First I had to sell Mr. O’Connor on letting me take a few days off to work on some “ideas.”
“Ideas?” he said. “Heaven forfend reporters start having ideas.”
“Sir, I have made acquaintance with a brilliant man. I feel he may have insights of some help. I would be remiss if I did not pursue them. And the paper will be to the profit if he is even half correct.”
“Gad, professors now. Careful he doesn’t try to slip his woodpecker into your bum, though even a homosexualist would be hard pressed to find such a scrawny rat as you worth a tup. Still, they do have odd tastes.”
“Sir, I assure you, no such possibility exists.”
“Who would this genius be?”
I told him.
“That one? Then it’s your sister’s bum I’d worry about, give him that much.”
“You know Professor Dare?”
“A few years ago, I played the bright London scene, trying to scare up investors for this enterprise. At that time, I saw him quite a bit with a lovely girl on his arm. Handsome couple they were, quite mysterious but also somewhat enjoying their mystery. I do remember a reception at an embassy one night, they were much amused by some Hungarian professor who kept chasing the gal about, so smitten he was. I could see they enjoyed the game, and the little Magyar was hopeless in his romantic silliness. It was like watching a terrier attempt to mount a Great Dane. So no, he is a brilliant man, that I give you, and a charmer, too. I’d just, as principle among them folk, be sure to keep my hand on my wallet.”
After receiving that lukewarm blessing, I was off, with the proviso that if I heard of another Jack action, I’d find a telephone cabinet, get the details, and decamp posthaste.
But disappointment lurked ahead. It turned out rather too swiftly that I was no detective. I could make no headway, not with my sister Lucy trilling away in the studio and Mother watching me like a hawk about to pounce upon and devour a mouse. I retreated to my old haunting grounds, the reading room of the British Library, thinking its intellectual solemnity might inspire or provoke me.
Alas, even surrounded by the ghosts of Britain’s great writers and thinkers, I was all dried out. I was a pickle absent the brine, a desiccated raisin. No ferment, no bubbles, whatever inappropriate metaphor one could create, they all applied to me. My brain was bereft of electricity. I tried many things: I wrote on a big yellow tablet in Pitman’s shorthand “Jack” and then listed at speed all the theories I had heard from both high and low, from copper and reporter, from harlot and poet, and all seemed gibberish. I thought one might inspire something, but it didn’t. How did he move, how did he disappear, what were his attributes? Whatever I tried, my dim mind could not find its genius, if it had any; in the end, it merely revealed its fraudulence. My performance suffered from the want of energy and impetus.
I could see areas to check out, lines of inquiry that the coppers, even the purportedly great Inspector Abberline, the Scotland Yard star recently appointed to head the investigation, had not explored. Yet there was no energy in me, or even in the others, coppers, citizens, vigilante committees, the Home Office ministers, any of them. It seemed we were all locked in a box and couldn’t get beyond the obvious. We loved the image of Jack as skulker in a topper, gliding through the nonexistent fog on empty streets under gas lamps, caparisoned against the damp, cackling maniacally like a brute in a West End melodrama. Clearly that could not be him, and remaining manacled to the image was harmful to investigative enterprise. There was something pathetic in us that wouldn’t let us abandon our earlier conclusions: sailor, Jew, doctor, royal. That not one shred of evidence pointed to these solutions made us hungrier to cling to them. It was as if they formed a known coastline, and we sailors upon the sea of Jack were afraid to sail beyond the horizon, thinking we’d never find our way back.
So it was with both eagerness and trepidation that I called on Professor Dare on the appointed morning three days further along through October to discuss and assess. I hoped he had better luck than I did, and realized that I had in some way come to put too much hope upon the man, who would be, I wanted to believe, our savior in all this. I was a seriously confused and dazed young man.
He lived near the university, 26 Wimpole Street, in a grand house, larger than I expected. It spoke of private income, though he’d never said as much, being, I recognized, somewhat reticent on the topic of his real self. I knocked, feeling the chill of late autumn, as November was fast on, drawing my brown wool drabs about me, and a senior servant lady opened, looked me over with a Scot’s eye toward detecting common riffraff, and finally allowed, “Sir, the professor is awaiting you.”
