Project Sweet Life (7 page)

The waitress shrugged helplessly. “Sorry. It’s
illegal
. Try the Indian restaurant down the street.”

We had no choice but to turn and go.

A block or so away, we tried the Olympus Hotel, which was also rumored to have an entrance to the China Tunnels in its basement. It isn’t a hotel anymore. Now it’s low-income housing, but it still has dark wood paneling on the walls and a floor of small hexagon-shaped tiles, like those in the bathroom of an old train station. It also has a looming front desk, now partitioned behind glass. We hadn’t even gotten five feet into the lobby when the man behind the counter said, “Can I help you boys with something?”

“We were wondering if we could have a look around the building,” Curtis said. “It’s for a school project.”

“In July?” the clerk said.

“Summer school.”

The clerk smiled. “Sorry. Can’t leave the front desk.”

Curtis hesitated a second, but I think even he knew he couldn’t lie his way into this basement. Finally he just nodded and said, “Okay, thanks.”

We walked to nearby Fireman’s Park, located at the edge of downtown on a bluff above the waterfront. It’s a narrow strip of a park that overlooks the tideflats, an ugly expanse of shipyards and heavy industrial plants
that stretches out across the interior of Commencement Bay. Two office workers ate bagged lunches at the picnic table while a sleeping homeless man wheezed in the corner gazebo.

“What were we thinking?” Victor said. “That we were just going to be able to walk up to these buildings and say, ‘Hey, you mind if we search for hidden entrances to secret tunnels in your basement?’”

“We could come back at night,” Curtis said. “I bet these places would be easy to break into.”

“I thought we agreed not to do anything illegal,” I pointed out. “Besides, I don’t want to ride all the way down here and then home again at night.”

“Then what?” Victor said. “How do we get in?”

I stared up at this big totem pole at one end of the park. A sign said it was the world’s tallest, but I’d read somewhere that this wasn’t true.

“We need to find someone who knows something,” I said.

“But who?” Victor asked.

I looked away from the totem pole and my eyes immediately fell upon a Chinese restaurant.

I smiled.

“I think,” I said, “it’s time for us to have lunch.”

For the record, not all of Tacoma’s early history was positive. In 1885, the city became infamous for forcibly evicting all its Chinese residents. An angry mob gathered up the entire Chinese community and forced them onto a train to Portland, Oregon. The next day, they burned Chinatown and the possessions of all those Chinese people, then pushed the remnants into the bay. The city’s actions were so notorious that they become known as the “Tacoma Method” when other cities debated what to do with their own Chinese populations.

According to
Trains and Totem Poles
, it was all about the anti-immigrant attitudes of the times. People, including the editor of the Tacoma newspaper, argued that the Chinese were taking jobs from everyone else; the truth was, they were simply willing to do the jobs that everyone else refused to do. What happened in Tacoma was particularly notable because the angry mob had the support of the city government and was led by the mayor himself. Nice, huh?

Anyway, fast-forward to the present. Tacoma now has large Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese communities. But unlike Portland, Oregon, to the south, which benefited from Tacoma’s stupidity and ended up with a huge, thriving Chinatown, Tacoma still has very few Chinese-American residents (or Chinese restaurants). I guess when a city makes such a blatant show of bigotry, it takes a while for people to forgive and forget.

It was well after lunch hour, so the Paper Lantern, the Chinese restaurant I’d spotted, was mostly deserted. There was a little bowl by the cash register soliciting donations for the Chinese Reconciliation Project, which had been set up to create a memorial commemorating what had happened all those years ago.

The restaurant itself was run by an older Asian couple—a short man with a crew cut puttering around back in the kitchen, and a woman with her hair in a loose bun who seemed to do everything else. The seats were gold vinyl, and unlike the greasy spoon diner, they weren’t sticky at all. Back in the kitchen, garlic sizzled delectably.

“Dave,” Victor whispered to me as we took a table, “we can’t
afford
lunch.”

