Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Jeb’s Memoir

Was he our Sherlock Holmes? Could the long-hoped-for genius intellect at last be entering the fray? Lord, I did so hope. I also, ambitious wretch, did so hope that I’d be the one to take it all down.

Two days hence I met him at the Reform Club, at Pall Mall next to the Traveler’s Club, in the high club land of central London. His tweeds were magnificent, flowing like the land forms of the heather itself, and again he seemed utterly unimpressed by the figure he cut with his wavy blond hair, his aquiline nose, his round specs, and his general air of Porthos amid the corpses of freshly skewered Richelieu swordsmen.

“Do sit down,” he said, “and pay no attention to the various Irish revolutionaries about you, as they are not apt to plant a bomb in the only place in London where you can have a good dish of lamb stew.”

“As I speak with a wee but insistent Dublin brogue,” I said, “I suspect they would not explode until I left the premises, for fear—misplaced, of course—of blasting one of their own.”

I knew there were no revolutionaries about, not even many radicals, rather that wan and forlorn tribe of misbegotten and guilt-bearing mere liberals, who wanted change at only a slightly increased pace over the progress of a turtle across the Sahara.

We sat in a corner nook of the great cigar– and pipe-smoked room, amid lustrous mahogany walls lined with books and portraits of various liberals from Anne Boleyn on down, and he offered me a cheroot and a drink, the first of which I took, the second of which I turned down.

“Probably a wise decision,” he said. “I have too many times awakened after a night with friend Jack Barley in the arms of a whore whom I promised to marry and thereby render licit. And bourgeois. Believe me, it takes more than phonetics to get out of that one with phiz intact.”

I laughed, loving again a wit based on shock, which I had not encountered in so pure a form. Perhaps Wilde had it in him, for his was also a sharpness of the knife as applied to moral convention (and how, as it turned out, poor man!). I wondered then, as I do now, if Wilde knew Dare and borrowed from him. I knew I would borrow from Dare. And I certainly have!

“So,” he said, “the Irish journalist who’s really a music critic wants a solution to the mystery of J-U-W-E, does he?”

“I’ve read and heard so many, I yearn for a thing I can believe in.”

“Not for you, then, satanic or Masonic ritual, ancient cockney slang, the ravings of a ill-educated lout who cannot spell a three-letter word and would, if challenged, produce C-A-E-T for cat? Are there others?”

“Some seem to think it Chinese. Or rather the pronunciation of a Chinese pictogram. Others place its derivation in the steppes, where Russia runs out and tribal Cossack elements begin. Language, most agree, is at the heart of it.”

“I do, too. Indeed, it is language.”

He reached into a briefcase I had not noticed and pulled out a volume, not a book but more than a newspaper, a kind of heavily bound journal of the sort I would later learn was a part of medical and scientific worlds.

“Here is your answer,” he said, “and congratulations on being the second man in London to behold it.”

I took it eagerly.

“Pages 132 through 139,” he said helpfully.

Alas, they were in German, as was the whole damned thing.

“Sir, I have no German.”

“Why, you have been advertised to me as a sort of genius.”

“I have taught myself Pitman shorthand and am able to read French, which I taught myself as well. I am known as a wit and have some potential as a writer. But that is where it stops, alas.”

“All right, then. The journal you have before you is Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Augenheilkunde. Which playfully translates into the ‘Journal of Comparative Ophthamology.’ On the pages specified, a brilliant German opthamalogist—that is, eye doctor—named Rudolf Berlin has published a study entitled Eine besondere Art der Worthblindheit (Dyslexie). Does that clear things up a bit for you?”

He was playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse. But he wasn’t meaning to eat me—rather, to enlighten me. To do so, he had to destroy me. Thus is education built.

“You know it hasn’t, sir,” I said.

“I think rather too much of myself, don’t I? I find myself so amusing. Always had that problem. All right, then, Herr Doktor Berlin’s title translates as ‘A Special Kind of Word Blindness,’ and in parentheses he has coined a term for a condition relevant to our inquiry here.”

“And that is—”

“This condition posits an interference between what the eye records and what the brain receives. He called it dyslexie, or in our more felicitous tongue, dyslexia.”

“You’re saying—” I was struggling with the concept.

