Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  “I recognize you now,” Faye said to Kaayla. “You took our picture right before the whole world went kablooie.”

  Cully nodded. “Yes, you certainly did. How are you? Were you hurt in the blast?”

  Kaayla said, “No, nothing to speak of,” but Faye saw a deep cut along her hairline. There was blood in Kaayla’s dark brown hair, and it had dripped onto her snowy white jacket. An emerging bruise cast its blue shadow along her cheekbone.

  Faye’s hand strayed to her own cheekbone. It felt bruised in the exact same place. She remembered going down, hitting her knees, then the right side of her pelvis, then her right shoulder, and then feeling her head crash down, driving her cheekbone into the floor. She realized that all of those contact points must be bruised, and this knowledge caused each of them to begin throbbing. Knowing that Kaayla had been standing very close to her at the time of the blast put a strange picture in her mind of the two of them falling identically, their moves choreographed like the motion of dancers. She felt a weird bond with the hotel manager, as if they were sisters in disaster.

  She considered the blood on Kaayla’s jacket and was glad that none of her own tender points had bled. Joe would have had a major freak-out over any sign of bleeding, no matter how small. And also, she’d just spent a lot of time wading in questionable water. That would have been idiotic if she’d had any open wounds.

  “I’m fine,” Kaayla said. “I’m just so grateful that nobody was killed. If it weren’t for my housekeepers, we might have had guests standing a lot closer. And if my housekeepers had been just a few feet closer to the blast…” Tears welled in her eyes and she swallowed hard. “I would probably have lost some people who are very special to me.”

  Faye’s memory fired and she remembered the two women in maids’ uniforms, one of them falling and one of them running from a familiar place turned suddenly into hell. “How did your housekeepers keep other people from being closer to the blast?”

  “They were working near the area where the bomb went off. One of them was really close. She’d just stepped out of the alcove where the bomb blew, and I get terrified all over again when I think about it. But here’s what saved other people. They’d both set up signs to keep people off the freshly mopped floor. If the ‘Wet Floor’ signs hadn’t been where they were, we might have had hotel guests right at the epicenter of the blast. My workers were just starting to walk away to take their breaks when it happened. Otherwise, they’d have been at the epicenter themselves.”

  “They were very lucky,” Cully said. Jakob, standing beside him, nodded.

  Kaayla’s answer was simple and characteristic of the steadfast faith that was so common in Oklahoma. “God provides for His own.”

  “Has the FBI spoken to your employees about what they remember?” Faye asked. “And to you?”

  Kaayla nodded and Faye felt like an idiot. Of course they had. Ahua was an experienced and high-ranking FBI agent, and he wasn’t the only experienced and high-ranking agent overseeing this case. If she thought she could run the investigation better than the FBI could, then she was having delusions of grandeur.

  “I hate to be selfish at a time like this,” Carson said, “but one good thing happened today. Kaayla says that there’s no reason that the conference can’t happen this week, as planned.”

  Faye looked down the street toward the Gershwin Hotel. Knowing the condition of its interior, she couldn’t imagine it being cleared for human habitation in time for the conference to start in sixteen short hours. She also couldn’t imagine when the FBI’s forensics people would be finished working a crime scene that encompassed its entire lobby and maybe more. Not to mention a substantial area that was underground. Carson wanted the impossible.

  Carson was laughing at the look on her face. “You’re making the same mistake I did.”

  “The original historic hotel is a small part of the property,” Kaayla explained. “You never had a chance to see your room before the disaster, but it’s in one of our two modern towers. They’re located in the Tower Annex, just a short walk down the block from the old hotel. Mr. Mantooth knows. He checked into his suite yesterday. So did Mr. Zalisky.”

  She pointed at two glass and steel buildings looming down the street from them. “The historic hotel houses a limited number of guest rooms, but it was never a large establishment. It has wonderful ambiance, but the heart of our business—both accommodations and conference facilities—is in the Tower Annex. We can easily move the conference there. Most of Carson’s guests were already staying in our tower accommodations, anyway.”

