An adventure for New Orleans PCs, working for Belasco’s Rare Books.
The International Pageant of Pulchritude.
Women from across the globe assemble on the sunny shores of Galveston, Texas, a thriving Mob-run casino town, to compete for the title of Beauty Queen of the Universe. The beaches are busy, the dance halls and dinner clubs are thriving, the Hotel Galvez is booked out.
Criminals mingle with the crowd. Frank Nitti represents the Chicago Outfit. Charlie Wall from Tampa, Silver Dollar Sam from New Orleans. John Lazia, standing in for Kansas City’s Pendergast Machine. Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, from New York City, is staying in the Presidential Suite.
Harry Bennett, Henry Ford’s top bodyguard, has been spotted at a downtown cockfight. Florence Sterling, treasurer of the Humble Oil Company and Houston president of the League of Women Voters, takes the air along the seawall. Eddie Mannix, Hollywood fixer, chats with hotel staff, setting up a meeting between Irving Thalberg and Miss Palestine.
Silver Dollar Jim, oil millionaire, races through town in his jalopy with half a dozen shrieking beauty queens piled in the back. Shooting at pickpockets, throwing silver dollars on the ground so he can laugh as people chase them. (Yes, that’s two entirely separate real historical figures with “silver dollar” in their names.)
Galveston’s controlled by Sam and Papa Rose Maceo. Sicilian brothers who started off as barbers, giving free drinks to their customers. Rose through the ranks of the Beach Gang to dominate the town. They run the Hollywood Dinner Club and the Balinese Room, a pier’s end nightclub with disappearing roulette tables that roll back into the wall before the law arrives.
Rose keeps order using the Night Riders, his private vigilante group of masked Zorro-like enforcers. The cops are all on his payroll. His only real opposition comes from Johnny Jack Nounes of the Downtown Gang, who still thinks he can make a play for the rum trade, and Frank Hamer of the Texas Rangers, the only guy around here who thinks Prohibition ought to be taken seriously.
The rum row of booze boats from Cuba and Jamaica wait offshore, at the twelve-mile line, the closest they can legally come to American soil. The mobsters travel out in small fast boats at dead of night.
Houston’s a boom town. Galveston Bay is full of oil refineries. The Spindletop strike over at Beaumont has made everyone in East Texas rich. The Maceo brothers are some of the friendliest mobsters around and the big scary East Coast syndicates have been politely kept out of town. Life is pretty good.
Jump back to 1817.
The pirate Jean Lafitte is expelled from his headquarters in Barataria Bay. He sails for Galveston Island, and founds a new pirate colony.
One day he raids a slave ship and steals a treasure from the captain. A woman’s head, cast in brass by a Yoruba sculptor. Stolen from a sacred grove along the banks of the Osun River. Possessed by Ayelala, an orisha of punishment and prophecy.
Once a month, at the full moon, Ayelala speaks. She will answer one yes-or-no question about the future. She is completely infallible.
Lafitte sold the slaves to Jim Bowie, shot the captain and built a red house to hold the oracle. He ruled the Gulf for a few more years before he was dislodged by the schooner USS Enterprise. He took most of his treasure with him, but the brass head stayed behind.
The Maceo brothers dug her out of the sand, a hundred years later. They used her to get rich. They found she was harder to use effectively than they expected. One day Rose asked “Should I sell you?” and Ayelala said “Yes.”
So now they’re auctioning her off.
The Hotel Galvez ballroom, at midnight, after the pageant is over. Bidding begins at $60,000 - over a million in today’s money. Every syndicate in America will have someone there.
You found out about this by accident. Belasco knows somebody on the booze boats who fills him in on what’s going on. You don’t know where the Maceos are keeping the head. There’s a vault in the back of the Balinese Room, guarded at all times by four Night Riders - you might try looking there.
If you steal it, Belasco can sell it. He’ll promise you a good cut. He swears it won’t be traced to you.
One thing you know is that the winner of the beauty contest gets a special ticket to the auction. It’s her job to unveil the head. The contestants did not send in photos in advance and would be easy to impersonate.
The beauty contestants are not all what they seem.
Dorothy Fisk, Miss Pine Bluff, is an international jewel thief who rigged a newspaper contest back in Arkansas. She’s not even that hot but she plans to win anyway, through unscrupulous means. She has associates on the hotel staff with access to the fuses for the ballroom lights.
Maria Casajuana, Miss Spain, is a devoted witch-cultist who has been commanded by the Horned King to secure the head at all costs. Her familiar, Cocorumbo, a small goat-headed ape, harasses her foes by poisoning their makeup and blighting their fair complexions with the pox.
Frances Dempsey, Miss Chicago, is in fact an assassin in the pay of Al Capone. Her job is to seduce the other mobsters and use a curare-tipped hatpin to get them out of the way. Her dressing room holds a pet rattlesnake and a set of throwing knives. She’s not as loyal to Capone as he thinks.
Angelina Anduiza, Miss Cuba, is secretly an iyalawo - a fortune-telling priestess devoted to Orunmila, the Father of Wisdom. Her dressing room holds a divination tray and a bunch of cowrie shells. She knows there’s a big market crash coming - she needs the head to tell her which stocks to sell short.
Bess Enness, Miss Port Isabel, is Rose Maceo’s wife - he thinks she’s dead. Only survivor of the 93 children who drowned in the 1900 Galveston hurricane, at St. Mary’s Orphan Asylum, while the nuns sang Queen Of The Waves. Rose threw her off a boat in 1924. She wants revenge.
The head judge, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, is perennially in debt and can be bribed. Dreamt of becoming a journalist - disinherited by his wealthy parents, who hate the press. Lost $6 million on a string of failing tabloids. Just got back from Italy, where he watched Mussolini hit a child with his car.
It’s a full moon tonight. The head is guaranteed to speak. Whoever wins the auction gets to ask it the first question.
I like that it's just a head, and nothing else. Where did it come from? Nobody knows. What does it want? Nobody knows. All we know is that one yes-or-no question a month sounds like a hot commodity...which is presumably the answer to the question.
These brass sculptures are quite the political topic here in Germany (repatriation and all that post-colonial stuff) but until now I never cared to look up what they actually _look_ like.
I like the beauty-pageant-angle. This is a story that will unfold into intrigue and action even if you don't add player characters. Dynamics might be complex to run but it sounds like a lot of fun. Also, I like Black Auctions and the time limit (it happens tonight!) is a good touch.
Now I'm off thinking about how you can get rich with one yes/no-question per month.