The Empty Birdcage

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  When the brougham began to slow, Mycroft dared have a look outside. It was a relatively mild day, with cirrostratus clouds that looked as if a painter had cleaned his white brush upon a periwinkle sky. But even that lovely overhead canvas could not mitigate the tottering wreck that lay below it.

  Most of the houses in Jennings were wooden and less structurally sound than the average matchbox. They spread out among five courtyards like decaying teeth. The windows, if one could call them that, were unglazed or absent altogether. Instead of mats on which to wipe one’s feet, before each door was a dunghill composed of the previous night’s waste—monuments in offal in a place where a thousand people were said to have use of less than fifty toilets. In the center of the buildings, like a squalid town square, was an open cesspool emitting noxious gases.

  “I’d heard this neighborhood referred to as ‘pestiferous,’” Mycroft said in hushed tones. “Whoever described it thus is proving accurate to a fault.”

  “No need to lower your voice, Mycroft, for no one is listening,” Douglas said. “Yet, I understand the impetus to whisper; such a place is a shock to the system. It should not exist at all.” Douglas sighed. “Such is the proverbial luck of the Irish: uneducated immigrants barred even from other woebegone rookeries. You’d think that they are here because they can afford nothing better. In fact, it costs more to live in Jennings than in better quarters, but it is the only corner of the city that will have them.”

  “I well know how such landlords earn their money,” Mycroft murmured. “As a matter of fact, I was asked to invest in a rookery of this ilk and I said no.”

  “Were you?” Douglas asked, surprised.

  “They have no shortage of pubs,” Mycroft went on, staring out. “I can count six within a stone’s throw.”

  He was busy with other sorts of counting as well: hordes of ragged people on the street. Men, women, and children with nowhere to go, adding to those who were peering out of the windows. Their eyes, wide with surprise at the fine carriage, were quickly turning shrewd with covetousness, mingled with territorial gall.

  The brougham turned around, and then around again, their driver clearly seeking a place to stop that would be dry and, above all, safe.

  “Alas, these poor shall have to live out their misery elsewhere, ere long,” Mycroft said as the driver performed several figure of eights.

  “Why is that?” Douglas asked.

  “Someone just bought Jennings Rents,” Mycroft replied. “A wealthy investor, so I hear, is set to purchase the freeholds from the owners, part and parcel. He plans to give each renter two pounds per room, provided they leave of their own free will.”

  “None of these people has ever held more than two shillings in their hands at once,” Douglas retorted. “My guess is, they will take it and will be scattered inside of a month. But why would Ai Lin be here?” he went on. “I imagine it is some sort of charity that consumes her, but even the charity workers give Jennings a wide berth, and now if it is to be destroyed, as you say…”

  Mycroft took in a deep breath to calm himself. “We should send the carriage away,” he said as the driver continued to turn the horses about. “For I cannot vouchsafe the Queen’s property, to say nothing of the poor driver. He can return for us in an hour’s time, what do you say? Are you up to it?”

  “By all means,” Douglas replied. “No doubt he is accustomed to more genteel environs.”

  Their driver was a thin, impeccably dressed and coiffed man of middle years named Carlton. Indeed, when Mycroft had first presented him with the address, Carlton seemed to have forgotten how to swallow, and beads of sweat had broken out from under his hat. Mycroft wondered how he was faring now.

  Meanwhile, out of the window, he was beginning to spot the glint of knives and rocks, their brandishers looking to overpower the driver the moment he dropped off his charges. They could break down a fancy rig in the blink of an eye, and cart it off from shaft to leaf spring.

  At last, Carlton found the only place to halt where wheels and men would not be instantly submerged in muck. As Mycroft and Douglas stepped out, the poor driver seemed so rattled by the whole endeavor that his mustaches quivered like the whiskers on a hare. He could hardly keep his hands still as he put up the folding step and closed the door behind them.

  “Once we ascertain that we have indeed come to the right place, you need not linger,” Mycroft informed him.

