Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

It is the most perfect screen for my next and most ingenious move. My mind is clever, and if I plot carefully, reconnoiter adroitly, and am bold, I will triumph in the end. This stroke of genius has an added advantage: I have enough blood on my hands and will happily greet Old Scratch when he leads me to hell’s tenth circle, but I do not need to add that of a thousand Jewish babies. I will be cleansed of that sin. Egad, have I accidentally done something moral? How appalling!

Iopened the envelope – finding it first of all to be on the heavy cream stock of higher taste, familiar somehow – removed the missive inside, unfolded it, half recognized the penmanship, and then fully recognized it fully: Charlie!

That is, Charles Harrison Hilliard, editor of Contemporary Review , a lively and often bawdy arts journal that I contributed to quite regularly for some years before falling into the Star ’s orbit, therefore aligning myself with Big Boring Press and cutting loose from Small Impudent Press. Charlie came from department store people in some far provincial town, but he, having none of it, was quite content to spend their hard-earned money on a quarterly of sublime physical beauty that was notably full of irreverence, immaturity passing as wit, radical politics, the need to shock for its own sake, and the occasional truly well-conceived essay by someone whose name was not yet big enough to get him published in the Atheneum . That was me. The Atheneum crowd, very Oxbridgy and, for all their liberal airs, quite nose-up when it came to rube Irish geniuses in brown suits with the look of a pig farmer’s right-hand man, had yet to notice me and perhaps never would. Very well, I snorted to myself many a time, I shall live quite happily without the Atheneum , and I paid them back the insult of not noticing me by not noticing them, which they never noticed.

So here was Charlie, after a few years’ absence from my life.

It’s been too long. We had so many good laughs but now you’ve disappeared, even from O’Connor’s horrid Star. You were the best critic in London, which meant you had to be punished for your temerity in so regularly humiliating the bigger fishes. Hope you’re writing a novel or a play or something. Can’t wait to hear.

In any event, do please come to a soiree I am holding tomorrow night at eight, full of interesting chaps, all of whom hate Atheneum, having not been noticed yet by them, either. Rather a chatty lot, you’ll fit right in. Gals, too, artist and poet types, perhaps shady in certain aspects if you wish that game upon yourself. Teetote if you want, but the punch will be spiked with rum and the fizzy in the bottle will knock a jack-tar on his arse!

Best,

Charlie

It arrived at the perfect time. I’d worked myself to exhaustion on the murders, much to O’Connor’s satisfaction, but even he could see I was running ragged. He instructed me to take some days off, which I spent mostly sleeping, to avoid my mother. Now, just as I was feeling revived, Charlie’s invite arrived and it seemed a perfect anodyne to dead whores in alleys and yards.

I had a bang-up time. I didn’t dominate, no, but neither did I withdraw into recessiveness, and I came up with as many clever lines and swift retorts as any of them. It was a fast crowd, they drank and smoked too much, they fancied themselves “outlaws” (but of the safest sort), and the alcohol liberated them to pretend to be who they wished to be. As for me, I pretended to be a more widely published writer, or a writer rather than a subspecies called “journalist” or “critic.” I wore the brown wool suit, having no choice in the matter, with a blue cotton shirt, and looked like a cross between a barroom poet and an IRA gunman, as I had wanted. Some may have thought me dangerous, which I rather liked, not knowing that lump in my pocket was an extra handkerchief instead of a Webley, and I enjoyed the mystery I seemed to carry about, the sense of knowing more than I did. As a veteran observer of life and death, I thought myself superior to all of them, for their bohemianism, social nonchalance, and contempt for convention was mostly affectation. I’d seen gutted lasses and knew in fact, not merely in theory, how short, nasty, and brutish life could be.

I’m not sure when I noticed him. It was subtle. He was just there. No, I am not about to confess some homosexualist secret, like the one that doomed poor Wilde to Reading Gaol a few years later, and I have no pressing desire to touch the flesh of a being of the same sex. But I am wooable by wit, dynamism, worldliness, good taste, and as I pretended to myself, the certain knowingness that bespeaks a fellow who has seen and tasted much.

“You’re the music critic, no?” he asked me when the drifting of people and the vagaries of alcoholic imbibing brought us together on the flow of the currents. He was tall, and his tweed, I noted, was of fine quality. The tailoring was superb, a three-piece suit of very modern cut, with red four-in-hand instead of a black fluffy bow tie, and the whole effect was of a fellow who paid close attention to his clothes until he put them on.

“I was for a time,” I said.

“Hope you closed down all the concert halls,” he said. “Such puerile jibber-jabber. When are they going to have the guts to change one single thing about the classical canon? It’s mostly Wagner done poorly, since we treacle-slopping Brits don’t have the coldness of soul to do Wagner as he should be done, all savage and scary. We do him like Dion Boucicault doing Dumas with kettledrums and trombones. Not a damned thing for anybody with a brain, or at least the aspirations to thought. Music as social instrument is an alien concept to them.”

“I must say,” I said, “you speak like a critic yourself, sir. That’s a thought I’ve had many a time. Meanwhile, in Europe there’s some interesting work. The Russian Anton Rubinstein is using the baton to do something other than slop treacle for the pigs.”

“ ‘Treacle for the pigs,’ ” he said. “I like that. My name’s Dare.”

I told him mine.

“Of course,” he said. “I pretended I didn’t know you, but I’ve read your pieces in Charlie’s little rag. You were a boy worth watching, I thought. I watched, I watched, I watched. Where on earth did you go?”

“I wrote music under a nom de guerre for a year for the Star and then had an opportunity to try my hand at another part of the journo game. It’s been interesting, though without much glory.”

“Well, you had the divine spark. Don’t lose it in some larger outfit that wants to regulate all voices to the same modulation. But I have tenure, so I’m great with career advice, not having to worry about such things as food, board, and money.”

“You teach?”

“I yell at them. They pretend to listen. I grade the papers by throwing them down the steps and determining which land on the ninety step, which the eighty step, which the seventy. No one seems to care much, and I can never get in trouble with the department, since I’m also the department head. The corruption is blissfully total.”

I found this line very amusing, almost irresistible. I love it when those safely in the bosom of a comforting institution trash it savagely, pointing out its follies, brutal politics, bad behaviors, and utter tomfoolery, but with such good cheer and equanimity as to suggest that all they say will be so relentlessly honest.

“You have a dramatic way about you, sir,” I said. “I’m sure you entrance the students.”

“I’d like to entrance some of the girls into bed, I would. The beastly boys, I’d entrance them off to Afghanistan or the Crimea – say, are we still in the Crimea?”