But the true depth of Henry’s greatness was expressed on the front page. It bore one word:
FIEND!
Who in passing could not pick that up for a shilling and lose him- or herself inside, where “ ‘Jeb’ on the scene at Whitechapel, and Henry Bright at the Star” had all the nasty details?
FURTHER MUTILATIONS
INTESTINES TOSSED
POLICE FIND CLUE
WARREN: NO COMMENT
And now on to my greatest triumph. It was so simple I hesitate to give it away. But it made me a legend, it earned me a ten-pound cash bonus, it went to six replates, and it impressed even Harry Dam, though I had yet to meet him. I went on a certain day back to Whitechapel, looking for a gal who knew Annie. I found her on station, as it were, in a slow patrol down Wentworth, looking haggard and ill used, which was clear indication that she was haggard and ill used.
“Madam, Jeb of the Star; I saw you at the occasion of Annie’s death.”
“You,” she said. “Reporter, news fella type. You wrote nice about poor Annie, everybody read it and remembered the poor gal.”
“May I buy you a gin? Perhaps we could discuss her some more.”
“I likes me gin, sure,” she said, and we shortly were arranged at a table at the Ten Bells, a watering and ginning hole to the trade.
The chat was general and pleasant and sad for a bit, and like all of the unfortunates I would meet, she turned out, once one was by her defenses, to be an all right sort, brought low by her love of the fiery blur she held in the glass before her, but she didn’t produce anything I could use for the longest time, and I began to wonder how to pass her off without buying her another thruppence of bliss, when she said in response to nothing I had been clever enough to ask, “Wonder what the bloke done with ’er rings?”
“I say, what rings?” And then I remembered Bagster Phillips remarking on her bruised finger and surmising the absence of the rings.
“Annie had them two brass rings. Nothing to ’em, but they was dear to ’er. They was wedding rings, she said. ’E cuts ’er guts out plain, and ’e takes them rings. ’E’s off ’is chum, that one.”
I nodded.
And thus the next day’s Star front page, consisting entirely of:
ANNIE’S RINGS
FIEND STOLE VICTIM’S BELOVED WEDDING BANDS
POLICE HAVE NO EXPLANATION FOR BIZARRE THEFT
That moved the story hard for a few days, being the sort of homey, horrifying detail the shopkeeps and shopgirls and clerks and barristers’ assistants could get an emotional fix on. Where were Annie’s rings? If the fiend was one of my readers, he’d be wise to chuck them in the Thames and think no more. But I thought I detected a whiff of vanity in him; he just might be arrogant enough to keep them. Be interesting, I thought, if it was the evidence of the rings that sent him to the gallows.
Many other issues drifted in and out of focus over the next weeks, all of them ultimately meaningless and not worth recording here, one of them being what time it was the poor girl expired, as several highly dubious witnesses reported hearing, seeing, and not seeing things at conflicting times during the morning. The coppers believed them and dismissed their own surgeon’s learned opinion. What utter foolishness!
But in the end, only one thing lingered: a business of the Jews. I suspect the large influx of them excited anger, fear that they would bring alien ways to old Albion, undercutting the labor market and driving good Englishmen out of work. Of the seventy-six thousand occupants of Whitechapel, thirty to forty thousand were Jewish, while of that same total population 40 percent were below the poverty level. Thus, in many minds, Jews equaled unemployment. So there was no love for them to begin with when the murders started.
This anger began to coagulate at their commission. We of Fleet Street were no help at all. One of our reporters—not the famous Jeb but the Yank calling himself Harry Dam, whom I didn’t know except by name, as, recall, his absence “with a floozy” had gotten me into this game in the first place—had reported even the week before Annie’s death that a fellow named “Leather Apron” was a suspect. That was, by the way, what many called Jewish butchers. That a leather apron was found soaking in a tub in the yard of 29 Hanbury (yes, I had missed it, as had the clomping coppers for quite some time) didn’t help matters, even if it was soon proved to have nothing to do with the case. Still, the Leather Apron whisper would not go away.
