I feign the swallowed H’s here to convey the comic fraudulence of the attempt at cockney. Harry thought it was funny because it was so grotesquely unfunny in his Yank accent, full of elongated vowels, misunderstood rhythms, and fractured timing; perhaps it was also an indicator of the full strangeness of the American mind. I turned, and yes, it was he, Harry Dam, in full boating regalia, waiting for the coxswain to start beating time so that his eight could beat Magdalen’s eight. He came stepping out of an alleyway across from the Pen and Parchment, where he had clearly followed me.
“Harry, where’s your megaphone?”
“Eh?”
“To count cadence for the oar strokes.”
“Oh, the boating stuff. You guys sure think that’s funny! Come on, chum, I’m serious. We need to powwow.”
“What on earth does ‘pow-wow’ mean?”
“You know, chitchat, palaver, yakkity-yak, have a sit-down, that sort of thing. A meeting!”
“Not now. It’s late and—”
“It may be later than you think,” he said. “Really, this is for your own good, pal. I could be with my girl—let’s see, Tuesday, yes, that would be Fran—I could be with Fran, but I’m here looking out for you.”
He was so absurd, standing there in his comically inappropriate wardrobe, complete with white suede shoes and straw boater, but nevertheless so beaming confidence and self-adoration that I let him steer me into a place called the Farmer’s Pig, and there we found a booth in a dark corner, and he went and got a beer for self and a frothy ginger beer for me.
“This ain’t the moment for you to start drinking, friend, believe me,” he said, and drained half his glass, then licked the foam from his upper lip. I assumed he was cheesed off because I was on this “secret project” and he was not, and I was off “making inquiries” while he was not. He was planted at the Yard, waiting for something to happen, a hard sit for a go-and-grab-it fellow like him.
“Harry, believe me, nothing is going on, I am not plotting against you, I just—”
“It’s not that. If you break the story, makes no dif, because there’ll be other stories that I’ll break, you can be sure. No, it’s this. I’m worried about you, pal. You’re overconfident but underexperienced. I’m worried you’re getting yourself in way beyond your depth, and it’s you we could next find in the gutter.”
“Whatever are you talking about?”
“What do you know about this Thomas Dare?”
“How do you even know the name?”
“I heard J.P. tell Bright your caper. I’m good at overhearing stuff. It’s sort of my trade, you might say. Anyhow, I heard it, and I didn’t get a schoolboy crush on him like you did, and I thought he ought to be the one we look at, so I took the liberty.”
“He’s a brilliant man!”
“How’s he know so much?”
“That same brilliance.”
“Too brilliant, if you ask me.”
“There are such men. Rare, to be sure, but genius is not without documentation. Surely Darwin, his cousin Galton, Matthew Arnold . . .” But I had been so taken by the brilliance of Professor Dare’s explanation that I had never questioned its origin. Surely he was a shrewd analyst, but he was so far ahead of the others that it might mean he had some kind of inside information. Inside what?
A far more likely explanation involved Harry, not Dare. Was Harry a more jealous type than I had figured, and was he working now to drive suspicion between me and Dare? That would be a sure way to destroy our partnership, and Harry might benefit, picking up the pieces we’d left on the floor and assembling them. Such deviousness seemed not only beyond Harry but beyond the American mind. Now, were he a Hungarian, one might think it plausible, but a son of the middle prairie, with those broad, flat vowels and that total absence of irony, much less subtle thinking, nuanced calculation, patience, cleverness? Hardly likely, I’d have thought.
“What are you here to tell me?” I said.
“It took some digging, some bribing, some considerable yakkity-yak and palaver, but the second best kept secret in London after Jack’s identity is that your Tom Dare has a violent streak in him.”
I looked at Harry, searching for signs of jest. I knew irony was well beyond him, but his crude American mind might conceive of a crude practical joke. “What are you talking about?”
