“Jeb’s the best I’ve ever read. He can’t put a sentence together that doesn’t sound like music. He’s the poet we need,” Harry proclaimed.
“Ah—” I started to object, but being hopelessly addicted to praise, I didn’t object too violently, for I wanted a few more gallons to come slopping down the chute onto my head.
“I wish I had his talent,” continued Harry. “My energy, his talent, his, uh, genius, no telling how far we’d go.”
“I think you’re right,” said O’Connor.
These fellows obviously thought it was something that could be turned on like a spigot. All I had to do was crank my genius faucet fully to the right and out would gush words for the ages. They had no idea that the faucet was rusty and temperamental, and the more you twisted it, the more you fretted and forced, the less likely it was to arrive on schedule. In fact, there was no schedule. It happened when it happened, and sometimes that was never.
“Now, listen here, Jeb,” said O’Connor. “Let’s think this through carefully. Indeed, yes, it’s built around a name, a name that clangs like a fire bell. But it’s also a tone. You’ve got to find something new. It has to play with words in an uncommon way, strike a chord that hasn’t been heard, affect an attitude new to the world. It has to be coldly ironic, for a start.”
“I don’t get ironic,” said Harry. “Never have. Iron, the ore? It has to have iron in it?”
“No, no, Harry, not the ore. It’s got to have a deft way of saying something A, so absurd and preposterous, that it decodes to something B, the exact opposite. When you asked Jeb about the shooting, he said, ‘Quite jolly.’ Lacking much sense of how we speak over here, you thought he meant ‘Quite jolly.’ But in his voice was that elusive tone of which I speak, nuanced, coded, subtle, a series of inflections meshed perfectly with little facial expressions such as slightly lifted left brow, slightly snarled upper lip, and a kind of trailing, dissipating rhythm, by which he communicated to me and far more to himself that he considers such action as blowing little birdies out of the sky with twelve-dram blasts, so that there’s nothing left but feathers and gristle, positively ghastly. That’s irony. That’s what this letter needs. That will make it last.”
Harry took an excellent lesson from this. “He doesn’t like hunting?” he asked incredulously.
We ignored him. He’d never get it, even if the initial impulse had been his.
“I’m not sure I’m up to this,” I said.
“Jeb, you’re halfway to a fine future. I’ll play you big in recompense, and in a bit you’ll be able to jump to a posh rag like the Times, where your gifts will make your fame, and they’ll send you all over the world and all the publishers will be beating down your door for a manuscript.”
I knew I was doomed. He had me cold. I was the birdie in the sights of his four-dram. The man was a genius.
* * *
And so, my first masterpiece. Like any piece of great writing, it has no autobiography. You cannot segmentize it and say, This came from there, and then I figured out that, and then from somewhere else that arrived, and there it was. No, no, not like that at all. It is more a process not of writing, I suppose, even less of willing, but somehow of becoming. You become what you must become.
Still, as I sat at what had become my desk in the newsroom, later that night after all the editions had been put to bed and most of the boyos had gone home or to the beer shop, I do remember odd notes coming together to form a melody, almost as if I were merely the conduit and something, some force (not God, as I don’t believe in Him and if I did, surely this is not the sort of enterprise He would willingly join), were dictating to me. For some strange reason, the word “boss” was in my mind, as Harry had used it to O’Connor, and it was not a common Britishism but more a bit of American slang, not the word, per se, but using it as a term of address. We call no one “boss,” we call the boss “sir.” Universally. So it amused me that whoever our fellow was, he’d address the world, via the Central News Agency, as “Dear Boss.” He wasn’t writing the coppers, you see, but in some sense the public, his true supervisor, as if putting on the whole show for their edification. I was conscious also of O’Connor’s dictate of irony, and I knew instinctively he was right. Our writer couldn’t be a foamer, a threatener, a bloviator, a loudmouth on a crate in Hyde Park haranguing the proletariat on its meat-eating habits. You couldn’t feel the sting of a volley of saliva when he talked. No, he’d been much too dry for that, so I used my own line from the meeting, “down on whores,” which understated by a thousand percent the carnage that he had released upon them. The word “shan’t” quite naturally appeared to me next, as I had never heard it spoken except on the lips of genteel vicars at the occasional ecumenical tea I had attended; I needed something harsh to play off the softness of “shan’t,” so I tried “cutting,” “slashing,” “whacking,” “sawing,” “hacking,” all of which did not, to my ear, work.
