The Geomancer's Compass (11 page)

I nodded. “Yep. Probably somewhere around here, but yes, he could be anywhere.”

Brian pushed his plate away, his lips painted with an orange clown's mouth from the spaghetti sauce. “And we're doing this why?”

“It's complicated.”

He eyed my salad hungrily.

“Don't even think about it,” I warned him, picking up my fork and encircling my salad with my left arm. I began wolfing it down. “How can you eat so much?” I complained between mouthfuls. “Didn't Auntie Ev ever tell you to chew?”

“Nobody chews spaghetti,” he countered. “You slurp spaghetti. Now, give me the goods, Randi. What's really going on here?”

“How do you expect me to talk while I'm eating?”

“So, eat. Go on.
Mangia. Mangia
. Chew that cud. I'm going to entertain myself by looking at the tunnel tour brochure.” He patted himself down until he found the pocket into which he had crammed the brochure.

“What's the point?” I asked flippantly. “It's not like you can read it.” The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I wished I had never said them.

The effect on Brian was like a slap in the face. He flinched. “I'm looking at the pictures,” he said in a subdued voice.

“Look,” I said quickly, “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that.”

“Never mind. It's OK.
Fugetaboutit
. It's not like it's not true.” He gestured in the direction of my salad. “I mean it, eat.” Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Svet! Oh, Svetty! Where's my bread?”

Svetlana rumbled out of the kitchen, full bread basket in hand and looking annoyed.

“Excellent!” said Brian. “I thought you might have died.”

She slouched over to the table, thumped down the bread basket, and made a beeline back to the kitchen. Brian helped himself to a piece of bread and used it to mop up his plate as he examined the brochure. “This is weird,” he said after a moment.

“What?”

“Why is there a picture of a Chinese dude on this brochure? The gangster I understand, that's Al Capone, but why this guy?”

I leaned forward to peer at the brochure. Sure enough, featured on its front flap was a sinister-looking man in a fedora and below him, against a red backdrop, a kind of line drawing, or maybe it was a woodcut, of a Chinese man wearing a jacket with a mandarin collar and a traditional Chinese hat, the kind that looks like a flowerpot. Under the top photo were the words “Gangster Underground.” Below the line drawing
were the words “Below Gold Mountain.” The words “Gold Mountain” were in fancy Chinese-style letters.

“Give it here,” I said.

He handed the brochure over.

“ ‘SEE the past come alive in Canada's most famous system of tunnels,' ” I read. “ ‘Go under the streets of modern-day Moose Jaw to discover what life was like during Al Capone's bootlegging heyday in the thrilling, live-action Gangster Underground tour. Then discover the hardships experienced by early Chinese immigrants to Moose Jaw in the moving Below Gold Mountain tour.' ” I looked at Brian. “Chinese immigrants … like The Grandfather's family? A-Ma never mentioned anything like that.”

“This we've got to see,” concluded Brian.

For once, I had to agree with him.

A
s it turned out, the next Below Gold Mountain tour wasn't for another hour. The next Gangster Underground tour, however, was due to start in fifteen minutes. “C'mon,” said Brian. “How else are we going to kill the time?” To which I had no good answer, so we bought tickets to both tours and, following the directions of the woman in the box office, crossed the street to another building and climbed a set of stairs to a second-story lobby where we took our place amid a jumble of tourists.

I stood off to one side, wishing I had a respirator mask. You don't know. Somebody in that group might be coming down with some deadly flu or Ebola fever or something.

Not Brian. He was making the rounds, shaking everybody's germ-encrusted hands, introducing himself first to a retired couple from Cornwall, Ontario, driving an RV across Canada;
then to two American couples power-shopping north of the 49th; and finally to the stressed-out parents of this really annoying brood from Brandon, Manitoba: two scowling tweenies chanting, “We want to shop. We want to shop,” and their bratty four-year-old brother who was busy barreling around the lobby like a wood beetle on amphetamines, bumping into people and displays and shrieking, “
Pow. Bam.
” He had green snot dripping from his nose. I made a mental note to stay far, far away from that kid.

“And what are you doing here in Moose Jaw?” one of the Americans was asking Brian.

I jerked to sudden life. “Oh, we're just passing through,” I said quickly, raising my voice to cover the distance between them and me, and at the same time shooting a warning glance at Brian. I hadn't even begun to sort through the legal implications of our assignment. A-Ma had seemed to think we could just disinter Qianfu's bones ourselves once they had been located, but surely it couldn't be that simple. You don't go around digging up people at will. There had to be some kind of legal process we'd have to go through – warrants obtained, permissions granted. We needed to play our cards close to our chest, for the moment at least, not go blabbing about our mission to strangers.

At that moment a pretty woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a black-and-red flapper dress, a red cloche hat, and a feather boa, burst from a set of double doors at the far end of
the lobby. Her makeup was sufficiently theatrical to carry across the distance of the room: emerald-green eye shadow, scarlet lips, even a painted-on mole. She struck a coquettish pose, one hand on cocked hip, the other brandishing a silver cigarette holder, and cried, “Howdy, fellow bootleggers! Welcome to Moose Jaw … or Little Chicago, as we like to call it. My name is Miss Marilla and I'm the proprietress of Miss Marilla's Speakeasy, one of Moose Jaw's finest.”

I suppressed a groan, shut my eyes, and hugged myself tight. According to the brochure, Below Gold Mountain had been recently updated to include mixed reality. Gangster Underground, however, remained low-tech; animatronics was its only claim to sophistication. This was going to be so lame.

“Cool,” Brian whispered in my ear. “It's interactive.”

“I hate interactive,” I muttered.

“Not me.”

“What are you doing standing around?” Miss Marilla cried. “Come on in.”

We filed through the double doors into a room meant to reproduce a 1920s bar, complete with a mustachioed bartender wearing a velvet vest and a wine-stained white apron, a piano player pounding out a ragtime tune, and what looked like some drunken dude sitting slouched at one of the several tables.

The tweenies eyed the drunk at the table. “Oooh,” they said.

“Oh, don't worry about Pete,” Miss Marilla assured them. “He's not going to bother nobody, least not today. Piano player, can you give it a rest while I get these here valuable customers looked after?”

The piano player stopped mid-note; he was animatronic. As for Pete, the snotty-nosed kid came up to him and gave him a solid thwack on the arm. Why do some little boys do things like that? It's like they're barbarians or something.

“Nigel!” His mother yanked him away.

“Ma!”

No reaction from the drunk, however; probably a dummy.

Miss Marilla introduced the bartender, Aloysius. He stopped wiping the wooden surface of his bar and smiled crookedly at the group. “Welcome to Moose Jaw, folks. As you can see, we're a pretty hopping burg, and I'm going to fill you in on our secret. But it's got to be
our
little secret, so mum's the word.” I had to admit he was a pretty good actor. He and Miss Marilla both. Maybe this attraction wasn't as cheesy as I had thought.

“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.