Harry played up the Jewish characteristics of this beast Leather Apron, intimating mystical use for the blood and certain body parts of poor Polly. And the killer hadn’t even taken any body parts! One day Mr. O’Connor, who knew a replate story if ever there was one, ran the headline LEATHER APRON: ONLY NAME LINKED TO WHITECHAPEL MURDERS. I suppose I didn’t approve, but I was hoping to be taken on permanent-like, so who was I to go against the great man’s judgment?
Then the Manchester Guardian wrote, “It is believed that (Scotland Yard) attention is directed to a notorious character named ‘Leather Apron.’ . . . all are united in the belief that (the killer) is a Jew or of Jewish parentage, his face being of a marked Jewish type.”
You could feel a fever building. I was part of it but had no tool by which to stop it. I also had no will to, being largely agnostic on the issue and knowing no Jews and feeling a little suspicious of them myself. That indifference, plus my customary greed and ambition, got the best of my low character; I had signed on to ride the train as far as it would take me, and damnation to all crushed beneath its progress. I had no idea how far that would be.
The mobs responded to this campaign as mobs do: violently. Crews of young toughs roamed Whitechapel and roughed up individual Jews. The coppers seemed to pick up anybody with a Jewish name and bring him in for hard questioning: among the arrestees, Jacob Isenschmid and Friedrich Shumacher.
Finally, a Jewish slipper maker, actually nicknamed Leather Apron, was arrested and interrogated. It turned out he had knocked a Judy or two about, but that was all, and he was in no way affiliated with knives or the sort of carnage our fellow had made twice. He had well-proven alibis and was let go.
But the Jewish fear grew. On several occasions, mobs formed outside the Spitalfields police station where this Leather Apron (John Pizer, by name) was incarcerated. Anti-Jewish graffiti began to appear mysteriously on tenement walls and storefronts. A very uncomfortable tension, palpable and unsettling, began to course through the lower orders—I love them in principle, but I was to learn on this adventure that they can be reprehensible louts in ungoverned mobs and need stern leadership to harness their rage—and violence was in the air. If our killer was a Jew, killing on some kind of twisted religious grounds, I had no idea what mischief might be released. For that and that alone, I began to hope that early suspicions of a doctor or a surgeon played out, for if it were an upper-class nob, it’s unlikely that a mob would head into Kensington with torches and pitchforks. For one thing, the Queen’s Royal Horse Guards would stop them with Gatling guns before they got across the street, just like the black-skinned ugga-buggas, and that would be a bloody day for old London.
Among all these voices, one was not heard from. The killer’s. His weekly schedule was not kept, and he did not strike again for two weeks after Annie. What was he doing?
September 10, 1888
* * *
Dear Mum,
I never heard from you after the last letter, but maybe that’s because I didn’t send it. Ha-ha! Maybe when they catch this fellow, I’ll send it and this one and you and Da can have a good laugh about how your bad daughter survived what all about is calling “the autumn of the knife.”
You know the fellow is back and he cut up another girl. He even stole her wedding rings! It’s been in all the papers, so I know you heard about it, and you’ll be worrying because this time it’s so close by me. Well, I am writing to tell you don’t be worried! Nothing’s going to happen to me. I have a guardian angel now!
I have a fellow, a nice man, he doesn’t beat me or try and s
hove me about to be a certain way. He lets me be, and what more can a girl ask, plus he brings in a good penny as he works as a porter at the Billingsgate fish market, where there’s a lot of packing and loading and ice chipping to do, so when he gets home, he’s a tired fellow and we’ll have a glass of beer at the pub. He wants me to stop with what I do bringing in the money, and maybe that’s in the cards, who can read the future? But I’ll tell you, he won’t let no other fellow on to me, well, on to me to hurt me. As I said, see, it’s different down here, all of us are so close to going under that it’s more forgiving of certain things. There’s no high and mighty. Nobody’s high, nobody’s mighty, you do what you has to, and you helps out them what needs it and in turn, when you’re down, they’ll help you back. The girls is all so nice, not like some I’ve known.
