I, Ripper

CHAPTER ONE The Diary

When I cut the woman’s throat, her eyes betrayed not pain, not fear, but utter confusion. Truly, no creature can understand its own obliteration. Our expectation of death is real but highly theoretical until the moment is upon us and so it was with her.

She knew me but she didn’t know me. I was of a type, and having survived on the streets for years, she’d cultivated the gift of reading for threat or profit, deciding in a second and then acting accordingly. I knew in an instant I’d passed beyond the adjudication and represented, in her narrow rat brain of what once was a mind, the profit, not the threat. She watched me approach, along a dark street that had subtended from a larger thoroughfare, with a kind of expectant resignation. She had no reason to fear, not because violence was rare here in Whitechapel (it was not), but because it was almost always affiliated with robbery, as strong-armed gang members from the Bessarabians or the Hoxton High Rips struck a woman down, yanked her purse free, and dashed away. Crime, for the working population of the streets, meant a snatch-purse with a cosh, and he would be some kind of brute, a sailor most likely, or a large Jew, German, or Irish Paddy with a face like squashed potato. I had none of these defining characteristics but appeared to be some member of a higher order, to suggest service in a household or some low retail position. I even had a smile, so composed was I, and she returned that smile in the dimness of a crescent moon and a far-off gaslight.

I know exactly what she expected; it was a transaction as ancient as the stones of Jerusalem, conducted not merely in quid but drachmas, kopeks, pesos, yen, francs, marks, gold pieces, silver pieces, even chunks of salt, pieces of meat, arrowheads.

“Want a tup, guv’nor?” she’d say.

“I do indeed, madam.”

“It’s a thruppence for what’s below, a fourpenny for me mouth, darling. My, ain’t you a handsome bloke.”

“Jenny in Angel Alley offers her lips for a thruppence flat,” I would dicker.

“Then off to Jenny in Angel Alley and her fine lips, and don’t be bothering me.”

“All right, we’ll rut front to back. A thruppence.”

“In advance.”

“Suppose you run?”

“Ask ’em all, Sweetie don’t run. She does what she’s signed for, fair and square.”

“So be it.” And with that the coin would be granted, a niche against the wall found, the position assumed, the skirts lifted, and I was expected to position myself suchways and angled so as to achieve fast entry. The system was not designed to accommodate finesse. Of foreplay, naught. The act itself would resolve into some sliding, some bucking, some in-out — in-out in the wet suction of the woman’s notch, and I’d have a small but reinvigorating event. I’d feel momentary bliss and step back.

“Thank you kindly, sir,” she’d say, “and now Sweetie’s off.”

That would be that — except not this night.

If she had words to speak, she never spoke them, and that half-smile, in memory of a woman’s comeliness, died on her lips.

With my left hand a blur, I clamped hard on her throat, seeing her pupils dilate like exploding suns — that to steady her for the next, which was contained in the strength and power of my stronger right hand. At full whip, I hit her hard with the belly of the blade, the speed, not any press or guidance on my own part, driving the keen edge perfectly and carrying it deep into her, sundering that which lay beneath, then curling around, following the flow of her neck. I hit my target, which Dr. Gray has labeled the inner carotid, shallowly approximated in the outer muscle of the neck, not even an inch deep. It was good Sheffield steel, full flat-ground to the butcher’s preference, my thumb hooked under and hard against the bolster for stability. There was no noise.

She meant to step back and had more or less begun to sway in that direction when I hit her again, the same stroke driven by full muscle, with all the strength in my limb against it, and opened the second wound near perfect upon the first.

Blood does not appear immediately. It seems as if it takes the body a few seconds to realize it has been slain and that it has obligations to the laws of death. She stepped back, and I gripped her shoulder as if we were to waltz, and eased her down, as if she’d just fainted or grown a bit dizzy from too much punch before the spin upon the floor among the lads and lasses.

Meanwhile, the two streaks that marked my work reddened by degrees, but not much, until they each looked like a kind of unartful application of a cosmetic nature, some blur of powder or rouge or lipstick. Then a drip, then a drop, then a rivulet, each snaking slowly from the lip of the cut, leaving a track as it rushed down the tired old neck.

Sweetie — or whatever, I didn’t know — was attempting to say something, but her larynx, though undamaged by the anatomical placement of my strikes, would not cooperate. Only low murmuring sounds came out, and her eyes locked all billiard-ball on infinity, though I do not believe she was yet medically dead, as she had not lost enough blood from her brain as yet.

That issue resolved itself in the next second. The severed artery realized what its interruption required and at that point, at last, begin to spurt massively. Torrent to gush to tidal wave, the blood erupted from the full length of each cut and obeyed gravity in its search for earth in which to lose itself. I laid her down, careful not to let the surge flow upon my hands, even though, like all gentlemen, I wore gloves. In the moonlight — there was a quarter moon above, not much but perhaps just a bit — the liquid was dead black. It had no red at all to it and was quite warm and had a kind of brass-penny stench, metallic, as it rose to meet my nostrils.

She lay supine, and her eyes finally rotated up into their sockets. If there was a moment of passing or an actual rattle, as the silly books claim, I missed it clean. She slid easily enough into a stillness so extreme it could not but be death.

CHAPTER TWO Jeb’s Memoir

This is a most peculiar volume. It consists largely of two manuscripts which I have entwined along a chronological axis. Each manuscript presents a certain point of view on a horrific series of incidents in the London of fall 1888. That is, twenty-four years ago. I have edited them against each other, so to speak, so that they form a continuous vantage on the material from its opposite sides, an inside story and an outside story. I do so for the sake of clarity, but also for the sake of story effect, and the conviction that everything I write must entertain.

The first narrative — you have just tasted a sample — is that of a figure known to the world as “Jack the Ripper.” This individual famously murdered at least five women in the Whitechapel section of the East End of London between August 31 and November 9 of that year. The deaths were not pretty. Simple arterial cutting did not appease Jack. He gave vent to a beast inside of him and made a butcher’s festival of the carcasses he had just created. I believe somewhere in police files are photographs of his handiwork; only those of steel stomach should look upon them. His descriptions in prose match the photos.

I have let Jack’s words stand as he wrote them, and if he defied the laws of the Bible, civilization, the bar, and good taste, you can be certain that as a writer he has no inhibitions. Thus I warn the casual: Make peace now with descriptions of a horrific nature or pass elsewhere.

If you persevere, I promise you shall know all that is to be known about Jack. Who he was, how he selected, operated, and escaped the largest dragnet the Metropolitan Police have ever constructed, and defied the best detectives England has ever produced. Moreover, you will believe in the authenticity of these words, as I will demonstrate how I came to have possession of Jack’s pages, which he kept religiously. Finally, I shall illuminate the most mysterious element of the entire affair, that of motive.

If this portends grimness, I also promise as a counterweight that most romantic of conceits, a hero. There is one, indeed, although not I. Far from it, alas. A fellow does appear (eventually) to apply intellect in understanding Jack, ingenuity in tracking him, resilience in resisting him, and courage in confronting him. It is worth the wait to encounter this stalwart individual and learn that such men exist outside the pages of penny dreadfuls.

I have also included four letters written by a young Welsh woman who walked the streets of Whitechapel as an “unfortunate” and was, as were so many, subject to fear of the monster Jack. They offer a perspective on events otherwise lacking from the two prime narratives, which are filled with masculine ideas and concepts. Since this was a campaign directed entirely at women, it is appropriate that a female voice should be added. You will see, in the narrative, how I came to obtain these items.

Why have I waited twenty-four years to put this construction together? That is a fair question. It deserves a fair answer. To begin, the issue of maturity — my own — must be addressed. I was unaware of how callow I was. Lacking experience and discrimination, I was easily fooled, easily led, prey to attributes that turned out to be shallow themselves, such as wit, beauty, some undefinable electricity of personality. This force may be as ephemeral as the random set of a jaw or shade of eye; it may be found in the words of a man to whom words come easily; it may or may not be linked to deeper intelligence simply by the random fall of inherited traits, which, after all, left us with both a nobility and a royalty, and we’ve seen how well that has worked out!

So I was ill prepared to deal with that which befell me, and I lurched along brokenly and blindly. That I survived my one meeting with Jack was high fortune, believe me, and had nothing to do with heroism, as I am not a heroic man in either my own comportment or my dreams of an ideal. I do not worship the soldier, the wrestler, the cavalryman (this Churchill is a bounder, up to no good, believe me), or even this new thing, an aviator, who serves only to proclaim the stupidity of mankind and the lethality of gravity. I didn’t know what I was then, which means I was nothing; now I know, and it is from this promontory that I at last can survey these events.

So: I was shallow, industrious, grotesquely charming, smart on politics (ignorant, I must add, of women, whom I then didn’t and still don’t understand), indefatigable, and hungry for the fame and success that I thought were mine by inheritance of a superior being. The fellow Galton, Darwin’s cousin, has written at length about those of us of “superior” being and orientation, and even if I hadn’t read him yet, I intuitively grasped his meaning. There is a German chap as well, whose name I could never hope to spell, who also had a formal belief in the superman. On top of that, I had an incredibly fertile motivation: I had to escape my loathsome mother, on whose stipend I lived, under whose gables I dwelt, and whose disgust and disappointment I felt on a daily basis, even as I did my best to repay the wicked old lady in kind.

There is another issue beyond my simple gaining of wisdom. It is my current ambition. I have in mind a certain project, which I believe to be of extraordinary value to my career. I cannot deny its allure. I am too vain and weak for such. But it draws upon the Jack business and what I know of it. It uses characters, situations, incidents, all manner of those behaviors deemed “realistic,” which I must arrange, soothe, disguise, and cogitate.

Since so many cruel deaths were involved, I must ask myself: Do I have the right? And to answer that question, I must face again the Autumn of the Knife and reimagine it as exactly and honestly as I can. Thus this volume, as a part of the process to prepare and examine myself for the next step in my ambition.

But as I say, I will get to that when I get to that. As did I, you must earn that knowledge the hard way. It will be a fraught voyage. As the old maps used to say: Beware. There be monsters here.

CHAPTER THREE The Diary

My work was not done. I could not halt myself any more at that moment than I could at any moment.

I pulled up her dress, not the whole thing but rather a section of it. I did not hack or flail. I was not indiscriminate or promiscuous in my movement. I had thought too long about this, and I meant to do it as I had planned, savor it for the pleasures it offered, and at the same time not attract attention by flamboyant action.

I quickly cut a gap in the twisted white cotton of whatever undergarment with which she shielded her body, finding it thinly milled, easily yielding to the press of blade, and the bare flesh itself was exposed. So sad, that flesh. Flaccid, undisciplined by musculature beneath, perhaps stretched by passage of a child or nine. It seemed to have fissures or signs of collapse already upon it, and was dead cold to touch. I placed the tip of my fine piece of Sheffield steel into it, put some muscle behind it, felt resistance, pushed harder, and finally skin and muscles and subcutaneous tissue yielded and the tip punctured, then slid in an inch or two. The sound of entry had a liquid tonality. Now having the purchase and the angle, I pulled hard toward me, again using the belly of the blade against the woman, and felt it cut. The shaft of the knife produced exquisite sensations. I could actually imagine the subtle alteration in rhythm as the edge engaged differing resistance while at the same time each region of blade had a differing response to what lay before it. Thus the progress, with these two factors playing against each other, ran from the slippery, gristly, unstable coil of the small intestine, all loose and slobbery-like, the thinnest part of the blade more sensitive to the instability, until it became firm and meaty, as the cutwork descended to the stouter and lower end of the blade, stabilized by my pressure against the bolster, this last sensation as it interrupted the outer raiments of the body, the skin, the muscled underneath.

The blade made its pilgrim’s progress through Sweetie’s abdomen toward her notch, which I had no need to observe and left for other women on other nights. For now it was enough to watch as, in the blade’s wake, a jagged, blackened crevice lay revealed to me as the two edges of the wound separated, yielding the structures below. There was no blood. She had already bled out; her heart, starved of fuel, had already ceased to beat, and so no pressure propelled internal fluids outward. It was just a raw wound, a hideous rent in the flesh that would have caused oceans of pain had anyone been home to notice them. It was a fine piece of handiwork, that. I felt some pride, for I had been curious about the yield of flesh to blade postmortem. Not neat, not a bit of it, just ripped and mangled — mutilated, one might say.

I put another one into her to pursue the strange delight it gave me and was equally pleased with the knife’s work and my own skill and attention to detail. At this point the odors of elemental reality and extinction had produced sensual epistles. It was a mad stench of the metallic, from the copper-penny musk of the blood, to ordure from food alchemized until it became shit for expulsion at the further end of the coils, and finally to piss, which somehow, some way, had slopped across everything, as if I’d nicked a tube in one of my awkward strokes. I inhaled it greedily. Delicious, almost ambrosial. A cloud of dizziness filled my head, and I had half a sensation of swoon come across me.

Then some mad infant within commanded me to further desecration. I needed to puncture her more. Why? God in heaven knows. It was the music of the kill, commanding me to make the exquisite sensation of triumph and transcendence last a bit longer. Like a playful child, I pierced her seven or eight or more times, down until the pubic bone beneath the matted fur took the pleasure out of it, across, around the navel, which was settled in soft folds of flesh, over toward the far hip bone, whose hardness again diminished the fun of it all. Again, no blood from these ragged punctures, just a puffiness of abraded red skin where the flesh recoiled against the violation as the knife’s point struck through it, then swelled into a kind of tiny little knot.

I wiped my blade on her clothes, feeling it come clean, and slipped it inside my frock coat, sliding it between my belt and my trousers, secured out of sight. I rose, rubbed my feet hard against the cobblestones, again to remove excess blood so that no hound could track me by footprint back to my lair. Then I looked upon the poor woman a last time.

She was neither beautiful nor ugly, just dead. Her pale face was serene in the snatch of moonglow, her eyes open but blank, as the pupils had disappeared. I wondered how common this might be and resolved to check for it the next time out and about. Her mouth was sloppy, her grim little teeth swaddled in a captured puddle of saliva. No dignity in the lady’s sense attended Judy that night, not that the world would ever recognize, but to me she had a kind of beauty. She would meet the world soon and it would make of her what it would make, noticing or not depending on its whimsy, but it seemed as if right now, having pleased this customer fabulously, she was resting up for the next ordeal.

CHAPTER FOUR Jeb’s Memoir

I had advanced in my career to the point of being the intermittent substitute music critic for Mr. O’Connor’s ambitious Star, an aggressive afternoon paper among the more than fifty that were trying to prevail in the incredibly competitive London newspaper market. It was a four-page broadsheet that was published six times a week. I liked its politics, which were liberal if much softer than my own, in that they favored the mugs of the lower classes over the prisses of the upper, and cast a snide eye on Queen Vicky’s propensity to have a Tommy stick a bayonet in the guts of every yellow, brown, or black heathen who defied her. Thomas Power O’Connor, besides being Irish to the soles of his shoes, was a visionary, to be sure, wiring his building up to the telegraph for the absolute latest from any place in the empire, including far-off, desolate, forgotten Whitechapel, as we were about to see. He also had gotten us wired for the new-to-London telephone system, which connected the paper by instantaneous vocal transmission to its reporters in the press rooms of such places as Parliament, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and most important, the Metropolitan Police HQ at Scotland Yard. He made war with the Pall Mall Gazette, the Globe, the Evening Mail, the Evening Post, and the Evening News. He seemed to be winning, too, leading them all in circulation with 125,000. His product was full of innovation — he ran maps and charts before anybody and broke up the dread long, dark columns of type with all kinds of space-creating devices, loved illustrations (and had a stable of quick-draw artists who could turn the news into an image in minutes), and embraced the power of the gigantic headline. He had converted from uncertain penmanship to the absolutism of the American Sholes & Glidden typewriters more vigorously than some of the sleepier rags, like the Times.

It happened that on that night, August 31, 1888, I had returned to the offices of the Star to hack out a two-hundred-word piece on that night’s performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 9 in A Minor, the “Kreutzer”) by a pianist and violinist at the Adelphi named Miss Alice Turnbull and Rodney de Lyon Burrows. They are forgotten now by all but me.

I can even remember my leader: IT TAKES NERVE, I wrote in the all-caps face of the Sholes & Glidden typewriter, TO PLAY “SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO NO. 9 IN A MINOR” IN MODERATE TEMPO BECAUSE ALL OF THE MISSED NOTES AND HALF-KEYS STAND OUT LIKE A CARBUNCLE ON A COUNTESS’S PALE WHITE CHEEK-BONE.

