Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Jeb’s Memoir

I told Professor Dare about my confirmation that the colonel had shown signs of the dyslexia condition that was the primal clue in his quest and that, as predicted, he had emerged from a morally nourishing humanitarian background.

“For my part,” I said, “I was not checking on you. I just had to know. It is unsettling to put such suspicion against so heroic a man. Something in me finds it unsavory.”

“Would you adjudge that physical bravery trumps deep moral evil? Is that your position?”

“No, of course. That not being so, however, does not make it anything to celebrate.”

“All right. I concur. Let us be sure, then. Have you another mechanism by which he may be tested?”

“No, of course not. It’s just that—” Then I said, “You would not say that unless you did.”

“Something has occurred to me. It’s somewhat dangerous, I suppose, and neither of us is particularly heroic.”

“Enter his rooms and search when he is absent?”

“I haven’t the spice for that, and I doubt you do, either. We are not cracksmen but amateurs, particularly in the action department.”

“True enough. So have you come up with something Sherlock Holmes might have conjured?”

“That damned fellow again. I must read that book you seem to think so highly of. As for this trick, it’s rather too basic for this Holmes’s elegant genius. You must merely ask yourself. It’s there, if you ponder rigorously. When is he vulnerable? When might his guard be down? When would he be unlikely to pull knife and cut his way out of an issue?”

I thought. I thought. I thought.

“His opium habit,” I finally said. “The drug puts him in a dream state. He may babble or confess or scream in guilt or cry in remorse. We do not force it upon him, he welcomes it and sees it as routine. But I could be there.”

“Is it in you to do so?”

I knew nothing of opium, its element, its practices, its dangers. But at the same time, I could not proceed with leverage against a man who had a VC without more proof that I believed in.

“I will find it in myself,” I said.

I was not without resources. I tutored with Constable Ross, assuming correctly that in his experience on the streets and within London’s lowest dives, rookeries, brothels, beer shops, gambling halls, and dogfighting arenas would be an acquaintanceship with opium dens. I was right, and thus armed, I waited outside and down the street on a bleak block on the margins of the Dockland for the colonel to show up, as the professor had insisted he would. Indeed he did, his banty stride giving him away, his energy in contrapuntal rhythm to the grimness of the spot somewhat amazing.

It was so West End melodramatic that I felt I was viewing something lit for the boards. He slid against a wood door in an otherwise blank brick wall and knocked, and just like onstage, a slot opened in the door, his identity was confirmed, a code was exchanged, and he was admitted.

“All right,” said Ross, who’d accompanied me on this trip to the demimonde as a buttress against my own terror, “now wait for him to get his pipe going, for the first calming effects to take hold, and then approach.”

“Indeed,” I said. “Damn, it’s cold.”

“It is, but soon you’ll forget the outer world. Now repeat to me what I have said.”

“I must partake of the first and even the second draw. The Chinaman will be watching. If I don’t, thugs will beat me and toss me out. From that point on, I can choose to not inhale but merely hold and release the vapor into the air and cut my consumption remarkably and only half descend into madness. I will feel effects, no doubt, dizziness, mild hallucinations, color exchanges, shape-changing, but nothing a man with a strong mind can’t handle.”

“What else?”

“Ahh”—drawing a blank, and then—“oh yes, the drug will hit me like a rugby tackle. I cannot avoid that, as I have no tolerance. It’s not Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup. I must not panic and instead let it take me. The stuff liquefies under heat, so one must be careful not to spill the pipe, as it will be a giveaway.”

“Very good, sir,” said Ross.

“And you’re sure I’ll write ‘Kubla Khan’ when I emerge?” I said.

Ross didn’t get my little witticism and only said, “I don’t know about that, sir.”

We waited another twenty minutes and no more customers arrived.

“All right, sir, now’s the time, there’s the good chap.”

“See you in a bit, or so I hope,” I said.

“You’ll be fine.”

I drew my mac tight, my hat low, and headed across the cobblestones to the doorway, pushing my way through low drifts of fog that had blown in from seaward. It was getting more West End by the moment. Excellent job on the dry ice for fog, Mr. Jones!

I slid in the doorway and rapped three, then two, then waited. The police intelligence was good, and in a few seconds the slot opened and I saw a pair of slanted eyes.

“Bawang hua,” I said, which means, I believe, “flower king.”

More good intelligence. The slot snapped shut, the door opened. I slid in, hammered immediately by the drifting pall of fume in the red air, as all the lanterns were tinted in that hellish shade.

