A Fatal Four-Pack

by P. B. Ryan

  “Good day, Deng Bao.” Will dipped his head while gripping a counter for support.

  The old man grunted something, his voice dry as ground bones.

  “Hsiang yen?” Will raised two fingers to his lips and inhaled.

  Deng Bao aimed a quaking finger at a shelf. Will foraged among cigar boxes and pouches of tobacco, sighing in relief when he came up with an exotically decorated tin labeled Turkish Orientals, which he pocketed. He paid the proprietor, who made change from his lockbox, handing him a box of matches along with the coins.

  Will pointed to a curtained doorway in the corner behind Deng Bao, and then to the ceiling. “We go upstairs?”

  The old man scrutinized Nell, taking in her elegant though soiled costume with a studied lack of expression. Pointing to Will and then to the doorway, he nodded and spoke a few cordial-sounding words in his native tongue. But his tone sharpened when he returned his attention to Nell. He held up his palm as if to say, “She stays here.”

  Will startled Nell by curling an arm around her waist and drawing her close. “Jinu,” he said.

  The old man’s wiry eyebrows twitched upward. He scrutinized her for a long moment, his gaze lingering for some reason on her disheveled hair. Finally he gave one quick little nod and gestured toward the doorway.

  “Come, before he changes his mind again.” Guiding her with a hand on her back, Will urged Nell through the heavy draperies—several layers of them—that hung over the door. “I’d best go first.”

  “What was that all about?” Nell asked as she followed him up a creaky staircase. She breathed in a sweet, sooty aroma from above. It reminded her of roasting hazelnuts, but wasn’t. Burnt treacle? Not that, either.

  “He probably suspected you were just here to gawk—or even worse, preach,” Will said, pausing halfway up to catch his breath. “You look too respectable.”

  “I didn’t know that was possible.”

  “Obviously,” he grunted, clutching the banister hand over hand until he reached the top step and another curtained-off doorway.

  “What did you say to convince him to let me come up?” she asked.

  “I told him you were a whore.”

  “What?” She gaped at him in outrage. “Why?”

  “Because,” he said mildly as he held the curtains aside for her, “only whores come to places like this.”

  The room Nell stepped into—a sort of reception parlor apparently, fashioned from the second-floor landing—was downright austere compared to the shop beneath them. The walls and floor were unpainted, the only furniture a small table behind which sat another Chinaman, albeit a good deal younger than the shopkeeper, and sporting a moustache and spectacles. Although traditionally garbed from the neck down, in a yellow-sleeved scarlet smock with frog closures, his headgear consisted of a rather rumpled black pork pie hat.

  Spread out on the table before him were perhaps two dozen little glass spirit lamps, which he was filling from a jug of oil. Nell caught a whiff of something that reminded her of a cake the Hewitts’ cook liked to make; coconut?

  “You’re back!” The Chinaman leapt to his feet, arms outstretched, his smile fading as he took in Will’s cuts and bruises. “What happen you?”

  “My own fault, Zhou Chiang. Had a bit too much absinthe and took a spill.”

  “Absinthe! Vile green piss!” Zhou Chiang’s sour expression morphed into a smile as he turned to Nell. “Who this?”

  “My keeper.”

  “Welcome, Miss Keeper,” greeted the Chinaman with a little duck of his head; not a full bow, and the pork pie stayed put. Only whores come to places like this. He gestured toward an open doorway, through which Nell could see four men—three white and one Chinese—sitting in a fog of cigar smoke around a table lit by a mammoth and ornate paper lantern. “Poker today.” He made a shuffling motion with his hands, winking conspiratorially at Will. “Rich suckers. You play? Win big.”

  “Not today, old man. Got the yen-yen.” Will held out a quivering hand.

  “We fix that.” Zhou Chiang crossed to a closed door on the other side of the landing and swung it open. “Lau!” he barked, motioning Will and Nell into the dimly lit room. An adolescent Chinese boy dashed over to them, murmuring assent in response to Zhou Chiang’s unintelligible commands.

