Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

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 containing 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.

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.”