“A pipe, old man, and none of that for-shite Turkish sludge. Your finest Persian silk, if you please.” It was gibberish to me, but again Ross had advised well. The Chinaman looked me up and down, but I’m guessing to him occidental faces were as formulaic as Oriental faces are to Englishmen, and at any rate he could not classify me as miscreant, so had only the density of my brown tweed to go on, which he found acceptable. Then he led me down the hall where a Laskar brute who looked as if he chopped heads for a hobby sat grimly under a sign that said PIPES AND LAMPS ALWAYS CONVENIENT. A beaded curtain hung in a doorway to the left, and he led me through it.

I beheld the glare of red lanterns, and in that illumination I saw supine men and heard the shift and sigh and squirm of their presence, and my eyes adjusted. The reddened vapor drifted in the air; the place seemed squalid and damp and dry and hot at once; groans, low moans, giggles, and coughs rose softly. The smell, oddly, of toasted nuts was present, though it had disturbing undertones. Glow worms burned against the dark, reddening with the draw, diminishing as put down. My eyes found better focus, and what I beheld was a hall of profound stupor, men beyond movement or care, spilled across wicker divans, their bodies lackadaisical as rag dolls, all pretense of rank and show completely abandoned, all jaws flaccid, all eyes fixated on eternity or infinity or the place where the two somehow met. I could not make out the colonel, but I could not make out anyone.

The Chinaman poked me and jibber-jabbered, small paw out. When I placed in it the standard three and six for a thimbleful, he looked disappointed, so I passed over another tuppence to show goodwill. He led me, I shed myself of hat and coat, and he bade me go supine on my own divan. There were four of them placed about a red lantern glowing in the center on a brass-plated table. I lay for a few minutes, letting my eyes further refine, not daring to peer about, as it wasn’t the sort of place where friendly eye contact was encouraged.

In time, my host returned with a long clay stem, slightly curved, which at its end held a small cup. Ross had provided me with a veteran’s retinue of tricks, so I drew the cup close to eye for a check, scraped the brown paste inside, drew off a little under my thumbnail, and brought it to nostril for sniff and to tongue for taste, as if I were capable of discerning the difference between Turkish and Persian. It had neither odor nor taste, as far as I could tell, but I nodded and winked at the deliverer and he sped away.

I placed the pipe cup atop the lantern and waited for it to absorb enough concentrated energy to begin to smolder. I had been instructed that it was impervious to live flame; only the application of pure heat, as passed through the conduit of soft metals, ignited it and began its alchemical magic. Obviously I was being watched, so when I saw tendrils of vapor, I put it to mouth and applied suction.

Nothing happened. Odd, Coleridge had seen far-off lands, his imagination liberated by the stuff’s mythical ability to provoke, but I saw nothing. I blinked again, thinking, Opium: overrated.

And then . . . My, my, isn’t this interesting. It was a sense of pleasure that can only be called acute. My skin felt soft, my body warmed pleasantly. In a few seconds the acute metamorphisized to the chronic. Pleasure was general. I seemed to forget who I was and why I was there. I lay back and for a second believed I had found paradise. Drat! Too early to make such a claim, for the next second completed my journey through the upper levels of poppyland and brought me to the destination the opiate had selected for me.

I was in a concert hall, alone, though well dressed. Upon the stage was my sister. The applause was tumultuous, although again I was by myself in the ranks of red-plush seats, and I was not clapping. Lucy, the adored one, accepted the enthusiasm of the invisible crowd with grace. She was quite lovely, in a rather low silk gown, a small but firm bust with a string of pearls about her swan’s neck. There was serene confidence on her beautiful face.

She sang. An aria from Wagner, I think, though one of his gentler, more romantic ones, nothing with dark clouds and northern war gods bashing each other with sword and hammer. Her voice was exquisite, but the odd thing was that each note emerged shimmering from her throat and found a place in midair above her, moreover then transfiguring into a bird of bright plumage. I saw nightingales, peacocks, blue parrots, proud ocher hawks and falcons, even some prehistoric saurian birds festooned in the colors of the rainbow. In time an aviary of dazzling brilliance had taken grip on roosts above her beautiful head, and the radiance of the color had a kind of translucent sparkle to it, so that it caught, refracted, redirected, and amplified the lights of the hall.

She stood, crowned. The glory of the music was enshrined in the pigment of feathers above her, the whole thing rather awesome. It seemed to be a scene from some sort of devotional. It was whoever God may be, adoring her formally.

I had always hated her. Where I struggled, she soared. Where I bumbled, she triumphed. Where I was unloved, she was worshipped. She had been sent here, I was convinced, to make mockery of my many failings, my lack of talent and industry, my crude ways, my slithery mendacity, my awareness that the music that was the river of life in our family would not be my destiny, while it would be hers in diamonds.