It went on in that vein for a bit, pointing out that Miss Turnbull was forty but looked seventy and Mr. de Lyon Burrows was sixty-two but looked like a twenty-five-year-old — alas, one who had died and been embalmed by an apprentice, and so forth and so on for a few hundred prickly words.

I took my three flimsies to Mr. Massingale, the music and drama editor, who read them, hooked the grafs with his pencil, underlined for the linotype operators (notoriously literal of mind) all the caps that should be capitalized, crossed out three adjectives (“white”), and turned one intransitive verb transitive (with a snooty little sniff, I might add), then yelled “Copy down” and some youngster came by to grab the sheets, paste them together, then roll them up for insertion into a tube that would be inserted into the Star’s latest modernism, a pneumatic system that blasted the tubes down to Composing, two floors below, via air power in a trice.

“All right, Horn,” he said, using a nickname derived from my nom de Star, as my own moniker would have impressed no one, “fine and dandy, as usual.” He thought I was better than our number one fellow, as did everyone, but since I was not first in the queue, that was that.

“I’d like to hang by and read proof, do you mind, sir?”

“Suit yourself.”

I went down to the tearoom, had a pot, read the Times and the new issue of Blake’s Compendium (interesting piece on the coming collision between America and what remained of the old Spanish empire in the Caribbean), then returned to the city room. It was a huge space, well lit by coke gas, but as usual a chaotic mess covering a genius system. At various desks editors pored over flimsies, tightening, correcting, rewriting. Meanwhile, at others, reporters bent over their S&Gs, unleashing a steady clatter. Meanwhile, smoke drifted this way and that, for nearly everyone in the room had some sort of tobacco burning, and the lamps themselves seemed to produce a kind of vapor that coagulated all that ciggy smoke into a glutinous presence in the atmosphere.

I picked my way across the room, weaving in and out of alleys of desks and tornadoes of smoke, stepping around knots of gossiping reporters, all in coats and ties, for such was the tradition in those days, and approached the Music and Drama Desk. Massingale saw me and looked up from his work. Under his green eyeshade, his eyes expressed nothing as he pointed to a nest of galleys speared into place on a spike.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“Hurry up; they’re wanting us to close early tonight. Something’s frying.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

I pulled my galley proof off the spike, read, caught a few typographical errors, wondered again why my brilliant prose had yet to make me a household name, then turned the long sheet back to Massingale. But he wasn’t paying attention. He was suddenly jacked to attention by the presence of a large man at his shoulder. This fellow had a beard that put the stingy ginger fur clinging to my jaw to shame, and the glow of a major general on a battlefield. He was surrounded by a committee of aides-de-camp, assistants, and errand boys, a whole retinue in obsequious quietude to his greatness. It took me a second to pull in the entire scene.

“Horn, is that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, Mr. Horn,” the powerful figure said, fixing me square in his glaring eyes, “you’ve left the hyphen out of de Lyon Burrows’s name.” He was holding my original flimsy.

“There is no hyphen in de Lyon Burrows’s name,” I said, “even if all the other papers in town put one in. They’re idiots. I’m not.”

He considered, then said, “You’re right. I met the fellow at a party recently, and all he did was complain about that damned hyphen.”

“You see, Mr. O’Connor,” said Massingale, “he doesn’t make mistakes.”

“So you’re persnickity about fact, eh?”

“I like to get fact right so that my overlords don’t confuse me with the Irish, from whom I am but of whom I am not.” I was always at labor to point out to all that I was Protestant, not Catholic, had no snout in the Irish republicanism trough, and considered myself English to the bone, in both education and politics.

It was intemperate, given O’Connor’s heritage, but I never enjoyed playing mute in the presence of power. Still don’t, in fact.

“Chip on the shoulder, eh? Good, that’ll keep you going full-bang when another man might take a rest. And fast?”

“I wrote it in Pitman on the hansom back,” I said. “It was merely a process of copying.”

“He’s very good with his Pitman. Maybe the best here,” said Mr. Massingale. “Pitman” was the system of shorthand I had taught myself one recent summer in an attempt to improve myself.

“So, Horn, you’re a bit frivolous, aren’t you? The odd book review, mostly music, silly nonsense like that, eh?”

“I feel comfortable in that world.”

“But you’re comfortable on streets, in pubs, among coppers, thugs, and Judys? You’re not some fey poof who falls apart outside Lady Dinkham’s drawing room.”

“I’ve studied boxing with Ned Corrigan and have a straight left that could knock a barn down, and you’ll note me nose ain’t broke yet,” I said, adding a touch of brogue for emphasis. It was true, as all Irish-born learn the manly art at an early age or spend their lives among the girls.

“Fine. All right,‘Horn,’ whatever your real name might be, I’m in a fix. My night crime star, that damned Harry Dam, is cobbing with a floozy in a far beach town this week, and we just got a call from our fellow at Scotland Yard with news of a nice juicy murder in Whitechapel. Someone downed a Judy, with a butcher’s knife, no less. I smell the blood of an English tart, fee-fi-fo-fart. So I want you to take a hansom, get out there before they move the body, snatch a look at it, find out who the unlucky gal is, and let me know if it’s as much the meat-cutter’s work as the fellow says. See what the coppers say. The Bobbies will talk; the detectives will play hard to get. Take it all down in your Pitman, then get back and hammer out a report. Henry Bright here, our news editor, will talk you through it. Can you do this?”

“It doesn’t sound too terribly difficult.”

The hansom dropped me there at about four-forty-five A.M., and I told the fellow it was worth half a quid if he’d wait, since I didn’t want to have to look for another at that ungodly hour in a neighborhood known for coshes and Judys. My noggin was too delicate to enjoy a gnashing by a Russky sailor or some such.

Buck’s Row was a kind of subshoot of White’s Row, which was bigger and brighter, but just before the rail bridge over the tracks into Whitechapel Station, it divided into Buck’s Row and Winthrop Street, both tiny and dark. I could see the coppers clustered around something down Buck’s Row, itself a nondescript cobblestone thoroughfare of brick walls fronting warehouses, grim, shabby lines of cottages for the workingman, gates that locked off yards where, in daylight hours, I supposed wagoners would load goods of some sort or another — I really couldn’t imagine what — for delivery. It was but twenty or so feet wide.

A bit of a crowd, maybe ten to twenty pilgrims in black hats and shapeless jackets, Jews, sailors, maybe a worker or two, maybe some Germans, stood around the cluster of coppers, and so, caution never being my nature, I blazed ahead. I pushed my way through the crowd and encountered a constable, who put up a broad hand to halt my progress. “Whoa, laddy. Not your business. Stay back.”

“Press,” I announced airily, expecting magic. “Horn, Star.”

“Star! Now, what’s a posh rag like that interested in a dead Judy?”

“We hear it’s amusing. Come now, Constable, let me pass if you will.”

“I hear Irish in the voice. I could lock you up on suspicion of being full of blarney and whiskey.”

“I’m a teetote, if it matters. Let me see the inspector.”

“Which inspector would that be, now?”

“Any inspector.”

He laughed. “Good luck getting an inspector to talk to you, friend. All right, off you go, stand there with the other penny-a-liners.”

I should have made a squawk at being linked to the freelance hyenas who alit on every crime in London and then sold notes to the various papers, but I didn’t. Instead, I pushed by and joined a gaggle of disreputable-looking chaps who’d been channeled to the side and yet were closer to the action than the citizens. “So what’s the rub, mates?” I asked.

Fiercely competitive, they scowled at me, looked me up and down, noted my brown tweed suit and felt slouch hat and country walking shoes, and decided in a second they didn’t like me.

“You ain’t one of us, guv’nor,” a fellow finally said, “so why’n’t you use use your fancy airs to talk to an inspector.”

The holy grail of the whole frenzy seemed to be acknowledgment by an inspector, which would represent something akin to a papal audience.

“It would be beneath His Lordship,” I said. “Besides, the common copper knows more and sees more.”

Perhaps they enjoyed my banter with them. I have always been blessed at banter, and in bad circumstances a clear mind for the fast riposte does a fellow no end of good.

“You’ll know when we know, Lord Irish of Dublin’s Best Brothel.”

“I do like Sally O’Hara in that one,” I said, drawing laughter, even if I’d never been brothelized in my life.

“Sell you my notes, chum,” a fellow did say finally. He was from the Central News Agency, a service that specialized in servicing second- and third-tier publications with information they hadn’t the staff to report themselves.

“Agh, you lout. I don’t want the notes, just the information. I’ll take me own notes.”

We bargained and settled on a few shillings, probably more than he would have gotten from Tittle-Tattle.

“About forty, a Judy, no name, no papers, discovered by a worker named Charlie Cross, C-R-O-S-S, who lives just down the row, at three-forty A.M., lying where you see her.”

And I did. She lay, tiny, wasted bird, under some kind of police shroud, while around her detectives and constables looked for “clues,” or imagined themselves to be doing so by light of not-very-efficient gas lanterns.

“They’ve got boys out asking for parishioners to come by and identify the unfortunate deceased, but so far, no takers.”

“Cut up badly, is she?”

“First constable says so.”

“Why so little blood?” It was true. I had expected red sloppage everywhere, scarlet in the lamplight. Melodramatic imagination!

“I’m guessing soaked into her clothes. All that crinoline sops up anything liquid, blood, jizz, beer, wine, vomit—”

“Enough,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Now you know what we know.”

“Excellent. Will the coppers let us see the body?”

“We’ll see.”

I stood there another few minutes, until a two-wheeled mortuary cart was brought close to her, and two constables bent to lift her. They would transport her — now technically an it—to the Old Montague Street Mortuary, which was not far away.

“I say,” I said to the nearest uniform, “I’m from the Star. I’m not part of this jackal mob but an authentic journalist. It would help if I could see a bit, old man.”

He turned and looked at me as if I were the lad in the Dickens story who had the gall to ask for more.

“The Star,” I repeated as if I hadn’t noted his scowl and astonishment. “Maybe mention you, get you a promotion.”

I was naturally corrupt. I understood immediately without instruction that a little limelight does any man’s career a bit of good, and having access to it, which the penny-a-liners never did, was a distinct advantage.

“Come on, then,” he said, and although it wasn’t expressed, I could sense the outrage and indignation of the peasants behind me and rather enjoyed it. He pulled me to the mortuary cart, and as the fellows struggled to shove the poor lady into her carriage, he halted them, so that she was held at equipoise between worlds, as it were, and pulled back the tarpaulin.

I expected more from my first corpse. And if the boys thought I’d puke my guts up, I disappointed them. It turned out that, like so much else in this world, death was overrated.

She lay, little bunny, in repose. Broad of face, blank of stare, doughy of construction, stiller than any stillness I’d ever seen. There seemed to be the purpling of a bruise on the right side of that serene face, but someone had otherwise composed her features so that I was spared tongue, teeth, saliva, whatever is salubrious about the bottom part of face. Her jaw did not hang agape but was pressed firmly shut, her mouth a straight jot. I wish I could say her eyes haunted me, but in fact they bore the world no malice and radiated no fear. She was beyond fear or malice. Her eyes were calm, not intense, and bereft of human feeling. They were just the eyes of a dead person.

I looked at the neck, where the dress had been pulled down so the coppers could have their look-see at the death wounds. I look-saw two deep if now bloodless slices, almost atop each other, crisscrossing from under left ear to center of throat.

“He knew what he was doing, that one,” said the sergeant who was sponsoring my expedition. “Deep into the throat, no mucking about, got all the rivers of blood on the first one, the second was purely ornamental.”

“Surgeon?” I asked. “Or a butcher, a rabbi, a pig farmer?”

“Let the doc tell you when he makes up his mind. But the fellow knew his knife.”

With that, one of the coppers threw the tarpaulin over her again, and her face vanished from the world.

“There’s more, I’m told,” I said. “I have to see it. Spare me her notch if you can, let the poor dear have a little dignity, but I have to see what else the man did.”

The three officers held a conversation with their eyes among themselves, and then one flipped up the material at midsection and carefully burrowed into her nest of clothing, exposing just the wound and nothing of delicacy.

“That, too, took some strength, I’d judge,” said the sergeant.

Indeed. It was an ugly excavation running imprecisely down her left side, say ten inches to the left of the navel (which I never saw), curving at her hip bone, cutting inward toward the centerline of her body. It, too, was bled out; it, too, left flaky blood debris in its wake; but it was somehow rawer than the throat cuts, and I could see where the blood had congealed into a kind of black (in that light) gruel or even pudding.

“Show him the punctures,” said the sergeant.

Another adjustment was made, and I saw where the knife’s point had been lightly “danced,” almost gaily, across her abdomen. A smudge of pubis hair was exposed in this exploration, but none of us mentioned it, as such things, even among men, were unmentionable twenty-four years ago.

THE BODY OF A WOMAN WAS DISCOVERED LAST NIGHT—

“No, no,” said Henry Bright. “We’re selling news, not informing the ladies of the tea party. Get the blood up front.”

Henry was hovering over my shoulder as I assailed the Sholes & Glidden, moving my Pitman notes into English prose. I had just returned from Buck’s Row, paying the hansom driver extra to force his way through the dawn and its increase in traffic, and seated myself directly at the machine. Henry was on me like a crazy man. Maybe he was the murderer!

A WOMAN WAS BUTCHERED LAST NIGHT IN WHITECHAPEL BY PERSON OR PERSONS UNKNOWN.

“Yes,” said Henry. “Yes, yes, that’s it.”

THE BODY WAS DISCOVERED—

“No, no, save that for the jump. Get to the wounds, the blood. Get a copper assessment up there, too, to give it some spice.”

HER THROAT WAS SLASHED—

“Brutally,” offered Henry.

— BY TWO PENETRATING BLADE STROKES WHICH CAUSED VIOLENT EXSANGUIN—

“No, no. Are we at Oxford? Are we chatting with Professor Prissbottom about the latest in pre-Renaissance decadence?”

— BLOOD LOSS. SHE EXPIRED IN SECONDS.

THEN THE MAN—

THEN THE BEAST—

“Yes, that’s it,” said Henry.

— THE BEAST RAISED HER SKIRTS AND USED HIS KNIFE TO MUTILATE HER ABDOMEN, OPENING ANOTHER LONG, DEEP, AND THIS TIME JAGGED CUT.

“New graf,” said Henry.

FINALLY, HE FINISHED HIS GRISLY NIGHT’S WORK WITH A SERIES OF RANDOM STAB WOUNDS ACROSS HER BELLY—

“Can I say ‘belly?’ ” I asked. “It’s rather graphic.”

“Leave it for now. I’ll check with T.P. It’s right on the line. The gals don’t have bellies or tits or arses in the Star. Maybe the Express, not the Star. But times are changing.”

— AND HIPS.

POLICE SAY THE BODY WAS DISCOVERED AT 3:40 A.M. BY CHARLES CROSS ON HIS WAY TO WORK AS HE WALKED DOWN BUCK’S ROW, WHERE HIS HOME—

“’is ’ome,” joshed Henry, playing on the cockney aversion to H’s, and evincing the universal newspaper stricture that all reporters and editors are superior to the poor sots they quote or write for.

— IS LOCATED.

“IT TOOK SOME STRENGTH AND SKILL TO DO THIS TERRIBLE THING,” SAID METROPOLITAN POLICE SERGEANT JAMES ROSS.

POLICE REMOVED THE BODY TO THE OLD MONTAGUE STREET MORTUARY, WHERE A SURGEON WILL FURTHER EXAMINE IT FOR CLUES. MEANWHILE, A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE WOMAN’S FACE WILL BE TAKEN FOR CIRCULATION IN HOPES OF IDENTIFICATION.

There was a last bit of business. Since my pseudonym, Horn, was affiliated with music, it occurred to Henry Bright that I should write crime under my own name. Gad, I didn’t want that, as I had aspirations of mingling with the quality and wanted no whiff of blood floating about my presence. So he said, “All right, then, lad, come up with something else. Dickens called himself Boz; certainly you can do better than that.”

“I can,” I said, and reached into my past to something only my sister, Lucy, had called me, as her child’s tongue could not manage my initials and they had eroded into a single syllable. “Call me Jeb.”

