The Last Dickens

by Matthew Pearl

  Because the Irish were assigned divisional beats in the poorest sections of London, Tom had been one of the constables on patrol alerted to the commotion in the Palmer's Folly court on the night of Osgood's attack. He had been fixing a coalhole that had come dangerously loose in a nearby street. Upon reaching the scene of activity Tom witnessed Rogers fleeing, his head bloodied and injured, and recognized him.

  “I knew him as the man who, in his Washington wig and old-fashioned three-cornered hat, started the riot at the ticket sale in Brooklyn that I was blamed for. His appearance in London was remarkable to me, as you'd imagine. I decided to shadow him so that I could discover more, and I found out that he was boarding under an assumed name in an out-of-the-way lodging house. I followed him for several more days, discovering that he had been wiring telegraphs and sending letters back to New York. When I saw him enter this hotel, I examined the guest ledger and was freshly amazed to find your name among the occupants here, Mr. Osgood. I suspected that he had been operating some design of nefarious nature ever since our time in America, but I didn't know if he was a confidence man of some kind, a thief, a brazen murderer.”

  “That is why you brought your pistol,” Osgood said.

  Tom nodded, putting his pistol aside with a relieved smile. “To be honest, it's lucky that I didn't have to use it. They have issued them to the department because of the Fenian attacks on the government and on the prisons. Because I'm of Irish blood, I have been assigned to infiltrate what's left of the Fenian groups. But the department has only held sporadic training with the pistols, and I have yet to be instructed in them.”

  Osgood, in his turn, shared with Tom a full and detailed account of their adventures on the Samaria with Herman and their experiences in England.

  Tom pulled the curtains around the room closed as he listened.

  “Mr. Branagan, what's wrong?” Rebecca asked. “Do you think someone is watching us?”

  Tom leaned both arms on the mantelpiece. In the two years since the American tour, he had grown a full beard and his arms and chest had become more prominent. Any Renaissance sculptor would have been grateful for him as a model.

  “The cane you described with the strange gold head that the man called Herman possessed-did you see it up close?” Tom asked.

  Osgood nodded. “It was a sort of dragon.”

  “Do you remember if it had teeth?”

  “Yes,” said Osgood, “sharp as razor blades. How did you know?”

  “Herman,” Tom repeated the name to himself. “We must move in secret from now on.”

  “You know who that monster is then who attacked Mr. Osgood on the ship?” Rebecca asked.

  “The marks on the necks and chests of the bodies of the dead opium fiends-they were almost like fang marks. The police did not know what to think of them.”

  “Made by his cane!” Osgood cried. “The beast's head!”

  “If you encountered the same man on your steamship, then this was no random attack,” said Tom.

  “Then I did not imagine him at the opium room,” Osgood said with a gasp. Even as he said this, Herman's stony visage entered his mind. “He really was there, Miss Sand; you were right, he was never a mere pickpocket! If he was the one who injected me with opium, it must have been him who did the same to poor Daniel. It was Herman that intervened in the attack, killing the Lascar and the Bengalee. He is the devil we must confront to unravel all this! Can the police find him, Branagan?”

  “Scotland Yard will not treat the death of two wretched opium eaters seriously. But I don't know if we will have to find him,” Tom said mysteriously.

  “What do you mean, Mr. Branagan?” Rebecca asked.

  “If I am correct, Miss Sand, the challenge will not be to find him. It will be to avoid him long enough to learn which way this fatal wind blows.”

  YAHEE WAS AN opium dealer but not only that. He was said to be the first one of his craft in London, the one to show all the others how to mix and smoke the black ooze. Known by many East Londoners as Jack Chinaman, Yahee occasionally irritated the wrong member of the London police, and when he did, he would usually be put in the cage for begging or some other trifle, since opium itself was not illegal. He was pleasantly surprised when, after the latest incarceration, he was released from prison two weeks early; at first, he thought his internal sense of the calendar had been altered while he was locked away, but he was told the prison was too crowded to feed every ill-mannered Chinaman.

  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.

  “You must escape,” said a young Englishman who had taken a particular interest in the singular Parsee boy. “They will kill you and cut off your head if you don't! We will help if you take us with you, Herman.” The British and American prisoners had called him Herman, their best approximation of his Parsee name.

  Realizing that there would be consequences for his murder of the pirate, Hormazd stiffened and nodded. “Please help,” he said.

  “Nah, don't count me in,” said a Scotch prisoner. “I won't risk my hide because of this fire worshipper's heathen impulses! A fellow who refuses even to smoke, and with that Hindoo wrap on his head!”

