Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

CHAPTER SIX

Jeb’s Memoir

Success is a narcotic. Experienced once, it must be had again and again. Pity the man who has it young and can never regain it. His must be a parched, bitter life. As for me, the week of September 1 through 7 was the best I’d ever had, and it strengthened my resolve to never, ever return to being the nonentity I had been my first thirty-two years.

I owe it all to Jack, though the name would not be affixed into eternity for another month or so. It’s terrible, but as truth is the guideline here, I must nevertheless confess it. Jack’s depredations made Jeb’s successes possible, and fixed Jeb on the course his life would take, giving him the sense of importance that he would never again cease to maneuver in search of.

Brilliance followed brilliance. I grabbed a nap in the Star office and watched with utter satisfaction as the MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN editions sold out, went back to what O’Connor said was “replate” seven times, and effectively not only invented but drove the story onward.

Such energy and determination. Such tirelessness. Jeb was the hero of the day, the ace reporter who had found and amplified the case for the millions of shopkeeps and -girls who comprised the London population. I was their thrill machine, I was their fear of darkness and sharp instruments, I suppose I was the swollen penis or the wetted cunny that they could never admit to having had. Jeb brought all this to them. It was a shame, then, that I had no idea what I was doing.

“Get yourself to the London Hall of Records,” Henry Bright instructed. “Find an amiable clerk to look up the name of the lady. Her official records should have leads—if she has children, an address, a husband, real or common-law. Go to them, not wasting a ha’penny’s worth of time, and chat them up. Stop off here first, pick up an artist, he will accompany you to sketch the faces. We need to put their faces in the newspaper.”

“He’s right. Readers need to attach a human identity to whoever’s doing the talking. It makes the thing have a complete sense to it,” said Mr. O’Connor.

“If you get the name, you’ll be way ahead. Also, cultivate that copper. The bastard detectives will play awesome, as if they’re university men among the pig farmers, but they probably don’t know half as much as the sharp-eyed street constable. Maybe your friend has resentments against them from slights delivered with which you can pry information out of him. Envy is the juice in which the world bubbles, with dashes of malice tossed in to bring the human stew to a delicious boil.”

I did all of that, napping at the paper. It worked out surprisingly well. Indeed, Sergeant Ross gave me the name out of thanks for the light the Star’s original story had shone on him, more than the poor man had ever got in his life, after years of dedicated work. Most important to him, it turned out, was how his mention had buzzed off the gentlemen from the Metropolitan Police Bethel Green J Division, CID, who had been handed the investigation.

Via the Records Department, I got to poor Polly’s husband first, and even broke the news to him. If I’d had a shred of human mercy left, I might have allowed the fellow a moment of repose after hearing that the woman he once loved, the woman who gave him five children, made his food, and gave him her body for twenty-six years before she lost her soul to demon gin, was now dead horribly in the gutter, all cut and minced. Quite the opposite: Knowing him to be vulnerable, I pressed him and got good details. My ambition was as fully sized as any addiction to opium by now. It had been a bit of time since he’d seen her, but through his eyes, I was at least able to give the poor old girl some humanity. That’s the rub of the newspaper game, I realized. It helps me, it does indeed, but it helps you, too, in the long run, though the gain may be a bit late to play out.

Then I went to the Frying Pan, a disagreeable enough place, and there found two souls—the barkeep and Emma Lownes, no fixed address other than the odd week or two in the Lambeth Workhouse, and for the thruppence it took to secure Emma a nice glass of gin that I doubt was distilled by Boodle’s, she evoked the decency of her late friend, her own fear of a man who stabbed and slashed by night, and her extremely limited prospects. In the end I gave her another thruppence, meant to go for a quiet night at a doss house, but I’m sure it went through her gullet and was pissed out by seven that evening.

Finally, having evoked the victim in vivid colors, I went on to the sorry state of the police investigation, Sergeant Ross being once again my confidential source. We met furtively, like spies, in a Whitechapel public house called the Alma, after the great victory in the Crimean War nearly half a century before. By day, it was a dark and low place, with no energy nor fire to it and only dissolute beer fiends and lonely Judys wasting their doss money on gin.

“You can’t use me name on this one,” he said. “Old Warren”—he meant Sir George Warren, embattled head of the Metropolitans—“has set a policy of reticence. You won’t be hearing much on this case, and anything gets out, they’ll be swift after the talker.”

