Opium and Absinthe: A Novel

by Lydia Kang

  “Are you all right?”

  “My shoulder. It’s worse now. I feel like a marble in a fist right now—it’s so crowded. My back hurts, too, and my head is pounding.”

  “Don’t you have any medicine?”

  Tillie shook her head.

  “Here. Stay close to me.” He put his arm around her waist and guided her through the crowd on the street. “We’re nearly there.”

  To keep her mind off the pain, Tillie started talking. “The Bowery, that’s where we are, right? When the Dutch came here, this area was all thick forest. The little farms were called bouweries or something like that. Washington marched through here and lowered the British flag in the Battery in 1783.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  Tillie shrugged her good shoulder. “I like to read things.”

  “Oh. Here we are.”

  Ian stopped in front of a darkened grocery store, closed for the evening. A yellow light glowed from the second story. He cupped his hands around his mouth.

  “Tobias!” he hollered. “Let us in!”

  A man popped his head out of the window. He had curls hanging down along the sides of his cheeks and a thick brown beard.

  “Let a man get some sleep!” he yelled back.

  “Your light was on. You weren’t sleeping.”

  “I was trying.”

  “You’re awake now.”

  “That is true. What, do you need to buy something? Who’s that lady with you?”

  “She’s nice, Tobias. Let us in.”

  Tobias threw both hands down, as if he were done speaking to them. The window closed, and the light went out.

  “What do we do now?” Tillie asked. Her stomach was starting to cramp. The pain reached through her belly to her lower back and twisted like a vise. If only she had brought that bottle. Just when she had convinced herself she should turn around and head back to the Grand Street station, a light blinked on inside the grocery, and Tobias—looking like he’d barely had time to put on his trousers—unlocked the door.

  “Come in, come in. Before I catch the grippe and die. Come in.”

  Ian smirked. “Nobody gets the grippe in June, Tobias.”

  “That would be my luck,” he growled.

  He relocked the door behind them. In the back of the grocery, a faint light shone. Tobias looked to be several years older than Ian. They had the same nose—straight, with a little bump on the bridge that made them look like statesmen. But Tobias was losing his hair on top and had a spine that hunched and curved slightly to the right, as if he were perpetually turning a corner.

  Beyond the crowded shelves of the grocery was a room that held boxes, crates, a small desk, and shelves overflowing with ledgers and papers. Ian leaned against a wall calendar printed with a blonde lady looking over a flowing wheat field, and Tobias indicated a wooden chair where Tillie could sit. He stared at them carefully.

  “Are you married?” he asked.

  Tillie and Ian both blurted, “No!”

  “Too bad. Marriage is wonderful. You should try it sometime.”

  “You’re not married.” Ian crossed his arms.

  “I wasn’t talking about me. So why are you with this shiksa, Ian?”

  “Long story. First, she needs some medicine. Do you have anything?”

  “I love you like a cousin, Ian, but I am not handing out free medicine.”

  Ian snorted. “You are my cousin, and we’ll buy it. What do you have?”

  Tobias sighed and left the office. He came back with a small, oblong paper-wrapped box with a druggist’s logo of a tree on the front. “Here you go. Willow extract.”

  Tillie frowned. “I need laudanum. Opium. See, I broke my collarbone a couple of weeks ago—”

  “Did he break it?” Tobias jabbed the bottle toward Ian.

  “No!” Ian and Tillie blurted simultaneously again.

  “You sure you two aren’t married?” Tobias asked, tilting his head.

  Ian rubbed his temples. “You’re killing me. Slowly but surely.”

  “What else is family for?” Tobias said, smirking.

  “Anyway,” Tillie said quickly, “I broke my collarbone, and I forgot to bring my medicine with me. The doctor says I should take it all the time to keep it healing well.”

  “All right, all right. I don’t need the spiel. She knows what she wants.” Tobias ducked out and returned with another bottle. “Here you go.”

