Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

II

BURNING BRIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Diary

September 30, 1888

Good Christ, what a day! I almost ran my luck, my escapes were equal to any hero’s at Maiwand, I felt the incredible agitations of the spirit and soul, to say nothing of abject fear turning my stomach to an ingot of pure lead. I had to improvise desperately, change courses, take risks, and cling when all else was gone to the mandate of boldness. And yet at a certain point I ran from a child. I now reach for a fine glass of port to settle myself enough to record the events of the last few hours.

And it began so well.

I did not connect on Commercial at all, as the pickings seemed slim thereupon. I took the turn onto Berner on my lonesome, meaning, I suppose, to take it to the next right, take that, then the next, and in that way circle the block, coming up for another run down Commercial. But ahead of me, bustling by, was a young man in one of those absurd deerstalker hats, package in hand, looking somewhat flustered, as if he’d just engineered a disaster. He sped by me without a look, and that was when I saw what catastrophe he was fleeing. It was a she, clearly a working lass, short of carriage, standing on the sidewalk a half-block ahead in what appeared to be a disappointed posture. Whatever discontent had passed between them, I did not know, but I put my eyes square to her, and she felt them and looked to me, not moving a bit. I sidled up, as was my fashion, the well-turned-out gentleman gone for a rogue encounter with change to burn in his pocket, and when she flashed me a smile, I merely nodded sagely, my face fully commanded by my will and lit with a kind of sexual glow from within. Actually, it was a glow for murder, but this one didn’t know that yet.

She was a short one, tonight’s. I must say, she was an improvement, gal-wise, over Polly and Annie. Any normal fellow would fetch a tup with this one on looks alone. Her near beauty almost exempted her from my attention; alas for her, it was not to be, as she alone was issuing the kind of signal that implies availability. All in black, she was, as if in mourning for herself already, and saving all the trouble by choosing sackcloth for her wardrobe.

“You’re a compact one, my dear,” I said.

“My legs is good for a wraparound, sir,” she said, “as they’ve a lot of muscle to them.”

I noted a trace of foreignness in her voice, not sure which part of the world to ascribe it, even as I replied, “That’s the spirit a bloke wants.”

We were in a canyon of darkness, as darkness was general all over Whitechapel, the city elders being ungenerous with gaslights for their poorest district. There seemed to be a little action across the street; I saw lighted windows at the Anarchists’ Club, where I’d visited on my scout. We drifted across Berner, passed by the club’s front under the sign International Men’s Educational Club, Yiddish translation in smaller letters below. We were out of the glare of those second-story windows because we were too close to be emblazoned. From above, I could hear indications of great rambunction and knew that throaty, endless choruses of “The Internationale” could not be far away.

We passed, the hubbub of politics not quite dying out but subsiding to a low murmur. We reached a gap in the building fronts that held, a few feet back, a double gate in darkness, scribbled with indecipherable lettering in white. Because I had scouted well, I knew what it contained: a few houses immediately across from the south wall of the club, and the “yard” where a cart manufacturer and a sack manufacturer had set up shop; next to that an abandoned building that once contained a forge and then a stable but now housed only rats.

This would be my lovely’s destination. The gates were not locked, and we slid through, opening them, and entered a channel between the club building and some kind of tenement housing not fifteen feet apart, where, off the street just a bit, it was dark as Erebus. We were swallowed and my darling took my arm—I was careful not to let her feel the knife in my hand—and pulled me closer as she glided to the wall just inside the arc of the hinged gate. Her breath was close and she pretended excitement, good actress she, playing the part till the end, and I smelled a bit of cachous on her breath, a little spice the gals would nibble to sweeten their mouths for whatever duties lay ahead.

Her face was pale before me, an apparition out of a painting by one of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, perhaps Ophelia lambent in her drowning pool—Elizabeth Siddal in her most famous pose for Mr. Millais—so natural and so ghostly at once, beautiful yet not quite knowable, shielding her mysteries well and radiating no pain, no fear, no dread, only the countenance of relaxed content. I made the traces of a smile upon that face, not forced but real, for she knew that the coin I would give her would earn her a room in a doss house for the night, to begin tomorrow’s struggle refreshed, or a glass of gin, to forget today’s struggle temporarily, the poor dear.

