Castle Rouge (10 page)

“She…bleated, Watson. Like a sacrificial lamb. Three times, none of them loud. I didn’t know what to make of it. In any other place I would have rushed to the lady’s rescue, but in Whitechapel I didn’t know the customs of the country and felt obliged to observe without judgment until I had made a conclusion. Obviously where kissing between strangers is such common coin of the realm, so violence is also. The cries of “Murder!” to be heard in a Whitechapel night are as common as cries of ‘Giddy up’ in Rotten Row.”

I doubt the upper-class riders of the Row would descend to a common “giddy up,” but I ignored Holmes’s sardonic humor and did as he said. I listened. The night was still, not in contradiction of Holmes’s words, but almost in honor of his tale-telling. I knew the story’s end, but the process of hearing it was agonizing.

“The second man who had been coming along the path bolted across the street to avoid the altercation. In doing so, he nearly threw himself into my arms. I was lighting my pipe but had to pocket it at his impetuous arrival. He was later identified as one Israel Schwartz and this is the tale he told police later: I was five-feet-eleven and thirty-five years old with light brown hair and mustache and a fair complexion. I wore an old black hard felt hat with a wide brim and a dark overcoat.”

“Is that true, Holmes?”

He chuckled. “Israel Schwartz was an excellent and accurate witness. I am five-and-thirty. I am taller than that, but had, of course, disguised my height by my own personal method of shrinking, or affecting to shrink. The clothing was from my supply of odds and ends to which I added the lighter hair and mustache. The wide-brimmed hat helped shade my features, which you notice Schwartz could not describe.

“At any rate, the man who had downed the woman startled us both by shouting the word “Lipski” in our direction. Now you must know the history of Whitechapel and the great resentment toward the influx of immigrant Jews who have come here because of the fierce pogroms against their kind in Russia in recent years. A pogrom is an odd word to describe an ancient human tendency to persecute, kill, and cast out some of its kind on very parochial pretexts. A Jew named Israel Lipski was convicted of killing a Christian woman named Miriam Angel a few years ago. Was there ever a victim’s name that so called out for vengeance? Naturally, this fanned the flames of religious and racial hatred, so any Jew seen on the streets of Whitechapel may now be taunted by the name of the deranged killer, Lipski.

“Israel Schwartz testified that he was convinced that the man opposite had called him ‘Lipski’ by way of alerting his accomplice across the street—myself—to his presence as a witness. I suppose Schwartz’s sharing the first name of the hated figure did not serve to calm his fears.

“Schwartz’s sudden flight caused me to take the epithet literally. I immediately wondered if Lipski had escaped custody and could he not be the perfect candidate for Jack the Ripper? This was not an idle speculation. So, as Schwartz ran, I sprinted after him.”

I leaped to the only conclusion for this tale, given recent history, a horrifying fact. “You ran
away
from Berner Street.” I watched Holmes’s heavy lidded eyes shut at my words, as if blotting out the facts of that night.

“Not for long, Watson. But long enough. Schwartz fled to the railway arch before he noticed that I was no longer behind him.

“Meanwhile, during the time I was absent from the scene, a woman named Fanny Mortimer stood outside her lodging at thirty-six Berner Street, two doors down from the murder site, and said she saw no one enter Dutfield’s Yard at that time.”

“That is impossible, Holmes!”

“This case is impossible. And if you think it unlikely that Israel Lipski could have been out and about the night of twenty-nine September, I will refer you to the particulars of another convicted murderer named James Kelly, an escaped lunatic who was a Ripper suspect and only two weeks ago figured as chief villain in a new series of vicious prostitute murders in France. I will recount his story at another, more amenable time. For now I am concerned with what appeared to happen on Berner Street the night of Long Liz Stride’s murder.

“We are still at the hour of a quarter to one on Berner Street. I am returning from my foot race after Israel Schwartz, having decided that the busy events in Berner Street will be more fruitful. And I am worried about the woman.

“At that very moment, James Brown, a dock laborer, was returning home with a late supper. He spied a man and woman standing at the corner of Fairclough and Berner Streets outside the Board School. She was backed against the wall facing the man, who at five-feet-seven loomed over her. He was reportedly stout and clad in a long dark coat. Brown heard the woman say, ‘No. Not tonight. Some other night.’ He identified Stride in the mortuary later as that woman.”

I frowned. “There was a man earlier who was reputedly five-foot-seven.”

“Yes.”

“Would Elizabeth Stride have been knocked to the ground outside Dutfield gate in one minute and be backed against a wall in Fairclough Street around the corner the next?”

“You tell me, Watson. How fast are these streetside transactions in Whitechapel?”

“They can take mere minutes, even moments. What happened next?”

“That is a puzzle. Fifteen minutes later, Brown, at home in Fairclough Street heard cries of ‘Police!’ and ‘Murder!’ This tallies with events reported by other witnesses. At 1:00
A.M.
Louis Diemschutz—”

“Another Jew, Holmes.”

“You see why suspicion falls upon such, besides the ancient distrust of the foreigner. Remember, though, that the International Working Men’s Educational Club is just across the way. Diemschutz, a Russian Jew and street jewelry seller, is steward of the club. He drove his pony and cart into the Dutfield yard. The hardworking pony balked and shied away. Diemschutz noticed a small heap on the ground. He prodded with the whip handle, then got down and struck a match. It was, of course, Liz Stride.

“Diemschutz fled into the club, ran upstairs and sought his wife. Was she safe, or the woman who he told others lay drunk or dead in the yard? Obviously he had been too frightened to examine the body and may have sensed lurking danger. He later told the police he feared that the Ripper might have stood unseen only feet away from him in the dark, and escaped when he ran into the club.