“I am saying Jack has a condition known not as stupidity or insanity or immorality or even cannibalism, but while he may indeed have all those, his condition is scientifically called dyslexia. He is dyslexic.”

I nodded, even if my eyes were occluded with confusion.

“Put simply: He looks at the letters J-E-W-S and that is what he sees, but as his eyes send that information brainward, they become, by tangled paths not yet understood, J-U-W-E-S. To him, J-U-W-E-S is objective reality. He has no idea he’s ‘misspelling,’ though assuming that he’s mature, he’s presumably aware that he has certain spelling and reading problems, but as no diagnosis for his condition existed until last year, he has spent his life quietly devising strategies to get around it. His friends, his family, his society, none of them has any idea he has this condition because he has gotten so damned good at hiding it. But it tells us certain things. For example, he is certain not to have a job in any firm or institution that demands carefully written reports, which lets out most forms of science, medicine being one. There goes the mad-surgeon theory. His infirmity would hold him back, even make him a laughingstock. He must therefore be in some action– or behavior-intensive line of work, such as policeman or soldier, perhaps a surveyor, or an architect. His form of the condition may not at all affect his acuity with numbers or images, so he could be an engineer, a retailer, a manufacturer, what have you. He might be very gifted in verbal expression, and thus a barrister, a sales representative, a stockbroker, a carnival barker.

Berlin says what’s fascinating about the condition is that it is in no way limited to idiots or half-idiots. Normally intelligent or even highly intelligent people can suffer from it and—as has our Jack, I suspect—they have found quiet ways to compensate. For example, he will always avoid reading aloud before an audience, as he may encounter a word whose letters will be scrambled and read, say, ‘detour’ for ‘doctor’ or ‘lofty’ for ‘laughter,’ and produce gibberish. He will have done that a few times, learned from it, and strategized a way around it, do you see?”

“So when he chalked that inscription, he had no idea he was giving up a vital piece of information about himself?”

“Exactly, though now he knows and is probably cursing his own stupidity. Being well versed in the avoidance of such faux pas, he presumably made elaborate plans to prevent the mistake, but something happened that startled him or frightened him, and he reverted unconsciously to form. As near as I can tell, it’s the only mistake he’s made so far, and it’s a mistake only because one man in London, and now two, understand what was going on.”

I was impressed. This was the first real insight I had encountered, discounting the mystery of the missing rings, since the Sussex Regiment envelope found at Annie Chapman’s side proved to be nothing. “I see what you are saying, and I am impressed. But I must say, Professor Dare, how does that advance the investigation? I mean, practically, one cannot suddenly test all three and a half million male Londoners to see which might have this dyslexia condition. And it seems not to be known how general a condition it would be, and so suppose it’s quite common—I recall a large number of bad spellers throughout my rather patchy education—and in the end you might have so many possible suspects that the winnowing didn’t winnow near enough.”

“That is true,” said Dare, “and I suspect that is why the inspector was so unimpressed with my analysis.”

“However,” I said, seeing some light in it, “as you say, this condition might be associated with certain other behaviors. You inferred an ‘action’– or ‘behavior’-style career path for such a man, so it seems we could rule out a huge number of suspects.”

“I think you’re beginning to catch on,” said Dare. “The test for dyslexia is so narrow that it would have to be the last, not the first, criterion for identification. My idea, at this point, is that someone gifted in analysis—”

“That would be you, indeed, sir—”

“Don’t underestimate yourself, Mr. Jeb. Two minds are better than one, and in the dialectic between them, they might create something better than either could do on his own.”

“I agree,” I said.

“So what I propose is this: We each take a few days off, not merely from the case but from each other. In solitude, using my distillation of the dyslexia as a guide, we see what we can infer or deduce from the events before us. You would know more than I, having been at most of the murder sites when hot with blood and having discussed the case with many professionals. On the other hand, that might make you too close to the events, and it might also lock your mind in the set of those professionals, who, after all, are wont to pin this on a Russian sailor or a Jew in a leather apron and have a bias against admitting that a homegrown Englishman could do such a thing.”

“What is our goal?”