“A few years back, he almost went on trial for assaulting a colleague. He and this guy, they got into it over a project they’d been working on, and Tom Dare jumped him, smashed him, shoved him down the steps, and was throttling him, only to be pulled off by cooler heads. This was at the school, you know, the University of London, where he was some mucky-muck-mullah type. You know how discreet your own people are, chum. It was, what’s the word, ‘hushed up.’ Can’t have a high-up professor at a high-up school acting like a low hooligan, cracking pals over the head and all. Tut-tut, old chap, we just cannot have it.”
“I have never heard of such a thing.” And I hadn’t. No, it was not done. Among “our” class of folk, that is, those of us with higher mental function, exposure to education, mastery of culture, familiarity with the genius canon of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, proficiency in the dead languages, the brightest, the best, the most gifted, it was understood that the laying on of hands was strictly off limits. One did not do such things. That was for Kipling’s sort of brutes. If there was to be pugilism, it would be at the gymnasium, under the regulations of the marquis of Queensberry.
“The guy has very strong ideas and, more to the point, a crazy belief in them. He cannot stand to be defied, and when he is, he goes all nuts in the brain. When he and this guy had a falling-out, it got real bad fast.”
“Come now, Harry, you must do better than that. Particulars? Names, issue involved, social ramifications? I feel certain that, had such an incident occurred, it would have been the talk of all London, it would have made all the rags, the Star especially. ‘PROF BEANS CHUM,’ as O’Connor would have it, a huge scandal, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t have that stuff yet. I only know what I know, and I wanted to warn you, tread easy with this guy. You never know what you might jiggle loose.”
That tore it. I am not a violent man, I despise and fear confrontations, and too many times I’ve not stood up to bullies for my own interests, but at that moment something either heroic or insane arose in me, and perhaps they are the same thing.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll have no more of this. I don’t know how they do it in that rustic backwoods you come from, but over here we do not spread ugly rumors and attempt to ruin the reputations of men without foundation. We even have laws against it. Dare could sue you for slander, and if you were found guilty, you could end up in jail. It’s happened before, it will happen again, and it’s our good insurance against nasty buggers spreading nasty rumors.”
He looked at me, shocked-like. “Whoa, there, friend Jeb, I’m not here for my health and to put a bullet in the professor’s back. I’m just telling you, this guy is a little nuts. He goes off, loses control, all that crazy—”
“Mr. Dam, I must inform you I am no longer interested in this conversation, whose veracity I entirely doubt. I believe you’re trying to sabotage my superior efforts on solving this issue. It’s a low-breed stunt that only a Yank could come up with.”
“That’s right, we shot you guys from behind trees, and it wasn’t fair, was it?”
“Mr. Dam. I will leave now. Please do not approach me with any more discussion on this topic. I find it distasteful. Even allowing for your frontiersman’s ignorance, I find you distasteful. It’s not acceptable, and I will not be a party.”
With that I rose, feeling I’d broken all relations with Harry permanently. At least I had by English rules. Who knew what an American would do?
I stomped out self-righteously, only to hear him cry, “Friend, if I was you, I’d get a gun.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Diary
Octobe
r 28, 1888 (cont’d)
* * *
I went to my knees, down hard but not quite unconscious. The sensations of the blow were unpleasant. It had sounded like a locomotive crashing hard against my ear, all clang and gong, echoing around my brain at a hundred miles an hour. My will vanished in the pain, as did my ability to think clearly. The world went to blur and whiz as I blinked, blinked again, felt the urge to vomit, put my hand to the site of the blow to feel, thankfully, not a laceration spurting blood but the swelling of a knot. I looked up to see him towering over me, blunt fellow in black wool, black cap, black of eyes, and beefy-wide of face. I saw his boot come out, and he didn’t kick me but put it square on my back and crushed me to the earth.
“Go on, Rosie, get out of here,” I heard him say.
“Don’t kill him,” she said, then clarified so that her intent wouldn’t be taken for mercy, “that’ll get the coppers on us like buzzards.”
She skittered away, and he bent low and whispered into my ear, “Now, guv’nor, I can cosh you till your brains is scrambled good, or I can let you alone if you promise to be a proper fellow and do as you’re told.”