“I am afraid that he was quite right, Watson. That is exactly what I did.”

I opened my mouth, and could not close it, could not speak. Had this expedition and recital all been an elaborate confession not to a friend or a physician, but to a loyal biographer?

Was Sherlock Holmes telling me that he was Jack the Ripper?

5.

Inhospitable

A complete account of the case [of hypnotic suggestion] will be found, with authority and evidence, in a pamphlet entitled
“
EINE EXPERIMENTAL STUDIE AUF DEM GEBIETE DES HYPNOTISMUS
,”
by Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Professor of Psychiatry and for nervous diseases, in the University of Gratz. 1889
.

—
F. MARION CRAWFORD, FOOTNOTE TO
THE WITCH OF PRAGUE
,
1891

FROM A JOURNAL

There are always many attractions in Paris worth visiting by the dedicated sight-seer. This was only June, yet the year of 1889 had already welcomed the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower, a sort of inverted thumbtack of embroidered iron, as well as a massive world exhibition.

Parisian sights of particular interest to the visiting girl reporter desperate for fodder for stories sensational enough to cable back to America are more rare. I myself had already explored the bowels of the Paris Morgue, various cellars, and a catacomb or two, and witnessed the results of violent death as well as glimpsed the mob violence that once made Paris cobblestones gleam redder than rubies with aristocratic blood.

One might think a visit to a Paris hospital too boring for words, but I was intrigued to see how this French institution compared to ones on my native soil. And, of course, I was mad to see the woman whose breast had been cut off.

Now, at last, I would glimpse an actual survivor of the unspeakable events that had transpired in the secret cavern beneath the electric lights and spouting fountains and thousands of strolling visitors of
l’Exposition universelle
.

“You think that this woman will remember enough of events to testify to us?” I asked Irene as we prepared to leave our hotel room while dusk darkened into evening. “And what language does she speak? Have the Paris police interrogated her? Why are they letting us see her?”

She answered my last question first. “They are not letting ‘us’ see her. They are permitting me access.”

She could be as coldly precise as Sherlock Holmes when it suited her, and she wasn’t even English!

Irene went on installing her hat atop her piled hair with a trio of formidable steel pins ornamented with finials of jet beads. The shafts disappeared into her coiffure like swords into sheaths, their hilts alone showing and providing surface glitter. In many ways, they reminded me of their owner.

Irene went on answering my questions. “She is Polish, the police say, saying also that they can get nothing sensible out of her.”

“Perhaps they have asked nothing sensible of her.”

“Quite right, Pink. They have either asked too much, too fast, or not enough. I believe,” she added, still replying to my flurry of questions, “that her memory of that outrage will be erased. I do speak a smattering of Polish. I was prima donna of the Warsaw Imperial Opera once.”

She regarded her hatted image in the mirror with utter inexpression. “I learned a few words, though it was long ago and far away.”

“That won’t do much good.”

Irene turned and thus turned the same flat expression she had bestowed on the mirror upon me. It was like regarding the eyes of the walking dead.

“There are other skills,” she said, “that I have acquired in my travels that may do more good. Are you ready?”

Well, I had been ready first, after all.

I don’t know if it was by accident or design, but my—mentor, shall I say?—had undergone a strange shift in her mode of dress and her very demeanor since the horrific events in the Seine-side cavern, which events all who know about them are all sworn to conceal, more’s the pity.

Somewhere among the wardrobe of an operatic diva prone to peacock display she had unearthed the simple, earth-colored garments of a sparrow. Today, in a gown of large-scale camel-and-charcoal plaid with a solid-gray jacket with matching revers, she suddenly could pass for a Quaker.

In fact, she seemed to mark the absence of Nell by assuming some of the coloration of Nell. On the other hand, she was a born chameleon and might be simply dressing in an unassuming fashion that wouldn’t intimidate a frightened foreign woman of peasant class. It was always hard to tell what was clever effect or deep conviction with Irene. No doubt that was why she was so successful as a private inquiry agent.

“I am ready and rarin’ to go,” I said, stabbing pins willy-nilly into my own hat and hair. “Is there anything I should know before we arrive?”

“With reporters, I understand, speculation is always more alluring than mere fact.”

“First comes speculation. Fact proves it. To find out facts, I must see for myself,” I finished pointedly.

“So you shall. At St. Sulpice.”

I certainly was glad of the time I’d spent in a madhouse, which resulted not only in a ripping good newspaper story, but my first book:
Ten Days in a Madhouse
by Nellie Bly.

Hospitals were but one step up from that in my opinion.

Perhaps it is the sight of those rows of iron beds, the rough-grained cotton cloths more resembling winding sheets than gentle bed linens.

The floors are hard and cold, the walls unadorned, the place reeks of carbolic acid, with the windows fastened tight as if to hold in pain and suffering.

The Paris hospital had no magic French touch to lighten its deprivations. Lit by too few lamps, the ward where our quarry lay looked like a dank underground mine populated with emaciated wailing women or fat moaning ones.

The matron in a striped apron who conducted us to our quarry’s bedside was utterly disinterested in our identities or our mission. This was good news for us, but rather awful for the residents.

I must admit, with all that I have seen that is unpleasant, I felt a slight shiver as we approached that spare bed and the sparer figure that barely raised the profile of the sheets.

I tried to keep my eyes from her chest in the dim light but couldn’t. The flatness seemed symmetrical. It was only one breast taken. Wasn’t it? How would Irene’s “smattering” of Polish include as extraordinary a word as “breast,” that is not heard in public unless it belongs to a chicken or a duck, and even then is deemed crude by some?