Dear Mum,

I know how you worry, so I thought I’d write and tell you that all is fine here, even if you never answer me, even if I never send it. I know how disappointed you are in me, at the low way I turned out, and I wish it had been different, but it ain’t, and there you have it.

Anyhow, I didn’t know the girl that got cut. There’s a lot of us down here and our friends are usually in the same area, a block or so, and poor Polly was out east, near a mile. Never laid an eye on the poor thing. We’re all talking about it, and we all feel pretty safe down here. We’re always together, and as I gets it from the newspapers, poor Polly was all alone on a dark road and the fellow that done her just did it for her purse and the thrill it gave him, and now he’s gone and won’t be back again. They’ve increased the coppers everywhere because the newspapers have made such a big skunk about it, so all of us believe he’s long gone and won’t be coming back, and if he does, it won’t be this year or even the next.

Other than the fright it give me at first, I am fine. I have so many things to say to you, I wish I talked and wrote better to get them all out. I know what upsets you and Da the most is the s-x. Really, that’s the smallest thing in my life. You get used to it early, and it comes to not mean nothing. It just happens, it’s over in a second, and you go on, it’s all forgotten.

As for the blokes, you’d think I’d be down on them, but I’m not. Most seem like gentlemen. I’ve never been cuffed about, nor coshed, nor robbed. Nobody has ever forced himself onto me against my will. Even the coppers, at least the ones in uniform, are nice enough to us gals. They have no interest in hurting us or “punishing” us, we’re just something they get used to fast down here, and they don’t want no bother from us, only to get through the day like we do, and go on home to the missus.

My problem ain’t never been the blokes, or the s-x they wants. Don’t all men want that? They’re going to get it one way or the other, is how I sees it. No, what my problem has been, ever since I were a little girl, is the demon gin. I do like my gin. I like my gin so much. All the girls down here drink it for the way it makes them feel and the happiness it brings. You and Da and Johnto never had no idea how young I was when I started it and how it explained all the trouble that I got into and why no matter how the nuns and priests talked to me and Da smacked me and you squashed me with that look you get when you’re disappointed — do I know that look! — it was always the gin that was behind it, and here I am all these years later, sometimes down and out, having lost everything, even a bed to sleep in, and all I think about is the gin.

I call it my disease. I can’t do nothing without thinking about it, and when I have it, I am happy. My happiness comes out in my singing, which I love, which is my way of telling the world that don’t otherwise notice I exist. Sometimes, too, I know, I can get pretty uppity on gin. I won’t let nobody tell me what to do when I am fortified up, because it don’t seem nobody knows any better than me, that’s how strong and good I feel.

I will tell you, Mum, they’ll never take the gin away. If reformers close the shops and burn down the gin factories, someone’ll figure out how to do it under the tracks or in a cellar nobody don’t know about, and it’ll be back on the streets in a day and I’ll be first in line.

Mum, I know you don’t want to hear that, but I have to tell it anyway, because it’s the truth. Mum, I miss you so much and remember such good times and how tender you always was with me before the sickness. I remember Johnto and Paul and the others and how happy we all was. I wished it had never changed, but it did and we went where we did and done what we done.

I love you, Mum.

Your daughter

Mairsian

CHAPTER FIVE The Diary

As I had anticipated, the excess butchery of my method, satisfying though it might be to mind and soul in and of itself, had an electric effect on London journalism. It was the new rag, the Star, that took up the clarion most energetically. It is run, so it is said, by an Irishman; therefore all is understandable by virtue of the cruder Irish temperament, their propensity for the bottle, their impulsiveness and natural tendencies to violence, all of which are manifest in the Star.

MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN, it announced in a headline smeared across leader boards all throughout London. The newsboys bustled about, screeching, “Mad butcher, mad butcher, mad butcher!” You could not escape these tribes of annoying urchins, noses all runny, pouty faces red, the glee of greed in their beaming little rat eyes. I’m betting the dim, dull shopkeeps and salesclerks of the town couldn’t resist such titillation. More deliciously yet, an artist had provided a detailed drawing of the poor woman’s major wounds, by my memory quite accurately evoked. There, in all their glory, were the two fatal cuts, deep and profound, that settled the issue. And, flirting with the very limits of propriety, there was the abdominal excursion, with its sloppy jag halfway down as it veered to center.

A debate soon developed in the rags as the week wore on. This is excellent. Now, five days after the event, they have yet to put this bone down. It seems to be breaking along evening and morning lines. The Star and the Pall Mall Gazette, our leading afternoon exponents, are purveyors of the single-killer theory. Can you see why? It’s obvious. Unlike their morning brethren, whose product arrives by discreet carrier, the unruly afternoon boyos must sell their wares to walkers-by, people headed to the train stations or coming off shift from some coal-powered hellhouse or waiting to get aboard the horse trams or looking to amuse and edify themselves as they are trotted crosstown in a cabriolet. Thus, the fare offered them will be more salacious, more provocative, more tainted with the odor of sex, blood, and ruin. Their baser natures must be appeased. At the same time, at the end of their journey home, the dirty rag itself, sucked dry of the lubricious, can be stuffed in a refuse can, and our hero may enter his home under the fraud of being morally sacrosanct, ready to speak the blessing before the dinner of meat and potatoes that his spouse has so dutifully and lovingly prepared.

The morning papers, by contrast, do go into the home, to be devoured along with breakfast. They are limited in the extent of the gore and nastiness they can allow; it is of significantly lesser denomination than among their opponents. No filth can be allowed to besmirch the purity of the hearthside and the little nippers frolicking there before being shipped off at age seven to a decade of buggery and horsewhipping, plus proficiency in Greek. The same rags are also more likely read by women, whose delicacy in most cases cannot stand exposure to the rawness of life and death.

The morning fellows — the Times, the Mail, the Sun, the Standard, all the others — backed the gang theory. It held, quite absurdly, that possibly the lady, in her peregrinations for customers, had bumbled into a robbery by a set of hooligans and, as a witness, had to be silenced. Had the poor girl failed to pay up or witnessed a robbery? Was it part of some initiation rite by which a novice proved himself manly enough? The gang theory was meekly buttressed by the lack of blood along the street, held to be evidence that she had been killed elsewhere and deposited along Buck’s Row. Obviously, the authors of this nonsense had not looked at the soppage in her knickers, which had absorbed all those pints of the vital life fluid.

The Star led the pack, and the Gazette was not far behind in pursuing the mad-butcher thematic. It was a newsstand natural. It played brilliantly on primordial fears of lurkers with knives, and what evil simmered and boiled down dark city alleys or in precincts where whores sold their bodies to the night. There was probably a sense of divine punishment, unstated because there was no need to state it. The victim was beyond the pale of Queen Victoria’s formal, dark-garbed, earnest empire of rectitude, where the strength of conformity was just as strong on the home island as a bayonet’s steel in the outer rings of our Christian conquest of the world.

You could see that pattern play out in the fate of the poor woman whose fate it was to encounter the butcher’s Sheffield. It turned out, courtesy of someone named Jeb on the Star who was running this story as if his life depended on it, that the poor dear’s name was Mary Ann Nichols, called Polly by all who knew and used her. She was exactly as expected, the dreg of a system that had no place for her, except to spread and pump her cunny in an alley, drop off a thruppence, and forget all about it in the next few seconds.

She is exactly what our system must necessarily produce. A disposable woman. If she does not have the sponsorship of a male, there is nothing for her except the meanest of charity interspersed with the whore’s plight. Darwin’s absolutism becomes the ruling principle of her existence: She develops cunning, deceit, cleverness as her only means of survival, her only goal the thruppence that will get her the day’s glass of gin. She becomes horrid and disgusting, blackened by the streets, rimmed with grime, her teeth rotting, her hair a scabrous mess, her body flaccid and fallen, her language and discourse degraded, and thus we are able to dismiss her from our view without qualm. She is sewage. She exists only for those randy men in the grip of sex fever, and when they have spent their pence and jizz, off they go. Any sane system would spare provision for the wretched creature and possibly save her from her wretchedness. Possibly men will invent it someday — but I doubt it.

The Star brought this tragic nonentity to banal life. No one read of it with more fascination than I. The method of identity: The police noted a laundry marker on one of her underclothes and, in a bit of time, found the laundry, displayed the morgue picture, and identified her. So Jeb, with that advantage, was able to track her last day’s odyssey toward a pool of blood in Buck’s Row. She was forty-three, he tells us, mother of five children. Her character flaw, for which God above and I below exacted our justice, was alcohol. It destroyed her life and, I suppose, killed her. After twenty-four years of marriage to a locksmith, as Jeb told the tale, her husband, finding her frequently inebriated, kicked her out. A divorce followed. There was no place to go but down and no place to land but the bottom. Her shabby last few years were mainly about raising enough money per diem for that glass of blissful gin or several, plus a grim bed in a doss house, of the many that festered in Whitechapel for her and others of the ilk.

Jeb constructed a template of her last hours. The details the plucky bastard unearthed were quite interesting. At twelve thirty A.M. she left a public house called the Frying Pan (who could make up such!) and shortly thereafter returned to her lodging house, where it turned out she hadn’t the cash to spend the night. Out she went. She met a friend and they had a nice chat, even if Polly was quite drunk, and Polly told the friend that she’d had her doss money three times that day but always drank it through, but she claimed that she’d get it again and everything would be all right. Then Polly walked on down Whitechapel Road and, when she saw a potential tryster following her, diverted to the far darker Buck’s Row to earn that doss fee. We know what happened next, don’t we?

Jeb’s account was also notable for the narrative it gave of police movement, and it contained a warning that I took seriously. It seemed that minutes before the dispatch of Polly, two constables on their patrol entered and coursed Buck’s Row from opposite directions. I saw neither; obviously, neither saw me. Yet it is in the record, Constable Thain being the first in one direction, then Sergeant Kerby in the other. Within minutes of my departure, first along came Cross, then a Constable Neill who made the second discovery (after Cross) and signaled to Thain, turning up again like a bad penny. Finally, a Constable Mizen arrived, he being the copper Cross alerted.

Good Lord, it was like Victoria Station when the express from Manchester arrives! All those men on that black, bleak little street in the space of twenty minutes or so, during which a dastardly deed was done unseen. How close I came! How lucky I was! How the whimsies favored my enterprise!

It taught me an important lesson. Luck would not always be my companion, so I must plan more carefully. I must choose the spot, not the woman, henceforth, based on the patrol patterns of the constables, thereby decreasing the chances of discovery in flagrante. I must examine the spot for escape routes so that I would not hesitate in disarray if noted, but could vanish abruptly. I also must locate less well-traveled areas of Whitechapel than the one I had so foolishly chosen, that close to a main thoroughfare lit brightly by gas illumination and the glare of grog houses and constable’s lanterns.

This was good to know, as certain auspicious signs suggested that I must strike again, soon.

CHAPTER SIX Jeb’s Memoir

Success is a narcotic. Experienced once, it must be had again and again. Pity the man who has it young and can never regain it. His must be a parched, bitter life. As for me, the week of September 1 through 7 was the best I’d ever had, and it strengthened my resolve to never, ever return to being the nonentity I had been my first thirty-two years.

I owe it all to Jack, though the name would not be affixed into eternity for another month or so. It’s terrible, but as truth is the guideline here, I must nevertheless confess it. Jack’s depredations made Jeb’s successes possible, and fixed Jeb on the course his life would take, giving him the sense of importance that he would never again cease to maneuver in search of.

Brilliance followed brilliance. I grabbed a nap in the Star office and watched with utter satisfaction as the MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN editions sold out, went back to what O’Connor said was “replate” seven times, and effectively not only invented but drove the story onward.

Such energy and determination. Such tirelessness. Jeb was the hero of the day, the ace reporter who had found and amplified the case for the millions of shopkeeps and — girls who comprised the London population. I was their thrill machine, I was their fear of darkness and sharp instruments, I suppose I was the swollen penis or the wetted cunny that they could never admit to having had. Jeb brought all this to them. It was a shame, then, that I had no idea what I was doing.

“Get yourself to the London Hall of Records,” Henry Bright instructed. “Find an amiable clerk to look up the name of the lady. Her official records should have leads — if she has children, an address, a husband, real or common-law. Go to them, not wasting a ha’penny’s worth of time, and chat them up. Stop off here first, pick up an artist, he will accompany you to sketch the faces. We need to put their faces in the newspaper.”

“He’s right. Readers need to attach a human identity to whoever’s doing the talking. It makes the thing have a complete sense to it,” said Mr. O’Connor.

“If you get the name, you’ll be way ahead. Also, cultivate that copper. The bastard detectives will play awesome, as if they’re university men among the pig farmers, but they probably don’t know half as much as the sharp-eyed street constable. Maybe your friend has resentments against them from slights delivered with which you can pry information out of him. Envy is the juice in which the world bubbles, with dashes of malice tossed in to bring the human stew to a delicious boil.”

I did all of that, napping at the paper. It worked out surprisingly well. Indeed, Sergeant Ross gave me the name out of thanks for the light the Star’s original story had shone on him, more than the poor man had ever got in his life, after years of dedicated work. Most important to him, it turned out, was how his mention had buzzed off the gentlemen from the Metropolitan Police Bethel Green J Division, CID, who had been handed the investigation.

Via the Records Department, I got to poor Polly’s husband first, and even broke the news to him. If I’d had a shred of human mercy left, I might have allowed the fellow a moment of repose after hearing that the woman he once loved, the woman who gave him five children, made his food, and gave him her body for twenty-six years before she lost her soul to demon gin, was now dead horribly in the gutter, all cut and minced. Quite the opposite: Knowing him to be vulnerable, I pressed him and got good details. My ambition was as fully sized as any addiction to opium by now. It had been a bit of time since he’d seen her, but through his eyes, I was at least able to give the poor old girl some humanity. That’s the rub of the newspaper game, I realized. It helps me, it does indeed, but it helps you, too, in the long run, though the gain may be a bit late to play out.

Then I went to the Frying Pan, a disagreeable enough place, and there found two souls — the barkeep and Emma Lownes, no fixed address other than the odd week or two in the Lambeth Workhouse, and for the thruppence it took to secure Emma a nice glass of gin that I doubt was distilled by Boodle’s, she evoked the decency of her late friend, her own fear of a man who stabbed and slashed by night, and her extremely limited prospects. In the end I gave her another thruppence, meant to go for a quiet night at a doss house, but I’m sure it went through her gullet and was pissed out by seven that evening.

Finally, having evoked the victim in vivid colors, I went on to the sorry state of the police investigation, Sergeant Ross being once again my confidential source. We met furtively, like spies, in a Whitechapel public house called the Alma, after the great victory in the Crimean War nearly half a century before. By day, it was a dark and low place, with no energy nor fire to it and only dissolute beer fiends and lonely Judys wasting their doss money on gin.

“You can’t use me name on this one,” he said. “Old Warren”—he meant Sir George Warren, embattled head of the Metropolitans—“has set a policy of reticence. You won’t be hearing much on this case, and anything gets out, they’ll be swift after the talker.”

“I will protect you. But in stories to come, you’ll emerge as the true hero of the case. To hell with the CID. They only exist to take bribes anyhow.”

“Appreciated, guv’nor. So this is where we seem to be at”—he paused for the effect—“and that’s nowhere.”

I nodded, having suspected as much. It would be a hard case to crack.

DESPITE INTENSE EFFORTS, POLICE PROGRESS IN THE CASE OF THE SLAUGHTERED WHITECHAPEL UNFORTUNATE, I would write that night, HAVE YET TO YIELD A SUBSTANTIAL CLUE.

AN EARLY ARREST IS RULED OUT, POLICE TELL THE STAR, AND THERE’S LITTLE THAT CAN BE DONE EXCEPT WAIT FOR THE DEMON TO STRIKE AGAIN AND HOPE HE LEAVES A CLEARER TRAIL.

