I Ripper Page 8

  Perhaps they had been warned off by Sir Charles, because halfway down the first block was a queer institution known as the Anarchists’ Club, where I’d once heard William Morris hold forth on a new aesthetic for modern times to an indifferent audience. He preferred wallpaper to revolution, not a popular position in those precincts. It was full nearly every night with radicals of various Slavic, Jewish, and Russian origins, singing and chanting and conspiring the night away. The coppers would fancy that so much energy would keep any mad killer away, when the exact opposite was true. I knew that such men as were drawn to the club were of a species known as zealots, which would mean that though their eyes were open, what they were really seeing would be dreams of a society where they, and not the pale, lily-livered millionaires of the Kensington Club set, were the masters. The anarchists would hang anybody who belonged to a club, and it was the image of those well-shod feet dangling eight inches above the ground that occupied their imaginations. Then, of course, they would found their own clubs. Such it is with all grand dreamers, of this ilk or that.

  I spent this evening rooting around the club. Since radicals believe (happily) that property is crime, they find the notion of locked doors abhorrent. Anyone radical or pretending to be radical may enter and wander the club, which sits next to one of those improvised spaces in chockablock Whitechapel called Dutfield’s Yard. It’s not a yard and there’s no Dutfield anywhere, save painted long ago on the gate. I observed that Judy would frequently open a door in the closed gate for a quick stand-up assignation in the darkness and quietude of the yard, then leave, always pulling the door shut behind her. Thus for my purposes, it was perfect.

  But I had to know what species of experience the club offered, so I found myself one of a hundred or so throaty rip-roarers purporting to represent the masses as they—none more enthusiastically than myself—bellowed forth the sacred hymn of all those who believed we had to tear down before we could build up. I came a bit late, so it wasn’t until the fifth stanza that I made my contribution.

  The kings made us drunk with fumes,

  Peace among us, war to the tyrants!

  Let the armies go on strike.

  Stocks in the air, and break ranks.

  If they insist, these cannibals

  On making heroes of us,

  They will know soon that our bullets

  Are for our own generals!

  Lovely sentiment, but try singing it in the mess of the 44th Argyle Foot and you’ll end up swinging from a tree overlooking the parade ground. Were they planning this year’s uprising or celebrating last year’s? Was it to be Mittleuropa or some unpronounceable republic in the far Balkans? Or maybe they were planning to go against the Great Bear herself, which meant that of the two hundred comrades the building held, at least a hundred and fifty of them were tsarist secret policemen, but they would have no interest in what happened in the yard outside their windows, only in far-off dungeons and torture rooms. However, I shared my doubts with nobody and presented to the company the very image of a happy mansion arsonist and execution squad commander. The louder I was, the more invisible I became.

  After group sing, there was much hugging and babbling in a number of languages alien to my ear, but the universal thematic of the room was brotherhood, as accelerated by the effects of vodka. Everyone glowed in the pink of either revolutionary fervor or rotting capillaries. When the bottle came to me, I took a swig, finding it to be liquid fire, more appropriate for battle than society, but who was I to disagree with the masses. I hugged, I kissed, I shook hands, I raised fists, I shouted, I carried on essentially like a bad imitation of a drunken bear. However, there was no penalty for overacting on these boards.

  In time, after the minutes had been discussed and accepted in several different tongues and certain policy issues debated rather too fiercely (suggesting that the participants loved debate over revolution) and the next picnic/mass action planned, postponed, and ultimately canceled, the meeting atomized, and various cliques and factions withdrew to their own counsel, and all the lone wolves too anarchistic to join were free to mosey about. I fit that category, in shabby clothes with a derby pulled low, and it was via this process that I was able to make a secret examination of the building in public, without rousing suspicion. They were too busy contemplating dreams of Thermidor and who would run the Midlands Electrification Program to pay attention to any particular individual. To their imaginations, it was the mass, not the man, that mattered. I would soon set them straight on that matter.

