home.
He gave his fans a smile and a nod, but his attention was focused on Faye and he was revealing himself as a micromanager. “She hit the ground hard. Face-first. Did you check her neck? And she hasn’t had much to say. I mean nothing, really. Do you think she has a concussion?”
Faye was pretty sure that all composers were micromanagers. Who else would be interested in telling every last person in an orchestra what to do and when?
“Probably shock,” the paramedic said. “Can you say something for me, ma’am?”
Faye was pretty sure Cully was exaggerating until she tried to speak and nothing came out but “Check ma fllllt.”
The paramedic looked concerned. “Maybe she does have a concussion.”
Cully understood her, and he responded like a father whose teenager had turned bullheaded. “Don’t be stupid. Your flute is fine. I’m worried about your head. I can always make you a new flute.”
Faye felt the power of speech returning. “Yeah. But I like this one.”
She remembered hitting the floor, then a timeless instant of nothing. She had opened her eyes while smoke was still rising and people were still pushing themselves up on all fours. Those who could run were still running, so the moment of blackness obscuring her memory couldn’t have lasted long. She was conscious before the sirens began to scream, with no thought in her head beyond, I have to get out of here before things get worse.
When her head began to clear, the need for flight became even more obvious. Any fool could have seen that running was the smart thing to do. People were sprinting down the grand staircase and running for the huge, heavy doors of the lobby’s monumental entrance. Faye saw one of them literally hurdle an old man lying stunned on the floor.
She remembered trying to work herself to an upright position, planning to run as far as her feet would take her. Unfortunately, those feet had turned out to be attached to legs made of jelly. Without Cully’s hands grasping her armpits and lifting her to her feet, Faye would still have been lying on the plush golden carpet, covered with ash. By the time he got her upright, she was clearheaded enough to realize that they couldn’t leave yet. They needed to check on the people still lying facedown in the debris.
Together, she and Cully had staggered across the lobby to check on those people, one by one. Across the room, she saw a young woman doing the same and the gray-haired hotel clerk and a teenaged boy. Miraculously, the five of them had found that all of the wounded and stunned people still lying on the floor were alive. Even more miraculously, they’d all been more or less ambulatory. Working together, everybody had been able to get out of the building.
All but one.
Only when she found herself standing next to the only corpse in the room did Faye know for sure what had happened. The condition of the body, the pattern of the damage radiating outward from it, the remnants of a backpack still attached to the remnants of his torso, all of these things had told the story of a bomber. Presumably a suicide bomber. Looking up at the ceiling stretching two stories above the lobby, painted with the stars of a western sky, she saw the soot of a tremendous blast. Only a bomb could do that.
Faye knew that she was literally shell-shocked. Looking at the bomber’s corpse had made her hope with all her heart that her memory would be affected by the blast. She would have happily sacrificed a few brain cells to ensure that she lost the memory of that one torn body. She wanted to hate the dead man for the thing he had just done, and she knew that she eventually would. At that moment, though, she’d just wanted to run hard from the scattered pieces of him.
“Squeeze my hand,” the paramedic said, bringing her back to the sidewalk and chasing away, for a time, the memory of a body utterly destroyed. Faye looked around, nervous, until she remembered that a bomb squad had swept up and down this street, so she could be pretty sure that there wasn’t a second bomb waiting to annihilate the people who survived the first one.
“He wants you to squeeze his hand,” Cully repeated.
“I heard him,” Faye snapped.
“Wonderful,” someone said. “She can still snarl. She’ll be herself again any minute now.”
Faye looked toward the voice and saw a familiar face that she’d thought she might never see again. She had worked with FBI Agent Tom Bigbee to solve a very cold case in east Oklahoma—and by very cold, she meant twenty-nine years cold—just a few months before. Ordinarily, Bigbee had a face like a beige rock. It was the kind of face that made suspects talk because its very stillness freaked them out. Today, Bigbee was smiling, and that was just weird.
He rushed toward her, right hand thrust forward to shake hers.
“I’m so happy to see you sitting out here, safe. Are you all right?” He looked her up and down. “No bleeding. No broken bones.” He gave the paramedic a nervous glance. “Right?”
