The Geomancer's Compass

by Melissa Hardy

  “In case you haven’t heard of it, there’s a little something going on in the States called Prohibition,” Aloysius was saying. “Yep. Prohibition. That means it’s against the law for folks to manufacture, transport, or sell alcohol in the United States. Started in 1920 and it’s still going strong five years later. Only, folks got to get their booze somehow, and that’s where Moose Jaw comes in. We like our liquor in Moose Jaw and we got plenty of it, both imported and distilled right here in Saskatchewan. We also got us a rail line, the Soo, which runs through Minneapolis to Chicago. Add American gangsters like our boss and you’ve got what we like to call ‘organized crime.’ ”

  “Should I let them in on our little secret?” Miss Marilla was coy.

  Aloysius shrugged. “Might as well.”

  “Our boss is none other than Al Capone, the greatest American gangster who ever lived.”

  A murmur arose from the group. “Bam!” yelled the snotty-nosed kid.

  Aloysius nodded. “Yep,” he agreed, “you heard right. Al Capone. Old Scarface himself.”

  Miss Marilla went all conspiratorial on us. “And now I’m going to show you Big Al’s room. I wouldn’t dare do this if he was in town – Big Al likes his privacy and, believe you me, you don’t want to cross Big Al. But since he’s in Chicago and all, I figure it’s OK to take just a little peek.” She crossed the room and opened a door.

  The old man from Cornwall turned to his wife. He looked confused. “I thought we were going to have a drink!”

  “Hush,” his wife said. “It’s pretend. Like a murder mystery dinner.”

  We followed Miss Marilla into a simulated flapper-era hotel room, complete with an art deco bed, dresser, and vanity. “This is where Big Al hangs out when it gets too hot for him in Chicago,” she explained. “This here’s Big Al’s spats and his silk jammies –”

  All of a sudden a phone rang. It was one of the old-fashioned phones that you see in old movies or TV shows, wall-mounted with a wooden cabinet, a crank handle, and brass ringers. Miss Marilla answered it and after a few back-and-forths, during which she became more and more agitated, she hung up, wrung her hands, and cried, “It’s Chief of Police Alfred Humes. It’s a raid!”

  Alfred Humes – my mind snagged on the name. I was sure I had heard it before, but when? In what context? I started to raise my hand like I was in class, but caught myself in time – shades of dorkitude. “Alfred Humes. Who did you say he was again?”

  “Chief Humes?” Miss Marilla replied. “Oh, he’s the law in these here parts, sweetie, and he’s gotten plenty rich by not fighting crime, if you get my drift.” She winked. “We have a saying here in Moose Jaw: ‘In Humes’s way? Prepare to pay.’ And if you bootleggers don’t want to grease his palm, you’d better knock on this door right now and give Gus the secret password.” Flinging open a secret panel, she gestured for the group to follow her down a flight of rickety wooden stairs into what looked like an old coal chute. “Hurry,” she insisted. “Hurry.”

  That’s when I remembered who Alfred Humes was and where I had heard the name before – from A-Ma. He had been the police chief when the Death House burned down in 1915, a decade before the events portrayed in the Gangster Underground tour. Evidently he had stayed on as chief of police and had managed to be as corrupt then as he had been when Qianfu’s bones went missing from his jail. “In Humes’s way? Prepare to pay.” Had somebody paid him for the privilege of making off with Qianfu’s bones? Given that Humes was obviously a bad cop, that notion didn’t seem too far-fetched.

  I stumbled down the stairs after the rest of the tour group, my mind clicking and snapping, barely taking in what was going on around me. Never mind the Gangster Underground. Was the Humes underground a place to start, something we could investigate, something that might lead us to Qianfu’s grave?

  In the meantime, a secret password (“So’s your old man!”) was gaining us entry into a facsimile of a gambler’s den where a gangster let a delighted Brian fondle an apparently authentic Thompson submachine gun. Then we were traipsing down a damp, dirt-floored tunnel lined with pitted cement to a mocked-up brewery where another actor playing a distiller explained how to age alcohol quickly by adding two or three drops of sulfuric acid to a barrel of fresh hooch. Pretty interesting. Back again to the tunnels, a different one this time, brick-lined, and then we were ushered into an office where an actor playing a bookkeeper panicked at the prospect of a raid by Chief Humes.