This was the bully game. It happened, not a lot, but it happened. A tart made an assignation and drew her John to darkness, and as he was about to hand over the coin, her bully jumped out and gave him a knot on the head. The robbery was clean and usually involved no more violence. The clouted knave would never go to the coppers, as to do so would involve confessing he’d been on the scout among the Judys, so he would just write off the six or eight quid or whatever it cost him, swear off the Judys, and limp home with a headache. This threat was always there, nothing to be done about it, but now I’d walked smack into it, obviously on account of my bad judgment in improvising off-plan and ending up in circumstances I couldn’t control. Fool! Idiot!
“Now, sir, you just stay where you is, flat as an empty sack, and reach back there for that wallet, and I’ll take all them bills. No fancy tricks or I cosh you again. I am a bloody artist with cosh, I am, and I know a fine gentleman such as yourself don’t want no more trouble. I’ll even leave you a thruppence for a stout after I’m long gone, that’s the kind of mate I am, guv’nor.”
“Don’t hurt me,” I said feebly.
“No need for hurting,” he said. “Who you think I am, Jack the Ripper? He’d cut you for the larfs it brung his lips. Me, I just want me pay and I’m off, and you and I are well quit.”
“So be it,” I said, rolling slightly, pulling myself up.
“Sure, make yourself comfortable, but no fast moves or I’ll do what I must. I’m a businessman like you, and I don’t want no trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Garn,” he said, a cockneyism that I believe means “Imagine that!” but loaded to brim with cynic’s irony, “a guv’nor like ’im calling a blackguard like me ‘sir.’ Who’d a seen that one coming?”
My servile manner amused him no end. It confirmed all his social prejudices. I knew him in an instant: He believed his own physicality and willingness to go brute made him the superior man, and that it was he who was nature’s nobleman by rights, but with the coming of civilization, the “gentlemen” had taken over, being book-smart if muscle-dumb, and had contrived unfair methods to cheat him out of his natural lordship over all things. He was merely seeking compensation for his loss.
“Yes, there now,” he said as I withdrew my hand from my coat and handed over what he thought was my wallet. He reached for it and at that moment was monarch of a tiny kingdom, this lost alleyway on the quay. His rectitude blazed outward, his sense of self-righteous justice having been served, his appetite whetted for what pleasures were upcoming and soon. He was feeling generous and magnificent, a “larf” on his merry lips.
Hello, sir, allow me to introduce myself, all proper-like, I’m Jack the Ripper.
It was a wonderful stroke. Well, not a stroke so much as an épée’s hit, a darting jab faster than the eye can see, much less track, so swift it cannot be blocked by hand, and I drove the six inches of steel into him hard at a kind of upward angle, through his right side under the arm so that it would glance off ribs if it happened to strike them (it didn’t) and cut through his abdomen on the rise toward his thoracic cavity where it pierced the lower left ventricle, opening a wound that would never close, and his blood began to drain into his guts. It lasted only a second, but I felt the bliss of steel in muscle, I felt all the infinitesimal vibratory sensations of the muscle fibers yielding as the point penetrated and opened the pathway wider for the blade to glide through, slicing deep and wide as it went. I even fancy I felt the slightly more gelid obstruction of the heart, where, for an instant too small to be measured, that lump of muscle resisted, then yielded as the point pushed a full inch into it, opening it to drain its contents and cease its throbbing evermore. Then the withdrawal, neat as the closing of scissors; with a sense of zip and snick to it, the blade was out as fast as it had entered, perhaps in his flesh for less than half a second. The peritoneal lining closed over the small wound, so there was no copious outflow as I had observed in my other escapades. All his bleeding would be internal.
He felt little pain, perhaps a sting, and jerked, as if to say “Ouch!” or “Damn!” but his pressure dropped instantly and he sat backward with a smack as his buttocks hit cobblestone, the cosh dropped from hand, and he shook his head. He could not believe, as I have noted before, that this moment, which all must face, was upon him. An instant senility came across him, and his face seemed to melt toward languor, losing all firmness and jut.
“By Christ,” he said, “you’ve killed me.”
“By Christ, I have,” I said.
“Aw, Jesus.”
