Will Thomas - The Limehouse Text

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.”