The other thing is that poor Annie, that’s what the newspapers say was her name, she was again a lone gal on a dark street, with nobody about to see or stop nothing. He fooled her into taking him into a backyard where it was even darker than the street, and that’s where he ripped her up, and you must have heard, as I have, it’s in all the papers, this time he did a job on the ripping.
I don’t know what makes a fellow want to do that. We girls never hurt nobody, and only a few of us gets involved in any bully game, and then only when a boyfriend threatens with a whipping or worse. But mostly we get along with each other, with the blue bottles, as we call coppers, and with the boyos who come down here for their bit of dirty.
See, Mum, I’m always with other girls, and we’ll be walking round and round and keeping an eye out for each other. And we’ll only go with a gentleman if he’s nicely dressed and polite and don’t smell too bad. It’s said this fellow is a Jew called Leather Apron, as all the Jew butchers seem to wear such a thing. One of our better coppers, called Johnny Upright for his good and fair ways, done arrested him, and for a time, it seemed there’d be no more cutting. Johnny Upright got his man! Too bad, ain’t it so, that this Leather Apron wasn’t the true bad bloke, only someone the papers said was bad. They had to let him go. But Johnny Upright’s still on the case and you can bet on that one.
Sometimes you do see the Jews down here, but usually they stick to their own section, which ain’t far, but almost always they’re doing some business, they’re always buying for three and somehow turning it about to sell for four, so I’m not one who thinks it is a Jewish fellow. They’re too busy counting their gold, ha-ha! More like a sailor or a soldier, they can be brutes and want what they want. I don’t like soldiers; hurting is what they does.
But as I say, even after the job he done on poor Annie and the ripping they say was horrible, and even though it was but a few blocks down, I know it’ll be all swell. Johnny Upright will save us, and then my man’s always on guard and won’t let nobody touch me. Well, ha-ha, “touch” me. Now I know I won’t send this letter to you, Mum, because you wouldn’t find it so funny ha-ha at all.
But still it makes me feel so close to you and to all that I miss so bad. I keep hoping that someday I’ll wake up and the thirst will be gone and I can go back to having a nice life like everybody else. I hope that so bad and I love you so much.
Your loving daughter
Mairsian
CHAPTER NINE
The Diary
September 24, 1888
* * *
To quote my many Cockney friends, it only hurts when I larf. And there is much about which to larf. I cannot help the larfter, for example, when I contemplate the accounts of the bumbling clowns better known as the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard, the coppers, the Bobbies. Make that Boobies. What a show of idiocy.
Forget the idiocy of competing, distracting witnesses, the crushing of the crime scene until, if it wasn’t clueless to begin with, it was quickly rendered thereup, forget that one thing, they dismiss their own surgeon, according to the Star, who correctly placed the time of Annie’s journey at four-thirty A.M.
No, the issue here is Lieutenant Colonel Sir Charles Warren, the soldier fellow who runs the coppers in his dotage, a gift, one supposes, from the monstrous dowager Vicky as reward for having sent so many heathens to heathen heaven, so our merchants could move in and rob the survivors blind. Note how a certain pattern holds true: The more honorifics before a man’s name and the more initials after them, the bigger an idiot he is likely to be. Thus, he is at his worst when his best is most demanded by the situation. How our empire managed to crush all those wogs under such fools is a mystery, the answer, I suspect, having to do with a superior mechanical imagination as to machines than its poor victims as opposed to any genius among its leaders. We had got the Gatling, and they had not. Sir Charles is so pressured by my predations that he has lost all ability to discriminate. What is needed is the sharp intelligence of a single man who has the wisdom to penetrate the obvious nonsense and press hoo-hah and understand exactly how it happened and from that deduce who did it. Alas, such a man only exists in the fancies of a fellow named Conan Doyle, and his portrait is an ideal, not an actuality. I would tremble in my boots if Sherlock Holmes were after me, but dear Sherlock exists only in the vapors of the Conan Doyle mind, not on the cobblestones of Whitechapel! Ha, and double ha.