  Suddenly the lights went out. “Duck!” the bookkeeper yelled. Guns fired. There was the rat-a-tat of a machine gun and the smell of smoke. People shouted and screamed. A siren wailed. “Run!” someone shouted. “Run for your lives!” A distant door was flung open; there was light beyond. “Quick! Quick!” Miss Marilla urged us, shepherding us down another tunnel toward a second set of wooden stairs, dimly lit at its top by a single light bulb hanging from a frayed electrical cord.

  Then it was all over, and we found ourselves standing on the corner of River and Main, blinking at the light and shivering a little after the dampness and chill of the tunnels.

  “That was good,” breathed Brian, beaming. “Even you have to admit that was good.”

  “Better than good,” I replied. “It gave me an idea.”

  “An idea?”

  “A connection, at least. Between Alfred Humes and Qianfu.”

  “Alfred Humes?” Brian repeated. “You mean, the same Alfred Humes who was supposed to be leading the raid just now?”

  I nodded. “He was the chief of police when Qianfu’s remains went missing from his jail in 1915, and according to this tour, at least, he had quite the reputation for corruption. So I’m thinking maybe somebody greased his palm a little in exchange for Qianfu’s bones. The question is, who?”

  Brian slapped me on the back. “Good work, cuz. That super-brain of yours is firing on all cylinders today. And who knows? Maybe the Below Gold Mountain tour will tell us something else we can use. Something tells me it’s going to be great.”

  “Well, it does have mixed reality.”

  “That’s not the reason it’s going to be great,” he said. “It’s going to be great because it’s about us.”

  “Please read this over and sign on the dotted line.” The cashier handed us each a piece of paper.

  “Randi …” Brian whispered, with the desperation that greeted any suggestion that he read something.

  “Shhh,” I whispered back. “It’s just a waiver.” Since virtual reality began to be widely used in rides and games and simulations, a bunch of people have died or been injured. There were a couple of landmark cases. In one, an old guy suffered a massive heart attack when the computer-generated image, or CGI, of a fire-breathing dragon headed straight for him; in another, a little girl, running away from a CGI green gremlin, fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck. It didn’t take long (or many lawsuits) for enterprises offering VR and even AR, which is much less unsettling, to insist that would-be participants sign a form absolving them in case of accident. “Pretend to read it and then sign,” I told him.

  “And here is your complimentary motion sickness bag.” The cashier handed each of us a standard issue barf bag; it was a rare VR event that didn’t make someone throw up, usually me.

  “Now HMDs,” she added. “Do you know what size you are?” The head-mounted displays were lined up on a shelf behind her; like bowling shoes, they came in a range of sizes. She eyeballed Brian’s unusually round head. “You look like a large to me.”

  Brian turned to me. “HMDs are so clunky. It’s like having a watermelon stuck on your head.”

  “These are the latest thing,” said the cashier, defending her gear. “They’ve got a positioning system and head tracking.”

  “How are we accessing the tour?” I asked.

  “Downloaded onto a card.”

  “We’ll use our own I-spex then.”

  “You have I-spex? Wow. Lucky you.” Although I-spex were starting to be used in the military and by poli
ce, fire, and rescue, they were still not generally available. Unless you had the right connections, of course. “You can download the tour onto your glasses, but wait until the guide tells you to start the program. Launch needs to be simultaneous. Here you go.” She handed Brian a card and extended one to me. I shook my head and pointed to Brian.

  Brian rolled his eyes. “I’ll take it.” He took the card from her and held it out to me. I picked it up with the hem of my sleeve. “I’m her toucher,” he explained. “Like a taster. You know – the guy who tastes the king’s food to see if it’s poisoned. She’s so germaphobic.”

  “I’m not germaphobic, I’m careful.”

