Marcia Muller: The Body Snatchers Affair

The boeuf bourguignon and the Bordeaux were both excellent. As was the gateaux Sabina ordered for dessert. Her appetite had always been prodigious, and she was one of those fortunate individuals who never gained an ounce no matter how much rich food she consumed.

She and Carson lingered over coffee. He was something of a raconteur and more than once he made her laugh out loud with stories that ranged from the droll to the mildly outrageous. By the time they left the restaurant, she felt comfortable with him again, her earlier fears of a possible dark side to his nature temporarily dispelled.

Outside, the night was chilly. Sabina drew her angora wrap tightly about her as Carson went to engage the first in a line of three waiting hansom cabs, and glanced casually about the vicinity while she waited. A few pedestrians, passing conveyances... and a dark figure lurking in a doorway a short distance away.

Oh, no!

She kept a narrowed eye on the doorway as Carson returned to take her elbow and guide her to the hansom. Just as she took the first step up, she saw the figure emerge and had a clear look at him in the glow of a streetlight as he hurried into the next hack in line.

Oh, yes, drat him. The bogus Mr. Holmes.

The hack containing him took every turn hers and Carson’s did on the way to the lower flank of Russian Hill, following a relatively short distance behind. Sabina confirmed this by three brief glances through the rear window.

Now she was bemused as well as irritated. Why on earth would the crackbrain want to spy on her? It couldn’t be for usual reasons men followed women; like the genuine Sherlock Holmes, he seemed to have little if any romantic interest in the female sex. But neither could she imagine any other reason for his not so covert surveillance. Of course, the man wasn’t in his right mind, but there had always been method in his mad behavior before. The previous cases of hers and John’s that he’d intruded into, with rather startling results, had been of considerable importance and notoriety. None of the agency’s current investigations had any such significance, except possibly the one involving the unrest in Chinatown and that had come to them only today.

When their hansom arrived at her flat, Carson escorted her to the front door. The street was sufficiently well lighted for her to note that the trailing hack drew up less than half a block behind. At the door, Carson was once again the perfect gentleman; he took her hand, kissed it, said that it had been a splendid evening, and invited her to attend a dramatic performance at the Baldwin Theatre on Saturday evening. She accepted tentatively and a little distractedly, and he smiled, bowed, and left her.

Sabina went inside and shut the door, only to open it again a few inches and peer out. She watched Carson climb back into the hansom they had shared, the driver crack his whip smartly to start them moving again along the cobbles. Watched the Englishman’s hansom jerk into motion, following until both were out of sight.

This was even more disconcerting. From the look of things, the would-be Sherlock hadn’t been spying on her after all.

The person he was spying on was Carson Montgomery.

In his twenty years as a detective John Quincannon had visited a great many strange and sinister places, but this September night was his first time in an opium den. And not just one — four of the scurvy places, thus far. Four too many.

Cellar of Dreams, this one was called. Supposedly one of the less odious of the reputed three hundred such resorts that infested the dark heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown in this year of 1895. (Another Caucasian-generated myth like the one that claimed the existence of a subterranean honeycomb of secret rooms and passages throughout the Quarter; in actuality the number of opium dens was well under a hundred.) Located in Ross Alley, it was nonetheless a foul-smelling cave full of scurrying cats and yellowish-blue smoke that hung in ribbons and layers. The smoke seemed to move lumpily, limp at the ends; its thick-sweet odor, not unlike that of burning orange peel, turned Quincannon’s seldom-tender stomach for the fourth straight time.

“The gentleman want to smoke?”

The question came in a scratchy singsong from a rag-encased crone seated on a mat just inside the door. On her lap was a tray laden with nickels — the price of admittance. Quincannon said, “No, I’m looking for someone,” and added a coin to the litter in the tray. The statement, he thought corrosively, was no doubt one she had heard a hundred times before. Cellar of Dreams, like the other three he’d entered, was a democratic resort that catered to Caucasian “dude fiends” — well-dressed ladies and diamond-studded gentlemen from the upper stratum of society — as well as to Chinese coolies with twenty-cent yenshee habits. Concerned friends and relatives would come looking whenever one of these casual, and in many cases not so casual, hop smokers failed to return at an appointed time.

Quincannon moved deeper into the lamp-streaked gloom. Tiers of bunks lined both walls, each outfitted with nut-oil lamp, needle, pipe, bowl, and supply of ah pin vin . All of the bunks in the nearest tier were occupied. Most smokers lay still in various postures, carried to sticky slumber by the black stuff in their pipes. Only one here was a Caucasian, a man who lay propped on one elbow in the shadows, smiling fatuously as he held a lichee-nut shell of opium over the flame of his lamp. It made a spluttering, hissing noise as it cooked. Quincannon stepped close enough to determine that the man wasn’t James Scarlett, then turned toward the far side of the den.

And there, finally, he found his man.

The young attorney lay motionless on one of the lower bunks at the rear, his lips shaping words as if he were chanting some song to himself. Had he been here the entire two days since his wife had last seen him? If he was in fact an expendable cog in the brewing trouble between the rival Hip Sing and Kwong Dock tongs, as their client, Andrea Scarlett, was afraid was the case, Chinatown was the worst possible place for him to hole up.

Quincannon shook him, slapped his beard-stubbled face. No response. Scarlett was a serious addict who regularly “swallowed a cloud and puffed out fog,” as the Chinese said, and escaped for hours, sometimes days as in the present case, deep inside his pipe dreams — no doubt the reason he had sold his services, if not his soul, to the corrupt elements in the Hip Sing tong. An unlimited supply of opium was as great a lure to a hophead as the money he was paid to give legal aid to hatchet men and other Chinatown lowlifes.

“You’re a blasted fool in more ways than one,” Quincannon told the deaf ears. “It’s a wonder you’re not dead already.”

He took a grip on the attorney’s rumpled frock coat, hauled him around and off the bunk. There was no protest as he hoisted the slender body over his shoulder. The hanging opium smoke had begun to make him dizzy; he lurched a little as he groped toward the door with his burden. He was halfway there when his foot struck one of the cats darting through the gloom. It yowled and clawed at his leg, pitching him off balance. He reeled, cursing, against one of the bunks, dislodged a lamp from its edge; the glass chimney shattered on impact, splashing oil and wick onto the filthy floor matting.

The flame that sprouted was thin, shaky; the lack of oxygen in the room kept it from flaring high and spreading. Quincannon stamped out the meager fire, then strained over at the waist and reached down to right the lamp with his free hand. When he stood straight again, fighting off the dizziness, he heard someone giggle, someone else begin to sing in a low tone off-key. None of the pipers whose eyes were still open paid him the slightest attention. Neither did the smiling crone by the door as he staggered past her.