by Graham Moore
There was no way this man could hold a hot needle steady enough to ink a tattoo without forever scarring the customer.
“Pardon me,” said Arthur, the excitement puffing out of him through a deep sigh. Without another word, he led Bram outside the shop. Though they had been inside for only a short while, they each felt a shock of daylight and fresh air as they stepped back on to the street. The spice smell tingled Arthur’s nose hairs as it was sucked away by the wind.
“But I would swear,” he said after a moment, “that they must have come by here. They must have, Bram, it’s the only path that makes sense!”
“She might have found a willing tattooist in any public house between the river and Whitechapel Road,” replied Bram. “Or she might have asked any passing sailor on the street to perform the service. There’s no way to deduce where she went, my friend.”
Arthur considered the problem deeply. Was Bram in the right? Was there truly no way, given the faint information they had, to deduce the thoughts and actions of those girls? If that was true, then the whole process of detective work that Arthur had described in two dozen ripping tales was fraudulent. He had everything he needed to piece the matter together, Arthur felt so in his bones. If he could not do it, then he wouldn’t merely be a failed detective—he’d be a failed writer as well. He and Holmes would go down as charlatans together. Arthur’s “science of deduction,” the ability to reason one’s way through the darkest horrors of the human experience, would prove but a dreadful sham. A penny lie, and not worth so much as that.
Another strange thought came to Arthur’s mind as he stood on St. George, just below the Wellclose Square. Was this how it felt to be one of his readers? To be lost in the middle of the story, without the slightest of notions as to where you were headed? Arthur felt horrible. He felt as if he had no control of events as they unfolded. What trust his readers must put in him, to submit themselves to this unnerving confusion, while holding out hope that Arthur would see them through to a satisfying conclusion. But what if there were no solution on the final page? Or what if the solution were balderdash? What if the whole thing didn’t work? His readers took a leap, did they not? They offered up their time and their money. And what did the author promise them in return?
I am going to take care of you, he wanted to say to them. I know it seems impossible now, but it will all work out. You cannot see where I’m going, but I can, and it will delight you in the end.
Trust me.
And so many had honored Arthur with their trust.
He took the map from his pocket. He pulled it wide and sat down on the curb.
Bram gave a look of displeasure. “Arthur, it must be filthy down there—”
“She hadn’t a clue where she was going, man! That’s the key. If you knew nothing about this area, where would you go?” Arthur traced his fingers across the map as if it were written in braille.
“We walked directly from the Metropolitan Station to the docks, and I didn’t see any other spicers along the way.”
Arthur looked hard at the map.
“We walked to the docks directly,” he said. “Directly! That’s it!”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“We walked to the docks directly, by taking the most direct route, because you knew how to get here! But Sally would not have known the most direct route. Remember how I stopped at Wellclose Square and started off to the left?”
“Yes,” said Bram, beginning to put it together himself. “The street opened out that way. But it doesn’t actually lead toward the docks, it only leads east and back up to Cable Street.”
“But I didn’t know that!” said Arthur with great excitement. “Without you there to correct me, I would have headed into the square!”
He leaped to his feet. He was almost run over by a broad four-wheeler as he dashed into the street. The baying horses missed him by only a few inches. The carriage driver shouted something that sounded like an obscenity, though Arthur wasn’t paying enough attention to hear precisely what the man had said. He turned around and raced back north up Leman Street, away from the docks. Bram ran just behind him.
In the center of Wellclose Square, the Danish Church rose two stories above the Neptune Street Prison to its left. A flophouse for sailors, run by the Methodist Mariners Church, lay east of the square, beside the London Nautical School. Looking over the run-down inhabitants of the square, Arthur couldn’t help but think that the whole of the East End conformed to the square’s odd architectural organization: church, then prison, then slum; church, then prison, then slum.
Between the throngs of dark-faced sailors, Arthur spied another Oriental shop across the square. He ran to it eagerly.
But inside, he found the shopkeeper little more help than the previous one. Though of Eastern descent, the man did not administer tattoos. Arthur left dejected, again shaken in his faith.
“I cannot bear it, Bram. We reasoned it out. My logic is incontrovertible. The steps, as I’ve described them, are orderly and sequential. As sure as two and two make four, Sally Needling came into this square. It is too reasonable to be untrue.”
Arthur sat down again on the cold dirt. He leaned back against the side wall of the mariners’ boardinghouse. Two small windows dotted the wall above his head. They were surrounded by wooden placards announcing the rules of the house: “All sailors welcome,” said one. “Orientals welcome” and “Alcohol is forbidden on the premises,” said others. A warm glow came from inside, illuminating the placards and casting a red backlight on Arthur’s hat.
Bram stood before Arthur and gave him a pitying look.
“I’m sorry, my friend. Perhaps reason ends at the Tower, and in the slums of East London we have only madness to guide us.
“Let us go back home,” Bram continued, “and get a good night’s rest. You look exhausted. Perhaps tomorrow some thought will have burst into your mind which—” Bram stopped speaking. His next words appeared caught in his mouth, before he then swallowed them back down. He had the queerest expression on his face that Arthur had ever seen.