  Faye was confused. “You mean people are actually staying in town after the bomb? Wouldn’t you think everybody would run for the hills?”

  Kaayla said “Oh, no no no no no” like someone who wished, for her employer’s sake, that Faye would shut up. “We’ve gotten calls from people who wanted to cancel their reservations, certainly, but when we explained that their rooms are nowhere near the bombing site and that the FBI has checked out the premises thoroughly and—”

  “And that you’re throwing in free champagne and spa treatments.”

  Kaayla’s ultra-professional demeanor cracked slightly and she smiled. “How did you guess? People like luxury and they like a good deal. When we offered them enticements not to cancel their trips, many of our guests decided not to let a little thing like a bomb change their plans.”

  “Many?” Faye said.

  “Many,” Kaayla said firmly.

  Faye had to admire Kaayla’s tenacity. She hoped her employer paid her what she was worth. Her very expensive shoes said that they might.

  Kaayla was still rattling off information about her hotel. “Carson’s guests will have everything they need, even if our historic building stays locked down. I’ve put conference attendees into rooms in the North Tower. Recreational facilities—gym, pool, bars, indoor playground—are there and I’ll set up a temporary office there for myself. Our convention center is on the bottom three floors of the South Tower. One of our restaurants, George and Ira’s Place, is also in the South Tower, and it’s a good thing because the bomb seriously damaged Rhapsody, our fine dining restaurant. If we didn’t still have a working kitchen at George and Ira’s Place, I’d never be able to get all of your people fed.”

  “George and Ira? Did the musical Gershwin brothers have something to do with founding this place?”

  Kaayla’s laugh was sweet and a little shy. “Oh, no. In the 1920s, oil was booming, and a man named Waldo Gershwin was looking for a place to put his money. Waldo was no relation at all to the musical geniuses, but he was the biggest investor in the hotel, so his partners named the place after him. My employer is a pretty big hotel chain—worldwide, actually, but you probably know that. When they bought the place ten years ago, they took the Gershwin name and ran with it. The old building still had its Art Deco décor, which really fits the Gershwin brothers vibe, so they didn’t even have to redecorate. They just polished the place up and made sure they weren’t breaking any historic preservation laws. I like the Jazz Age theme because the piped-in music I listen to all day is pretty awesome.”

  “So,” said the single-minded Carson. “You were telling us that you have a working kitchen.”

  “We do. And we have an extra meeting room where we can cater meals for the conference. You and your VIP guests will unfortunately miss out on the special banquet in Rhapsody that was going to happen tonight, but everything else should be fine.”

  “Serve us peanut-butter-and-jelly, then let us go to bed at eight,” Cully said. “Like seven-year-olds. After a day like today, that will make us all very, very happy. And hey! I’ve got enough room for the VIPs in that humongous suite you gave me. We can all eat our peanut-butter-and-jelly together. It’ll be like a conference banquet without the rubber chicken.”

  “The Gershwin does not do rubber chicken,” Kaayla said, sounding horrified. “Nor
do we do peanut-butter-and-jelly. We had rock Cornish hens on the menu for this evening.”

  “Oh, man,” Jakob said. “I love those.”

  “Glazed in sorghum syrup, with roasted butternut squash and braised chard.”

  “Oh, man,” Jakob repeated, softer this time. “As you can see by his waistline, Cully doesn’t care much about food, but I sure do.”

  “Give my chefs a couple of days to regroup and you’ll have your rock Cornish hens. If the FBI follows through on their plan to release the towers to us this afternoon, you can start your conference without missing a beat. Even better, you’ll all be able to check into your rooms very soon.”

  Faye felt good about the way Kaayla was handling things. Going ahead with the conference, no matter what, was the way that scientists and sociologists said, “The show must go on!” It was their way of shaking a fist in the face of the bomber.

