by Seán Haldane
I meant to make a list, go down it by elimination, scientifically, then present my conclusions in a report to Augustus Pemberton. Before this, I should try Lee again. Besides, my single-minded pursuit of information was a help to me personally – like nursery rhymes to a child stranded over an abyss.
* * *
When I falter in my quest I fall into reveries about Lukswaas. I burn at the memory of her body and I feel like calling out ‘Lukswaas, I love you!’ But that is madness. I could as well hate her. Her talisman, the mirror stone which I now wear around my neck under my shirt, is like a millstone I cannot take off. While she has given herself to me, her husband, Wiladzap, sits crouched in his iron and brick cage surrounded by the coarse jests and smells of the chain-gang – a bunch of crimps, rogues, thugs, and swindlers – and he will hang one day soon by the neck from the white man’s gallows. Yes I hate Lukswaas. Firbanks would see her as a devil. But so clean, so innocent-seeming a devil … Hate and love. Catullus’s two line poem, Odi et amo, would be in English something like:
‘I hate and I love. How I do it, you may ask.
I do not know. But I feel it, and I suffer.’
* * *
The word for ‘I suffer’ is Excrucior. I have had enough of this excruciating.
I felt too restless to spend time in the court-house jail. I finished my coffee hurriedly, then went out into the street almost at a run.
I knew McCrory’s house was already empty. Rabinowitz had put the furniture into storage and advertised the house for rent – more hurriedly than he had told me he would. But why not? The property would revert to him anyway.
The only place to look for Lee was his natural habitat, the area several blocks out of town towards the Upper Harbour which was so crowded with Celestials – some said 2,000, some 3,000 – that it was coming to be known as Chinatown. Every ramshackle building of wood and brick was a tenement in which a hundred or more Chinamen lived, in bachelor ‘clubs’. Their families were mostly in China, where they sent most of what they earned. There were very few women, though those few were respectable, never prostitutes. Every other vice was available on demand. There were Chinese bum-boys for the more degenerate among our sailors, and of course the squaws in the Cormorant Street shanties with their Chinese landlords-cum-pimps. But a crimp like Sam would steer clear of Chinatown, for fear of ending up with a cleaver in his skull. It was rumoured that people disappeared there, to end up chopped in small pieces, eaten in stews with chopsticks. But then many things were said about the Celestials. Amor de Cosmos, the lover of the universe, who worked fanatically to link British Columbia with his native Canada, was a particularly virulent foe of the Chinese – and no one would want De Cosmos as an enemy. In spite of my irritation with Lee, I liked the Celestials. Where else could several thousand people live within six city blocks without any sign of disorder? Red and green banners hung from hovels and houses; ideograms of great beauty were painted on the filthy walls; the tenements had wooden balconies thick with plants and herbs in hanging pots or baskets or in window boxes; shop windows were hung with unmentionable chunks of meat on hooks, which were shining from being scrubbed every day; stalls contained open boxes and crates of fresh and dried fruits and vegetables, herbs, dried fish and crab; apothecaries in shops, which I imagined would have done credit to medieval England, presided over rows of bottled seahorses, slugs, molluscs, and jars of powders; hawkers sold so-called thousand year old eggs coated in a black crust, stored in barrels. It all showed a level of social organisation, of import of goods and export of money from China – although by the white man’s ships – which existed as it were parallel to that of the white man’s Victoria, and was no less efficient.
On the other hand, I imagined a sea of misery swelled and strained under the beaming sky of all those polite faces. Could the men, without women, really be happy? Not unless with opium, the snake in the Celestial paradise. In dens in the narrow alleys which linked the bustling streets, Chinamen apparently lay stacked like bales on warehouse shelves, smoking the deadly gum whose smell sometimes wafted among that of the spices, wood-smoke and ubiquitous Victorian horse-dung and sewage.