“Bram? Is something the matter?”
“Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. Fuck.” Bram looked positively bewitched.
Arthur sighed, leaning his head against the wall and folding his hands across his lap.
“I’m aware that we’re among sailors here,” he gently chastised his friend, “but that hardly means you have to speak like one.”
Bram responded with a cackle. Arthur was growing concerned. Had Bram suddenly lost his wits?
“I can’t believe my own eyes,” said Bram through his laughter. “Arthur, stand up.”
With a shake of his head, Arthur ascended to his feet. He dusted the dirt off his coat with a few pats of his hand.
“Now, turn around.”
Arthur turned around and faced the wall of the mariners’ flophouse.
Not six inches from his face was a pen-and-paper drawing of a threeheaded crow. It was tacked to one of the wooden placards on the wall, the one that announced “Orientals welcome.” The drawing was identical to the one Arthur held in his coat pocket.
“I would very much like to see Sherlock Holmes do that,” said Bram slyly. Arthur grinned, feeling devilish in his victory.
“Come along,” he said quietly.
Arthur led Bram around the Methodist Mariners’ boardinghouse until he found a side entrance, away from the church. A few other placards adorned the outer wall of the building. They were drawn in Oriental characters, each shape a complex array of interlocking strokes. Arthur was reminded of the hedge maze in front of Alnwick Castle.
“They’ve a separate house set up for the Oriental sailors,” said Arthur slowly as he realized what he’d found. “They can stay here for pennies while their ships are docked. And so a little community has formed. The sailors can trade goods with each other, alcohol and tobacco, opium and fresh pipes. And, naturally, they’ve a tattooist in residency.”
Arthur entered the
building and was greeted by a wall of noise. Sailors from every port of the Orient shouted at one another in tongues, belting out foreign curses and dissonant chanteys. In one corner, a pile of men lay stacked, as if in a tin. Some puffed opium from three-foot pipes, while others had already fallen unconscious and lay across the floor or on the legs of their fellows. Two massive, bald Orientals held bottles, from which they drew a viscous liquid into glistening syringes. The bottles were small and bore the label “Friedrich Bayer & Co.: Pure Heroin for the Alleviation of a Child’s Bedtime Cough.” A nearby group was engaged in similar activities with a heavy jar of morphine. Arthur surveyed the state of international relations: Heroin from the Germans, morphine from the English, opium from the Chinese, and all traded freely until everyone drifted unconscious into his own sweet and vivid chimeras.
Arthur thought of Sally and Morgan entering through these same doors, two virgins crossing the river Styx. He said as much aloud.
“If you’re Virgil, does that make me Dante?” Bram joked in response.
“I believe it to be the other way around,” said Arthur.
An employee in a crisp black suit approached Arthur and Bram. He was a thin white man, and he spoke with the lilt of the Scottish Highlands.
“And what ship has brought the two of you to my doors?” he said through half a smile.
“Charon’s raft, perhaps, but let’s leave that aside for now.” The house employee did not seem to catch Bram’s reference, but his face betrayed no impression either way. “We’re looking for some young women.”
“So are half the men you see before you,” said the employee. “I doubt they’ve the coin to pay for it. But you two, on the other hand . . .” He looked Arthur and Bram up and down, from their polished shoes to their ridged hats. “My name is Perry. I’m sure I’ll be able to help you find what you require.”
“Thank you,” said Arthur, “but we’re not looking for young women who are here tonight. We’re looking for a pair of women who came in here some months, perhaps as much as a year or so, in the past. They made use of your resident tattooist.”
Perry frowned. He had hoped to make a tidy profit off these two gents.
“You may find him in the back.” He pointed toward a far doorway. “And when you’ve finished speaking to him, we’ll see if there isn’t anything in which I can interest you gentlemen.”
A velvet curtain, drenched in smoke and pocked with pipe burns, separated the larger room from which Arthur and Bram came and the quieter back room into which they proceeded. Bram pressed the curtain aside.
The haze of smoke was thinner here, and sconces of thick candles were attached every few feet to the walls. On a cushioned table in the center of the room, a foreign sailor with skin the color of an ash tree lay shirtless. He reclined belly-down on the table, his back facing up into the light. A handful of colored designs were imprinted upon the sailor’s back and an equal number upon his arms, which hung down at the man’s sides.
Before the sailor stood the tattooist himself. He was the largest Japanese native Arthur had ever seen. His head was completely bald, a style made all the more pronounced by the intricate tattoos that were printed onto his scalp. As he turned to face Arthur and Bram, they could see the colored designs running up his neck, across to his ears, and over the top of his head.
The tattooist was dressed in work clothes: wool slacks and a white shirt. Before him he held a long, sloped needle, which he pointed directly at Bram as he spoke.
“You’ll wait outside, gentlemen,” he said, somewhere in between a question and a statement. His accent was purely native to the London docks, without a trace of his Eastern homeland. His voice was deep and ragged from smoke. Arthur thought that his insides must be as burnt as his skin.
Before Arthur could respond, Bram reached over into Arthur’s coat.