  At any rate, the building was what one might expect of such a place, the second-floor meeting hall rather like the vaulted cathedral of the religion, all sorts of ancillary rooms off or below it, including a printing shop at the rear to crank out the necessary broadsides, a crude kitchen for brewing soup by the gallon, a reading room that collected the latest in revolutionary news from all over the world, a cellar that seemed like cellars anywhere, even under the Houses of Parliament. All in all, quite banal.

  That is, unless one knew where to look.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jeb’s Memoir

  Indeed, where was he? The party finished with a vague invitation to drop in on Professor Dare “sometime,” and it was back to the murder grind. The monster missed his weekly assignment, and then he missed his second. Was he planning some extra-special extravaganza? Had he gone on the slack? Was he bored? It was hop-picking time, so maybe he’d gone to the country to earn a few quid filling sacks for our brewers. If rich, perhaps he was even now luxuriating at Cap d’Antibes, eating snails and other Frenchy things, his knife forgotten for a bit.

  Whatever the reason, O’Connor could see the consequences playing out in newsstand sales, upon which we depended for our circulation of 125,000, “Largest Circulation of Any Evening Newspaper in the Kingdom.” I tried my best, and the rings push was of some help, but after the ludicrousness of the Polly and Annie inquests, the multiplicity of absurd clues, such civic vanities as a vigilante committee forming to offer the reward that Warren had so far refused to authorize (as if this fellow were part of a network of criminals and could be ratted out like a common cracksman or swindler), and many heated speeches against the Jews for this, that, and the other thing, some other detective blowhards who opined that the High Rips or the Green Gaters were the culprits, and finally some high copper muckety-muck’s much promulgated idea of a husky Russky, it seemed both pointless and hopeless. I wrote a nicely vicious piece on the inefficiencies of the police, which attracted very little attention, Harry Dam reheated shabby notions of Jewish ceremony, which until now required only Christian babes for blood with which to make matzos, but henceforth he claimed that the blood of whores was some part of some ritual in the cabala that I suppose was to make Baron Rothschild the richest man in the world again twice over. As far as progress in the investigation, practical steps to deal with the issue, shrewd analysis of the evidence, none of that. Nothing was happening.

  An idle mind is indeed the devil’s plaything, so we entered full scoundrel time, and who but I would enter history as the biggest of all scoundrels. That is, at the urging of the damned Harry Dam.

  I was transforming some Pitman into typing, some nonsense that would go on page 4 under an advertisement for Du Barry’s Revelenta, the flatulence and heartburn cure, when a lad approached and said, “Sir, Mr. O’Connor needs to see you.”

  “Eh?”

  “Now, sir. I gather it’s urgent.”

  “All right, then.” I rose, put on the old brown, and followed the boy across the room and down a hall, where he knocked, and we heard a gruff Irish rasp respond, “Come in, then.”

  O’Connor put no store in majesty. I imagined the office of the editor of the Times to be a bookish chamber with a fireplace, a stag on the wall, and a globe, where cigars and port were often enjoyed. That of the Star was half a compass in another direction. Shabby is as shabby does, or perhaps the word would be “utilitarian,” for it was simply a larger room with a desk, a table, a
nd a few books. On the desk were several spikes, and on each spike were dozens of galleys of the stories that would comprise that afternoon’s Star. At the table, I could see mock-ups of the front page, with nothing so dynamic as FIEND across the front, but rather, the usual gabble of unimpressive notices, such as 13 DIE IN AFGHAN SLAUGHTER (theirs or ours, I wondered), REWARD FOR WHITECHAPEL MURDERER DOUBLED, BISHOP PLEADS FOR CALM, and WHITECHAPEL LIGHTING BILL TURNED DOWN.

  O’Connor sat at the desk, and next to him, almost invisible because he was backlit against a window that occluded his details, another man. They had been chatting warmly, I judged from the postures, the odor of cigars (one, still lit, sat in an ashtray and leaked a trail of vapor into the atmosphere), and the fact that before each was a glass.

