Текст книги "I, Ripper: A Novel"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Just when I thought I was done and could get back home, grab some sleep, curse out my mother again, then return to the office refreshed for a long session at the Sholes machine, what should enter the yard but a copper who raced to Smith in alarm.

I could see the jolt of electricity it supplied to the worn-down crew of police executives. Smith seemed especially to pop to life and began shouting orders. I moseyed to Inspector Collard, who seemed in a rush to leave. “I say, what’s it all about?”

“They’ve found the missing apron piece not four blocks off. And the bastard has left us a message.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Diary

September 30, 1888 (cont’d)

I strode through the night, imagining what I’d left behind. It may have been my happiest time in the whole adventure. Again, I had missed apprehension by the width of a hair, so I was feeling invulnerable. I felt my superior intelligence was validated on the grand scale, and in a game against not only my enemies but the entire city of London, from working girls to academic aristocrats. I was on the verge of not merely victory but triumph. I was routing them. They had no idea who and what I was, why I was doing what I was doing, what drove me. The last was important, because without knowledge of it, they assumed I was a chaotic madman and could be caught only by the net of chance, not logic. And all the lists of “suspects”—Jews, Poles, boyfriends, witnesses who lied—published by the newspapers proved that our best minds were hopelessly out of the game.

I eventually reached Goulston Street. It was deserted. By day a buzzing commercial street (the poultry market was thereupon), it was by night closed down, not a beer shop or Judy part of town, and the shuttered costers’ sheds along either side of the street were unpatrolled and locked. I could see piles of fruit behind iron gratings, hear the squawk and bustle of crated chickens that hadn’t been sold and had therefore earned another day of life in their tiny dung-crusted dungeons, smell the shit from the horses as it formed a steady presence on the dirt road. All the pennants—why are market streets usually festooned like medieval jousting tournaments?—hung limp in the moist though not rainy air. It had the feel of a city abandoned by its citizens, who’d fled to jungle or cave to escape a portended doom. Perhaps I was that doom, or at least its harbinger.

I eased down Goulston between the shuttered stalls and the blank wall of this or that apartment building, looking for a nook where I could do my business without observation. I was alongside something calling itself the Wentworth Model Dwellings, a grim brick fortress against the night for those fortunate enough to afford the tariff, when I espied an archway that contained a door to whatever squalor and degradation lay on the several floors above. It was perfect.

I nipped into it, and first thing, I pulled the damned lump of apron from my pocket and dumped it. It did not fall right—I wanted the blood to show conspicuously so not even the thickest of the thick could miss its implications. Some fluffing was required to achieve the proper show.

That done, I fetched a piece of chalk from my trousers, where it had been secured for just this purpose. I had thought carefully about the message for almost a month, parsed it as lovingly as any poet does his poem, for it had to carry certain messages and certain implications but nothing more. I found a suitable emptiness of wall and began to inscribe my message, large enough to be seen as language, not scrawl, taking my time. I had thought it out as a visual expression, lines perfectly symmetrical, a quatrain of long, short, long, short, a few brisk syllables, perfectly clear as to meaning and intent and—

Good Christ!

I nearly leaped out of my boots.

As I labored in intense concentration and was nearly through the third line, something—someone—had poked me in the small of the back.

I turned, aghast, my heart hammering like a steam engine gone berserk and near exploding, reached back for the Sheffield, and turned to confront the enemy I must slay.

It was a child.

She was about six, frail and pale with a raw burlap makeshift sack on, her grubby feet bare, her hair blond and stringy, flowing down her face over huge and radiant eyes, skin like pearl yet here and there smeared with dirt.

“Would the gentleman care to buy a flower?” she said. She held out a single wilted rose.

Was this a scene from Old Man Dickens? Perhaps Mrs. Ward, who produced her share of the lachrymose treacle for genteel, tea-sucking lady readers, or even the humorless Hardy? They’d both killed off lads and lasses every fifty pages or so to make a dime or so off their penny dreadfuls. But this was not literature, it was real, this thin-shouldered beauty standing for all the dispossessed, the impoverished, and the slowly starving, cowering under their bridges and by the railway tracks in the cruel London night, aware that even crueller temperatures lay a month anon.

“What on earth are you doing out by yourself, child?” I said.