I nodded, handing her my mac, and followed her to the study.
He was in a red velvet dressing gown with an ascot over heather trousers and velvet slippers with dragons embossed upon them, very fetching. He looked quite home-from-the-hunt. His pipe jutted furiously from his lean jaws, emitting briar vapor. His wrinkly blond hair was pushed back, his noble temples gleamed, his strong nose cut through the miasma like the scimitar it was, and behind his circular round spectacles, in a kind of dappled maple, his blue orbs took me in quickly.
“I fancy the house,” I said. “Well done.”
“Evidently my father did something quite remunerative. I meant to ask him about it but never got around to it. I didn’t enjoy his company much. Horrible fellow. However, I do enjoy having the money that I never earned myself. It makes life easy, frees me for my fun, and pays for all of this.”
I looked about. The room was like so many of the professorial class I had seen behind London’s brick and ivy, all booky and leathery, with brass gas outlets for nighttime illumination so necessary to the soirees that drove their society and furniture heavy enough to crush an elephant’s skull and carpets from the Orient that would tell pornographic stories of Scheherazade’s actual relations with the Caliph if one but understood the code. What distinguished it from all the other Bloomsbury iterations was a contrapuntal melody that might be called “Throat.” It was quite extravagantly decorated in Throat. Was he a Sherlock Holmes of the voice?
That is, it was dedicated to matters pertaining to the vocal cords and their substructures, from charts of that particular organ in profile half-section complete to Latin labels for all the tiny flowerlike leaves and tendrils, charts on the wall that I took to be for eye but revealed themselves to be of the letters we call vowels; then strange devices on a large laboratory table that could be for torture but seemed for measuring breath, both intensity and consistency, including a tiny torchlike thing against whose flame one would speak, I’m guessing, and by that method give visual evidence of the absence or presence of the letter H, whose existence bewildered half the population of our city.
“I say, you take this phonetics business rather seriously, don’t you?”
“Voice is communication, communication is civilization,” he said. “Without the one, we lose the other, as those festivals of slaughter called wars attest.”
“May I write that down? It’ll do for an aphorism.”
“Go ahead. Claim authorship, if you prefer. As I say, I am beyond glory. I merely want to stop this nasty chap from gutting our tarts. That’s enough for me.” He bade me sit.
“I have to tell you,” I said, “I have not accomplished much. I go forward and back, upward and downward, I enter randomly or by system, and I cannot seem to get beyond what the police know, that a skilled, dedicated individual is, as has been said, ‘down on whores,’ and butchers them with such grace that he has yet to be caught or even seen.”
He drew reflectively on his pipe, the atmosphere he was pulling past the burning tobacco intensifying its burn so that more great roils of vapor tumbled forth. It was like the skyline of Birmingham.
He proceeded to ask questions that showed intimate familiarity with the material. How wide was the passageway Jack had taken Annie down on Hanbury Street? What were the dimensions of the pony wagon at the Anarchists’ Club, versus the dimens
ions of the gate, and how low to ground was that wagon? How many stone was Mr. Diemschutz, the pony-cart man? Over which shoulder were Kate Eddowes’s intestines flung? How quickly had the various teams of coppers arrived at Buck’s Row? Why did he only cut Polly but not eviscerate her like the others, assuming interruption in the matter of Liz Stride? Why was there no moon her night but quarter-moon the others? What explained the odd irregularity of rhythm between the murders? What was my opinion of the quality of mind of both Sir Charles and the number one detective, Abberline? Did I get a bonus for writing the Dear Boss letter?
“Now, see here,” I said, all fuddled up, “that is uncalled for.” Particularly since it was true.
