Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The Diary

November 9, 1888

I got there around five A.M. If the world was expecting dawn, that was not yet evident. A gloom had clapped itself across the city and scored the night with bitter rain. A wind blew nails through the air, to chill the skin and the soul. The streets, even in the hustle-bustle of Whitechapel, where the ever rotating wheel of sex walk dominated, were quiet. Only now and then could a pedestrian be sighted in the shrouded element; all the Bobbies had retreated to warmer climes. Only a madman would be walking about with impunity.

Equally, Miller’s Court, a city in its own way, was empty of humanity. All the bad little girls, their thighs smeared with goo, their mouths slack and distended by cocks, were abed for a little peace and dreams of prosperity. Working families, of whom there were a few so unfortunate as to share whoretown with the Judys, had yet to arise for their twelve to sixteen hours of routine exploitation in whatever form of hired slavery it was their fate to endure. I went swiftly to the window of No. 13, reached in, feeling as my fingers found the lock button. I pulled it and heard the click that indicated the spring had sprung.

That easily I was in. Her little cave was dark, though embers glowed in the fireplace. It was no more than twelve by twelve, and whoever would consign a human being to so small a space was himself criminal, though since it was Mary Jane’s own fondness for the laudanum of gin that brought her there, it was she herself who was largely guilty of the crime against Mary Jane. Character, as much as system, was in play in this case. I was soon to add my meager share of woe upon the lady, but it was she herself and the society in which she existed that had engineered such colossal cruelty. I was merely the last in a long line of criminals who feasted on their victim’s weakness.

I slid off my overcoat as I stood there, then slid off my frock coat. I rolled up my sleeves, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. In time, they accommodated and I saw her, her flesh translucent and delicious as she lay in slumber, breathing gently in the wan light, slightly tilted to her left, pinning that arm beneath her, her nubbin nose and pouty fount of lip oriented likewise to left. She was, however brief it would last, a picture of beauty. I could see her clothes neatly folded on the table next to her bed, along with a few folded pieces of paper, letters, evidently. She had been reading them prior to slumber.

She was not naked. She guarded her sweets against the curiosity of strangers with a flimsy chemise that fell in soft, tantalizing disarray to reveal as much of Mary as any would need to want to see more of her. I could identify the hollow of her throat, the smoothness of her shoulders, the alabaster glow of her skin, the mild flattening effect that gravity had on her two voluptuous, ripened breasts, which lay toward me, constructions so gelid of flesh and so perfect in distribution that it was all one could do not to approach and demand suckle, anything that would draw a lad close to those eternal udders and their awesome whisper of the bounty and pleasure of life.

I pulled on my gloves and snapped them tight so that the leather glowed. They had been through much, and I had one more ordeal for them to protect me from. I reached back and slipped the butcher from the belt that had secured it against the flat of my back, under my jackets. I stood there for who knew how long, lost in computation. Which angle, which hand, a cut or a stab, a hand to mouth, or would the first wound be powerful enough to buy silence through the few seconds of the dying? Would she thrash, kick, buck, twist? She looked so formidable that I doubted she’d take her passage easily.

Decisions made, I stepped to the side of the bed.

I stood over her, heard the soft murmur of her lungs as, beneath her breasts, they processed oxygen into life fuel for her, watched her occasional twitches or shudders as, unknowing, her body evinced its aliveness in its incapacity to achieve the perfection of stillness, heard a swallow, a gulp, a sniffle, perhaps some of the other ablative sounds of a body functioning properly in sleep, stretching, bending, unwinding in tiny degrees here and there. I felt the radiation of her warmth, I smelled the sweetness of her body.

I cut her throat.

I pressed her face with my right hand down deep into the mattress, and with my left—though not as strong and educated as my right, which I had so come to rely on, I found it clever enough to do the job—I began low and cut hard and high, feeling the sharpness of the blade as it bit and sliced through the layers of muscle and cartilage, the skin being nothing of an obstruction. I had grown sensitive to the feel of the blade as it engaged and vanquished tissue and felt the subtle textures of each structure of the throat as the blade intercepted them.

She struggled, and with my stronger right, I forced her facedown into the mattress and could see it distended and distorted by its friction against the yielding cotton sheets and whatever underlay to render the mattress soft. Her right hand, unregimented by her body weight, clawed a bit, grasping for life, but ever more feebly. I cut again, nearly in the same track, and her muscles fought me, she bucked and died harder by far than any of the first four, that arm whipping out in final spasm, her leg straightening, then reloading to straighten again. She was a strong girl, no doubt about it, full of life and dreams but no match for the prim efficiency of Sheffield’s best steel as it glided through the ensheathed arteries and veins. Again, curiously, more blood by far than before, and I felt her struggle against the pinioning leverage of my strength, and desperate if muted noises issued from her crushed mouth. Her heart pumped her empty before it quit.

