Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“So. Does hunger for treasure trump abundance of opportunity?”

“A believer in capital – that is, treasure – would argue that it did.”

“It is indeed human motive, well verified in history, literature, myth, and folklore since ancient times.”

“I must say, I do agree.”

“We are in accord?”

“Indeed. To Major Pullham, then, boulevardier, dasher, swordsman, cavalryman, ace salesman of horsey gimcracks and gewgaws, and Jack the Ripper,” said the professor.

It is almost over. I have but once more piece of butcher’s theater to provide the horrified, titillated busybodies of London. And the great city demands that it be a corker. I have to surpass all previous efforts and stamp my legend on the face of the town as permanently as Big Ben or St. Paul’s Cathedral or the stone intricacy fronting the Houses of Parliament. Those three plus Jack: London, linked in memory forever.

What does one need for a masterpiece? Clearly, I needed time and space and privacy. The street had done well in the early going, if somewhat insecure. Moving to sealed-off squares and yards was an improvement. But none had light, room, and security, and I’d had too many by-the-whiskers escapes with blue bottles just missing me or me just missing them, with cart drivers and night watchmen and all the riffraff that coagulates in the rotting East End good nights and bad, fair and foul, morning, noon, or night.

Thus I took my most monstrous risk today. I tried to make it as safe as possible, minimize the play of fate, discipline myself severely for the part I need play, not give in to temptation to show off my wit or learning or eloquence, but keep hard and steady on course, wheel locked or tied in.

I chose my wardrobe with some patience, acquiring a dingy, stained frock and a bowler that looked as if it had been dragged behind the omnibus, escaping none of the shit the team of beasts normally left on our city streets. White shirt, though tending toward gray, frayed at the collar; black four-in-hand, utterly unremarkable; my dingiest boots, no spats, no knife hidden away in belt beneath frock.

Garbed several levels below my station, I got to the Ten Bells at the busy hour of eleven P.M. It’s not a big place, with the bar in a square island at the center eating up more floor space, so it was crowded, smoke hung in the air, gambling games were in full drama, yells and shouts and curses filled the air, most of the inhabitants being men either preparing for a night’s friction in the alleyways all ’round or recovering from same, and so it was a diverse group united only by sex impulse: bankers, stock traders, beer wagon teamsters, sailors, soldiers perhaps, hod carriers, maybe a construction laborer or two. Many looked like something out of Mr. Dickens’s sugar-glazed ingot of Christmas treacle, perhaps the low clerk Bob Cratchit, drinking to oblivion after whoring away the money that should have been saved against Tiny Tim’s operation, ha ha.

Exactly as I desired. I sat at the bar, sipping stout, enjoying it, I smoked a cigar, I laughed and seemed as animated as any of them, and after I felt comfortable and had assured myself that none of Abberline’s plainclothesmen lurked about, I enjoyed the rhapsody of Jack. You heard it everywhere.

“Think he’s gone? Been a bit.”

“Not Jack. That boy’ll ride his horse hard to the end.”

“Sooner or later, he’ll jigsaw a dolly and a copper will round the corner. Copper goes to whistle, gives chase, and soon enough the revolver squad arrives. One shot, and that’s the end of Jack.”

“One shot? More like fifty, and they’ll knock off a parson, two choir members, and a wee lassie in the volley!”

In time, I entered a conversation with one of the barmen, a burly chap with reddish muttonchops and hands and forearms that you might find on a dock worker. Tattoos, too, signifying naval or army service or to the East for John Company. He had the beady eyes of a man who noticed.

As for entrée into a conversational encounter, the universal welcome mat to chat was conjecture about Jack, every man’s obsession.

“I say, friend, I heard a rumor they got Jack already.”

“No such bloomin’ luck,” he said. “My wife’s brother’s a copper for Warren, and he’s telling us the boys in blue don’t have nothing, not a clue, not a direction, not even a scrap of evidence. Most of the witnesses is liars, and Jack’s by far a cleverer boy than anybody knows. It ain’t luck getting him by, it’s brains, it is.”

“I agree,” I said. “From what I hear, he’s been a hair away from apprehension four or five times, and the coppers just missed it together.”

“He’s clever and he’s got guts,” the barman said. “Bloke is mad as a hatter, but you’ve got to admire the cheek on the bugger.”

We lapsed into silence, he drifted off to fill glasses with gin or stout or beer, exchange cheer, josh a gal or two, and eventually return to my area for a lounge. But I knew the man, like all the men, wanted to talk Jack. I waited for him to think of something to say, and finally he did.

“Quarter-moon’s coming up. He’ll do it again, you watch. He’s got a thirst now, bad, likes the blood, but most of all likes the way the town is all rattled. Him, one lad, bringing five million people to a dead halt. Must be a feeling.”

“I’ll never know,” I said. “I’m too busy adding sums by gaslight to squash a fly.”

“That’s me, too, brother, slinging suds twelve long hours a day,” he said.

“Let me ask you something.”

At this point, another round of professional activity ensued as he tended to his customers, a rowdy lot, and when I caught an eye, I pointed to my empty glass, and he nodded and brought me another, almost black it was, with a cusp of foam like frosting on a Christmas cake. I took a mellow gulp, enjoyed, and then leaned a little closer. “I’m betting a feller like you, works in here, knows a thing or two. Pays attention-like. Hears a lot, forgets nothing.”

“Perhaps it’s so.”

“Yes, well, here’s the point. I’m a married man, see, but I likes the pleasure when it’s safe. I come down here once every two or three months off money I’ve cribbed up the wife don’t see. It don’t harm no one, is how I see it.”

“It sure don’t,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “Now, here’s my little issue. I can’t help think of what happens if I’m with Judy in the alley, all steamed up, boiler set to pop, and Jack comes along and decides to do two tonight instead of one.”

He laughed. That is, larfed. “Old son, Jack’s down on birds. He ain’t picking out men yet, is he now?”

“He ain’t till he is. I’d hate to be first. You don’t stand much chance against a fellow so right with a knife.”

“Not without the Royal Artillery, you don’t.”

“So here’s my play, friend. Worth a shilling. Would you know of a gal who’s got a room? You could visit her there, be all safe and tidy and away from Jack’s ways with the blade. I’d pay the tariff, knowing it’s more than the thruppence standard. The safety would be worth it.”

“Hmm,” he said, scrunching up an eye.

Then business called, and he tended some others, paused for a time to josh two men who looked like barristers slumming, poured three gins for a gal in the trade who wound her way back to a table where she sat with two friends, lit a fellow’s cheroot, then drifted back. The shilling was on the bar, under my hand.

He came close, I released, he snatched and pocketed. “All right, chum, you didn’t hear this from Brian Murphy, now.”

“Got it.”

“Fellow named Joe Barnett, lives with a gal off and on. Now I hear it’s off. She lets her friends double up when it’s cold out and they can’t make doss. He don’t like that, as the room is small. So off he goes, all the girls is talking about the poor thing. She’s a pretty thing, too, though somewhat gone to flab. Says she worked in a high-class house once. She ain’t in here now, but she’s on the streets most nights; believe me, she ain’t at choir practice.”