  “Sit,” O’Connor commanded, “and possibly a spot of the old Irish?” His glass had a dram’s worth of amber fluid left inside, whether a normal routine or the product of emergency, I didn’t yet know.

  “I’m a teetote, sir,” I said. “My drunken father, this day sleeping under Dublin soil, drank more than enough for not only my own life but the lifetimes of any sons I might have.”

  “Suit yourself. Have you met Harry? You two fellows ever cross each other in the newsroom? Though Harry is no newsroom rat, I know.”

  “Hiya, pal,” said Harry, rising, putting out a big American hand. It must have been his straw boater’s hat on O’Connor’s desk, for only an American would wear a boating hat where there were no boats to be found. He had a big, raw-boned face and a winning smile under a droopy red mustache, which displayed spadelike, rather gigantic teeth. He was wearing an Eton rowing blazer edged in white, a white shirt, a deep blue cross-hatched waistcoat, a tie of color (red), trousers of white with dark blue stripes, and white shoes and socks. Was there a regatta? Was he going picnicking with a lady on the Thames, or perhaps coxswaining a boat in the big tilt against Balliol’s eight? I put it all on loathsome American crudity; as a people, they seem to lack any sense of tradition and are utterly incapable of reading the cues and learning from what they see. They’re entirely bent on results or, rather, money. What they like they take and make their own, regardless.

  “Nice coat,” he said as we shook. “Can I get the name of your tailor?”

  “Alas,” I said, “a German madman.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “I like the sort of belted, harnessed look that thing has. Is it for some kind of fishing?”

  “Hunting jacket,” I said. “Vented shoulders, gives one more flexibility on the turning shots. It’s said the coloration dumbfounds the grouse, but even if their brains are the size of a pea, they cannot be that dim.”

  “You never know. Good shooting?”

  I had no idea. I’d never done it, would never do it. “Quite jolly,” I said.

  “Now, fellows,” said O’Connor, “glad to have us together for our little chat. Jeb, as I’ve been telling Harry, I’m proud of what you fellows have done. You’ve lit this place up and set the pace for the whole town. We’re driving the story, and all the other rags are following us. And I know, if anything breaks fast and sudden-like, whichever of you is here will get it first, hard and straight. And we’ll continue to drive, which means we’ll continue to sell, which means my investors will shut up and leave me in peace.”

  Neither Harry nor I said a thing.

  “However,” said O’Connor, “I don’t mind telling you, we have a problem.”

  He paused. We waited. He took up and sucked on his cheroot, and its glow inflamed as he drew air through it, then exhaled a giant puff of smoke.

  “The problem is: Where is he?”

  “In hell, hopefully,” I said.

  “Good for the world, bad for the Star. These greedy investors I have, they’re like opium addicts. They get a whiff of the profits when something this bloody-wizard big happens, they want that to be the norm. So they put the squeeze on. You have no idea what I go through.”

  It occurred to me that it was quite wrong to hope for the killer to strike again as an aid toward boosting sales, but that was the reality of the business; O’Connor had no moral problem stating it so baldly, and the American wasn’t about to make a speech, so I kept my own mouth sealed tightly.

  “Boss, do you want me to go out and slice up a dolly?” said Harry, and we all three laughed, for it somewhat ameliorated the anguish in the room.

  “No, indeed,” said O’Connor. “The lawyers would never approve. But I want us to put our heads together and come up with an angle that we can push to heat things up again. The rings gag was a start, but there’s more we can do. That’s what this meet is about.”

  It never occurred to me. Covering the killer was enough; the idea of generating news, presumably of some sort of fabricated nonsense, struck me as appalling. Yet again, because I am who I am and lack certain moral strengths, and because I had gotten so much out of the killer’s campaign against Whitechapel’s Judys, I said nothing.

  Dam mentioned something about a special edition that put the pictures of the two victims on the front page, to be run in black borders, with comments from the various children.