And then she was gone. It took nearly a minute. The blood soaked the mattress, and it looked as if she lay in the midst of a strawberry pastry, melted and collapsed and turned squalid by the passage of hours since the party broke up.

Now to work. Now to give London and the world what I felt those two corrupt entities demanded in their despicable way, and who was I but their humble servant? I would give the shopgirls much to natter about for a few days.

Where there was flesh, softness, ripeness, the quiver, the undulation beneath the skin, the sense of heaviness and softness, I cut. I cannot remember much about it, only that once started, the temple once desecrated, all restraints were magically removed, and whatever darkness has wormed its way to the center of my brain had full vent and expression. I was in a delirium of destruction, as if the body were an insult to the philosophy of my life, and only in destroying it could I reclaim my sanity.

I cut her guts out. I had done so before, but in the dark alleys, in the out-of-doors, worried terribly about the arrival of the odd Peeler or stroller to give the shout, but that fear removed, I emptied her, pulling out sacks of glistening coils and flinging them about the room, where they struck the wall with the sound of a wet sock slapping hard.

I got in among the sweetbreads and cut out various shapeless dark objects, pulling them when they stuck, amusing myself by placing them in odd spots by sheer whimsy, and thus built an altar of the sundered, kidney under her head, liver between her feet, spleen by the left side of the body. The flesh I sliced off her thighs and abdomen went to the table, where it lay like long shreds of cheese drying in the sun. Her thighs, whose embrace would have meant the arrival to paradise of any who found himself so enmeshed, I cut to bare bone. The same to the curve of abdomen, the well of life, removing three giant slabs to lay upon the table. I turned her a bit to breach her right buttock, and my knife savaged it as if it were the family porker on Easter Sunday, with God above looking down and smiling. I went to the neck and jabbed, using the point of my knife, since for some reason the neck’s wholeness offended me, and I hacked and chopped at it, scoring it of flesh, reaching spine. I laid bare her upper chest and took her heart. It did not struggle but came readily to my hands after a cut here and there, a gross lump of muscle gray in the light, heavier than one would have thought, still bathed in the slipperiness of the blood it sent crashing through the body. I took it to my frock coat and dumped it in the right pocket, knowing that it would be well hidden by my outer coat.

My gloves were heavy with blood and smeared with near-liquid fat, my wrists and forearm speckled, and I knew spatter had arrived to my face and shirtfront; if seen, I would be the Jack all feared, Jack the Demon, unfazed by his entry into the world of viscera and carnage where so few men are comfortable. Iron Age soldiers who fought intimately with sword and spear would know what I knew, as would today a few doctors and perhaps morticians, but for most the body’s integrity was a philosophical given in their perception of the world. To breach it was to turn things upside down, and that was part of the magic of my oversize impact upon the tidier world.

At last, only the beautiful face lay unmutilated. It was even composed, untouched by the horror of the body to which it belonged. That could not stand, and what followed was the lowest depravity to which I had sunk, as even I, a connoisseur of depravities, understood. Like a drunken butcher attacking a carcass, I attacked the face. I had no system, no thought, no plan, only an objective, which was to inflict as much cruelty on the beauty as possible, to offend all the poets in heaven and all the painters in hell, and all of humanity that worshipped beauty, which is to say, all of humanity. I hacked. I twisted and pulled. I sawed. I jabbed. I cut off her nose, cheeks, eyebrows, and ears. I cut her lips down to chin. I gashed her whimsically, to no design, simply looking for a new patch of skin to desecrate. Each foray left its own record of gore, and cumulatively they became a thing no longer human, so ripped and torn and shredded that to look upon was to know that there were some among us who knew no limits. It was, I thought, a good message for the coming modern age. No atrocity is beyond man, as I have proved here tonight.

At last I was done. I left her eyes intact, because I wanted all to know she had at one recent point been human. That moored the abstraction of my work in reality. It happened, furthermore, that my last burst of energy left her face tilted left, so that her stare from beyond greeted any copper or reporter who entered her queendom. It was an artistic touch, I thought, if inadvertent.

My handiwork, in the dim light, was a landscape of ruin, as grotesque as Carthage after the Romans or Troy after the Greeks, but all worked in the compass of a single woman’s body. I stood back, breathing hard, bathed in sweat, perhaps awobble in my knees and aflutter in my stomach. It was time to leave reverie behind and reenter the quotidian. I knew I had to move swiftly, for soon the world would be up and about. I went to the window and peeked out, seeing that a full third of the sky was blurred by light, as the sun was beating itself upward, though behind a shelter of cloud. I could see spatters where the rain still fell, and the strong wind pushed it like gunsmoke across the narrow little court that bore the name Miller’s and was soon to become famous.

