Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

Jack became a virtual industry, as all papers went all Jack, all editions. Replate, replate! (I still hadn’t figured out what that meant.) I’m not sure if fear was driving the frenzy or something a little bit more dubious, being some kind of secret, sick fascination with the hideous tragedy of others. As long as Jack limited his slaughter frenzy to whores, he’d have hundreds of thousands of fans among the bourgeois and the intelligentsia, safely fenced from his hunter’s dementia as they were. Let him knock off one of those poofs, however, and he’d be less titillating and by far a more palpable threat.

In all this, I was kept incredibly busy. On Sunday the first, Harry Dam and I worked through the night with Henry Bright, who united our two stories into a single seamless piece of reportage that I thought, having read what the Times and the Evening Mail and the Gazette offered, was quite the best. Henry was a talented journalist and an ethical one, and he knitted the stories into a calm tapestry of murder, mystery, mayhem, and official police ineptitude. It can be read today with profit, I say with some pride. It was my best journalism.

I will merely allude to subsequent developments of the next week or so, among them the upping of various rewards, the holding of inquests, funerals, the staging of a bloodhound test at Regent’s Park that produced yet more humiliation for Warren (his prize beasts, Barnaby and Burgho, managed to find only a couple copulating in the trees!), who was rapidly becoming the laughingstock of Western civilization. The victims of the double event were quickly identified, and their names became as well known as any West End ingenue’s. Poor Elizabeth Stride, who is always short-shrifted, as her murder is so much less interesting, was the lady who met her end at Dutfield’s Yard, being a Swedish immigrant, who, despite her nickname Long Liz, was another dumpling, she having just returned from the country where she and her paramour had been hop picking, though without much success. The second was Catherine Eddowes, in Mitre’s, where Jack had taken his time to do right by her and left some kind of hideous exhibition on the theme of “her guts for garters” for all to see.

When everything had been reported, we in the journalism business, knowing a good thing, rereported it with embellishments, theories, illustrations, and so forth and so on. Issues emerged: How had Jack miraculously escaped from Dutfield’s Yard when the pony wagon clearly trapped him in it? How had he then gotten cross town, near a mile by the shortest street route (shorter by crow, but as far as was known, he was not a crow) to butcher Mrs. Eddowes within forty-five minutes under the very noses of two separate City constables, without a noise being sounded, and then, still more intriguing, how had he escaped from that locked box, surrounded as it was by patrolling coppers, to arrive at Goulston Street and the Wentworth tenements to deposit his obvious clue and leave his opaque, tantalizing inscription? And what could those words mean? What was the secret of “Juwes”? Was it a code, was it a foreign word, was it a willed misspelling, was it a Masonic symbol, was it a tsarist ploy, was it an obscure cockneyism? Many a tea and crumpet were downed over consideration of the Juwe jigsaw.

At exactly this moment, what should arrive but a note from my new friend Professor Thomas Dare. Eager to keep acquaintance with so brilliant a mind and keen a wit, and still hungry for his alluded-to theories of Jack, I tore it open.

“My dear Jeb,” it began. “How pleasant to chat with you at Charlie’s soiree. You may recall the subject of he who is now called ‘The Ripper’ came up. Saucy Jacky, what a fellow. He sells your newspapers, he keeps my mind aflutter.

“But nothing has so moved me as this business of ‘J-U-W-E-S.’ It’s on my foredeck. It’s language. It’s communication. It has a Beneath. Thus I have spent a good part of the last week trying possibilities against the archetype, in hopes of cracking the code.

“I have reached certain conclusions. Being civic-minded when it’s not too much trouble, I went to Scotland Yard and waited three hours to reach an inspector, who listened politely, nodded, then said, ‘Well and good, sir, noted, now if you don’t mind, I’ve other duties,’ and showed me the door. That uninterest I put to Warren, who after all is no policeman, certainly no detective, not even a soldier, but really a kind of engineer. When brick and mortar have to be calculated against the requirements of budget, transport, estimated time of use, repair costs, all for a bridge to be built in Mesopotamia, I suppose he’s the fellow you want, but that’s how he sees the world, nuance-free, unburdened by a Beneath, ultimately quantifiable and measurable. Such silliness won’t catch a devil like Jack.

