The Limehouse Text

18

A few hours later, the maid came up the stairs, interrupting my reverie. I had been sitting and staring into the fire in Barker’s hearth for who knows how long, worrying.

“Monsieur Llewelyn, there is a visitor.”

“Send him away,” I said. “There have been too many people up here already.”

“But he is not here to see M’sieur Barker. He wishes to see you.”

“Show him to the library, then. I shall be along in a few minutes.”

Who wished to speak with me? To tell the truth, I didn’t much care. I would go downstairs and tell whoever it was to go away. I wasn’t expecting a friend.

Israel Zangwill rose from the fireside chair in the library as I entered. His hat was on his knee, mottled with melting snow. It was early afternoon and yet Israel was here, instead of at his position at the Jews’ Free School.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I started a new position, Thomas. I have given up teaching,” he said, a smile on his Pucklike face. “I have become a reporter for the Jewish Chronicle. ”

“That’s marvelous, Israel. Congratulations.” I shook his hand. “No more first period gymnastics for you now, eh?”

“Exactly. Who is the new maid in the hall and what has become of Mac?”

I explained the immediate situation and Israel took it all in.

“So he was attacked in Limehouse, you say. Does this have anything to do with a fellow named Mr. K’ing?”

“How on earth do you know about K’ing?” I asked. “His name is hardly spoken above a whisper.”

“I’ve been investigating him for an article after a few of our crowd lost a painful amount at fan-tan. I suppose telling the Chronicle was a way to get even.”

“You haven’t by chance been given a tour of Limehouse by an individual named Jimmy Woo?”

“‘Individual’ is a good word for him. Yes, that was me. He showed me all over the district until I mentioned Mr. K’ing. Then he shut up so tight I might as well have stuck a cork in his mouth.”

“K’ing has that effect on people. Woo says he doesn’t even exist.”

“He exists, all right. He owns an opium den in Pekin Street.”

“How did you come by that information?”

“I’m a reporter. I bought it. I thought your employer might be interested, though I didn’t know he was working on a similar case.”

“It’s just the sort of information he’s been looking for, but I doubt he’ll be up for several days, if at all. He hasn’t woken up since he was attacked.”

“Drat!” Zangwill said. “I spent my last shilling on the information and now I can’t even afford to get inside. You’re the only fellow I know with both the courage and the ready to go there with me.”

“I’m sorry, Israel, but I can’t leave Barker’s side, and, besides, you shouldn’t be going to an opium den. It’s dangerous and terribly addictive.”

“Oh, I’m going, all right. I have to. My employment depends upon it. I rather sold it to my editor, you know, ‘Sinister Oriental, pipe of poppy, white slave trade’ and all that. I’ve got to go through with it. I’ve rather burned my bridges behind me.”

“I wish I could help you, but Barker’s health, his life is too precarious now.” I studied my friend. “I can’t believe you threw over a good position.”

“It is your fault,” he retorted. “You are the one that got me thinking. You’re always doing important things, risking life and limb daily, and what do I do? I wet-nurse a group of children. It was stultifying. This last week has been the most exciting of my life! If I have to visit an opium den or stalk Limehouse for an underground criminal leader to get a story, I shall do it.”

“Your parents must be livid.”

Zangwill gave me a pained smile. “They are not overjoyed, but it is already done. If I fail, I shall have to find other work, but I refuse to fail. Look, supposing this place is pertinent to the case and you’re spending precious hours here when you could be solving it. How would you like to serve your employer a finished case on a platter when he wakes up?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, Israel. The Guv would caution me just as I am cautioning you. Slow down and think this over.”

He ran a hand through his shock of curly hair. “I have an idea, then. I won’t go tonight if you go with me tomorrow night. Your boss might wake up in the morning. I really need your help. If you don’t go with me, I shall have to take Ira.”

Ira Moskowitz was a close friend of ours. He is built like a sack of potatoes and would be of no help at all in a desperate situation.

“All right, all right,” I relented. “I shall go with you tomorrow night if Barker’s condition does not worsen or if he wakes up and feels it is the right thing for me to do. But I’ve already made one mistake in this case and I do not want to make another if I can help it. You’re not actually going to smoke the stuff, are you?”

“Surely you don’t think I’m the sort that would go to such an establishment for pleasure.”

“No,” I said, “just to beard the most dangerous man in London in his den.”

Zangwill leaned forward. “Do you really think he is the most dangerous man in London? Oh, I like that phrase. I simply must use it.” He pulled a small pad from his pocket and made a notation in pencil.

“You’re treating this like a game, Israel,” I told him. “K’ing is very real and, I suspect, very dangerous. I, for one, would not care to be under his scrutiny.”

“Look, we’ll go in and buy a few pipes. It’s not illegal and we won’t smoke them, though people do it all the time. I’m more interested in what goes on behind the opium den than what occurs inside it.”

“That’s what I am afraid of.”

“Tomorrow, then,” Zangwill said as I saw him to the door.

“Very well. Tomorrow. Where and when?”

“Pekin Street. Let us say seven.”