I went quickly, unrolling my sleeves, sliding into my coats, replacing my steel. Fastening my scarf, pulling the coat tight to button, restoring my hat and pulling it low over eyes that showed nothing. At that point a perversity yet beyond afflicted me. I went to, pulled up, and stuffed in my pocket the letters I had noted on the table. Now I had to read them, having shattered the vault of her body so as to shatter the vault of her privacy. It gave me a shiver of extra pleasure. I, Ripper, I, Evil, I, Tomorrow, I, Forever. Then I took my exit. When the door shut behind me, I heard Mary Jane’s efficient lock clicking obediently as it bolted itself closed and the world out.

The rain still fell. I thought of an old verse and appropriated it to my usage: “Western wind, when wilt thou blow, the small rain down can rain.” I thought, “Christ, that I were in my bed and my love in my arms again,” knowing bitterly that my love would never be in my arms again, and that the world would be—had been—made to pay for that folly.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Jeb’s Memoir

It was the usual muck-up, only worse. At least the rain had ceased to fall, though its moisture hung in the gray air, and it left puddles and sloughs of congealed mud everywhere it could, mischievous devil that it was. In this miasma, the crowds intensified on Commercial, and the hansom driver had to whip his horse to drive it among them down Dorset. Meanwhile, newsboys with placards and clumps of papers were already selling the news, EAST END FIEND SLAYS AGAIN, that sort of thing. You had to look carefully to see the day’s other big news, which is that by that insane coincidence which the God who does not exist seems to enjoy so heartily, just before Jack started hacking, Sir Charles Warren had resigned. So I supposed it could be said that on the night of November 8/9, 1888, Saucy Jacky sent off two, not just one. He was a busy lad, he was.

I pushed my way to the narrow passage by yelling, “Make way, Jeb of the Star,” and, though grudgingly, the Whitechapelians drawn to slaughter admitted my passage. Forcing my way through the narrow passage, I entered the court, which was jammed with coppers and plainclothesmen and the usual newsrag riffraff of the Jack beat who had been accorded a close-up perch to the little room that I presumed held the body, and would perhaps be allowed a quick and tasty glimpse of what Our Boy had wrought this time out. I saw Cavanagh of the Times and Renssalaer of the Daily Mail and several others, plus the motley assortment of penny-a-liners, as well as a boy from the Central News Agency, who looked a bit shaky. If this was his first Jack experience, the buzz in the crowd (“I ’eared ’e done ’er right good this time. Ain’t nothin’ left but guts ’n’ ’air!”) suggested he’d be losing his breakfast soon.

I didn’t deign to join them, and they hadn’t spotted me, so I peeled off and spied my friend Constable Ross standing quiet sentry to the left and edged to him. I didn’t want to confer in public, so as to embarrass him, so worked my way not to him but near him, and shielded in the crowd, whispered, “Ross, it’s me, Jeb. Don’t turn around, but get me up to date.”

He didn’t react, but I knew he’d hear and figure out a way to make the exchange easier. He turned, held out his broad arms, and began to chant, “’Ere now, back it up, then, people, let us do our work.” Nobody backed up, but it brought him to whisper distance.

“Hello, Mr. Jeb,” he said. “Oh, this one’s a dandy, it is.”

He gave me the rest. At ten-forty-five A.M. Thomas Bowyer, an agent from Mr. McCarthy, the owner of the court, knocked on Mary Jane’s door to make another attempt to get her to pay rent, which was several weeks in arrears. No answer. Knowing the property, he moved around the corner, where, owing to the odd angles of the court’s haphazard design, two windows permitted vision into her room. He reached in one with a broken pane, pushed the curtain aside, and saw her remains on the bed about ten feet away. Horrified, he ran back to his office, and he and McCarthy went to get the blue bottles, and the circus commenced. Now, nearly three hours later, all the stars were in accord: I noted Arnold, chief of H Division; Dr. Phillips, the examiner; and a chap who seemed to have stopped off on his way to his bank or brokerage. That had to be the famous Inspector Abberline from downtown. Abberline a hero in some accounts but not in this one, was of standoffish mien, his thinnish hair creamed over his pate, his mustaches drooping, his suit—not a frock-coat fellow, I’ll say that for him—immaculately pressed.

Any mysteries that the court may have contained were by now obliterated by the wanderings to and fro of coppers, reporters, citizens, the curious, maybe even, for all we knew, Jack himself. Yet for all the activity, there was no activity.

“Why is no one doing anything?” I asked Ross.

“They’re all waiting for Commissioner Warren to arrive. He will have bloodhounds with him, and that’s thought to be the latest in scientific detection.”

