“How old were you when you worked at the brothel?” asked William.
“Who knows? Too young to do nothin’ else.”
William tried to look sympathetic, but the man was so unsavory in his appearance and manner that it was hard to feel sympathy.
“But then I got strong, and they couldn’t do nothin’ more to me,” Pizer continued, having apparently lost his reticence. “I could make ’em do what I said. Jus’ show ’em a knife, and they done it.”
“You carried a knife?”
“’Course I did. Everyone feared Leather Apron.”
“Why were you called Leather Apron?” asked William.
“’Cause I wore a leather apron,” said Pizer with what William had to admit was impeccable logic.
“And why did you wear a leather apron?”
“’Cause I was a boot maker,” said Pizer, as though any moron should know that.
“Did you like your trade?”
“I liked usin’ a knife,” snarled Pizer. “Needed to, to cut the leather. But I’d rather ’ave used it to cut somethin’ else. That Ripper has it right, there.”
“Did you…know…Jack the Ripper?” William asked, suddenly taken with the idea that the two might be friends. Did demonic killers have friends?
“Didn’t know ’im, though they say as he wrote my name in one of ’is letters.” He noted this with a touch of pride. He then said scornfully, “But I wouldn’t ’ave done it his way, myself. He’s too fancy for me.”
“What do you mean ‘too fancy’?” asked William, intrigued by this comparative notion.
“All that slashin’ and cuttin’ up. I likes my knife,” growled Pizer, “but I use it spare. Ain’t that the point of a knife?” His eyes darted up at William in stating this professional view of the matter.
“So you feel Jack the Ripper cuts more than is necessary?”
Pizer snorted. “Don’t need to be fancy to cut shoes. Nor throats neither. Cut ’em clean and simple, I say.”
William pondered the idea a moment. What did that signify, to cut more than was necessary? There was something to be said for Pizer’s observation that the point of using a knife was to be economical in the realm of killing. But then, it wasn’t to kill these women that Jack the Ripper had cut them; they were dead when most of the cutting happened. Why, then, the need to cut more, to be “fancy,” as Pizer put it? Pizer had learned to cut sparingly in his trade as a boot maker. Even a surgeon was economical in his use of a knife. Under what circumstances, then, would fancy cutting be appropriate? He was back to the idea that the key to understanding a madman was to find the context in which his madness made sense, became, that is, perversely rational.
Pizer had resumed talking. “Not as I need a knife to do ’em harm,” he boasted. “I could use these.” He flexed his blunt fingers. “Did it once too.”
“You strangled someone?” There had been suspicion among the people of Whitechapel that Pizer was a killer, but no proof of it, as far as William knew.
Pizer did not respond to the question but snarled, “Can’t treat me like a dog! Cleanin’ up their messes, smellin’ their stench, emptyin’ their piss, makin’ me do filthy things so they could laugh at me.”
The man had again returned to the scene of his childhood, and William suddenly had a vivid image of the boy forced to perform all manner of ungodly acts for the amusement of his employers. But what had prompted him to kill later in life? “The person you strangled,” he pressed. “Why did you do it?”
Pizer seemed not to hear. “Can’t treat me like a dog. Can’t make me do that no more. Nobody gonna make me!”
William was staring with an expression of curiosity and disgust. “The person you killed…wanted to make you do something?”
Pizer began to twitch, and his speech grew rapid and wild. “Can’t make me! Can’t make me! Can’t shame me like that! Ain’t gonna be shamed no more!” His voice grew shrill with fury. “Ain’t shamed by you neither!” He fastened his eyes on William’s shoes and stared at them fixedly. “Even with yer nice shoes, you don’t shame me!”
“I’m a doctor!” William said sharply. “I’m here to get information about your condition, nothing more.”
Pizer was not listening. His eyes were again darting about the room. “All dressed up in good leather to do filthy things! You’re a stinking, bloody fraud with your fine shoes!”
“I’m Professor James from Boston,” William felt compelled to assert. He could sense that Pizer had lost track of where he was, if he had ever known.
His voice incensed Pizer further. “I can make ’em do as I say if I wants to,” he growled and flexed his fingers again. “I can make ’em, as they made me!” His eyes focused again on William’s shoes, and he stared at them for several seconds in a state of rapt attention. His face then contorted into a grimace.
It was then that William understood his shoes, bought before he left Boston from a very good boot maker at the insistence of his Alice (“A Harvard professor must have a good pair of shoes,” she had scolded), must put Pizer in mind of the men who had scorned and abused him. “Calm yourself!” he said sharply.
The sound of his voice seemed to be a trigger rather than a palliative. The man grimaced again, and William stood up in sudden awareness of the threat, but too late.
Pizer leaped from the cot and placed his hands around his visitor’s neck.
William felt a searing pain from the pressure on his throat, and a thought darted through his mind: This is how I will die, interviewing a madman, with a policeman standing outside the door, but the next moment, Abberline and Maudsley rushed into the cell. Abberline adeptly pried Pizer’s fingers from his neck, while Maudsley ran back into the corridor to call for help.
Within a few seconds, a guard twice the size of Pizer and with eyes even more snakelike entered the cell and, with a sweep of his arm, knocked the man onto the bed. “Don’t worry, sirs. I’ll have him in hand in a jiffy,” said the guard. “You best get yourselves out of the way.”
As Maudsley went off to get a compress for William’s neck, and Abberline helped him stagger out of the cell, they could hear the blows falling inside.
“So what did your visit do for you besides almost getting you killed?” asked Abberline, when they were once again seated on the train back to London.
William touched his neck and felt the dull ache of the bruise. He had fortified himself with a shot of whiskey in Maudsley’s office and had left Broadmoor with an improved feeling about his host. However much the two men differed in basic precepts, they shared an understanding of the horrors of mental illness. Perhaps more to the point, Maudsley’s guilt regarding the attack had softened him toward his visitors. It seemed that Pizer had never exhibited violent behavior before, despite his reputation for being violent in the East End. It was another case where salient information had been discounted. If the people of his neighborhood were convinced that he was Jack the Ripper, certainly there must be a reason for their conviction. William suspected that Pizer had not been violent at Broadmoor because no one had spoken to him long enough to elicit violence.
“What did the visit do for me?” he mused in response to Abberline’s question. “It taught me that shame is a powerful impetus for action, perhaps the most powerful. Pizer spent his childhood in a brothel, abused by women and men too. I reminded him of the men who frequented that place and used to demean him. His humanity was stolen from him as a child. It seems almost logical that he would become an animal himself, driven to abuse those who shamed and abused him.”
“You’re saying that Jack the Ripper kills out of rage for having been shamed?”
“I’d say killing of the sort he does must stem from extreme humiliation. It’s a frenzied kind of retribution. No knowing whether the initial trauma was even intended as such; it may have been accidental, a matter of circumstance, but I suspect there was shame involving a woman at its origin.”