Ross had confirmed what everyone with half a brain knew already, which was that the Metropolitan Police were dependent on the old methods. Though they knew of fingerprints in theory, they had no base or file of them to deploy and, unless left in blood on a knife blade or painted wall, were hard to record from other surfaces. They had only primitive chemistry and medical help, estimating time of death by lividity or temperature of body, a chancy method at best. Their techniques were as old as the Middle Ages: protection and examination of the crime scene, autopsy findings, questioning of suspects, local intelligence, interviews with witnesses, increase in patrolling in the crime area, and finally, reward. However, those techniques worked best when applied to a fellow who was part of an organized criminal underworld, worked for a gang like the High Rips, had mates and a boss and all the appurtenances of the aboveground world only perverted into criminality. He also would have competitors or enemies, neutral observers who would sell him out as a favor for someone else. There was a whole barter system — negotiation, feint, bluff, reward, and punishment — that really underlay the Metropolitan Police’s attempt to control the underworld, even as half successful as that was. Our boy, the mad butcher, was vulnerable to none of it, except by a chance that hadn’t happened or hadn’t evinced itself yet.

You could tick off the mistakes already made one by one: Not realizing how big the case would get, the coppers had been very sloppy on Buck’s Row, even allowing Jeb to track across the murder ground to look at the body as it was fitted into the cart; and the two constables had already mucked up the soil where they’d squirmed to find the leverage to lift poor Polly. The autopsy might yield something, but unless he left a calling card, it would reveal only that a knife was used, which was obvious even to Charlie Cross on his way to work.

As for suspects, presumably the coppers had an index with names of boys in the area who’d taken a hand or even a blade to whores in the past, but this crime was so out of scale with what had come before — and was being blown up even further by the industry of Jeb — that it was unlikely one of these lads had done the deed. All of us, copper, reporter, and reader alike, understood that some threshold had been achieved, some new level had been reached, and like it or not, we had entered a modern age. So the records would be of little use. Maybe the whores knew something, but by nature they weren’t the sort to chatter to CID swells, though the constabulary who shared the streets with them might fare a bit better.

Would extra patrols help? That alone bore some promise, if only to act as a deterrent to the killer’s mad impulses. Maybe, knowing that more constables were about, he’d decide his one triumph was enough to savor in old age. But that was unlikely. There was something unformed, even callow, about the taking of poor Polly’s life. It was like an expeditionary force, not an occupation; he wanted to see if he could get away with it, what it felt like, what could be learned from it, and might regard the increased patrolling as more of a challenge to his intellect.

After all, for all his boldness, he’d been very lucky, barely missing the blue bottles both coming and going. That would annoy him; he had expected so much more to be on his side than pure dumb luck. This time, having mastered the basics, he’d be sharper.

I left the Alma with my Pitman notepad chuck-full, looking for a hansom cab to get me to the office so I could amaze London tomorrow with yet more new revelations. But the traffic on Commercial Street was so heavy, a hansom would do me no good. So I decided to walk a few blocks up till it crossed Whitechapel, and if that broadway were clearer, I’d find the cab there. It was now about eight o’clock by my pocket watch, and up the street I hastened.

It struck me that in my several times here in Whitechapel, I’d never really looked at the place in full clarity. Now, at last, I had space and time and opportunity to behold the hell den where the killer lurked, the ladies walked, the gentlemen searched, and sex and death were in the air.

What you saw, on Commercial Street, at least, was a great bazaar of humanity, a sort of gathering of tribes for sustenance of all sorts (all sorts were available) amid clamor, dust, the smell of horse ordure and human excrement, various foodstuffs, including meat and fruit and candy offered from the abundant stalls clotting the sidewalks, the eau de toilette the ladies presumably splashed about between commercial transactions, and the ever present London tang of coal-oil smoke from all the burners at the hearth, which I am told sometimes combined with the evil sea dew to create the city’s cottony billows of fog. But mostly, you felt the hubbub, the bustle, the clamor, the circus-midway urgency of people unconsciously living out their lives without much thought or hope or worry.

It was a festival of hattery, as none in those days went uncapped. The men beneath, most in heavy frock coats or tweedy Norfolks, all with dark ties cinched about their necks, and most obscured by beard, were unknowable and mysterious as they drifted this way and that. Not all were hunting for Judys, but I think it fair to say that all were hunting for something, be it a beer in a public house, an oyster in a stall, a piece of meat on a stick, a glowing globe of fruit, a new trinket or toy, a bonnet for a lover, an office for a lawyer, a freak with no nose, conjoined twins, magic shows, minstrels true Negro or just paint, or what have you, and I do not know what you have. Some were just slumming, as coming in from the sober City to see the show was quite the habit.

Meanwhile, those of lower origin and destiny fought for space amid the costers’ stalls, coal heavers and dock laborers, dolly mops and magsmen, cabinetmakers and seamstresses, bug hunters and mudlarks, and “entertainers” of various type, ballad singers and oratorical beggars and running patterers and the street-fire king, who devoured and disgorged great scuts of flame for a penny a pyre.

Dust rose from the streets as the cabs and wagons and tram buses coursed slowly up or down, the horses pausing now and again to beshit themselves and the cobblestones, all of it creating a mad din that, heard once, would ring forever in your ears (I hear it now, in a quiet study, twenty-four years later). God was not entirely absent: At street corners the anointed addressed small flocks of believers or want-to-believes and threw scripture hard and loud at them. Commerce of a thousand kinds transpired. But Babylon demanded its obeisance as well: Down side streets were the penny gaffs, wherein, or so it was claimed, scantily clad young maidens cavorted to bad music. Gambling went on everyplace, and if you looked sex-wanting but frightened of a real Judy, a scurvy-looking fellow might approach and offer you French postcards from underneath his coat, these being glimpses of carnal entanglements that took some deciphering. Rat killing seemed an enjoyable sport for certain Johnnies, while others turned to dog fighting, all forms of barbarism offered to the top hats without a blush of shame.

So much frenzy, so much throbbing, so much shove and slip and shuffle, everywhere, everywhere. Chanters, second-edition sellers, boardwalkers, strawers, mountebanks, clowns, jugglers, conjurors, grease removers, nostrum vendors, fortune-tellers, French polishers, turnpike sailors, various classes of lurkers and peepers, stenographic-card sellers, racetrack-card sellers. It was all illuminated by naphtha lamps atop high poles but also by swaths of glare from the public houses, of which there appeared to be one every thirty or forty feet. Besides the Alma, I passed the Ten Bells, the Queen’s Head, the Britannia, the Horn of Plenty, the King’s Share, and the Princess Alice. Each was full packed, in full swing, in full glug, for I should add that liquor was the fuel that kept the human fires of Whitechapel ablaze, which meant that it slowed speech, slurred and slowed and misguided decisions, stuttered steps, and slewed behavior this way and that. A man fully drunk is not fully human: He pisses and shits without remorse, he speaks without thought (the truth, usually, God help us), and he’s quick to fist or blade or bullet. So that, too, that distance from normal discourse, hung over everything like a cloud, a pall, garish in the grotesque play of the light on the puddles in the street or the windows across the way or the shine of the beaver in the hats. No wonder the slummers came to watch.

And the women, of course. By law they could not stop. If they stopped, the coppers could nick them, and it was off to the tank for a night, a night without the comforts of gin, and the quick blast of jizz to pay for it, and finally, hard earned, the lice-infested bed at a doss house. So walk the poor dearies did, in a great circle, up Commercial to Whitechapel, down Whitechapel to Brick Lane, then Brick Lane to Hanbury, which led them back to Commercial. It was said by the Metropolitans that there were at least fifteen hundred Judys on the streets and, in the dark avenues off the lighted concourses, sixty-six brothels, perhaps for a higher class of girl and a higher class of customer. The street girls, however, were the permanent feature of the Whitechapel experience.

Which brings me to the core of the issue: the presence of all those streets and alleys. That was what made the whole thing go, that was what turned Whitechapel into a square-mile outdoor brothel where the grunts and squeals and gasps of the sex dance were never far from the ear, and if you turned as you walked by a dark passageway off the boulevard, you could often make out the shadowy figures of those seeking oblivion in the final spurt of the act.

Whitechapel was so fully laced with dark roads off the main stem, which functioned as “rooms” in the imaginary brothel of which I speak, that you could almost smell the jizz and cunny in the air. The stage design of the immense show was structured along elemental lines: It was simply dark vs. light, each being intensified by the presence of the other, and perhaps many came simply to appreciate the sharpness of the divide between those two worlds. I know I found it fascinating and could not stop turning it over in my mind, believing it had to mean something more than it did.

The light was commerce, family, order, civilization; the dark was raw sex, violence, and by implication the end to civilization. I took as premise that our fellow, our mad butcher, our fiend with a knife, was a creature of the dark, and as such had a kind of mythical significance few could articulate but all could appreciate, for it quivered the marrow of the human bone.

He was what we left behind when we moved indoors, he was the beast of the heart, he was a creature of pure will without interest in, much less an obedience to, all those rules we agreed upon when we put ourselves under roof. Mercy? Pity? Cooperation? Civility? Brotherhood? The hallowed temple of the soul? Bah, he pushed them aside with a single brutish swipe. He was out of the Cimmerian darkness, mangy, hairy, quick to slash and cut and exult in the spillage of blood. He cried havoc, he let slip the dogs of depravity and murder, but even more loudly he cried, Not so fast. With your modern age, your railways, your steel ships and machines of war and deep penetrations under the earth for a fuel to drive it all — not so fast, you blighters. Here is the message I deliver for you to contemplate. I am anarchy. I am fear. I am carnage, slaughter, destruction for its own sake. I will remind you: It is your vanity to believe you have come so far and left me behind. You will never leave me behind. Don’t you see it yet? I am you.

That, really, is why I knew he’d strike again.

And he did.

CHAPTER SEVEN The Diary

I left my dwelling at nine P.M. and took a hansom to city center, and had a repast in a public house, aware that I had my Sheffield in my belt at my hip, under the shirt and the frock coat I chose to wear on these expeditions. It gave me a nice shiver of bliss to be sitting there amid men of business and journalism or whatever, serious men, being seemingly one of them, and them not knowing what lay beneath my coat, them not noticing me at all or if so only in passing, them never guessing in a million years that eight inches of just-sharpened steel held tight in a grip of fine English maplewood pressed against my flesh, rather uncomfortably but not without its own measure of pleasure. A man with a good knife feels king of the world, that’s for certain!

I ambled about, taking pleasure in the city at night. It was such a mad, delirious carnival, and because the weather was superior, most seemed to be temporarily jolly and taking pleasure in the fact that life had put so much on their table. In this way I passed the hours, partaking, enjoying, meandering, observing, and, one supposes, gathering. Everywhere the lights were magnificent and in them showed the red, pleased faces of common men, pleased again to be common and to be men. By midnight I had made my way to Whitechapel by avoiding the Underground railway and its steam-engined efficiency and shoulder-to-shoulder crowds entirely. The flesh parade was in full operation. Again I ambled, even took a stroll down Buck’s Row to see the spot of my previous action. There, flowers and candles and various memento mori had been placed on the street just beyond the bridge over the East London Railway tracks, exactly where I had felled poor Polly. A few others stood by, trying to absorb what had happened there, standing, pointing, hoping perhaps to find in the dark a clue the police had missed in full daylight. I suppose some thought that the murderer always returns to the site of his crime, and though in this case it turned out to be true, it happened not out of will or even vague plan but just because at the time the whimsy took me.

I returned to Whitechapel High Street, ambled down it, found a crowded public house — the Horn of Plenty — and had a stout. It wasn’t for nerves, for mine were steady on without a problem; it was to kill time. But I had wanted plenty of time, and to make my way on foot in a moseying fashion, so that no hansom cabman or horse-tram driver could remember, no matter how small a chance that might be. One couldn’t be too careful, except in the act of commission, where one had momentarily to be bold as a pirate, to strike and go to red carnage, and then obsequiously depart under cover of darkness and unprepossesion of being.

Sometime after two, I slipped out; the crowd was thinning, and again I was worried about standing out. Now my course took me down Whitechapel, where the crowds were more or less thick, and I began my wend through smaller streets until I found myself at Hanbury and Brick Lane, another thoroughfare known as a Judy broadway. It was well lit, and though the crowds were thinner, the business — which, after all, is based on the eternal fires of lustful loins and the eternal availability of opened thighs — still produced a human density. I glanced at my watch, saw that it was nearly three, and instead of continuing down Hanbury, took a right to eat up some more time and wait for the crowds to thin further. I stopped for another stout, finding a seat at the bar where I could keep an eye on the street, and there watched for constables and, at a certain time when the street seemed devoid of them, wandered out upon it.

I spotted her right away. This one was short and thick but obviously a Judy on patrol, trolling for her thruppence. She wore two rings on her left hand, middle finger; I had already conjured a use for such a clue. It fit neatly into the overall plan animating my campaign. I approached her, moving a bit faster than she, until I was just behind her left shoulder, where I adjusted my pace to hers and made certain to violate the commonly understood social principles of space, coming far too close, so that my intention was clear. She turned, but not fully to face me, and I saw her doughy profile at the quarter-angle, the broad nose, the painted-on brightness of inexpensive coloring. I could smell her eau d’toilette. She flashed a sliver of a smile, enough for me to see amazingly strong teeth, and more or less whispered, “What’s it, then, dearie? Bit of sport for the gentleman?”

“I am indeed hoping for just such, my dear,” I said. I had timed it perfectly, intercepting her before and making the connection exactly at the Hanbury Street junction.

“We’ll find a lovely private spot, then,” she said, and led me to the right, into the darkness, down Hanbury.

We drifted slowly, my love and I, along the dark block, lost in a canyon of dark brick, illuminated here and there by a late reader’s light. Ahead, another block away, we could see the brightness that was Commercial Street, and see the traffic upon it, the drift of the gals and beaus and visitors and innocents. As a twosome, we were too close, not quite a couple but not strangers, either. Ghostlike apparitions drifted by us now and then, a Judy, a John, an early-rising workman, who could tell?

Near the end of the block, as I had anticipated — for I had probed the area for possibility a few days earlier — she indicated a rightward turn with her head and put her weight against a door, and it opened to reveal the dark passage that was the throughway to the backyard of 29 Hanbury. We slipped along a dark corridor, passing a mute stairway at the left, and came to nestle near the way out.

“Got a present for Annie, your lordship?” she asked. She had a rheumy, wet slough to her voice, as if her lungs were full of death, and seemed a little blurry, not drunk as a sailor but in that zone of vagueness that the gin confers before it hammers one into full-bang disorientation.

I pressed the coin into her hand, and she took it greedily, sliding it into some hidden pocket of her voluminous dark dress. I said, “Come, let’s move a bit, into more privacy.” I had a fear that this place was too vulnerable, that noise would rise through the house or that another Judy and her companion of the minute might enter 29, not knowing it was occupied.

And here is where what happened began to deviate from the ideal. I had imagined a hundred times since picking the site how we’d end up in the backyard, and how I’d cut her hard, and how fast she’d die, and how I’d do what must be done, and how smoothly it would all go. But no plan survives contact with the world beyond the mind.

“Sweetie, here’s fine, come on, then, let me pull up me petticoats and we can—”

As if it had a will of its own, my left hand shot out like a snake and bit hard at her throat. Recalling now, I realize that I was not prepared to be defied, I was certainly not willing to argue, and my threshold of frustration was dangerously low, though I had been unaware, thinking myself blissfully composed and utterly in control of both self and lady. It was not so. My hand clamped at her larynx and began to squeeze with the full force of my musculature and my will behind it. Even in the dark, I saw the surprise light her face as the oxygen was pressed off, and though so cinched she could not cry out, her throat’s machinery began to manufacture unintelligible noises of despair, dry clicks and hitches, half-grunts, spitless, noiseless screams, the sound of inner structures rubbing frictively against each other, words that no letters exist to approximate, a whole product line of constricted-throat expectorations, and one hand feebly came to beat against my pinioning arm. I knew this would not do, not here, not indoors, where at any moment we could be interrupted, and so with my right hand, I grabbed her fleshy biceps and put force behind, bumping her along, if you will, shoving her with my chest, guiding her with one hand to arm, one to throat, all the while strangling. It was as weird a dance as has ever been danced, an uncoordinated shuffle of bodies set against each other with the ultimate progress to the way out ten feet, then seven, then four away.

Three, two, one, and we were out the rear door. Still almost carrying her — she was not light, but the intensity of the struggle released strange fluxes of strength through my limbs — I took her down three steps, pivoted to the left, and braced her hard against the wooden fence there, well constructed, as I have said, and able to sustain the force of my thrusting her body against it.