“Good Christ,” I said. These idiots didn’t know Warren was gone.

At that moment, Abberline’s frosty gaze struck me, and he came over. “Mr. Jeb, is it not? Here to find more avenues of criticism for our hardworking policemen, are you, and to make the apprehension of this brute more difficult?”

“Inspector, love me or not, allow me to give you some helpful information. I’m told you’re waiting on Sir Charles. I’ve just arrived and have not been sealed up here for two hours, so I know what you do not: That is, Sir Charles will never show up. At least not in official capacity, because he has no official capacity. He resigned late last night.”

If Abberline had a reaction, he kept it to himself, though I thought I saw a shade of gray pass across or beneath his otherwise grimly controlled face.

I watched as he went to Arnold, the two conferred, and an order was given. McCarthy was called up and, armed with an ax handle, began to pummel the door heroically. It yielded to his thunder, the door was sprung, and the official party entered. In seconds McCarthy emerged, went to his knees, and vomited.

“Oh, my,” I said.

Abberline came out, face blank as per normal, and signaled a fellow with some photographic equipment to enter. More science. For the first time the crime scene would be recorded by means other than memory. Then he came to me. “All right, Jeb,” he said, “you have helped, now I will help you. Constable, let the man pass, and we’ll show him what Jack has brought to London today.”

To the jeers and catcalls of the other press boys, I was led in. It soon became evident that this was no favor; Abberline meant to get me puking in the yard, too, so all the fellows could enjoy a good hard laugh at my destruction.

My first reaction was not horror so much as confusion. What I saw fit no pattern. “Dissonant” was a term that came to mind: It had no melody, structure, harmony, undertone, contrapuntal melody; it was just a random pile of notes, lines, and staffs. As my eyes adjusted to the darker palette of the room, I forgot musicality and moved next to the idea of a butcher shop in which the anarchists had detonated a small bomb, for heaps and piles of meat seemed to be laying about, and the walls had been spattered crimson.

I looked upon it—it was no she but only an it—as it lay at bed’s edge, and in a few seconds my mind was nimble enough to pick out the form that lay beneath the desecration.

“Holy Jesus,” I said.

“Not Jesus at all,” said the sanguine Abberline, “but Jack.”

Had she been a pretty girl? Had she a bonnie smile, a sparkle to the eye, a pert button nose, lips of cushion and comfort? I hope memory had the answer, because as of now, no one would ever know. It was not a face at all but a kind of mask of red death, after Poe’s helpful presentation of the apt phrase, all grisly and chopped, with chasms where features had been, all the more hideous for the fact that the more you looked at it, the less abstract it became, until it resolved itself into something precise and quite beyond metaphor, beyond literature, beyond even the great Poe. It took one’s breath and breakfast away, but fortunately, owing to Mother’s war on me, I had no breakfast to contribute to a festival of vomit; however, if nothing in my stomach raised itself up, I felt a shudder down to my knees and had a moment of wooze as I rocked back and forth. The cold of November, especially as admitted by the open window and now shattered door, kept well in control the odors that would have been choking, and that was a great aid in control of intestinal reactions, but I broke out in sweat and felt it roll down inside my suit.

“Who was she?” I uttered.

“Neighbors say a tart named Mary Jane Kelly, among other aliases. A nice enough girl, they say, no need whatsoever to do her up like this.”

“Can she be identified in such condition?”

“We’re looking for a Joe Barnett, paramour, who knew her best. He’ll have to make the identification official. That is, if he’s not the fellow himself.”

“I thought it was a Jack job.”

“Certainly seems as much, but the death cuts are on the right, not the left. Perhaps that’s how he found her and cut her lying down, finding it the easiest way.”

There was a sudden pop! and flare of illumination, as the photographer had finally gotten his kit assembled and in action. The flash device admitted the vapor of burned chemicals, whatever they were, strong enough to make me wince. He set about to take more pictures, snapping plates in and out of the box, adding flash powder to his device and the like.

I bent close and looked into the one undestroyed aspect of her visage, her eyes.

“If you’re looking for the image of her killer, save your effort,” said Abberline rather snippily. “Old wives’ tale. Seen a hundred in my time, no image on any of ’em.”

I stood, shaking my head. The great Jeb, at last with nothing to say.

“All right,” said Abberline, “you’ve had your peek. Now be a good boy and share your findings with your peers and keep them out of my hair while we set about to learn all that can be learned until Dr. Phillips makes his own determinations.”

I was escorted out and set free. I went to the press boys and told them what I had learned, and they appreciated my generosity. Though our papers were at war, we were friends and colleagues at ground level, and I shared what I had, then joined the general scramble to find a phone cabinet and get it off.