Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Diary

October 4, 1888

I have been named.

It had to happen. If I am the demon incarnate, sooner or later some fellow will pin a moniker on me, first, to simplify communication of my charisma, and second, in some way, to diminish me by cramming all my nuances, improvisations, heroic acts of sheer will, bravery, and long-term shrewdness into one banal package that at first holds those attributes in high regard but eventually erodes until the name—and I—become commonplace.

25 Sept. 1888

Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck

Yours truly

Jack the Ripper

Don’t mind me giving the trade name.

wasn’t good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now ha ha

However, I rather like it. Whoever coined it is not without a certain low genius. Jack the Ripper. I, Jack. I, Ripper. It’s both violent and short, it combines two commonalities in an unexpected way, it uses the verb “to rip” in an equally unexpected way, as very little of what I’ve done involves ripping. But Jack the Cutter would not work, because cutting is a term, though accurately employed here, that more usually finds its place in discussions of tailoring. So Jack the Ripper it shall be.

I suspect it’s the business of the ear that drove it home. Whichever pusillanimous journo coined “Jack the Ripper” had no way of knowing that in my frenzy in Mitre Square involving what was left of Mrs. Eddowes, I indeed loosed an ear from its mooring on the side of the skull. I had no memory of doing so; that was a period of blur, although rereading my last entry, I see I retained enough recollection to record it immediately postcoitus, if ever so swiftly it vanished under the tidal swell of sleep that overwhelmed me.

But that freak of circumstance gave Jack the Ripper’s missive, with its lurid silliness about using blood as ink, a certain kind of instant celebrity. You need a vivid detail to nail something hard and permanent into the public consciousness, and whosoever my benefactor was, he provided that. He should be writing adverts!

Meanwhile, the “double event,” as the papers are calling it, seems to be seen as evidence of a particularly malignant higher genius. How I wish it were so! Were I that genius, I might not have had to improvise so desperately and to depend on luck so totally. But nobody seems to have cottoned to the fact that the second event existed purely because the first was so unsatisfactory, just as no one has an inkling as to why JEWS is spelled JUWES in my graffito, or why that sentence seems to make no sense, grammatically or otherwise. I have to laugh at how incompetent are our supposedly great minds. It appears that nobody has the gift of putting these things into their proper pattern and inferring where this campaign is ultimately going. That pleases me no end.

In fact, I am at this time more happy than I have ever been in my life. Those who smote me so deeply and took from me that which I had created and loved, they will meet the knife—of one sort or another—soon. Those who criticized me, those who disdained my work, those who found me shallow and overambitious, I am in the process of proving them all wrong, in thunder. “Ha ha,” as Jack has written, and whoever he is, the anonymous scribe got exactly the joy I feel in confounding the world. Sir Charles, the boys of the press, all the mobs who cannot help themselves but for prattling and dreaming of Jack, all of them are miles from the truth, and the only crime is that if I succeed, as I surely feel I will, no one will be wise enough to put it all together.

I have a little left to do. I must be on with it.

October 24, 1888

Dear Mum,

Well, I know you heard the news. He done two up, one real bad. They even have a name for him these days, the newspapers do, they call him “Jack the Ripper” on account of some letter he’s said to have written, although if you ask me, it’s all a bunch of horseradish, as a fellow who could do what he done to the last one wouldn’t make no sense when it comes to writing letters on account of his being all crazy and everything. He’s like an orang or something, in human form, some kind of crazy ape with a knife, maybe a Russky or a Pole or a Chinaman, but no Englishman, that I’ll tell you.

That’s what us girls think. No Englishman could do such horrors and so we still feel safe with our own kind, which seems to be how we’re doing things these days.

And we are not alone. You’d think the city might sit back and enjoy this foul brute chopping on unfortunates but it’s like everybody is behind us! It’s something! Why, just a few weeks back, before the double event, two constables spotted a local hooligan and gave chase to him. People thought it was Jack himself, and they got in on the game, and soon a mob was on this chap’s tail, they right near strung him up. Well, he weren’t no angel, but he weren’t Jack, either. It was a fellow called Squibby, a low common bully. The coppers got there in time to save him a jig under the gallows tree. They even went to the police station and tried to get him for the rope, sure it was Jack, but the coppers held firm.

