“Now let us talk of vision. His must be extraordinary, not a mere 20/20, as is normal, but at least the rare but infinitely superior 20/200. He sees farther into the dark and retains more precision from the quarter-moonlight he prefers—”
I could not but interrupt. “Professor, Annie Chapman, the second, was not slain in quarter-moonlight but in full dark.”
“Indeed. That was his exception. And why? Because he had already performed reconnaissance, like the good raider, and knew from observation that she would guide him to 29 Hanbury Street, through the passage, and into the yard. He knew there would be illumination from still-lit windows on the backsides of 29 and 27, next door. The moon’s light was not a consideration on that one. He made adjustments; he struck outside the range of his vision requirements. That, too, is what a soldier does, or he dies. He must adapt. So he found the generally correct range of illumination, when there’s enough to commit but not enough to give one away. He must have been on campaign in these conditions and gotten used to it and feels capable and more than equal to the police in the circumstance. On the other hand, being both resilient and inventive, he is supple enough to violate the dogma when he finds he must do so.”
I was writing this all down in the twisted dashes and swoops that formed the Pitman method; at the same time, I was hearing interpretations that fascinated me. He had seen so deeply into it! Was he the world’s greatest detective? Or was I the world’s greatest boob?
“Let me sum up: He is a very special sort of Britisher. He is comfortable among wild tribes and in desert or jungle wilderness. He loves desolate spaces. He yearns to be free of the filaments and silken bonds of our Victorian society, with its rigid caste system and its terrible hypocrisies, yet he’s willing to risk his life for those alone. He can live, even thrive, amid a native element, which means he has a quick ear for language. He is what might be called a pathfinder for empire. He was the first boyo to go beyond the frontier and reach out and open communications. He was a quick study on the intricacies of tribal politics and could play faction off against faction, all while keeping the agenda rolling to the queen’s good. He must have been adept, it follows, at the tricks of espionage, such as coding, signaling, assassination, subterfuge, camouflage, gambits of deceit, disguise. He must have a love of adventure and tire quickly of the nonsense that is spoken at balls and soirees and in Whitehall or Parliament or Buckingham. He has friends in intelligence or political circles, so he’s a public school man, where he met those he would be serving, and where they learned him to be a good man, reliable, loyal to the throne.”
“That plus his dyslexia,” I said, so excited I could hardly contain myself, “and by God, sir, we’ve got him.”
“Oh, I left out his most salient aspect,” said Professor Dare. He paused, for he was not without theatrical guile.
“What, dammit?” I said.
“As I said, the spiritual.”
The man was a sphinx with his mystery, playing me like a fool. And like a fool, I could not resist. “What, Professor? What are you—”
“Why, man, is it not obvious? The man indeed has a faith, and he has expressed it every time he has struck. It is his bedrock, his religion, his God. He is a true believer.”
The look on my face must have amused him. He finally took pity. “The man, above all else, is humanitarian.”
Humanitarian? A humanitarian throat cutter? At that point, I thought: Farewell, Sherlock Holmes!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Diary
October 18, 1888 (cont’d)
* * *
I pulled my weapon. It was my cock.
“Here, then,” she said, “let Suzie put you to me and make you feel all good and warm, that’s what Suzie does, she does.”
Her hands upon me were indeed an angel’s. I felt each of them against my stout member. As she guided me into her, her fingers were gentle yet firm, kind yet serious, ideal yet sensual. I felt some wiggle as she found opening, acquired proper angle, pushed, pulled, guided, adjusted, corrected, bringing herself to me as much as me to her, and then she had me full in, set, and into her center I plunged. I felt it as satin on silk with some hint of lubricity, the surfaces meshing against a whisper of friction for the thrill of tightness, and we formed perfectly into a dynamo of smoothness, a sense of gliding, gliding, gliding until, in so far I felt I’d die, either she ran out of channel or I ran short on instrument.
“Oh, God,” she said, “oh, sir, how wonderful you feel inside of me.” Was this malarkey she gave all the boys? Who cared at that point, for my hips took up a natural rhythm and we began the dance, the ritual, the tribal ceremony. I felt her heart, her thin-boned chest against my heavier issue, the damned interference of our clothes, but soon, in the plunging and partial withdrawing to plunge again, there was a magic in her hips, and she found the primal rhythm, she was able to arrange her body and her hips as if on a sustaining armature, and it freed her hips to begin to move as if alone in space, propelled by a reptile brain unacknowledged by higher functions, and that is why it was so magical and that is why men and women in circumstances high and low, mortal or humane, decent or desperate, sell their souls in a trice for its exquisite anarchy.
I lost all sense of clothes at all, two bodies in a church, the church in the city, the city in the nation, the nation on the planet. With my hands I pressed her against me, believing I could feel her shudder, knowing I could feel her hips find and match my speed and urgency. I kissed her hard, and it was a tongue-tongue thing, all thrash and suck and slurp and mash, feeling our breath combine as it poured from engorged nostrils. There remained but the spasm, and it occurred when it should occur, too soon yet too late, which is to say perfection, as there seemed no point of postponement, to say nothing of the will. My release was cataclysmic. I have heard of of a chemical called dynamite that can explode anything, and it was as if I’d been packed with this wonder stuff. The details are banal in the telling, but not in the remembering, and not in the actual.