In a flash, I let go of her arm and reached back to withdraw the Sheffield from my belt, aware the whole time that the episode had completely veered south from perfection and become a graceless, cruel thing. Whether she was dead or not — her tongue seemed to protrude from her lips, and her eyes were shut — I could not tell, but if so, just so, and if not, almost so. I struck her neck hard with the knife, blade belly sinking into the softness, and drew it strong around, letting my left hand slip off her throat at last.

That was a moment. She was propped against the fence, unsupported by me, her throat ripped but not yet producing blood, utterly still, quite vulnerable. I struck her again, again felt bite of knife’s belly, again drew down and, pivoting myself, around until my natural length of arm ran out and the blade broke free of its cutting stroke. Now came the blood. As before, a progression, first the droplet, then a few crooked tracks tracing the geography of her neck where it merged into shoulder, an area as full of subtle hollows and ridges as a landscape, then a black stream, then a torrent, then a deluge. She slid to the left as the blood continued to gush, and came to rest with her head next to the three steps down which we had come, parallel to the fence.

Again, there was no death rattle; no sound marked her passing from this world to the next. I controlled my breathing — exertions so intense always stir the heart, it is a natural rule of the body, found universally in biology among all mammalian creatures — and reacquired the focus I needed. First the rings. I pulled her dead hand up, laid the knife upon her chest, and yanked the two brass circles off her pudgy digit. I may have done some harm, not that she noticed, for the finger fought me and I had to yank and twist quite aggressively. I deposited them in my pocket. Next up was her pitiful estate, as looted from her pocketbook. I took some care in arranging its meager contents neatly next to her feet: two small hair combs, one in a paper sheath of some sort, and a piece of coarse muslin whose function was utter mystery to me. An envelope didn’t fit into the line by her feet, so I placed it daintily next to her head. That neatness stood in contrast to what came next, and I was not unaware of the effect.

I reacquired the knife, pulled her petticoats up, saw — oh, comic detail, too pretty to be true but true nonetheless — striped bloomers. I pulled them down until I’d exposed her slack gut, a large dish of pudding, creased and gelid and wrinkly, with a kind of substrata that looked, even in the quarter-moon, like curdled milk.

I cut a deep stroke, left to right, across her lower belly, but unlike with Polly, did not stop there. More work was to be done. My cut was longer, deeper, more workmanlike. I opened a flap into her bowels, pulling it back as one would pull back a canvas, and they lay before me, almost an abstraction. In the moon’s faint blush, they were like a sausage stew, all interconnected in twisty, labyrinthine ways. Perhaps I hesitated, perhaps I didn’t. There was blood, but, the heart that drove it being quieted, no pressure, and so it simply ran downhill to disappear in her swaddles of clothing.

I had seen beasts gutted and felt no remorse, for I was applying myself merely to a sack that now had no spiritual dimension, no sentience, memory, individuality, hope, or fear. I slipped the knife behind the tubes to find the way out — that is, the large one leading to the anus — and cut through it, finding it slippery to penetrate but yielding once the knife edge had found purchase and made its argument persuasively. The whole bloody pile was open for play. I grabbed, my gloves turning black in the moonlight where they would have been scarlet in the sun, and extracted one slippery clottage and tossed it over her shoulder, where it did not quite fly away but rather unraveled, as the flight through air took out its kinks.

That foray into the cavity took most of her from her stomach, but at least a quarter of the tubing remained, and so I repeated the act, removing all but remnants of what remained, and flung them over the same shoulder. Again the phenomenon of unraveling, as the yards of curled loop became, under the process of being flung, a long and stringy ribbon.

Thus was she excavated. Now, pièce de résistance. Dr. Gray was my guide, Sheffield’s legendary sharpness my facilitator, but will to complete the task was the true coal that made my furnace rage. I dipped into the crater I had created, searched downward through wreckage and liquifaction, and even though my gloves cut off the subtle sensations to my fingers, found what I desired. I thought of them as the woman’s biscuits. Once found, I quickly removed, by suppleness of hand, the two trophies I will leave to the reporters to identify, if they dare.

I stood, after cleaning my blade on her dress, and restored it to its place. I deposited my trophies in an inner pocket, where, after wiping and wringing them, I was certain they would not be moist enough to stain through the heavy wool. I peeled the gloves from my hand and put each in a different pocket, gave my suit a quick examination so that I was confident its darkness and the darkness of the quarter-moon night would camouflage it well. I clutched the two rings in my pocket to make sure I had them both, and departed through the same door by which I had come.

On Hanbury I took a right but didn’t bother with either Brick Lane or Commercial Street, as both, I feared, would be too well lit to conceal the moisture from the dear lady’s insides if it sneaked through the wool. Instead I turned down Wilkes Street and continued to more or less track my way helter-skelter through the dark warren of Whitechapel. I saw only the occasional ghost and once or twice heard a gentle call—“Sir, is the gentleman seeking something?”—but shook my head firmly and continued on my way at a medium, somewhat relaxed pace. I looked at my watch in the farthest light of a gaslamp I encountered, and saw that it was not yet four-thirty A.M.

CHAPTER EIGHT Jeb’s Memoir

It was about six-twenty A.M. — I could tell by the clock on the spire of the Black Eagle Brewery just down the street — when I arrived, in pale, moist dawn, a ha’penny’s worth of moon above the western horizon. At 29 Hanbury, there was no cordon of coppers, no wagons drawn up, no sense of municipal officialdom. Rather, I saw something between a group and a crowd of citizens already formed; it lacked the crowd’s anger and purpose, being not packed, angry, clamoring to all get somewhere at once. Too, it was more than a group, for it had purpose and focus, not random togetherness, as its organizational principle. I suppose it was something oxymoronic, like a “crowd of individuals,” that is to say, each of the men — mostly workers — was there but not bonded with any other particular person. They were there because of the fascination of death, fate, slaughter, crime, murder, all those Big Things that have an eternal pull on heart and mind. I was the same, except that I had a mission, not just a fascination.

Thus I slid through them easily, and no one felt pressured to block the way or forbid me passage. It turned out they were clustered at an open door, and I could see that it revealed a passage through past No. 29 to what was presumably a yard in back. I entered the tunnel, again found no resistance, and moved along the shabby walls, the peeling paint, the unvarnished wood, all of it screaming its message of messy squalor, Whitechapel style.

I reached the doorway, took a quick peek out, and saw nothing to impede my progress. Only a single man was there, and he was kneeling over what I knew to be the body, to my immediate left at the foot of the steps, next to the fence, though in the still-dim light, from my angle, I could make no sense of the corpse: It appeared to be some kind of spilled, opened suitcase, as I saw mostly disheveled clothes and could make out no identifiable features. I did what no other would do; I stepped into the yard.

The man looked up, his face grave and his demeanor stilled by trauma. “Dr. Phillips— Say, you’re not the surgeon.”

“No, Inspector,” I said. “Jeb, of the Star.”

“Bloke, Old Man Warren doesn’t like you press fellows mucking about.”

“I’m fine with that, but since I’m here first, I’m a responsible writer and not a screaming lying hack, and I can get your name in the largest newspaper in the kingdom, you won’t mind if I peek about a bit, will you then, Inspector…?”

“Chandler.”

“First name, rank?” How quickly I made him a conspirator!

“Inspector Joseph Chandler.”

“Thank you.”

“All right, but don’t dawdle, and I’ll show you the particulars.”

That’s how I met the lady who turned out — by eleven-thirty that morning, another Jeb scoop — to be Annie Chapman. I met her; she did not meet me. All she did was lie there, her guts spread to the sun, moon, and stars.

“God,” I said.

“Ever seen an animal gutted?”

I lied. “Many a time, hunting red Irish stag.”

“Don’t know if our boy is a hunter, but he does like the knife.”

I immediately noted, as I bent over her, the difference between her and her sister in martyrdom, Polly Nichols, and that was her tongue. It was bloated like a hideous sausage, so wide an impediment that her lips were distended about it.

“Seen anything like that, Inspector Chandler?”

“Unfortunately. It happens as a consequence of strangulation. He crushed her throat before—”

He pointed. As before, the two deep eviscerations in the left quarter of the throat, leading around to the front before petering out. As before, clear of blood, as it had all slobbered out, sinking into her clothes and the ground and leaving spatters on the fence, where she had been cut. The dawn rendered it more as to coloration but not as to truth; in the pale light it was a kind of purple or lavender. I had yet to see the mythic red.

“Look here,” said Chandler, “this, too, is extraordinary.” He pointed to her possessions, which had been neatly arrayed, as if for an inspection, next to her roughly shod feet, between them and the base of the fence. I wrote down what I saw: a few combs broken and whole, another piece of raw muslin that I thought the ladies secured as a handkerchief for wiping up the fluids generated by their profession. A crumpled envelope lay next to her head.

“Quite tidy,” I said.

“Maybe he’s something of a perfectionist.”

“He certainly did the perfect job on her middle parts.”

“Aye, that he did.”

Yes, no doubt. I will here spare the reader and myself another recitation (vide, the diary, previous chapter) of the destruction.

“Quite nasty,” I said. “Obviously mad as a hatter.”

“You wouldn’t want to meet him in the dark. Not without a Webley, that is.”

Suddenly a third man joined us.

“Dr. Phillips, sir?” asked Chandler.

“Yes, yes. Oh, God, look at that.” He was brought back by the carnage inflicted, as would all men be.

George Bagster Phillips, the surgeon of the Met’s Whitechapel H Division, which would take over the murder cases, slid by me, drinking in the detail. He seemed to assume I was another plainclothes copper, and Chandler was so nonplussed by the arrival of the higher rank that he never introduced me. Meanwhile, other cops were drifting in, taking a look at the body. They stomped about in their heavy black shoes, flattening all upon which they trod, trying to be efficient but, as per expectation, doing damage to the scene far more than uncovering any clues. They were like penned hogs fighting to get to the trough. A supervisor was trying to impose some semblance of order. “Now, now, fellows, let’s be thorough, let’s be organized, let’s not rush through the scene. We need clues.”

“Here’s a dandy,” said Chandler. He had bent and turned the envelope, which said “Sussex Regiment” on it. That seemed to be the first break! And I was there to witness it.

“Good work, Chandler,” the supervisor said. “Now you others, you do the same.”

Well, I knew that it took no great genius to notice an envelope on the ground, but Chandler seemed so pleased with the nod, he again forgot to explain who I was and what I was doing there.

At about this time, Dr. Phillips arose from the body, scribbling notes to himself on a notepad.

“Sir,” I said, “have we a time of death?”

“She’s cold except where her body was in contact with the ground, and so I’d put time of death at about four-thirty A.M. Rigor is beginning to set in.”

“Any interesting tidbits?”

“I noted bruises on one finger. It wasn’t broken, but all blotchy blue, as if roughly treated. I saw the indentations of rings, so he clearly helped himself to her jewelry. It can’t have been much, given her circumstances, but I do wonder why.”

“Did the killer remove any parts of her?” She seemed not merely destroyed but looted as well.

“I’ll know when I get her back to the mortuary. It’s quite a shambles in there now.”

“Any man stains on her, indicating an attack of a salubrious nature?”

He turned and looked me full in the face. “I say, who are you?”

Well, the jig was up. Two constables quickly escorted me to the street. My time in the yard at 29 Hanbury was finished.

It was about now that genius of O’Connor came into full play. I did not race back to Fleet Street by hansom, eating up the minutes in traffic, stuck behind horse trams and delivery wagons and other hansoms. No indeed. Instead I went to the Aldgate East Underground station, which had just opened at seven, and found a telephone cabinet. I picked up the instrument, waited until one of the girls at the Telephone Exchange came on the line, and in five seconds, I was talking with Henry Bright.

“Woman in backyard, 29 Hanbury, Whitechapel. Tongue swollen as if strangled, two deep cuts to neck, as at Buck’s Row. Henry, this next part is nauseating.”

“Spit it out, young fellow.”

“He pulled out her guts and flung them over her shoulder. They quite unraveled. It looked like spaghetti, purpled spaghetti.”

“Superb,” said Henry. “Oh, excellent.”

I went on with details, putting Dr. Phillips there, confirmed the lack of identity of the victim, and told him I’d be headed next to the mortuary.

“Splendid, lad. Bang-on splendid.”

So the Star was again first with the worst. I don’t know how they did it, but Henry Bright turned my notes into serviceable prose, as abutted by official responses garnered by someone at Scotland Yard, mostly piffle, and the story was on the street by eleven A.M., beating all the other afternoon boys by a good thirty minutes. In O’Connor’s world, that was a mighty triumph.

But the true depth of Henry’s greatness was expressed on the front page. It bore one word:

Who in passing could not pick that up for a shilling and lose him- or herself inside, where “ ‘Jeb’ on the scene at Whitechapel, and Henry Bright at the Star” had all the nasty details?

And now on to my greatest triumph. It was so simple I hesitate to give it away. But it made me a legend, it earned me a ten-pound cash bonus, it went to six replates, and it impressed even Harry Dam, though I had yet to meet him. I went on a certain day back to Whitechapel, looking for a gal who knew Annie. I found her on station, as it were, in a slow patrol down Wentworth, looking haggard and ill used, which was clear indication that she was haggard and ill used.

“Madam, Jeb of the Star; I saw you at the occasion of Annie’s death.”

“You,” she said. “Reporter, news fella type. You wrote nice about poor Annie, everybody read it and remembered the poor gal.”

“May I buy you a gin? Perhaps we could discuss her some more.”

“I likes me gin, sure,” she said, and we shortly were arranged at a table at the Ten Bells, a watering and ginning hole to the trade.

The chat was general and pleasant and sad for a bit, and like all of the unfortunates I would meet, she turned out, once one was by her defenses, to be an all right sort, brought low by her love of the fiery blur she held in the glass before her, but she didn’t produce anything I could use for the longest time, and I began to wonder how to pass her off without buying her another thruppence of bliss, when she said in response to nothing I had been clever enough to ask, “Wonder what the bloke done with ’er rings?”

“I say, what rings?” And then I remembered Bagster Phillips remarking on her bruised finger and surmising the absence of the rings.

“Annie had them two brass rings. Nothing to ’em, but they was dear to ’er. They was wedding rings, she said. ’E cuts ’er guts out plain, and ’e takes them rings. ’E’s off ’is chum, that one.”

I nodded.

And thus the next day’s Star front page, consisting entirely of:

That moved the story hard for a few days, being the sort of homey, horrifying detail the shopkeeps and shopgirls and clerks and barristers’ assistants could get an emotional fix on. Where were Annie’s rings? If the fiend was one of my readers, he’d be wise to chuck them in the Thames and think no more. But I thought I detected a whiff of vanity in him; he just might be arrogant enough to keep them. Be interesting, I thought, if it was the evidence of the rings that sent him to the gallows.

Many other issues drifted in and out of focus over the next weeks, all of them ultimately meaningless and not worth recording here, one of them being what time it was the poor girl expired, as several highly dubious witnesses reported hearing, seeing, and not seeing things at conflicting times during the morning. The coppers believed them and dismissed their own surgeon’s learned opinion. What utter foolishness!

But in the end, only one thing lingered: a business of the Jews. I suspect the large influx of them excited anger, fear that they would bring alien ways to old Albion, undercutting the labor market and driving good Englishmen out of work. Of the seventy-six thousand occupants of Whitechapel, thirty to forty thousand were Jewish, while of that same total population 40 percent were below the poverty level. Thus, in many minds, Jews equaled unemployment. So there was no love for them to begin with when the murders started.

This anger began to coagulate at their commission. We of Fleet Street were no help at all. One of our reporters — not the famous Jeb but the Yank calling himself Harry Dam, whom I didn’t know except by name, as, recall, his absence “with a floozy” had gotten me into this game in the first place — had reported even the week before Annie’s death that a fellow named “Leather Apron” was a suspect. That was, by the way, what many called Jewish butchers. That a leather apron was found soaking in a tub in the yard of 29 Hanbury (yes, I had missed it, as had the clomping coppers for quite some time) didn’t help matters, even if it was soon proved to have nothing to do with the case. Still, the Leather Apron whisper would not go away.

Harry played up the Jewish characteristics of this beast Leather Apron, intimating mystical use for the blood and certain body parts of poor Polly. And the killer hadn’t even taken any body parts! One day Mr. O’Connor, who knew a replate story if ever there was one, ran the headline LEATHER APRON: ONLY NAME LINKED TO WHITECHAPEL MURDERS. I suppose I didn’t approve, but I was hoping to be taken on permanent-like, so who was I to go against the great man’s judgment?