To find a particular Chinaman was not difficult. All one had to do was ask for him by name and one would be directed and redirected until at last the Chinaman would appear out of a door, an alley, or a knot of people. I started by asking the owner of a restaurant the whereabouts of the Mr Lee who had worked for Dr McCrory. The man offered me a bowl of clear tea and a sweet bun to eat while I waited and he disappeared into the street. The bun turned out to have a patch of meat stew in a gingery sauce in the centre. Strange combination, sugar and meat and spice. The tea was delicate and refreshing. The man re-appeared with word that Mr Lee would be coming shortly. But after a while another man appeared, gap-toothed and dirty, who asked me to come with him. I offered to pay for the bun and tea but the restaurant owner refused with a bow. I thanked him and followed the new man across the street and into the most notorious of dives, Fan Tan alley, where many a sailor has been made drunk, robbed, and stripped, to be pushed or kicked naked out onto the sidewalk of Fisguard Street and found there, usually alive, in the morning. It was said that absolutely anything could be bought or sold in Fan Tan alley. It was only a few hundred feet long, but very narrow and hemmed by brick walls with the occasional door. The man politely asked me to wait outside one of the doors, which as he opened it to go in let out the resinous opium smell. I ignored the passers by who ducked or squeezed past me in the narrow space. At length the door opened and the gap-toothed man appeared, literally leading Lee behind him by the silken cord of a black and gold robe. Lee blinked in the light – which was not dazzling since the sun never shines in Fan Tan alley – and stood swaying slightly. Even I, no expert on opium, could recognise the pin-point pupils, the hanging open mouth, of the stupor. I doubted if Lee knew me.
There we stood, Lee swaying on his feet, I perplexed and not knowing what to say, and the little gap-toothed man whose pigtail was monstrously long in proportion to his body, in between us looking up eagerly. I knew total defeat: not even the rack would make Lee tell what he knew. I thanked the gap-toothed man, and said goodbye to them both, then walked crossly back to the court-house – only two hundred yards but a world away.
* * *
I went to the small room which I slept in at night and, the camp bed folded, used during the day as a private office. I began working on my list of suspects, but no sooner had I dipped my pen into the ink-well than there was a bang at the door. It was Inspector Wilson, one of the original recruits from when Pemberton had hastily formed the Victoria police during the Gold Rush – the ‘five foot nine men’ as they were sometimes called, since height had been the only qualification apart from the usual ‘good character.’ Wilson in fact was scarcely up to the height, and stooped from spending most of his time at a desk, in charge of administration and paper-work. He had a peculiar sense of humour which I supposed was characteristic of the Scots Irish whose accent he retained strongly. Although he looked worried he was droll as usual.
‘Hobbes, you’ll be accompanying me down to the Inner Harbour. There’s a young lady’s met with an accident: she’s lying two fathoms deep. The Superintendent’s at Carey Castle cooling his heels for an audience with the Governor, so it devolved on me to take charge of this. Come now.’
I followed hastily, buttoning my tunic. We stepped out into the sun of the square and walked as quickly as we could with dignity, to the edge of the bastion foundation overlooking the harbour, clattered in our heavy boots down the stone steps which led to Wharf Street, crossed it, then clattered down another flight of steps onto the quay.
A hundred yards or so away, near Quattrini’s warehouse, a small crowd had gathered, looking at the water. A few people were talking quietly but most were silent.
‘Move aside now, move aside,’ Wilson said. The crowd separated and we pushed through to the edge of the wharf.
The tide was low and the surface
of the water was twenty feet or so below the wharf. Since the sun was behind us, the water was in shadow for some fifty yards out, although beyond that it was sparkling brightly. In the dark shadow it was possible to see to the bottom which was brown and muddy. Ten yards or so out lay the body of a woman, her outline dim but the shape of a billowing dress, perhaps pink, clearly visible, making her look like a huge submerged flower.
‘Where’s the lighter?’ Wilson said impatiently. ‘Och, there’s it there.’
There was a ship moored at Quattrini’s warehouse and around it a lighter appeared with several men in it.
‘It was one of Quattrini’s warehousemen that brought the message about the body’, Wilson explained. ‘I sent him back to get a lighter and a grapple. I’ve also sent for the undertaker and the doctor.’
‘The poor dear’, said a woman in the crowd. ‘I dare say she must have destroyed herself.’
‘The usual place,’ someone else said darkly. The Inner Harbour attracted suicides.
