Castle Rouge (8 page)

“Apparently,” he said cryptically through an immense huff of smoke. I could see that my indignant charges had hit home.

“It was necessary to mislead you, Watson. I was called into the case last autumn, although late, by a Personage of such eminence that even to hint at the name and position would be a betrayal any true Englishman would face an execution squad rather than reveal.”

“Oh,” I said, understanding immediately that he referred to Her Majesty, the Queen, herself. Sometimes Holmes ran the danger of being most transparent when he most wished to bemuse.

“I deeply regretted the necessity. You have been a most loyal old fellow and deserved more. But you do have a tendency to write down the particulars of my cases and are even eager to publish them. However, now—”

“Yes, I suppose old Toby and I do deserve a small treat now and again.”

Holmes flashed me a look of impatience over the bowl of his favorite black clay pipe at my reference to the scent-hound he occasionally used on his cases. “No need to be testy about it. The matter was of national secrecy, and now it has grown into a matter of international discretion.”

He had me there, hooked like a salmon in an icy Scottish stream. “International?”

“Indeed,” he murmured to his oil-stained pipe bowl, his favorite accessory for cogitating. “See here, Watson. I defer to your superior experience in this one area and cast myself upon your mercy. Come with me to Whitechapel, and show me how a gentleman might see the place and might see opportunity there.”

“A gentleman?”

“A man of good character, at least apparently. You cannot deny that when you served in foreign climes you did not fail to sample the…recreational aspects of the locality.”

“I was in the Army, Holmes! And I am not a saint.”

“Exactly why I value your knowledge now. I was never in the Army, and while I do not aspire to sanctity, neither do I to sin. I had long considered this an advantage in my calling, but am discovering this to be a handicap in this particular case.”

“It is unlike you to admit a failing.”

Holmes laughed into the smoke welling up from the pipe. “It is humbling indeed when the lack of what is commonly considered a moral failing proves a stumbling block to my investigation.”

He leapt up as he was wont to, without warning, and made for the bookshelf. He returned with a slim volume I had not seen before, an odd stutter in his usually confident stride as he came abreast of the mantel and glanced at something on it.

I consulted it myself, for its terrain was as unvarying as the cursed wilds of Afghanistan. I saw nothing amiss: the jackknife pinning correspondence to the wood, the Persian slipper, the clutter, the cabinet portrait of the dead adventuress, Irene Adler, the wad of saved tobacco ends at the mantel’s opposite end.

“Do you read German, Watson?”

“I can stumble through it. Medical texts, you know. ‘Richard von Krafft-Ebing.’ I have heard of this doctor, although in a scandalous context.”

“Excellent.” Holmes cast himself into the basket chair and huffed away on the pipe like a steam locomotive. “Tell me what is so scandalous.”

“He claims to have discovered a class of killers that he calls ‘lust-murderers.’”

“And he means by that?”

“That the lust to kill is also a carnal urge.”

“And how does that make these killers different from those who slaughter in the name of greed or vengeance or pure madness?”

I perused the thick pages. “I am not sure. I have heard of but not read his work.”

“And how is it that I have escaped knowledge of this most useful volume?” Holmes asked a bit querulously. His voice was a trifle high-pitched to begin with. When he felt overlooked, or worse, offended, it would rise to a strident tone.

“Holmes, these matters are discreetly discussed among men of the world, in clubs, at gentleman’s bars. Such knowledge is not deemed fit for the public at large.”

“Nor for women.”

“Certainly not! I would shoot the man who would lay such filth before my Mary.”

“Yet women, and occasionally children, seem to most often be the victims of such lust-murders, if one is to believe Krafft-Ebing.”

Holmes may have eschewed certain knowledge. He was never not astute.

“First one needs to believe his theories, and they have been roundly abused.”

“So were Galileo’s.”

“I cannot recall that you ever cared one iota about whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa. We have had words on this very issue.”

“And I do not care one whit more about these tiresome empyrean arrangements,” he said with a dismissive wave of a long, lean hand. It struck me for the first time that he had a conductor’s hands, incredibly communicative when his face so often was not.

