My next task was her chemise, for I had use of a garment, and as I slithered down her still body just a bit to reach under her skirts for my trophy, that was where my luck both soared and crashed at the same time.
It soared in that, moving and dipping, I lowered my profile deeper into the dark, so that a man standing but ten feet away could not see me.
It crashed in that a man did stand but ten feet away.
What alerted me was the sudden bluster of a beast, and I looked up to see not three feet from me the face of a pony who knew that I was there, his animal senses being sharper than any human’s. He clomped twice, foot heavy against the cobblestone of Dutfield’s accursed yard, but locked his legs in refusal to move, for he was as scared of me as I was of him. He was in harness, and behind him, barely identifiably by outline, he pulled what appeared to be a cart of some sort, and over his rear haunch, I could see the profile of a man standing in the cockpit of the vehicle.
He snapped his buggy whip at the animal’s flank; the animal tossed his head, shivered, flinging mane into commotion, but resolutely stayed where he was, all the while his big eyeballs lancing directly into mine. He snorted and I felt the cascade of warm, slightly moist air from his lungs wash across me, with an odd musk of grass woven into it. He breathed heavily, wheezily, now and again shivering, and when he shivered, his tack rattled and jingled. I could not crouch any lower over Ophelia in her small ruby pond, but I did have knife in hand, and my first thought was to plan an attack. If the fellow got out of the cart and came snooping, he would come upon me, and I would rise like the devil reborn and plunge blade into throat, aiming for a spot a whisker off the larynx (thank you, Dr. Gray), and rip through that structure so that no cry would accompany its owner’s exsanguination. Then I would bolt the yard and disappear.
He climbed down and stood in the narrow space between the wagon and the wall, my only escape route.
“Vas ist? Gott verdammt! Vas ist?” I heard him ask of the pony, about whose welfare he was clearly not sentimental. The pony was equally unsentimental, as he remained in his place, his joints having alchemized into steel fixtures by suspicion of whatever life-form he smelled (he would have smelled her blood as well) and whatever life-form he made out with those huge billiard-ball eyes.
A match flared in the darkness, and its circle of illumination reached my fingertips but no farther; I was out of the zone of visibility by a hair’s width. The man held it tremblingly, unperturbed as it burned toward his fingers, and began to rotate to see what its light revealed. As he turned his shoulders to the right, he drew the cone of light with him, and my love’s dark clothes were revealed, as were her shoulder, and then her pale, serene, beautiful face, and next to it, crimson as the blood of the Lamb spilled off that Golgotha cross, the satiny pool of her own life’s fluid. It was so red. I’d never seen their blood in full light before, only by the quarter-moon’s low-power beam.
“Mein Gott!” I heard him expel. He seemed to shiver in confusion up there on his contrivance, as he tried to make a decision, and then he made it.
I gripped the knife hard, collected my muscularity as I slipped into a raider’s crouch, ready to spring and bring the man down hard and dead, and indeed, he nearly plunged through to his death at my hands. In the last second he pivoted not forward, toward me, but backward, toward the gate.
He slipped through and dashed hard left, and I heard him bang hard on the Berner Street door of the Anarchists’ Club. I recognized the sound as he remembered the door wasn’t locked and pulled it open.
I was trapped. It was too late to dash in my own fashion to the gate, for the damned pony still blocked it, and if I squeezed by in time, the street would in the next instant be flooded with excitable Russian revolutionaries and vegetarian socialists who would draw Peelers from every nook and cranny, and there was nothing behind me in the yard that would permit escape, only locked shops and homes and a small deserted building.
There was nowhere to go.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jeb’s Memoir
I was not in the newsroom when news of the slaughter at Dutfield’s Yard came, although since Jack, as I now thought of him, struck near or on the weekends and late, I had rearranged my schedule to night hours so that I was present and ready to fly when it seemed most propitious that he would pay another visit. But Harry had adopted the same schedule (as had Mr. O’Connor and Henry Bright and several others, a flying squad of Jack boys, if you will), and so he was the one to race out there, leaving me and my bitter tea down in the tearoom, where I was sulking.
Here’s the irony: My sulking stood me in very good stead. Not being at the Anarchists’ Club where the one called Long Liz was found that night freed me up for the evening’s second act, of which more anon.
It is relevant as to why I was sulking. Of course it had to do with that damned letter. I had labored over it until achieving what I thought was perfection, then I’d given it to Mr. O’ Connor. I thought he’d be pleased, but a full day passed before his boy came and got me—much too long, I feared, and that was where my confidence, always a frail vase in a typhoon, began to spring cracks. I went to the office, and there, wearing an eyeshade, was O’Connor, and in shirtsleeves next to him was Harry Dam, damned Harry. I did not hate Harry, you must understand; I actually had some respect for his reckless energy and cagey way with all the tricks of the trade, but I did fear him a bit, as I knew his ambition was as outsize as mine and that he was capable of nearly anything to advance it. Moreover, his contempt for the Jews was a signal that something inside was not right.
“Ah, there you are!” said O’Connor, and I read him anxiously for signs of love but could tell that he was focused totally on task. “Come in, come in. This letter you’ve written, it’s quite good. I believe we’re almost there.”
Almost there! Those are not words any writer pines to hear. Much more preferable is “masterpiece” or “timeless brilliance” or “it shall live forever.” But such accolades were not to be.
Harry said, again damning with praise so faint it was almost inaudible, “Wow, it’s a great first pass. I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am we got you to do this. I could not come even close to such a brilliant thing.” In his voice I could hear a contrapuntal going in another direction; it suggested that he and he alone knew how to fix it, not that I could ever accept that it needed any sort of fixing.
“Drink? Oh, that’s right, you’re a teetote,” said O’Connor. “Well and good, I should be myself, maybe me nose would stop glowing in the dark”—a little attempt at levity that got profoundly insincere smiles from Dam and me. He took a draught of whatever is brown, is served in small glasses a third full, burns and yet calms on the way down; he accepted a tear at the corner of each eye from its impact, then said, “I think it needs a bit more.”
“Do you want me to take it through another draft, sir?” I asked with perhaps more tremble in my voice than I cared to acknowledge.
“No, no, the words are great. ‘Jack the Ripper,’ by God, a name to conjure with, absolutely magnificent, it will rattle the city to its cellars and sell a million papers, no doubt. No, that’s not it. It needs one more touch. An amplification, as it were.”