  This thought stopped her short. She had been too busy surviving the explosion and then exploring a storm sewer to even think about why the bomb was set in the first place.

  “Has anybody claimed responsibility?”

  “The news stations say no,” Cully said as he looked at his phone, which was finally working.

  “And if they know who he was, they’re not saying,” he said, thumbing his screen repetitively like a man hoping to stumble on some good news somewhere.

  “So we don’t know why this happened,” Joe said.

  “Not a clue.”

  Everyone in the group—Carson, Kaayla, Stacy, Joe, Cully, Jakob, and Faye—stood silent for a moment. Had the bomber truly acted alone? If so, then surely he’d left a note somewhere, but Faye hadn’t heard any of the investigators talking about one. Nor about a social media post, or even a manifesto in the darkest corner of the internet. Somebody needed to find out why he did what he did, so that the world would make sense again.

  Faye laughed at her naive belief that the world ever made sense, but what better definition of a scientist could there be than “a person looking for a way to make sense of the world”?

  Faye’s need to know why someone had blown up the Gershwin Hotel knew no bounds. She felt certain, admittedly for no solid reason, that answering this question would also answer the question of what had happened to the three children beneath it. The world was not going to make sense to her until the dangling question of “Why?” was answered.

  Three children were dead. A man carrying a bomb had died, and many more might have died with him. And for what?

  Stacy Wong had been silent while her companions obsessed over what they knew about the bombing. Now she was beckoning Faye to join her for a one-on-one conversation, saying “Come tell me all about it! We’ve found the Chinese underground, after all these years. I can’t believe you were actually down there! And with the FBI, no less.”

  Faye wasn’t sure she felt up to being questioned by an academic on the trail of an intellectual obsession, but it didn’t look like she had much of a choice.

  Meeting Stacy in person was like seeing an old friend after a long time apart. Faye had the sense that she was as smart and funny in person as she was online, and she was clearly just as obsessed as Faye was with the Chinese underground.

  Stacy’s curiosity was relentless. “Tell me again. Was the staircase under the Gershwin Hotel stone or brick? Did you take pictures?”

  Faye wasn’t allowed to show Stacy pictures and she still didn’t have a phone to do it with, anyway. She wasn’t supposed to tell her anything at all.

  “I can’t tell you anything.”

  “You can’t even tell me what the stairs were made of?”

  “Nope.”

  Faye could see that it was a struggle for Stacy to keep from badgering her for answers, but the historian successfully shut her curiosity down and said, “I just can’t believe you were down there.”

  Faye couldn’t quite believe it, either. “To tell the truth, it was a little surreal.”

  “No joke. If only I could have been with you.”

  Faye thought that maybe Stacy didn’t know what she was wishing for. Her bruised cheekbone ached.

  “Did you see anything like this?”

  Stacy held out her phone, which made Faye miss hers. As it turned out, Cully had rescued it, scooping it up off the floor as they fled the bombing. While she was underground, Joe had taken it to a repair shop that had promised to have it repaired or replaced within twenty-four hours. They’d given her a loaner that would have seemed like a miracle device when Faye was in college, but not now. It hung in her pants pocket like a foldable brick.

  Stacy’s phone screen showed the famous photo taken underneath Oklahoma City in 1969. It was black-and-white, and it featured a man in a 1960s-era business suit, crouching slightly and holding a flashlight. The floor was bare and the walls were bare, but in front of the crouching man was an old metal stove standing on four curved legs. Above him, conduit pipes hung overhead, which were the only things she’d seen while she was underground that she could honestly say were much like this photo. But she couldn’t say that to Stacy.

  “I’m sorry, Stacy. I just can’t talk about what I saw.”

  Stacy looked at her like she’d been slapped, but she didn’t respond. She just went on raving about the photo as if she and Faye hadn’t talked about it online about a million times. “Would you look at that stove? And the people who went down there in 1969 said that they saw almost nothing else. Just a few flyers with Chinese writing on them.”