Then from somewhere—God’s mouth to my ear, or the devil’s lips to my brain—I came across “ripping,” which was perfect euphonically, even if wrong technically. He hadn’t ripped them, he’d cut them. But ripping had the right sound and connoted a savagery that the world would adore, even if, bent in the quarter-moon over his felled carcass, the man would in no way resemble a wild ripper, since his movements had to be focused, concentrated, driven by considerable application of disciplined force, all of it done with the knife’s sharp edge, none of it “ripped” as if by a crazy man’s churning hands, fingers all tightened to clamp strength as they tore asunder gobbets of flesh and flung them wildly. Whatever he was, he was no ripper, and perhaps the man could not have called himself a ripper, but the delicious sound of the word “ripper” trumped all those considerations. There is a poetic truth higher than fact.
After that, it seemed to come. I had to work in the word “jolly” some place, and I did, and I left it poetically adangle, in a form I’d never seen or heard. “Just for jolly,” I said. I avoided, out of fastidious liberal grounds, any mention of Jews, as one of my secret impulses was to absolve them in my fiction. I wanted no pogroms and no Peelers acting as Cossacks on my conscience, as full as that organ already was. That I was proud of, that I took some moral pleasure in.
And finally, the name. Well, “Ripper” was already achurn in my mind, and I was so pleased with the phrase “shan’t quit ripping” that I didn’t want to let it go, although I knew I had to alter it to a noun form from the verb, both to prevent repetition of an uncommon sound and to continue a kind of word melody playing with that sound. “Ripper” presented itself to me. So if “Ripper” is more or less the anchor, one needs something without an R in it, to avoid singsong or alliteration. “Robert the Ripper” or “Roger the Ripper” just sounded silly. Indeed, you needed counteriteration, a name bereft of R’s and P’s, yet also, to place it firmly in British tradition, a stout, sturdy Anglo-Saxon blurt of a name. “Tom” came to me, and I almost went with that, as “John” was too soft and “Will” hard to say because it need a fricative stop in order to slide easily into the sibilance of the R’s and P’s, and then I remembered the flag, like some common shopkeep or mill hand, and the patriotic treacle of it provoked my radical sensibility profoundly, amused me.
Here was Irony, capital I, in bold italic. Irony! something that O’Connor would grasp and poor Harry Dam nevermore. A smile came to my face. Union Jack, waving atop some battlefield atangle with drifting rifle smoke where the stench of cordite and blood intermingled in the air, and the Gatling guns had piled up heaps of wogs outside the wire, and the officer classes had broken out the beer ration, and all the lads in red had turned and raised a glass to the Union Jack. Yes, Jack, Jack, Jack, as our Lord and Savior Kipling would have it, and I knew I had my name. It was exactly what my masters had demanded: a perfect name, resonant, memorable, easy on the tongue, solidly British, conjuring up the dark warrens of Whitechapel and the idea of a sharp steel knife against the alabaster of Judy’s throat and at the same time con
taining the faintest echo of the stripe-spangled banner waving o’er our green fields and sanctimonious pieties. I had given the world Jack the Ripper.
II
BURNING BRIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Diary
September 30, 1888
* * *
Good Christ, what a day! I almost ran my luck, my escapes were equal to any hero’s at Maiwand, I felt the incredible agitations of the spirit and soul, to say nothing of abject fear turning my stomach to an ingot of pure lead. I had to improvise desperately, change courses, take risks, and cling when all else was gone to the mandate of boldness. And yet at a certain point I ran from a child. I now reach for a fine glass of port to settle myself enough to record the events of the last few hours.
And it began so well.