“It is quite called for. As I have said, I have a gift for the Beneath of a piece of writing. Beneath ‘Dear Boss’, not entirely but mostly, lies our friend Jeb, for I recognize the boldness and clearness of his sentences united with his vividness of image. Those are separate talents, by the way, not a single general one for ‘writing.’ You are lucky to have them both. Anyhow, ‘Jack the Ripper’ is indeed vivid, if not quite accurate. It certainly echoes and deploys a genius for the exact and the resonant. It may indeed become immortal. I love the melody of ‘reaper’ in its own Beneath, and I like the ‘Jack’ for its onomatopoetic evocation of brisk, decisive action, as the snap cutting of a throat. I mention your clear authorship not to embarrass you or flatter you but to point out that the reason so many have tested their brains against the riddles Jack poses and failed is because they now see him as you created him—Jack, demon of mythology, folklore, mischief, a god of mayhem and slaughter—and that will occlude their thinking, cause them to miss what I would consider obvious. So even as I twit you, I do so because I want you to exile this Jack-demon idea from mind and concentrate instead on a human being who is knowable, trackable, and findable. Will you do me that honor, sir?”
“I will,” I said.
“Then let us turn this hellhound.”
“May I record in Pitman’s? This may be historic.”
“I doubt that. I hope only that it’s coherent.”
For the record, then, here is Professor Thomas Dare’s interpretation of the phenomenon of Jack the Ripper, as recorded with sublime accuracy by me on that date at that time, October’s third week, 1888, in his study at 26 Wimpole Street, London, England, via the Pitman method of shorthand. I have the papers before me as I translate them to English in my study, also London, England, in the year of someone else’s Lord 1912. Let me add, I did not bother to record my interruptions, which in any case were few and stupid.
“I begin with the conclusion and will then support it,” he began. “Here’s my somewhat radical final sum, new, I think, to the field. Our man is military. More, he is army; that is, a soldier.”
He paused, reading the look on my face, which was not stunned surprise but at least a minor bit of being taken aback, for this possibility had not been postulated previously. “Now I will track my argument through a series of subarguments, the first being attributes, the second being character, the third being physical, and the final being spiritual.”
He cleared his throat, rose, and began to pace back and forth while I sat, scribbling away in the Pitman notation.
“I say ‘soldier,’ but I mean not merely a soldier; rather, a certain kind of soldier, a type so rare that there are but few of them in London, much less the army as a whole. He is not an artilleryman, he is not a lancer, he is not an infantry lad. He is no engineer; he certainly has nothing to do with quartermastering or the medical ends of the profession of arms.
“His sort of soldiering is so rare it has no name, at least not a proper noun in the folk vocabulary common to newspapers and barroom chatter. Perhaps, as I believe this sort of thing is to become more, not less, utilized in the future, someone will christen him. But for now the closest I can come is ‘scout,’ or perhaps ‘agent,’ or perhaps ‘raider.’
“I will go with ‘raider,’ as it’s easiest off the tongue. Let’s define the attributes. The raider is used to operating alone. He is very well schooled in certain skills: He must be an officer, since he is literate, despite his dyslexia, and in these days few rankers are. Furthermore, like an officer, he plans well, scouts thoroughly, and memorizes routes in and out. He is not averse to killing, obviously, having done and seen much of that work. But for him, killing is not the point; it is part of the job. He’s always driven by task, not mere infliction of damage. He has purpose, design, agenda as his Beneath.
“This one, in particular, clearly served in Afghanistan, because the wounds he leaves on the bodies are typical of the sorts of mutilations that the Pathans commit against British troops, alive or dead, quite routinely. The women torture our wounded. They cut them open and pull their guts out while the boys are quite alive, but no one except the mountains can hear the screams. The guts are flung, the point being to attract buzzards, the further point being that relief columns will see the buzzards, find the bodies, and suffer the dislocating shock of the carnage, which must have a terrifying influence on morale. Jack has seen enough of it not to be agitated, either by seeing it or by doing it, but for him, it’s part of doing business in a certain methodology. It is restricted, I should add, to the mountains of the Hindu Kush, where so many have died so horribly. The Negroes of Africa are savages, but not so committed to dogma in their desecrations. The Pathan go more toward beheading and dismembering, as part of their primitive faith insists that by disassembling the body of the enemy, it follows that he will not bother you in the afterlife. From their point of view, it makes very good sense, if it is a little monstrous by our standards. We feel that a bundle of bullets out of Gatling, traveling faster than the speed of sound—yes, sound has a measurable speed—so that it shatters bone and shreds muscle is far more civilized.
