“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.
“Harry has a very fine idea, I think. Go ahead, Harry, tell him.”
“Better, I’ll show him!” He ran to his Eton rowing blazer, reached into it, and pulled something from the pocket. “The piece of resistance,” he said, meaning, of course, “pièce de résistance,” “yep, you’re gonna love this.” He paused, letting his little presentation acquire the drama that a pause provides, and then held aloft his treasure. “Red ink!”
Good God, I thought. Can he be serious?
“Red,” he said proudly, “as in blood.”
“Isn’t it a little melodramatic?” I asked. “Perhaps overstated.”
“Hmm. Can a guy overstate murder?” Harry asked.
“As a practical matter, I believe you can,” I said. “You can make it so bombastic that no man in his right mind would believe in it. ‘Jack the Ripper’ would be a joke and not a symbol of chill aspect, meant to frighten for a thousand years.”
“Your pride is commendable,” said O’Connor. “Which demonstrates that it’s a writer you are, sir, without doubt. But can I suggest what goeth before the fall? Knowing that, I ask you to listen to what Harry proposes.”
“It’s not much,” said Harry. “It’s hardly anything. It’s still ninety percent yours, maybe ninety-five percent. It’s not as if there will be royalties, you know.”
“I hate to see my efforts trifled with,” I sniffed. “Maybe bring in Henry Bright for an opinion. He’s a sound man.”
“No, no,” said O’Connor. “Henry knows nothing about this, nor does anyone else, and that’s how it should remain. Jeb, just listen to Harry.”
“Here’s my concoction,” said Harry. “Flat-bang-out, no palaver or jerky chewing.”
I had no idea what he was talking about except that he was about to pitch his “improved” version.
“Red ink is just the start,” he said. “And really, that’s more the package than the content. But a sentence is added. Jack says something like ‘I was going to use whore’s blood, but it turned all sticky, like gooseberry jam. Now I’ve got this damned ink on my hands.’ ”
“Does it in fact turn all sticky?”
“So I hear,” Harry said. “Not having scalped a whore lately, I’m not sure. But see, it’s the cold detail that nails it. He is so insane that he thinks nothing about using a dead gal’s blood for his little note, and maybe he adds a ‘ha ha’ or something like that. The red ink makes it jump as a package, it’s like the wrapper on the Black Jack gum pack, and bang-on, nobody can ignore it.”
I could not think of a response to a Black Jack gum allusion; who could? After all, what on God’s earth was a Black Jack gum pack?
“Then,” said Harry, “we need one gory detail. I mean, he’s the Ripper, right, not the Kisser or anything. So let’s add a line, say, in which he tells us he’s going to chop off an ear and ship it to the coppers.”
It was horrifying. It was perfect.
“One last thing,” he said. “More packaging, that’s all, it’s still the great Jeb who came up with Jack the Ripper, but let’s mangle the punctuation. I was never good on apostrophes anyhow. Can’t seem to keep the rules in mind. Whoever thought that one up? Anyhow, I’ll dump the curlicue things—”
“But,” I said, “that would give it the diction and vocabulary of an educated man, yet the form of an uneducated one. I do not see how that advances the cause.”
“It makes it scary,” said Harry. “The final nail in the coffin is, I copy it over in my hand. The reason for that is, unlike you boys, I only have one posh thing going. It’s my handwriting, and I can still feel the smart where Sister Mary Patricia hit my wrist a dozen times with a steel ruler. That girl packed a wallop. So believe me, I learned a fair hand. It just makes the whole thing, I don’t know, mysterious. It’s got a lot of this-ways but also a lot of that-ways.”
“I must say, it’s a dandy idea,” said O’Connor. “Deftly employed, it will sell thousands more papers and elevate Jeb’s Jack into the bogeyman of the nineteenth century. Maybe the twentieth as well.”
Who was I to protest such imbecility? I had no moral standing to argue it the other way, so I just nodded grimly and sat down. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Great,” said Harry, and with relish he set to work, clearing space on the makeup table. O’Connor and I watched as, in his surprisingly adroit hand, he copied my words on a piece of foolscap, so the whole thing did come to resemble a missive from the devil himself, had that old boy been educated by nuns, and come to think of it, he probably was!
When Harry was done, he pinched it by the corner, waved it about to dry, then folded it and crammed it into an envelope. “I’ll go hire a kid and make sure he drops it in the right slot at the Central News Agency,” he said. “By God, it’ll shake the old town up when they run it. And we’ll be ready to jump on the horse before anyone.”
“Excellent, Harry, positively brilliant. Jeb, you agree?”
“I suppose,” I said poutily, having lost on all rounds; I had written a document without integrity, then gotten all prideful over my effort, as if it were a noble calling, and now, absurdly, I felt degraded by further breaches of its integrity inflicted by others. Suddenly, I wanted to vomit.
“All right, then, boys,” said O’Connor, “let’s get back to business.”
Harry threw on his hat and coat and smiled as if he’d eaten the Christmas goose.
“Off you go, then,” said O’Connor, and Harry departed. O’Connor turned to me. “No long faces, Jeb. It’s just business. It’s how we operate, always have, always will. Now mind your P’s and Q’s, and wait for this to stir the pot.”
But I was far too much a baby to let a nice period of self-pity and victimization go wasted, so I took it upon myself to spend more rather than less time in the tearoom. And that was why I was playing the injured party, even several days later, and only Henry Bright noticed, if circumspectly.
So it was that when I came back to the newsroom after my dawdling, I was late to learn that Jack had done his bad trick a third time, at a place I’d never heard of called Dutfield’s Yard, and that Harry was shortly to be, if not already, on the scene.
“There you are, old man,” said Henry Bright. “I’ll be in makeup. We’ve got to redesign for tomorrow. Harry will call in with details and you—”
Someone came running over, and to this day, I cannot remember who, for the news was so overwhelming.
“My God,” whoever it was said, “the bastard’s done it again. Two in one night! This one at a place called Mitre Square a mile away. Two in one hour! And she’s really chopped up!”
“All right, Jeb,” said Henry Bright. “Get on your horse. It looks like it’ll be a long evening of fun.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Diary
September 30, 1888 (cont’d)
I now pass to the second event of the evening. As to my disappearance from Dutfield’s Yard and the Anarchists’ Club, I record nothing, as I am exhausted (you will see why), and though it might be of interest to readers, I anticipate no readers and thus airily mean to skip that which I find tedious.
I found myself 1,570 paces to the west, on Aldgate, that being the same concourse as Whitechapel High Street, but having moved from London to the City of London, it had acquired a new name, as well as a new municipal government and police force. It was well after one A.M., and on the street I found myself, no rumble of the momentous events transpiring some blocks behind me evident. It was as if I had magically migrated to another planet, another atmosphere, another range of life-forms. I was disconsolate, as I had extremely well-laid plans for the evening and goals to be achieved, and I had failed utterly. It was my first such failure, and I had left the thing unfinished by a far part at Dutfield’s Yard, where my cursed luck had produced that Yiddish oaf on a pony cart, with his wonder horse, Boobsie, to muck everything up. Gad, I was angered. I am, as it turns out, not the type to go all jabberwocky and expectorate in rage; rather, my fury is entirely inward and takes the form of a fiery furnace in my chest, blazing madly in the chill air. I would have to start again, and damn thee to hell. Dutfield’s, carefully selected, had been so perfect for my plan. I wondered if ever I would find such a spot again.