  Tillie handed him a few coins and unwrapped the bottle. Her fingers shook slightly as she measured several drops under her tongue. She used to prefer it mixed with water and sugar, but lately, she enjoyed the burn of it on the tender flesh beneath her tongue. It seemed to work faster this way. She took fewer drops than last time, as she didn’t like the way Ian had kept commenting on how sleepy she seemed.

  When she put the dropper back in the bottle and sighed luxuriantly, she looked up to see Tobias and Ian were watching her carefully. Ian seemed as if he didn’t recognize her.

  “What is it?” Tillie asked.

  “The girl really enjoys opium, eh?” Tobias said. “So is this why you woke me up? Medicine?”

  “No,” Ian said, frowning as he turned from Tillie. “I need you to teach Miss Pembroke how to pick a lock.”

  “What, am I a gonif?” Tobias said, exasperated.

  “Of course not! Just . . . teach her. I’ll pay you back. Two tickets to the Irving Place Theatre next Saturday. I know someone.”

  “You always know someone,” Tillie murmured.

  “Doesn’t he, though?” Tobias said, clearly amused. “All right. I’ll show her. But you should know, Miss, I know this not because I am a thief but because my good father, Abraham, Ian’s uncle, became very forgetful in his last twenty years. He owned a jewelry shop, and all his supplies were locked up, but he would accidentally throw the keys away every week. So I learned to pick the lock from a locksmith, and there you go.”

  “I see,” Tillie said, brightening. This must be the strangest evening she’d ever had, and she was loving it.

  “What kind of lock is it that you need to open?”

  “A side table drawer.”

  “Oh. Easy. I’ll show you.”

  Tobias stood and glanced around the cramped office. “Does it look like this?” He pointed to a broken bureau crammed into the far reaches of the office. There was a keyhole in the top drawer.

  “Very similar,” Tillie said.

  “All right. Not too difficult. I can’t give you any skeleton key to try, as chances are the shank diameter and bit length will be off. You’ll have to figure it out on your own.”

  Tillie joined him in front of the bureau. Tobias withdrew a skeleton key from one of the drawers. He pointed out the different parts. “This is the shank. This is the bit, the post, and the bow. It’s the bit that helps open the lock. This is the part you need to re-create.”

  Tillie listened with keen ears. Tobias showed her two L-shaped pieces of metal she would need to pick the lock.

  “Push this one up until you feel and hear a click. Then use the other to turn, and then it’s open.”

  He demonstrated with the bureau, then handed the metal pieces to Tillie.

  She knelt on the dusty floor. She pulled her arm out of her makeshift sling, but her shoulder was terribly stiff and sore. It took at least ten tries before she could unlock the drawer.

  Ian whooped. “There! You’ve done it!”

  “Not bad,” Tobias said, wheezing a little. He stood up and stretched.

  Tillie hesitated. “May I see the inside of the lock?”

  “What?” Tobias asked.

  Ian looked at her, puzzled. “What for?”

  “I want to know why it works. It feels like someone giving me the answer to a puzzle, without figuring it out for myself.”

  “But—” Ian started, but the look on Tillie’s face made his frown disappear. They had time, after all. They had all night. “Tobias? Would you mind?”

  “Sure, why not
? It’s only sleep I’m missing.” He grabbed a broken lock that looked like it had once been embedded in a door and started unscrewing the front face. “We’re all just walking around half-dead anyway.”

  “Ah, but it’s the half-alive part that makes it all fun,” Tillie said, beaming.

  “That optimism will be the death of you,” Tobias said, wheezing again now that he was cramped over the deconstructed lock. “Okay, Miss Pembroke. This is how a lock works.”

  They all crowded in to look as Tobias painstakingly went over the mechanism. In the midst of the lesson, Tillie caught her reflection in an old bronze mirror leaning against the wall. What was that expression, that fire in her eyes? Not just curiosity or happiness. Something else.

  Ah—she knew.

  Incandescence. If a face could be the definition of a word, Tillie had it.

  After they left Tobias’s grocery store with four different L-shaped metal tools in Tillie’s purse, Ian motioned for her to go down the street.

  “One last thing I promised,” he said. He brought her to a saloon around the corner. It was dimly lit and noisy. Several men stood outside the door, smoking and arguing in Polish. Spotting Ian, two of them smiled. The taller, blonder man, wearing a vest, clapped him on the back.

