Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“Harry, believe me, nothing is going on, I am not plotting against you, I just—”

“It’s not that. If you break the story, makes no dif, because there’ll be other stories that I’ll break, you can be sure. No, it’s this. I’m worried about you, pal. You’re overconfident but underexperienced. I’m worried you’re getting yourself in way beyond your depth, and it’s you we could next find in the gutter.”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“What do you know about this Thomas Dare?”

“How do you even know the name?”

“I heard J.P. tell Bright your caper. I’m good at overhearing stuff. It’s sort of my trade, you might say. Anyhow, I heard it, and I didn’t get a schoolboy crush on him like you did, and I thought he ought to be the one we look at, so I took the liberty.”

“He’s a brilliant man!”

“How’s he know so much?”

“That same brilliance.”

“Too brilliant, if you ask me.”

“There are such men. Rare, to be sure, but genius is not without documentation. Surely Darwin, his cousin Galton, Matthew Arnold …” But I had been so taken by the brilliance of Professor Dare’s explanation that I had never questioned its origin. Surely he was a shrewd analyst, but he was so far ahead of the others that it might mean he had some kind of inside information. Inside what?

A far more likely explanation involved Harry, not Dare. Was Harry a more jealous type than I had figured, and was he working now to drive suspicion between me and Dare? That would be a sure way to destroy our partnership, and Harry might benefit, picking up the pieces we’d left on the floor and assembling them. Such deviousness seemed not only beyond Harry but beyond the American mind. Now, were he a Hungarian, one might think it plausible, but a son of the middle prairie, with those broad, flat vowels and that total absence of irony, much less subtle thinking, nuanced calculation, patience, cleverness? Hardly likely, I’d have thought.

“What are you here to tell me?” I said.

“It took some digging, some bribing, some considerable yakkity-yak and palaver, but the second best kept secret in London after Jack’s identity is that your Tom Dare has a violent streak in him.”

I looked at Harry, searching for signs of jest. I knew irony was well beyond him, but his crude American mind might conceive of a crude practical joke. “What are you talking about?”

“A few years back, he almost went on trial for assaulting a colleague. He and this guy, they got into it over a project they’d been working on, and Tom Dare jumped him, smashed him, shoved him down the steps, and was throttling him, only to be pulled off by cooler heads. This was at the school, you know, the University of London, where he was some mucky-muck-mullah type. You know how discreet your own people are, chum. It was, what’s the word, ‘hushed up.’ Can’t have a high-up professor at a high-up school acting like a low hooligan, cracking pals over the head and all. Tut-tut, old chap, we just cannot have it.”

“I have never heard of such a thing.” And I hadn’t. No, it was not done. Among “our” class of folk, that is, those of us with higher mental function, exposure to education, mastery of culture, familiarity with the genius canon of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, proficiency in the dead languages, the brightest, the best, the most gifted, it was understood that the laying on of hands was strictly off limits. One did not do such things. That was for Kipling’s sort of brutes. If there was to be pugilism, it would be at the gymnasium, under the regulations of the marquis of Queensberry.

“The guy has very strong ideas and, more to the point, a crazy belief in them. He cannot stand to be defied, and when he is, he goes all nuts in the brain. When he and this guy had a falling-out, it got real bad fast.”

“Come now, Harry, you must do better than that. Particulars? Names, issue involved, social ramifications? I feel certain that, had such an incident occurred, it would have been the talk of all London, it would have made all the rags, the Star especially. ‘PROF BEANS CHUM,’ as O’Connor would have it, a huge scandal, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t have that stuff yet. I only know what I know, and I wanted to warn you, tread easy with this guy. You never know what you might jiggle loose.”

That tore it. I am not a violent man, I despise and fear confrontations, and too many times I’ve not stood up to bullies for my own interests, but at that moment something either heroic or insane arose in me, and perhaps they are the same thing.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll have no more of this. I don’t know how they do it in that rustic backwoods you come from, but over here we do not spread ugly rumors and attempt to ruin the reputations of men without foundation. We even have laws against it. Dare could sue you for slander, and if you were found guilty, you could end up in jail. It’s happened before, it will happen again, and it’s our good insurance against nasty buggers spreading nasty rumors.”

He looked at me, shocked-like. “Whoa, there, friend Jeb, I’m not here for my health and to put a bullet in the professor’s back. I’m just telling you, this guy is a little nuts. He goes off, loses control, all that crazy—”

“Mr. Dam, I must inform you I am no longer interested in this conversation, whose veracity I entirely doubt. I believe you’re trying to sabotage my superior efforts on solving this issue. It’s a low-breed stunt that only a Yank could come up with.”

“That’s right, we shot you guys from behind trees, and it wasn’t fair, was it?”

“Mr. Dam. I will leave now. Please do not approach me with any more discussion on this topic. I find it distasteful. Even allowing for your frontiersman’s ignorance, I find you distasteful. It’s not acceptable, and I will not be a party.”

With that I rose, feeling I’d broken all relations with Harry permanently. At least I had by English rules. Who knew what an American would do?

I stomped out self-righteously, only to hear him cry, “Friend, if I was you, I’d get a gun.”

Iwent to my knees, down hard but not quite unconscious. The sensations of the blow were unpleasant. It had sounded like a locomotive crashing hard against my ear, all clang and gong, echoing around my brain at a hundred miles an hour. My will vanished in the pain, as did my ability to think clearly. The world went to blur and whiz as I blinked, blinked again, felt the urge to vomit, put my hand to the site of the blow to feel, thankfully, not a laceration spurting blood but the swelling of a knot. I looked up to see him towering over me, blunt fellow in black wool, black cap, black of eyes, and beefy-wide of face. I saw his boot come out, and he didn’t kick me but put it square on my back and crushed me to the earth.

“Go on, Rosie, get out of here,” I heard him say.

“Don’t kill him,” she said, then clarified so that her intent wouldn’t be taken for mercy, “that’ll get the coppers on us like buzzards.”

She skittered away, and he bent low and whispered into my ear, “Now, guv’nor, I can cosh you till your brains is scrambled good, or I can let you alone if you promise to be a proper fellow and do as you’re told.”

This was the bully game. It happened, not a lot, but it happened. A tart made an assignation and drew her John to darkness, and as he was about to hand over the coin, her bully jumped out and gave him a knot on the head. The robbery was clean and usually involved no more violence. The clouted knave would never go to the coppers, as to do so would involve confessing he’d been on the scout among the Judys, so he would just write off the six or eight quid or whatever it cost him, swear off the Judys, and limp home with a headache. This threat was always there, nothing to be done about it, but now I’d walked smack into it, obviously on account of my bad judgment in improvising off-plan and ending up in circumstances I couldn’t control. Fool! Idiot!