Then the Manchester Guardian wrote, “It is believed that (Scotland Yard) attention is directed to a notorious character named ‘Leather Apron.’… all are united in the belief that (the killer) is a Jew or of Jewish parentage, his face being of a marked Jewish type.”

You could feel a fever building. I was part of it but had no tool by which to stop it. I also had no will to, being largely agnostic on the issue and knowing no Jews and feeling a little suspicious of them myself. That indifference, plus my customary greed and ambition, got the best of my low character; I had signed on to ride the train as far as it would take me, and damnation to all crushed beneath its progress. I had no idea how far that would be.

The mobs responded to this campaign as mobs do: violently. Crews of young toughs roamed Whitechapel and roughed up individual Jews. The coppers seemed to pick up anybody with a Jewish name and bring him in for hard questioning: among the arrestees, Jacob Isenschmid and Friedrich Shumacher.

Finally, a Jewish slipper maker, actually nicknamed Leather Apron, was arrested and interrogated. It turned out he had knocked a Judy or two about, but that was all, and he was in no way affiliated with knives or the sort of carnage our fellow had made twice. He had well-proven alibis and was let go.

But the Jewish fear grew. On several occasions, mobs formed outside the Spitalfields police station where this Leather Apron (John Pizer, by name) was incarcerated. Anti-Jewish graffiti began to appear mysteriously on tenement walls and storefronts. A very uncomfortable tension, palpable and unsettling, began to course through the lower orders — I love them in principle, but I was to learn on this adventure that they can be reprehensible louts in ungoverned mobs and need stern leadership to harness their rage — and violence was in the air. If our killer was a Jew, killing on some kind of twisted religious grounds, I had no idea what mischief might be released. For that and that alone, I began to hope that early suspicions of a doctor or a surgeon played out, for if it were an upper-class nob, it’s unlikely that a mob would head into Kensington with torches and pitchforks. For one thing, the Queen’s Royal Horse Guards would stop them with Gatling guns before they got across the street, just like the black-skinned ugga-buggas, and that would be a bloody day for old London.

Among all these voices, one was not heard from. The killer’s. His weekly schedule was not kept, and he did not strike again for two weeks after Annie. What was he doing?

Dear Mum,

I never heard from you after the last letter, but maybe that’s because I didn’t send it. Ha-ha! Maybe when they catch this fellow, I’ll send it and this one and you and Da can have a good laugh about how your bad daughter survived what all about is calling “the autumn of the knife.”

You know the fellow is back and he cut up another girl. He even stole her wedding rings! It’s been in all the papers, so I know you heard about it, and you’ll be worrying because this time it’s so close by me. Well, I am writing to tell you don’t be worried! Nothing’s going to happen to me. I have a guardian angel now!

I have a fellow, a nice man, he doesn’t beat me or try and shove me about to be a certain way. He lets me be, and what more can a girl ask, plus he brings in a good penny as he works as a porter at the Billingsgate fish market, where there’s a lot of packing and loading and ice chipping to do, so when he gets home, he’s a tired fellow and we’ll have a glass of beer at the pub. He wants me to stop with what I do bringing in the money, and maybe that’s in the cards, who can read the future? But I’ll tell you, he won’t let no other fellow on to me, well, on to me to hurt me. As I said, see, it’s different down here, all of us are so close to going under that it’s more forgiving of certain things. There’s no high and mighty. Nobody’s high, nobody’s mighty, you do what you has to, and you helps out them what needs it and in turn, when you’re down, they’ll help you back. The girls is all so nice, not like some I’ve known.

The other thing is that poor Annie, that’s what the newspapers say was her name, she was again a lone gal on a dark street, with nobody about to see or stop nothing. He fooled her into taking him into a backyard where it was even darker than the street, and that’s where he ripped her up, and you must have heard, as I have, it’s in all the papers, this time he did a job on the ripping.

I don’t know what makes a fellow want to do that. We girls never hurt nobody, and only a few of us gets involved in any bully game, and then only when a boyfriend threatens with a whipping or worse. But mostly we get along with each other, with the blue bottles, as we call coppers, and with the boyos who come down here for their bit of dirty.

See, Mum, I’m always with other girls, and we’ll be walking round and round and keeping an eye out for each other. And we’ll only go with a gentleman if he’s nicely dressed and polite and don’t smell too bad. It’s said this fellow is a Jew called Leather Apron, as all the Jew butchers seem to wear such a thing. One of our better coppers, called Johnny Upright for his good and fair ways, done arrested him, and for a time, it seemed there’d be no more cutting. Johnny Upright got his man! Too bad, ain’t it so, that this Leather Apron wasn’t the true bad bloke, only someone the papers said was bad. They had to let him go. But Johnny Upright’s still on the case and you can bet on that one.

Sometimes you do see the Jews down here, but usually they stick to their own section, which ain’t far, but almost always they’re doing some business, they’re always buying for three and somehow turning it about to sell for four, so I’m not one who thinks it is a Jewish fellow. They’re too busy counting their gold, ha-ha! More like a sailor or a soldier, they can be brutes and want what they want. I don’t like soldiers; hurting is what they does.

But as I say, even after the job he done on poor Annie and the ripping they say was horrible, and even though it was but a few blocks down, I know it’ll be all swell. Johnny Upright will save us, and then my man’s always on guard and won’t let nobody touch me. Well, ha-ha, “touch” me. Now I know I won’t send this letter to you, Mum, because you wouldn’t find it so funny ha-ha at all.

But still it makes me feel so close to you and to all that I miss so bad. I keep hoping that someday I’ll wake up and the thirst will be gone and I can go back to having a nice life like everybody else. I hope that so bad and I love you so much.

Your loving daughter

Mairsian

CHAPTER NINE The Diary

To quote my many Cockney friends, it only hurts when I larf. And there is much about which to larf. I cannot help the larfter, for example, when I contemplate the accounts of the bumbling clowns better known as the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard, the coppers, the Bobbies. Make that Boobies. What a show of idiocy.

Forget the idiocy of competing, distracting witnesses, the crushing of the crime scene until, if it wasn’t clueless to begin with, it was quickly rendered thereup, forget that one thing, they dismiss their own surgeon, according to the Star, who correctly placed the time of Annie’s journey at four-thirty A.M.

No, the issue here is Lieutenant Colonel Sir Charles Warren, the soldier fellow who runs the coppers in his dotage, a gift, one supposes, from the monstrous dowager Vicky as reward for having sent so many heathens to heathen heaven, so our merchants could move in and rob the survivors blind. Note how a certain pattern holds true: The more honorifics before a man’s name and the more initials after them, the bigger an idiot he is likely to be. Thus, he is at his worst when his best is most demanded by the situation. How our empire managed to crush all those wogs under such fools is a mystery, the answer, I suspect, having to do with a superior mechanical imagination as to machines than its poor victims as opposed to any genius among its leaders. We had got the Gatling, and they had not. Sir Charles is so pressured by my predations that he has lost all ability to discriminate. What is needed is the sharp intelligence of a single man who has the wisdom to penetrate the obvious nonsense and press hoo-hah and understand exactly how it happened and from that deduce who did it. Alas, such a man only exists in the fancies of a fellow named Conan Doyle, and his portrait is an ideal, not an actuality. I would tremble in my boots if Sherlock Holmes were after me, but dear Sherlock exists only in the vapors of the Conan Doyle mind, not on the cobblestones of Whitechapel! Ha, and double ha.

But idiocy doesn’t stop there. Even Dr. Phillips, whose expertise, if ignored, specified the deed’s time, is not immune. Upon discovering some sweetbreads gone from Annie, who needed them no longer, he expostulated that I — that is, a theoretical “I”—had sold them to medical schools. Indeed, yes, another ha. And how would a fellow go about doing such, I wonder, without giving up the jig? A far more judicious interpretation, even if equally untrue, would be that “I” am a researcher of some sort, an MD or a Doctor of Science in chemistry or some arcane element of body knowledge, and needed the U and the V for experimentation. From that supposition, all kinds of worthy enterprises could be hatched: One could go to medical faculties and inquire about “unbalanced” graduates with an interest in the areas inferred by these sweetbreads; one could inquire of pharmaceutical companies, who would know such things, what drugs had been and were still being or were possibly being implemented to affect these areas of the woman body. One could also take inquiries into a much lower realm, for example, and examine the nonoccidental element for magic uses of these two biscuits in preparing such products sexual as aphrodisiacs, pregnancy terminators, love potions, and the whole panoply of imaginative folkloric usage. All would be wrong, but all would nevertheless be intelligent deductions from the material at hand.

The only sensible man alive appears to be this Jeb of the Star, who quite helpfully noted and played all ruffles and flourishes with the missing rings. ANNIE’S WEDDING RINGS! The fiend even took poor Annie’s rings. If only she’d have had a cat to murder, that would have blown the keg full to heaven. But the rings thing was perfect calculation on my part and perfect application on Jeb’s; his mission is to sell newspapers, at which he no doubt succeeded, and though I have a different product in mind, his enthusiasm at his “scoop” is a first stop on the way to my triumph. It pleases.

Yet in all the mirth, a certain melancholy cannot be denied. First, poor Annie has been lost in all this. It seems that I, her slayer, her strangler, her vivisectionist, am the only being on earth who laments her passing, doomed enough by corrupted lung as the poor lass was, testimony of Dr. Phillips proving the point. I could solipsistically argue that my intercession spared the poor lady much in the way of pain and dissolution, in exchange merely for time, a year’s worth. But I will not. Each man’s death and et cetera diminishes even me. It was my agency and I am the bloke all are on the prowl to bring down and see floating beneath the gallows arm, suspended by a stout piece of hemp. I am guilty, guv’nor, at least by your laws.

Like that of Polly before her, Annie’s character flaw appeared to be alcoholism, perhaps brought about by the wretched and crushing fates of two of her three children, one an early death, the other a cripple who had to go into a state ward. As before, there was no net to capture the falling Annie, and she landed in Whitechapel’s most wretched slum, the Wicked Quarter Mile, as it has been called, selling notch and lip for enough bad gin to drown the pain. There is little else to tell; the most remarkable thing about her was the encounter with me and, I suppose, her surprisingly strong, straight teeth, so unusual that even Phillips remarked on them in his report. If anyone of celestial royalty is listening — as an atheist, I doubt it, but one must abide by the ceremony — I hereby apologize for the botch I made of the passing. The business of the left hand and the constriction of the throat happened, as it were, spontaneously, but nevertheless, it speaks as an expression of and extension of my will which would not be denied, so I will not deny responsibility. The knife at least takes these angels quickly and sends them painlessly to their god and his heaven, if that is where they in fact go, or possibly just into a painless forever of dreamless sleep. The strangulation business is ugly, to say nothing of difficult to manage and slow to take effect. My apology and my pledge to all who come before me never to repeat the sacrilege.

On the other hand, another of my plans is working splendidly, beyond ANNIE’S WEDDING RINGS. That is this business of the Jews. It is something I had foreseen, as it seems to be a universal. Wherever they go, these people inflame malice, envy, anger, suspicion, and violence. Yet Mr. Disraeli was a Jew, was he not? The great banking family Rothschild, which has financed many of the glorious buildings of Paris and other cities, is Jewish. Many great philosophers are Jewish, as are scientists, mathematicians, scholars, and doctors. I suspect the hatred that always accompanies their presence has to do with the fact that some of them have a gift for numbers and are able to figure in extreme speed the advantage of this rate over that rate in the long term versus the short term, and they have a way of offering deals that sound good to the taker, except that in time he learns the terms were not in his favor.

An ugly current has been loosened, egged on by reprehensible newspapering, as led by the noxious Mr. Harry Dam of the Star. He was, for a time, obsessed with some apparition called Leather Apron, a mystical Jew butcher-beast, and as a consequence, Whitechapel became unsafe for the many poor Jews who live there. About that reality, neither Dam nor the Star appears to care a jot! In any event, Leather Apron was soon rounded up and found completely innocent, as were several other Jews and marginal wretches who bumbled into Warren’s crude dragnet. But even as these cases are revealed to be without foundation, nobody is listening and the temperature is rising. Soon lynchings may occur, followed by pogroms, neighborhood burnings, the death of innocents. It will be a return to the Middle Ages.

It is the most perfect screen for my next and most ingenious move. My mind is clever, and if I plot carefully, reconnoiter adroitly, and am bold, I will triumph in the end. This stroke of genius has an added advantage: I have enough blood on my hands and will happily greet Old Scratch when he leads me to hell’s tenth circle, but I do not need to add that of a thousand Jewish babies. I will be cleansed of that sin. Egad, have I accidentally done something moral? How appalling!

CHAPTER TEN Jeb’s Memoir

I opened the envelope — finding it first of all to be on the heavy cream stock of higher taste, familiar somehow — removed the missive inside, unfolded it, half recognized the penmanship, and then fully recognized it fully: Charlie!

That is, Charles Harrison Hilliard, editor of Contemporary Review, a lively and often bawdy arts journal that I contributed to quite regularly for some years before falling into the Star’s orbit, therefore aligning myself with Big Boring Press and cutting loose from Small Impudent Press. Charlie came from department store people in some far provincial town, but he, having none of it, was quite content to spend their hard-earned money on a quarterly of sublime physical beauty that was notably full of irreverence, immaturity passing as wit, radical politics, the need to shock for its own sake, and the occasional truly well-conceived essay by someone whose name was not yet big enough to get him published in the Atheneum. That was me. The Atheneum crowd, very Oxbridgy and, for all their liberal airs, quite nose-up when it came to rube Irish geniuses in brown suits with the look of a pig farmer’s right-hand man, had yet to notice me and perhaps never would. Very well, I snorted to myself many a time, I shall live quite happily without the Atheneum, and I paid them back the insult of not noticing me by not noticing them, which they never noticed.

So here was Charlie, after a few years’ absence from my life.

It arrived at the perfect time. I’d worked myself to exhaustion on the murders, much to O’Connor’s satisfaction, but even he could see I was running ragged. He instructed me to take some days off, which I spent mostly sleeping, to avoid my mother. Now, just as I was feeling revived, Charlie’s invite arrived and it seemed a perfect anodyne to dead whores in alleys and yards.

I had a bang-up time. I didn’t dominate, no, but neither did I withdraw into recessiveness, and I came up with as many clever lines and swift retorts as any of them. It was a fast crowd, they drank and smoked too much, they fancied themselves “outlaws” (but of the safest sort), and the alcohol liberated them to pretend to be who they wished to be. As for me, I pretended to be a more widely published writer, or a writer rather than a subspecies called “journalist” or “critic.” I wore the brown wool suit, having no choice in the matter, with a blue cotton shirt, and looked like a cross between a barroom poet and an IRA gunman, as I had wanted. Some may have thought me dangerous, which I rather liked, not knowing that lump in my pocket was an extra handkerchief instead of a Webley, and I enjoyed the mystery I seemed to carry about, the sense of knowing more than I did. As a veteran observer of life and death, I thought myself superior to all of them, for their bohemianism, social nonchalance, and contempt for convention was mostly affectation. I’d seen gutted lasses and knew in fact, not merely in theory, how short, nasty, and brutish life could be.

I’m not sure when I noticed him. It was subtle. He was just there. No, I am not about to confess some homosexualist secret, like the one that doomed poor Wilde to Reading Gaol a few years later, and I have no pressing desire to touch the flesh of a being of the same sex. But I am wooable by wit, dynamism, worldliness, good taste, and as I pretended to myself, the certain knowingness that bespeaks a fellow who has seen and tasted much.

“You’re the music critic, no?” he asked me when the drifting of people and the vagaries of alcoholic imbibing brought us together on the flow of the currents. He was tall, and his tweed, I noted, was of fine quality. The tailoring was superb, a three-piece suit of very modern cut, with red four-in-hand instead of a black fluffy bow tie, and the whole effect was of a fellow who paid close attention to his clothes until he put them on.

“I was for a time,” I said.

“Hope you closed down all the concert halls,” he said. “Such puerile jibber-jabber. When are they going to have the guts to change one single thing about the classical canon? It’s mostly Wagner done poorly, since we treacle-slopping Brits don’t have the coldness of soul to do Wagner as he should be done, all savage and scary. We do him like Dion Boucicault doing Dumas with kettledrums and trombones. Not a damned thing for anybody with a brain, or at least the aspirations to thought. Music as social instrument is an alien concept to them.”