I know all this scares you and Da, Mum. But don’t let it. See, I’m not like those other girls. They all works the street and their jobs take them into alleys. All Jack done, he done in alleys and squares or other dark nooks. Myself, it’s all different for me. I’m safe and snug as a bug in a rug in my own little room. My fellow and I are sort of on the outs now, but I see him every day and I know he’ll be back soon. Having Joe around is one thing, as he won’t let nobody hurt me. Oh, and on top of that, there’s a watch dog. Well ha ha ha, there I go again, making jokes. It’s not a dog, it’s a cat. The lady upstairs, Elizabeth, she keeps a kitten she calls Diddles, but Diddles ain’t no ordinary cat. Diddles knows when somebody’s about who shouldn’t be, and you can be sure Diddles will let out a racket if anyone shows up here who don’t belong.

So I know I’m safe. I’ve got my room, locked hard by automatic spring mechanical system, so even if I ain’t paying mind because of my thirst, it’s solid shut behind me, and then upstairs there’s Diddles, and he’s paying attention if anyone comes poking around, and then there’s my fellow Joe who wants me out of my business and comes by every day to talk about it, and believe me, if anyone tries a thing when Joe’s here, Joe’s going to leave him in the worst shape he’s ever been in. Then there’s Constable Johnny Upright and there’s Constable Walter Dew, who chased after and arrested Squibby, and above ’em all is Detective Abberline, the smartest fellow there ever was, and then there’s the big boss himself, Sir Charles, a war hero, so I’ve got all these important and powerful men to save me from Jack the Ripper.

So Mum, don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll lose my thirst, maybe I’ll marry Joe, maybe we’ll leave London if Joe finds work someplace clean, away from all this trash here, and maybe we’ll even take Diddles the cat along with us.

Oh Mum, miss you so, wish it had worked out different, but I know it’ll be okay. I have nothing but hopes for a bright future and happiness for all.

Your loving girl,

Mairsian

CHAPTER TWENTY

Jeb’s Memoir

Since the aftermath of the famous “double event” is so well known, it hardly needs dramatization; summary will suffice. As it turned out, the murder of the two shocked not merely London and the empire that sustained it but the entire world. At the precise point in the hysteria, the name Jack the Ripper arrived out of nowhere (that is, if my fevered imagination can be considered nowhere) and, taken with the coincidence of the chopped ear and the brilliance of the contrivance (ahem!), became instantly accepted by that same world, a globe terrified with Jack and yet desperate for information about him. By midweek the enigma of “Juwes” had emerged, lodged as it was in an opaque sentence, to further excite comment, fear, hysteria, and all sorts of bad behavior. Various suspects were named, their curricula vitae examined, and ultimately, when their regrettable innocence was proved, they were left to fade back into nothingness. We did our best to keep the hubbub hubbing along nicely, as O’Connor insisted on running a letter, a postcard actually, that he knew to be fraudulent, simply because it rehammered the Jack idea and contained the felicitous self-identifier—clearly inspired by my insouciant tone—“Saucy Jacky.”

Jack became a virtual industry, as all papers went all Jack, all editions. Replate, replate! (I still hadn’t figured out what that meant.) I’m not sure if fear was driving the frenzy or something a little bit more dubious, being some kind of secret, sick fascination with the hideous tragedy of others. As long as Jack limited his slaughter frenzy to whores, he’d have hundreds of thousands of fans among the bourgeois and the intelligentsia, safely fenced from his hunter’s dementia as they were. Let him knock off one of those poofs, however, and he’d be less titillating and by far a more palpable threat.

In all this, I was kept incredibly busy. On Sunday the first, Harry Dam and I worked through the night with Henry Bright, who united our two stories into a single seamless piece of reportage that I thought, having read what the Times and the Evening Mail and the Gazette offered, was quite the best. Henry was a talented journalist and an ethical one, and he knitted the stories into a calm tapestry of murder, mystery, mayhem, and official police ineptitude. It can be read today with profit, I say with some pride. It was my best journalism.

