Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  “What are you saying? Was the picture of Cully and Angela?”

  “That’s the thing. They all took a look at his wife’s picture, but nobody had a bit of doubt. It wasn’t her. All those years, everybody in Sylacauga had been wondering what happened to Cully and Angela, and Cully had finally showed up without her. Now we knew what happened to him. But what happened to Angela?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  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 f
rom. 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.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After saying goodbye to Sly, Faye found a pair of pants and a pair of socks with no root beer stains. Her boots wiped pretty clean, leaving her smelling only a little bit like sassafras. Shortly after she gave up on getting them any cleaner, Ahua called her with an assignment that was, to be honest, pretty tedious.

  She knew the reason why she was stuck at a computer and not out looking for bad guys or finding Stacy. She didn’t like Ahua’s reasoning, but she understood it. The reason was that she was not an FBI agent, but she was a darned good archaeologist. And sometimes, archaeologists get stuck doing tedious computer work. Or library work. Archaeology was only exciting in the movies or on those once-in-a-lifetime occasions when something really cool emerged from the earth. When Ahua hired an archaeologist to consult on this case, this was exactly the kind of problem that he’d had in mind for her to solve.

  She was facing two computer monitors. On one, she had a selection of the photos Goldsby took before the vandalism. On the other, she was paging through the shots taken since the paintings had been defaced. Ahua wanted her to continue with her original task of trying to determine the age of the paintings and the rooms, but now he wanted her to take it a step further.

  “There is a reason somebody wanted specific scenes gone, and they wanted them gone bad enough to obliterate them with sandpaper, paint thinner, and paint. Your job is to figure out what that reason is.”

  It had taken her a while, but she’d selected all the photos that included areas that were later sanded away. They were now arranged on her left display. Then she’d selected photos taken after the vandalism that centered on the sanded-away areas, arranging them on her right display. Now her job was simple: she needed to figure out which images were so important that the vandal had needed them obliterated.

  One image of people happily enjoying each other’s company caught her eye. She knew that the painter, whose style was primitive but still graceful and fluid, wanted her to know that the people were happy, because beatific smiles shone on all of their faces. A bearded man, smiling, held an infant in his arms. A child leaned against his leg and smiled down at the baby. Beside him was a large-breasted woman with long dark hair, also smiling down at the baby. The child wore a long smock-like garment over pants. So did the man and woman, so she couldn’t be sure if the child was a boy or a girl.

  Nearby, another woman, also with long, dark hair, reclined beneath a tree. Faye couldn’t tell if she was supposed to be part of this group. If not, this might even be another image of the same woman at another time in her life. She was hugely pregnant, perhaps with one of the children in the other picture. The painting celebrated her fertility, giving her the heavy belly, breasts, rump, and thighs seen on so many prehistoric fertility figures.

  The walls were covered with scenes like this one. On every wall, three trees were painted from floor to ceiling, separating each of the walls’ rectangular spaces into four parts that were further divided by clusters of flowers or strands of ivy that served as frames for the paintings of people. And everywhere there was color. Magenta flowers, emerald leaves, aquamarine streams, a big yellow sun-ball in the sky.

  On the trees, she saw fruit of every color, apples, pears, blush-bellied peaches. Between the trees grew rows of tall corn capped by golden tassels, separating rows of fat tomatoes, round cabbages, and chartreuse broccoli. The benches pushed up against three of the walls were painted to disappear into the scene, but the door in the wall was painted to draw attention. Its metallic surface was enhanced with sparkly silver paint, and it was ringed with a garland of ivy with every leaf carefully painted to convey the texture of its rib and veins. The ivy sprawled out onto the surrounding walls, tying all the scenes together with its vegetal ropes. Carmine red handprints were scattered everywhere.

  Religious imagery, too, was everywhere, sharing space with magical symbols like pentagrams. If asked to describe the scene, Faye would have called it an effervescent celebration of magic and fertility. Or maybe it celebrated the magic of fertility.

  Did these paintings date to the 1920s, when she knew for a fact that the underground community was occupied? The fantastical gardens and forests of the artist’s world had a hippie vibe to them, which would suggest the 1960s or later, but pastoral images were timeless scenes.

  How could she give these pictures the date that Ahua needed? A garden planted in the early 1900s, when the Chinese underground city was built, would look pretty much like a garden planted in
the 1940s, when the catacombs were thought to have emptied. It would also look like a garden planted in the 1990s, when three little bodies had been placed on one of the benches in the pictures. And it would look pretty much like the garden growing right now behind her house on Joyeuse Island.

  Except…hmm. She zoomed in on the rows of vegetables. If her memory could be trusted, broccoli didn’t have a long history in the Americas.

  She pulled out her phone to check how long Americans had been growing broccoli. The answer was ambiguous. The vegetable originated in Italy, but it didn’t catch on in the United States until Italian Americans began growing it commercially in the 1920s. Wide-scale availability came after World War II and the Chinese community was back aboveground by then. More to the point, those people were living underground for the entire early period of broccoli in America, from the 1920s until World War II. They likely never saw it growing and thus wouldn’t have been able to paint it.

  Besides, even if they’d seen it when they were living topside, Faye didn’t think that people living on the economic edge would look at a strange, new, and probably expensive food on their grocery store shelves and think, “Hey! A new vegetable that we’ve never eaten. Let’s give it a whirl. What do we have to risk? Starvation?”

  If asked to bet cold, hard cash that a poor person living underground before 1940 had painted broccoli into their idealized memory of a vegetable garden, Faye would have said, “Heck, no.”

  Something else bothered her about the broccoli. The plants were a beautiful shade of yellow-green, it was true, but healthy broccoli plants were supposed to be dark green. And they weren’t usually shaped like squat, pointy pyramids.

  She zoomed in on the chartreuse plants. Then, interest piqued, she zoomed in some more. The masses of meticulously painted buds on each broccoli plant resolved themselves into spiraling geometric patterns that Faye recognized as fractals, and this wasn’t just a mathematical oddity.