I ignored him. “We can’t afford
not
to have lunch,” I said. “Don’t you see? If it’s true that the China Tunnels were dug by the Chinese and used by Chinese smugglers, who would know better about them?”

“The owners of a Chinese restaurant?” Victor said. “Isn’t that kind of racist?”

Right then, the woman stepped up to our table with menus. We ordered the only thing we could afford with the five dollars and change that we had between us: three cups of hot-and-sour soup.

We were now officially broke.

The woman just smiled and brought us a pot of hot tea.

When she came back a few minutes later with the soup, I said, “We were wondering if we could ask you a question.”

Her smile reminded me of a small butterfly, gentle and elusive. But I wasn’t going to say that to Victor for fear that he’d call me racist again.

“Do you know anything about the China Tunnels?” I asked the woman.

Her smile immediately fluttered away. I followed her eyes to the back of the restaurant. The cook was now
watching us warily. Had he heard us from all the way back there?

“Please,” I said quietly. “It’s really important.”

“It’s for…” Curtis started to say, and I knew he was about to tell her that it was for a school project. But this time, something held his tongue. Instead, he just said, very quietly, “It’s really important.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I can’t help you.”

She left, and Curtis whispered, “She
knows
something.”

“
Obviously
,” Victor said. “Do you think Dave and I are stupid or what?”

“But what can we do?” I said. “We can’t
make
her talk.”

We ate our soup. The woman never said another word to us the whole time.

Before we left, she gave us three fortune cookies. I felt guilty that she’d given us tea
and
cookies after we’d only ordered soup. The one person downtown who treated us like real people, and we hadn’t been able to pay her back.

Outside the restaurant, I cracked open my cookie.

Sometimes the answer is right in front of your face,
the fortune read. But someone had written on the fortune, crossing out
your
and writing
the
, and adding an
s
to the word
face
.

“That’s funny,” I said.

“What?” Curtis said.

And that’s when I realized:
It’s a message from the woman in the restaurant!

“Nothing,” I said casually. “Never mind.” Careful not to show a reaction that might be seen by the man in the kitchen, I led Curtis and Victor back to Fireman’s Park. Then I explained about the fortune.

“She wrote on the fortune
inside the cookie
?” Curtis said. “How is that even possible?”

I ignored him. “It’s totally a clue! She’s telling us how to find the China Tunnels, but she didn’t want to come right out and say it.
The answer is right in front of the faces
,” I read aloud.

“But what does that
mean
?” Victor said.

“How did she get the fortune out in the first place?” Curtis said. “And then how did she get it back inside the cookie again?”

I kept ignoring Curtis. “Faces,” I said, thinking
aloud. “What faces?”

Victor pointed over at the clock tower rising up from Old City Hall. “The clock tower?”

“But that has four faces,” I said. “Each one facing in a different direction. That doesn’t help us. I don’t think that’s what she meant.”

“I just want to know how she got that fortune in and out of that cookie!” Curtis said.

“
Tweezers!
” I exploded. “Would you give it a
rest
!”

As I whirled away from him in annoyance, my eyes fell on the World’s Largest Totem Pole, rising above Fireman’s Park.

“Wait,” I said. “That’s
it
!”

The totem pole definitely had different faces—fifteen in all. It was hard to tell what most of the carvings were supposed to represent. There was a bear, a baby, something that looked sort of like a chipmunk, and something else that was maybe a frog. At the very top was an eagle with its wings extended, and perched on one of the wings was a real-life seagull.

All those faces, even the seagull’s, were peering in the same direction: toward the opposite end of the park.

We followed the direction of the totem pole, walking the narrow park, but we didn’t see a thing. Finally, we reached the far end. There was a colony of feral cats living in the undeveloped greenbelt that bordered the park, and three of them watched us, as if in fascination, from behind the protection of a waist-high chain-link fence.

“There’s nothing here,” I said. I pointed to one of the old brick structures nearby, now an architect’s office. “Does she mean that building? There’s a back entrance—maybe it’s unlocked.”

