Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

I swallowed involuntarily. I made a secret promise to myself not to get too close. The man was fast with the blade, and in a blinding second, before I had time to react, he’d have my heart in his hand, munching it like an apple. No, no, I told myself, Jeb, old boy, you think too highly of yourself to end up that way. Keep your distance, remember to cock the damned gun, and if he steps toward you, send him to hell. Be the hero. Welcome the endless love. Just remember to cock the damned gun!

We stood there, across from the pub and could see him hunched at the bar. In a bit, more people within moved about, obscuring him, but he couldn’t have come out, as there was only one exit.

“He’s coming,” said the professor. “Oh my God, he’s got one, he’s got a Judy!”

Indeed it was so. He emerged, dawdled, and in another few seconds a young woman came out, by her demeanor and wardrobe of the whore subset and the smaller still prey subset. She moseyed ahead until out of view of the patrons in the bar through the broad windows and, once in shadow, paused to look back. He leaped to her side with mock gallantry, which made her smile.

“Here we go,” said the professor.

We rushed crazily across Commercial, hearing the shouts of drivers as we interrupted their rights to passage through the muddy concourse. Meanwhile, the rain pelted down, stinging our faces and forcing us to squint, but somehow we made it with no incident other than additional mud to our boots from the glop that had become the road surface. We arrived on that side of Commercial about fifty feet behind the happy twosome as they walked down the street, arm in arm. They had elected not to try Fournier but ambled down Commercial, past Christchurch and its towering steeple, and down another block. I got a good view, and I must say, if this were Jack, the public would be shocked.

Far from the creepy, anonymous skulker, his face cadaverous, his eyes haunted, his teeth pointed, this Jack was a merry seducer. We could see how totally engaged he was in charming her. Perhaps that was the plan, to gull her toward defenseless love with wit and then cut her down. Perhaps he enjoyed the moment when she saw the knife and knew the cad was her killer and the shock stunned her face.

But he was laying it on with a trowel. I could see him whispering in her ear intimately; evidently he was a wit and quite experienced in the art of making women comfortable (an attribute I sadly lacked): Her face, turned admiringly toward him, radiated rapture at his performance and affection for the man behind it. I watched as she seemed to gradually melt in to him, until they were not two walking side by side but one, of four-legged persuasion, in perfect unison and of one heart, easing their way down the sidewalk, too close to worry about costers’ stalls, too close to note the others passing them by at a far faster pace, and too intent on each’s response to the other to notice the two hooded gentlemen fifty feet behind them, matching perfectly their pace.

At last they came to a side street on the left, and I saw them put their heads together as they came to a halt, and then she giggled and he guffawed and they turned left.

“All right,” said the professor. “Now it gets dicey. Get that gun out so you don’t have to pull it while he’s cutting off your ears.”

I obeyed, sliding it out by one hand and easing it more or less under my mac, and we nodded, each took a deep breath, and steeled self against the upcoming. The rain was really falling now, cutting horizontally, propelled by angry wind, and a chill lay upon all and every. Perhaps hoarfrost in the morning? Who knew what morning would bring? At that moment, we took the corner hard and stepped into the blackness of an alley and saw in a second the figures of two people, enmeshed.

“Remember to cock the gun,” the professor whispered.

This was quite new. Before, they were apparitions in the night. I didn’t see their faces clearly until I’d killed them, hardly to their advantage. The slack of death did a great deal to undercut beauty, if any beauty there had been to begin with.

But Mary Jane, in full bloom, was a lively, roundish specimen who generated goodwill and happiness wherever she went. She was a full-bodied thing, just a bit beyond the age at which you could call her a girl, and it was hard not to desire her, with her blond hair and her buxom figure and her happy smile for each and all.

After the barman’s description, I simply observed and was surprised that I hadn’t noticed her before. I didn’t bother asking anyone to point her out, since it was unnecessary. She was clearly visible from the window of the Ten Bells, so I didn’t have to reenter and risk the barman fixing my face in his memory, as I was sure he had not previously. I could see her sitting at a table with a gaggle of “the girls.” For all their forlorn history, they were a gay, larky lot who enjoyed each other’s presence, enjoyed the hospitality that the Ten Bells offered, and most of all enjoyed the glass of gin set before them. Like women of all sorts, from the Hindu Kush to the Amazon and the Danube to the Yellow and the Mississippi to the Colorado, they spoke a private language of gesture and enthusiasm, loved the thrill of gossip and slander, were united in their contempt for the men who had ruined so many of their lives, and brought out absolutely the best in each other. I could tell all that from their animated postures around the table.

She was the lively one. One could hear her laughter through the glass, perhaps even feel it in the reverberations in the air. Her eyes were blue and her skin pink and firm. She seemed far from The Life, as it was called, even if she was famous within The Life. I knew tragedy haunted her, as it did so many of the girls. They all seemed to come from broken homes, were runaways or had been kicked out of hearth and home, some to turn to the streets, some already drawn to the streets. Her current torment came from the abandonment by the man in her life, a fellow named Joe Barnett, whom I watched visit her every evening. He was a shaggy brute by my standards but maybe a good-hearted man in the end, not too judgmental, willing to accept Mary Jane for what and who she was. His visits suggested some possibility of reengagement, as neither could quite let the other go. At the same time, it wasn’t as if she were making amends to Joe, for she still took tups for pay, let others of her trade sleep in her tiny room on cold fall nights, still hit the gin three, four, sometimes five times a day. She couldn’t say no to it, to her eternal damnation. I don’t know if she turned to drink for escape or she escaped to turn to drink, but it was the core of her existence, as I have observed her over the past few days.

The Ten Bells and the Horn of Plenty were her main spots. She’d wander outside and, sooner or later, find her beau for the next hour. Then the happy couple took a turn down Dorset. This was a dark scut of street that ran a few blocks until it came to an end, and its reality was elemental “English poverty,” if such a style were to be named, meaning brick tenements looming inward on each side, undistinguished by any wit or cleverness, just brick boxes laid end on end one after another, under low chimneys that spewed out coke fume, to combine with London fog into a yellow soup that sometimes smeared the streets. The housefronts were identical but for futile attempts at individuality, such as a flower pot here, a flag there, a yellow door, a rug hanging from a window, otherwise just the dullness of warehouses for forgotten people.

Mary Jane would take her beau a bit down Dorset, and thence – you had to know where to look for it, for it was easy to miss – she’d lead him into a passage wide enough for but one person. That was the entryway to Miller’s Court, and it cut between buildings for fifty feet of enclosed brick closeness, where it opened into the space that earned it the comic designation “court”: This was an interruption between the continuity of the buildings that offered yet more frontage for dwellings, apartments, or really rooms, chockablock, two stories in height, tiny in dimension, in which yet more desperate souls could be stockpiled until they died and were buried in nameless paupers’ fields. Someone owned it, someone collected rent, someone profited, but you wouldn’t house pigs in such shabby circumstances.