  The door closed behind them; Nell felt her stomach tighten. The room in which she found herself was large, and lined on three sides with wide, double-tiered wooden bunks covered with straw matting. None of the top bunks was occupied, but several shadowy figures reclined on the bottom. A handful of flickering little lamps provided the only light in the dusky room. The air was sultry, thick and permeated with that scorched sweetness she’d first detected in the stairwell.

  The boy called Lau cocked his hand toward Nell in a “give me” gesture.

  Nell looked toward Will, who said, “He wants to hang up your coat. Let him. It gets awfully close in here.” He shucked off his own coat and handed it to Lau, who hung it on a peg.

  “I can’t stay,” Nell said. “Neither can you. I need to take you home, Dr. Hewitt.”

  “I need this more, Miss Sweeney.”

  “No, you don’t understand. It’s a condition of your release on bail that you avoid all public houses and establishments of ill fame. Gambling and opium are specifically prohibited.” Along with “purveyors of strong liquor” and “houses of assignation.”

  Lau pointed to Will’s shoes. Squatting to untie them, he said, “Telling me not to come to places like this, Cornelia, is like telling me not to eat and breathe.”

  She said, “I would actually appreciate it very much if you didn’t call me that.”

  He looked up at her with a wry expression as he loosened his laces. “You’ve seen me vomiting in the gutter. I should think we might properly be on a first name basis.”

  “I’d rather leave things as they are, if it’s all the same.”

  He appeared to mull that over as he stood and kicked off his shoes for Lau to line up against the wall next to several other pairs. “Yes, I suppose I would prefer that, too, if I were you.”

  Lau turned to Nell a little shyly, glancing in the direction of her feet.

  She backed up a step. “I’ll keep mine, thank you.”

  “At least let him take your overcoat,” Will said. “Wouldn’t want you fainting on me.”

  “I never faint,” she protested, even as she relinquished her coat, wishing she hadn’t sworn to Viola that she would stay with Will until he was safely ensconced in his lodgings.

  Lau hung up the coat and turned to Will. “Yen gao?”

  Will dug a shaky hand into his trouser pocket. “Absolutely.”

  Lau held his hand out. “Two bit.”

  “Two bits’ worth won’t do, I’m afraid.” Will counted out six dollars. “Hop toy. And a smoking pistol—yen tsiang—a good one this time. Bamboo, not wood. Understand? Bamboo?”

  “Bamboo.” The boy took the money and disappeared through a door in the corner.

  Will walked to an empty bunk on the left, ducking under the top tier to seat himself on the bottom. Extracting his cigarettes and matches, he set them on a pair of nested lacquered trays laid out with an assortment of curious implements, including an unlit oil lamp like those Zhou Chiang had been filling. The lamp’s base of tarnished brass was engraved with what looked like poppies.

  There’s one in the South Cove that’s a proper lay-down joint with all the fixings, like what they’ve got in San Francisco.

  “Have a seat, Miss Sweeney.” Will indicated the bunk on the other side of the tray.

  “I’d rather stand.”

  “You’ll only draw attention to yourself,” he said as he rolled up his bloodstained sleeves. “Is that really what you want?”

  Nell surveyed the room. On the bunk catty-corner from theirs, two Chinamen drowsed on their sides, their heads supported by odd little concave wooden benches. At first she thought that the bunk directly opposite was occupied by a lone woman, a w
anton judging by her painted face and tawdry dress, unfastened at the neckline to display an indecent swell of bosom. But then Nell noticed a white-sleeved arm embracing her from behind and realized it belonged to a man tucked up against her. A mound of pillows served in lieu of wooden headrests—a concession for non-Chinese customers, perhaps? The man lay unmoving, while the woman busied herself by twirling something that looked like a knitting needle over the flame of her lamp. She glanced icily at Nell, as if to ask, What are you looking at?

  Nell sat. The ceiling formed by the top bunk was inches above her head; it felt strange and somehow illicit to be sharing this cramped space with this man. “I can’t be here, Dr. Hewitt.”

  “No one’s holding a gun to your head, Miss Sweeney.” He lifted a pair of dainty little scissors from the tray and used them to trim the lamp wick. Furrows formed between his brows as he strove to keep his hands steady and snip the wick just at the right point. He struck a match and touched it to the wick, bathing them in an aura of golden light that only seemed to magnify the intimacy of their little niche.