The paramedic nodded, then gave him a dismissive hand gesture that said, “Would you get out of my way?”
Bigbee stepped back and let the paramedic resume prodding Faye. “I saw your name on the triage list and on the list of witnesses to interview, so I volunteered to be the one who took your statement.”
He let his face return to its rock-like normal state and turned it toward the paramedic. “You’ve done a full workup? A careful one? You’ll never meet a sharper mind than this one, so you might not notice if she were having neurological problems. If it weren’t for Dr. Faye, a murdered woman in Sylacauga would have never gotten justice.”
The confident young man stammered in the face of Bigbee’s judgment. “I’m not a doctor, but—um—I don’t think she has a concussion and—um—I see no signs of internal injuries or broken bones.”
Bigbee kept his blistering stare on him and said, “The FBI wants to know how this woman is.”
The stammering resumed in earnest. “Um—I’m—I’m not a doctor, so I can’t render that kind of opinion but—” He caved under Bigbee’s glare. “She seems okay to me.”
The federal agent waved the words away. “I don’t want to hear ‘seems okay.’ I want to hear your professional opinion. Is this woman physically and neurologically okay to work?”
The paramedic gave up trying to play by the rules. “Yes. She is.”
“I came looking for you for a reason, Faye,” Bigbee said. “Well, I wanted to make sure you were okay, but I also had a professional reason. The bomb uncovered something that’s historical for sure and, in a way, I think it’s archaeological. You’re already in the Bureau’s system as a consultant and I know personally that there are none better than you. I’ve recommended you to Assistant Special Agent in Charge Micah Ahua, and he agrees that we can use your skills. Can we hire you to consult on an extremely oddball situation?”
“Oddball seems to be what I do best.”
He beckoned and walked away without looking behind him. Faye shot a nervous glance at Cully and the paramedic, then she followed.
* * *
As Faye grew nearer to the site of the bombing, she got a closer look at the people investigating it and at their tools. She could see the FBI’s Mobile Command Center, a tricked-out gray semi that she imagined to be full of high-tech gadgets and serious-faced agents. Another truck, black and almost as big as the command center, boasted in big gold letters that it housed the FBI Bomb Squad. The Technical Hazard Response Unit had its own vehicle, and so did the Evidence Response Team. It comforted Faye to see how many resources the FBI could put on-scene and how fast they could do it.
“The SWAT team and the Bomb Squad made fast work of clearing the hotel and the buildings in the vicinity,” Bigbee said. “Now the evidence response people are doing what they do and things will be moving a lot more slowly. It takes a long time to clear out a bombing site when the piece of evidence that will solve a crime might measure a centimeter across.”
Faye thought of the way she excavated an archaeological site, sometimes removing soil a few grains at a time, if that’s what it took to do the job. Evidence retrieval was the same kind of destructive technology. When you’re doing the kind of work that can’t be undone, you do it slowly.
The SWAT Team and the Bomb Squad hadn’t found any other bombs or any other bombers, so the FBI had cordoned off an area in the immediate vicinity of the Gershwin Hotel. Outside of that area, the rest of Oklahoma City was now free to get back to normal, or at least to try. She knew this because Cully had been streaming newscasts on his phone since they were detained in this no-man’s-land reserved for witnesses, away from the bomb site but not free to go.
Faye hadn’t seen her own phone since the blast, so she guessed it was one more piece of evidence on the floor of the Gershwin Hotel’s bombed-out lobby. She could only watch the FBI agents at work. Years of training were obvious in the confident way they moved, like dancers who knew their choreography cold. You can’t fake competence, and these people were utterly competent.
Cully and his phone were behind her as Bigbee led her toward the Mobile Command Center. Once there, she was greeted by an intimidating array of computers and other high-tech devices she didn’t recognize, all of them being operated by people who looked far too busy and competent to bother with her. As it turned out, the one person who didn’t consider himself too busy doing important things to give her the time of day was, in fact, pretty darn important.