“I must say,” I said, “you speak like a critic yourself, sir. That’s a thought I’ve had many a time. Meanwhile, in Europe there’s some interesting work. The Russian Anton Rubinstein is using the baton to do something other than slop treacle for the pigs.”

“ ‘Treacle for the pigs,’ ” he said. “I like that. My name’s Dare.”

I told him mine.

“Of course,” he said. “I pretended I didn’t know you, but I’ve read your pieces in Charlie’s little rag. You were a boy worth watching, I thought. I watched, I watched, I watched. Where on earth did you go?”

“I wrote music under a nom de guerre for a year for the Star and then had an opportunity to try my hand at another part of the journo game. It’s been interesting, though without much glory.”

“Well, you had the divine spark. Don’t lose it in some larger outfit that wants to regulate all voices to the same modulation. But I have tenure, so I’m great with career advice, not having to worry about such things as food, board, and money.”

“You teach?”

“I yell at them. They pretend to listen. I grade the papers by throwing them down the steps and determining which land on the ninety step, which the eighty step, which the seventy. No one seems to care much, and I can never get in trouble with the department, since I’m also the department head. The corruption is blissfully total.”

I found this line very amusing, almost irresistible. I love it when those safely in the bosom of a comforting institution trash it savagely, pointing out its follies, brutal politics, bad behaviors, and utter tomfoolery, but with such good cheer and equanimity as to suggest that all they say will be so relentlessly honest.

“You have a dramatic way about you, sir,” I said. “I’m sure you entrance the students.”

“I’d like to entrance some of the girls into bed, I would. The beastly boys, I’d entrance them off to Afghanistan or the Crimea — say, are we still in the Crimea?”

“I believe we’ve moved onward in our Christian crusade.”

“Well, wherever there are too many wogs, the darker the better, all fuzzy and wuzzy at once. Every good English boy should spend a few years Gatling-gunning nig-nogs for queen, country, and the interests of the Birmingham steel lords. And to keep the price of silk for Charlie’s pater’s department stores down.”

Speaking of Charlie, he suddenly bore down upon us, holding a champagne bottle in each hand. He’d been pouring his way through his guests.

“I see you two have found each other,” he said. “I knew you would, as you’ve much the same temperament and scabrous insight. Tom does phonetics at the University of London.”

Good God, I thought. The Professor Thomas Dare!

“I was telling our young friend here the sad truth of academics today,” said Professor Dare. He had round black spectacles, wavy blond hair, and one of those aquiline profiles that seemed to make him the grandson of the Iron Duke. But his irony had no Wellington in it. “At least my lackadaisical approach to duty leaves me with enough time for my experiments, which are the real thrust of my life. I can tell you, if you want, why a tribe in Africa called the Xhosa speaks with a peculiar popping sound, like a short, dry belch; they literally communicate by burps.”

I laughed. Amusing fellow.

“And then there are the Germans. Do you know, they form words by just sticking them together, so that their word for ‘Gatling gun’ literally translates into ‘mechanicaldeviceshootingwithoutcockingrifle?’ The words get longer still. No word is too long for a German because it’s quite impossible to bore a German. You cannot entertain a Norwegian, you cannot bore a German, and you cannot educate an American or a chimpanzee.”

I laughed again, then sought to turn him on another course. “What experiments have you done?”

“Too many by half,” he said.

I had read of him and thought I knew the background. Renegade intellectual, too bold for Oxford or Cambridge, too radical for any provincial place, always going off exploring, had theories of language as it related to society, and had invented — yes, that was it — a universal alphabet.

He wanted to do away with tribalism, nationalism, paternalism, capitalism, communism, militarism, vegetarianism, colonialism, ismism, anything that could take — ism as a tail end. Any thought, belief system, article of faith, uniqueness of dress, or size of boot heel. His methodology consisted of converting the world to one language that all would speak without accent, or indication of geography, class, or origin. Each man, each woman, each child would be a tabula rosa, so to speak, and come at the world without prejudice or hostility applied before he even got a chance to show what he or she could do.

Naturally, Dare was laughed off the front pages and hadn’t been heard from in some time. For one thing: Who would pay for it? For another: Who would teach it? For still another: Who would enforce it?

“I do remember your piece in the Times, Professor Dare,” I said. “A nice stir it caused, as I remember.”

“Dare’s Dare. What piffle. All gone, best forgotten. I was a fool, believed in the educability of the species and that humanity was capable of acting on its own behalf. But people are born with such deep ideas and grow so attached to them that it’s like trying to argue them out of a limb. If I said to you, ‘Say, your life would be better without that damned leg,’ what would you say?”

“Why, you’re a madman.”

“Indeed, and that is what they said to me. Anyhow, enough of this chitchat about my squalid past. I will leave you and mingle. I think there’s someone here who could help my reputation whom I haven’t yet insulted tonight. Possibly it will come to fisticuffs, which would be the ideal outcome.”

And he was swept away.

“Interesting fellow,” I said to Charlie.

“Tom’s a charmer. Brilliant but won’t back down. Perhaps a ruinous fault. You could call it a personality flaw, but you could also call it a heroic attribute. Socrates had it, too. So he gets destroyed and the mediocre continue to clump along to domination, producing universal stultification. Perhaps in a hundred years he will get his due. Champagne, my friend?”

I turned Charlie down, and he drifted away to fill more glasses. The party waxed and waned like a moon, and it seemed little eddies of energy were forever breaking out wherever I wasn’t, and when I turned to the laughter, I always saw Professor Dare at the center of it, and yet when they seemed to have him pinned down for serious conversation, he’d somehow peel off and take his magic elsewhere.

At last the party seemed to be breaking up, and by my pocket watch, I knew it was time to say thanks to Charlie and depart from this leafy street in Bloomsbury. I assumed finding a hansom wouldn’t be much of a problem. But a crowd had backed up around Charlie at the doorway, so I backed off and, seeking relief from the closeness of the room, stepped out on the terrace. Ah, the sweetness of the clean air, the drift of some sweet flower’s perfume, the clear night above. I drew it all in, enjoying, and then who should I find hunched against the balustrade but Professor Dare, enjoying a cheroot.

“Oh, hullo,” I said. “I enjoyed your company. You see the world much as I do myself.”

“I hope not. I detest it and everything in it. I once believed in everything, now I believe in nothing. You’re much too young for such cynicism. You have bruising and scarring left to do. You must earn the purity of your contempt, else it’s a pose meant to attract attention.”

“Well, you hide your disillusion brilliantly by the boldness of your wit.”

“Could always crack a line, I’ll say that for myself. But we do have something in common, I might add, now that I think of it.”

“And that would be?”

“Why, Jeb, we both detest Sir Charles Warren and understand that he is entirely too stupid in his thinking to catch this fellow you chaps call the Whitechapel Murderer.”

It was quite a moment. Not a word had been said about the murders the whole night, and I had presumed no one there had any idea I wrote under Jeb for the Star and had seen the wrecked and bleeding bodies steaming and leaking in the cool night air.

“I say,” I said, which is what people say when they have nothing to say, “I say, you have the advantage over me. I know not—”

“Oh, come now. I’ve particularly enjoyed the pieces on Warren’s folly. Your analysis of the broken system that underlies his Scotland Yard is spot-on, but even if they become more efficient and get more boots to the street faster, I don’t think the killer will fall to dragnet. If he were that careless, his luck would have run out, given his need to commit his deeds in heavily patrolled areas, just missing the blue bottles by a hair each time out.”

“Professor Dare, I shan’t lie, because I am indeed professionally Jeb, but how on earth, sir, did you know? Did some kind of spy—”

“No, no. Language. Phonetics. One of my many theories is that we speak two Englishes, a shallow English and a deep English. The second is the language of structure, organization; I call it the Beneath. It lurks, prehistoric and brutal, under the gibbets of grammar, words, punctuation, and neatness in penmanship. It is a reflection of the manner in which we solve problems, it expresses how we think, it expresses our true self. It is, in the end, our truth. I believe I’ve trained myself to read for the tracks of this Beneath, and when I read Jeb in the Star over the past few weeks, I saw those tracks. The music was extremely familiar. Some of the words, too, some of the effects — though now you’re drawn through the sieve of newspaper editing, with some dilution occurring. But I recognized it. You have much to write, much to learn, but if you give it your life, you might at one time accomplish something of note.”

“I’ve actually written five novels. Unpublished, the lot.”

“Write five more.”

“Perhaps I shall. But may I ask, to return to first causes, why you despise Warren at my level of intensity? It seems to be my job, and that explains my occasional interceptions of his vector, but you, sir, a professor at university, I cannot—”

“The murderer. The fiend, of course.”

“The murderer?”

“I adore him. He is so real, he is so fascinating, I cannot get enough. And unlike anything in years, he provokes me. That is why I pore over the accounts; that is why, when time has cooled off the curious mobs, I visit each murder site and look hither and yon for whatever the coppers may have missed. Haven’t found a thing yet. And the most demanding question of all: Where is he? Do you have theories?”

“I don’t believe, no matter what the Star publishes, that he’s a Jew. What little I know of Jews convinces me they are not of killing ilk. No, he’s one of us, and his contempt for the poor degraded Judys is really a critique on our system. But perhaps I impose my politics. Sir, do you have theories?”

“In formation. Unsuited for expression at this time.”

“I would love to hear them.”

“Perhaps, then, when they jell into aspic, I shall invite you to the club for a chat. Does that suit?”

“Fabulously,” I said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Diary

I had planned very carefully this time, and reconnoitered skillfully, examining against the triple indices of privacy, escape possibilities, and constable patrols. I had found a perfect spot, for this one had to be perfect, and for it to be perfect I had to have privacy with the body for more than a few minutes. I had this night an important agenda. Too bad a poor missy would have to pay for my higher purpose, but then that is the way of our wicked world, is it not?

This time I marked the area south of Whitechapel Road as my hunting ground, while my two previous expeditions had been well north of it. Where Commercial crossed it, then bent toward the east — Whitechapel’s layout is a mess, by the way, having been invented a thousand years ago by wandering cows, chiefly — it pursued an admirable straight course for quite a ways, and the fourth intersection it afforded was with the nondescript Berner Street. This byway yielded a low no-man’s-land of grimy brick and chimney, and being close to Commercial, where the Judys still were ample, it offered darkness for many a secluded rut. I reasoned it would be easy enough to engineer a tête-à-tête with one, and she would turn off Commercial and lead me down Berner. That such a spot was but a few blocks from the police station did not particularly perturb me, for in my observation, the constables did not favor Berner with their attentions.

Perhaps they had been warned off by Sir Charles, because halfway down the first block was a queer institution known as the Anarchists’ Club, where I’d once heard William Morris hold forth on a new aesthetic for modern times to an indifferent audience. He preferred wallpaper to revolution, not a popular position in those precincts. It was full nearly every night with radicals of various Slavic, Jewish, and Russian origins, singing and chanting and conspiring the night away. The coppers would fancy that so much energy would keep any mad killer away, when the exact opposite was true. I knew that such men as were drawn to the club were of a species known as zealots, which would mean that though their eyes were open, what they were really seeing would be dreams of a society where they, and not the pale, lily-livered millionaires of the Kensington Club set, were the masters. The anarchists would hang anybody who belonged to a club, and it was the image of those well-shod feet dangling eight inches above the ground that occupied their imaginations. Then, of course, they would found their own clubs. Such it is with all grand dreamers, of this ilk or that.

I spent this evening rooting around the club. Since radicals believe (happily) that property is crime, they find the notion of locked doors abhorrent. Anyone radical or pretending to be radical may enter and wander the club, which sits next to one of those improvised spaces in chockablock Whitechapel called Dutfield’s Yard. It’s not a yard and there’s no Dutfield anywhere, save painted long ago on the gate. I observed that Judy would frequently open a door in the closed gate for a quick stand-up assignation in the darkness and quietude of the yard, then leave, always pulling the door shut behind her. Thus for my purposes, it was perfect.

But I had to know what species of experience the club offered, so I found myself one of a hundred or so throaty rip-roarers purporting to represent the masses as they — none more enthusiastically than myself — bellowed forth the sacred hymn of all those who believed we had to tear down before we could build up. I came a bit late, so it wasn’t until the fifth stanza that I made my contribution.

Lovely sentiment, but try singing it in the mess of the 44th Argyle Foot and you’ll end up swinging from a tree overlooking the parade ground. Were they planning this year’s uprising or celebrating last year’s? Was it to be Mittleuropa or some unpronounceable republic in the far Balkans? Or maybe they were planning to go against the Great Bear herself, which meant that of the two hundred comrades the building held, at least a hundred and fifty of them were tsarist secret policemen, but they would have no interest in what happened in the yard outside their windows, only in far-off dungeons and torture rooms. However, I shared my doubts with nobody and presented to the company the very image of a happy mansion arsonist and execution squad commander. The louder I was, the more invisible I became.

After group sing, there was much hugging and babbling in a number of languages alien to my ear, but the universal thematic of the room was brotherhood, as accelerated by the effects of vodka. Everyone glowed in the pink of either revolutionary fervor or rotting capillaries. When the bottle came to me, I took a swig, finding it to be liquid fire, more appropriate for battle than society, but who was I to disagree with the masses. I hugged, I kissed, I shook hands, I raised fists, I shouted, I carried on essentially like a bad imitation of a drunken bear. However, there was no penalty for overacting on these boards.

In time, after the minutes had been discussed and accepted in several different tongues and certain policy issues debated rather too fiercely (suggesting that the participants loved debate over revolution) and the next picnic/mass action planned, postponed, and ultimately canceled, the meeting atomized, and various cliques and factions withdrew to their own counsel, and all the lone wolves too anarchistic to join were free to mosey about. I fit that category, in shabby clothes with a derby pulled low, and it was via this process that I was able to make a secret examination of the building in public, without rousing suspicion. They were too busy contemplating dreams of Thermidor and who would run the Midlands Electrification Program to pay attention to any particular individual. To their imaginations, it was the mass, not the man, that mattered. I would soon set them straight on that matter.

At any rate, the building was what one might expect of such a place, the second-floor meeting hall rather like the vaulted cathedral of the religion, all sorts of ancillary rooms off or below it, including a printing shop at the rear to crank out the necessary broadsides, a crude kitchen for brewing soup by the gallon, a reading room that collected the latest in revolutionary news from all over the world, a cellar that seemed like cellars anywhere, even under the Houses of Parliament. All in all, quite banal.

That is, unless one knew where to look.

CHAPTER TWELVE Jeb’s Memoir

Indeed, where was he? The party finished with a vague invitation to drop in on Professor Dare “sometime,” and it was back to the murder grind. The monster missed his weekly assignment, and then he missed his second. Was he planning some extra-special extravaganza? Had he gone on the slack? Was he bored? It was hop-picking time, so maybe he’d gone to the country to earn a few quid filling sacks for our brewers. If rich, perhaps he was even now luxuriating at Cap d’Antibes, eating snails and other Frenchy things, his knife forgotten for a bit.

Whatever the reason, O’Connor could see the consequences playing out in newsstand sales, upon which we depended for our circulation of 125,000, “Largest Circulation of Any Evening Newspaper in the Kingdom.” I tried my best, and the rings push was of some help, but after the ludicrousness of the Polly and Annie inquests, the multiplicity of absurd clues, such civic vanities as a vigilante committee forming to offer the reward that Warren had so far refused to authorize (as if this fellow were part of a network of criminals and could be ratted out like a common cracksman or swindler), and many heated speeches against the Jews for this, that, and the other thing, some other detective blowhards who opined that the High Rips or the Green Gaters were the culprits, and finally some high copper muckety-muck’s much promulgated idea of a husky Russky, it seemed both pointless and hopeless. I wrote a nicely vicious piece on the inefficiencies of the police, which attracted very little attention, Harry Dam reheated shabby notions of Jewish ceremony, which until now required only Christian babes for blood with which to make matzos, but henceforth he claimed that the blood of whores was some part of some ritual in the cabala that I suppose was to make Baron Rothschild the richest man in the world again twice over. As far as progress in the investigation, practical steps to deal with the issue, shrewd analysis of the evidence, none of that. Nothing was happening.

An idle mind is indeed the devil’s plaything, so we entered full scoundrel time, and who but I would enter history as the biggest of all scoundrels. That is, at the urging of the damned Harry Dam.