“I will protect you. But in stories to come, you’ll emerge as the true hero of the case. To hell with the CID. They only exist to take bribes anyhow.”

“Appreciated, guv’nor. So this is where we seem to be at”—he paused for the effect—“and that’s nowhere.”

I nodded, having suspected as much. It would be a hard case to crack.

DESPITE INTENSE EFFORTS, POLICE PROGRESS IN THE CASE OF THE SLAUGHTERED WHITECHAPEL UNFORTUNATE, I would write that night, HAVE YET TO YIELD A SUBSTANTIAL CLUE.

AN EARLY ARREST IS RULED OUT, POLICE TELL THE STAR, AND THERE’S LITTLE THAT CAN BE DONE EXCEPT WAIT FOR THE DEMON TO STRIKE AGAIN AND HOPE HE LEAVES A CLEARER TRAIL.

Ross had confirmed what everyone with half a brain knew already, which was that the Metropolitan Police were dependent on the old methods. Though they knew of fingerprints in theory, they had no base or file of them to deploy and, unless left in blood on a knife blade or painted wall, were hard to record from other surfaces. They had only primitive chemistry and medical help, estimating time of death by lividity or temperature of body, a chancy method at best. Their techniques were as old as the Middle Ages: protection and examination of the crime scene, autopsy findings, questioning of suspects, local intelligence, interviews with witnesses, increase in patrolling in the crime area, and finally, reward. However, those techniques worked best when applied to a fellow who was part of an organized criminal underworld, worked for a gang like the High Rips, had mates and a boss and all the appurtenances of the aboveground world only perverted into criminality. He also would have competitors or enemies, neutral observers who would sell him out as a favor for someone else. There was a whole barter system—negotiation, feint, bluff, reward, and punishment—that really underlay the Metropolitan Police’s attempt to control the underworld, even as half successful as that was. Our boy, the mad butcher, was vulnerable to none of it, except by a chance that hadn’t happened or hadn’t evinced itself yet.

You could tick off the mistakes already made one by one: Not realizing how big the case would get, the coppers had been very sloppy on Buck’s Row, even allowing Jeb to track across the murder ground to look at the body as it was fitted into the cart; and the two constables had already mucked up the soil where they’d squirmed to find the leverage to lift poor Polly. The autopsy might yield something, but unless he left a calling card, it would reveal only that a knife was used, which was obvious even to Charlie Cross on his way to work.

As for suspects, presumably the coppers had an index with names of boys in the area who’d taken a hand or even a blade to whores in the past, but this crime was so out of scale with what had come before—and was being blown up even further by the industry of Jeb—that it was unlikely one of these lads had done the deed. All of us, copper, reporter, and reader alike, understood that some threshold had been achieved, some new level had been reached, and like it or not, we had entered a modern age. So the records would be of little use. Maybe the whores knew something, but by nature they weren’t the sort to chatter to CID swells, though the constabulary who shared the streets with them might fare a bit better.

Would extra patrols help? That alone bore some promise, if only to act as a deterrent to the killer’s mad impulses. Maybe, knowing that more constables were about, he’d decide his one triumph was enough to savor in old age. But that was unlikely. There was something unformed, even callow, about the taking of poor Polly’s life. It was like an expeditionary force, not an occupation; he wanted to see if he could get away with it, what it felt like, what could be learned from it, and might regard the increased patrolling as more of a challenge to his intellect.

After all, for all his boldness, he’d been very lucky, barely missing the blue bottles both coming and going. That would annoy him; he had expected so much more to be on his side than pure dumb luck. This time, having mastered the basics, he’d be sharper.

I left the Alma with my Pitman notepad chuck-full, looking for a hansom cab to get me to the office so I could amaze London tomorrow with yet more new revelations. But the traffic on Commercial Street was so heavy, a hansom would do me no good. So I decided to walk a few blocks up till it crossed Whitechapel, and if that broadway were clearer, I’d find the cab there. It was now about eight o’clock by my pocket watch, and up the street I hastened.

It struck me that in my several times here in Whitechapel, I’d never really looked at the place in full clarity. Now, at last, I had space and time and opportunity to behold the hell den where the killer lurked, the ladies walked, the gentlemen searched, and sex and death were in the air.

