I, Ripper

“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?”

I thought a bit. I saw it in my mind’s eye.

“The Juwes are The men that Will not be Blamed for nothing”

Or was it “The Juwes are not The men that Will be Blamed for nothing,” as some had it?

“Hmm, missing? I suppose, other than sense, grammar, somewhat chaotic capitalization, I don’t see that anything – oh, yes, wait, well, that is being very persnickity.”

“I am a persnickity sort. I am a phoneticist.”

“Then one would say the concluding period. None of the three copyists recorded a period at its conclusion. However, that may be because of an error in transmission. The copyists—”

“All three forgot a period?”

“Hmm,” I said again. “All right, I take your point.”

“Do you? The larger point?”

“The larger point?”

“He was interrupted, who knows by what or whom. Possibly that copper coming down the street. But he realized that although he had really engineered the whole thing to pass on this message, he had the discipline – military, that is – to retreat upon threat of discovery and not drive himself on false pride and end up in the bag. He decided not to compromise the completion of the whole mission for this one component of it. Do you see?”

“So there’s more?”

“Indeed. What could the next few words be, considering what was going on in London then, his character as we have drawn it, his few but admittedly existent virtues, perhaps even, out of his military past, a sense of duty, moral duty. It must also fit on the wall, which limits the space. Limits it to just a few more words, another line at most.”

Was Dare mad? “I have no idea.”

“This,” he said. “ ‘The Juwes are The men that Will not blamed for nothing … was done by them.’ ”

I looked at him.

“WAS DONE BY THEM! It’s in the passive voice of so much military report writing, it restores the grammatical integrity of the educated man – Sandhurst, I’m guessing – to the composition, it is succinct, the space on the wall would permit it, and it could be written by the light of a quarter-moon by a fellow with sharp eyes. But its point is to absolve the Jews, because he could see that fear and hate was building, that beatings had taken place, that the newsrags, including yours—”

That damned Harry Dam again!

“—were fanning the flames to sell yet more papers, that the thugees and druids of the slums were building up energy. He saw all that and could not live with the idea of a thousand Jews dying in the flames of hatred because of his mission. So he took it upon himself to formally absolve them, signing his statement with Mrs. Eddowes’s blood and placing it on a police route where it could not be missed.”

I was not convinced, although the man’s argument had logic to it. “And if so, of what import? I see it leading us nowhere.”

“Quite the contrary, it leads us very much somewhere.” Dare smiled.

He was a cat toying with a mouse, and I, the great Jeb, did not care a bit to be made mouse of, to have all my arguments dashed upon the stones so insolently by a fellow who was not only smarter but could afford a better tailor and didn’t live with a horrid mum and a trilling sister.

“What somewhere, pray tell?”

“Where would he get such ideas? Clearly, he believes that the Jews – bogeymen of the popular press, demons of the working-class imagination, devils of the retail exchange, depraved and violent in folk rumor, despised by the capitalist class because they are so much better at capitalism, despised by the revolutionary class because they are so much better at revolution, detested for lacking fairness and physical beauty and portrayed everywhere as hook-nosed, yellow-skinned, shawl-wearing, matzoh-ball-eating vermin – he believes them to be human beings, like all of us. Where on God’s earth could he have gotten such an idea?”

“I see it,” I said.

“Then explain it.”