Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“So,” he said, “the Irish journalist who’s really a music critic wants a solution to the mystery of J-U-W-E, does he?”

“I’ve read and heard so many, I yearn for a thing I can believe in.”

“Not for you, then, satanic or Masonic ritual, ancient cockney slang, the ravings of a ill-educated lout who cannot spell a three-letter word and would, if challenged, produce C-A-E-T for cat? Are there others?”

“Some seem to think it Chinese. Or rather the pronunciation of a Chinese pictogram. Others place its derivation in the steppes, where Russia runs out and tribal Cossack elements begin. Language, most agree, is at the heart of it.”

“I do, too. Indeed, it is language.”

He reached into a briefcase I had not noticed and pulled out a volume, not a book but more than a newspaper, a kind of heavily bound journal of the sort I would later learn was a part of medical and scientific worlds.

“Here is your answer,” he said, “and congratulations on being the second man in London to behold it.”

I took it eagerly.

“Pages 132 through 139,” he said helpfully.

Alas, they were in German, as was the whole damned thing.

“Sir, I have no German.”

“Why, you have been advertised to me as a sort of genius.”

“I have taught myself Pitman shorthand and am able to read French, which I taught myself as well. I am known as a wit and have some potential as a writer. But that is where it stops, alas.”

“All right, then. The journal you have before you is Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Augenheilkunde . Which playfully translates into the ‘Journal of Comparative Ophthamology.’ On the pages specified, a brilliant German opthamalogist – that is, eye doctor – named Rudolf Berlin has published a study entitled Eine besondere Art der Worthblindheit (Dyslexie). Does that clear things up a bit for you?”

He was playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse. But he wasn’t meaning to eat me – rather, to enlighten me. To do so, he had to destroy me. Thus is education built.

“You know it hasn’t, sir,” I said.

“I think rather too much of myself, don’t I? I find myself so amusing. Always had that problem. All right, then, Herr Doktor Berlin’s title translates as ‘A Special Kind of Word Blindness,’ and in parentheses he has coined a term for a condition relevant to our inquiry here.”

“And that is—”

“This condition posits an interference between what the eye records and what the brain receives. He called it dyslexie, or in our more felicitous tongue, dyslexia.”

“You’re saying—” I was struggling with the concept.

“I am saying Jack has a condition known not as stupidity or insanity or immorality or even cannibalism, but while he may indeed have all those, his condition is scientifically called dyslexia. He is dyslexic.”

I nodded, even if my eyes were occluded with confusion.

“Put simply: He looks at the letters J-E-W-S and that is what he sees, but as his eyes send that information brainward, they become, by tangled paths not yet understood, J-U-W-E-S. To him, J-U-W-E-S is objective reality. He has no idea he’s ‘misspelling,’ though assuming that he’s mature, he’s presumably aware that he has certain spelling and reading problems, but as no diagnosis for his condition existed until last year, he has spent his life quietly devising strategies to get around it. His friends, his family, his society, none of them has any idea he has this condition because he has gotten so damned good at hiding it. But it tells us certain things. For example, he is certain not to have a job in any firm or institution that demands carefully written reports, which lets out most forms of science, medicine being one. There goes the mad-surgeon theory. His infirmity would hold him back, even make him a laughingstock. He must therefore be in some action- or behavior-intensive line of work, such as policeman or soldier, perhaps a surveyor, or an architect. His form of the condition may not at all affect his acuity with numbers or images, so he could be an engineer, a retailer, a manufacturer, what have you. He might be very gifted in verbal expression, and thus a barrister, a sales representative, a stockbroker, a carnival barker.

Berlin says what’s fascinating about the condition is that it is in no way limited to idiots or half-idiots. Normally intelligent or even highly intelligent people can suffer from it and – as has our Jack, I suspect – they have found quiet ways to compensate. For example, he will always avoid reading aloud before an audience, as he may encounter a word whose letters will be scrambled and read, say, ‘detour’ for ‘doctor’ or ‘lofty’ for ‘laughter,’ and produce gibberish. He will have done that a few times, learned from it, and strategized a way around it, do you see?”

“So when he chalked that inscription, he had no idea he was giving up a vital piece of information about himself?”

“Exactly, though now he knows and is probably cursing his own stupidity. Being well versed in the avoidance of such faux pas, he presumably made elaborate plans to prevent the mistake, but something happened that startled him or frightened him, and he reverted unconsciously to form. As near as I can tell, it’s the only mistake he’s made so far, and it’s a mistake only because one man in London, and now two, understand what was going on.”

I was impressed. This was the first real insight I had encountered, discounting the mystery of the missing rings, since the Sussex Regiment envelope found at Annie Chapman’s side proved to be nothing. “I see what you are saying, and I am impressed. But I must say, Professor Dare, how does that advance the investigation? I mean, practically, one cannot suddenly test all three and a half million male Londoners to see which might have this dyslexia condition. And it seems not to be known how general a condition it would be, and so suppose it’s quite common – I recall a large number of bad spellers throughout my rather patchy education – and in the end you might have so many possible suspects that the winnowing didn’t winnow near enough.”

“That is true,” said Dare, “and I suspect that is why the inspector was so unimpressed with my analysis.”

“However,” I said, seeing some light in it, “as you say, this condition might be associated with certain other behaviors. You inferred an ‘action’- or ‘behavior’-style career path for such a man, so it seems we could rule out a huge number of suspects.”

“I think you’re beginning to catch on,” said Dare. “The test for dyslexia is so narrow that it would have to be the last, not the first, criterion for identification. My idea, at this point, is that someone gifted in analysis—”

“That would be you, indeed, sir—”

“Don’t underestimate yourself, Mr. Jeb. Two minds are better than one, and in the dialectic between them, they might create something better than either could do on his own.”

“I agree,” I said.

“So what I propose is this: We each take a few days off, not merely from the case but from each other. In solitude, using my distillation of the dyslexia as a guide, we see what we can infer or deduce from the events before us. You would know more than I, having been at most of the murder sites when hot with blood and having discussed the case with many professionals. On the other hand, that might make you too close to the events, and it might also lock your mind in the set of those professionals, who, after all, are wont to pin this on a Russian sailor or a Jew in a leather apron and have a bias against admitting that a homegrown Englishman could do such a thing.”

“What is our goal?”

“Our goal is to assemble a portrait of the man by his salient aspects. He has to be thus and so, and he cannot be anything other. The more we think, the more we shrink. As opposed to a dragnet that hopes to catch him in flagrante or post flagrante, we assemble this – well, perhaps ‘profile’ is a better word than ‘portrait’ – profile of the man, and locate those few suspects who might fit it. Then we – you and I, of course – investigate each of them and see if there are any indications of such deviant behavior.”