  It was as he was replacing the lamp’s bell-shaped glass cover that Nell noticed a ring of livid abrasions around each of his wrists. They were the scars left by manacles, or rather by his hands straining against them. She knew that because her brother Jamie had ended up with marks like that back in fifty-nine, after the Falmouth constabulary ran him in for robbing that livery driver. They’d yanked his hands behind him and shackled them to a chair rung before they started working him over; his feet had been bound, too, so he couldn’t kick at his tormenters. Was that how it had been with Will the night before last? She imagined him fettered like that, unable to ward off the blows, yet refusing to explain how Ernest Tulley had ended up with a certain folding bistoury in his throat. Perhaps, knowing Will, he’d even gotten in a droll gibe or two. And knowing the police—for they were the same everywhere—they would have responded by redoubling their punishments.

  Nell looked away, sweeping the image from her mind, or trying to. The last thing she should be feeling for this man was pity. Perhaps “Saint August,” with his interminable harangues about mastering one’s emotions for one’s own good, had a point after all. For Nell to allow herself to feel sorry for William Hewitt would only serve to give him power over her. She had herself to think of. He could go to the Devil, as he seemed so determined to do.

  With the added lamplight, and with her eyes growing accustomed to the gloom, Nell could see just how dreary this place really was. The ceiling was smoke-blackened and dappled with water spots; the walls as well, to a lesser extent. Chinese scrolls had been tacked up here and there in a vain attempt to cover gaps in the plaster where the laths were exposed. There were windows, but they were all shut tight and papered over, no doubt for privacy. The very air felt heavy and rank in her lungs.

  “Relax, Miss Sweeney.” Will slumped against the wall, coughing weakly. “You’re propped up like a fashion doll on a shelf.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t know how to comport myself in a hop joint.”

  “If you recall, I advised you to stay away. You’re free to leave whenever you wish.”

  “I promised your mother I’d see you safely home. You led me to believe that was where you were taking me.”

  He smiled blandly. “You led yourself to believe that. You infer too much, Miss Sweeney—far too many facile assumptions. It’s the only flaw I can discern in an otherwise sterling intellect.”

  Lau reappeared, placing upon Will’s tray a little cylindrical horn box and what could only be a pipe—although it didn’t look like any pipe Nell had ever seen. It was crafted of a two-foot length of bamboo stained with a glossy black patina. The small terra-cotta bowl, several inches from the pipe’s ivory-tipped end, took the form of an enclosed chamber shaped somewhat like a doorknob, with a tiny hole in the center of the flattened upper surface.

  Lau offered a pillow to Will, but he waved it away.

  “Too soft. Chum tow.”

  The youth retreated with a nod.

  “Stay or go,” Will said as he twisted the lid off the horn box, revealing a soft black paste, which he sniffed approvingly. “It’s your choice. If you choose to stay, I promise not to hold you down and force a smoking pistol into your mouth. In return, I would simply ask that you stop blathering on about how I’ve lured you to this lair of corruption when, in fact, I’d just as soon you were on your way.”

  “Chum tow.” Lau returned with a headrest, which he set near the tray. Will pressed a coin into his hand and sent him away.

  Taking up a long steel spindle—what had looked before like a knitting needle—Will scooped up a pea-sized dab of opium paste on its tip. He reclined on his side, his head on the chum tow, and rotated the tarry little mass just above the oil lamp’s flame. His movements were halting, his breathing labored, his hands still quite unsteady.

  The woman on the opposite bunk whispered something to her companion. Casting a discreet glance in their direction, Nell saw that the man had awakened and lifted his head to watch the woman draw on her pipe. He was handsome and well-groomed, with a clean-shaven face and fair, lightly oiled hair—probably some young swell out for a little illicit afternoon exploit. His arm was still curled around the trollop, but he’d shifted his hand to cradle her right breast, as nonchalantly as if they were alone in bed.

  Will, preoccupied with his preparations, didn’t seem to notice. The little nugget bubbled and swelled as he spun it above the flame.

