Chapter 6251: Chicago Stories (20)

The University of Chicago library is always packed, its lights never go out no matter the hour. Even though everyone tries to keep quiet, there’s still that unavoidable rustling noise. Bruce was sprawled over a seat at the very edge, reading a book while keeping an eye on the library entrance.

It wasn’t long before a guy in a blue jacket came over. Bruce immediately went up to greet him: “Hey, Chino, right? Ah, I’m a freshman too, Bruce Wayne. So, there’s something I wanted to ask you…”

The two of them quickly moved to a table off to the side and sat down. Classes for freshmen hadn’t started yet; no one came here to study, they were just reading to kill time. In this era it wasn’t convenient to keep fiddling with phones or computers, so reading counted as a relatively fun way to entertain yourself.

“…Yeah, nobody saw that coming. I talked to the police, but they refused to say anything. The main reason I came to you is to ask: have you, recently, taken a red plaid suit to any laundromat nearby? The owner told me he mixed up two pieces of clothing…”

From morning till night, several different people rotated through the seat across from Bruce, all of them freshmen on his list. He probed them indirectly about whether they owned a very distinctive red plaid suit, but all he got were negative answers.

The people he’d filtered out were all young men roughly similar to him in height, weight, and looks, highly likely to be the scapegoats Brian had picked out. But all of them said no, and Bruce could tell they weren’t lying.

That left another possibility: Brian had chosen upperclassmen, or simply someone off campus. However, according to Jennifer, there hadn’t been any missing upperclassmen cases around this time of year in previous years. They’d already studied here for a year, everyone knew each other; if someone went missing, it would definitely get reported. Jennifer not only came from money, she was on the cheer squad and had strong grades—she was something of a campus star. If there were that kind of news, she would absolutely know.

Since it wasn’t freshmen, and it wasn’t upperclassmen either, that meant the scapegoat was very likely not a student. Which also suggested it might not have been Brian’s crew who did the dirty work, but, as Stark had said, someone from outside the school.

And the “accidental” fall during the fishing tournament was visibly suspicious—someone had definitely tampered with something. Stark’s behavior was basically the same as Bruce’s at the party: he might not have done anything with his own hands, but he absolutely fanned the flames. That implied the four dead men were far from innocent.

Bruce actually trusted Stark’s character more than a little. Don’t be fooled by how Iron Man is made up of flaws everywhere except his few strengths; he’s not some flawless hero, but on the path of holding to justice he’s gone much farther than most people. If those guys had truly been clean, he’d have risked drowning himself to save them.

It might have been judgment based on experience, but Bruce felt he must have seen something, and then gone to verify it. In that case, the odds were high that the dead local toughs had been colluding with the Brotherhood. If they’d been in charge of “resolving” the scapegoat, there had to be clues to dig up.

Bruce might not know the Brotherhood all that well, but he knew the Mob inside out. He hadn’t had that much firsthand exposure to cases involving sex crimes and human trafficking, but when it came to how these “umbrellas” collude with street bosses, how Evil Forces are generated, how the political–business revolving door spins—he couldn’t be clearer. That’s Gothamites’ specialty field.

He knew exactly how sloppy this Mob crew worked. They weren’t some high-IQ criminal class; they got to commit crimes with impunity because their ecological niche was low enough and their methods filthy enough to help big shots make trouble disappear. And precisely because there was an umbrella over them, they never bothered to do a perfectly thorough job. As long as it looked decent on the surface, the rest would be handled by the big players behind them.

But right now, those big players probably didn’t have the bandwidth to worry about them. The umbrella would definitely try to shield the Brotherhood. Besides the fact that the Brotherhood knew more, the umbrella wouldn’t yet feel the situation was dire enough to warrant cutting off a limb to save the body. They wanted to protect their source channels so they could keep doing this down the line.

The Mob’s role is easy to replace—wipe out one batch and another rises—but Brotherhood members who actually understand how to run this operation are rare. The Mob itself doesn’t have any real reputation; it exists to take the fall. The Brotherhood is different. If the University of Chicago Brotherhood got into serious trouble, it would implicate organizations in other universities as well—DKE is a nationwide Brotherhood. The blow would hit not just one or two channels, but the entire industry chain. Before they’re staring real death in the face, they will absolutely try to protect their interests.

After ruling out, by this method, the possibility that the scapegoat was a student, Bruce went to find the organizers of the fishing tournament. The organizers seemed clean enough. They’d held a lot of competitions in the Great Lakes Region, and not the high-end kind of fishing tournaments either—more like local residents’ self-entertainment, the type of thing contracted as community events.

This accident had scared them badly too. You could only say it was fortunate that the out-of-control boat belonged to the victims themselves, and that they had issued warnings. Most importantly, thanks to Stark and Bruce’s rescue effort, not too many people died—that was what let them escape doom.

The organizers’ attitude toward Stark and Bruce was extremely warm; they practically saw the two of them as their saviors, and even wanted to contact reporters to interview them. Bruce didn’t accept any interviews; he only, under the pretense of checking in on them, asked about the deceased.