I did not connect on Commercial at all, as the pickings seemed slim thereupon. I took the turn onto Berner on my lonesome, meaning, I suppose, to take it to the next right, take that, then the next, and in that way circle the block, coming up for another run down Commercial. But ahead of me, bustling by, was a young man in one of those absurd deerstalker hats, package in hand, looking somewhat flustered, as if he’d just engineered a disaster. He sped by me without a look, and that was when I saw what catastrophe he was fleeing. It was a she, clearly a working lass, short of carriage, standing on the sidewalk a half-block ahead in what appeared to be a disappointed posture. Whatever discontent had passed between them, I did not know, but I put my eyes square to her, and she felt them and looked to me, not moving a bit. I sidled up, as was my fashion, the well-turned-out gentleman gone for a rogue encounter with change to burn in his pocket, and when she flashed me a smile, I merely nodded sagely, my face fully commanded by my will and lit with a kind of sexual glow from within. Actually, it was a glow for murder, but this one didn’t know that yet.
She was a short one, tonight’s. I must say, she was an improvement, gal-wise, over Polly and Annie. Any normal fellow would fetch a tup with this one on looks alone. Her near beauty almost exempted her from my attention; alas for her, it was not to be, as she alone was issuing the kind of signal that implies availability. All in black, she was, as if in mourning for herself already, and saving all the trouble by choosing sackcloth for her wardrobe.
“You’re a compact one, my dear,” I said.
“My legs is good for a wraparound, sir,” she said, “as they’ve a lot of muscle to them.”
I noted a trace of foreignness in her voice, not sure which part of the world to ascribe it, even as I replied, “That’s the spirit a bloke wants.”
We were in a canyon of darkness, as darkness was general all over Whitechapel, the city elders being ungenerous with gaslights for their poorest district. There seemed to be a little action across the street; I saw lighted windows at the Anarchists’ Club, where I’d visited on my scout. We drifted across Berner, passed by the club’s front under the sign International Men’s Educational Club, Yiddish translation in smaller letters below. We were out of the glare of those second-story windows because we were too close to be emblazoned. From above, I could hear indications of great rambunction and knew that throaty, endless choruses of “The Internationale” could not be far away.
We passed, the hubbub of politics not quite dying out but subsiding to a low murmur. We reached a gap in the building fronts that held, a few feet back, a double gate in darkness, scribbled with indecipherable lettering in white. Because I had scouted well, I knew what it contained: a few houses immediately across from the south wall of the club, and the “yard” where a cart manufacturer and a sack manufacturer had set up shop; next to that an abandoned building that once contained a forge and then a stable but now housed only rats.
This would be my lovely’s destination. The gates were not locked, and we slid through, opening them, and entered a channel between the club building and some kind of tenement housing not fifteen feet apart, where, off the street just a bit, it was dark as Erebus. We were swallowed and my darling took my arm—I was careful not to let her feel the knife in my hand—and pulled me closer as she glided to the wall just inside the arc of the hinged gate. Her breath was close and she pretended excitement, good actress she, playing the part till the end, and I smelled a bit of cachous on her breath, a little spice the gals would nibble to sweeten their mouths for whatever duties lay ahead.
Her face was pale before me, an apparition out of a painting by one of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, perhaps Ophelia lambent in her drowning pool—Elizabeth Siddal in her most famous pose for Mr. Millais—so natural and so ghostly at once, beautiful yet not quite knowable, shielding her mysteries well and radiating no pain, no fear, no dread, only the countenance of relaxed content. I made the traces of a smile upon that face, not forced but real, for she knew that the coin I would give her would earn her a room in a doss house for the night, to begin tomorrow’s struggle refreshed, or a glass of gin, to forget today’s struggle temporarily, the poor dear.
I believe this was my best stroke yet. I am indeed improving. I hit her hard with the belly of the blade, and it sank deep, an inch, maybe more, and I felt the tremble of impact ride my bones up to the elbow. I drew, rather artistically, almost like a Spanish fencer, the blade around the half-circumference of her neck, pivoting as I opened her. Then an odd thing happened. She died. She simply died. Well, yes, I had cut her throat, but somehow in the power of my stroke, I had launched a bomb into her arterial system, and it hit home in seconds, exploding her heart. That, at least, was what my instincts told me, for she went into the instant repose of death and her heart’s energy failed, so there was no propulsion to the system to drive, as before, the first trickle zigzagging across the neck’s lovely contours, then the gush, the tide, the wave. Not at all—no pump, no evacuation. She lay in a small puddle, as if I’d spilled a glass or two of cabernet on the pavement.