“Our goal is to assemble a portrait of the man by his salient aspects. He has to be thus and so, and he cannot be anything other. The more we think, the more we shrink. As opposed to a dragnet that hopes to catch him in flagrante or post flagrante, we assemble this—well, perhaps ‘profile’ is a better word than ‘portrait’—profile of the man, and locate those few suspects who might fit it. Then we—you and I, of course—investigate each of them and see if there are any indications of such deviant behavior.”

“The rings,” I said with excitement. “Suppose we can ascertain that indeed he has recently acquired two wedding bands, or perhaps those bands might be located in his kit or jewelry drawer.”

“Yes, yes, that’s it,” said Dare. “Suppose we learn, for example, that Mr. X, a dyslexic barrister, was seen to return to his dwelling very early morning on all the days there were murders. Somehow—I’m not a detail type of fellow—but somehow we penetrate his rooms and there locate his rings. That’s a clumsy example, but it’s the idea. We might locate the fellow who has left other clues, but since no one was looking for them, he went unobserved. We are identifying a pattern. That is my real idea.”

I caught fire with it. “Perhaps I should obtain a revolver for the arrest.”

“Arrest? Confrontation? Gad, no, I will have nothing of heroism. That is for the lunkheads who stood with Chard against the Zulu at Rorke’s Drift intead of sensibly running like flaming bats. They didn’t realize that Chard’s awesome stupidity was his armor. They, being more fully evolved humans, were so much meat for the blackie spear points. I’m far too intelligent to be brave, thank you very much.”

“No confrontations, then. No revolver. But we take our findings to the Yard and let the blue bottles on to it from there. The story and the glory are ours but the danger theirs. I think I could grow friendly with that.”

“It’s police business, indeed. For me, Jack’s transit to hell aboard HMS Noose on the Newgate gallows is reward enough.”

“Without ignoring the moral implications of such a coup,” I said, “do not think ill of me, sir, for admiring the professional implications! Why, man, we’d be glory on two legs.”

“Glory’s overrated,” he said. “You’ll see that when you advance in years somewhat.”

“You misunderstand. Not glory in and of itself, as a shallow end, but as part of a process. With glory comes influence, and with influence, perhaps the chance to change things. That’s the legacy I’m conjuring with. Although as to the shallower glory, I suppose I could use a little of that, too.”

“Your idealism will get you killed or, worse, knighted, and you’ll spend the rest of your days among fools and MPs. As for me, the chance to refuse an audience with the queen would be exquisite.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Diary

October 18, 1888

I wanted a pretty. The others had not been pretty, though Liz had gotten near; but this one would be. She would be lean of face, not doughy, like a muffin or a crumpet. Her skin should be smooth, her hair smooth, the color of corn silk. She must be clean, not just in from picking hops or awakened from a night in doss or the gutter; she must be delicate, with elegant fingers, long, thin legs whose coltlike grace would be evident even under the crinoline; an alabaster neck. If the eyes be blue, so much the better, although a lass with blond hair and brown eyes has a fetching quality, whereas the blues tend toward a frostiness that I do not find appealing. She must be young, fresh, innocent to serve as the vessel of my desecration.

It seemed hard to believe that such a creature, more out of a fairy tale or a myth or even a Rossetti painting, would be working the streets of Whitechapel. Whitechapel is the grinder of the flesh; it sustains its girls but at a price almost too steep to pay, for it erodes them swiftly, it takes their singularity, their character, what wit they have, what memories, what hopes, what dreams, and swiftly makes them a crude composite, rimmed with grime, surly and cynical, untouched by melody in carriage or voice, vacant of eye, loose and slack of mouth. Black or broken of teeth. It’s the trade, it’s the gin, it’s the spunk, it’s the nightly ritual of finding a posture in which to be penetrated easily, it’s the disease, it’s the closing of horizons, it’s the crush of destiny, it’s the immense indifference of society, of civilization, even.

In short, I wanted what I couldn’t have.

I went far afield. I perambulated in my slow, easeful way down the Whitechapel High Street, beyond the intersection with Commercial, that hub of the flesh and sperm trade, passing as I went such lesser applicants to Sodom and Gomorrah as the Black Horse, the Black Bull, the Blue Boar, as if any such animals had been seen in the wild here in a thousand years. It was softer beyond Commercial, and the coster-squatters had relented, so no stalls had been spread about like obstacles against normal pedestrianism, and I hoped to find a softer woman. I walked, I walked, I walked. I cut down Angel Alley, I walked the Wicked Quarter Mile, I looked into Itchy Park at Christchurch and thence to the coagulation of flesh outside, within and around the Ten Bells. It was not as late as I prefer, but the quarter-moon stood guard, providing enough but not too much light, and now and then a gaslight flung its bit of glow off a corner, just enough to suggest safety without actually providing it.