  “Not going to do it, I’m afraid,” said O’Connor. “Our readers don’t want maudlin, they want mayhem. They want the red stuff sticky on their hands.”

  We batted it around for a bit, nice and easy-like, and I popped up with a few absurdities—what would the day’s leading intellectuals, such as Mr. Hardy, Mr. Darwin, Mr. Galton, think, for example.

  But the chat ran down sadly, and gloom filled the room. And then—hark, the herald angels sing!

  “I got it,” said Harry. “Yes, I do. Okay, what’s this missing? It’s even missing here in this room, and we’re talking around it.”

  Silence, not of the golden sort.

  “It’s a story,” said Harry finally. “It needs a villain.”

  “Well, it’s got a villain,” I said. “We just have no idea who it is.”

  “But he’s not a character. He’s an idea, a phantom, a theory, an unknown. Sometimes he’s ‘the fiend’ and sometimes ‘the murderer,’ but he has no personality, no image. We can’t get a fix on him. It’s not enough that he’s an Ikey, even if the folks do hate their Ikeys. He’s still blurry, indistinct.”

  “I don’t—” I started to say.

  “He needs a name.”

  It was so absurdly simple, it brought conversation to a halt.

  O’Connor sucked the cigar, Harry tossed down more brown and looked up, smiling. I sat there, feeling like a conspirator against Caesar, but then remembered I hated Caesar, so it would be all right. I also hated Harry for coming up with such a great idea. He was not without ability.

  He was so positive. It’s an American trait. Doubt is not in their vocabulary, nor half-speed ahead, nor anything that smacks of consideration, context, contemplation. They leave that for the poofs. For them it’s always Dam the torpedoes!

  Harry went on. “It can’t just be any name, like Tom, Dick, or Harry. It needs to be special, clever, the sort of catchy thing you remember and that sticks in your mind. It’s got to have that ring to it. I thought of ‘Ike the Kike,’ but that’s too ridiculous.”

  “And suppose he turns out to be a High Church Anglican bishop,” I said. “How embarrassing.”

  “Good point,” said Harry. “That’s why it has to be a good name. We need a genius to figure it out.”

  “I’ll drop in on Darwin,” I said, “and if he’s not busy, I’m sure he’ll pitch in. If not he, perhaps Cousin Galton will join our campaign.” Sarcasm: last redoubt of the utterly defeated.

  “I don’t know those guys, but I get your point. We need something thought up by someone who’s got a big talent.”

  “Harry,” said O’Connor, “do go on. I like this, even if I can’t yet see where it’s going. And I’m confused how to make it happen.”

  “Okay,” said Harry. “Here’s how I see it. We come up with a letter from the guy, and he signs it with a name that will ring bang-on t
hrough the ages. No advert can top it, it’s so perfect. Now, we can’t run it ourselves, because everyone would sniff a phony. So the letter goes to the Central News Agency. You know, they’re such hacks, they won’t think twice about spreading it throughout the town. And now he’s got a name, he’s hot again. It bridges the gap until he strikes.”

  “Suppose it makes him strike again,” I said.

  “Come now, man,” said O’Connor. “You saw the wounds. This darling rips them up so bad, he’s obviously mad as a March hare. Nothing we do is going to influence that degree of insanity a whit.”

  I did see the wisdom in this. After all, I had seen the gutting of Annie Chapman, and I believed no sane man could do such a thing. It was hard for a sane man to even look upon it.

  “Since it’s your idea, Harry, perhaps you should write it,” said O’Connor.

  “Wish I could, boss,” said Harry. “But I’m not what you call a poet. Words come out of me like little tiny rabbit turds. Grunting, oofing, and pushing. I’m a reporter, not a writer.”

  Again silence, but this time it was accompanied by stares, which came in a bit to rest on me. They both bored into me. It dawned on me where this was going, and I had to suspect it had been set up this way to make it seem spontaneous.