“What, dammit?” I said.

“As I said, the spiritual.”

The man was a sphinx with his mystery, playing me like a fool. And like a fool, I could not resist. “What, Professor? What are you—”

“Why, man, is it not obvious? The man indeed has a faith, and he has expressed it every time he has struck. It is his bedrock, his religion, his God. He is a true believer.”

The look on my face must have amused him. He finally took pity. “The man, above all else, is humanitarian.”

Humanitarian? A humanitarian throat cutter? At that point, I thought: Farewell, Sherlock Holmes!

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The Diary

October 18, 1888 (cont’d)

I pulled my weapon. It was my cock.

“Here, then,” she said, “let Suzie put you to me and make you feel all good and warm, that’s what Suzie does, she does.”

Her hands upon me were indeed an angel’s. I felt each of them against my stout member. As she guided me into her, her fingers were gentle yet firm, kind yet serious, ideal yet sensual. I felt some wiggle as she found opening, acquired proper angle, pushed, pulled, guided, adjusted, corrected, bringing herself to me as much as me to her, and then she had me full in, set, and into her center I plunged. I felt it as satin on silk with some hint of lubricity, the surfaces meshing against a whisper of friction for the thrill of tightness, and we formed perfectly into a dynamo of smoothness, a sense of gliding, gliding, gliding until, in so far I felt I’d die, either she ran out of channel or I ran short on instrument.

“Oh, God,” she said, “oh, sir, how wonderful you feel inside of me.” Was this malarkey she gave all the boys? Who cared at that point, for my hips took up a natural rhythm and we began the dance, the ritual, the tribal ceremony. I felt her heart, her thin-boned chest against my heavier issue, the damned interference of our clothes, but soon, in the plunging and partial withdrawing to plunge again, there was a magic in her hips, and she found the primal rhythm, she was able to arrange her body and her hips as if on a sustaining armature, and it freed her hips to begin to move as if alone in space, propelled by a reptile brain unacknowledged by higher functions, and that is why it was so magical and that is why men and women in circumstances high and low, mortal or humane, decent or desperate, sell their souls in a trice for its exquisite anarchy.

I lost all sense of clothes at all, two bodies in a church, the church in the city, the city in the nation, the nation on the planet. With my hands I pressed her against me, believing I could feel her shudder, knowing I could feel her hips find and match my speed and urgency. I kissed her hard, and it was a tongue-tongue thing, all thrash and suck and slurp and mash, feeling our breath combine as it poured from engorged nostrils. There remained but the spasm, and it occurred when it should occur, too soon yet too late, which is to say perfection, as there seemed no point of postponement, to say nothing of the will. My release was cataclysmic. I have heard of of a chemical called dynamite that can explode anything, and it was as if I’d been packed with this wonder stuff. The details are banal in the telling, but not in the remembering, and not in the actual.

I pulled back, breathing hard, sucking for God’s oxygen to fill my depleted lungs and bring vigor to my exhausted limbs. I felt the great, satisfied emptiness. I saw her in candle flicker, skirts dropped again, smiling almost as if it had been more than a performance, shaking her head to release her fair hair from the tangles that the dampness of her sweat had ensnared it within. She dipped into her purse and pulled out some muffinlike piece with which to powder her face.

“There now,” she said, “feeling all better, are we?”

“Indeed, my Juliet. It is the east and you are the sun.”

“You talk fancy even after I’ve yanked me knickers! Now, there’s a gentleman.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Jeb’s Memoir

“Jack the Ripper is humanitarian,” he said.

“Good heavens, Professor. The man has ripped four women to shreds, pulled their guts out, and lived to laugh about it. How on earth could you apply that term to such bestiality?”

“Indeed, his work is total destruction. Consider it not as we find it, all messy and blood-spattered, with lakes of red about, but as it is experienced. He is, it must and should be noted, not torturing the women. He takes no thrill in their pain. He feels no pleasure in slow, screaming deaths. Quite the contrary, he is well practiced in the art of the immediate and silent kill. Part of this, to be sure, is pure efficiency. It is much easier on him, though a case could be made that chloroform and transfer of the sleeping body to a private nearby spot would clearly not be beyond his powers, and once there, he could amuse himself with torture games for hours and hours. He seems not remotely tempted by such a thing. I suppose another part of it is that selfsame military technique, for part of a raider’s skill must be in eliminating sentries before the attack or ambush. One slithers silently through the brush and fells the watcher from behind with a sure stroke. It must be well done or the watcher screams as he dies and alerts the campful of Pathan or Zulu about to go to the slaughter.

“While there’s all this, consider that of all ways to kill a human being, the sudden sundering of the carotid artery is among the kindest, assuming consciousness. A bullet to the brain might trump it, as would the immensity of an artillery detonation. Next comes Jack’s method, which would be experienced as a blur, an impact, a tingle, an instant fatigue and loss of balance, perhaps a fleeting awareness that the end is upon one, which would be somewhat occluded by the cloud of disbelief, and then the slip-sliding away of consciousness. It’s unlikely that much pain would accompany the journey.”

“Sir,” I said, somewhat arisen, “that hardly counts as humanitarianism.”

“By liberal pieties, no, which is one of the things I find so appalling about liberal pieties. You see it in terms of the discomfort it gives you in the contemplation, because you lack the imagination to see it in terms of the pain it spares her in the occurrence. Think on it, if you would, and put aside all those bromides and homilies that sustain the bourgeoisie in the face of reality, which I believe you are becoming aware of in your forced sojourns into Whitechapel.”

“I will hold it in abeyance until further evidence is produced, but my tendency is to discount it and prefer the first two explanations.”

“Well enough. I proceed, confident that I am soon to convince you.”

More pipe theater as he emptied, tamped, refilled, lit, inhaled, exhaled, enjoyed the mushroom of vapor that billowed before him, then turned.

“I await,” I said, pen poised above tablet.

“I deliver,” he said, smiling at his riposte. He found himself, it must be said, quite amusing. “Now turn to the incident at Goulston Street.”

“The baffling graffito, with J-E-W-S misspelled, on which you have already theorized.”

“Put aside that for an instant. Put aside the business of grammar. Turn to punctuation. What is missing, as the reports all agree?”