I believe this was my best stroke yet. I am indeed improving. I hit her hard with the belly of the blade, and it sank deep, an inch, maybe more, and I felt the tremble of impact ride my bones up to the elbow. I drew, rather artistically, almost like a Spanish fencer, the blade around the half-circumference of her neck, pivoting as I opened her. Then an odd thing happened. She died. She simply died. Well, yes, I had cut her throat, but somehow in the power of my stroke, I had launched a bomb into her arterial system, and it hit home in seconds, exploding her heart. That, at least, was what my instincts told me, for she went into the instant repose of death and her heart’s energy failed, so there was no propulsion to the system to drive, as before, the first trickle zigzagging across the neck’s lovely contours, then the gush, the tide, the wave. Not at all—no pump, no evacuation. She lay in a small puddle, as if I’d spilled a glass or two of cabernet on the pavement.

She was more or less resting against the wall, the better to receive my entry and offer friction amid the lubrication in right proportions, and had no idea it was a blade that would enter her, not a penis, and yet her face never bore distress, much less fear or pain. It was as if—or possibly I flatter myself—she wanted to die at my hand. I would at least make her famous, maybe not such a bad bargain, given her day-to-day.

Of the ones so far, hers was the easiest; there was no mess with the choke hold, no crush of clamping hand, no shove or push. With my other hand I grabbed her shoulder, to keep her from thudding or falling forward, and guided her down to earth, she rotating downward until she came to rest next to and exactly parallel to the building. I knelt to her, put my hand to her heart to feel its absence of beat, looked to her soft, relaxed face and gently closed eyes, and knew that she was gone.

My next task was her chemise, for I had use of a garment, and as I slithered down her still body just a bit to reach under her skirts for my trophy, that was where my luck both soared and crashed at the same time.

It soared in that, moving and dipping, I lowered my profile deeper into the dark, so that a man standing but ten feet away could not see me.

It crashed in that a man did stand but ten feet away.

What alerted me was the sudden bluster of a beast, and I looked up to see not three feet from me the face of a pony who knew that I was there, his animal senses being sharper than any human’s. He clomped twice, foot heavy against the cobblestone of Dutfield’s accursed yard, but locked his legs in refusal to move, for he was as scared of me as I was of him. He was in harness, and behind him, barely identifiably by outline, he pulled what appeared to be a cart of some sort, and over his rear haunch, I could see the profile of a man standing in the cockpit of the vehicle.

He snapped his buggy whip at the animal’s flank; the animal tossed his head, shivered, flinging mane into commotion, but resolutely stayed where he was, all the while his big eyeballs lancing directly into mine. He snorted and I felt the cascade of warm, slightly moist air from his lungs wash across me, with an odd musk of grass woven into it. He breathed heavily, wheezily, now and again shivering, and when he shivered, his tack rattled and jingled. I could not crouch any lower over Ophelia in her small ruby pond, but I did have knife in hand, and my first thought was to plan an attack. If the fellow got out of the cart and came snooping, he would come upon me, and I would rise like the devil reborn and plunge blade into throat, aiming for a spot a whisker off the larynx (thank you, Dr. Gray), and rip through that structure so that no cry would accompany its owner’s exsanguination. Then I would bolt the yard and disappear.

He climbed down and stood in the narrow space between the wagon and the wall, my only escape route.

“Vas ist? Gott verdammt! Vas ist?” I heard him ask of the pony, about whose welfare he was clearly not sentimental. The pony was equally unsentimental, as he remained in his place, his joints having alchemized into steel fixtures by suspicion of whatever life-form he smelled (he would have smelled her blood as well) and whatever life-form he made out with those huge billiard-ball eyes.

A match flared in the darkness, and its circle of illumination reached my fingertips but no farther; I was out of the zone of visibility by a hair’s width. The man held it tremblingly, unperturbed as it burned toward his fingers, and began to rotate to see what its light revealed. As he turned his shoulders to the right, he drew the cone of light with him, and my love’s dark clothes were revealed, as were her shoulder, and then her pale, serene, beautiful face, and next to it, crimson as the blood of the Lamb spilled off that Golgotha cross, the satiny pool of her own life’s fluid. It was so red. I’d never seen their blood in full light before, only by the quarter-moon’s low-power beam.

“Mein Gott!” I heard him expel. He seemed to shiver in confusion up there on his contrivance, as he tried to make a decision, and then he made it.

I gripped the knife hard, collected my muscularity as I slipped into a raider’s crouch, ready to spring and bring the man down hard and dead, and indeed, he nearly plunged through to his death at my hands. In the last second he pivoted not forward, toward me, but backward, toward the gate.

He slipped through and dashed hard left, and I heard him bang hard on the Berner Street door of the Anarchists’ Club. I recognized the sound as he remembered the door wasn’t locked and pulled it open.