  In a near-whisper, Nell said, “I can’t imagine why that old man believed you when you told him I was a...” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word, one which she’d uttered freely in her former life, when half the women she knew earned their livings on their backs; only by the grace of God had she avoided that fate. Will cast her a fleeting, amused glance before returning his attention to the seething opium, transmuted by fire into something that looked and smelled as enticing as molten caramel.

  “I don’t look like a...” She pressed her lips together, embarrassed by the priggishness he brought out in her, and at him for thinking it was funny. “I don’t.”

  “That just shows your naivete. There are whores plying their trade in this city—in every city—who look as if they could be taking tea with the Queen. They’re often the best ones, though you’d never guess it to look at them.”

  How often, when others treated her like the innocent little Irish governess without a past, had Nell thought, If only you knew... Yet it mattered not a whit how straightlaced she acted—and felt—with William Hewitt; he saw right through her. He talked about things every well-bred man knew not to bring up in the presence of a lady, but she couldn’t quite decide whether to be insulted or gratified. Did he feel free to discuss whores, for instance, because he viewed her as occupying a lower moral plane, or because he deemed her intelligent and enlightened enough not to swoon with indignation?

  Will withdrew the opium from the flame and, retaining it on the tip of the spindle, proceeded to knead and stretch it upon the roof of the pipe bowl, dipping it from time to time in the flame to keep it pliant. They’re often the best ones... No wonder he knew the Chinese word for “whore.” He probably knew it in any number of different tongues.

  “If your position as a governess ever falls through,” he said as he rolled the opium once again into a pea-sized ball, “you might consider that line of work yourself. I daresay you could be very successful at it.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “There you go drawing inferences again. You should watch that. You give far too much away.”

  Impaling the little morsel on the tip of the needle, he thrust it into the bowl’s tiny aperture, extracting the instrument with a twisting motion in order to leave the pea there with a little hole in it. He leaned forward then, slanting the bowl across the flame while maneuvering the opium with the needle to keep it in place. It sizzled into vapor as he sucked on the pipe, drawing so deeply of the treacly fumes that his cheekbo
nes stood out like a Chinaman’s. Nell found it hard to believe that he could inhale as long as he did; fifteen full seconds must have passed before he slid the pipe from his mouth.

  Sweet white smoke trickled from his nostrils as he lowered the pipe with an arm gone utterly slack. He sank down bonelessly onto the bunk, eyes slitted, lips parted, exuding an otherworldly repose. No longer did he tremble; his chest rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm.

  “Dr. Hewitt?” Nell said softly.

  His hand twitched, but slowly, as if he were underwater; his eyes drifted shut.

  “Are you...are you all—”

  “Shhh,” he breathed.

  Chapter 8

  For the second time in one day, Nell was struck by William Hewitt’s resemblance to a corpse—only this time, despite his wounds and bloodstained shirt, he looked like a man who’d died happy instead of anguished. Moreover, there was a kind of languid masculine grace in the way his body had settled, all long limbs and interesting angles. Perhaps, when she got home this evening, she would sketch him like this.

  Will’s eyes opened halfway, his dreamy, opalescent gaze seeking out hers before closing again on a sigh.

  Perhaps not. Turning away from him, Nell fluffed and smoothed her skirts. She set about tidying her hair as best she could, but the wayward tendrils didn’t seem to want to get tucked back into the netting.

  Across the room, the harlot with the pipe had also fallen into a stupor, her head slumped forward on the pillow, her lips—so darkly rouged as to look black in the halflight—slightly parted. The man behind her, his face fully visible now, caressed her languorously.

  Three and a half years had passed since Nell had felt the touch of a man’s hand on her bare flesh. A lifetime might pass without her feeling it again. Such was the price of respectability—a respectability William Hewitt might find laughable, but which she cherished for making possible her new life with all its many boons, the chief of which was Gracie. Nothing worthwhile came without a price, and Nell was willing to pay for her blessings. Still, sometimes, especially late at night as she lay in her big bed by herself, she found herself reflecting that the cost was really rather cruel.