What you saw, on Commercial Street, at least, was a great bazaar of humanity, a sort of gathering of tribes for sustenance of all sorts (all sorts were available) amid clamor, dust, the smell of horse ordure and human excrement, various foodstuffs, including meat and fruit and candy offered from the abundant stalls clotting the sidewalks, the eau de toilette the ladies presumably splashed about between commercial transactions, and the ever present London tang of coal-oil smoke from all the burners at the hearth, which I am told sometimes combined with the evil sea dew to create the city’s cottony billows of fog. But mostly, you felt the hubbub, the bustle, the clamor, the circus-midway urgency of people unconsciously living out their lives without much thought or hope or worry.

It was a festival of hattery, as none in those days went uncapped. The men beneath, most in heavy frock coats or tweedy Norfolks, all with dark ties cinched about their necks, and most obscured by beard, were unknowable and mysterious as they drifted this way and that. Not all were hunting for Judys, but I think it fair to say that all were hunting for something, be it a beer in a public house, an oyster in a stall, a piece of meat on a stick, a glowing globe of fruit, a new trinket or toy, a bonnet for a lover, an office for a lawyer, a freak with no nose, conjoined twins, magic shows, minstrels true Negro or just paint, or what have you, and I do not know what you have. Some were just slumming, as coming in from the sober City to see the show was quite the habit.

Meanwhile, those of lower origin and destiny fought for space amid the costers’ stalls, coal heavers and dock laborers, dolly mops and magsmen, cabinetmakers and seamstresses, bug hunters and mudlarks, and “entertainers” of various type, ballad singers and oratorical beggars and running patterers and the street-fire king, who devoured and disgorged great scuts of flame for a penny a pyre.

Dust rose from the streets as the cabs and wagons and tram buses coursed slowly up or down, the horses pausing now and again to beshit themselves and the cobblestones, all of it creating a mad din that, heard once, would ring forever in your ears (I hear it now, in a quiet study, twenty-four years later). God was not entirely absent: At street corners the anointed addressed small flocks of believers or want-to-believes and threw scripture hard and loud at them. Commerce of a thousand kinds transpired. But Babylon demanded its obeisance as well: Down side streets were the penny gaffs, wherein, or so it was claimed, scantily clad young maidens cavorted to bad music. Gambling went on everyplace, and if you looked sex-wanting but frightened of a real Judy, a scurvy-looking fellow might approach and offer you French postcards from underneath his coat, these being glimpses of carnal entanglements that took some deciphering. Rat killing seemed an enjoyable sport for certain Johnnies, while others turned to dog fighting, all forms of barbarism offered to the top hats without a blush of shame.

So much frenzy, so much throbbing, so much shove and slip and shuffle, everywhere, everywhere. Chanters, second-edition sellers, boardwalkers, strawers, mountebanks, clowns, jugglers, conjurors, grease removers, nostrum vendors, fortune-tellers, French polishers, turnpike sailors, various classes of lurkers and peepers, stenographic-card sellers, racetrack-card sellers. It was all illuminated by naphtha lamps atop high poles but also by swaths of glare from the public houses, of which there appeared to be one every thirty or forty feet. Besides the Alma, I passed the Ten Bells, the Queen’s Head, the Britannia, the Horn of Plenty, the King’s Share, and the Princess Alice. Each was full packed, in full swing, in full glug, for I should add that liquor was the fuel that kept the human fires of Whitechapel ablaze, which meant that it slowed speech, slurred and slowed and misguided decisions, stuttered steps, and slewed behavior this way and that. A man fully drunk is not fully human: He pisses and shits without remorse, he speaks without thought (the truth, usually, God help us), and he’s quick to fist or blade or bullet. So that, too, that distance from normal discourse, hung over everything like a cloud, a pall, garish in the grotesque play of the light on the puddles in the street or the windows across the way or the shine of the beaver in the hats. No wonder the slummers came to watch.

And the women, of course. By law they could not stop. If they stopped, the coppers could nick them, and it was off to the tank for a night, a night without the comforts of gin, and the quick blast of jizz to pay for it, and finally, hard earned, the lice-infested bed at a doss house. So walk the poor dearies did, in a great circle, up Commercial to Whitechapel, down Whitechapel to Brick Lane, then Brick Lane to Hanbury, which led them back to Commercial. It was said by the Metropolitans that there were at least fifteen hundred Judys on the streets and, in the dark avenues off the lighted concourses, sixty-six brothels, perhaps for a higher class of girl and a higher class of customer. The street girls, however, were the permanent feature of the Whitechapel experience.

