Dan Simmons - Drood

She squinted at us.

“Madam,” said Dickens, his tone as easy and cordial as if he were addressing a lady visitor to his parlour, “we are seeking out an individual named Drood. We know that he used to patronise your… ah… establishment. Could you tell us, please, where we might find him now?”

I saw the shock and sobriety hit the opiated woman as surely as if Dickens had thrown a bucket of freezing water on her. Her eyes widened for a few seconds, then closed in an even more narrow and suspicious squint. “Drood? I don’t know no Drood.…”

Hatchery smiled and prodded her harder with his stick. “That won’t wash, Sal. We know he was a customer ’ere.”

“Who says?” hissed the crone. A dying candle on the floor extended her hiss.

Hatchery smiled again but also prodded her again. The club pressed against her skeletal arm, harder this time.

“Mother Abdallah and Booboo both told me that they’ve seen someone you called Drood ’ere in years past… a white man, missing fingers, strange accent. Said he used to be a regular of yours. He smells of rotting meat, Mother Abdallah told me,” said the detective.

Sal attempted a laugh but it came out only as a wheezing rattle. “Mother Abdallah’s a crazy bitch. Booboo’s a lying Chinaman.”

“It may be.” Hatchery smiled. “But no more crazy nor lyin’ than you, my Puffer Princess. Somebody named Drood has been ’ere and you know it and you’ll tell us.” Still smiling, he brought the end of the weighted baton down on her long but arthritis-gnarled fingers.

Sal howled. Two heaps of rags in a corner began dragging themselves and their opium pipes into another room where the noise, should someone be murdered, would not disturb their dreams.

Dickens removed several shillings from his purse and jingled them in his palm. “Telling us everything you know about Mr Drood shall be to your advantage, madam.”

“And you’ll spend a few nights—maybe weeks—not just in my station cell but in the dankest pit in Newgate if you don’t tell us,” added Hatchery.

The impact of that struck me on a level that could not affect Dickens. I tried to imagine a few nights, much less weeks, without my laudanum. This woman obviously ingested much more of the pure opium than I ever had. My own bones ached at the mere idea of being deprived of my medicine.

There were real tears in the Puffer Princess’s watery eyes now. “All right, all right, leave off wi’ the bludgeonings and threatenings, ’Ib. I’ve always done right by you, ain’t I? I’ve always paid up when pay-up was due, ain’t I? ’Aven’t I always…”

“Tell the gentlemen about this Drood and shut your gob about anything else,” Hatchery said in his most quiet and threatening voice. He laid the length of his club along her quivering forearm.

“When did you know this Drood?” asked Dickens.

“Up to about a year ago,” breathed the Puffer Princess. “’E don’t come around no more.”

“Where does he live, madam?”

“I don’t knows. I swears I don’t knows. Chow Chee John Potter brought this Drood bird in for the first time about eight… maybe nine years ago. They smoked prodigious amounts of the product, they did. Drood always paid in gold sovereigns, so ’is credit was pure gold and all paid up for the sweet future, as it were. He never sung or shouted like the others… there, you ’ear one now in t’other room… ’e just smoked and sat there and looked at me. And looked at the others. Sometimes ’e’d leave first, long before t’others, sometimes ’e’d be the last t’leave.”

“Who is this Chow Chee John Potter?” asked Dickens.

“Jack’s dead,” she said. “He was an ol’ Chinee ship’s cook who had the Christian name ’cause he’d been christened, but he was never right in ’is head, sir. ’E was like a sweet child, ’e was… only a mean, vicious child if he drank rum. But never mean just from smokin’. No.”

“This Chow Chee was a friend of Drood’s?” asked Dickens.

Old Sal rattled another laugh. It sounded as if her lungs were almost gone from the smoke or consumption or both.

“Drood—if that was ’is name—didn’t have no friends, sir. Everyone was afraid of ’im. Even Chow Chee.”

“But the first time you saw him here—Drood—he came in with Chow Chee?”

“Aye, sir, he come with ’im, but I suspect that ’e’d just run into old Jack and had the old pleasant idiot show ’im the way to the nearest opium house. Jack would’ve done that for a kind word, much less for a shillin’.”

“Does Drood live around here?” asked Dickens.

Sal started to laugh again but then started coughing. The terrible noise went on for what seemed like an endless amount of time. Finally she gasped and said, “Live ’round ’ere? ’Round New Court or Bluegate Fields or the docks or Whitechapel? Nossir. No chance of that, sir.”

“Why not?” asked Dickens.

“We would’ve known, gov’ner,” rasped the woman. “Someone like Drood would’ve scared every man, woman, and child in Whitechapel and London and Shadwell. We all would’ve left town.”

“Why?” asked Dickens.

“Because of his Story,” hissed the crone. “His true and awful Story.”

“Tell us his story,” said Dickens.

She hesitated.

Hatchery ran the edge of his club up the outside of her arm and lightly rapped her on her bony elbow.

After her howling stopped, she told the story as she had heard it from the late Chow Chee John Potter, another opium dealer named Yahee, and yet another user named Lascar Emma.

“Drood’s not new to these ’ere parts; them what knows says ’e’s been a’haunting these neighbourhoods for forty years and more.…”

I interrupted with “What is this Mr Drood’s Christian name, woman?”

Hatchery and Dickens both scowled at me. I blinked and stepped back. It was the only question I was to ask the Puffer Princess that night.

Sal scowled at me as well. “Christian name? Drood ain’t got no Christian name. He ain’t no Christian and never was. It’s just Drood. That’s part of his Story. Do you want me to tell it or don’t you?”

I nodded, feeling the blush heat the skin between the lower rim of my spectacles and the beginnings of my beard.

“Drood’s just Drood,” repeated Old Sal. “Word from Lascar Emma was that Drood was a sailor once. Yahee, who’s older than Mother Abdallah and dirt combined, says he wasn’t no sailor, just a passenger on a sailing ship that come here long ago. Maybe sixty years ago—maybe a hundred. But them all agreed that Drood come from Egypt.…”

I saw Dickens and the huge detective exchange glances, as if the crone’s words were confirming something they already knew or suspected.

“’E was an Egyptian, and dark-skinned as all of ’is damned-to-hell Mohammadan race,” continued Sal. “Word was that ’e had ’air then, too, black as pitch. Some says ’e was handsome. But ’e was always an opium man. As soon’s ’e set foot on English soil, they says, ’e was puffing at the blue bottle pipe.

“First ’e spent all the money ’e had on it—thousands of pounds, if the story is true. He must’ve come from royalty there in Mohammadan Egypt. At the very least, ’e come from money. Or come by it some’ow shady. Chin Chin the Chinaman, the old Chinee dealer in the West End, stole Drood blind, charging him ten, twenty, fifty times what ’e charged ’is reg’lar customers. Then, when ’is own money runned out, Drood tried to work for the money—sweepin’ at crossin’s and doin’ magic tricks for the gents and ladies up at Falcon Square—but ’onest-come-by money didn’t buy ’im enough. It never does. So the ’gyptian became a cut-purse and then a cut-throat, robbin’ and a’killin’ sailors near the docks. That kept ’im in Chin Chin’s good graces and guaranteed the ’ighest-quality smoke, bought by the Chinaman from Johnny Chang’s establishment up at the London and Saint Katharine Coffee-’ouse on Ratcliff ’ighway.