But idiocy doesn’t stop there. Even Dr. Phillips, whose expertise, if ignored, specified the deed’s time, is not immune. Upon discovering some sweetbreads gone from Annie, who needed them no longer, he expostulated that I—that is, a theoretical “I”—had sold them to medical schools. Indeed, yes, another ha. And how would a fellow go about doing such, I wonder, without giving up the jig? A far more judicious interpretation, even if equally untrue, would be that “I” am a researcher of some sort, an MD or a Doctor of Science in chemistry or some arcane element of body knowledge, and needed the U and the V for experimentation. From that supposition, all kinds of worthy enterprises could be hatched: One could go to medical faculties and inquire about “unbalanced” graduates with an interest in the areas inferred by these sweetbreads; one could inquire of pharmaceutical companies, who would know such things, what drugs had been and were still being or were possibly being implemented to affect these areas of the woman body. One could also take inquiries into a much lower realm, for example, and examine the nonoccidental element for magic uses of these two biscuits in preparing such products sexual as aphrodisiacs, pregnancy terminators, love potions, and the whole panoply of imaginative folkloric usage. All would be wrong, but all would nevertheless be intelligent deductions from the material at hand.
The only sensible man alive appears to be this Jeb of the Star, who quite helpfully noted and played all ruffles and flourishes with the missing rings. ANNIE’S WEDDING RINGS! The fiend even took poor Annie’s rings. If only she’d have had a cat to murder, that would have blown the keg full to heaven. But the rings thing was perfect calculation on my part and perfect application on Jeb’s; his mission is to sell newspapers, at which he no doubt succeeded, and though I have a different product in mind, his enthusiasm at his “scoop” is a first stop on the way to my triumph. It pleases.
Yet in all the mirth, a certain melancholy cannot be denied. First, poor Annie has been lost in all this. It seems that I, her slayer, her strangler, her vivisectionist, am the only being on earth who laments her passing, doomed enough by corrupted lung as the poor lass was, testimony of Dr. Phillips proving the point. I could solipsistically argue that my intercession spared the poor lady much in the way of pain and dissolution, in exchange merely for time, a year’s worth. But I will not. Each man’s death and et cetera diminishes even me. It was my agency and I am the bloke all are on the prowl to bring down and see floating beneath the gallows arm, suspended by a stout piece of hemp. I am guilty, guv’nor, at least by your laws.
Like that of Polly before her, Annie’s character flaw appeared to be alcoholism, perhaps brought about by the wretched and crushing fates of two of her three children, one an early death, the other a cripple who had to go into a state ward. As before, there was no net to captu
re the falling Annie, and she landed in Whitechapel’s most wretched slum, the Wicked Quarter Mile, as it has been called, selling notch and lip for enough bad gin to drown the pain. There is little else to tell; the most remarkable thing about her was the encounter with me and, I suppose, her surprisingly strong, straight teeth, so unusual that even Phillips remarked on them in his report. If anyone of celestial royalty is listening—as an atheist, I doubt it, but one must abide by the ceremony—I hereby apologize for the botch I made of the passing. The business of the left hand and the constriction of the throat happened, as it were, spontaneously, but nevertheless, it speaks as an expression of and extension of my will which would not be denied, so I will not deny responsibility. The knife at least takes these angels quickly and sends them painlessly to their god and his heaven, if that is where they in fact go, or possibly just into a painless forever of dreamless sleep. The strangulation business is ugly, to say nothing of difficult to manage and slow to take effect. My apology and my pledge to all who come before me never to repeat the sacrilege.
On the other hand, another of my plans is working splendidly, beyond ANNIE’S WEDDING RINGS. That is this business of the Jews. It is something I had foreseen, as it seems to be a universal. Wherever they go, these people inflame malice, envy, anger, suspicion, and violence. Yet Mr. Disraeli was a Jew, was he not? The great banking family Rothschild, which has financed many of the glorious buildings of Paris and other cities, is Jewish. Many great philosophers are Jewish, as are scientists, mathematicians, scholars, and doctors. I suspect the hatred that always accompanies their presence has to do with the fact that some of them have a gift for numbers and are able to figure in extreme speed the advantage of this rate over that rate in the long term versus the short term, and they have a way of offering deals that sound good to the taker, except that in time he learns the terms were not in his favor.