Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“Now, sir, you just stay where you is, flat as an empty sack, and reach back there for that wallet, and I’ll take all them bills. No fancy tricks or I cosh you again. I am a bloody artist with cosh, I am, and I know a fine gentleman such as yourself don’t want no more trouble. I’ll even leave you a thruppence for a stout after I’m long gone, that’s the kind of mate I am, guv’nor.”

“Don’t hurt me,” I said feebly.

“No need for hurting,” he said. “Who you think I am, Jack the Ripper? He’d cut you for the larfs it brung his lips. Me, I just want me pay and I’m off, and you and I are well quit.”

“So be it,” I said, rolling slightly, pulling myself up.

“Sure, make yourself comfortable, but no fast moves or I’ll do what I must. I’m a businessman like you, and I don’t want no trouble.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Garn,” he said, a cockneyism that I believe means “Imagine that!” but loaded to brim with cynic’s irony, “a guv’nor like ’im calling a blackguard like me ‘sir.’ Who’d a seen that one coming?”

My servile manner amused him no end. It confirmed all his social prejudices. I knew him in an instant: He believed his own physicality and willingness to go brute made him the superior man, and that it was he who was nature’s nobleman by rights, but with the coming of civilization, the “gentlemen” had taken over, being book-smart if muscle-dumb, and had contrived unfair methods to cheat him out of his natural lordship over all things. He was merely seeking compensation for his loss.

“Yes, there now,” he said as I withdrew my hand from my coat and handed over what he thought was my wallet. He reached for it and at that moment was monarch of a tiny kingdom, this lost alleyway on the quay. His rectitude blazed outward, his sense of self-righteous justice having been served, his appetite whetted for what pleasures were upcoming and soon. He was feeling generous and magnificent, a “larf” on his merry lips.

Hello, sir, allow me to introduce myself, all proper-like, I’m Jack the Ripper.

It was a wonderful stroke. Well, not a stroke so much as an épée’s hit, a darting jab faster than the eye can see, much less track, so swift it cannot be blocked by hand, and I drove the six inches of steel into him hard at a kind of upward angle, through his right side under the arm so that it would glance off ribs if it happened to strike them (it didn’t) and cut through his abdomen on the rise toward his thoracic cavity where it pierced the lower left ventricle, opening a wound that would never close, and his blood began to drain into his guts. It lasted only a second, but I felt the bliss of steel in muscle, I felt all the infinitesimal vibratory sensations of the muscle fibers yielding as the point penetrated and opened the pathway wider for the blade to glide through, slicing deep and wide as it went. I even fancy I felt the slightly more gelid obstruction of the heart, where, for an instant too small to be measured, that lump of muscle resisted, then yielded as the point pushed a full inch into it, opening it to drain its contents and cease its throbbing evermore. Then the withdrawal, neat as the closing of scissors; with a sense of zip and snick to it, the blade was out as fast as it had entered, perhaps in his flesh for less than half a second. The peritoneal lining closed over the small wound, so there was no copious outflow as I had observed in my other escapades. All his bleeding would be internal.

He felt little pain, perhaps a sting, and jerked, as if to say “Ouch!” or “Damn!” but his pressure dropped instantly and he sat backward with a smack as his buttocks hit cobblestone, the cosh dropped from hand, and he shook his head. He could not believe, as I have noted before, that this moment, which all must face, was upon him. An instant senility came across him, and his face seemed to melt toward languor, losing all firmness and jut.

“By Christ,” he said, “you’ve killed me.”

“By Christ, I have,” I said.

“Aw, Jesus.”

“He can’t help you, friend,” I said as I cleaned my blade on his rough workman’s sleeve. “He’s working elsewhere. You heart will pump dry in less than a minute as you become drowsier and drowsier. Any last words for the monseigneur?”

My little jest flew over his head. Nothing like being murdered to kill a sense of humor!

“Sir,” he said, “me boy Jamie is parked at St. Barnaby’s Rectory orphanage in Shadwell. I’ve got a few pounds in me stash, can you see he gets it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “If I give the money to Jamie, his mates will be jealous and beat him and steal it, and he will curse you into eternity. Instead, I’ll give it to the rector for all the boys in your name, and all will benefit. I’ll even match it, and you should consider yourself well treated by Jack the Ripper. On top of that, you got to meet a famous man before you died, and how many of your station can say the same? You have no cause for complaint.”

“Aw, Christ,” he said, eyes opening wide in amazement. “Jack himself! Just my bleedin’ luck!”

It was his last sentence.

I looked about and all was silent. Pennington Street, a hundred feet away, showed no sign of commotion. The woman was long gone, no doubt back at the Rookery, waiting for her man to come home so they could go out for a nice glass of gin and then have a bounce among the bedbugs.

I thought the better of leaving him there, so I dragged him to the quayside. He was heavy, but my sense of the pleasure of the kill filled my muscles with magic elixir, so it was not as difficult as it might have been. Before I let him slip, I removed the cache and found four pound eight, which I wadded and stuffed in my pocket. I rolled him, controlling him as he went, almost wrenching my back. But there was no splash as he slipped away, disappearing in seconds in the quarter-moon’s light, beneath the arrival of a swell. On either side, two vast merchantmen towered, creaking, rocking, but from them came nothing but silence. I picked up the cosh, a leather pouch filled with lead shot grafted to a short wood grip, and tucked it away for who knew what possibility.

I expect to hear nothing about the fellow. It was as if he never lived, and the lump on my head will go down in two days or so. It will ache a bit longer, but that is the price of the business I am in.

It all turned on three letters, and the colonel knew where to look for them, and quick as a fox, he provided Penny with the names so designated and specifics of three officers so marked, and just as quick, Penny forwarded them to me.

The three letters of the crucial designation were: “s/ID.” That meant “Seconded to the Intelligence Department,” which was both the kiss of professional death in the army – once tainted with exposure to the black world of intelligence procedures, the officer had sealed his administrative fate and would never rise to the level of a general officer, as the boys in charge did not trust their own spies – and the ticket to some truly interesting adventures. It was amazing how many brave officers would give up forever their chance at wearing the general’s insignia for a few years of scuttling around the hills beyond Kabul with the Pathan. To a certain mind, I could tell, it was someone’s idea of jolly fun! Pip, pip, ho, ho, all larky and merry in the Great Game, shan’t we have a dashing good time, Geoffrey, and to Hades with those hidebound mummies at headquarters! Perhaps sexual possibility was part of the lure, for the dusky-skinned, sloe-eyed beauties of the brown races were said to have lesser standards of acquiescence than our Victorian ladies behind their crinolines and tight bodices. Because we had so many men with these issues in their brains, we had an empire.