“Wasn’t no room in the doss ternight, so me mum took me under the bridge. I think she’s dead, though. She’s been coughing up blood awful bad. I could not wake her. I been walking an hour. Found a rose, thought I might sell it to a gentleman. Please, sir. It would mean so much.”

“You cannot be out here alone. It’s a dangerous time and place. Have you no people but your poor mother?”

“No, sir. We moved in from the country some months ago, for work, but Dad could find none. He went away some time ago, don’t know where to. Been alone with Mum ever since.”

“All right,” I said, “I shall find you a place to be.”

“Sir, just a penny for the rose is all I needs.”

“No, no, that will not do. The rose is worthless, you are without price. You come with me now, child.”

And so, the message unfinished and forgotten, I wrapped the child in my coat and lofted her to my torso, where she soon fell asleep across my shoulder. I headed up Goulston. At a certain point I looked back at what I had abandoned, wondered if I could get back to finish once I had attended to the girl, but instead saw, a block behind and approaching the nook where I’d paused for labor, the bull’s-eye lantern of a copper, swinging to and fro, at the end of the fellow’s long blue arm as he bumbled along, searching for rapers, robbers, bunco artists, pickpockets, and even the odd whore murderer such as myself.

Good Lord, I thought. Had this small girl not interrupted me, I’d be there still, finishing up my task. But no, she came along, I forgot that which had brought me there, and I abandoned my post. So once again my escape was too narrow to calculate, my luck too vast to appreciate. The whole episode seemed divinely plotted, though there was no room for divinity in my thoughts.

I carried the broken, tiny thing with me for several more blocks, past dark and sealed houses on streets that led nowhere, reached another intersection, and saw illumination a long block away. The child was light as a leaf. I thought at one point she perhaps had died, and it occurred to me that if so, I could be arrested and hanged for a crime I had not committed, and that might have been God’s way of showing me what an idiot I was to disbelieve in Him. But that was a petty hack’s irony, and our Father who art not in heaven or any place clearly saw through such a tinny conceit and stayed far away.

The girl stirred, rearranged herself to increase comfort against my shoulder, and I turned toward the incandescence, and in a bit found myself and my new charge in the gaslight of Commercial Street, perhaps a mile north of its intersection with Whitechapel Road. It was not crowded, but neither was it quite empty; a few public houses were open, spilling good cheer into the night; a few Judys patrolled this way or that; a few costers hawked meat and vegetables and candy to the indifferent after-midnighters.

I passed by several of the working gals and finally came upon one who seemed somehow less desperate than the others. I put up a finger to halt her. She showed no fear of the Whitechapel Murderer, as the street was well lit and I was with a child.

“See here, madam,” I said, “I found this poor girl wandering about a few blocks back with no place to go. Could you take her somewhere?”

“It’s a shame about the wee child, who reminds me of my own two girls,” she said. “But I’m a down-and-outer trying to earn me doss money for the night, guv’nor.”

“If I give you money for doss, will you first find a place for the girl, a church, a home, or something? I must be off. No gin, now. You’ve had your gin for the evening, haven’t you?”

She narrowed an eye at me, looked me up and down, and I prayed that whatever violence I had done back in the square or before, in the yard, had not left a scarlet letter on my face or chest.

It had not.

“All right, give me the girlie. There’s a home down the way for the wayward kiddies of the workers. Reckon she’ll fit right in.”

I handed my charge over to her, then pulled out a few quid and crunched them into her fist. Only a Rossetti could capture the soft light for The Good Whore, the Destitute Child, and the Insane Killer on a Whitechapel street late Saturday’s eve turning to Sunday’s morn; too bad he was dead. But then I thought: We are so beyond the artist’s ability to record that it nears a sort of black comic spiral of absurdity.

“I see you’ve a kind face,” she said, “as well as a kind heart. God will look after you.”

“Doubtful,” I said, and walked away.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jeb’s Memoir

By the time I arrived at 108–119 Goulston, the idiot Warren had already ordered the inscription washed off.

“What?” I barked at the constable who told me this as I stood in a cluster with the gentlemen of the Times, the Evening Standard and the Mail, the Pall Mall Gazette, and others outside the doorway into the tenement. That vast building was known humorously enough as the Wentworth Model Dwellings—yes, they were a model, all right, for how to debase the worker by cramming him and his into a brick cracker box twelve to a room, hot in summer and cold in winter, with the crapper out back so that all who used it were degraded by its squalor.