Dr. Quong arrived about an hour later. He tried a different kind of needle treatment this time, involving small cups with holes in the bottom through which the needle was passed. A bit of cotton on the end of the needle was ignited, which sucked the air out of the small chamber and adhered the cup to the skin. In ten minutes, Barker was covered in little glass cups.

“It doesn’t hurt?” I asked.

“I would no hurt Shi Shi Ji, ” Quong said. “He will find my son killer.”

“When can I get this cast off?”

“You Westerners all the time hurry. Chop, chop. Cannot rush healing body. Chinese medicine work slowly but good.”

After he had pulled every pin from Barker’s body and massaged a bottle of liniment into his back that turned it bright yellow, he left us alone. Harm came in, sniffed at everything, and hopped up on the corner of the bed. He put his almost chinless head on his paws and sighed.

“I know how you feel,” I told him.

At a loss for what to do, I explored the books on Barker’s shelves. The walls slope from the apex until they meet a line of low, long bookcases on both sides. They contained mostly religious texts. I pulled an old copy of Pilgrim’s Progress from the shelf and reacquainted myself with Christian, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and my personal favorite, the Slough of Despond. Barker stirred and sighed in his sleep twice during the evening but did not wake up. I debated sleeping in a chair but allowed the night nurse when she arrived to shoo me off to bed like a mother.

The next morning, Barker was still profoundly asleep, one foot firmly planted in this world and the other in the one to come. I was sure he would have woken by now. Was he getting better or was this bad news? Applegate came midmorning and spoke cryptically. He said the Guv was doing “as well as can be expected,” but would not make any further comment. I asked if I should go out and pursue an inquiry that evening involving the case. He said he thought that the fresh air would do me good.

The way it is described in the guidebooks, one would think Limehouse a kind of Brighton-on-the- Thames instead of a worn-down and bedraggled district with outdated sewer systems and buildings teetering on stilts by the edge of the river, a constant source of worry for the Lord Mayor.

Arriving at my destination, it occurred to me that it takes a certain measure of courage for a man to go to a place that might be dangerous and another measure before going in. I had brought the first but I was not positive about the other.

“Does this place have a name?” I asked Israel, for I saw no hoarding bidding people to enter, nothing save for a small gas lamp over the entrance door.

“Jimmy Woo says this place is called Inn of Double Happiness,” Zangwill said.

“This is an inn?” I asked skeptically. It looked more like a house of assignation to me.

“How should I know?”

“Are you sure about this, Israel?” I asked as we stared at a flickering gas jet over the door.

“Yes,” Zangwill said steadily, then wavered. “Well, sureish.”

I felt as if we were schoolboys daring each other to go into a deserted house. “There’s no way you could impress the editors at the Jewish Chronicle with some other story?”

“Not unless I can create a hair-raising account of the annual meeting of the Daughters of Judah that would thrill the world in its entirety. How is Mr. Barker doing?”

“He is…recovering.”

Zangwill played with his upper lip, a habit he has when he is debating something. It was accompanied by a tapping of his foot, much in the way Harm jerks his leg when I scratch his stomach.

“Let’s go in, then,” he finally said.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death-”

“Stop that!” he said and began moving forward.

We clattered down the steps and flung open the door, where we were greeted by a wall of smoke that had size and shape and atmosphere. My companion plunged into it and I followed, my hand in the pocket of my coat where my pistol lay in its built-in holster. Now that I was about to do it, I felt even more the foolishness of it, but Zangwill had gone in and I couldn’t let him go it alone. Cautiously, I slipped into the smoky darkness.

The reek of opium assailed my nose. Its sweet, cloying odor is so unpleasant I felt I could detect the lightest whiff miles away. It clawed at my throat and I knew I’d need several baths and my clothes several washings before the smell would go away. Zangwill and I passed through two rows of double berths, all of them filled. Most occupants were Chinamen and other Asiatics, but there was the odd European. I stopped to gaze at a man in formal attire, his top hat pulled down over his eyes and his long pipe on his chest. He could be dead and I’d be none the wiser.

I passed an alcove festooned with old sail material tied up with bits of rope like a curtain. A candle was lit and a woman was sucking in smoke. She stopped and regarded me a moment. She was dark and had a hooked nose and large hoop earrings, but I could tell nothing else-her age, her nationality, why she was smoking opium, how she got here. Her eyes followed me as I moved, and then she reached out a clawlike hand to me, a longing for who knows what? I shook my head and her hand fell. She sucked in more smoke and I continued on my way.

“Amazing,” I heard Zangwill say through the smoke a few steps ahead of me. “To think we’re in London.”

The room opened out at the back. There was a small bar made of crude wood; a staircase going upward; and several old, mismatched chairs. The area was lit by a single gas lamp, but the darkness encroached upon it and herded it into a small circle. An Oriental, little more than a boy, came forward.

“No,” I said, “I’m not smoking.”

“No smoky one pipey?”

“Yes,” Israel ordered. “One pipey. Do we pay now?”

“No, no, no, later. You sit there. I bring pipey.”

Zangwill sat down on the dirty sheets of one of the berths, and I pulled up a chair beside him.