She was more or less resting against the wall, the better to receive my entry and offer friction amid the lubrication in right proportions, and had no idea it was a blade that would enter her, not a penis, and yet her face never bore distress, much less fear or pain. It was as if—or possibly I flatter myself—she wanted to die at my hand. I would at least make her famous, maybe not such a bad bargain, given her day-to-day.
Of the ones so far, hers was the easiest; there was no mess with the choke hold, no crush of clamping hand, no shove or push. With my other hand I grabbed her shoulder, to keep her from thudding or falling forward, and guided her down to earth, she rotating downward until she came to rest next to and exactly parallel to the building. I knelt to her, put my hand to her heart to feel its absence of beat, looked to her soft, relaxed face and gently closed eyes, and knew that she was gone.
My next task was her chemise, for I had use of a garment, and as I slithered down her still body just a bit to reach under her skirts for my trophy, that was where my luck both soared and crashed at the same time.
It soared in that, moving and dipping, I lowered my profile deeper into the dark, so that a man standing but ten feet away could not see me.
It crashed in that a man did stand but ten feet away.
What alerted me was the sudden bluster of a beast, and I looked up to see not three feet from me the face of a pony who knew that I was there, his animal senses being sharper than any human’s. He clomped twice, foot heavy against the cobblestone of Dutfield’s accursed yard, but locked his legs in refusal to move, for he was as scared of me as I was of him. He was in harness, and behind him, barely identifiably by outline, he pulled what appeared to be a cart of some sort, and over his rear haunch, I could see the profile of a man standing in the cockpit of the vehicle.
He snapped his buggy whip at the animal’s flank; the animal tossed his head, shivered, flinging mane into commotion, but resolutely stayed where he was, all the while his big eyeballs lancing directly into mine. He snorted and I felt the cascade of warm, slightly moist air from his lungs wash across me, with an odd musk of grass woven into it. He bre
athed heavily, wheezily, now and again shivering, and when he shivered, his tack rattled and jingled. I could not crouch any lower over Ophelia in her small ruby pond, but I did have knife in hand, and my first thought was to plan an attack. If the fellow got out of the cart and came snooping, he would come upon me, and I would rise like the devil reborn and plunge blade into throat, aiming for a spot a whisker off the larynx (thank you, Dr. Gray), and rip through that structure so that no cry would accompany its owner’s exsanguination. Then I would bolt the yard and disappear.
He climbed down and stood in the narrow space between the wagon and the wall, my only escape route.
“Vas ist? Gott verdammt! Vas ist?” I heard him ask of the pony, about whose welfare he was clearly not sentimental. The pony was equally unsentimental, as he remained in his place, his joints having alchemized into steel fixtures by suspicion of whatever life-form he smelled (he would have smelled her blood as well) and whatever life-form he made out with those huge billiard-ball eyes.
A match flared in the darkness, and its circle of illumination reached my fingertips but no farther; I was out of the zone of visibility by a hair’s width. The man held it tremblingly, unperturbed as it burned toward his fingers, and began to rotate to see what its light revealed. As he turned his shoulders to the right, he drew the cone of light with him, and my love’s dark clothes were revealed, as were her shoulder, and then her pale, serene, beautiful face, and next to it, crimson as the blood of the Lamb spilled off that Golgotha cross, the satiny pool of her own life’s fluid. It was so red. I’d never seen their blood in full light before, only by the quarter-moon’s low-power beam.
“Mein Gott!” I heard him expel. He seemed to shiver in confusion up there on his contrivance, as he tried to make a decision, and then he made it.
I gripped the knife hard, collected my muscularity as I slipped into a raider’s crouch, ready to spring and bring the man down hard and dead, and indeed, he nearly plunged through to his death at my hands. In the last second he pivoted not forward, toward me, but backward, toward the gate.