“Honestly, I’m worried about you guys.” Bruce sat across from the event coordinator. “Running something like this is exhausting enough; you’re not charging anything and still handing out prize money. If it weren’t for sponsors, it wouldn’t be sustainable at all. Now this kind of accident happens, and if someone comes to shake you down for cash…”

The words clearly hit home for the coordinator, whose face was lined with worry. He said, “Some ambulance-chasers have already latched onto me. They’re trying to stir up participants to sue, and then there are those shameless reporters…”

Bruce comforted him for a while, then said, “Actually, as long as the families of the dead don’t make a fuss, it shouldn’t turn into a big deal. Didn’t you reach out to the sponsors, get them to find a way to smooth things over?”

The event manager opened his mouth, hesitated a bit, then lowered his voice and said, “You don’t know, the people who died… they’re not in ordinary business. The two on that blue boat seemed to be in wildlife smuggling, and the two on the white boat were probably in logistics or shipping…”

Bruce looked suddenly enlightened. “If that’s the case, you guys are definitely going to get into trouble. These people are not easy to mess with.”

“We’ve already decided to pull out of Chicago for now,” the event manager said. “To be honest, we’ve got some backing ourselves, but we’re afraid these people will lash out like cornered dogs. We won’t be holding any events on Lake Michigan for quite some time.”

Bruce nodded. He’d gotten what he wanted. He added a few polite remarks and then left. For more specific information he’d have to sound out Jennifer, and he had a ready-made excuse. After all, he was hanging around with Stark now, and her boyfriend bravely jumped into the water to save people—something very praiseworthy. As long as he talked to her parents a bit, he’d naturally be able to pry some information out of them.

Jennifer really had gone with Stark to the junkyard; Bruce had no idea what Stark built there, but Jennifer took her Dad out to see it that very night, and then she smoothly brought back the information Bruce wanted.

Just like the event manager had said, these people were all in the grey economy. Not strictly Mob, but tied up with Evil Forces. For example, the smuggler also did legal cargo transport, just with contraband mixed in; the logistics guy opened the door wide for illicit goods. And these two lines of work are clearly strongly linked to human trafficking.

They couldn’t possibly be trafficking only students—that wouldn’t even cover costs. And you don’t wait until you’ve killed the scapegoats before you grab them; you definitely keep stock. Looking from the criminals’ perspective, Bruce could easily infer they probably had something like a Human race breeding base, a place to store victims. That had to be taken down first.

Doing that might scare the snake into the grass, but it could save a lot of people. Most importantly, once it’s exposed, Brian will absolutely not be able to sit still.

No one can count on the Mob to keep their mouths shut. Once these guys sit down in the police station, they’re dying to frame a few more people to wriggle out of their own charges. Their testimony will definitely send Brian’s suspicion level soaring. There’s no way he can silence that many people; he’ll be forced to look for other options.

That was Bruce’s goal. He needed to push Brian until he snapped, only then could he figure out what secret Brian was hiding. Having Eric collect evidence on past student disappearances was one front, hitting the Mob was another—two-pronged pressure, and Brian would crack under the strain.

The Mob had tried to cover their tracks, but unfortunately, they weren’t very good at it, and their protective umbrella was busy lately. After studying Chicago’s logistics system and maps, Bruce locked onto a location: unsurprisingly, the Chicago sewers.

Bruce once again suspected that Chicago was basically the Gotham of his cosmos, because this city’s history was almost the same as Gotham’s. Back in the day, Chicago’s poor sanitation triggered a cholera outbreak. After investigating, they found the water wasn’t clean—domestic sewage, industrial waste, all kinds of filth mixed into the water system, causing frequent, large-scale epidemics.

The way people of that era solved the problem was simple and brutal: they literally lifted the city up and built sewers underneath.

It was really a last resort. Chicago’s elevation is too low, and in the nineteenth century they had no water pumps, only gravity drainage. If the city was too low and the lake level too high, you simply couldn’t drain into the lake. So they artificially raised the city by three to four meters, and even straight-up reversed the flow of the river.

You have to admit, people in that era of America were incredibly capable. There were no cranes or anything like that—just hand-cranked jacks. They didn’t just raise the streets; hotels, residences, government office buildings, all of it got jacked up with people still inside, and then they built the sewers below, solving the city’s sanitation problem.

The reason it feels so similar to Gotham is that Gotham’s sewers were built in almost the same way. Gotham is hilly, with some low-lying areas that were too low; they leveled them out by lifting buildings. And Gotham River was once rerouted as well, extremely similar to Chicago.

Chicago is actually one of the earliest cities in the world to take this issue seriously. They placed huge importance on sewer construction. Those sewers you see in cartoons or comics, big enough for people to walk and cars to drive, actually exist in Chicago.

Today, beneath Chicago lies a very complex drainage network, a mesh of countless conduits, reservoirs, and tunnels, and it’s the inspiration for many depictions of the underground city in art and fiction. Even though there’s no Court of Owls hiding down here, the bad guys of this world tend to think alike. Chicago’s underground also conceals countless filthy secrets of criminals.