He pulled the crow drawing from Arthur’s pocket and held it before the tattooist without a word. The tattooist stared at it strangely. Arthur could see the recognition in his face, as well as a sense of pride in his work.
“Aye now!” barked the bare sailor on the operating table. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”
“And where’d you find that, then?” said the tattooist, ignoring his customer.
“A young girl’s corpse. This image was printed on her leg.”
“A corpse? Somebody killed one of those girls?”
One of which girls? thought Arthur, though he remained silent.
“Yes,” said Bram.
“Who?”
Bram paused for a moment, considering. The tattooist stepped backward, toward a small instrument table in the corner of the room. Arthur could see dozens of thin, sharp needles arranged from smallest to largest across the table. Some were straight, the size of clothespins, and others were long and hooked, like the beaks of seagulls. The tattooist stroked his needles menacingly.
“Not you,” Bram said at last.
The tattooist smiled. “All right, Smithy, off you go,” he said to his customer. “Let me have a minute with my friends here.”
With a series of hand gestures, the customer indicated his extreme displeasure at this turn of events. As he left the room, he bent over and spit on Bram’s shoe. Bram did not so much as flinch.
Arthur felt it was time to take the lead on the investigation.
“You tattooed a group of girls, at least two, sometime ago?” he said.
“I did,” said the tattooist. “Must have been more’n a year. The design was quite simple. No shading, just black ink on those pale little legs. I used . . .” The tattooist paused and turned to his instrument table. He selected a needle of medium grade, from the middle of the table. He handed it to Arthur.
“. . . this one.” It felt impossibly light in Arthur’s palm, as if it weren’t even there. The needle was made of ivory and was only as wide as a charcoal pencil. Arthur looked up at the tattooist to find him staring back, waiting for a sign of Arthur’s approval. There isn’t a craftsman alive who doesn’t take pride in his tools.
“It’s a lovely . . . device,” said Arthur.
“I carved it myself. In Kyoto.” The tattooist sighed, and his eyes went soft. He lost himself for a moment to nostalgic recollection and then quickly returned his mind to his surroundings.
“It was the first and only time a flock of mollies came in for a set of matching ink,” he said. “I put that crow there on all four of them.”
“Four?” exclaimed Arthur.
“Right so. There were four girls that came in together, with a copy of that drawing on a piece of paper. Just like the one you have now.”
“What were their names?”
“Well, let’s see, allow me to consult my bankbook. I’m sure they each provided me with a check.” The tattooist’s voice dropped even lower to convey his icy sarcasm.
“I see,” said Arthur. “And how about the drawing itself? I’ve never seen such a design in my life. What does the three-headed crow symbolize? From where did it derive?”
“I cannot hardly say. Isn’t it just the devil’s own, that image? The girls brought that paper in here with them, told me how they wanted it inked. I practiced a few times on paper before moving on to the skin. You saw the image I tacked up outside this place? One of my practice drawings. I took a liking to it. The girls never said what it meant.” The tattooist gave a chortle. “But do you know? I tacked it to the wall in here, and sailors, they have made inquiries. Off the boat they’ve come, and when they’ve seen that design, they’ve said, ‘Aye, paint me up with that.’ I moved the sketch outside, since it had become so popular. Don’t think they know what it means any more than I do. But it’s a spooky shape, isn’t it, that crow, and I think it drums me up business.”
“What did the girls’ conversation consist of, when they were in your shop?”
“I hardly remember, there was so much chattering. They were loud. Giddy, I think, nervous about the pain from the needle. People will go one of two ways when it’s th
eir first time. Either they grow quiet like little mice, too scared to speak, or else they talk my ear off, can’t shut them up for anything. And they cried out, too, when the needle hit. Had to give them each a double dose.” The man gestured to his table, at a hypodermic syringe.
“Morphine?” inquired Arthur.
The tattooist nodded. “And lately I’ve been adding a shot of that imported heroin. It seems to make the customers less drowsy than the morphine, but just as docile.”
“We believe that these girls were part of some club. Or a group of some sort. Can you recall if they spoke at all about women’s suffrage?”
“What’s that, then?”
“Never mind,” said Bram. “Can you recall anything they said? Even the littlest word or phrase could make all the difference.”
The tattooist raised his hand to the top of his head while he thought. He tapped idly on his bald scalp. It sounded like the ticks of a clock.
“A faucet,” he said at last.
Arthur and Bram exchanged a look.
“A faucet?” said Bram.
“Yes, odd, I know,” said the tattooist. “That’s why I remember it. One of them would make some joke, and another would say, ‘Tell it to the faucet!’ And they’d all double over in giggles. They kept repeating the jokes again and again. The morphine will do that to you. Little girls, really, couldn’t have weighed more than six, seven stone apiece. Probably should have used less anesthetic. Anyhow, they became quite giggly.”
“About a faucet?”
“ ‘I’d like to see the faucet do that!’ Or, ‘And what’ll the faucet say now?’ And then, ‘Drip, drip, drip!’ and they’d flop on the floor with their laughing.”
“What in the world does that mean?” asked Bram, a puzzled look across his face.
“It means,” said Arthur, “that these girls were disgruntled members of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.”