I saw several. One, too old by far, turned out not to be in the life, and when I approached, she skittered away with a haughty tut-tut to her carriage to inform me that I had made a mistake, that she was not up for trade, and to chastise me for my impertinence with the suggestion that I return to busier thoroughfares. Another, alas, was too swift; I never caught up with her and lost her in a crowd on one of my peregrinations.

In time, I wore out and found a seat at the bar of the public house called the Three Nuns—not many of them about, either, I’ll tell you! In that rowdy place, among the many and anonymous, I refreshed with an ale, then another. Eventually I arose and escaped the clamor, then found that the beer had slowed and dulled me and moved my mood toward the sourly comic, in which everything was amusing and nothing meaningful. I knew I had no patience for the kind of careful stalk I had planned; the evening was well shot. Accepting defeat is sometimes the best way to assure victory, for as I began my desultory walk homeward, I saw her.

I dubbed her, in my mind, Juliet, after Shakespeare’s most tragic young lover. She was no thruppence Judy, that was for sure, and you saw them sometimes, for among the twelve hundred who plied their trade to stay alive down here in hell’s maw and Jack’s feeding ground, now and again a lass of some exquisiteness might appear. She’d be quickly bought up by a rich man for mistress or recruited by a house for the room of highest ceiling and reddest silk, but in this way she got her start and advanced in her trade and, who knew, ultimately made it to the arm of someone already chosen by society as a lucky fellow. The lucky get luckier, that’s the rub.

She was tall and thin and painfully young, as if untouched, even virgo intacticus, with a doll’s delicate translucent face and tendrils of curled blond hair framing it. Her hat was pert, her bodice tight, gathered in satin posies about her swan’s neck to emphasize an impossibly adorable bosom, the amenities contained within not heavy to flesh and droop, but all perfect in pouty haughtiness. She would do perfectly for the blasphemy I intended, and by the luck of He Who Does Not Exist, she was exactly where she had to be when she had to be there.

The quality of her clothing gave her away, I saw in a second. She was of a subspecies in the trade called a “dress lodger,” meaning, poor girl, that she was employed by a house, lent finer clothes than she could afford on her own and, in return for them, split the fee with the madam who ran the place and was further obligated to steer her client its way when all was done. It was a form of advertising, if you will, in the brothel industry. Whatever, I knew then she was no innocent. Oddly, that inflamed me even more.

I approached, brushed close by her, and smelled her—delicious, ambrosial—then turned to melt my eyes on her, noting a spray of youthful freckles across the bridge of nose, playing out on her cheeks. Our eyes beheld each other for just a second, but it was a long and, for me, a passionate one. As for her, nothing perturbs the calm of beauty, for she believes beauty is her Achilles’ potion, shielding her from all harm. Generally, that is a terrible mistake.

“Would the young lady care for an escort?” I inquired, removing my hat and bowing slightly.

“I know your sort,” she said. “Start off nice and friendly, all gentle-like, then directly comes the cuff and the fist and finally the kick.”

“I would slay any man who would kick, even slap, such a face, whose eyes, I might add, sparkle with intrigue, not the cow’s surrender to its fate.”

“He talks fancy, then, does this one. Maybe you’re Saucy Jacky, the one that rips, and it’s something sharp is my destiny, not something sweet.”

“Madam, this Jack works a later shift. As well, I invite you to examine my body and see it bereft of blade,” I said. “For who could see you and think of such?”

The poor thing. She had no idea with whom she spoke and how close was the Reaper’s—the Ripper’s, another hidden meaning in whatever hack had so coined the moniker—scythe.

“We’ll walk a bit now, and I’ll see if you’re one that I like enough.”

“You among all the birds can pick and choose,” I said. “Perhaps my luck is to be the chosen tonight.”