I was trapped. It was too late to dash in my own fashion to the gate, for the damned pony still blocked it, and if I squeezed by in time, the street would in the next instant be flooded with excitable Russian revolutionaries and vegetarian socialists who would draw Peelers from every nook and cranny, and there was nothing behind me in the yard that would permit escape, only locked shops and homes and a small deserted building.

There was nowhere to go.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jeb’s Memoir

I was not in the newsroom when news of the slaughter at Dutfield’s Yard came, although since Jack, as I now thought of him, struck near or on the weekends and late, I had rearranged my schedule to night hours so that I was present and ready to fly when it seemed most propitious that he would pay another visit. But Harry had adopted the same schedule (as had Mr. O’Connor and Henry Bright and several others, a flying squad of Jack boys, if you will), and so he was the one to race out there, leaving me and my bitter tea down in the tearoom, where I was sulking.

Here’s the irony: My sulking stood me in very good stead. Not being at the Anarchists’ Club where the one called Long Liz was found that night freed me up for the evening’s second act, of which more anon.

It is relevant as to why I was sulking. Of course it had to do with that damned letter. I had labored over it until achieving what I thought was perfection, then I’d given it to Mr. O’ Connor. I thought he’d be pleased, but a full day passed before his boy came and got me—much too long, I feared, and that was where my confidence, always a frail vase in a typhoon, began to spring cracks. I went to the office, and there, wearing an eyeshade, was O’Connor, and in shirtsleeves next to him was Harry Dam, damned Harry. I did not hate Harry, you must understand; I actually had some respect for his reckless energy and cagey way with all the tricks of the trade, but I did fear him a bit, as I knew his ambition was as outsize as mine and that he was capable of nearly anything to advance it. Moreover, his contempt for the Jews was a signal that something inside was not right.

“Ah, there you are!” said O’Connor, and I read him anxiously for signs of love but could tell that he was focused totally on task. “Come in, come in. This letter you’ve written, it’s quite good. I believe we’re almost there.”

Almost there! Those are not words any writer pines to hear. Much more preferable is “masterpiece” or “timeless brilliance” or “it shall live forever.” But such accolades were not to be.

Harry said, again damning with praise so faint it was almost inaudible, “Wow, it’s a great first pass. I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am we got you to do this. I could not come even close to such a brilliant thing.” In his voice I could hear a contrapuntal going in another direction; it suggested that he and he alone knew how to fix it, not that I could ever accept that it needed any sort of fixing.

“Drink? Oh, that’s right, you’re a teetote,” said O’Connor. “Well and good, I should be myself, maybe me nose would stop glowing in the dark”—a little attempt at levity that got profoundly insincere smiles from Dam and me. He took a draught of whatever is brown, is served in small glasses a third full, burns and yet calms on the way down; he accepted a tear at the corner of each eye from its impact, then said, “I think it needs a bit more.”

“Do you want me to take it through another draft, sir?” I asked with perhaps more tremble in my voice than I cared to acknowledge.

“No, no, the words are great. ‘Jack the Ripper,’ by God, a name to conjure with, absolutely magnificent, it will rattle the city to its cellars and sell a million papers, no doubt. No, that’s not it. It needs one more touch. An amplification, as it were.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.

“Harry has a very fine idea, I think. Go ahead, Harry, tell him.”

“Better, I’ll show him!” He ran to his Eton rowing blazer, reached into it, and pulled something from the pocket. “The piece of resistance,” he said, meaning, of course, “pièce de résistance,” “yep, you’re gonna love this.” He paused, letting his little presentation acquire the drama that a pause provides, and then held aloft his treasure. “Red ink!”

Good God, I thought. Can he be serious?

“Red,” he said proudly, “as in blood.”

“Isn’t it a little melodramatic?” I asked. “Perhaps overstated.”

“Hmm. Can a guy overstate murder?” Harry asked.

“As a practical matter, I believe you can,” I said. “You can make it so bombastic that no man in his right mind would believe in it. ‘Jack the Ripper’ would be a joke and not a symbol of chill aspect, meant to frighten for a thousand years.”

“Your pride is commendable,” said O’Connor. “Which demonstrates that it’s a writer you are, sir, without doubt. But can I suggest what goeth before the fall? Knowing that, I ask you to listen to what Harry proposes.”

“It’s not much,” said Harry. “It’s hardly anything. It’s still ninety percent yours, maybe ninety-five percent. It’s not as if there will be royalties, you know.”

“I hate to see my efforts trifled with,” I sniffed. “Maybe bring in Henry Bright for an opinion. He’s a sound man.”

“No, no,” said O’Connor. “Henry knows nothing about this, nor does anyone else, and that’s how it should remain. Jeb, just listen to Harry.”