I was transforming some Pitman into typing, some nonsense that would go on page 4 under an advertisement for Du Barry’s Revelenta, the flatulence and heartburn cure, when a lad approached and said, “Sir, Mr. O’Connor needs to see you.”

“Eh?”

“Now, sir. I gather it’s urgent.”

“All right, then.” I rose, put on the old brown, and followed the boy across the room and down a hall, where he knocked, and we heard a gruff Irish rasp respond, “Come in, then.”

O’Connor put no store in majesty. I imagined the office of the editor of the Times to be a bookish chamber with a fireplace, a stag on the wall, and a globe, where cigars and port were often enjoyed. That of the Star was half a compass in another direction. Shabby is as shabby does, or perhaps the word would be “utilitarian,” for it was simply a larger room with a desk, a table, and a few books. On the desk were several spikes, and on each spike were dozens of galleys of the stories that would comprise that afternoon’s Star. At the table, I could see mock-ups of the front page, with nothing so dynamic as FIEND across the front, but rather, the usual gabble of unimpressive notices, such as 13 DIE IN AFGHAN SLAUGHTER (theirs or ours, I wondered), REWARD FOR WHITECHAPEL MURDERER DOUBLED, BISHOP PLEADS FOR CALM, and WHITECHAPEL LIGHTING BILL TURNED DOWN.

O’Connor sat at the desk, and next to him, almost invisible because he was backlit against a window that occluded his details, another man. They had been chatting warmly, I judged from the postures, the odor of cigars (one, still lit, sat in an ashtray and leaked a trail of vapor into the atmosphere), and the fact that before each was a glass.

“Sit,” O’Connor commanded, “and possibly a spot of the old Irish?” His glass had a dram’s worth of amber fluid left inside, whether a normal routine or the product of emergency, I didn’t yet know.

“I’m a teetote, sir,” I said. “My drunken father, this day sleeping under Dublin soil, drank more than enough for not only my own life but the lifetimes of any sons I might have.”

“Suit yourself. Have you met Harry? You two fellows ever cross each other in the newsroom? Though Harry is no newsroom rat, I know.”

“Hiya, pal,” said Harry, rising, putting out a big American hand. It must have been his straw boater’s hat on O’Connor’s desk, for only an American would wear a boating hat where there were no boats to be found. He had a big, raw-boned face and a winning smile under a droopy red mustache, which displayed spadelike, rather gigantic teeth. He was wearing an Eton rowing blazer edged in white, a white shirt, a deep blue cross-hatched waistcoat, a tie of color (red), trousers of white with dark blue stripes, and white shoes and socks. Was there a regatta? Was he going picnicking with a lady on the Thames, or perhaps coxswaining a boat in the big tilt against Balliol’s eight? I put it all on loathsome American crudity; as a people, they seem to lack any sense of tradition and are utterly incapable of reading the cues and learning from what they see. They’re entirely bent on results or, rather, money. What they like they take and make their own, regardless.

“Nice coat,” he said as we shook. “Can I get the name of your tailor?”

“Alas,” I said, “a German madman.”

“Too bad,” he said. “I like the sort of belted, harnessed look that thing has. Is it for some kind of fishing?”

“Hunting jacket,” I said. “Vented shoulders, gives one more flexibility on the turning shots. It’s said the coloration dumbfounds the grouse, but even if their brains are the size of a pea, they cannot be that dim.”

“You never know. Good shooting?”

I had no idea. I’d never done it, would never do it. “Quite jolly,” I said.

“Now, fellows,” said O’Connor, “glad to have us together for our little chat. Jeb, as I’ve been telling Harry, I’m proud of what you fellows have done. You’ve lit this place up and set the pace for the whole town. We’re driving the story, and all the other rags are following us. And I know, if anything breaks fast and sudden-like, whichever of you is here will get it first, hard and straight. And we’ll continue to drive, which means we’ll continue to sell, which means my investors will shut up and leave me in peace.”

Neither Harry nor I said a thing.

“However,” said O’Connor, “I don’t mind telling you, we have a problem.”

He paused. We waited. He took up and sucked on his cheroot, and its glow inflamed as he drew air through it, then exhaled a giant puff of smoke.

“The problem is: Where is he?”

“In hell, hopefully,” I said.

“Good for the world, bad for the Star. These greedy investors I have, they’re like opium addicts. They get a whiff of the profits when something this bloody-wizard big happens, they want that to be the norm. So they put the squeeze on. You have no idea what I go through.”

It occurred to me that it was quite wrong to hope for the killer to strike again as an aid toward boosting sales, but that was the reality of the business; O’Connor had no moral problem stating it so baldly, and the American wasn’t about to make a speech, so I kept my own mouth sealed tightly.

“Boss, do you want me to go out and slice up a dolly?” said Harry, and we all three laughed, for it somewhat ameliorated the anguish in the room.

“No, indeed,” said O’Connor. “The lawyers would never approve. But I want us to put our heads together and come up with an angle that we can push to heat things up again. The rings gag was a start, but there’s more we can do. That’s what this meet is about.”

It never occurred to me. Covering the killer was enough; the idea of generating news, presumably of some sort of fabricated nonsense, struck me as appalling. Yet again, because I am who I am and lack certain moral strengths, and because I had gotten so much out of the killer’s campaign against Whitechapel’s Judys, I said nothing.

Dam mentioned something about a special edition that put the pictures of the two victims on the front page, to be run in black borders, with comments from the various children.

“Not going to do it, I’m afraid,” said O’Connor. “Our readers don’t want maudlin, they want mayhem. They want the red stuff sticky on their hands.”

We batted it around for a bit, nice and easy-like, and I popped up with a few absurdities — what would the day’s leading intellectuals, such as Mr. Hardy, Mr. Darwin, Mr. Galton, think, for example.

But the chat ran down sadly, and gloom filled the room. And then — hark, the herald angels sing!

“I got it,” said Harry. “Yes, I do. Okay, what’s this missing? It’s even missing here in this room, and we’re talking around it.”

Silence, not of the golden sort.

“It’s a story,” said Harry finally. “It needs a villain.”

“Well, it’s got a villain,” I said. “We just have no idea who it is.”

“But he’s not a character. He’s an idea, a phantom, a theory, an unknown. Sometimes he’s ‘the fiend’ and sometimes ‘the murderer,’ but he has no personality, no image. We can’t get a fix on him. It’s not enough that he’s an Ikey, even if the folks do hate their Ikeys. He’s still blurry, indistinct.”

“I don’t—” I started to say.

“He needs a name.”

It was so absurdly simple, it brought conversation to a halt.

O’Connor sucked the cigar, Harry tossed down more brown and looked up, smiling. I sat there, feeling like a conspirator against Caesar, but then remembered I hated Caesar, so it would be all right. I also hated Harry for coming up with such a great idea. He was not without ability.

He was so positive. It’s an American trait. Doubt is not in their vocabulary, nor half-speed ahead, nor anything that smacks of consideration, context, contemplation. They leave that for the poofs. For them it’s always Dam the torpedoes!

Harry went on. “It can’t just be any name, like Tom, Dick, or Harry. It needs to be special, clever, the sort of catchy thing you remember and that sticks in your mind. It’s got to have that ring to it. I thought of ‘Ike the Kike,’ but that’s too ridiculous.”

“And suppose he turns out to be a High Church Anglican bishop,” I said. “How embarrassing.”

“Good point,” said Harry. “That’s why it has to be a good name. We need a genius to figure it out.”

“I’ll drop in on Darwin,” I said, “and if he’s not busy, I’m sure he’ll pitch in. If not he, perhaps Cousin Galton will join our campaign.” Sarcasm: last redoubt of the utterly defeated.

“I don’t know those guys, but I get your point. We need something thought up by someone who’s got a big talent.”

“Harry,” said O’Connor, “do go on. I like this, even if I can’t yet see where it’s going. And I’m confused how to make it happen.”

“Okay,” said Harry. “Here’s how I see it. We come up with a letter from the guy, and he signs it with a name that will ring bang-on through the ages. No advert can top it, it’s so perfect. Now, we can’t run it ourselves, because everyone would sniff a phony. So the letter goes to the Central News Agency. You know, they’re such hacks, they won’t think twice about spreading it throughout the town. And now he’s got a name, he’s hot again. It bridges the gap until he strikes.”

“Suppose it makes him strike again,” I said.

“Come now, man,” said O’Connor. “You saw the wounds. This darling rips them up so bad, he’s obviously mad as a March hare. Nothing we do is going to influence that degree of insanity a whit.”

I did see the wisdom in this. After all, I had seen the gutting of Annie Chapman, and I believed no sane man could do such a thing. It was hard for a sane man to even look upon it.

“Since it’s your idea, Harry, perhaps you should write it,” said O’Connor.

“Wish I could, boss,” said Harry. “But I’m not what you call a poet. Words come out of me like little tiny rabbit turds. Grunting, oofing, and pushing. I’m a reporter, not a writer.”

Again silence, but this time it was accompanied by stares, which came in a bit to rest on me. They both bored into me. It dawned on me where this was going, and I had to suspect it had been set up this way to make it seem spontaneous.

“Jeb’s the best I’ve ever read. He can’t put a sentence together that doesn’t sound like music. He’s the poet we need,” Harry proclaimed.

“Ah—” I started to object, but being hopelessly addicted to praise, I didn’t object too violently, for I wanted a few more gallons to come slopping down the chute onto my head.

“I wish I had his talent,” continued Harry. “My energy, his talent, his, uh, genius, no telling how far we’d go.”

“I think you’re right,” said O’Connor.

These fellows obviously thought it was something that could be turned on like a spigot. All I had to do was crank my genius faucet fully to the right and out would gush words for the ages. They had no idea that the faucet was rusty and temperamental, and the more you twisted it, the more you fretted and forced, the less likely it was to arrive on schedule. In fact, there was no schedule. It happened when it happened, and sometimes that was never.

“Now, listen here, Jeb,” said O’Connor. “Let’s think this through carefully. Indeed, yes, it’s built around a name, a name that clangs like a fire bell. But it’s also a tone. You’ve got to find something new. It has to play with words in an uncommon way, strike a chord that hasn’t been heard, affect an attitude new to the world. It has to be coldly ironic, for a start.”

“I don’t get ironic,” said Harry. “Never have. Iron, the ore? It has to have iron in it?”

“No, no, Harry, not the ore. It’s got to have a deft way of saying something A, so absurd and preposterous, that it decodes to something B, the exact opposite. When you asked Jeb about the shooting, he said, ‘Quite jolly.’ Lacking much sense of how we speak over here, you thought he meant ‘Quite jolly.’ But in his voice was that elusive tone of which I speak, nuanced, coded, subtle, a series of inflections meshed perfectly with little facial expressions such as slightly lifted left brow, slightly snarled upper lip, and a kind of trailing, dissipating rhythm, by which he communicated to me and far more to himself that he considers such action as blowing little birdies out of the sky with twelve-dram blasts, so that there’s nothing left but feathers and gristle, positively ghastly. That’s irony. That’s what this letter needs. That will make it last.”

Harry took an excellent lesson from this. “He doesn’t like hunting?” he asked incredulously.

We ignored him. He’d never get it, even if the initial impulse had been his.

“I’m not sure I’m up to this,” I said.

“Jeb, you’re halfway to a fine future. I’ll play you big in recompense, and in a bit you’ll be able to jump to a posh rag like the Times, where your gifts will make your fame, and they’ll send you all over the world and all the publishers will be beating down your door for a manuscript.”

I knew I was doomed. He had me cold. I was the birdie in the sights of his four-dram. The man was a genius.

And so, my first masterpiece. Like any piece of great writing, it has no autobiography. You cannot segmentize it and say, This came from there, and then I figured out that, and then from somewhere else that arrived, and there it was. No, no, not like that at all. It is more a process not of writing, I suppose, even less of willing, but somehow of becoming. You become what you must become.

Still, as I sat at what had become my desk in the newsroom, later that night after all the editions had been put to bed and most of the boyos had gone home or to the beer shop, I do remember odd notes coming together to form a melody, almost as if I were merely the conduit and something, some force (not God, as I don’t believe in Him and if I did, surely this is not the sort of enterprise He would willingly join), were dictating to me. For some strange reason, the word “boss” was in my mind, as Harry had used it to O’Connor, and it was not a common Britishism but more a bit of American slang, not the word, per se, but using it as a term of address. We call no one “boss,” we call the boss “sir.” Universally. So it amused me that whoever our fellow was, he’d address the world, via the Central News Agency, as “Dear Boss.” He wasn’t writing the coppers, you see, but in some sense the public, his true supervisor, as if putting on the whole show for their edification. I was conscious also of O’Connor’s dictate of irony, and I knew instinctively he was right. Our writer couldn’t be a foamer, a threatener, a bloviator, a loudmouth on a crate in Hyde Park haranguing the proletariat on its meat-eating habits. You couldn’t feel the sting of a volley of saliva when he talked. No, he’d been much too dry for that, so I used my own line from the meeting, “down on whores,” which understated by a thousand percent the carnage that he had released upon them. The word “shan’t” quite naturally appeared to me next, as I had never heard it spoken except on the lips of genteel vicars at the occasional ecumenical tea I had attended; I needed something harsh to play off the softness of “shan’t,” so I tried “cutting,” “slashing,” “whacking,” “sawing,” “hacking,” all of which did not, to my ear, work.

Then from somewhere — God’s mouth to my ear, or the devil’s lips to my brain — I came across “ripping,” which was perfect euphonically, even if wrong technically. He hadn’t ripped them, he’d cut them. But ripping had the right sound and connoted a savagery that the world would adore, even if, bent in the quarter-moon over his felled carcass, the man would in no way resemble a wild ripper, since his movements had to be focused, concentrated, driven by considerable application of disciplined force, all of it done with the knife’s sharp edge, none of it “ripped” as if by a crazy man’s churning hands, fingers all tightened to clamp strength as they tore asunder gobbets of flesh and flung them wildly. Whatever he was, he was no ripper, and perhaps the man could not have called himself a ripper, but the delicious sound of the word “ripper” trumped all those considerations. There is a poetic truth higher than fact.

After that, it seemed to come. I had to work in the word “jolly” some place, and I did, and I left it poetically adangle, in a form I’d never seen or heard. “Just for jolly,” I said. I avoided, out of fastidious liberal grounds, any mention of Jews, as one of my secret impulses was to absolve them in my fiction. I wanted no pogroms and no Peelers acting as Cossacks on my conscience, as full as that organ already was. That I was proud of, that I took some moral pleasure in.

And finally, the name. Well, “Ripper” was already achurn in my mind, and I was so pleased with the phrase “shan’t quit ripping” that I didn’t want to let it go, although I knew I had to alter it to a noun form from the verb, both to prevent repetition of an uncommon sound and to continue a kind of word melody playing with that sound. “Ripper” presented itself to me. So if “Ripper” is more or less the anchor, one needs something without an R in it, to avoid singsong or alliteration. “Robert the Ripper” or “Roger the Ripper” just sounded silly. Indeed, you needed counteriteration, a name bereft of R’s and P’s, yet also, to place it firmly in British tradition, a stout, sturdy Anglo-Saxon blurt of a name. “Tom” came to me, and I almost went with that, as “John” was too soft and “Will” hard to say because it need a fricative stop in order to slide easily into the sibilance of the R’s and P’s, and then I remembered the flag, like some common shopkeep or mill hand, and the patriotic treacle of it provoked my radical sensibility profoundly, amused me.

Here was Irony, capital I, in bold italic. Irony! something that O’Connor would grasp and poor Harry Dam nevermore. A smile came to my face. Union Jack, waving atop some battlefield atangle with drifting rifle smoke where the stench of cordite and blood intermingled in the air, and the Gatling guns had piled up heaps of wogs outside the wire, and the officer classes had broken out the beer ration, and all the lads in red had turned and raised a glass to the Union Jack. Yes, Jack, Jack, Jack, as our Lord and Savior Kipling would have it, and I knew I had my name. It was exactly what my masters had demanded: a perfect name, resonant, memorable, easy on the tongue, solidly British, conjuring up the dark warrens of Whitechapel and the idea of a sharp steel knife against the alabaster of Judy’s throat and at the same time containing the faintest echo of the stripe-spangled banner waving o’er our green fields and sanctimonious pieties. I had given the world Jack the Ripper.