The astonishment was how proud I felt. Shorn of my fury at her position of supremacy in the family, I felt the cascade of love. That was my sister, my flesh, my family, my blood up there, and it reflected so well upon me that I could not but take immense contentment from it.

Yet into this demi-paradise—my true expression of love for Lucy, which I have heretofore hidden from all, most especially myself, the depth of her talent, the perfection of her beauty unsnarled by jealousy and fear—came at last the snake, except it wasn’t a snake, it was a large brutish boar (an opium pun? bore? boor? brother?), horned and snuffling, grunting, leaking filth and offal, his unorganized ways suggestive of violence.

He wandered, sniffing, munching, probing his way across the stage. Lucy did not panic nor race to safety. Her love abideth. She reached to his hideous head and stroked it, knelt to it and switched to Brahms, something delicate and soothing. She tamed the savage heart of the beast, which happily went to knees and then full supine, placed its great snout upon the floor, and began to snore rapturously, lost, perhaps, in its own opium dreams. These images, I might add, were as vivid to me as any in reality. What they symbolized, I have no idea, if anything at all. Yet they have stayed with me and will, I believe, forever.

I blinked and found myself back in the den, in the drifting pall of red haze, watching as now and then someone drifted this way or that. I was sure my trip had lasted but a second or two. However, once reality more or less returned, I became bored. If one does not smoke opium in an opium den, what is there to do? There is otherwise no entertainment, so the answer is nothing, and I did nothing for an hour or so, pretending to draw a lungful of the gas into my system now and then. Generally, however, I was quiet, and after more than a bit of time, I felt secure enough to look about in the low light.

I could not see him, but I could not see anyone or anything except the seething red vapors. At a certain point, a fellow across from me decided he’d been voyaging through the universe enough for one evening, and rose and stumbled out. That opened a vantage, and across the room, at another grouping of four divans, I made out the silhouette of the colonel’s derby, read the shortness of his form, and by that method identified him. His face was still, somewhat blocked from view by a large bat that hung off his nose. He seemed oblivious, as oblivious as all of them, and I wondered if he were dead. But now and then I’d detect motion, see a pipe rise, its stem put to mouth, and the glow suffusing the air above the cup signifying a deep inward draw. He must have had big lungs, as his ingestions were heroic in their length and depth. He also must have had terrible dragons in his brain, if it took that much to soothe them.

More eons passed. In other words, ten minutes went by, even if those ten had no place in real time, and two of the smokers from the colonel’s little collection of four got up to stumble out. As they shambled toward the door, the Chinaman attended them, and in this brief little circus of activity, I slipped off my divan and took up one next to the colonel.

Finally I got a good look at him. His face was rather dour, as if gravity had a special grudge against him and pulled his flesh downward at twice the going rate. Morever, the large bat that dominated his lower half turned out to be a spectacularly droopy mustache. It must have weighed a stone three. His eyes were lightless, he stared at nothing, he looked at nothing, he said nothing. He was utterly still.

I lay next to him. He was in a very deep place. I did notice one hand was closed into a tight fist, suggesting it gripped something, proof of tension unusual for this place, since the point seemed to be languor as an expression of collapse and escape.

By now it must have been close to dawn. I hoped poor Ross hadn’t frozen himself stiff. It was getting to seem rather pointless, as one learns nothing from a man so far gone as the colonel. But at a certain moment, he stirred.

I turned upward to his face and saw what might be called a just-after-battle stare, the stare of a commanding officer who sees his men slain and gutted in the sun.

He sensed my attention; our eyes met. I could seen pain in his. The drug, which offered such merciful surcease, had at last worn off. He was naked to memory in that moment, perhaps not yet hunkered down behind the Spartan war shields of self-discipline and willed stoicism that kept him sane. It was a rare moment.

“The blood,” he said. “There was so much of it. Blood everywhere, the poor girl. You see, it’s on me. I was the one. Her guts, her face, all butchered up, all cut to ribbons. Me, see, I was the one who done it.”

“Sir,” I said, “are you all right?”

“I killed her, you know. No one else, me alone. God help me, it was a terrible thing, but I could not help myself.”

Though this confession should have stirred horror in me, it inspired compassion. He was so in pain.

“Sir, would you like me to get you some water? Perhaps you have a fever and need a doctor?”

He wasn’t listening. He opened his hand to examine what he gripped so hard in his fist, and I nearly fell out of my own divan. He held Annie’s rings! I had to make certain I wasn’t the one hallucinating, so I closed my eyes hard and long, then opened them and made certain I saw what I saw, which was indeed two rings in his large palm.

