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.
“Horn, is that it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, Mr. Horn,” the powerful figure said, fixing me square in his glaring eyes, “you’ve left the hyphen out of de Lyon Burrows’s name.” He was holding my original flimsy.
“There is no hyphen in de Lyon Burrows’s name,” I said, “even if all the other papers in town put one in. They’re idiots. I’m not.”
He considered, then said, “You’re right. I met the fellow at a party recently, and all he did was complain about that damned hyphen.”
“You see, Mr. O’Connor,” said Massingale, “he doesn’t make mistakes.”
“So you’re persnickity about fact, eh?”
“I like to get fact right so that my overlords don’t confuse me with the Irish, from whom I am but of whom I am not.” I was always at labor to point out to all that I was Protestant, not Catholic, had no snout in the Irish republicanism trough, and considered myself English to the bone, in both education and politics.
It was intemperate, given O’Connor’s heritage, but I never enjoyed playing mute in the presence of power. Still don’t, in fact.
“Chip on the shoulder, eh? Good, that’ll keep you going full-bang when another man might take a rest. And fast?”
“I wrote it in Pitman on the hansom back,” I said. “It was merely a process of copying.”
“He’s very good with his Pitman. Maybe the best here,” said Mr. Massingale. “Pitman” was the system of shorthand I had taught myself one recent summer in an attempt to improve myself.
“So, Horn, you’re a bit frivolous, aren’t you? The odd book review, mostly music, silly nonsense like that, eh?”
“I feel comfortable in that world.”
“But you’re comfortable on streets, in pubs, among coppers, thugs, and Judys? You’re not some fey poof who falls apart outside Lady Dinkham’s drawing room.”
“I’ve studied boxing with Ned Corrigan and have a straight left that could knock a barn down, and you’ll note me nose ain’t broke yet,” I said, adding a touch of brogue for emphasis. It was true, as all Irish-born learn the manly art at an early age or spend their lives among the girls.
“Fine. All right,‘Horn,’ whatever your real name might be, I’m in a fix. My night crime star, that damned Harry Dam, is cobbing with a floozy in a far beach town this week, and we just got a call from our fellow at Scotland Yard with news of a nice juicy murder in Whitechapel. Someone downed a Judy, with a butcher’s knife, no less. I smell the blood of an English tart, fee-fi-fo-fart. So I want you to take a hansom, get out there before they move the body, snatch a look at it, find out who the unlucky gal is, and let me know if it’s as much the meat-cutter’s work as the fellow says. See what the coppers say. The Bobbies will talk; the detectives will play hard to get. Take it all down in your Pitman, then get back and hammer out a report. Henry Bright here, our news editor, will talk you through it. Can you do this?”
“It doesn’t sound too terribly difficult.”
The hansom dropped me there at about four-forty-five A.M., and I told the fellow it was worth half a quid if he’d wait, since I didn’t want to have to look for another at that ungodly hour in a neighborhood known for coshes and Judys. My noggin was too delicate to enjoy a gnashing by a Russky sailor or some such.
Buck’s Row was a kind of subshoot of White’s Row, which was bigger and brighter, but just before the rail bridge over the tracks into Whitechapel Station, it divided into Buck’s Row and Winthrop Street, both tiny and dark. I could see the coppers clustered around something down Buck’s Row, itself a nondescript cobblestone thoroughfare of brick walls fronting warehouses, grim, shabby lines of cottages for the workingman, gates that locked off yards where, in daylight hours, I supposed wagoners would load goods of some sort or another—I really couldn’t imagine what—for delivery. It was but twenty or so feet wide.
A bit of a crowd, maybe ten to twenty pilgrims in black hats and shapeless jackets, Jews, sailors, maybe a worker or two, maybe some Germans, stood around the cluster of coppers, and so, caution never being my nature, I blazed ahead. I pushed my way through the crowd and encountered a constable, who put up a broad hand to halt my progress. “Whoa, laddy. Not your business. Stay back.”
“Press,” I announced airily, expecting magic. “Horn, Star.”
“Star! Now, what’s a posh rag like that interested in a dead Judy?”
“We hear it’s amusing. Come now, Constable, let me pass if you will.”
“I hear Irish in the voice. I could lock you up on suspicion of being full of blarney and whiskey.”
“I’m a teetote, if it matters. Let me see the inspector.”
“Which inspector would that be, now?”
“Any inspector.”
He laughed. “Good luck getting an inspector to talk to you, friend. All right, off you go, stand there with the other penny-a-liners.”
I should have made a squawk at being linked to the freelance hyenas who alit on every crime in London and then sold notes to the various papers, but I didn’t. Instead, I pushed by and joined a gaggle of disreputable-looking chaps who’d been channeled to the side and yet were closer to the action than the citizens. “So what’s the rub, mates?” I asked.
Fiercely competitive, they scowled at me, looked me up and down, noted my brown tweed suit and felt slouch hat and country walking shoes, and decided in a second they didn’t like me.
“You ain’t one of us, guv’nor,” a fellow finally said, “so why’n’t you use use your fancy airs to talk to an inspector.”
The holy grail of the whole frenzy seemed to be acknowledgment by an inspector, which would represent something akin to a papal audience.
“It would be beneath His Lordship,” I said. “Besides, the common copper knows more and sees more.”
Perhaps they enjoyed my banter with them. I have always been blessed at banter, and in bad circumstances a clear mind for the fast riposte does a fellow no end of good.
“You’ll know when we know, Lord Irish of Dublin’s Best Brothel.”
“I do like Sally O’Hara in that one,” I said, drawing laughter, even if I’d never been brothelized in my life.
“Sell you my notes, chum,” a fellow did say finally. He was from the Central News Agency, a service that specialized in servicing second- and third-tier publications with information they hadn’t the staff to report themselves.
“Agh, you lout. I don’t want the notes, just the information. I’ll take me own notes.”
We bargained and settled on a few shillings, probably more than he would have gotten from Tittle-Tattle.
“About forty, a Judy, no name, no papers, discovered by a worker named Charlie Cross, C-R-O-S-S, who lives just down the row, at three-forty A.M., lying where you see her.”