The lighter was making its way to one of the many vertical wooden step-ladders built into the side of the wharf. Quattrini, bulky in a black waistcoat over a checked shirt, was sitting in the bow, his head turned to look up at us. One of two rowers amidships put down his oar and passed Quattrini a rope. The bow of the lighter disappeared below us. Without ado, Wilson went to the top of the steps and began to climb down backwards. I followed, peering into the black weed-smelling water between the tarred pilings of the wharf. I came down into the boat just in front of the stern, which a man was holding to the ladder, and stumbled to find a seat.
The lighter was large and flat-bottomed. Wilson and I sat facing the stern, where the man gave a shove to push the boat off, then turned his attention to a clamp he was tightening on the stern gunwale. This was attached to chains and curved iron bars in the bottom of the boat.
There was a splash at the bow. Quattrini, half standing up, had dropped the anchor. The boat swung slowly around. The rowers shipped their oars and Quattrini came climbing over the thwarts toward us, the boat lurching as he moved. His face had an odd expression of tension, his eyes bulging as if with pressure, the skin flushed on what was visible of his upper cheeks above his thick black beard. ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said, but pushed rudely past us to look over the stern.
‘Just a moment, Sir’, Wilson said calmly. ‘I think the Sergeant and I can assist the man. We should look carefully at the disposition of the corpse.’
Quattrini’s eyes bulged under raised brows, but he said nothing and moved to take our seat, the boat lurching again as we moved to the stern where we kneeled and looked down into the water. It reminded me of the Aquarium in London. There were schools of silvery minnows and on the bottom several crabs, big as dishes, moving among the trash of the harbour – bottles, jars, pieces of metal, bricks and tins.
The woman was lying on one side and to her front. Her face was not visible. Her hair floated up towards us like a dark brown clump of seaweed. She was wearing a pink hooped crinoline.
‘All right’, said Wilson to the man with the grapple. ‘Full steam ahead.’
From the winch clamped to the gunwale the man lowered the grapple very slowly, an open four-pointed claw on the end of its chain. Such grapples must be used fairly often in a warehouse like Quattrini’s to retrieve crates fallen from ships. The man reached out with one hand to guide it in an almost stealthy descent onto the corpse. It came down on the hooped crinoline and a cloud of fine mud began to rise through the water. The man raised his hand clasping the chain and called to the oarsmen to swing the stern to the left. Then he let the grapple fall quite suddenly. ‘Back up a little!’ he called, and the boat’s stern moved slowly over the body. ‘Stop!’ The chain was now vertical in the water. The man turned the winch handle a few times, then tugged at the chain with one hand. ‘Got her! We should lighten the stern. I’ll just need one man to help.’
Since Wilson moved promptly forward, I was that one man. The boat lurched and swung around the chain, which now seemed to anchor the stern. The man began to winch the chain in. I peered down. The body was coming up. The grapple had seized it around the waist from the back, and the head and legs drooped down and away. The grapple broke the surface of the water and the back appeared, the pink material of the dress soaking and streaked with mud. The man winched a little more. The stern dipped.
‘She’s very heavy’, the man said. ‘I don’t understand it.’ He winched a little more and the centre of the body came out and up to the gunwale, with water pouring off it. ‘I guess we manhandle her in?’ the man said uncertainly.
‘All right.’ My mouth had gone dry. Half-heartedly I reached and grabbed a fold of the woman’s dress just below the waist and gave a tug. She hardly moved. The man beside me reached and seized the dress at the level of the neck, just below the water surface, the brown hair swirling around his hand and stroking against his wrist. Both of us pulled hard and the body came up, but it was impossible to haul all that weight by grasping the dress, so we had to let it down again. The winch held it. I decided that if I did not take charge nobody would – or Quattrini would, which would prolong the whole ghastly procedure. ‘All right’, I said, ‘I’ll take her by the waist, you take her under one arm, and we’ll heave her in.’
‘Awright.’