Which brings me to the core of the issue: the presence of all those streets and alleys. That was what made the whole thing go, that was what turned Whitechapel into a square-mile outdoor brothel where the grunts and squeals and gasps of the sex dance were never far from the ear, and if you turned as you walked by a dark passageway off the boulevard, you could often make out the shadowy figures of those seeking oblivion in the final spurt of the act.

Whitechapel was so fully laced with dark roads off the main stem, which functioned as “rooms” in the imaginary brothel of which I speak, that you could almost smell the jizz and cunny in the air. The stage design of the immense show was structured along elemental lines: It was simply dark vs. light, each being intensified by the presence of the other, and perhaps many came simply to appreciate the sharpness of the divide between those two worlds. I know I found it fascinating and could not stop turning it over in my mind, believing it had to mean something more than it did.

The light was commerce, family, order, civilization; the dark was raw sex, violence, and by implication the end to civilization. I took as premise that our fellow, our mad butcher, our fiend with a knife, was a creature of the dark, and as such had a kind of mythical significance few could articulate but all could appreciate, for it quivered the marrow of the human bone.

He was what we left behind when we moved indoors, he was the beast of the heart, he was a creature of pure will without interest in, much less an obedience to, all those rules we agreed upon when we put ourselves under roof. Mercy? Pity? Cooperation? Civility? Brotherhood? The hallowed temple of the soul? Bah, he pushed them aside with a single brutish swipe. He was out of the Cimmerian darkness, mangy, hairy, quick to slash and cut and exult in the spillage of blood. He cried havoc, he let slip the dogs of depravity and murder, but even more loudly he cried, Not so fast. With your modern age, your railways, your steel ships and machines of war and deep penetrations under the earth for a fuel to drive it all—not so fast, you blighters. Here is the message I deliver for you to contemplate. I am anarchy. I am fear. I am carnage, slaughter, destruction for its own sake. I will remind you: It is your vanity to believe you have come so far and left me behind. You will never leave me behind. Don’t you see it yet? I am you.

That, really, is why I knew he’d strike again.

And he did.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Diary

September 7–8, 1888

I left my dwelling at nine P.M. and took a hansom to city center, and had a repast in a public house, aware that I had my Sheffield in my belt at my hip, under the shirt and the frock coat I chose to wear on these expeditions. It gave me a nice shiver of bliss to be sitting there amid men of business and journalism or whatever, serious men, being seemingly one of them, and them not knowing what lay beneath my coat, them not noticing me at all or if so only in passing, them never guessing in a million years that eight inches of just-sharpened steel held tight in a grip of fine English maplewood pressed against my flesh, rather uncomfortably but not without its own measure of pleasure. A man with a good knife feels king of the world, that’s for certain!

I ambled about, taking pleasure in the city at night. It was such a mad, delirious carnival, and because the weather was superior, most seemed to be temporarily jolly and taking pleasure in the fact that life had put so much on their table. In this way I passed the hours, partaking, enjoying, meandering, observing, and, one supposes, gathering. Everywhere the lights were magnificent and in them showed the red, pleased faces of common men, pleased again to be common and to be men. By midnight I had made my way to Whitechapel by avoiding the Underground railway and its steam-engined efficiency and shoulder-to-shoulder crowds entirely. The flesh parade was in full operation. Again I ambled, even took a stroll down Buck’s Row to see the spot of my previous action. There, flowers and candles and various memento mori had been placed on the street just beyond the bridge over the East London Railway tracks, exactly where I had felled poor Polly. A few others stood by, trying to absorb what had happened there, standing, pointing, hoping perhaps to find in the dark a clue the police had missed in full daylight. I suppose some thought that the murderer always returns to the site of his crime, and though in this case it turned out to be true, it happened not out of will or even vague plan but just because at the time the whimsy took me.