He was a thin, dark-skinned man in late middle age. His hair was trimmed so closely that the curl barely showed, and his expression was sober. Sitting in front of a computer display, he had the shiny shoes and close-to-the-vest poise that screamed FBI agent. As it turned out, he was an FBI agent plus some.
He stood up, extended a hand to shake hers, then gestured toward an empty chair next to his. As Faye sank into it, her weary legs failed and she hit the seat with an uncomfortable thump.
“Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth,” he said, “I’m Micah Ahua and I’m an Assistant Special Agent in Charge for the Oklahoma City field office of the FBI. I know you’ve been through a lot this morning, but we could use your help.”
“I’ll do anything it takes to find out what happened today.”
“I’m told you saw the bomber?”
“Only for an instant when he was alive.” And in one piece.
“That’s what all the witnesses are saying, but Bigbee says you’re the kind of person who will remember more detail.”
“Maybe, I think I may remember seeing him just as the bomb went off, but he wasn’t anywhere near the rest of us. I think he was the man I saw across the room, wearing a cowboy hat. It’s hard to be sure, considering the difference between what he looked like before the bomb went off and what he looked like afterward.”
“That’s good information. The other witnesses are too shaken up to remember even that much.”
Faye tried to picture the hotel lobby, with its grand staircase and ostentatious bronze elevator doors. “If I’m remembering the right guy, he wasn’t near the desk where people were checking in. He wasn’t in the main lobby where there are lots of chairs and sofas. He wasn’t by the stairs. He wasn’t near the elevators. He was in an empty alcove where there was…well…nothing that I could see. Maybe some display cases, but nothing else. Nothing to do, nothing to see, and no place to hide. No reason to be there.”
“Well, bombers don’t usually do their thing in the middle of a crowd.”
“Yeah, but what was he going to do? Just put the bomb on the floor and walk away? Even the Boston Marathon guys hid their bombs in a trash can. Was he a suicide bomber? Even if he was, that alcove makes no sense as a place to blow yourself up on purpose. If you want to take somebody with you, doesn’t it make sense to go stand where the people are?”
“I don’t know the answers to your questions. I do know that I wish all my witnesses had your powers of observation. And that they were half as logical.”
Faye laughed. “When I’m stressed, I fall back on logic. And I’m pretty stressed. See me sitting here all calm and collected? This is what I look like when I’m having a nervous breakdown.”
A disembodied voice emanated from behind a computer display. “Are we having nervous breakdowns? Is it time for mine?”
Even Bigbee smiled, but he didn’t loosen up enough to admit that he might enjoy a small breakdown.
“Not yet, Liu,” Ahua said. “And I hope you’ll put your breakdown on hold, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth. I didn’t call you in here so I could ask you the same questions that people have been asking you all morning.”
“All morning?? Has it been that long since the blast?”
He gave a single nod. “Time is a weird thing during a catastrophe like this. The mind shuts down from time to time, just to try to make sense of things. At least, that’s the way I think of it. An expert might describe it differently. Sometimes, it can make it really hard to gather consistent testimony from a group of traumatized people. In any case, our evidence recovery team uncovered something really weird while they were conducting interviews and I’d like an archaeologist’s eyes on it.”
Faye had been wondering why Ahua had called her into the FBI’s inner sanctum.
Ahua used the computer keyboard in front of him to pull up a photo on a large computer display. On the screen was a photo of the damage done to the side wall of the Gershwin Hotel’s lobby.
The bomb had taken out a chunk of the hotel’s stone wall, but the rest of the ninety-year-old wall looked sturdy and strong. On either side of the open hole, buttresses of hand-laid stones provided enough support to keep the wall vertical. They were helped along by more buttresses built at regular intervals down the entire length of the side wall.
In the screen’s lower right-hand corner, Faye saw a tremendous cornerstone chiseled with the names of people who were probably very important in 1927. It had done its job of holding the corner level and square, supporting more stone blocks than Faye could count.
Ahua pulled up another photo, shot through the open hole in the wall. Faye could see through it and into the hotel lobby, and this outside-in view was disorienting. The floor was heaped with chunks of metal, glass, charred wood, and stone, all of it twisted and blasted into bits.
