I, Ripper

I could not think of a response to a Black Jack gum allusion; who could? After all, what on God’s earth was a Black Jack gum pack?

“Then,” said Harry, “we need one gory detail. I mean, he’s the Ripper, right, not the Kisser or anything. So let’s add a line, say, in which he tells us he’s going to chop off an ear and ship it to the coppers.”

It was horrifying. It was perfect.

“One last thing,” he said. “More packaging, that’s all, it’s still the great Jeb who came up with Jack the Ripper, but let’s mangle the punctuation. I was never good on apostrophes anyhow. Can’t seem to keep the rules in mind. Whoever thought that one up? Anyhow, I’ll dump the curlicue things—”

“But,” I said, “that would give it the diction and vocabulary of an educated man, yet the form of an uneducated one. I do not see how that advances the cause.”

“It makes it scary,” said Harry. “The final nail in the coffin is, I copy it over in my hand. The reason for that is, unlike you boys, I only have one posh thing going. It’s my handwriting, and I can still feel the smart where Sister Mary Patricia hit my wrist a dozen times with a steel ruler. That girl packed a wallop. So believe me, I learned a fair hand. It just makes the whole thing, I don’t know, mysterious. It’s got a lot of this-ways but also a lot of that-ways.”

“I must say, it’s a dandy idea,” said O’Connor. “Deftly employed, it will sell thousands more papers and elevate Jeb’s Jack into the bogeyman of the nineteenth century. Maybe the twentieth as well.”

Who was I to protest such imbecility? I had no moral standing to argue it the other way, so I just nodded grimly and sat down. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Great,” said Harry, and with relish he set to work, clearing space on the makeup table. O’Connor and I watched as, in his surprisingly adroit hand, he copied my words on a piece of foolscap, so the whole thing did come to resemble a missive from the devil himself, had that old boy been educated by nuns, and come to think of it, he probably was!

When Harry was done, he pinched it by the corner, waved it about to dry, then folded it and crammed it into an envelope. “I’ll go hire a kid and make sure he drops it in the right slot at the Central News Agency,” he said. “By God, it’ll shake the old town up when they run it. And we’ll be ready to jump on the horse before anyone.”

“Excellent, Harry, positively brilliant. Jeb, you agree?”

“I suppose,” I said poutily, having lost on all rounds; I had written a document without integrity, then gotten all prideful over my effort, as if it were a noble calling, and now, absurdly, I felt degraded by further breaches of its integrity inflicted by others. Suddenly, I wanted to vomit.

“All right, then, boys,” said O’Connor, “let’s get back to business.”

Harry threw on his hat and coat and smiled as if he’d eaten the Christmas goose.

“Off you go, then,” said O’Connor, and Harry departed. O’Connor turned to me. “No long faces, Jeb. It’s just business. It’s how we operate, always have, always will. Now mind your P’s and Q’s, and wait for this to stir the pot.”

But I was far too much a baby to let a nice period of self-pity and victimization go wasted, so I took it upon myself to spend more rather than less time in the tearoom. And that was why I was playing the injured party, even several days later, and only Henry Bright noticed, if circumspectly.

So it was that when I came back to the newsroom after my dawdling, I was late to learn that Jack had done his bad trick a third time, at a place I’d never heard of called Dutfield’s Yard, and that Harry was shortly to be, if not already, on the scene.

“There you are, old man,” said Henry Bright. “I’ll be in makeup. We’ve got to redesign for tomorrow. Harry will call in with details and you—”

Someone came running over, and to this day, I cannot remember who, for the news was so overwhelming.

“My God,” whoever it was said, “the bastard’s done it again. Two in one night! This one at a place called Mitre Square a mile away. Two in one hour! And she’s really chopped up!”

“All right, Jeb,” said Henry Bright. “Get on your horse. It looks like it’ll be a long evening of fun.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Diary

September 30, 1888 (cont’d)

now pass to the second event of the evening. As to my disappearance from Dutfield’s Yard and the Anarchists’ Club, I record nothing, as I am exhausted (you will see why), and though it might be of interest to readers, I anticipate no readers and thus airily mean to skip that which I find tedious.