  Below Gold Mountain had attracted a larger crowd than Gangster Underground. Mixed reality always did. There were the same people who had been on the first tour, plus three beefy football-player types and their girlfriends, and a gaggle of Japanese tourists in nonstop photo mode, despite the fact that they were wearing helmets that made them look like giant, disoriented ants.

  The cashier looked up and beyond our heads. “Here comes your guide now.”

  I turned to see a thirty-something woman, wearing a turquoise mandarin coat over black leggings, and mesh beaded slippers. Her dyed black hair was wound tight into a bun held in place by two silver Chinese hair sticks, and her elaborate eye makeup was meant to suggest almond-shaped eyes in place of the rounder Caucasian eyes she had been born with. The entire costume – coat, hair sticks, and slippers – might have been purchased at the Azure Dragon Tea and Herb Sanatorium. I was surprised they hadn’t hired somebody with Chinese ancestry to play the role, but maybe all the Chinese Canadians had left town at the same time The Grandfather had. Given how they had been treated, you could scarcely blame them.

  “Welcome, everybody,” the guide said. She glanced around the group; for just a second her gaze snagged on me and Brian, then on the group of Japanese tourists. She’s taking note of our ethnicity, I thought, our Asian-ness. She’s probably received sensitivity training, and of course she can’t tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese. As was the case with Oscar, all Asians probably looked alike to her. “My name is Madison,” she said, “and I will be your guide on our Below Gold Mountain tour today. Everybody got their cards?”

  We all held up our cards.

  “Woo-woo.” For reasons known only to themselves, the football-player types made a sound like a train whistle, making their girlfriends wheeze with laughter. I viewed them with suspicion and resolved to keep my distance during the tour. At St. Izzy’s it was the nerds, not the jocks, who were on top. We had a chess team, not a football team, and that sort of says it all.

  “OK, then,” instructed Madison, “on the count of three, power up. One … two …”

  I put on my I-spex. “The power button is on your right earpiece,” I murmured to Brian.

  “Insert your cards.”

  “Play is on your left,” I added.

  “And press Play.”

  We pressed Play.

  That familiar jolt of dislocation, followed by the inevitable head spin. My stomach, full of Caesar salad, lurched. I clutched the barf bag tightly.

  “Wicked,” breathed Brian. “I feel ten feet tall. I love that about mixed reality.”

  Tipping cautiously forward, I glanced down at my feet. They looked impossibly far away, as though I were peering into a deep chasm at the bottom of which flickered a pair of red-and-white retro Keds belonging to me.

  “Everybody steady, now?” Madison asked. “No one’s going to lose their lunch on me? Are you sure? No dizziness? OK. We’re going to go down into the tunnels now, so everybody follow me, and please go slowly and one at a time. The stairs are steep, people, but there’s a handrail on the right. We don’t want any stampedes.” In recent years, there had been a number of VR-triggered stampedes. Just last year some kids playing virtual paintball in Toronto had panicked in a crowded arcade, run into the streets, and been hit by a streetcar.

  The tour filed slowly forward, forming a line, with Brian and me, at my silent insistence, taking up the very end. So far there was no CGI to contend with, I noted. This was a good thing given the fact that we were navigating stairs, which requires a modicum of depth perception.

  Like the stairs that led from Miss Marilla’s Speakeasy to the gamblers’ den below, these were narrow, steep, and rickety, leading to a tunnel with a low ceiling supported by large timbers. The tunnel smelled dank and faintly of sewage, and extended in both directions. A lantern hung from a hook in the wall, casting a wavering pool of yellow light on the packed earth floor. To the right of the lantern was a wooden door. As people jostled for position in the small, crowded space, fog began to roll in, until the entire floor of the tunnel was obscured.

  “Is that CGI?” Brian whispered.

  I shook my head. “Probably dry ice.”

  “What you’re seeing here is steam,” said Madison. “This is how it might have looked back in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the men who tended the boilers that kept Moose Jaw warm during our long, cold winters used these tunnels to get from one boiler to another. And this is how it must have been when Chinese immigrants to Canada, both legal and illegal, were forced to take up residence here in order to survive.”

  I felt as though somebody had punched me in the stomach. “Residence?” I whispered to Brian. “They lived down here?”