  “Cześć! Czy to twoja żona?”

  “Cześć. Nie, nie. Przyjaciel,” Ian responded, but his eyes were downcast, and Tillie could swear that he was blushing.

  “What were you saying?” Tillie whispered as they went into the saloon.

  “They thought you were my wife. Seems a common thought this evening! I said no, but I should have said yes. Now they probably think you’re a . . . a . . .”

  Tillie blanched. “A what?”

  “Well, most unaccompanied women down here can be assumed to be . . . working women.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll tell them you’re my fiancée when we leave so they don’t get any ideas.”

  Now it was Tillie’s turn to blush. Luckily, there was so much to look at and absorb. She had never been in such an establishment, and she was taken aback by the noise. People were chatting loudly in every corner, filling tables and standing by the walls. Italian, German, Polish, Russian, Yiddish, all swirling around her. The bar was serving plates of small meat pies, sliced bratwurst, pickles, fried oysters. Ian found a small table for them and hollered to a man behind them wearing a filthy apron.

  “Absinthe, for two.”

  “Absinthe?” Tillie squeaked.

  “Yes. If you’re going to know why it was found where your sister died, you need to know what it is. Also, it’s one of my favorite drinks.”

  They waved away a bowl of salted pickled herring. Ian wrinkled his nose. “This saloon serves everyone, which means that their food isn’t the best. If you want better Russian or Polish fare, I know where to go. Oh, here it is.”

  The absinthe arrived. There were two small wineglasses, smaller than the ones at Tillie’s home. At the bottom was a portion of a faintly green, clear liquid perhaps two fingers high. A bowl with two flat, rectangular sugar cubes sat between them, and two slotted spoons (just like Ian’s!) were laid next to the glasses. A carafe of cold water was also placed on the table.

  “What do I do with all of this?” Tillie asked, waving her hands. “Why is it green? Is the water for after?” She sniffed the liquor delicately. “It smells like licorice.”

  “It’s the anise and fennel. The wormwood makes it green. They say that it makes you more creative to drink this. They call it ‘the green muse.’ Didn’t you hear that it was a favorite of Lord Byron and all the great artists?”

  “I didn’t. Fascinating.”

  “Well, here is what you do. Put the spoon on the top of the glass. And put the sugar cube on the spoon. Then we take the cold water and . . .” Ian began to pour a dribble of icy-cold water over the sugar. It saturated the cube, changing its color from white to slightly translucent before the cube began to disintegrate, and the crystals slipped through the slotted spoon into the drink. As the sweetened ice water hit the absinthe, the clear emerald liquid turned a murky greenish fog.

  “That’s a good louche,” Ian murmured. “Your turn.”

  Tillie did the same, her eyes wide with fascination. When the sugar was gone and the glass full (“Not too full!” Ian warned, stopping her just in time), they raised their glasses.

  “Here’s to finding out answers,” Ian said.

  “For Lucy,” Tillie said, her eyes smarting.

  She sipped the liquid. It was stronger than she’d expected, even after all the watering down. And it was so strange. Slightly bitter, slightly sweet, with that intense licorice flavor.

  “Do you do this often?” Tillie asked between sips.

  “Drink absinthe? Sometimes. I think it’s delicious. And sometimes it helps me think through problems. It brings a different perspective.”

  “No, I mean, bring girls to saloons and plan on tracking down murderers.”

  Ian laughed. “Of course not. You’re my first.”

  Tillie smiled. The drink warmed her stomach and began to send a buzzing sensation through her torso and up to her cheeks. She felt wonderful. Wonderful, but off. Her head felt slightly detached, and she blinked a few times, trying to focus on Ian’s brown eyes. She felt like she could fly right now. But somehow, she didn’t think she should say so out loud.

  “Don’t drink it all. It’s a little strong, and you had that medicine too.”

  “Yes, I did,” Tillie said, smiling.

  “You shouldn’t take so much,” Ian said, his smile loosening to a look of consternation.

