Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

After receiving that lukewarm blessing, I was off, with the proviso that if I heard of another Jack action, I’d find a telephone cabinet, get the details, and decamp posthaste.

But disappointment lurked ahead. It turned out rather too swiftly that I was no detective. I could make no headway, not with my sister Lucy trilling away in the studio and Mother watching me like a hawk about to pounce upon and devour a mouse. I retreated to my old haunting grounds, the reading room of the British Library, thinking its intellectual solemnity might inspire or provoke me.

Alas, even surrounded by the ghosts of Britain’s great writers and thinkers, I was all dried out. I was a pickle absent the brine, a desiccated raisin. No ferment, no bubbles, whatever inappropriate metaphor one could create, they all applied to me. My brain was bereft of electricity. I tried many things: I wrote on a big yellow tablet in Pitman’s shorthand “Jack” and then listed at speed all the theories I had heard from both high and low, from copper and reporter, from harlot and poet, and all seemed gibberish. I thought one might inspire something, but it didn’t. How did he move, how did he disappear, what were his attributes? Whatever I tried, my dim mind could not find its genius, if it had any; in the end, it merely revealed its fraudulence. My performance suffered from the want of energy and impetus.

I could see areas to check out, lines of inquiry that the coppers, even the purportedly great Inspector Abberline, the Scotland Yard star recently appointed to head the investigation, had not explored. Yet there was no energy in me, or even in the others, coppers, citizens, vigilante committees, the Home Office ministers, any of them. It seemed we were all locked in a box and couldn’t get beyond the obvious. We loved the image of Jack as skulker in a topper, gliding through the nonexistent fog on empty streets under gas lamps, caparisoned against the damp, cackling maniacally like a brute in a West End melodrama. Clearly that could not be him, and remaining manacled to the image was harmful to investigative enterprise. There was something pathetic in us that wouldn’t let us abandon our earlier conclusions: sailor, Jew, doctor, royal. That not one shred of evidence pointed to these solutions made us hungrier to cling to them. It was as if they formed a known coastline, and we sailors upon the sea of Jack were afraid to sail beyond the horizon, thinking we’d never find our way back.

So it was with both eagerness and trepidation that I called on Professor Dare on the appointed morning three days further along through October to discuss and assess. I hoped he had better luck than I did, and realized that I had in some way come to put too much hope upon the man, who would be, I wanted to believe, our savior in all this. I was a seriously confused and dazed young man.

He lived near the university, 26 Wimpole Street, in a grand house, larger than I expected. It spoke of private income, though he’d never said as much, being, I recognized, somewhat reticent on the topic of his real self. I knocked, feeling the chill of late autumn, as November was fast on, drawing my brown wool drabs about me, and a senior servant lady opened, looked me over with a Scot’s eye toward detecting common riffraff, and finally allowed, “Sir, the professor is awaiting you.”

I nodded, handing her my mac, and followed her to the study.

He was in a red velvet dressing gown with an ascot over heather trousers and velvet slippers with dragons embossed upon them, very fetching. He looked quite home-from-the-hunt. His pipe jutted furiously from his lean jaws, emitting briar vapor. His wrinkly blond hair was pushed back, his noble temples gleamed, his strong nose cut through the miasma like the scimitar it was, and behind his circular round spectacles, in a kind of dappled maple, his blue orbs took me in quickly.

“I fancy the house,” I said. “Well done.”

“Evidently my father did something quite remunerative. I meant to ask him about it but never got around to it. I didn’t enjoy his company much. Horrible fellow. However, I do enjoy having the money that I never earned myself. It makes life easy, frees me for my fun, and pays for all of this.”

I looked about. The room was like so many of the professorial class I had seen behind London’s brick and ivy, all booky and leathery, with brass gas outlets for nighttime illumination so necessary to the soirees that drove their society and furniture heavy enough to crush an elephant’s skull and carpets from the Orient that would tell pornographic stories of Scheherazade’s actual relations with the Caliph if one but understood the code. What distinguished it from all the other Bloomsbury iterations was a contrapuntal melody that might be called “Throat.” It was quite extravagantly decorated in Throat. Was he a Sherlock Holmes of the voice?

That is, it was dedicated to matters pertaining to the vocal cords and their substructures, from charts of that particular organ in profile half-section complete to Latin labels for all the tiny flowerlike leaves and tendrils, charts on the wall that I took to be for eye but revealed themselves to be of the letters we call vowels; then strange devices on a large laboratory table that could be for torture but seemed for measuring breath, both intensity and consistency, including a tiny torchlike thing against whose flame one would speak, I’m guessing, and by that method give visual evidence of the absence or presence of the letter H, whose existence bewildered half the population of our city.

“I say, you take this phonetics business rather seriously, don’t you?”

“Voice is communication, communication is civilization,” he said. “Without the one, we lose the other, as those festivals of slaughter called wars attest.”

“May I write that down? It’ll do for an aphorism.”

“Go ahead. Claim authorship, if you prefer. As I say, I am beyond glory. I merely want to stop this nasty chap from gutting our tarts. That’s enough for me.” He bade me sit.

“I have to tell you,” I said, “I have not accomplished much. I go forward and back, upward and downward, I enter randomly or by system, and I cannot seem to get beyond what the police know, that a skilled, dedicated individual is, as has been said, ‘down on whores,’ and butchers them with such grace that he has yet to be caught or even seen.”

He drew reflectively on his pipe, the atmosphere he was pulling past the burning tobacco intensifying its burn so that more great roils of vapor tumbled forth. It was like the skyline of Birmingham.

He proceeded to ask questions that showed intimate familiarity with the material. How wide was the passageway Jack had taken Annie down on Hanbury Street? What were the dimensions of the pony wagon at the Anarchists’ Club, versus the dimensions of the gate, and how low to ground was that wagon? How many stone was Mr. Diemschutz, the pony-cart man? Over which shoulder were Kate Eddowes’s intestines flung? How quickly had the various teams of coppers arrived at Buck’s Row? Why did he only cut Polly but not eviscerate her like the others, assuming interruption in the matter of Liz Stride? Why was there no moon her night but quarter-moon the others? What explained the odd irregularity of rhythm between the murders? What was my opinion of the quality of mind of both Sir Charles and the number one detective, Abberline? Did I get a bonus for writing the Dear Boss letter?

“Now, see here,” I said, all fuddled up, “that is uncalled for.” Particularly since it was true.

“It is quite called for. As I have said, I have a gift for the Beneath of a piece of writing. Beneath ‘Dear Boss’, not entirely but mostly, lies our friend Jeb, for I recognize the boldness and clearness of his sentences united with his vividness of image. Those are separate talents, by the way, not a single general one for ‘writing.’ You are lucky to have them both. Anyhow, ‘Jack the Ripper’ is indeed vivid, if not quite accurate. It certainly echoes and deploys a genius for the exact and the resonant. It may indeed become immortal. I love the melody of ‘reaper’ in its own Beneath, and I like the ‘Jack’ for its onomatopoetic evocation of brisk, decisive action, as the snap cutting of a throat. I mention your clear authorship not to embarrass you or flatter you but to point out that the reason so many have tested their brains against the riddles Jack poses and failed is because they now see him as you created him – Jack, demon of mythology, folklore, mischief, a god of mayhem and slaughter – and that will occlude their thinking, cause them to miss what I would consider obvious. So even as I twit you, I do so because I want you to exile this Jack-demon idea from mind and concentrate instead on a human being who is knowable, trackable, and findable. Will you do me that honor, sir?”