“The guy has very strong ideas and, more to the point, a crazy belief in them. He cannot stand to be defied, and when he is, he goes all nuts in the brain. When he and this guy had a falling-out, it got real bad fast.”
“Come now, Harry, you must do better than that. Particulars? Names, issue involved, social ramifications? I feel certain that, had such an incident occurred, it would have been the talk of all London, it would have made all the rags, the Star especially. ‘PROF BEANS CHUM,’ as O’Connor would have it, a huge scandal, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t have that stuff yet. I only know what I know, and I wanted to warn you, tread easy with this guy. You never know what you might jiggle loose.”
That tore it. I am not a violent man, I despise and fear confrontations, and too many times I’ve not stood up to bullies for my own interests, but at that moment something either heroic or insane arose in me, and perhaps they are the same thing.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll have no more of this. I don’t know how they do it in that rustic backwoods you come from, but over here we do not spread ugly rumors and attempt to ruin the reputations of men without foundation. We even have laws against it. Dare could sue you for slander, and if you were found guilty, you could end up in jail. It’s happened before, it will happen again, and it’s our good insurance against nasty buggers spreading nasty rumors.”
He looked at me, shocked-like. “Whoa, there, friend Jeb, I’m not here for my health and to put a bullet in the professor’s back. I’m just telling you, this guy is a little nuts. He goes off, loses control, all that crazy—”
“Mr. Dam, I must inform you I am no longer interested in this conversation, whose veracity I entirely doubt. I believe you’re trying to sabotage my superior efforts on solving this issue. It’s a low-breed stunt that only a Yank could come up with.”
“That’s right, we shot you guys from behind trees, and it wasn’t fair, was it?”
“Mr. Dam. I will leave now. Please do not approach me with any more discussion on this topic. I find it distasteful. Even allowing for your frontiersman’s ignorance, I find you distasteful. It’s not acceptable, and I will not be a party.”
With that I rose, feeling I’d broken all relations with Harry permanently. At least I had by English rules. Who knew what an American would do?
I stomped out self-righteously, only to hear him cry, “Friend, if I was you, I’d get a gun.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Diary
October 28, 1888 (cont’d)
I went to my knees, down hard but not quite unconscious. The sensations of the blow were unpleasant. It had sounded like a locomotive crashing hard against my ear, all clang and gong, echoing around my brain at a hundred miles an hour. My will vanished in the pain, as did my ability to think clearly. The world went to blur and whiz as I blinked, blinked again, felt the urge to vomit, put my hand to the site of the blow to feel, thankfully, not a laceration spurting blood but the swelling of a knot. I looked up to see him towering over me, blunt fellow in black wool, black cap, black of eyes, and beefy-wide of face. I saw his boot come out, and he didn’t kick me but put it square on my back and crushed me to the earth.
“Go on, Rosie, get out of here,” I heard him say.
“Don’t kill him,” she said, then clarified so that her intent wouldn’t be taken for mercy, “that’ll get the coppers on us like buzzards.”
She skittered away, and he bent low and whispered into my ear, “Now, guv’nor, I can cosh you till your brains is scrambled good, or I can let you alone if you promise to be a proper fellow and do as you’re told.”
This was the bully game. It happened, not a lot, but it happened. A tart made an assignation and drew her John to darkness, and as he was about to hand over the coin, her bully jumped out and gave him a knot on the head. The robbery was clean and usually involved no more violence. The clouted knave would never go to the coppers, as to do so would involve confessing he’d been on the scout among the Judys, so he would just write off the six or eight quid or whatever it cost him, swear off the Judys, and limp home with a headache. This threat was always there, nothing to be done about it, but now I’d walked smack into it, obviously on account of my bad judgment in improvising off-plan and ending up in circumstances I couldn’t control. Fool! Idiot!
“Now, sir, you just stay where you is, flat as an empty sack, and reach back there for that wallet, and I’ll take all them bills. No fancy tricks or I cosh you again. I am a bloody artist with cosh, I am, and I know a fine gentleman such as yourself don’t want no more trouble. I’ll even leave you a thruppence for a stout after I’m long gone, that’s the kind of mate I am, guv’nor.”
“Don’t hurt me,” I said feebly.
“No need for hurting,” he said. “Who you think I am, Jack the Ripper? He’d cut you for the larfs it brung his lips. Me, I just want me pay and I’m off, and you and I are well quit.”
“So be it,” I said, rolling slightly, pulling myself up.
“Sure, make yourself comfortable, but no fast moves or I’ll do what I must. I’m a businessman like you, and I don’t want no trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Garn,” he said, a cockneyism that I believe means “Imagine that!” but loaded to brim with cynic’s irony, “a guv’nor like ’im calling a blackguard like me ‘sir.’ Who’d a seen that one coming?”
My servile manner amused him no end. It confirmed all his social prejudices. I knew him in an instant: He believed his own physicality and willingness to go brute made him the superior man, and that it was he who was nature’s nobleman by rights, but with the coming of civilization, the “gentlemen” had taken over, being book-smart if muscle-dumb, and had contrived unfair methods to cheat him out of his natural lordship over all things. He was merely seeking compensation for his loss.
“Yes, there now,” he said as I withdrew my hand from my coat and handed over what he thought was my wallet. He reached for it and at that moment was monarch of a tiny kingdom, this lost alleyway on the quay. His rectitude blazed outward, his sense of self-righteous justice having been served, his appetite whetted for what pleasures were upcoming and soon. He was feeling generous and magnificent, a “larf” on his merry lips.
Hello, sir, allow me to introduce myself, all proper-like, I’m Jack the Ripper.
It was a wonderful stroke. Well, not a stroke so much as an épée’s hit, a darting jab faster than the eye can see, much less track, so swift it cannot be blocked by hand, and I drove the six inches of steel into him hard at a kind of upward angle, through his right side under the arm so that it would glance off ribs if it happened to strike them (it didn’t) and cut through his abdomen on the rise toward his thoracic cavity where it pierced the lower left ventricle, opening a wound that would never close, and his blood began to drain into his guts. It lasted only a second, but I felt the bliss of steel in muscle, I felt all the infinitesimal vibratory sensations of the muscle fibers yielding as the point penetrated and opened the pathway wider for the blade to glide through, slicing deep and wide as it went. I even fancy I felt the slightly more gelid obstruction of the heart, where, for an instant too small to be measured, that lump of muscle resisted, then yielded as the point pushed a full inch into it, opening it to drain its contents and cease its throbbing evermore. Then the withdrawal, neat as the closing of scissors; with a sense of zip and snick to it, the blade was out as fast as it had entered, perhaps in his flesh for less than half a second. The peritoneal lining closed over the small wound, so there was no copious outflow as I had observed in my other escapades. All his bleeding would be internal.