  Hormazd took a step toward the Scotchman. The English prisoner stepped between them. “Would you like to fight him?” he asked the Scotch sailor, who demurred. “The man you see is neither a Hindoo nor a Mohammedan,” the Englishman went on, “but a Parsee, a follower of Zoroaster and an ally of British power in India. Respect him, my friend, and we will help each other.”

  Rolling the body of the murdered pirate into the water, Hormazd and the European captives were able to procure a small arsenal of weapons from the lorchas stores without being observed and then slipped into an open whaleboat. Before long, they had been spotted by the pirates’ lookout aboard the lorcha and were fired upon with grapeshot. Lying down flat in the boat, Hormazd used a rifle to kill more than half of the twenty pirates on the deck.

  Hormazd insisted on turning back to reboard the lorcha.

  “Insanity! We have a clear path to escape!” the Scotchman in the whaleboat protested. “We're almost out of ammunition.”

  “We have enough,” Hormazd said flatly. “In ancient times, my people were driven from our land. In battle we scatter the heads of our foes-no Parsee ever turns his back though a millstone were dashed at his head.” Several of the pirates who'd escaped his fire because they were belowdeck, he said, had been responsible for the slaughter of his family and shipmates, and he would not leave them to prosper. Hormazd alone climbed up the netting on the side of the lorcha. After a quarter of an hour, Hormazd returned holding the head of one of the pirates. On the shore, he placed the head on a stake facing the water for Ah'ling to find. Then he strapped the body of a Chinese pirate to each yardarm, and Hormazd and the Englishman piloted the lorcha away.

  When they reached Canton, they were congratulated by a chief mandarin on disabling one of the most nefarious pirate crews terrorizing innocent fishermen and traders. The men were showered by the mandarin with drink, jewels, and silver. On their way through the streets of Canton to the English settlement, a thief tried to take Hormazd's booty by smashing him across the head with a steel bar. Hormazd did not even flinch or turn around. Instead, he grasped the bar and flung the man to the ground, breaking the thief's arm in two places.

  This was witnessed by many of the locals, who whispered of it, and from that day forward began to speak of a ghostly figure from foreign lands they called Ironhead.

  The thief, who had fled by foot, dropped a bag filled with riches he'd plundered from other victims. Among these was a pure gold idol, a head of a Kylin with onyx for eyes-the Kylin, a mythological single-horned beast believed to bring good fortune and punish wicked men with fire and destruction. When it walked on land it left behind no footprints; when it walked on water it caused no ripple. Hormazd knew none of this then but, regardless, was drawn to it the empathetic way an ordinary man might be drawn to a starving dog. At the English settlement he paid to have the Kylin head to be attached to a walking stick and kept it with him when he sailed to London from Canton.

  With his new riches and
his great fortitude, Hormazd, it was said, began to build his own London-based opium-smuggling business. Ships would procure opium taken from India, away from the official channels of the colonial government, which was strictly controlled by the English, and smuggle the drug into English and American ports without the burden of tariffs and inspection for adulteration. However, the Englishman who had been a captive with Hormazd among the pirates and had helped him to escape soon unwittingly discovered some of the secrets of his operations.

  “Who was this Englishman?” Osgood interrupted the teller urgently.

  “A son of Han,” said Yahee. “Young man, name Edward Trood.”

  “What do you mean, a son of Han?” Tom asked.

  Yahee explained that Eddie Trood was a quick-witted though reserved young man who had learned Chinese so well in his travels that he had been kept alive by the pirates to do translations. He was called a son of Han, as if he were a Chinaman himself, by the natives, and a true rarity, for the Chinese government had banned the teaching of their language to foreigners, wishing to control Chinese merchants’ dealings with Europeans and to curb the sale of opium to the Chinese people.

  Back in London, where Eddie had also returned, Herman soon discovered that Eddie possessed great knowledge of the workings of Herman's operation. Herman and Imam, a Turkish opium trader also involved in the worldwide scheme, sought out Eddie's uncle, a minor opium pusher in London, who quickly and cowardly gave up his nephew. Eddie had been doomed, Yahee said with a glum chuckle, “because he crossed Ironhead Herman.”

  Opium eaters whispered to dealers who whispered to traders. The youth's body was rumored to be buried in a wall of the uncle's home, and when Yahee and all the others heard the whispers, nobody ever dared try to infiltrate Herman's operation again.

  Yahee stopped his story in the middle of a thought. He craned his head back and looked into the gloom of the tunnel.

  “What is it, Yahee?” Osgood asked.

  Yahee shivered. There was a creak from somewhere in the tunnel, a series of loud bangs following after.