  Faye, who also loved historical photographs, put on her glasses to get a better look. “They must have taken everything they could carry with them when they moved out. It would be pretty hard to carry a cast iron stove up to the surface, but they got it down there somehow. And it was a really expensive thing to leave behind. Maybe they kept building after the stove was already down there, and the doors they built were too narrow to get it out.”

  “Or they were all moving into apartments with modern kitchens and heating systems,” Stacy said. “If they moved underground in the early twentieth century and moved back topside around, say, 1940, the whole world would have changed. Even cheap apartments would have had electric or gas heat by then. Refrigerators, even. Imagine how plush those things would have seemed to people who had been living underground, maybe since the turn of the century.” She reached out a single finger to the photo, maybe to point at it or maybe just to touch the past. “If they went underground early enough, they would have left a world without universal indoor plumbing.”

  Now Faye was thinking about plumbing and it wasn’t a pleasant thought. “Do we know what they did about…you know…sewage?”

  Stacy gave her an appraising look. They’d talked about the oil stove a million times, but Faye had added a new wrinkle by asking what the underground residences had used for bathrooms. Stacy didn’t say, “That’s a new thought. What made you come up with it?” She just accepted it at face value, or she pretended she did. Faye had known “Intense Stacy” online, but she was beginning to think that she and “Thoughtful Stacy” could come to be real friends.

  “I’ve never heard anybody mention anything about what they did for bathrooms. Latrines, maybe? Or slop buckets that they dumped…somewhere. In a faraway tunnel or someplace topside. They were smart. The health inspectors gave them a good rating for cleanliness. They must have figured something out.”

  “I heard about those health inspectors. Can you just imagine it?” said Faye, who was thinking that she knew what the underground community had done about their waste disposal problem. She was thinking that they probably took their slop buckets to a room with a small metal door in the wall, where they could throw the contents into an old brick storm sewer.

  “In their way, those health department records are hilarious. Six health inspectors and a policeman descended on 200 people living in conditions that could have been really awful, but th
ey ended up saying that the community was ‘in good health and surroundings and as sanitary as all get out.’”

  “Except for that crate of live chickens waiting to be killed and cooked.”

  Faye’s deadpan comment made Stacy laugh. “Yup. They may have figured out the bathroom problem, but the crate of live chickens was just a little too much for those inspectors. They got demerits for that.”

  Stacy looked at the photo again. “I wish the people exploring the place in 1969 had taken more pictures. We don’t have much beyond eyewitness accounts. But you know that.”

  She shot Faye an accusing look that said, And you’re keeping your eyewitness account to yourself.

  Ahua approached and Stacy said, “He’s the one in charge, right? I saw him on the news.”

  Faye cringed a little. She was pretty sure that Stacy was about to beg Ahua to take her underground. And she was right.

  “You need me, Agent. You just don’t know you need me. I can help you—”

  “It’s a crime scene, Dr. Wong. I have to limit access. It’s just standard procedure. When we release the scene, I’m sure you’ll have a chance to go down there.”

  “But who do I ask? The hotel? The hotel next door? The person who owns the alley above the stairs, whoever that is? The city maybe? That’s who destroyed the other entrance back in 1969. I don’t trust the city. Not at all.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Ahua had enough gravitas to shut down Stacy’s pleading, but Faye thought that she might need to plaster both hands over her mouth, just to keep the words in.

  To be honest, Faye felt a little sorry for the woman, who seemed retiring and nondescript when she wasn’t talking about her passions. It would be easy for people to ignore Stacy, and that was an insult to a woman with her intelligence and ability. When Ahua released Faye to talk about what she’d seen underground, she vowed to have a cup of coffee with Stacy and share everything she knew.

  She was seeing evidence of Stacy’s invisibility right in front of her eyes. As soon as the woman did what Ahua wanted and stopped talking, he turned his attention to Faye as if Stacy had never existed.