“She wore them both, you know,” he said. “It fell to me to take them from those still, bloody fingers. I am beyond damnation. Hellfire awaits, and rightly so.”

With that he arose, turned, and walked out.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The Diary

November 19, 1888

The funeral. It seemed that once the papers recounted the thoroughness with which I had hashed poor Mary Jane, she became London’s favorite martyr. It was not to me to point out that, alive, she was invisible to the gentry who would not so much as spit in her direction, unless of a dark night they were tupping her sweet loins for a few pennies’ worth of ejaculate deposit, after which it was back to nothingness for her. In death she became magnificent, a star, however briefly, more so than any actress or opera singer. They had not read her letters to her phantom mum, they had not wondered at her addiction to demon gin, they had not missed her brothers and sisters.

When it turned out no money was available to send her on, a churchman named Wilson, the sexton of St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, put up the sum. I’m guessing he thought it would get him to heaven, and I’m guessing that it will, assuming heaven exists, which it doesn’t. According to the Times, Mary Jane was laid into polished oak and elm, a box, that is, with metal fittings. A brass plate would accompany her into the dirt: “Marie Jeanette Kelly, died 9 November 1888,” so that He above would not get her mixed up with another Marie Jeanette Kelly, unless that one, too, had died on the ninth.

Sexton Wilson’s crown and pounds and guineas went rather far: They obtained two wreaths of artificial flowers and a cross made up of heart seed, which went upon the coffin, which was put into an open two-horse hearse to be drawn all the way from the mortuary to St. Leonard’s.

The crowds—I was one of the thousands, in a dowdy bowler, lumpy dark suit, and black overcoat, looking like the clerk of a clerk who clerked for a clerk, but a really important clerk—were quite hysterical with grief. A crowd is a fearsome thing. If you are in it, you cannot fight it, and I did not. It frothed and flashed and rolled and rumbled, filling all the streets around the mortuary and the path from that grim little house of the dead to the slightly more prominent St. Leonard’s, whose steeple, though a piercing construction, was no match for the Christchurch missile that soared Godward. But it was, as the shopkeeps say, nice.

Absorbed in the bosom of the crowd, I did note something of interest and must mark it down. In this case it was the women who were the driving force of that mass of flesh and sadness called The People, and you could feel them yearning to be close with Mary in her box, to touch it somehow. What possible motive did they have? To assure themselves that they were alive and that she was not? Or to remind themselves that as long as Jack was about, their own grip on life was fragile? No, I think it was something vaster, more universal: They invested in her, poor Welsh-Irish whore given to song when drunk and knowing no way of saying no when a thruppence was offered by a cad who wanted to have a spasm of jizz with someone other than his dour old lady; they invested in Mary Jane, shredded and splayed in her box, as Woman Universal. Somehow, I don’t know how, it would link up with the suffragette movement and other uniquely feminine power dynamos who are only now finding the voice and the means to express themselves. Mary Jane was the eternal woman, I, Ripper, was the eternal man, even though sex had been quite far from my mind as I ripped.

I watched from afar as the coffin was removed from its transportation and borne by four men into the church, where presumably Sexton Wilson and the St. Leonard’s parish priest said the proper wording in our tongue and the ancient papal one, sufficient to consecrate the poor bird and send her on the next step.

In and out of the hearse, her journey was lubricated by gestures of universal pain and respect, as hats came off (including my own, for however unholy that may seem, I could not stand against the will of the mass without inviting severe repercussion), and from the women came such a wailing as had never been heard. “God forgive her,” they insisted, as if their words could so convince Him, whereas I believed that though He did not exist, had He, He never would have had need to forgive, for unlike our social lords, he understands that one does what one must to get through the lonely, dark night.

In a short time, it was over. She was transported by the same four back to the hearse and her intimates—the paramour, Joe Barnett, her landlord, McCarthy, and a batch of soiled doves who claimed to know her well—traversed the churchyard to clamber into the mourning carriages the sexton had acquired for their use, and the whole parade began the second part of its journey, to the St. Patrick’s Catholic cemetery in Leytonstone, six miles hence. At this point, the crowd began to fall away, I among them, though I stuck with the procession longer than most. But there seemed no point in watching the final act, as Mary Jane was slipped beneath our planet’s surface, there to begin her sure return to the elements of chemistry we all share.

Besides, I had more important work ahead. My campaign was almost complete. It had but one trick left to be brought off, and it was essential that it be done quickly, that is, within the mourning period, as again, a quarter-moon approached.