“He ordered it removed?” seconded Cavanagh of the Times. We were astounded, restless, and I suppose quite rude. In other words, we were doing our jobs.

“Sir, he—”

“What’s the damned bother with these unruly gents now?” Somebody interrupted the poor constable’s excuse-making, and I looked away from the clearly troubled face of the messenger and thus encountered Sir Charles himself as he clomped over like Mrs. Shelley’s beast or the golem of Jewish lore, a brutish man, all ancient muscle and large bone and imperturbable glare in his beady eyes. Sir Charles Warren was made to wear a uniform—even as head of the Met’s HQ, known as Scotland Yard, he wore his like something you’d wear on the foredeck of HMS Pinafore; stuffed into civilian garb, he looked about to take a deep breath, expanding his chest explosively so that shards of black wool were blasted about without mercy. I will give the man this: He had a presence. His was the Gordon-at-Khartoum sort of Englishman, a human fortress of rectitude, self-belief, conviction of superiority, and view of world as only glimpsed down the barrel of a rifle at a running wog. A shame, then, he was so stupid. He was stout, bull-chested, bowler-hatted, waistcoated, and his blunt features were somewhat obscured behind one of those walrus mustaches that certain men of power found appealing, two great triangles of fur that both encircled and camouflaged his mouth. His chin looked as if it was made of British steel, and if you smacked it bang-on with more British steel, sparks might fly, but no damage to either piece of steel would be recorded.

“Sir, it’s a clue,” I said. “It might lead you to the fellow. One wonders how—”

“Nonsense,” he said. “We recorded the words, and Long will give them out. However, the message chalked upon the wall is clearly excitory in intention, meant to focus anger on certain elements. I will not have a riot in this city and need to call the Life Guards to quell it—”

“As upon Bloody Sunday, Sir Charles?” someone asked, alluding to the great man’s most famous (heretofore) blunder. I think the person who spoke was me, now that I remember it.

“I’ll ignore that crack, sir,” he replied. “The larger point is that London needs no blood spilled. Public order is the first order of business, on orders of the Home Office, and all orders will be followed.” With that, he turned, then turned back. “You, who are you, sir?”

“Sir, I am Jeb, of the Star.”

“Lord of the rings, eh? Do you know the man-hours you cost us checking into reports of strangers with rings? An abomination.”

“It’s a fair clue, fairly reported,” I said.

“You should be advised, sir, that I have sent a letter to your Mr. O’Connor in complaint of your misrepresentations of our efforts.”

“Sir, with two more butchered on a single evening, and the case’s most important clue having been erased, it seems your efforts have come to nothing. The public has—”

“By God, sir, we at the Yard will do our duty, and intemperate commentary and preposterous, misleading clues in the press only worsen matters. I assure you, the Yard will prevail, good order will be kept, and all will be as it should be. We will catch this nasty boy and see him hanged at Newgate Gaol. But you must do your part, for we are all on the same side, and that part does not include making us look like asses. Good night, gentlemen!”

One perquisite granted a general is that he need not hang around to face the consequences of his decisions, and so it was with Sir Charles, who turned and was immediately surrounded by a flock of aides-de-camp who clucked and cooed around him and nursed him to a carriage, at which point he sped off into what had become the dawn.

Poor Constable Long was left alone to face us, while all the other Bobbies and detectives stood around, perhaps relieved that the big boss hadn’t made them perform close-order drill, as was his wont, in some cuckoo effort to instill military discipline on men who were underpaid and undertrained and overmatched.

“So, Long, out with it. You found it; the story, man.”

We crowded about poor Long as if we were going to devour him, to discover the red nose and bloodshot eyes of a man who’d soaked the better part of his brain in gin for a dozen years and smelled the same as well.

“I’s on me beat, and it’s near on three A.M.,” he began, and then told a dreary tale of walking down Goulston with his lantern, peeping into nooks and crannies, when his light illuminated a bright splotch of crimson on a crumple of cloth in the corner of a doorway arch that could be but one thing. He picked it up, smelled it to learn that the red was indeed blood and that stains of a certain ugly shade suggested fecal matter. He claimed that he thought it might be evidence of a rape, as he had not received the bad news about Mitre Square and Dutfield’s Yard, and then he noticed some words scrawled on the wall. He went straight back to the Commercial Street station and showed them the clue, and a wiser detective sergeant put the picture together, which is how now, at around five in the pale light of dawn, such a scrum had formed in front of the Wentworth Model Dwellings.

