Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“Indeed, my Juliet. It is the east and you are the sun.”

“You talk fancy even after I’ve yanked me knickers! Now, there’s a gentleman.”

“Jack the Ripper is humanitarian,” he said.

“Good heavens, Professor. The man has ripped four women to shreds, pulled their guts out, and lived to laugh about it. How on earth could you apply that term to such bestiality?”

“Indeed, his work is total destruction. Consider it not as we find it, all messy and blood-spattered, with lakes of red about, but as it is experienced. He is, it must and should be noted, not torturing the women. He takes no thrill in their pain. He feels no pleasure in slow, screaming deaths. Quite the contrary, he is well practiced in the art of the immediate and silent kill. Part of this, to be sure, is pure efficiency. It is much easier on him, though a case could be made that chloroform and transfer of the sleeping body to a private nearby spot would clearly not be beyond his powers, and once there, he could amuse himself with torture games for hours and hours. He seems not remotely tempted by such a thing. I suppose another part of it is that selfsame military technique, for part of a raider’s skill must be in eliminating sentries before the attack or ambush. One slithers silently through the brush and fells the watcher from behind with a sure stroke. It must be well done or the watcher screams as he dies and alerts the campful of Pathan or Zulu about to go to the slaughter.

“While there’s all this, consider that of all ways to kill a human being, the sudden sundering of the carotid artery is among the kindest, assuming consciousness. A bullet to the brain might trump it, as would the immensity of an artillery detonation. Next comes Jack’s method, which would be experienced as a blur, an impact, a tingle, an instant fatigue and loss of balance, perhaps a fleeting awareness that the end is upon one, which would be somewhat occluded by the cloud of disbelief, and then the slip-sliding away of consciousness. It’s unlikely that much pain would accompany the journey.”

“Sir,” I said, somewhat arisen, “that hardly counts as humanitarianism.”

“By liberal pieties, no, which is one of the things I find so appalling about liberal pieties. You see it in terms of the discomfort it gives you in the contemplation, because you lack the imagination to see it in terms of the pain it spares her in the occurrence. Think on it, if you would, and put aside all those bromides and homilies that sustain the bourgeoisie in the face of reality, which I believe you are becoming aware of in your forced sojourns into Whitechapel.”

“I will hold it in abeyance until further evidence is produced, but my tendency is to discount it and prefer the first two explanations.”

“Well enough. I proceed, confident that I am soon to convince you.”

More pipe theater as he emptied, tamped, refilled, lit, inhaled, exhaled, enjoyed the mushroom of vapor that billowed before him, then turned.

“I await,” I said, pen poised above tablet.

“I deliver,” he said, smiling at his riposte. He found himself, it must be said, quite amusing. “Now turn to the incident at Goulston Street.”

“The baffling graffito, with J-E-W-S misspelled, on which you have already theorized.”

“Put aside that for an instant. Put aside the business of grammar. Turn to punctuation. What is missing, as the reports all agree?”

I thought a bit. I saw it in my mind’s eye.

“The Juwes are The men that Will not be Blamed for nothing”

Or was it “The Juwes are not The men that Will be Blamed for nothing,” as some had it?

“Hmm, missing? I suppose, other than sense, grammar, somewhat chaotic capitalization, I don’t see that anything – oh, yes, wait, well, that is being very persnickity.”

“I am a persnickity sort. I am a phoneticist.”

“Then one would say the concluding period. None of the three copyists recorded a period at its conclusion. However, that may be because of an error in transmission. The copyists—”

“ All three forgot a period?”

“Hmm,” I said again. “All right, I take your point.”

“Do you? The larger point?”

“The larger point?”

“He was interrupted, who knows by what or whom. Possibly that copper coming down the street. But he realized that although he had really engineered the whole thing to pass on this message, he had the discipline – military, that is – to retreat upon threat of discovery and not drive himself on false pride and end up in the bag. He decided not to compromise the completion of the whole mission for this one component of it. Do you see?”

“So there’s more?”

“Indeed. What could the next few words be, considering what was going on in London then, his character as we have drawn it, his few but admittedly existent virtues, perhaps even, out of his military past, a sense of duty, moral duty. It must also fit on the wall, which limits the space. Limits it to just a few more words, another line at most.”

Was Dare mad? “I have no idea.”

“This,” he said. “ ‘The Juwes are The men that Will not blamed for nothing … was done by them.’ ”

I looked at him.

“WAS DONE BY THEM! It’s in the passive voice of so much military report writing, it restores the grammatical integrity of the educated man – Sandhurst, I’m guessing – to the composition, it is succinct, the space on the wall would permit it, and it could be written by the light of a quarter-moon by a fellow with sharp eyes. But its point is to absolve the Jews, because he could see that fear and hate was building, that beatings had taken place, that the newsrags, including yours—”

That damned Harry Dam again!

“—were fanning the flames to sell yet more papers, that the thugees and druids of the slums were building up energy. He saw all that and could not live with the idea of a thousand Jews dying in the flames of hatred because of his mission. So he took it upon himself to formally absolve them, signing his statement with Mrs. Eddowes’s blood and placing it on a police route where it could not be missed.”

I was not convinced, although the man’s argument had logic to it. “And if so, of what import? I see it leading us nowhere.”

“Quite the contrary, it leads us very much somewhere.” Dare smiled.

He was a cat toying with a mouse, and I, the great Jeb, did not care a bit to be made mouse of, to have all my arguments dashed upon the stones so insolently by a fellow who was not only smarter but could afford a better tailor and didn’t live with a horrid mum and a trilling sister.

“What somewhere, pray tell?”

“Where would he get such ideas? Clearly, he believes that the Jews – bogeymen of the popular press, demons of the working-class imagination, devils of the retail exchange, depraved and violent in folk rumor, despised by the capitalist class because they are so much better at capitalism, despised by the revolutionary class because they are so much better at revolution, detested for lacking fairness and physical beauty and portrayed everywhere as hook-nosed, yellow-skinned, shawl-wearing, matzoh-ball-eating vermin – he believes them to be human beings, like all of us. Where on God’s earth could he have gotten such an idea?”

“I see it,” I said.

“Then explain it.”

“Those ideas are hardly held anywhere in the world except in certain liberal reform circles, very small but very passionate. Not at all the place where one would find a soldier or intelligence agent of much battle experience. So your point has to be that he has been exposed, somehow, somewhere, sometime, to those ideas, but more important, to people who espouse them, for it is not the sort of inconvenient passion one would absorb merely from reading. You’d have to live it, feel it heavy in the air, indulge in it at length as an assumption, not an argument. And where would we find people of such ideas? I cannot see him gadding about among the better sort of intellectual circles in Bloomsbury, can you?”