Matthew Pearl - The Last Dickens

The newly liberated opium mixer walked on the night of his release through the long, narrow tar-stained streets toward the dismal slum region of the docks. The air smelled of rubbish mixed with the odors of coffee and tobacco from the big brick warehouses lining the streets. As he came closer to where he kept his rooms, Yahee was stopped by an unfamiliar man in a police cape and hat.

“Keep distance, bobbie,” Yahee mumbled, pushing him aside. “Free man here!”

“You're free because of me, Yahee,” the constable said, the words slowing Yahee's steps. The wind was dispersing the fog and revealed a clearer view of the policeman. “I was the one to arrange it and I can undo it. I suspect you heard about what happened at Opium Sal's rooms to two of her hirelings, a Lascar and Bengalee.”

“No,” Yahee said dumbly. “What?”

Tom took a step closer. “I think you probably know.”

“Yahee hear of it,” the man said, breaking quickly under Tom's knowing glare. “They murdered, yes, I hear of it in quod.”

“Correct. And I wonder if you could have been behind it,” said Tom.

“No chance, stupid bobbie! Yahee in prison when happened!” the Chinese man said angrily, spitting on Tom's boot. “They try to rob wrong man, I hear. You try to make Yahee guilty! Go chase pickpocket!”

“Sally is your competition. How can we be certain you didn't arrange for her men to be attacked while you were in prison?” Tom asked.

“Unfair! Unfair, you Charlie!”

Tom didn't argue the point. He knew what he was doing was unfair-he knew Yahee had nothing to do with what had happened in Palmer's Folly. But he also knew that the small number of Chinese in London were looked upon with ready suspicion, especially an opium pusher like Yahee. Tom's threat to him was credible, and that made Yahee the perfect candidate.

Yahee, understanding something more was at hand, said, “Why you want Yahee?”

Tom leaned in. “I want to know about Herman.” This last word he whispered.

Yahee opened and closed his mouth as though ridding himself of a sour taste, waved this idea into the air and spouted out an impressive line of curses in Chinese as he began to hurry away. “No, no! No Iron-head! I talk of Ironhead Herman, I die! You die!”

Tom drew his baton and blocked Yahee from moving. Yahee's fear of Herman was painted across his face and in that moment Tom knew he had him trapped. “You will tell me everything you know of the man you call Ironhead, and I will never breathe your name to anyone. Or I lock you up-and spread the word that you told me about Herman.”

“Nah, you just plain bobbie! No one believe you!”

Yahee turned and scurried the other away but his path was blocked by another man. Osgood, who had been waiting in the shadows, stepped forward.

“They might not believe a constable,” Osgood said, “but they will be ready to believe the American businessman who was attacked.”

Yahee looked around in fright. “Why do this to Yahee?”

“We won't talk in the open, Yahee,” Tom said. “We will go inside the jail. I am a constable, not a detective-nobody will notice anything but a beggar being taken in, and then taken out when we're done. Is it a bargain or not, Jack Chinaman?”

Yahee spit this time at Tom's shoulder. “Bargain no! No jail! Yahee not go back in there! Herman eyes everywhere inside the cage!”

“Very well,” Tom conceded. “We'll go to your rooms, then.”

“To the devil with you! Yahee sooner die than be seen there with you!”

“Then we'll go to a place where nobody can see.”

THE THAMES TUNNEL had been built with great ambition and fanfare and no thoughts of failure. The massive passage would, for a twopence fee, allow pedestrians and carriages a convenient and pleasant crossing under the city's main waterway. But this would be the third attempt to tunnel underneath the Thames, and though more ambitious, it had been no more successful than the first two.

The gigantic construction undertaking was fraught with problems. Accidents and escalating expenses plagued the eighteen years of work on the tunnel; ten lives, mostly miners, had been taken through mishaps and mismanagement, falls, floods, gas explosions; surviving miners had gone on strike; after a brief period of excitement upon its finally being opened to the public, the massive tunnel was soon abandoned by Londoners. Investors lost their shares. Even the prostitutes and cadgers who frequented it grew tired of the leaks, the dangerous disrepair, the long and treacherous walk down the dizzying staircase to the tunnel eighty feet below the ground. It waited in limbo as one of the railroad companies negotiated its purchase for a line to Brighton. Its entrance by now surrounded by dilapidated warehouses, the Thames Tunnel became a mercifully for gotten embarrassment.

It was here, underneath the metropolis, in these desolate trails to nowhere, that Yahee stood with Tom Branagan and Osgood. They had descended the winding stairs to the lowest level of the abandoned subterranean underworld.

“This is only what people say,” Yahee qualified himself before beginning, leaning against the cold, sweaty stone as the three listened to the harsh churning of water pumps. “No more than that.”

“Tell us,” ordered Tom, trying to refrain from breathing in too much of the putrid air.

Yahee looked around, his eyes following up on the slightest noise. He put up his nose and winced. “Do not like here. People die building. Devil here.”

Tom did not argue, simply nodded a promise of safety. “Tell us what you know, and you can go. Tell us about Herman.”

What people said, according to Yahee's broken English, was that a boy named Hormazd had been part of the Cama family of Parsee opium traders who carried the drug in shipments from India to the Chinese ports.

“Parsees best opium traders in world. Fast and most fierce. Hormazd whole family traders-whole family slaughtered by Ah'ling, pirate chieftain.”

This chieftain took Hormazd captive and put him with an assortment of European sailors taken from other merchant vessels. Young Hormazd had lived on an opium clipper since he was ten years old and was kept alive by the pirates to use his strength in labor. Hormazd prayed in his native Zend language toward the sun in the morning and evening. Living among the brutal Chinese pirates, Hormazd and the other captives were beaten with bamboo rods whenever they fatigued or failed to heed their superiors.

The captives were forced to aid the pirate lorcha , a swift and light vessel, in the attack of smaller Chinese ships. The pirates were brutal in their attacks. When the captain of a captured vessel refused to cooperate in telling them where opium or precious metals were hidden, the pirates would cut open the captain's skin and drink his blood to terrorize him further.

The captives had to chew tobacco to prevent nausea at the sight of the horrors the pirates perpetrated on their way to treasures. All except Hormazd. The boy seemed to absorb rather than repel the grotesque lessons of the pirates. Though he did not forget how he had come to be there and never wavered in his hatred for his captors, he did not seem to cherish any particular notions of right and wrong. This friendless Parsee, knowing nothing else but his own strength and misfortunes, operated like a dumb animal, with no consciousness of the master's moral demerits.

The pirates lived in a vile state of humanity. To them, a delicacy every bit equal to guavas or oysters was a boiled rat cut into slices or raw caterpillars over rice served with a foul-tasting bright blue liquor they mixed.

One muggy afternoon, which happened to fall on Hormazd Cama's fourteenth birthday, he and some of the European captives had been taken on the lorcha away from the rest of the pirate fleet to a far-off strait for target practice. A malicious member of the pirate crew was beating Hormazd on his back and arms for some real or imagined infraction. Something flickered in the boy's eye, and in a swift series of motions, Hormazd had broken the pirate's neck. Some of the European captives were witnesses.