We fell into an easy rhythm, and for a second, as we passed along the way, I saw us as a perfect couple, he of property, she of beauty, both of style and wit and grace, and thought how London rewards such worthies, and how at a certain point I was convinced, goddess on arm, that such was my own destiny. Alas, and bitterly, it was not to be, and that outcome carried with it the mallet of melancholy. But this melancholy, like a headache, passed as we approached the structure around which I had planned tonight’s infamy, and in time we came under the shadow, had there been a sun or a moon bright and well placed enough, of that large entity.

She stopped as if she had made up her mind. “You smell good,” she said. “If it’s something you’d be wanting, I could provide, I think, if only for my dying mother.”

“I am happy to keep Mum alive another night or so.”

“And it’s not without considerable cost. I’m told I’m selling something above common, far above common.”

“Far, far above common.”

“I don’t do this all the time, you understand.”

“Nor I. It’ll be an adventure for both of us. Did I hear a figure mentioned?”

“Five, I think, would put me in the mind.”

Five! And it wasn’t pence she was talking but shillings. Good Christ, she thought highly of herself. But she’d read my want, my cleanliness, my prosperity, liked my smell since I’d bathed in anticipation, so she’d set the market to the customer. It was pure Bentham.

“That lightens my purse considerably,” I said. “But I shall happily meet the tariff on the condition that, for our privacy, it’s the building beyond us that contains our assignation. Having you in it makes it worth the five. In fact, I’ll give you six, my dear.”

She looked, reading the place up and down. It was a fragile moment, for some would panic at the prospect and others blush. But this Juliet was a bold young woman. “Six, then, for the Church.”

I pulled a crown from my pocket and fished the coinage of the rest and pressed it all into her hand. She tucked it in some pouch beneath her petticoats. “Then leave us proceed, sir,” she said.

We advanced up the stone walk. The spire of St. Botolph’s rose above us. It was not the loveliest church in London, or even Whitechapel, appearing prosaic next to the Methodist adoration of deity that propelled Christchurch to such height and glory, but it was not without its merits. It had been called the prostitute’s church, for it was on an island, surrounded on four sides by street or walk, and they could be in constant orbit and impervious to the reach of the rozzers. Its steeple was a pile of size-descending boxes, as a child might assemble from blocks of wood, each with its note of decoration, one being a Roman clock, another a square window, the third an arched window of louvers, and above that a cupola festooned in urns of some sort. Now that I think of it, it wasn’t lovely at all, and it was rather close to Mitre Square, which lay a bit down the street that we had just left. Still, I hadn’t come for the sightseeing, as there wasn’t much of a sight to see. I had come for the blasphemy.

We stood in the shadow of the great thing, though at that hour there was no shadow, and after a second, we rose up the steps and entered, there to be greeted by an Anglican goodbody of minor capacity, who greeted us with a nod, saw that we were of bourgeois and not of street, and let us pass, as would happen in any church, town, city, pub, restaurant, fancy house, factory, or office in Britain, so enamored of the bourgeois was this country.

Did I feel God’s presence? Since there is no God, I could not, don’t you see? If there were, surely He would send a bolt from the blue to electrify me into bacon grease before letting me enter His house holding in mind what I held in mind. Not being there, He did nothing. We entered the nave and walked down the center aisle, feeling the marble serenity engulf us, hearing our footsteps echo against the polished stone flooring. We could see the crossing ahead under the circular gulf that allowed the steeple, saw the lectern to the right at the epistle side of the holy space, and turned left from the altar—rather prim, I might add, lacking the theatricality of the papist version—and headed into the north transept, where indeed there was privacy. It was dark, the stone carried a bit of the night’s chill, and from here the ever burning candles had distilled their light to flickering on the stone wall.

We stopped. We looked. All was quiet; no other churchgoers interrupted our concentration. It was the time. It was the place.

“Forward, or would you be of the backward persuasion, sir?”

“Why, it is your angel’s face that I’m paying for, dear girl, as all men and all women are pretty much the same to the anterior. I need to see it as I work and enjoy its passion, for its passion will enable my passion.”

“Then I’ll arrange meself as you yourself make ready.”

She smiled, showing perfect white pearls, and I do believe a trace of anticipation leaked from her large gray eyes. She was not scared, she was not quick, she was not desperate, she smelled of flowers and powdered sugar, her breath was sweet as I neared.