  “Sir?” Carlton queried, puzzled.

  “I said you are free to leave and then reclaim us an hour from now,” Mycroft repeated.

  The man looked about at the gathering rabble as if he were expecting to be struck at any moment, which was not far from the truth, and shook his head. “I cannot leave you here, sir. Defenseless.” He leaned in and whispered the final word.

  “I said I give you leave,” Mycroft insisted.

  “Sir, I cannot,” Carlton repeated, his legs quaking in fear. “It wouldn’t be right, sir.”

  Mycroft glanced at Douglas, who glanced about in turn.

  “You, boy!” Douglas called out to one of some dozen scabby urchins who had begun to approach the carriage with unwholesome intent, while ragged adults lingered a bit farther afield, watching the proceedings for their opportunity.

  “Yes, you!” Douglas repeated, pointing.

  Some fourteen years of age, the boy whom Douglas addressed seemed the biggest and most canny of the lot.

  “Wot’s it you want?” the boy demanded, moving closer.

  “That rock you hold in your pocket, I would like you to lob it at my head.”

  The boy seemed taken aback: he and the others with him.

  “You want I should lob a rock at yer ’ead?” he repeated.

  “If you would be so kind,” Douglas said with a nod. “As hard as you can.”

  The boy stared suspiciously at the tall black man, as if he were being made a fool of, but too late. His mates had already begun to snicker, and to goad him on.

  “Get ’im, Pete! Smack that teapot good!” they cried until the boy—Pete—had no choice but to bow to pressure.

  He reached into his pocket, selected a good-sized rock, reared back his fist, and lobbed it for all he was worth.

  Douglas ducked his head out of the way just as it sailed past, then lunged forward and leapt sideways until the bottom of his shoe was parallel to Pete’s thorax, halting a millimeter shy of contact.

  Mycroft watched this spectacle, amused. For Douglas was a master at capoeira, a martial art that he and Mycroft’s bodyguard and driver, Huan, had learned as children in Trinidad, and which had its foundation in dance and play, rather than combat and war.

  As for the spectacle at hand, it was as if the onlookers and participants had been captured in tin type: Douglas with his leg extended, the boys with their jaws dropping open, adults rearing back as if they might be next in Douglas’s sights, and finally the lad Pete, staring at Douglas’s foot in a combustion of admiration and dread. For it seemed all but certain that the tall Negro would complete that extremely short trajectory and end his brief life.

  Instead, Douglas lowered his foot, straightened his lapels, bowed slightly to his victim as if this had been a friendly sparring all along, and strolled back to Mycroft, who turned to Carlton the driver and said, in the absolute silence that had just befallen them:

  “No need for you to tarry.”

  This time, Carlton did not have to be told twice. He nodded and climbed back onto the brougham, his mustaches still quivering.

  “You put on quite the spectacle, Douglas,” Mycroft murmured as they turned their backs on their former assailants and walked on.

  “I have had no one to spar with since Huan left, so I am a bit rusty,” he replied. “Still, I assume we shall have fewer problems from here on out,” he added with notable understatement as the denizens of Jennings parted like an unholy sea to let them pass.

  He and Douglas zig-zagged to avoid various puddles of dreck until they reached the address that Bingwen Sh
i’s family had provided. From the outside, the set of rooms appeared no less shoddy than the rest of the rookery. Douglas looked doubtful as Mycroft knocked.

  “Miss Lin?” he called, then knocked again.

  A moment later, it opened, and Ai Lin stood in the doorway.

  She was, as Mycroft had once observed, “the sort who would look every bit as regal if covered in rags.” And although far from that, she was not dressed in the sumptuous Han style that he remembered, but in modern garb, with a white blouse and a narrow, close-fitting skirt with a small train, both in lavender. The only homage to her culture was in her glorious ebony hair, combed severely away from her face, then spun into a long chignon that was held in place by two bamboo sticks.