  “What? Opium? You sound like my mother.”

  “Oy, not something I’m usually accused of.”

  “Tell me about your brother,” Tillie said, shaking her head and bringing her focus back.

  Ian’s gaze was wistful. “He was so cute. Curly brown hair, curlier than mine. And he had these pretty blue eyes, the first blue eyes in the family. If you tickled his ears, he would laugh.”

  Tillie smiled, but it was the smile of remembering all things precious now gone from the world. Christmas mornings past. The day her father had gifted her her prized dictionary. Lucy, reading out of the very same tome to soothe her.

  “You know, that lady who killed him didn’t even go to jail. She wasn’t even sorry. I hear she eventually left town for Boston, but . . .” He sighed. “I despise opium. You should see people lined up to smoke it on Baxter Street. They look half-alive. It’s not right.”

  Tillie stiffened. “Well, I have a broken bone. My doctor told me to take it.”

  Ian’s face was neutral. “Anyway, I have my sad story. And you have yours.” He took some money out and handed it to the waiter. “And now you know what absinthe is, and we need to find out why it was at the scene of your sister’s murder.”

  “Yes,” Tillie said faintly. “I don’t think Lucy ever drank it. But then again, I can’t ask her. Maybe the vampire drinks it. But vampires drink blood, not absinthe, so that makes me think the murderer wasn’t a vampire after all.”

  “That’s sound logic. But then again—it might have just been someone’s trash, nothing to do with your sister at all.”

  “That’s possible too,” Tillie admitted.

  Ian walked her to the elevated station, all the way up the stairs, and waited with her for the next train. The slightly cooler air and the walking had cleared her head a bit. The absinthe’s effect was melting away.

  “You’ll read that”—she pointed to the book in Ian’s jacket pocket—“and let me know what you think. I have so many questions. You’ll find out if we can do some looking into the other vampire claims in the papers?”

  “Sure, I can.” He yawned. It was three in the morning, and Ian would have to pick up his papers soon. “And you see if you can find something useful in that locked drawer. We can meet again next week.”

  “Midnight, if that’s all right. Where?”

  “You really can’t go out during the day? You’re a
vampire yourself.” Tillie frowned deeply, and Ian put up a hand. “Sorry. Bad joke. All right then. Midnight. Meet me at Newspaper Row, in front of the World Building. One week from today.”

  “Very well. Thank you, Mr. Metzger.”

  “Good golly, just call me Ian.”

  “And you can call me Tillie.”

  Ian smiled brightly, but she could see the redness creeping into his eyes. “Oh, and here.” He handed her back her little notebook, the one he’d been writing in when they were walking. “Keep writing notes!”

  As the train chugged into the station, he offered to buy a ticket to accompany her, but Tillie refused. The train was empty, and she thought he looked rather exhausted.

  All the way back, she was the only passenger in her car. Unexpectedly, she enjoyed the solitude. When the train stopped at the Sixty-Seventh Street station, she walked briskly home, but her pain was returning with every step.

  What a night, she thought. She had escaped her house and gone on an adventure in the Bowery, of all places. She’d learned how to pick a lock! And drink absinthe! And spent time with a man, unaccompanied—and nothing untoward had happened.

  When Tillie arrived at her house, she watched from a far street corner as John O’Toole rounded the front. The second he turned the corner, Tillie moved as fast as she could. It was difficult to run without being able to swing her one arm. She made it through the gate, up the stairs, and inside just before John wound around the south side of the house to the front.

  Her breath came in quick pants. She would have to ask Ada to bring John more food later in the night so she could bookend her comings and goings without fear of getting caught.

  Tillie was too tired to try to pick the lock of Lucy’s side table. She went instead to her room and, with great difficulty, undressed herself. Her pain was creeping back, as well as that sensation of falling—or was it failing? She was transmuting back into the Tillie that was imperfect, cracked. The timing of this inevitable transformation seemed to coincide with her medicine wearing off. She pulled out the tiny bottle from Tobias’s grocery and drew up a full dropperful. She would need to sleep quite a bit, and she had a broken bone, after all.