Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

That is, unless one knew where to look.

Indeed, where was he? The party finished with a vague invitation to drop in on Professor Dare “sometime,” and it was back to the murder grind. The monster missed his weekly assignment, and then he missed his second. Was he planning some extra-special extravaganza? Had he gone on the slack? Was he bored? It was hop-picking time, so maybe he’d gone to the country to earn a few quid filling sacks for our brewers. If rich, perhaps he was even now luxuriating at Cap d’Antibes, eating snails and other Frenchy things, his knife forgotten for a bit.

Whatever the reason, O’Connor could see the consequences playing out in newsstand sales, upon which we depended for our circulation of 125,000, “Largest Circulation of Any Evening Newspaper in the Kingdom.” I tried my best, and the rings push was of some help, but after the ludicrousness of the Polly and Annie inquests, the multiplicity of absurd clues, such civic vanities as a vigilante committee forming to offer the reward that Warren had so far refused to authorize (as if this fellow were part of a network of criminals and could be ratted out like a common cracksman or swindler), and many heated speeches against the Jews for this, that, and the other thing, some other detective blowhards who opined that the High Rips or the Green Gaters were the culprits, and finally some high copper muckety-muck’s much promulgated idea of a husky Russky, it seemed both pointless and hopeless. I wrote a nicely vicious piece on the inefficiencies of the police, which attracted very little attention, Harry Dam reheated shabby notions of Jewish ceremony, which until now required only Christian babes for blood with which to make matzos, but henceforth he claimed that the blood of whores was some part of some ritual in the cabala that I suppose was to make Baron Rothschild the richest man in the world again twice over. As far as progress in the investigation, practical steps to deal with the issue, shrewd analysis of the evidence, none of that. Nothing was happening.

An idle mind is indeed the devil’s plaything, so we entered full scoundrel time, and who but I would enter history as the biggest of all scoundrels. That is, at the urging of the damned Harry Dam.

I was transforming some Pitman into typing, some nonsense that would go on page 4 under an advertisement for Du Barry’s Revelenta, the flatulence and heartburn cure, when a lad approached and said, “Sir, Mr. O’Connor needs to see you.”

“Eh?”

“Now, sir. I gather it’s urgent.”

“All right, then.” I rose, put on the old brown, and followed the boy across the room and down a hall, where he knocked, and we heard a gruff Irish rasp respond, “Come in, then.”

O’Connor put no store in majesty. I imagined the office of the editor of the Times to be a bookish chamber with a fireplace, a stag on the wall, and a globe, where cigars and port were often enjoyed. That of the Star was half a compass in another direction. Shabby is as shabby does, or perhaps the word would be “utilitarian,” for it was simply a larger room with a desk, a table, and a few books. On the desk were several spikes, and on each spike were dozens of galleys of the stories that would comprise that afternoon’s Star . At the table, I could see mock-ups of the front page, with nothing so dynamic as FIEND across the front, but rather, the usual gabble of unimpressive notices, such as 13 DIE IN AFGHAN SLAUGHTER (theirs or ours, I wondered), REWARD FOR WHITECHAPEL MURDERER DOUBLED, BISHOP PLEADS FOR CALM, and WHITECHAPEL LIGHTING BILL TURNED DOWN.

O’Connor sat at the desk, and next to him, almost invisible because he was backlit against a window that occluded his details, another man. They had been chatting warmly, I judged from the postures, the odor of cigars (one, still lit, sat in an ashtray and leaked a trail of vapor into the atmosphere), and the fact that before each was a glass.

“Sit,” O’Connor commanded, “and possibly a spot of the old Irish?” His glass had a dram’s worth of amber fluid left inside, whether a normal routine or the product of emergency, I didn’t yet know.

“I’m a teetote, sir,” I said. “My drunken father, this day sleeping under Dublin soil, drank more than enough for not only my own life but the lifetimes of any sons I might have.”

“Suit yourself. Have you met Harry? You two fellows ever cross each other in the newsroom? Though Harry is no newsroom rat, I know.”

“Hiya, pal,” said Harry, rising, putting out a big American hand. It must have been his straw boater’s hat on O’Connor’s desk, for only an American would wear a boating hat where there were no boats to be found. He had a big, raw-boned face and a winning smile under a droopy red mustache, which displayed spadelike, rather gigantic teeth. He was wearing an Eton rowing blazer edged in white, a white shirt, a deep blue cross-hatched waistcoat, a tie of color (red), trousers of white with dark blue stripes, and white shoes and socks. Was there a regatta? Was he going picnicking with a lady on the Thames, or perhaps coxswaining a boat in the big tilt against Balliol’s eight? I put it all on loathsome American crudity; as a people, they seem to lack any sense of tradition and are utterly incapable of reading the cues and learning from what they see. They’re entirely bent on results or, rather, money. What they like they take and make their own, regardless.

“Nice coat,” he said as we shook. “Can I get the name of your tailor?”

“Alas,” I said, “a German madman.”

“Too bad,” he said. “I like the sort of belted, harnessed look that thing has. Is it for some kind of fishing?”

“Hunting jacket,” I said. “Vented shoulders, gives one more flexibility on the turning shots. It’s said the coloration dumbfounds the grouse, but even if their brains are the size of a pea, they cannot be that dim.”

“You never know. Good shooting?”

I had no idea. I’d never done it, would never do it. “Quite jolly,” I said.

“Now, fellows,” said O’Connor, “glad to have us together for our little chat. Jeb, as I’ve been telling Harry, I’m proud of what you fellows have done. You’ve lit this place up and set the pace for the whole town. We’re driving the story, and all the other rags are following us. And I know, if anything breaks fast and sudden-like, whichever of you is here will get it first, hard and straight. And we’ll continue to drive, which means we’ll continue to sell, which means my investors will shut up and leave me in peace.”

Neither Harry nor I said a thing.

“However,” said O’Connor, “I don’t mind telling you, we have a problem.”

He paused. We waited. He took up and sucked on his cheroot, and its glow inflamed as he drew air through it, then exhaled a giant puff of smoke.

“The problem is: Where is he?”

“In hell, hopefully,” I said.

“Good for the world, bad for the Star. These greedy investors I have, they’re like opium addicts. They get a whiff of the profits when something this bloody-wizard big happens, they want that to be the norm. So they put the squeeze on. You have no idea what I go through.”

It occurred to me that it was quite wrong to hope for the killer to strike again as an aid toward boosting sales, but that was the reality of the business; O’Connor had no moral problem stating it so baldly, and the American wasn’t about to make a speech, so I kept my own mouth sealed tightly.

“Boss, do you want me to go out and slice up a dolly?” said Harry, and we all three laughed, for it somewhat ameliorated the anguish in the room.

“No, indeed,” said O’Connor. “The lawyers would never approve. But I want us to put our heads together and come up with an angle that we can push to heat things up again. The rings gag was a start, but there’s more we can do. That’s what this meet is about.”