I pulled back, breathing hard, sucking for God’s oxygen to fill my depleted lungs and bring vigor to my exhausted limbs. I felt the great, satisfied emptiness. I saw her in candle flicker, skirts dropped again, smiling almost as if it had been more than a performance, shaking her head to release her fair hair from the tangles that the dampness of her sweat had ensnared it within. She dipped into her purse and pulled out some muffinlike piece with which to powder her face.
“There now,” she said, “feeling all better, are we?”
“Indeed, my Juliet. It is the east and you are the sun.”
“You talk fancy even after I’ve yanked me knickers! Now, there’s a gentleman.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jeb’s Memoir
“Jack the Ripper is humanitarian,” he said.
“Good heavens, Professor. The man has ripped four women to shreds, pulled their guts out, and lived to laugh about it. How on earth could you apply that term to such bestiality?”
“Indeed, his work is total destruction. Consider it not as we find it, all messy and blood-spattered, with lakes of red about, but as it is experienced. He is, it must and should be noted, not torturing the women. He takes no thrill in their pain. He feels no pleasure in slow, screaming deaths. Quite the contrary, he is well practiced in the art of the immediate and silent kill. Part of this, to be sure, is pure efficiency. It is much easier on him, though a case could be made that chloroform and transfer of the sleeping body to a private nearby spot would clearly not be beyond his powers, and once there, he could amuse himself with torture games for hours and hours. He seems not remotely tempted by such a thing. I suppose another part of it is that selfsame military technique, for part of a raider’s skill must be in eliminating sentries before the attack or ambush. One slithers silently through the brush and fells the watcher from behind with a sure stroke. It must be well done or the watcher screams as he dies and alerts the campful of Pathan or Zulu about to go to the slaughter.
??
?While there’s all this, consider that of all ways to kill a human being, the sudden sundering of the carotid artery is among the kindest, assuming consciousness. A bullet to the brain might trump it, as would the immensity of an artillery detonation. Next comes Jack’s method, which would be experienced as a blur, an impact, a tingle, an instant fatigue and loss of balance, perhaps a fleeting awareness that the end is upon one, which would be somewhat occluded by the cloud of disbelief, and then the slip-sliding away of consciousness. It’s unlikely that much pain would accompany the journey.”
“Sir,” I said, somewhat arisen, “that hardly counts as humanitarianism.”
“By liberal pieties, no, which is one of the things I find so appalling about liberal pieties. You see it in terms of the discomfort it gives you in the contemplation, because you lack the imagination to see it in terms of the pain it spares her in the occurrence. Think on it, if you would, and put aside all those bromides and homilies that sustain the bourgeoisie in the face of reality, which I believe you are becoming aware of in your forced sojourns into Whitechapel.”
“I will hold it in abeyance until further evidence is produced, but my tendency is to discount it and prefer the first two explanations.”
“Well enough. I proceed, confident that I am soon to convince you.”
More pipe theater as he emptied, tamped, refilled, lit, inhaled, exhaled, enjoyed the mushroom of vapor that billowed before him, then turned.
“I await,” I said, pen poised above tablet.
“I deliver,” he said, smiling at his riposte. He found himself, it must be said, quite amusing. “Now turn to the incident at Goulston Street.”
“The baffling graffito, with J-E-W-S misspelled, on which you have already theorized.”
“Put aside that for an instant. Put aside the business of grammar. Turn to punctuation. What is missing, as the reports all agree?”
I thought a bit. I saw it in my mind’s eye.
“The Juwes are The men that Will not be Blamed for nothing”
Or was it “The Juwes are not The men that Will be Blamed for nothing,” as some had it?
“Hmm, missing? I suppose, other than sense, grammar, somewhat chaotic capitalization, I don’t see that anything—oh, yes, wait, well, that is being very persnickity.”
“I am a persnickity sort. I am a phoneticist.”
“Then one would say the concluding period. None of the three copyists recorded a period at its conclusion. However, that may be because of an error in transmission. The copyists—”
“All three forgot a period?”
“Hmm,” I said again. “All right, I take your point.”
“Do you? The larger point?”
“The larger point?”
“He was interrupted, who knows by what or whom. Possibly that copper coming down the street. But he realized that although he had really engineered the whole thing to pass on this message, he had the discipline—military, that is—to retreat upon threat of discovery and not drive himself on false pride and end up in the bag. He decided not to compromise the completion of the whole mission for this one component of it. Do you see?”
“So there’s more?”
“Indeed. What could the next few words be, considering what was going on in London then, his character as we have drawn it, his few but admittedly existent virtues, perhaps even, out of his military past, a sense of duty, moral duty. It must also fit on the wall, which limits the space. Limits it to just a few more words, another line at most.”
Was Dare mad? “I have no idea.”
“This,” he said. “ ‘The Juwes are The men that Will not blamed for nothing . . . was done by them.’ ”
I looked at him.