  But it was something else that nearly undid him. In the same way that a particular room or a fleeting vision could bring back one’s childhood, so her familiar scent—subtle hints of lavender, chamomile and Marseille soap—returned him fully to the tiny Chinese herbalist shop where he had first laid eyes on her.

  Staring at her, Mycroft inhaled sharply, a sound she thoroughly misunderstood.

  “Mr. Holmes, Mr. Douglas. Please forgive my appearance, as it has been rather a trying morning.”

  Strangely, she did not appear to be at all surprised to see them. While Mycroft struggled to find his voice, Ai Lin once again had no trouble finding hers.

  “Thank heavens you have arrived,” she said, “for I am in dire need of your help.”

  “We are aware of that, Miss Lin,” Mycroft managed to say. “Your fiancé—”

  “Mr. Holmes,” she interrupted, sounding slightly perturbed, “though I am grateful for any assistance you can provide the Shi family and mine in regard to Bingwen Shi’s whereabouts, at the moment you and Mr. Douglas are to follow me inside, and quickly!”

  Pull yourself together, man! Mycroft cautioned himself as he and Douglas did as instructed.

  18

  THERE WERE NO BODYGUARDS WITHIN, AS MYCROFT HAD expected. Ai Lin appeared to be quite defenseless. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see that they were in a long, tidy reception hall which had been turned into a makeshift infirmary and furnished with the barest essentials: bandages, cotton, alcohol and other unguents, along with a jar of thermometers. A pot of water burbled on coals in a hearth, with more pots beside it, all filled with water.

  “As you can see, I have no one with me today,” Ai Lin said, “for we were not expecting more than the usual toothache or feverish child… but look!”

  She pulled aside a thick curtain that served as a door to a larger room where some thirty-odd people of varying ages lay on blankets and cots while others—those not so badly off—were seated on the bare floor, bewildered but passive. Here and there were the faint sounds of moaning and retching.

  “They walked here from a nearby building, everyone in various stages of illness, and have been arriving for the last half hour or so. I sent boys out for water and have been boiling it since, for these poor people are much dehydrated, and I had barely got them settled when you arrived. Since I was informed by the Shi family that you were coming, I also took the liberty of writing up a list of symptoms: one for you, and one for you, Mr. Douglas. I assume you carry writing implements?”

  Slightly cowed, both men nodded.

  “Good. Please assist me in questioning them, to see how many symptoms they experience.”

  “Symptoms of what?” Douglas asked, for Mycroft had yet to utter a peep.

  “I believe it is merely gastric distress and not cholera,” she replied, “but I must be certain. We lost so many twenty years ago, as you are too well aware.”

  Although Mycroft did not think it cholera, his fear for her had swept all logic from his brain and every word from of his tongue. He could feel his heart tumbling like a rock downhill.

  “Kindly keep the queries in order,” Ai Lin was saying, “and then write down their answers most carefully. Mr. Holmes, you can start with that elderly lady in the green felt hat; you see her there? She is Mrs. Arnold. Mr. Douglas, that young woman with the twisted leg, the one who appears flushed, I believe her name is Dora. I shall begin at that corner,” she went on, “and when we are done, we shall see what we have. Ready?” she added with a smile, as if she were suggesting a wade in a warm pool on a balmy spring day.

  Mycroft, list in hand, approached the elderly lady in the green felt hat.

  “Mrs. Arnold?” he ventured.

  She looked up at him and smiled. Most of Mrs. Arnold’s teeth were rotting or nonexistent, and her bare feet were filthy.

  The skin on her hands let him know that she had been a washerwoman until rheumatism made such work unmanageable. He assumed that what she had attempted next, so as not to starve, was to sell her body. He surmised from the patchy hair loss, which the hat did little to hide, as well as from the ugly white pustules at the corners of her mouth, that if some gastric distress did not carry her away, she would eventually be claimed by syphilis.

  “Well, aren’t you the bonny golden lad!” she declared in a phlegmatic voice.

  “Good morning,” he began, attempting to sound professional but kind.