I returned to Whitechapel High Street, ambled down it, found a crowded public house—the Horn of Plenty—and had a stout. It wasn’t for nerves, for mine were steady on without a problem; it was to kill time. But I had wanted plenty of time, and to make my way on foot in a moseying fashion, so that no hansom cabman or horse-tram driver could remember, no matter how small a chance that might be. One couldn’t be too careful, except in the act of commission, where one had momentarily to be bold as a pirate, to strike and go to red carnage, and then obsequiously depart under cover of darkness and unprepossesion of being.

Sometime after two, I slipped out; the crowd was thinning, and again I was worried about standing out. Now my course took me down Whitechapel, where the crowds were more or less thick, and I began my wend through smaller streets until I found myself at Hanbury and Brick Lane, another thoroughfare known as a Judy broadway. It was well lit, and though the crowds were thinner, the business—which, after all, is based on the eternal fires of lustful loins and the eternal availability of opened thighs—still produced a human density. I glanced at my watch, saw that it was nearly three, and instead of continuing down Hanbury, took a right to eat up some more time and wait for the crowds to thin further. I stopped for another stout, finding a seat at the bar where I could keep an eye on the street, and there watched for constables and, at a certain time when the street seemed devoid of them, wandered out upon it.

I spotted her right away. This one was short and thick but obviously a Judy on patrol, trolling for her thruppence. She wore two rings on her left hand, middle finger; I had already conjured a use for such a clue. It fit neatly into the overall plan animating my campaign. I approached her, moving a bit faster than she, until I was just behind her left shoulder, where I adjusted my pace to hers and made certain to violate the commonly understood social principles of space, coming far too close, so that my intention was clear. She turned, but not fully to face me, and I saw her doughy profile at the quarter-angle, the broad nose, the painted-on brightness of inexpensive coloring. I could smell her eau d’toilette. She flashed a sliver of a smile, enough for me to see amazingly strong teeth, and more or less whispered, “What’s it, then, dearie? Bit of sport for the gentleman?”

“I am indeed hoping for just such, my dear,” I said. I had timed it perfectly, intercepting her before and making the connection exactly at the Hanbury Street junction.

“We’ll find a lovely private spot, then,” she said, and led me to the right, into the darkness, down Hanbury.

We drifted slowly, my love and I, along the dark block, lost in a canyon of dark brick, illuminated here and there by a late reader’s light. Ahead, another block away, we could see the brightness that was Commercial Street, and see the traffic upon it, the drift of the gals and beaus and visitors and innocents. As a twosome, we were too close, not quite a couple but not strangers, either. Ghostlike apparitions drifted by us now and then, a Judy, a John, an early-rising workman, who could tell?

Near the end of the block, as I had anticipated—for I had probed the area for possibility a few days earlier—she indicated a rightward turn with her head and put her weight against a door, and it opened to reveal the dark passage that was the throughway to the backyard of 29 Hanbury. We slipped along a dark corridor, passing a mute stairway at the left, and came to nestle near the way out.

“Got a present for Annie, your lordship?” she asked. She had a rheumy, wet slough to her voice, as if her lungs were full of death, and seemed a little blurry, not drunk as a sailor but in that zone of vagueness that the gin confers before it hammers one into full-bang disorientation.

I pressed the coin into her hand, and she took it greedily, sliding it into some hidden pocket of her voluminous dark dress. I said, “Come, let’s move a bit, into more privacy.” I had a fear that this place was too vulnerable, that noise would rise through the house or that another Judy and her companion of the minute might enter 29, not knowing it was occupied.

And here is where what happened began to deviate from the ideal. I had imagined a hundred times since picking the site how we’d end up in the backyard, and how I’d cut her hard, and how fast she’d die, and how I’d do what must be done, and how smoothly it would all go. But no plan survives contact with the world beyond the mind.