“What was on the wall?” Cavanagh demanded, rather harshly, as it was not this poor idiot who’d ordered it erased but Sir Charles himself, who had adjudged it important enough to arrive at the scene posthaste.

Long said in an uncertain voice, “It read, ‘The Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ ”

“Jews?”

“Yes, sir, so it did, and here’s the odd-like part, even a bloke like me knows ‘Jews’ to be spelled J-E-W-S, but this fellow must have been off his chum, he spelled it all wrong, it was ‘J-U-W-E-S,’ it was.”

All of our pens took the strangeness down.

“You’re sure?”

“Sure as I’m standing here before you.”

We all shook our heads. Indeed, the Jews had been a theme in this thing, and my own paper, the Star, had not been circumspect in controlling speculation. Jews were, to so many, an alien element, and certain were quick to blame them. It would, for that same some, be quite helpful if the Jews or a Jew were in some way to blame, and the strange opacity of the graffito tended to point to that possibility, if to anything at all.

“Has the piece of bloody rag you found been definitely linked to the dead woman’s apron?”

“Sir, you’d have to ask at the mortuary, sir,” said Long, and then another copper—this may have been Constable Halse, of the City Police, who would make himself more visible in a few seconds—chimed in with “I can help with that; I’m just from the mortuary, as Commissioner Smith has put many of us out on the street, and yes, indeed, the rag matches by shape, texture, and size exactly the torn apron that was on the poor woman’s remains in the square.”

That was it, then. He had come this way. But were those his words? It certainly seemed so, for indeed they spoke to the central social issue of the case, and it seemed that he had indeed communicated a thought.

But . . . what thought?

Before we separated, we coagulated a bit on our own, we old boys who’d been on the case since Polly, even the penny-a-liners, treated for once as if they were equal, and we stood there in the pale light as Whitechapel came awake around us, and tried to make sense out of it. I cannot recall who said what, but I do remember the various arguments and now set them down as relevant and, moreover, typical of what transpired regarding this issue not merely in the week and the weeks that followed, but even now, twenty-four years after, is argued vehemently.

Some, I should add, believe poor Long got it wrong. It developed that the aforementioned Constable Halse of City had shown up before the erasure and inscribed in his own notebook a slightly different version. Thus there was no stationary target, which is why the damned thing still floats in the ether so provocatively.

Halse said the words were “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing,” as opposed to Long’s “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

That damned “not”! It drifts hither and yon like a balloon, untethered, on the zephyrs of the interpreter’s bias.

“Double negative,” said Cavanagh, university man. “Technically, grammatically, by all the rules, the two negatives cancel each other out, so the true meaning, regardless of the placement of the ‘not,’ is that the Jews are indeed guilty. It is saying, ‘The Jews are the men who will be blamed for something.’ ”

“That does not impute guilt,” said another. “It is neutral, simply stating the Jews will be blamed, and as we all know and have observed, the Jews being this era’s prime bogeymen, indeed they will be blamed.”

“So he’s merely a social critic, like Dr. Arnold?”

There was some laughter at the idea of killer as essayist, but then the subject drifted elsewhere. On and on it went for almost an hour, as the boys tossed various ideas to and fro. Was our nasty chap really mad or only pretending? Did he have a program, or was he random? Was he intelligent, even a genius, or pure savage brute out of the dark forests of the east, full of primal blood lust for arcane religious purposes? Could he even be, after it all, someone similar to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, two separate personalities in one body? Perhaps, as in the Scot’s fiction, the one did not know of the other. It was all quite curious—pointless in the end, I suppose—but one remark stood out and colored my reactions to all that was to come.

“Well,” someone said, “one thing’s for certain, the only man who could solve this one is Sherlock Holmes.”

Laughter, but not from me. Now, that was a damned fine idea. I had read Mr. Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” the previous year in a magazine where it was published, though I understand it has since come out in book form. Sherlock was exactly what we needed: a calm, dispassionate intellect with a gift for deduction, who could master a complex set of clues and make appropriate inferences, and through the swamp of this and that track a steady course that led inevitably to but one culprit. It was to be done, moreover, stylishly, with dry wit, wry observation, and despite a sort of academic diffidence, a true grasp as to how the world actually worked.

Where could we find such a man? Where was our Sherlock Holmes? I was ready to be his Watson.