  Then he looked down at the list in his hand and felt himself choke. Regardless of circumstances, how in heaven’s name could he broach the subject of ‘watery stools’ or ‘bits in the feces, like kernels of rice,’ much less ‘rectal pain’ with a female more than twice his age?

  Helpless, he glanced over at Douglas and was gratified to see that his friend did not appear to be faring much better with his patient, Dora; that in fact he was glancing back at Mycroft with the helpless look of a cur who’d been caught snuffling about in the rubbish.

  In contrast, on the other side of the room, Ai Lin was flying through the questions, jotting down answers, chatting with those who could, all the while placing a hand on a forehead or a thermometer under an armpit with nary a pause.

  Some forty minutes later, it was mercifully over. They had gathered twenty-nine completed questionnaires, had washed dozens of hands, had disposed of several buckets of bile and other bodily emissions, and had doled out every drop of water to be had. The patients were made as comfortable as could be managed and encouraged to rest.

  After that, Mycroft, Douglas, and Ai Lin sipped tea at a coarse wooden table much like the one in the kitchen of Nickolus House while Ai Lin read over the questionnaires.

  “Yes, clearly a gastric complaint and not cholera. But I shall keep them a few more days, hoping that they do not become infected again.”

  Mycroft still had not located his vocal cords and may as well have been an empty chair for all he was contributing to the conversation.

  “They did not consume the same food. Several have not eaten for days,” she said. “Surely there is a contaminant somewhere in their building. It should not be so very difficult to locate the source, though I cannot imagine what can be done about it.”

  “Perhaps it can be repaired,” Douglas ventured.

  “With what money, Mr. Douglas? And, until it is repaired, who is able to provide clean water to fifty residents?” Ai Lin shook her head. “Ah, well. At least now we know the culprit.”

  “Thanks to John Snow,” Douglas said.

  “Yes, Mr. Douglas! I too am a huge admirer of his,” Ai Lin replied enthusiastically. “The work he did in Soho was awe-inspiring, though no one believed at the time that cholera and similar diseases could be water-borne.”

  “What a difference twenty years can make,” Douglas said.

  “And I should count our blessings, I am aware,” Ai Lin interjected, “but I fear there is still much prejudice to overcome. Earlier this year, the local sanitation inspector reported that the lack of lavatories here was an advantage, since it would be difficult ‘to get the inhabitants to use them as ordinary persons would.’ A medical man! A man whose mission it is to represent the residents, does not believe that the Irish know how, or could be taught, to use a commode!” she said angrily. “I cannot abide such crave
n disregard for fellow human beings. Especially from one who has taken an Hippocratic oath. Oh, and he also claimed that the filthiness of the rookery was not due to poor management, but to ‘the habits of the people who inhabited them’!” she added. “How can we lift up our fellow man when faced with that sort of prejudgment and ignorance, especially among those who have been hired to assist?”

  Her gaze was so intense and her indignity so complete that, although Mycroft realized she had posed a rhetorical question, he felt obliged to reply. But instead of offering some sagacious or enlightened word, as he had hoped, he blurted out: “Why are you here? And where are your bodyguards?”

  Ai Lin and Douglas stared in his direction as if the empty chair had commenced not merely to speak, but to hector.

  Mycroft expected Ai Lin to pronounce that it was none of his business, which indeed it was not. Instead, she said: “The bodyguards frighten some of the residents, Mr. Holmes. And those who are not frightened can become enraged. These people are not accustomed to strangers, most especially large, looming Chinese men who are better dressed and in every aspect of life more fortunate than they. Therefore, if I wish to help, I cannot have them hovering. The bodyguards bring me here, and then they return for me a half hour before I am scheduled to depart, to deposit me back at my lodgings. The Shi family has acquiesced to these peculiar orders solely because they know my time in Jennings is short-lived. In less than one month, we shall lose one precious method of understanding just how infectious disease is spread, while its former residents are elsewhere, but no better off.”

  “Mycroft mentioned that this rookery is to be sold,” Douglas said with a nod.