Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

I pointed to the end of the vault. “It’s a big crapper,” I said. “Romans and Normans must have shat here. I’m guessing that comes out in some abandoned building in Fairclough Street.”

“Yes, yes,” said the Professor, who had fully entered the place. “The colonel dips in the side door while the pony cart driver runs for aid on the street, and first a few, then a lot of, anarchists spill from the main door. He’s vanished in seconds, makes his way to the exit, and is out unseen very quickly. From here it’s but a ten-minute walk to Mitre Square, where he has ample time to track and do his horrors to Kate Eddowes. Yes, this is a brilliant discovery, Jeb, and it will do well to enhance the accuracy and drama of your piece.”

“Yes,” I said, “but here is my problem. This is the only secret passage in any of the murder sites. I have examined them exhaustively. Neither Buck’s Row nor Hanbury Street, certainly not Mitre Square with its several passageways out, and nothing in Miller’s Court could be construed as a secret passage. Only here. What is interesting is that, as you and I have just proved, there is no limiting provision for size in achieving passage. Full-grown men fit quite nicely. So the most elementary and the only empirical point of your profile – Jack’s slightness – is thereby disproved. That, furthermore, is the only empirical index to his identity. All the rest are cognitive, based upon inference of what he knew, what he learned, what his skills would be. But the whole theorem rests upon the conviction that his size was essential to the commission of the crimes. Yes, he was slight, but it had nothing to do with anything. A man my size or even yours could have escaped after killing all five without difficulty.”

“Possibly, then, I was wrong. I seem to have been right in all other interpretations, if I recall correctly.”

“Indeed. It comes to nothing, does it? Oh, unless one knew that the colonel was slight, and inserted that condition into the profile as a means of specifying him among the others.”

“I must say, this seems an odd direction.”

“I have learned some things since last we spoke, which will perhaps explain the oddness of my tangent. I have learned, for example, that under your commanding personality and capability to light up a room, you are an angry man. You have been exiled from the polite society of academics and intellectuals on account of unsavory rumors concerning your behavior. They now shun you and pay you no attention.”

“I bear them no animosity, I assure you. Our ideas diverged. They’re too reformist, and they find me too cynical. It was always an uneasy fit.”

“Not as I hear it. The precipitating event of your exile was a bizarre ‘experiment’ that you undertook several years back, rumor of which left many uneasy. You invited a London street girl – a whore, certainly, like Annie and Long Liz and the others – into your home. You and a colleague labored with her night and day for well over six months, and it was desperately hard work for both you and the girl, a Miss Elizabeth Little, I believe. It brought you to the point of madness and violent anger. Assumptions include beatings, sexual improprieties, various profligacies. As for your colleague, you attacked him at one point. That, too, frightened off all your friends. They abhor physical violence. He now seems to have vanished.”

“So he has,” said the professor.

“So, too, has the girl. Did she flee to the country, go to America, commit suicide? No one knows, but it seems like the old Greek tale of Pygmalion, where the sculptor fell in love with his sculpture. Except in your version, you had much congress with the poor child.”

“This is beginning to disturb me. Are you making accusations?”

“Another question might well be: Who was your colleague? I believe it was Colonel Woodruff, who had come to you upon mustering out from mutual fascination with the mechanisms of language. He lived with you while you were working with Elizabeth. When he saw how you were abusing Elizabeth, he objected, and under his advice – and I’m betting with his money – she fled.”

“I loved them both. They betrayed me. That is all. Not much of a tale.”

“It never occurred to you that she might fear you rather than love you. It never occurred to you that Colonel Woodruff would – selflessly, as was his style – send her away because he feared what you might do to her. That is why you attacked him at the university.”

“So dear Jeb isn’t as simple as I thought. Not simple but slow, too slow.”

“You see how it follows. You devise a ‘profile’ for the crimes that indicates no one but Woodruff, down as far as the two rings he carried with him since 1857. So detailed were your plans that you approached me even before you had unleashed the J-U-W-E-S clue, which you used to snag me. And how snaggable I was. But in order for the proof to hold, there must be murders. What good is the profile without the murders? It follows that the murders were informed by the profile, not the other way around. That being the case, there can be only one killer.”

He said nothing.

“Dr. Ripper, I presume,” I said.

“At your service,” he said.

“Your madness and your brilliance are in perfect syncopation. Your madness kills to express your rage at her betrayal, and your brilliance finds use for it by constructing a ‘Ripper’ who terrifies the city and whom you track and vanquish. You get everything. You take everything from the weakest of all women on earth, the most powerless and degraded. You have your revenge on the colonel, who besides being murdered is then to be eternally damned in history. You want credit as the man who discovered and killed the Ripper, and it is my job to hand it to you. You get everything in return and make yourself in a society that has exiled you.”

“It’s too bad you’re so late to understanding,” said the professor. “Elizabeth was, too. She never quite apprehended me. My score isn’t five, it’s six. She was the first. She will not step out of the shadows to reveal my friendship with Colonel Woodruff. Nor will you. A few others got in the way. The colonel, of course, a bully here, a bartender there. All done in a good cause, I assure you.”

I saw his hand disappear under his coat and reappear with a butcher knife.

“I will find another newspaper fool,” he said rather calmly, as with the weapon he was controlling the action. “I will get what I deserve, as I have paid back those who betrayed me.”

“You, sir, are despicable.”

“Who are you to judge me, you tiny man? You offer the world nothing. I offer everything, from my genius to my higher morality to my designs of utopia. But to employ them I must rise, and rise I will and rise I have.”

I beheld him then: creature of nightmare, avatar of destruction, murderer from the dark hole of the Beneath, radiant in self-love and madness. Jack flagrante, Jack in excelsis, Jack gloria mundi , Jack rampant, Jack fortissimo . He was all that and more. It was Jack the Ripper, fully bloomed and unleashed, the butcher knife in his right fist, held high as he meant to step forward and drive it deep into me, knowing his strength was so much greater than mine, knowing how and where to place the blade, knowing that he had the physical skill to make the thrust and cut a hundred times out of a hundred.

“Look on me, you fool. Know who I am. It is worth your life to enjoy the privilege of a meeting with Jack. You are nothing before him. I, Ripper, now take your meaningless life and go on and on and on. Jack is forever.”

He had never been Sherlock Holmes. He had always been Mr. Hyde.

He stepped toward me, cocking his arm for the killing blow.