“Then, our Jack is highly organized, as the neat setting out of Annie Chapman’s goods next to her desecrated body indicates; he seems to think tidiness counts. In fact, his sites are all notable for their concision, economy, succinctness, even. They’re very small, never orgiastic or out of control in suggestion. Contained, I suppose, would be the word. It’s like a kind of sex fetish, this need he has to do his damage in very small compass, and I can ascribe that only to years in the military trade, which demand of a man few possessions arranged by rigid convention for inspection, until such habits, which pay their premium on campaign for months if not years, are ingrained.
“And the final attribute, which deserves some additional commentary. That is, like all raiders, he is quite bold, almost nerveless. Perhaps he became a raider to harness that which he already knew was within him, the courage for heroic action in extremely mortal, frenzied circumstances. Now, many think of courage as moral, even noble. Not so at all; it is instead neutral and may be applied equally in the service of good or evil. It offends to say of a murderer, an assassin, a spy, an exploder, an agitator that he is courageous; but he is, for he risks life and tests arcane skill, whatever the purpose. Whether it’s Jack mincing a tart on Buck’s Row or Color Sergeant Archie Cunningham skewering six Fuzzies on his bayonet to inspire his men to stand firm, it’s courage nonetheless, in that it features bold action at moral risk in service to some sort of larger idea.
“Jack has courage, undisputedly. It may be twisted savagely by madness, but in the end it’s the same stuff that rode the charge of the Light Brigade to the Russian guns at Balaclava or stood up to the Zulu Impis at Rorke’s Drift. He’s not a man to panic and flee: He gets his mission accomplished.”
Dare paused as if to check on my progress and, satisfied, awarded himself another nugget of tobacco, plugged it into his pipe, put it aflame with a large wooden match, sucked, enjoyed satisfaction, exhaled, filled the air with the architecture of castles in clouds, and then set back to task.
“We may also infer certain physical attributes: He is slight. Some say he’s strong. I say not necessarily. Despite the purported ‘strength’ evinced by the savage wounds inflicted, an exper
ienced fellow using a sharp blade and the knowledge of anatomy—as a man who’d been in battles with bladed instruments and field hospitals where such wounds were crudely treated would have—could supply the same result. So he does not have to be a big fellow at all. More important: Jack had to take advantage of those narrow passageways and warrens that afforded him access to and escape from the murder sites. A full-bodied man could not, at least not without some effort.
“Consider, for example, his escape from Dutfield’s Yard. It seems to have been forgotten that the pony cart was lodged in the gate, which itself was only nine feet wide. There was little room around, and the cart was low, so little room under. Yet somehow, there being no other way, he slides through. Consider again the pony. We know that it’s skittish from Mr. Diemschutz’s testimony at the inquest, where he stated, ‘My pony is frisky and apt to shy.’ He noted also the pony’s ‘odd, continued reluctance to coming into the yard.’ After all, its skittishness has informed Diemschutz of Jack’s presence. Now, when Jack rises from the darkness to slip out in the man’s rush to the front door of the International Working Men’s Educational Club, he must confront the nervous horse. But the horse does not react, does not rise, buck, neigh, whinny, jostle, jingle, shudder, panic and flee, whatever. That is because the horse, while no genius, knows certain things and is able to recognize certain things. It knows, for example, that a large man will beat it, while a small one would be a child and will not. Thus the horse does not frighten or comment upon the sudden appearance of the dark figure; it knows instantly, by reading the size, that the figure is no threat.
“Then, Jack must be invisible. Not in the physical sense but in the social sense: He must be someone whom all could look upon, of high station or low, of fine education or none, and see nothing. This is partly that aforementioned slightness, but it is also his demeanor. Such a demeanor, carefully calibrated, is again exactly the sort of behavior the raider, a scout in mufti among an enemy population, must achieve. He must pass for the banal poor, unremarkable of aspect and unsurprising of presence; he must be part of the wallpaper. But that accounts only for witnesses on the to-or-from. More pertinently, none of the victims screamed or gave evidence of having fled or fought. They identified Jack, from the first time they saw him to his approach to all that passed between them before the incidence of the knife, as being without threat, which is why he was able to close to cutting range on them and finish them so devastatingly.