I will merely allude to subsequent developments of the next week or so, among them the upping of various rewards, the holding of inquests, funerals, the staging of a bloodhound test at Regent’s Park that produced yet more humiliation for Warren (his prize beasts, Barnaby and Burgho, managed to find only a couple copulating in the trees!), who was rapidly becoming the laughingstock of Western civilization. The victims of the double event were quickly identified, and their names became as well known as any West End ingenue’s. Poor Elizabeth Stride, who is always short-shrifted, as her murder is so much less interesting, was the lady who met her end at Dutfield’s Yard, being a Swedish immigrant, who, despite her nickname Long Liz, was another dumpling, she having just returned from the country where she and her paramour had been hop picking, though without much success. The second was Catherine Eddowes, in Mitre’s, where Jack had taken his time to do right by her and left some kind of hideous exhibition on the theme of “her guts for garters” for all to see.

When everything had been reported, we in the journalism business, knowing a good thing, rereported it with embellishments, theories, illustrations, and so forth and so on. Issues emerged: How had Jack miraculously escaped from Dutfield’s Yard when the pony wagon clearly trapped him in it? How had he then gotten cross town, near a mile by the shortest street route (shorter by crow, but as far as was known, he was not a crow) to butcher Mrs. Eddowes within forty-five minutes under the very noses of two separate City constables, without a noise being sounded, and then, still more intriguing, how had he escaped from that locked box, surrounded as it was by patrolling coppers, to arrive at Goulston Street and the Wentworth tenements to deposit his obvious clue and leave his opaque, tantalizing inscription? And what could those words mean? What was the secret of “Juwes”? Was it a code, was it a foreign word, was it a willed misspelling, was it a Masonic symbol, was it a tsarist ploy, was it an obscure cockneyism? Many a tea and crumpet were downed over consideration of the Juwe jigsaw.

At exactly this moment, what should arrive but a note from my new friend Professor Thomas Dare. Eager to keep acquaintance with so brilliant a mind and keen a wit, and still hungry for his alluded-to theories of Jack, I tore it open.

“My dear Jeb,” it began. “How pleasant to chat with you at Charlie’s soiree. You may recall the subject of he who is now called ‘The Ripper’ came up. Saucy Jacky, what a fellow. He sells your newspapers, he keeps my mind aflutter.

“But nothing has so moved me as this business of ‘J-U-W-E-S.’ It’s on my foredeck. It’s language. It’s communication. It has a Beneath. Thus I have spent a good part of the last week trying possibilities against the archetype, in hopes of cracking the code.

“I have reached certain conclusions. Being civic-minded when it’s not too much trouble, I went to Scotland Yard and waited three hours to reach an inspector, who listened politely, nodded, then said, ‘Well and good, sir, noted, now if you don’t mind, I’ve other duties,’ and showed me the door. That uninterest I put to Warren, who after all is no policeman, certainly no detective, not even a soldier, but really a kind of engineer. When brick and mortar have to be calculated against the requirements of budget, transport, estimated time of use, repair costs, all for a bridge to be built in Mesopotamia, I suppose he’s the fellow you want, but that’s how he sees the world, nuance-free, unburdened by a Beneath, ultimately quantifiable and measurable. Such silliness won’t catch a devil like Jack.

“In any event, I believe I know what ‘J-U-W-E-S’ is. I’m the only man in London who does, unless I tell you. Would you be interested?

“Yours, Thomas.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Diary

October 15, 1888

I had to see it, of course. It had been a darkened, even a dream, landscape, in a part of the city I hardly knew. I acted on instinct, boldness, without hesitation, and thus, like Cardigan at Balaclava, my headlong, crazed charge through the enemy phalanxes enabled me to survive for another day’s fight.

I waited, I waited, I waited. Today was long enough after, the air was coolish, the sun bright, and it seemed as good a time as any. I wandered out, seeming merely to take a stroll as might any Londoner, and meandered casually this way and that, though trending toward Mitre Square. Being no fool, I would now and then double around to make certain no one was following, though that felt impossible. Indeed, no one was on to me, I was just another citizen, strolling haphazardly block by block, perhaps on the way to an appointment, a meal, an assignation. Nothing about me was remarkable.