“In any event, I believe I know what ‘J-U-W-E-S’ is. I’m the only man in London who does, unless I tell you. Would you be interested?

“Yours, Thomas.”

Ihad to see it, of course. It had been a darkened, even a dream, landscape, in a part of the city I hardly knew. I acted on instinct, boldness, without hesitation, and thus, like Cardigan at Balaclava, my headlong, crazed charge through the enemy phalanxes enabled me to survive for another day’s fight.

I waited, I waited, I waited. Today was long enough after, the air was coolish, the sun bright, and it seemed as good a time as any. I wandered out, seeming merely to take a stroll as might any Londoner, and meandered casually this way and that, though trending toward Mitre Square. Being no fool, I would now and then double around to make certain no one was following, though that felt impossible. Indeed, no one was on to me, I was just another citizen, strolling haphazardly block by block, perhaps on the way to an appointment, a meal, an assignation. Nothing about me was remarkable.

Now and then I passed an apothecary’s, a tobacconist’s, or an out-and-out newstand, where this afternoon’s leader boards blazed away with the latest revelations. It was all old milk, reheated ever so slightly for misleading sale. Jack, Jack, Jack. Jack everywhere, Jack nowhere, Jack spotted in the Thames Tunnel, Jack observed in Hyde Park. Who Jack, where Jack, how Jack, why Jack? When they imagined Jack, I had to laugh. Their Jack was a skulker, a creeper, a lurker who slithered through the fog in a giant topper, with some kind of curving Oriental blade clenched in his fist, held close to his face, which was shielded by the cape he drew tight around his neck with his other hand. His posture was feline, for he moved by cat law, silky, silent, gliding on only toes to ground. Ha and ha again. I was as normal a bloke as you could imagine, nobody but the thrushes saw the blade, which in any case was a straight piece of Sheffield steel, as found in every kitchen in Great Britain. I walked through crowds, shoulders back, head erect, my garb not at all theatricalized along West End variations on cunning evil, and never in my adventures had I glimpsed so much as a wisp of fog. I had a fair, somewhat blocky face, hair of modest attainment, and wouldn’t be caught dead in a top hat. Was I going to a ball after my dates with murder, is that what they thought? Perhaps to Buckingham for tea with the queen? Newspapers: What’s the point of existing if you’re always going to get everything so wrong?

As I got deeper into Whitechapel, the roads clogged up with horse traffic, and the costers’ stalls became obstacles on the sidewalk for pedestrians, all of us squeezing around the choke points, careful not to get shit on our boots or to be crushed by horse tram or beer wagon or speeding hansom. There were dollies out, I suppose, for theirs was a twenty-four-hour-a-day business, men needing notch at any odd stolen hour, but they did not dominate as they did during the evening hours, nor was there the sickly glare of the gaslights and beer shops and public houses to give the place its customary demimonde grotesquerie. It was just business as usual among Brits themselves, the low dregs of empire drawn here, more and more Jews, Indiamen, Teutons, Slavs, and Russkies, so much so that English did not prevail in the constant din of shouts and shills. The overwhelming miasma of the horse deposits that no street sweeper, no matter how energetic, could keep up with, occluded both the nose and the eyes (which wept unavoidably, and who could blame them?), as well as the drifting tang of methane, that other more deadly horse product, headache-inducing if sampled too intensively. The shops, the stalls, the pubs, they fled by in no pattern, as did the various appliances that sustained a horse-drawn economy, troughs, hitching rails, gates leading into yards for the unloading of goods, stables here and there, and the constant noise of the brutes themselves, sometimes a neigh or a whinny, sometimes a cloppity-clop as shoed hoof struck pavement, sometimes the general bluster and sigh of the beasts who basically carried the city on their broad backs without a complaint or a speech. All and all, there was no palpable sign of Jack panic, giving the lie to the conceit that the city was clenched in a fist of fear. Newspapers again, telling a tale that wasn’t.