The camera had caught two crime scene technicians at work. One of them was squatting down to mark a barely visible clue with a cone. Another one crouched on all fours, his face close to the floor but not touching it. Faye couldn’t quite make out the evidence he was studying, but it looked like something that was mere millimeters in diameter.
Above the technicians, Faye could see that a section of the bronze gallery railing encircling the lobby was warped and twisted. Blackened carpet showed that there had been a fire at ground level, but it must have been quickly contained, because only the portion of the cavernous room nearest the blast was scorched. Farther away, heavy tables lay on their sides where they had been heaved. A fallen chandelier had sprayed crystal prisms everywhere.
Now Ahua pulled up another photo, taken at the epicenter of the destruction, just inside the hole in the wall. Faye could see that the bomb had blasted away several of the floor’s marble tiles. This was no surprise, given the strength of the blast. The surprise came when he pulled up yet another photo, taken by a camera pointing straight down into the hole. The crime scene photographer had done a great job of using flash for illumination, but she couldn’t see the bottom, because the hole just kept going.
It extended into a darkness almost deep enough to hide a staircase that the missing floor tiles had covered. Faye, too excited to craft actual words, flapped a hand at the screen.
Ahua used the computer keyboard to enlarge the high-definition photo to show details of brickwork so intricate that it was surely built when labor was really cheap. Judging by the age of much of downtown Oklahoma City, Faye would have guessed that the staircase was built after World War I and before the Great Depression.
Ahua flipped to another photo, an extreme closeup of a single brick’s orange-red and crumbling clay. As Faye had suspected, the brick itself was obviously made by hand. She said, “Would you look at that?”
“So it’s old?” Ahua said. “As old as the hotel?”
“Oh, yeah,” Faye said. “It’s not even out of the question that those bricks and that staircase are older than the hotel. Can you show me where the stairs are in relation to the rest of the lobby?”
Ahua picked up a felt-tip marker and moved to a whiteboard. With a few deft strokes, he drew the square lobby and sketched the monumental entryway at the bottom of the whiteboard. He drew the staircase near the middle of the left wall and looked up expectantly.
“Wait,” Faye said. “I need to fill in some details. The front desk is here, right?” she said, pointing to a spot near the top of the whiteboard. “The elevators and fire escapes are behind it. The grand staircase is here,” she said, pointing to a spot near the center of the square room. “Or it was. Is the staircase still standing?”
Ahua nodded and drew in those details. “The building didn’t sustain much structural damage. Buttressed stone walls are pretty sturdy and the bomb wasn’t built to take down a building. It was a people-killer.”
The word made Faye shiver.
“The Technical Hazardous Response Unit was able to clear us for entry fairly quickly,” Ahua continued, “because they judged that the building wasn’t in any danger of collapse. When they sent me these photos, I knew I wanted to get some expert eyes on them. Bigbee told me that somebody who did this kind of work was sitting right outside and…well. Here you are.”
Faye was studying his sketch. “The alcove? The one that was on top of the old staircase?”
“Some of those walls are gone, but they weren’t load-bearing.” He roughed in some walls, marking the destroyed sections with dotted lines. Faye was relieved to see that her memory of the lobby’s layout was reliable, despite the fact that the bomb had given her brain a big jolt.
“Can we go look at the underground staircase? I really want to see it in person.” Faye asked, knowing that the realities of crime scenes and evidence protection meant that the answer would be no. Still, she burned to see those stairs.
“I’m sorry,” Ahua said, confirming what she already knew, “but we have to protect the integrity of our data collection efforts. All I can do is show you these pictures, but that staircase is in a very significant spot, and it’s obviously very old. What can you as an archaeologist tell me about it?”
Faye kept silent and thought for a minute. Ordinarily, she would have guessed that the staircase’s purpose was to access the hotel’s basement, except for the fact that it led away from the center of the room, extending under the plane of the exterior wall. From there, it kept going, heading toward the hotel next door. It didn’t make sense for there to be a basement running outside the Gershwin Hotel’s footprint, underneath the narrow sidewalk between the two buildings. Nevertheless, there the staircase was. It had to go somewhere. And Faye had a pretty good idea where.
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.”
“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.