“Here’s my concoction,” said Harry. “Flat-bang-out, no palaver or jerky chewing.”

I had no idea what he was talking about except that he was about to pitch his “improved” version.

“Red ink is just the start,” he said. “And really, that’s more the package than the content. But a sentence is added. Jack says something like ‘I was going to use whore’s blood, but it turned all sticky, like gooseberry jam. Now I’ve got this damned ink on my hands.’ ”

“Does it in fact turn all sticky?”

“So I hear,” Harry said. “Not having scalped a whore lately, I’m not sure. But see, it’s the cold detail that nails it. He is so insane that he thinks nothing about using a dead gal’s blood for his little note, and maybe he adds a ‘ha ha’ or something like that. The red ink makes it jump as a package, it’s like the wrapper on the Black Jack gum pack, and bang-on, nobody can ignore it.”

I could not think of a response to a Black Jack gum allusion; who could? After all, what on God’s earth was a Black Jack gum pack?

“Then,” said Harry, “we need one gory detail. I mean, he’s the Ripper, right, not the Kisser or anything. So let’s add a line, say, in which he tells us he’s going to chop off an ear and ship it to the coppers.”

It was horrifying. It was perfect.

“One last thing,” he said. “More packaging, that’s all, it’s still the great Jeb who came up with Jack the Ripper, but let’s mangle the punctuation. I was never good on apostrophes anyhow. Can’t seem to keep the rules in mind. Whoever thought that one up? Anyhow, I’ll dump the curlicue things—”

“But,” I said, “that would give it the diction and vocabulary of an educated man, yet the form of an uneducated one. I do not see how that advances the cause.”

“It makes it scary,” said Harry. “The final nail in the coffin is, I copy it over in my hand. The reason for that is, unlike you boys, I only have one posh thing going. It’s my handwriting, and I can still feel the smart where Sister Mary Patricia hit my wrist a dozen times with a steel ruler. That girl packed a wallop. So believe me, I learned a fair hand. It just makes the whole thing, I don’t know, mysterious. It’s got a lot of this-ways but also a lot of that-ways.”

“I must say, it’s a dandy idea,” said O’Connor. “Deftly employed, it will sell thousands more papers and elevate Jeb’s Jack into the bogeyman of the nineteenth century. Maybe the twentieth as well.”

Who was I to protest such imbecility? I had no moral standing to argue it the other way, so I just nodded grimly and sat down. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Great,” said Harry, and with relish he set to work, clearing space on the makeup table. O’Connor and I watched as, in his surprisingly adroit hand, he copied my words on a piece of foolscap, so the whole thing did come to resemble a missive from the devil himself, had that old boy been educated by nuns, and come to think of it, he probably was!

When Harry was done, he pinched it by the corner, waved it about to dry, then folded it and crammed it into an envelope. “I’ll go hire a kid and make sure he drops it in the right slot at the Central News Agency,” he said. “By God, it’ll shake the old town up when they run it. And we’ll be ready to jump on the horse before anyone.”

“Excellent, Harry, positively brilliant. Jeb, you agree?”

“I suppose,” I said poutily, having lost on all rounds; I had written a document without integrity, then gotten all prideful over my effort, as if it were a noble calling, and now, absurdly, I felt degraded by further breaches of its integrity inflicted by others. Suddenly, I wanted to vomit.

“All right, then, boys,” said O’Connor, “let’s get back to business.”

Harry threw on his hat and coat and smiled as if he’d eaten the Christmas goose.

“Off you go, then,” said O’Connor, and Harry departed. O’Connor turned to me. “No long faces, Jeb. It’s just business. It’s how we operate, always have, always will. Now mind your P’s and Q’s, and wait for this to stir the pot.”

But I was far too much a baby to let a nice period of self-pity and victimization go wasted, so I took it upon myself to spend more rather than less time in the tearoom. And that was why I was playing the injured party, even several days later, and only Henry Bright noticed, if circumspectly.

So it was that when I came back to the newsroom after my dawdling, I was late to learn that Jack had done his bad trick a third time, at a place I’d never heard of called Dutfield’s Yard, and that Harry was shortly to be, if not already, on the scene.

“There you are, old man,” said Henry Bright. “I’ll be in makeup. We’ve got to redesign for tomorrow. Harry will call in with details and you—”

Someone came running over, and to this day, I cannot remember who, for the news was so overwhelming.

“My God,” whoever it was said, “the bastard’s done it again. Two in one night! This one at a place called Mitre Square a mile away. Two in one hour! And she’s really chopped up!”

“All right, Jeb,” said Henry Bright. “Get on your horse. It looks like it’ll be a long evening of fun.”