I, Ripper

He was so absurd, standing there in his comically inappropriate wardrobe, complete with white suede shoes and straw boater, but nevertheless so beaming confidence and self-adoration that I let him steer me into a place called the Farmer’s Pig, and there we found a booth in a dark corner, and he went and got a beer for self and a frothy ginger beer for me.

“This ain’t the moment for you to start drinking, friend, believe me,” he said, and drained half his glass, then licked the foam from his upper lip. I assumed he was cheesed off because I was on this “secret project” and he was not, and I was off “making inquiries” while he was not. He was planted at the Yard, waiting for something to happen, a hard sit for a go-and-grab-it fellow like him.

“Harry, believe me, nothing is going on, I am not plotting against you, I just—”

“It’s not that. If you break the story, makes no dif, because there’ll be other stories that I’ll break, you can be sure. No, it’s this. I’m worried about you, pal. You’re overconfident but underexperienced. I’m worried you’re getting yourself in way beyond your depth, and it’s you we could next find in the gutter.”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“What do you know about this Thomas Dare?”

“How do you even know the name?”

“I heard J.P. tell Bright your caper. I’m good at overhearing stuff. It’s sort of my trade, you might say. Anyhow, I heard it, and I didn’t get a schoolboy crush on him like you did, and I thought he ought to be the one we look at, so I took the liberty.”

“He’s a brilliant man!”

“How’s he know so much?”

“That same brilliance.”

“Too brilliant, if you ask me.”

“There are such men. Rare, to be sure, but genius is not without documentation. Surely Darwin, his cousin Galton, Matthew Arnold …” But I had been so taken by the brilliance of Professor Dare’s explanation that I had never questioned its origin. Surely he was a shrewd analyst, but he was so far ahead of the others that it might mean he had some kind of inside information. Inside what?

A far more likely explanation involved Harry, not Dare. Was Harry a more jealous type than I had figured, and was he working now to drive suspicion between me and Dare? That would be a sure way to destroy our partnership, and Harry might benefit, picking up the pieces we’d left on the floor and assembling them. Such deviousness seemed not only beyond Harry but beyond the American mind. Now, were he a Hungarian, one might think it plausible, but a son of the middle prairie, with those broad, flat vowels and that total absence of irony, much less subtle thinking, nuanced calculation, patience, cleverness? Hardly likely, I’d have thought.

“What are you here to tell me?” I said.

“It took some digging, some bribing, some considerable yakkity-yak and palaver, but the second best kept secret in London after Jack’s identity is that your Tom Dare has a violent streak in him.”

I looked at Harry, searching for signs of jest. I knew irony was well beyond him, but his crude American mind might conceive of a crude practical joke. “What are you talking about?”

“A few years back, he almost went on trial for assaulting a colleague. He and this guy, they got into it over a project they’d been working on, and Tom Dare jumped him, smashed him, shoved him down the steps, and was throttling him, only to be pulled off by cooler heads. This was at the school, you know, the University of London, where he was some mucky-muck-mullah type. You know how discreet your own people are, chum. It was, what’s the word, ‘hushed up.’ Can’t have a high-up professor at a high-up school acting like a low hooligan, cracking pals over the head and all. Tut-tut, old chap, we just cannot have it.”

“I have never heard of such a thing.” And I hadn’t. No, it was not done. Among “our” class of folk, that is, those of us with higher mental function, exposure to education, mastery of culture, familiarity with the genius canon of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, proficiency in the dead languages, the brightest, the best, the most gifted, it was understood that the laying on of hands was strictly off limits. One did not do such things. That was for Kipling’s sort of brutes. If there was to be pugilism, it would be at the gymnasium, under the regulations of the marquis of Queensberry.

“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.”