Now and then I passed an apothecary’s, a tobacconist’s, or an out-and-out newstand, where this afternoon’s leader boards blazed away with the latest revelations. It was all old milk, reheated ever so slightly for misleading sale. Jack, Jack, Jack. Jack everywhere, Jack nowhere, Jack spotted in the Thames Tunnel, Jack observed in Hyde Park. Who Jack, where Jack, how Jack, why Jack? When they imagined Jack, I had to laugh. Their Jack was a skulker, a creeper, a lurker who slithered through the fog in a giant topper, with some kind of curving Oriental blade clenched in his fist, held close to his face, which was shielded by the cape he drew tight around his neck with his other hand. His posture was feline, for he moved by cat law, silky, silent, gliding on only toes to ground. Ha and ha again. I was as normal a bloke as you could imagine, nobody but the thrushes saw the blade, which in any case was a straight piece of Sheffield steel, as found in every kitchen in Great Britain. I walked through crowds, shoulders back, head erect, my garb not at all theatricalized along West End variations on cunning evil, and never in my adventures had I glimpsed so much as a wisp of fog. I had a fair, somewhat blocky face, hair of modest attainment, and wouldn’t be caught dead in a top hat. Was I going to a ball after my dates with murder, is that what they thought? Perhaps to Buckingham for tea with the queen? Newspapers: What’s the point of existing if you’re always going to get everything so wrong?

As I got deeper into Whitechapel, the roads clogged up with horse traffic, and the costers’ stalls became obstacles on the sidewalk for pedestrians, all of us squeezing around the choke points, careful not to get shit on our boots or to be crushed by horse tram or beer wagon or speeding hansom. There were dollies out, I suppose, for theirs was a twenty-four-hour-a-day business, men needing notch at any odd stolen hour, but they did not dominate as they did during the evening hours, nor was there the sickly glare of the gaslights and beer shops and public houses to give the place its customary demimonde grotesquerie. It was just business as usual among Brits themselves, the low dregs of empire drawn here, more and more Jews, Indiamen, Teutons, Slavs, and Russkies, so much so that English did not prevail in the constant din of shouts and shills. The overwhelming miasma of the horse deposits that no street sweeper, no matter how energetic, could keep up with, occluded both the nose and the eyes (which wept unavoidably, and who could blame them?), as well as the drifting tang of methane, that other more deadly horse product, headache-inducing if sampled too intensively. The shops, the stalls, the pubs, they fled by in no pattern, as did the various appliances that sustained a horse-drawn economy, troughs, hitching rails, gates leading into yards for the unloading of goods, stables here and there, and the constant noise of the brutes themselves, sometimes a neigh or a whinny, sometimes a cloppity-clop as shoed hoof struck pavement, sometimes the general bluster and sigh of the beasts who basically carried the city on their broad backs without a complaint or a speech. All and all, there was no palpable sign of Jack panic, giving the lie to the conceit that the city was clenched in a fist of fear. Newspapers again, telling a tale that wasn’t.

I passed the Aldgate pump, then Houndsditch and Duke, and there spied the spot where I’d come upon Mrs. Eddowes and put a proposition to her so she’d lead me into the darkness down Mitre Street. When I reached Mitre Street, I turned, finding myself surrounded on either side by low residences undistinguished by anything except that they were sublimely undistinguished. That led, within half a block, to Mitre Square, and on normal days, a lone man entering its portal might attract some suspicion, for what would his business be, but not today, as it still enjoyed its celebrity from my earlier visit.

I cannot say it was packed cheek by jowl like an exhibit at the Great Exposition, but gawkers were all about, most of them clustered in the right-hand corner, near on the wooden yard fence, where Mrs. Eddowes met her fate. I felt no need to approach it and infiltrate the mob just to see a patch of flagstone no different from any other flagstone; instead I took in the whole of the place, seeing in the sun that which had been shrouded in the shadow.