“He can’t help you, friend,” I said as I cleaned my blade on his rough workman’s sleeve. “He’s working elsewhere. You heart will pump dry in less than a minute as you become drowsier and drowsier. Any last words for the monseigneur?”
My little jest flew over his head. Nothing like being murdered to kill a sense of humor!
“Sir,” he said, “me boy Jamie is parked at St. Barnaby’s Rectory orphanage in Shadwell. I’ve got a few pounds in me stash, can you see he gets it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “If I give the money to Jamie, his mates will be jealous and beat him and steal it, and he will curse you into eternity. Instead, I’ll give it to the rector for all the boys in your name, and all will benefit. I’ll even match it, and you should consider yourself well treated by Jack the Ripper. On top of that, you got to meet a famous man before you died, and how many of your station can say the same? You have no cause for complaint.”
“Aw, Christ,” he said, eyes opening wide in amazement. “Jack himself! Just my bleedin’ luck!”
It was his last sentence.
I looked about and all was silent. Pennington Street, a hundred feet away, showed no sign of commotion. The woman was long gone, no doubt back at the Rookery, waiting for her man to come home so they could go out for a nice glass of gin and then have a bounce among the bedbugs.
I thought the better of leaving him there, so I dragged him to the quayside. He was heavy, but my sense of the pleasure of the kill filled my muscles with magic elixir, so it was not as difficult as it might have been. Before I let him slip, I removed the cache and found four pound eight, which I wadded and stuffed in my pocket. I rolled him, controlling him as he went, almost wrenching my back. But there was no splash as he slipped away, disappearing in seconds in the quarter-moon’s light, beneath the arrival of a swell. On either side, two vast merchantmen towered, creaking, rocking, but from them came nothing but silence. I picked up the cosh, a leather pouch filled with lead shot grafted to a short wood grip, and tucked it away for who knew what possibility.
I expect to hear nothing about the fellow. It was as if he never lived, and the lump on my head will go down in two days or so. It will ache a bit longer, but that is the price of the business I am in.
CHAPTER THIRTY r />
Jeb’s Memoir
It all turned on three letters, and the colonel knew where to look for them, and quick as a fox, he provided Penny with the names so designated and specifics of three officers so marked, and just as quick, Penny forwarded them to me.
The three letters of the crucial designation were: “s/ID.” That meant “Seconded to the Intelligence Department,” which was both the kiss of professional death in the army—once tainted with exposure to the black world of intelligence procedures, the officer had sealed his administrative fate and would never rise to the level of a general officer, as the boys in charge did not trust their own spies—and the ticket to some truly interesting adventures. It was amazing how many brave officers would give up forever their chance at wearing the general’s insignia for a few years of scuttling around the hills beyond Kabul with the Pathan. To a certain mind, I could tell, it was someone’s idea of jolly fun! Pip, pip, ho, ho, all larky and merry in the Great Game, shan’t we have a dashing good time, Geoffrey, and to Hades with those hidebound mummies at headquarters! Perhaps sexual possibility was part of the lure, for the dusky-skinned, sloe-eyed beauties of the brown races were said to have lesser standards of acquiescence than our Victorian ladies behind their crinolines and tight bodices. Because we had so many men with these issues in their brains, we had an empire.
Two majors and a lieutenant colonel. The names meant nothing to me, nor the regiments from which they had sprung, though one fellow, a major, was a double outlier, as he was seconded initially from his “real” regiment to something all woggy called the 3rd Queen’s Own Bombay Cavalry. It was in the Bombay Cavalry that he had survived the ruinous defeat at Maiwand, in 1880, as had the other two in their respective regiments or whatever they were (I’ll never get the military system of regiment and battalion and brigade straight!). All were shortly thereafter “s/ID”ed, if such a term existed, at which point the archivists of the British army lost track of them, and at intervals of, respectively, eighteen months, two years, and, my God!, five years, they were “r/RHq,” meaning “Returned to Regimental Headquarters,” which is a way of saying home safe. Who knows how many of the s/ID boys never made it back to r/RHq and had their guts pulled out on some dry knob in the Hindu Kush? Such is the price of empire.