“Sweetie, here’s fine, come on, then, let me pull up me petticoats and we can—”

As if it had a will of its own, my left hand shot out like a snake and bit hard at her throat. Recalling now, I realize that I was not prepared to be defied, I was certainly not willing to argue, and my threshold of frustration was dangerously low, though I had been unaware, thinking myself blissfully composed and utterly in control of both self and lady. It was not so. My hand clamped at her larynx and began to squeeze with the full force of my musculature and my will behind it. Even in the dark, I saw the surprise light her face as the oxygen was pressed off, and though so cinched she could not cry out, her throat’s machinery began to manufacture unintelligible noises of despair, dry clicks and hitches, half-grunts, spitless, noiseless screams, the sound of inner structures rubbing frictively against each other, words that no letters exist to approximate, a whole product line of constricted-throat expectorations, and one hand feebly came to beat against my pinioning arm. I knew this would not do, not here, not indoors, where at any moment we could be interrupted, and so with my right hand, I grabbed her fleshy biceps and put force behind, bumping her along, if you will, shoving her with my chest, guiding her with one hand to arm, one to throat, all the while strangling. It was as weird a dance as has ever been danced, an uncoordinated shuffle of bodies set against each other with the ultimate progress to the way out ten feet, then seven, then four away.

Three, two, one, and we were out the rear door. Still almost carrying her—she was not light, but the intensity of the struggle released strange fluxes of strength through my limbs—I took her down three steps, pivoted to the left, and braced her hard against the wooden fence there, well constructed, as I have said, and able to sustain the force of my thrusting her body against it.

In a flash, I let go of her arm and reached back to withdraw the Sheffield from my belt, aware the whole time that the episode had completely veered south from perfection and become a graceless, cruel thing. Whether she was dead or not—her tongue seemed to protrude from her lips, and her eyes were shut—I could not tell, but if so, just so, and if not, almost so. I struck her neck hard with the knife, blade belly sinking into the softness, and drew it strong around, letting my left hand slip off her throat at last.

That was a moment. She was propped against the fence, unsupported by me, her throat ripped but not yet producing blood, utterly still, quite vulnerable. I struck her again, again felt bite of knife’s belly, again drew down and, pivoting myself, around until my natural length of arm ran out and the blade broke free of its cutting stroke. Now came the blood. As before, a progression, first the droplet, then a few crooked tracks tracing the geography of her neck where it merged into shoulder, an area as full of subtle hollows and ridges as a landscape, then a black stream, then a torrent, then a deluge. She slid to the left as the blood continued to gush, and came to rest with her head next to the three steps down which we had come, parallel to the fence.

Again, there was no death rattle; no sound marked her passing from this world to the next. I controlled my breathing—exertions so intense always stir the heart, it is a natural rule of the body, found universally in biology among all mammalian creatures—and reacquired the focus I needed. First the rings. I pulled her dead hand up, laid the knife upon her chest, and yanked the two brass circles off her pudgy digit. I may have done some harm, not that she noticed, for the finger fought me and I had to yank and twist quite aggressively. I deposited them in my pocket. Next up was her pitiful estate, as looted from her pocketbook. I took some care in arranging its meager contents neatly next to her feet: two small hair combs, one in a paper sheath of some sort, and a piece of coarse muslin whose function was utter mystery to me. An envelope didn’t fit into the line by her feet, so I placed it daintily next to her head. That neatness stood in contrast to what came next, and I was not unaware of the effect.

I reacquired the knife, pulled her petticoats up, saw—oh, comic detail, too pretty to be true but true nonetheless—striped bloomers. I pulled them down until I’d exposed her slack gut, a large dish of pudding, creased and gelid and wrinkly, with a kind of substrata that looked, even in the quarter-moon, like curdled milk.

I cut a deep stroke, left to right, across her lower belly, but unlike with Polly, did not stop there. More work was to be done. My cut was longer, deeper, more workmanlike. I opened a flap into her bowels, pulling it back as one would pull back a canvas, and they lay before me, almost an abstraction. In the moon’s faint blush, they were like a sausage stew, all interconnected in twisty, labyrinthine ways. Perhaps I hesitated, perhaps I didn’t. There was blood, but, the heart that drove it being quieted, no pressure, and so it simply ran downhill to disappear in her swaddles of clothing.

I had seen beasts gutted and felt no remorse, for I was applying myself merely to a sack that now had no spiritual dimension, no sentience, memory, individuality, hope, or fear. I slipped the knife behind the tubes to find the way out—that is, the large one leading to the anus—and cut through it, finding it slippery to penetrate but yielding once the knife edge had found purchase and made its argument persuasively. The whole bloody pile was open for play. I grabbed, my gloves turning black in the moonlight where they would have been scarlet in the sun, and extracted one slippery clottage and tossed it over her shoulder, where it did not quite fly away but rather unraveled, as the flight through air took out its kinks.