“I merely point out what is of more interest to me than the subject matter of the Baron’s speculations: that new ideas are often roundly rejected. I suspect that the theories of Baron von Krafft-Ebing are of more immediate use to me and my work than any roundabout made by heavenly bodies for untold millennia.”

I could not restrain a “
tsk
” of exasperation. That a man of scientific bent in the minutiae of evidence to be discerned by a microscope could ignore the magnificent yet grossly visible and daily dance of the planets and stars struck me as beyond belief.

Holmes shrugged and offered one of his rare, charming smiles, which were usually exerted with nervous clients and not myself.

“I am a reprobate, Watson, when it comes to matters which have no bearing on the intimate course of my investigations. However, I am willing to learn. And it appears that this Krafft-Ebing has, in his much-loathed and yet eagerly devoured book, described a legion of Jack the Rippers.”

I began to page through it looking for an assemblage of words that would translate most readily to my stumbling eye. “How did you come across this book?”

“It was a gift.”

I looked up amazed. Holmes received payment, sometimes in the form of costly trinkets from rich and titled persons, never anything as personal as mere “gifts.”

His lips remained firmly shut, an expression that a stick of dynamite could not blast open, but I detected a dampened smile. A smug dampened smile.

“So you believe that this bizarre book will aid you in finding the Ripper, who appears to have finished his work with the ending of last year and has vanished into the foul mists from which he came.”

Holmes’s eyes narrowed, perhaps from the rank smoke the old clay bowl heaved up like Vesuvius.

“This is as foul a trail as I have ever followed, Watson, and already I know of decent women who have been devastated by it. I find that makes my blood boil. I am even finding the brutal despoilation of indecent women making my blood boil. No honest Englishman should tolerate what has been made of Whitechapel, both before and after Jack the Ripper. I mean to have him. That may require me to delve into deeper, darker matters than I ever have before, and you know my appetite for human horror, for the axe murderers and acid poisoners and all manner of human depravity. This Ripper has reached a new level of atrocity. I will understand it. I will understand him. And I will catch him. Are you game to go with me?”

“Of course, Holmes. I brought my old service revolver.”

Holmes smiled, tightly. “Bullets may be our least line of defense against what will come. But it is heartening to know you stand with me on this.”

4.

Pitiless Whitechapel

Here I am noble; I am boyar. The common people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not—and to know not is to care not for
.

—
THE COUNT TO JONATHAN HARKER, BRAM STOKER’S
DRACULA

FROM THE NOTES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M. D.

Before we left on our unwholesome errand, Holmes had changed into one of the lounge suits that were becoming popular on the streets of London, an American habit, I believe, that no Harley Street physician would dare adapt, nor even a lowly Paddington doctor. The jacket lacked the flourishes of city attire: coat skirts or tails. In that respect it resembled the more casual dress worn at sporting events, save it was constructed in decent, sober black wool rather than loose-woven linen or sackcloth.

“I am told, Watson, that supposed gentlemen amble among the greasy lanes of Whitechapel, though all I have thus far seen there are would-be gentlemen tricked out in bits and pieces of their betters’ attire, rather like the unfortunates themselves in their velvet-trimmed bonnets.”

The hansom had left us off where Holmes had directed, at Fairclough and Berner Streets. The jointure of those two names brought a shudder to my sturdy frame, for they often figured in newspaper stories of various evils.

“You suspect a gentleman of the Ripper slayings?” I asked, keeping my tone low against eavesdroppers and my hands in my pockets against thieves.

“I? No. But that is the current fashionable theory among the Fleet Street speculators who pass themselves off as journalists. It is not bad enough that a homicidal monster stalks the alleyways; he must be a man of privilege and position. If I had a farthing, Watson, for all the far-fetched tales constructed around the acts of Jack the Ripper, I could…well, I could afford a finer blend of shag.”

I coughed a bit at inhaling the foul stew that passed for air among these twisted byways. “What do you need of me?”

“You have no acquaintanceship of Whitechapel?”

“I am a married man, Holmes!”

“It was not always thus, Watson.”