It was a series of brick structures of no particular style or pedigree surrounding for no reason a small patch of space in the middle of a city wilderness. No care, no thought, no wit, most assuredly no brilliance, had gone into its design, if it had indeed been designed, but far more likely, it just happened, as various structures appeared along slipshod principles around it, and someone finally got the idea to crush the wild grass between them under flagstone. Why was it even called a square? Nothing about it suggested the acute angle.

The murder, however, drew many to this otherwise undistinguished lot, and if you guessed the murderer would return to the scene of his crime, you would have been right, I suppose, but at the same time, if you perused the crowd for just such a man, I, the authentic guilty party, would have been the last upon which your eyes would light. Murder has a peculiar odor, and some are drawn to it despite themselves. Many of the people were singles, men mostly but a few ladies as well, all of them unsure how to act, possibly a bit ashamed, but unable to stay away. They stood around stiffly, trying to remain inconspicuous, as if Major Smith and his blue bottles were likely to sweep them up. Nobody made eye contact or really acknowledged each other; out of deference to the newspaper image of Jack under his topper in his opera cape, nobody wore a topper: It was strictly a bowler or slouch hat locality, the clothes all dark and lumpy, as if Mrs. Eddowes would have been insulted by a splash of color.

I glanced over to the left and saw the church passage from whence I had escaped, and again thanked the God whom I knew did not exist for providing it, copper-free, for that reason alone in His Grand Plan, just as I owed Him for constructing this helpful place so I could improvise brilliantly that night. I meant to leave that way as soon as I got over my disappointment at the prosaic nature of the square and its lack of drama or dynamism in the daylight, but at that point I was discovered.

My guilt was known. It was pointed out. The jig was up. I had returned to the scene and paid the price. All that is true.

It is also true that I was discovered by a dog.

I do not know what higher sensitivities these creatures have, but this one knew. She saw into and through me. She had me, whether by rude particle of blood scent adhering to my flesh (I had meticulously burned all the clothes I wore that night and bathed scrupulously) or some instinctive warning system that highlights predators, or maybe by shrewd analysis of my uninterest in the site of the body for the channel of escape, I know not.

She was a small Scottish West Highland terrier, dead white to proclaim virtue and justice, proving that symbolism of times appears in reality just as readily as it does in fiction, poetry, or art. Her bark was not alarming, but it was insistent; truly heroic, she pulled hard to assault me, plunge her fangs into my flesh, and bring me down.

“Maddy, my goodness, you must stop at once, oh, bad lady, bad bad girl,” yelped her embarrassed master, a grandmotherly type under a straw bonnet with more than a few ribbons, posies, and bows, another murder gawker embarrassed to be stirred into human contact by her doggie’s misbehavior.

But Maddy knew and would not relent. She screamed aloud, “It’s he, it’s Jack, it’s the knifer, the ripper, the killer, oh, you foolish people, if you would but look into this blackguard’s soul, you would see his evil and smell the blood he spilled not thirty feet away!” Unfortunately, since she spoke only terrier, the doltish humans about her paid no attention whatsoever and went about their nervous murder-site gawking.

The mistress bent and scooped up Maddy and hugged the squirming thing to her bosom, but Maddy kept trying to alert civilization to the threat it faced, although to no effect.

“Sir, I am so sorry, I cannot fathom what has got into her today, she is usually so polite.”

“Madam,” I said, “do not be concerned. Dogs, children, and women universally loathe me, but on the other hand, gentlemen do not much care for me, either.”

“Well, sir, at least you’re not a Mason!” said the lady, a rather game riposte, I thought, and it brought our conversation to a pleasing close, as we had chatted in the enjoyable language of high irony. I bent, bowed, removed my bowler in a sweeping, overmagnanimous gesture to signify theatrical-sized graciousness, and turned smartly to abandon the square.

I walked to the church passage, and it was much narrower by day than I recalled by night, with the brick walls pressing in fiercely but a meter or so apart. As I meant to make egress, I turned and saw that the lady had gone back to her ruminating on the events of the square, but Maddy, ever vigilant, had me fixed in a baleful glare.