Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

He slipped through and dashed hard left, and I heard him bang hard on the Berner Street door of the Anarchists’ Club. I recognized the sound as he remembered the door wasn’t locked and pulled it open.

I was trapped. It was too late to dash in my own fashion to the gate, for the damned pony still blocked it, and if I squeezed by in time, the street would in the next instant be flooded with excitable Russian revolutionaries and vegetarian socialists who would draw Peelers from every nook and cranny, and there was nothing behind me in the yard that would permit escape, only locked shops and homes and a small deserted building.

There was nowhere to go.

Iwas not in the newsroom when news of the slaughter at Dutfield’s Yard came, although since Jack, as I now thought of him, struck near or on the weekends and late, I had rearranged my schedule to night hours so that I was present and ready to fly when it seemed most propitious that he would pay another visit. But Harry had adopted the same schedule (as had Mr. O’Connor and Henry Bright and several others, a flying squad of Jack boys, if you will), and so he was the one to race out there, leaving me and my bitter tea down in the tearoom, where I was sulking.

Here’s the irony: My sulking stood me in very good stead. Not being at the Anarchists’ Club where the one called Long Liz was found that night freed me up for the evening’s second act, of which more anon.

It is relevant as to why I was sulking. Of course it had to do with that damned letter. I had labored over it until achieving what I thought was perfection, then I’d given it to Mr. O’ Connor. I thought he’d be pleased, but a full day passed before his boy came and got me – much too long, I feared, and that was where my confidence, always a frail vase in a typhoon, began to spring cracks. I went to the office, and there, wearing an eyeshade, was O’Connor, and in shirtsleeves next to him was Harry Dam, damned Harry. I did not hate Harry, you must understand; I actually had some respect for his reckless energy and cagey way with all the tricks of the trade, but I did fear him a bit, as I knew his ambition was as outsize as mine and that he was capable of nearly anything to advance it. Moreover, his contempt for the Jews was a signal that something inside was not right.

“Ah, there you are!” said O’Connor, and I read him anxiously for signs of love but could tell that he was focused totally on task. “Come in, come in. This letter you’ve written, it’s quite good. I believe we’re almost there.”

Almost there! Those are not words any writer pines to hear. Much more preferable is “masterpiece” or “timeless brilliance” or “it shall live forever.” But such accolades were not to be.

Harry said, again damning with praise so faint it was almost inaudible, “Wow, it’s a great first pass. I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am we got you to do this. I could not come even close to such a brilliant thing.” In his voice I could hear a contrapuntal going in another direction; it suggested that he and he alone knew how to fix it, not that I could ever accept that it needed any sort of fixing.

“Drink? Oh, that’s right, you’re a teetote,” said O’Connor. “Well and good, I should be myself, maybe me nose would stop glowing in the dark” – a little attempt at levity that got profoundly insincere smiles from Dam and me. He took a draught of whatever is brown, is served in small glasses a third full, burns and yet calms on the way down; he accepted a tear at the corner of each eye from its impact, then said, “I think it needs a bit more.”

“Do you want me to take it through another draft, sir?” I asked with perhaps more tremble in my voice than I cared to acknowledge.

“No, no, the words are great. ‘Jack the Ripper,’ by God, a name to conjure with, absolutely magnificent, it will rattle the city to its cellars and sell a million papers, no doubt. No, that’s not it. It needs one more touch. An amplification, as it were.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.

“Harry has a very fine idea, I think. Go ahead, Harry, tell him.”

“Better, I’ll show him!” He ran to his Eton rowing blazer, reached into it, and pulled something from the pocket. “The piece of resistance,” he said, meaning, of course, “pièce de résistance,” “yep, you’re gonna love this.” He paused, letting his little presentation acquire the drama that a pause provides, and then held aloft his treasure. “ Red ink! ”

Good God, I thought. Can he be serious?

“Red,” he said proudly, “as in blood.”

“Isn’t it a little melodramatic?” I asked. “Perhaps overstated.”

“Hmm. Can a guy overstate murder?” Harry asked.

“As a practical matter, I believe you can,” I said. “You can make it so bombastic that no man in his right mind would believe in it. ‘Jack the Ripper’ would be a joke and not a symbol of chill aspect, meant to frighten for a thousand years.”

“Your pride is commendable,” said O’Connor. “Which demonstrates that it’s a writer you are, sir, without doubt. But can I suggest what goeth before the fall? Knowing that, I ask you to listen to what Harry proposes.”

“It’s not much,” said Harry. “It’s hardly anything. It’s still ninety percent yours, maybe ninety-five percent. It’s not as if there will be royalties, you know.”

“I hate to see my efforts trifled with,” I sniffed. “Maybe bring in Henry Bright for an opinion. He’s a sound man.”

“No, no,” said O’Connor. “Henry knows nothing about this, nor does anyone else, and that’s how it should remain. Jeb, just listen to Harry.”

“Here’s my concoction,” said Harry. “Flat-bang-out, no palaver or jerky chewing.”

I had no idea what he was talking about except that he was about to pitch his “improved” version.

“Red ink is just the start,” he said. “And really, that’s more the package than the content. But a sentence is added. Jack says something like ‘I was going to use whore’s blood, but it turned all sticky, like gooseberry jam. Now I’ve got this damned ink on my hands.’ ”

“Does it in fact turn all sticky?”

“So I hear,” Harry said. “Not having scalped a whore lately, I’m not sure. But see, it’s the cold detail that nails it. He is so insane that he thinks nothing about using a dead gal’s blood for his little note, and maybe he adds a ‘ha ha’ or something like that. The red ink makes it jump as a package, it’s like the wrapper on the Black Jack gum pack, and bang-on, nobody can ignore it.”

I could not think of a response to a Black Jack gum allusion; who could? After all, what on God’s earth was a Black Jack gum pack?

“Then,” said Harry, “we need one gory detail. I mean, he’s the Ripper , right, not the Kisser or anything. So let’s add a line, say, in which he tells us he’s going to chop off an ear and ship it to the coppers.”

It was horrifying. It was perfect.

“One last thing,” he said. “More packaging, that’s all, it’s still the great Jeb who came up with Jack the Ripper, but let’s mangle the punctuation. I was never good on apostrophes anyhow. Can’t seem to keep the rules in mind. Whoever thought that one up? Anyhow, I’ll dump the curlicue things—”

“But,” I said, “that would give it the diction and vocabulary of an educated man, yet the form of an uneducated one. I do not see how that advances the cause.”

“It makes it scary,” said Harry. “The final nail in the coffin is, I copy it over in my hand. The reason for that is, unlike you boys, I only have one posh thing going. It’s my handwriting, and I can still feel the smart where Sister Mary Patricia hit my wrist a dozen times with a steel ruler. That girl packed a wallop. So believe me, I learned a fair hand. It just makes the whole thing, I don’t know, mysterious. It’s got a lot of this-ways but also a lot of that-ways.”