“It’s not too late to leave,” I told him. “When he comes back, I’ll say we changed our minds. We can go over to the Barbados for a cup of coffee and-”

“No, I must go through with it,” Israel insisted. “This is just as it was described to me. Turn your chair ’round and keep an eye on that stairwell. I believe the insidious Mr. K’ing’s lair is up those steps.”

The boy brought the pipe and lit a match for my friend, who was then forced to suck in enough smoke to keep it lit. I watched the little bead of gummy opium bubbling in the bowl of the pipe.

He coughed a couple of times. “It’s not exactly a clay pipe at the Barbados,” he squeaked. “This stuff tastes terrible.” He put the pipe aside when the boy left.

“So, you have quit teaching and become a reporter,” I asked. “What else has happened since we last met?”

“I’ve met a girl, a corking girl. Her name is Amy Levy. She is a poetess and a member of the Fabian Society.”

It was quite unlike him to talk about a girl. “A poetess, eh?”

“Yes. She is very modern, one of these new women.”

Just then an Oriental man came down the stairwell, looked at some figures in a ledger and returned upstairs. If that was Mr. K’ing, I was not impressed. He was all upper teeth and Adam’s apple and very little chin. He looked nothing like the portrait Bainbridge had left us.

After a while we fell into a reverie. I hadn’t reckoned that the combined effluvia of so many pipes would be almost like having one of my own. It began with pinwheels at the corners of my vision. Before I knew it, I was having a headache and feeling woozy.

“Llewelyn!” a voice spoke into my ear. I opened my eyes, though my sight wasn’t very clear. It was the chap in the top hat, who had been lying in the bunk against the wall. He had thrown his hat back and he looked familiar. “Llewelyn,” he repeated, shaking my shoulder.

“Mr. Forbes?”

“Pollock, old man,” he corrected. “So what are you and your friend doing here?”

“Friend?”

“You need some air, I think. In fact, you both do. Help me get him on his feet.”

We got on both sides of Zangwill and lifted him up. He was nearly insensible. Forbes reached into his pocket and a rain of coins jingled down onto a rickety table. Then we opened the door and met the bracing cold air.

Outside, the snow had stopped, but a misty haze had formed in the cold air. It felt good coming out from the infernal stench of the den. Inn of Double Happiness, my eye. Double Misery, more like. I needed a few breaths before I could walk, but I wasn’t sure I could trust Zangwill to stand upright. We led him down the street a bit and propped him against a building. Then I did the same for myself.

It felt as if someone was squeezing the bridge of my nose with a pair of pliers. I was nauseous, too, and felt I might be sick, but managed to get hold of myself. We were just about to step into the street when a horse and cab nearly ran us down. I fell back against the wall, my heart racing. It had been close. The four-wheeler came to a stop in front of the den and the door opened. Could it possibly be?

A form was getting out of the cab, a black shape, a shadow until he turned around and his face was illuminated by the meager gaslight from above the door. A broad-brimmed hat, Astrakhan-collared coat, thin face, Chinese eyes, thin mustache. It was Mr. K’ing.

“There’s your man,” Forbes said in a low voice.

K’ing settled his coat about him and turned, speaking to someone in the cab. A second fellow stepped out, a figure in dove gray. It was the last person I expected: Jimmy Woo.

We leaned against the wall in the shadows. K’ing and Woo spoke to each other for a moment in Chinese, and then Woo bowed and walked off in the other direction.

Forbes kept his head down, covered by his top hat, but I was staring straight at Mr. K’ing when his eyes swept the street and locked onto mine. Surely he couldn’t see us in the shadow, could he? His face hardened and I thought we were caught for certain, but he turned and stepped briskly down the steps into the inn.

Forbes breathed out and coughed. He breathed in quickly and began coughing again. Finally, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and clamped it over his mouth. Slowly, the spasms passed. I pretended not to notice and let the man retain his dignity. I owed him that and more.

“That was close,” he finally gulped.

“Do you think he saw us?”

“Who can say?” Forbes said and hefted Zangwill again.

“Thank you for coming to my aid,” I told him. “What were you doing there?”

“Keeping an eye on things,” he said cryptically. “What about you and this fellow?”

“He’s a reporter and a friend of mine. He is doing a story on Limehouse.”

“This is the sharp end of the sword, old boy,” he said. “Couldn’t you just take him to a noodle shop or a fan-tan parlor?”

“Exposing K’ing was going to make his career.”

“More likely it would end it. I think Mr. K’ing might have an opinion on whether or not he would care to be exposed.”

“Woo,” I remembered. “He was with Jimmy Woo. What does that mean?”

“You will have to ask your employer that question. Cab!”

We caught a cab and shared it as far as Whitehall and Israel’s lodgings. We didn’t speak much. I still had pinwheels in the corners of my eyes and was half asleep. In fact, I think we all were. When the cab stopped, we got down and I waved to Forbes, who tapped the brim of his hat with his walking stick.

A few more streets, I told myself. A few more streets and I will be home. I kept seeing K’ing’s eyes boring into mine.