I started toward the door, walking across a little field of ground cover.

And something squeaked under my feet.

I looked down and tried to kick the foliage out of the way. Something squeaked again.

I was standing on an old metal grate.

“There’s something here,” I said. I crouched down, pushing the bushes aside, and peered through the iron. “And it leads
down
.”

“It’s probably just a sewer,” Victor said. “That’s all.”

“It’s
not
a sewer!” Curtis said. “Why would there be a sewer in a park? Is it locked?”

The grate wasn’t locked, but it was very heavy. It took all three of us to lift it up.

I glanced over to see the feral cats watching us with wide eyes and bristled fur.

Curtis noticed the cats too. “It was the scrape of the metal,” he said. “It sounded like an animal or something.”

Without warning, all three cats bolted into the bushes at the same time. It wasn’t just the scrape of the metal that had frightened them; it was something about the opening of the grate. But what did they have to be frightened about?

“They’re
cats
,” Curtis said, reading my mind. “You know how weird cats are.”

“We’ll need flashlights,” Victor said.

I turned and dug into my backpack. Incredibly, I’d actually remembered to bring them.

A narrow shaft plunged down into darkness. A rusty metal ladder clung to walls of stone. The air smelled musty—not like sewage but like what we’d smelled through those broken sidewalk lights.

Curtis tested the top rung with his foot.

“It seems okay,” he said.

We climbed down for what seemed like a long time. When we reached the bottom, we found ourselves in a cold cavern of ancient stone and stale dirt.

“It’s real!” I whispered. “The China Tunnels are
real
.”

“And if the tunnels really exist,” Curtis said, his voice echoing, “I bet the Labash gold coins do too!”

We turned on the flashlights and saw that this was definitely no sewer. It was a tunnel lined with large gray stones. The roof was low and rounded, and the floor was packed dirt. I expected to see cobwebs, but there weren’t any. The air was stale—at least ten degrees chillier than it had been aboveground. Victor brushed himself off, even though we hadn’t touched anything yet.

It was also damp. This made sense since it rains a lot in Tacoma, and all the water from above had to go somewhere. You could taste the water in the air, along with the wet dirt.

“Now what?” I said. My voice echoed so cleanly, you could hear the quiver.

“Now we check it out!” Curtis said. Of course there
was no quiver in his echo.

Since the tunnel dead-ended behind us, we had no choice but to go forward.

Twenty feet ahead, the tunnel joined another that ran perpendicular to the first. The far wall changed from gray stone to blood-red brick. These definitely weren’t modern bricks, fat and solid and cleanly shaped. No, they were long and narrow, and crumbling from age. Here it wasn’t so much an actual tunnel but what seemed to be the space between the foundations of two buildings.

We turned right and continued on. A few feet later we saw another turn, even as the main tunnel kept going; it was an absolute maze down there. As we walked on, looking down offshoots and side passages, I noticed that almost every leg of the tunnel was different than the one before it. Most were lined with stone or brick, but sometimes the tunnels weren’t tunnels at all, but forgotten cellars or crawl spaces that ran off from the main tunnel. And sometimes, the tunnels were just dirt shafts, like mine shafts, with ancient wooden struts supporting the ceiling. It was all completely makeshift and chaotic.

All the tunnels had in common was that they were very, very old. The stones in the ceiling were charred in
places, maybe from the torches of the bootleggers and smugglers who had traveled these tunnels more than a hundred years earlier.

Our flashlight beams probed the way ahead of us. I couldn’t help but think that finding a small valise of rare gold coins in this maze of tunnels wasn’t going to be quite as easy as I’d thought. Still, we had nothing but time, especially now that we were underground, away from the dangerous eyes of our various family members.

Soon the walls turned to blackened terra-cotta brick, and the tunnel became a cavern of some sort: wider and taller. To our right loomed three sets of rusted metal bars with smaller rooms beyond them, like cells.