I Ripper Page 10

  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 prote
st 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.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Diary

  September 30, 1888 (cont’d)

  * * *

  I now pass to the second event of the evening. As to my disappearance from Dutfield’s Yard and the Anarchists’ Club, I record nothing, as I am exhausted (you will see why), and though it might be of interest to readers, I anticipate no readers and thus airily mean to skip that which I find tedious.

  I found myself 1,570 paces to the west, on Aldgate, that being the same concourse as Whitechapel High Street, but having moved from London to the City of London, it had acquired a new name, as well as a new municipal government and police force. It was well after one A.M., and on the street I found myself, no rumble of the momentous events transpiring some blocks behind me evident. It was as if I had magically migrated to another planet, another atmosphere, another range of life-forms. I was disconsolate, as I had extremely well-laid plans for the evening and goals to be achieved, and I had failed utterly. It was my first such failure, and I had left the thing unfinished by a far part at Dutfield’s Yard, where my cursed luck had produced that Yiddish oaf on a pony cart, with his wonder horse, Boobsie, to muck everything up. Gad, I was angered. I am, as it turns out, not the type to go all jabberwocky and expectorate in rage; rather, my fury is entirely inward and takes the form of a fiery furnace in my chest, blazing madly in the chill air. I would have to start again, and damn thee to hell. Dutfield’s, carefully selected, had been so perfect for my plan. I wondered if ever I would find such a spot again.

  And yet, as if Satan himself had become my sponsor, what should I spy as I moseyed drearily up Aldgate past the pump, past Houndsditch, but a lady herself. Judy or no? Difficult to tell, as she was in dark and the streets were not well lit, as all the newspapers continued to point out, but in an instant my mood transfigured from the blackest of black to the sudden blast of high engagement. I watched her meandering along, as if a bit unsteady, and noted that outside her skirts she wore an apron, a wide white expanse of milled cotton that marked off her whole front. It was most useful for my purposes, and seeing it, I decided her fate in an instant.

  It took no speed or athleticism to catch up to her, and when she sensed my heat as I placed myself at her left shoulder, I in turn sensed her drunkenness, or should I say, her recent close acquaintanceship with liquor, for she fairly reeked, poor lass, of the devil’s favored beverage. But not then or consequently did she seem impaired as regarded her faculties.

  Her first response was quite sensible, that being fear, but when she saw how fair of face I was, how kind of countenance, how much a gentleman stroller out for a bit of rogue notch and nothing else, she forced a smile to her worn and plain face. She was no beauty, as had been the last unfortunate to cross my path, and one would not notice her in any crowd except those more interested in notch than face. She was a short one, too, even shorter than the first, and rather square of face, a solid block of a gal.

  “Good evening, madam,” I said.

  “Just put off a drunken sailor,” she said. “All over me, that one was. You’re not that sort, is you, guv’nor?”

  “My dear,” I said, “I’m a gentleman, I assure you, I only do that which is allowed, when it is allowed, where it is allowed, and I pay generously, not the usual thruppence for a night’s favor but a full fourpenny, good for both a gin and a night in a doss house.”

  “No more gin for me, as I taxed my limits earlier. But a soft bed is worth a little putting out for such a fine man as yourself, sir.”

  “Then lead on, and I’ll give you a swag you’ll not forget.”

  She even giggled. “They all say that, they do.”

  She led me another half block up Aldgate, and though it was late of hour, that avenue was still lit and bore some traffic. As was the way in the larger polity, no one paid us a bit of mind, since gentleman-and-Judy was such a common sight.

  We reached a corner that led off to darkness, and not knowing what it could be, I glanced at the sign, learning that it was Mitre Street.

  “A nice quiet square down this way for our business,” sang the nightingale. “Come on, then, don’t be shy.”

  She lead me down this Mitre Street, and indeed there lay another passage, off to the right, between what appeared to be commercial buildings, maybe a dwelling or two, though I could not tell, as it was so dark. We followed the passage but a short bit, and it led us into a square, bulked up on either side by larger buildings that appeared to be of commercial nature. It was a tiny oasis in so vast a metropolitan desert, being barely if at all twenty-five yards on a side. I could make out in the dim light—our parsimonious city fathers allowed only two gas lamps for the entire square—some white lettering of the kind that usually heralds an owner’s name, but it was so dark and far that I could resolve no meaning for it. Besides, we were not to tarry. She took a direct right once within the square and led me, again not far, into its darkest corner. No light from the two wan lamps reached us, yet there was enough ambient illumination from our vantage point to see that the square was empty. I had no idea how long it would so remain, for I had not reconnoitered it and was not entirely sure where I was or how I would get out if danger appeared. But the opportunity was here, and fortune, it is said, always favors the bold, and I am by nature bold, and so I went ahead.

  We stopped in th
e corner against a wooden fence that seemed to cut off some more room, perhaps forming a yard within a square. I had no idea why it was there or what its function was. There was no illumination from the usual quarter-moon, as clouds covered and produced a fine mist, near to but not quite a drizzle. She halted, pivoted to face me, and upped her skirts.

  “There now,” she whispered—we were so close—“let’s get it done, Old Cock, and be on our ways, you a fourpenny lighter, meself the same heavier.”

  Of the stroke I will not say much. It was better than some and worse than others, being a passing middling effort. It was not nearly so poetic as the Spanish duelist’s thing of beauty back against the Anarchists’ Club wall forty-odd minutes ago, but it was solid, straight on, dead to target. She stepped back, seemed to lose balance, coughed delicately, looked at me with beseeching eyes, which in eight seconds’ time, as the blood emptied from her brain, ceased to beseech and commenced to lock hard on a faraway nothing. I did not strike her a second time because I felt that the first had been so solid, going deeper than most, and there was no need of the redundancy. Down she went, quiet as a mouse, me nursing her to earth. And there she lay on her back, her sightless eyes open and not a trace of pain nor fear on her square face. She could have been asleep as easily as freshly murdered.

  I had much to accomplish and no idea how much time I had. It was better, I knew, to assume little and discover much, rather than the other way around. The first business was her apron. With my knife, I opened a cut at the bottom, then ripped upward, almost halving the thing, and when, near her waist, I encountered a seam, I nicked another bit to change the direction of the rip, and continued to pull it apart. I daresay the noise of the cloth ripping was greater than the noise of the woman dying.