“WAS DONE BY THEM! It’s in the passive voice of so much military report writing, it restores the grammatical integrity of the educated man—Sandhurst, I’m guessing—to the composition, it is succinct, the space on the wall would permit it, and it could be written by the light of a quarter-moon by a fellow with sharp eyes. But its point is to absolve the Jews, because he could see that fear and hate was building, that beatings had taken place, that the newsrags, including yours—”
That damned Harry Dam again!
“—were fanning the flames to sell yet more papers, that the thugees and druids of the slums were building up energy. He saw all that and could not live with the idea of a thousand Jews dying in the flames of hatred because of his mission. So he took it upon himself to formally absolve them, signing his statement with Mrs. Eddowes’s blood and placing it on a police route where it could not be missed.”
I was not convinced, although the man’s argument had logic to it. “And if so, of what import? I see it leading us nowhere.”
“Quite the contrary, it leads us very much somewhere.” Dare smiled.
He was a cat toying with a mouse, and I, the great Jeb, did not care a bit to be made mouse of, to have all my arguments dashed upon the stones so insolently by a fellow who was not only smarter but could afford a better tailor and didn’t live with a horrid mum and a trilling sister.
“What somewhere, pray tell?”
“Where would he get such ideas? Clearly, he believes that the Jews—bogeymen of the popular press, demons of the working-class imagination, devils of the retail exchange, depraved and violent in folk rumor, despised by the capitalist class because they are so much better at capitalism, despised by the revolutionary class because they are so much better at revolution, detested for lacking fairness and physical beauty and portrayed everywhere as hook-nosed, yellow-skinned, shawl-wearing, matzoh-ball-eating vermin—he believes them to be human beings, like all of us. Where on God’s earth could he have gotten such an idea?”
“I see it,” I said.
“Then explain it.”
“Those ideas are hardly held anywhere in the world except in certain liberal reform circles, very small but very passionate. Not at all the place where one would find a soldier or intelligence agent of much battle experience. So your point has to be that he has been exposed, somehow, somewhere, sometime, to those ideas, but more important, to people who espouse them, for it is not the sort of inconvenient passion one would absorb merely from reading. You’d have to live it, feel it heavy in the air, indulge in it at length as an assumption, not an argument. And where would we find people of such ideas? I cannot see him gadding about among the better sort of intellectual circles in Bloomsbury, can you?”
“No, I do not see that.”
“Only one possibility remains. In the church. Possibly in family, given a rector as father or brother, possibly by marriage to a Quaker woman.”
“You have it, sir. Exactly.”
“A soldier—raider, rather—experienced in Afghanistan, highly evolved military skills, dyslexic, Sandhurst, yet the son of a pastor or minister of some sort.”
“Ecce Jack.”
I realized then: He had made his sale.
Against his campaign, my little foray into detectivism seemed trivial.
“All right,” I said, “it’s quite brilliant, so much further along than anything anyone else has said. You have a genius for this sort of analysis, I must admit. I am humbled. Why, it is as if you are Sherlock Holmes himself.”
“Who?”
“The detective Sherlock Holmes. The genius who can decode a crime scene brilliantly, sift through clues with ease, point out the plot, its purpose, and its perpetrator. In Conan Doyle’s book A Study in Scarlet.”
“Never heard of it. As I said, let’s just stop the gutting of the whores. Now I turn to you for practicality.”
“Perhaps I can at last contribute,” I said. For even as I had been listening and recording in Pitman, I had been, in a different part of my mind, seeking utility for these new ideas.
“I await patiently,” he said. “As you know, I am somewhat bereft of practicality. I am an expert on one thing alone, the voice.” So Holmesian!
“My thought,” I said, “is that I am, after all, a journalist
. While the Star is not the best of all papers in London, even if it is one of the loudest, my connection to it secures me entry into the journalists’ society. On our paper or on another, there has to be a fellow who has made it his speciality to cover issues of war. He’s been to many, he knows the officers and the civilians who supervise them well, and most of all, he already has cultivated a network of private informants. He is well known at Cumberland House, army headquarters. My idea would be to locate this man and somehow entice him to our aid. We would start with the broadest categorization of what you have said. We are looking for someone recently retired from active duty, with connections to intelligence, who is privately known by those who are privy to such things, as a superb operative in mufti, particularly in Afghanistan, who has a gift for languages and a reputation for that which we will call ‘efficiency,’ it being understood that such a word connotes the willingness to kill if necessary. He has been, further, much exposed to the horrors of battle and mutilation as performed in that hellhole, perhaps his mind subtly addled by it.”
“Excellent,” said Professor Dare.
“If we can get a list of such, some being more closely matched to the criteria than others, we can our own selves identify them and continue to winnow, by which method we can determine if the other markers are present: the dyslexia, the religious childhood, the superb night vision, the physical aspect of slightness, perhaps even the possession of poor Annie’s rings, though that may be too much to be wished. In that way, we can ultimately identify the one man who matches the template with perfection. Police notification would follow, then arrest, and we bathe in glory. I do like the glory part.”