I leaned forward, my ribs pressing against the gunwale, and hooked my right arm around the woman’s waist, feeling around the wet material of her dress, my arm plunged underwater. I stubbed my fingers on something hard and rocklike through the cloth and moved my hand further around to get a grip on it. ‘All right’, I said. ‘Heave ho!’ The cheerful cliché came out easily but I wished I could take it back. The man and I pulled hard, the stern dipped further, and I felt the woman’s dress wet against my cheek. I was almost hugging her as she came out of the water. She lay over the gunwale, water pouring off her. We heaved again and rolled the body onto the seat where she lay facing upwards.
‘Aaah!’ A bellowing shriek from behind me. I turned my head. It was Quattrini, standing in the bow, looking towards us over the seated oarsmen. His face above his beard had gone pale and his eyes were bulging more than ever.
I looked at last at the body and felt a shiver up my spine. Her face! Then I realised what it was: an enormous purple starfish, about a foot across, centred on one cheek, its thick pointed arms studded with shiny protuberances spread out over the forehead, cheeks and chin. There was only one thing to do. I reached forward and seized one limb of the star. Its skin was rough, like coarse sandpaper, and cold. The whole starfish came off with a squelch. I threw it over the stern into the water with a splash.
The girl’s face was pale blue and luckily the eyes were closed, though the lids were swollen and the cheeks were puffy. Just beside the nose where the starfish had been centred was a small patch of abraded flesh, but no blood. Her hair was dark brown from the water but might have been fair if dry. Her dress was dripping and tight over her nipples as if there were no undergarments. There was a huge bulge at her waist as if she were pregnant, but oddly shifted to one side. ‘It’s a rock’, I said to fill the deadly silence. ‘I could feel it.’ Then I noticed that the pink of the dress, sticking up ridiculously because of its hoops, was streaked and darker in places from the upper legs downwards. This was not silt from the harbour bottom, but blood.
‘Can we bring her back to your warehouse, Mr Quattrini?’ This was Wilson’s voice. ‘If you don’t mind receiving her as your guest for a short while till the undertaker comes.’
‘Guest?’ said Quattrini. ‘Of course. My God, that was a shock – the sea star. I know this girl. She’s one of my domestics. Kathleen Donnelly. Terrible business.’ His voice was now completely firm. He began giving orders to the lightermen.
I looked at the body. It was still dripping. The grapple man was sitting slumped beside me. ‘I knew her’, he said quietly, ‘Pretty gal she was. Jesus Christ.’ He leaned his face forward into his hands.
The corpse
frightened me less than I might have expected. But McCrory had not frightened me much either. A corpse was, after all, simply a corpse. She – whoever she had been – was simply not present. This was not ‘she’ but ‘it’. At a given moment she had ceased to be and left this familiar thing she had lived with all her life – now embarked on decay. The starfish had only started the job the worms would finish. I had often contemplated in agony a universe in which as the mechanical meaning of things was discovered the spiritual meaning had vanished – as this girl had vanished although the abandoned machine of her body was here. It was a mere thing. But she had been more than a thing – no thing, not nothing. Although I had lost my faith I could believe that something had survived. ‘She’ was not here, but elsewhere.
Then as the lighter was rowed across the harbour, in the transient sparkle of the sun on the water, the comfort of my intuition began to fade. If she was elsewhere it was only as a ghost – either in her own right or in the mind of those who had known her. How long could a ghost survive? I had steeled myself to the fact that knowledge – or ‘science’ as we are beginning to call it – had abolished the immortal soul. But what if, as the emptiness of this corpse suggested, there was after all a soul, but not necessarily an immortal one? If body was nothing without soul, what was soul without body? The great John Donne in his sermons had insisted that at the day of judgement the body would be reconstituted into new life. A comforting dream. What if the soul was in turn mortal? This would be a worse nightmare than no soul at all: the girl’s soul merely a ghost fading away as her abandoned body rotted.
* * *
By the time we had hauled the corpse up the steps to the wharf at Quattrini’s warehouse the undertaker’s wagon had arrived. The corpse was loaded onto it, grotesquely on one side, with that huge rock still inside the dress. Dr Powell would do an autopsy at the undertaker’s. Wilson, showing no signs of wear, scurried back to his paper at the courthouse and I was left to find out what I could about the dead girl.