“No, but even then I should never find my way to Whitechapel. The disease potential alone would dissuade any man of sensibility.”

“We are not looking for a man of sensibility.” Holmes paused beneath one of the too-few gaslights to study the street. “We are hunting a man who revels in the opposite. That does not mean he cannot sleep on silken sheets elsewhere.”

“And the Ripper letters?”

“Are they indeed from the monster? Possibly. But why then the Americanisms and the mock Cockney phonetics?” He gazed around the ill-lit scene, people lurching beyond the honest circle of gaslight like supernumeraries in some contemporary vision of urban hell. “I understand the opium addict, Watson. The drug brings phantoms, illusions. It makes pain seem like pleasure, for a while. I do not understand the men who come here looking for
that
particular delusion as any kind of surcease, or illusion of pleasure.”

I followed his gaze to a staggering woman across the way.

She was a creature of the ignored and much-abused homeless classes: thick of frame with poor nutriance, thick of mind thanks to too many tankards, about as feminine as that quality is experienced in a drawing room as an andiron. To a physician, a walking cesspool of disease and decay. No wonder they were known as “unfortunates.”

“Why bother slaying such a sad creature?” he went on. “Yet men willingly consort with such. Can you explain it?”

“The men are drunk as well.”

“I am devoutly grateful that the occasional fine port does not bring me to such a condition.”

I nodded to some tattered-looking men linking arms with lamp-poles along the lane. “Most of these men are brute laborers. Their work is low and vile and distasteful, and so are their scant and guilty pleasures, but I tell you, Holmes, the same game is played in more attractive guise in the West End nightly.”

“Ah. So I understand. Or know for a fact. It is the same game you say, Watson. Then a man from a pristine playing surface might wish to…try his skill in a more…dangerous neighborhood.”

“True, Holmes. The confirmed hedonist seeks sensation at its rawest. A demented aristocrat may wish to wallow in the city’s worst sinkhole.”

“There. That innocuously run-down building is an opium den of my…knowledge. I guarantee that all within are dead to the world, Watson. The life that goes on in these streets is another matter. When death strikes here it is usually not worth noting. Where does the Ripper begin and end? I begin to think he is eternal. Not a man, but a…mania.”

“How can you find and accuse a mania, Holmes?”

“I don’t know. I suspect it hasn’t been done before.” He paused under another lamp to light his pipe, nodding at the bobby who strolled past.

“You’ve been here before,” I accused.

“Frequently. In many guises, including my own.”

“Your own personage is not a disguise, Holmes.”

“Is it not? One night I stood perhaps ten feet from the Ripper.”

“You saw him?”

“I glimpsed his shadow. And chased another shadow, believing it more likely.” He inhaled so deeply on the clay pipe the bowl glowed as cherry-red as fresh-spilt blood. “I went the wrong way. I pursued a witness, not a perpetrator. I left the Ripper behind to do his bloody work.”

“You, Holmes?”

“I, Watson. The man I observed was berating a woman. He knocked her down but from my recent observations of the environs, knocking down women is more the commonplace than the exception. I took it for the usual street scene. By the time I returned, she was warm but no more. It was all I could do to remove myself from the vicinity without being hailed as the Ripper myself.”

“Good God, Holmes! You were that close?”

“I was that far, and for that I shall never forgive myself. If I ever do somehow stand before St. Peter and he is inclined to admit me to the pearly gates, I shall take myself off directly in the opposite direction, merely for the evil I did that one night with one wrong decision. I did not understand the customs of the country, Watson. I am a stranger in a strange land.”

“You are indeed, when you quote Holy Writ.”

“How is it holy?”

“‘A stranger in a strange land.’ It is what Ruth became for her mother-in-law Naomi’s sake.”

“These are persons I should know?”

“Well, yes. If one were well-read.”

“I am perfectly well-read, Watson, merely not in those tiresome tomes that pass for essential in our day. In fact, I am so well-read that I now number Krafft-Ebing among my acquaintance.” It was as close as Holmes ever came to a jocularity. He eyed me, head tilted like a robin expecting some unwise worm to rise to the surface. “Do you think that this author would have useful insight on this place?”