  “Wow, that sucks,” he whispered back. He sounded shaken as well. “That’s … inhumane.”

  There was a rumbling sound, distant at first, then disturbingly near, and the shriek of a train whistle, followed by the sound of a train chugging to a noisy stop. VR, of course, but incredibly realistic.

  “Times were tough in China back then,” continued Madison. “The Chinese came to Canada to escape poverty and famine, to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, and to seek their fortune in the country they called Gold Mountain. However, once the railroad was completed, they were left without work, and the tide of public opinion – never positive toward the Chinese to begin with – turned against them.” She glanced nervously, first in the direction of the Japanese and then in our direction, as if trying to gauge the impact this information was having on us.

  It was intense – doubly so because of the VR, which always heightens feelings, making them less cerebral and more visceral. Through the spin cycle going on in my head flew scraps of what A-Ma had said about the reaction of white Moose Jaw to the Chinese Death House, the uproar and outrage it had caused, the accusations that had flown: that we were half human and half devil, that we ate rats and sucked entrails. Seriously messed up stuff. Somehow it had never seemed as real as it did right then, standing in that dark, dank hole in the earth, where rabbits or moles or prairie dogs might live, or rats, but not human beings.

  Madison cleared her throat. “To discourage further immigration,” she said, “the government imposed a head tax on any Chinese wishing to come into the country. In the years between 1885 and 1923, the Canadian government made over $23 million on the immigration tax. To pay for their fare to North America as well as the head tax, many Chinese were forced to take out ruinous loans from so-called coolie brokers. They had to repay these loans by working for the coolie broker, who would hire them out to slaughterhouses and laundries and burlap factories and take a percentage of their meager wages – sometimes as low as thirty-five cents a day – to cover their room and board.”

  “Have you ever heard about this stuff?” Brian muttered.

  I shook my head. “I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was this extreme.”

  “Let’s visit a typical laundry of the period,” said Madison. “That will show you the conditions under which the Chinese lived and worked back then.”

  I tugged at Brian’s vest. With all those pockets, there were lots of places to grab hold of. “Once I heard A-Ma say that The Grandfather was born in the back of a Chinese laundry. A hand laundry.”

  “What? They laundered hands?”

  I poked him in th
e approximate location of his ribs. “No, Doofus. They washed the clothes by hand. Somehow I didn’t picture it being underground.”

  Madison opened the door and held it ajar while everyone filed through into a basement room outfitted like a Chinese washhouse, circa 1900. Through a cloud of counterfeit steam, CGI figures wearing black skullcaps, white blouses, and black pajama-style bottoms labored at washtubs, sewing machines, and ironing boards; the figures had been drawn with vaguely Asian features and had pigtails. The layered effect was achieved through a process called optical see-through – the CGI was projected through a partially reflective mirror onto our real view.

  “You’ll notice that all of these workers are men,” Madison said. “Usually it was the men who came over to Canada and the U.S., hoping to make their fortune and either return to China or bring their families over here. You can imagine how hard that was, given their debt load and miserable wages. In addition, there was a great deal of prejudice against them. One of the reasons they had to live and work down here in the tunnels was so white people wouldn’t have to see them.”

  Brian shook his head. “How bizarre is that?”

  “I had no idea,” I whispered back. And I truly hadn’t. Certainly I had never experienced any prejudice growing up in Vancouver. If anything, being Chinese was seen as a plus, an advantage. Chinese kids were viewed as being smarter than white kids, more talented, better disciplined. Our families tended to be affluent because our great-grandparents and our grandparents and our parents had worked so hard for everything they got. But here in this prairie town only a little over a century before, we had been considered scum of the earth. Worse. Suddenly I did not feel so self-assured, so confident of my place in the world or of my own abilities. If I had been born back then, what chances would I have had? How would others have seen me? What sort of life would I have been able to carve out for myself, here in this darkness? For the first time, my heart ached for my ancestors. My life was incredibly easy compared to theirs; I owed them everything, especially The Grandfather. Where I had seen a slightly smelly, possibly senile Yoda action doll, way past his expiry date, there had been nothing less than a giant.