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.