City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (47 page)

Had Mary seen this?  Had her father
or her brother?

It is easier to die than to live.  That
is the great surprise. 

8:25 PM

Severin drew the blade of the knife
lightly across his palm. 

“You did not know?”  He said it as a
question but meant it as a statement.  “Did not know I was the one they are
looking for?  They have been looking for a very long time.”

Cecil inched back, knocking over a
trash can, his boots slipping over the piles of fish bones and slimy fruit.  He
wanted to tell the man he didn’t see him, that he would never tell anyone they
had been here, but his voice seemed to have left him.  He could do no more than
shake his head. 

Severin stepped toward him slowly. 
“And now at last I am caught,” he said.  “What are we to do about this?”

And then, like the vengeance of
angels, a crescendo of police whistles began to rise up all around them.  Not
one or two but a dozen, coming from all directions.  Severin’s dark eyes flickered
and he hesitated.  Just long enough to allow Cecil to turn. 

8:25  PM

“What’s that sound?” Tom said.  “It’s
coming from the water.” 

“Get there when you can,” John said.
He bent to slide Tom from his back and then he began to run.

8:26 PM

The three figures before him were images
from a nightmare.  The giant at the mouth of the dock was Micha - the man Abrams
had served up to him on a platter and that he had been fool enough to release. 
Micha had thrown Emma’s limp form to the pavement as casually as a man shucks a
coat.   Even as Trevor ran down the dock with his whistle screaming, Micha did
not pause at the sound or hesitate in his task.   He left Emma and turned
toward Leanna, who was struggling to sit up.   Trevor dropped the whistle from his
lips and began to simply roar the same word over and over again.  The darkness around
him had a new name.  Jack.  Jack.  Jack.

The big man moved with an almost
leisurely grace, stooping over Leanna, lifting a shank of her hair, which
glowed snow-white in the streetlight, pulling back his hand….but Trevor saw
that Emma had somehow gotten to her feet, was running at the man, throwing her
small body against his, and in just that moment Leanna also managed to get her
knees beneath her, to push up from the dock like a diver from a board.  The
collective movement of their bodies disturbed the man’s equilibrium.  Just for
a moment, but it was enough.  They weaved and staggered, six arms about each
other, in a bizarre triangular dance, and they were moving down the mouth of
the pier, over the water.  The man’s arm rose, there was a flash of silver in
the sky, and then Leanna was slung to his right, toward the dock, and Emma to
his left, toward the pier.  Trevor was running, pulling off his coat,
screaming, and at last someone seemed to hear him.  Emma turned, stumbling, and
her eyes locked with Trevor’s for a split second, just as she made one final
grab at the giant’s arm, just as she was starting to fall.

Leanna was slowly regaining her
breath.  She rolled to her back, looked up at the sky.  Her throat ached, her
vision was blurred, and all there seemed to be in the world was the noise of
the whistles, sharp and insistent, and beneath them, another sound.  She heard
the splash of a body falling into water, then another, and finally, a few
seconds later, a third.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

8:34 PM

Thanks to shouted orders of Davy
Mabrey, nearly every bobby in the East End was on hand to fish Micha Banasik
out of the Thames.   Emma’s final lunge had managed to knock him off balance
and the two had gone tumbling into the water below the pier.  Trevor dove in a
few seconds later and reached Emma just as she was breaking the surface.  He
had pulled her to the stones where Davy had gone scrambling down the bank to help
them both back to land. 

John had found Leanna sprawled on the
dock, the back of her hair blackened with blood and for a horrible moment he
thought she was dead.  But then he heard her cough. “Don’t try to talk,” he
said, bending over her, straining to see the marks on her throat in the
shadows.  “Lie still,” he whispered.  “I’m here.  We all are.”

Trevor stumbled up with Emma in his
arms and simply said “Doctor?”

“She’s alive,” John said.  “We need a
coach.”  He unclasped his cape and gave it to Trevor to wrap around Emma while
Davy sprinted off in search of the Scotland Yard carriage. 

Tom, who had not only been limping
but who had been further delayed by slamming right into a man with a mustache
who’d come fairly flying out of an alley, finally stumbled up as well.   At the
sight of the two girls lying side by side on the dock, he burst into deep
racking sobs.

“They’re all right,” John said
hoarsely, for he felt like weeping himself.  “Leanna’s got some nasty bruising
and we don’t want Emma to get hypothermia.  We need to get them to Geraldine’s
as fast as possible.  You too, Welles.   You’re drenched straight through.”

But Trevor was staring toward the
bobbies collected around Micha.

“The carriage is just here, Sir,”
Davy said quietly.

“Tell the doctor,” Trevor said, just
as quietly.  Within minutes John had Emma, Leanna, and Tom loaded in and the
coach rumbled off in the direction of Mayfair. 

Micha was equally battered and wet
but not so well-attended.   He coughed and sputtered while it took three men to
get his dead weight lifted into the back of the wagon.  As it rolled away, a
shout of glee went up among the bobbies.  They would all someday tell their
grandchildren of the night they single-handedly collared Jack the Ripper.  

Trevor and Davy were standing off to
the side.

“Not the man we expected him to be,
is he Sir?” Davy said.

“No,” Trevor answered shortly.  He
was beginning to feel the cold.

“Not the man at all,” Davy confirmed,
and Trevor shook his head.  They had caught a brute to be sure, but he knew in
his heart the clumsy beast inside the wagon wasn’t the Ripper.  He had known it
while he was falling through the air, heading towards the knife-cold water of
the Thames, had known with a kind of finality that had felt like his heart
being cut from his chest.    

He turned.  People were trying to talk
to him.  More than one of the men offered to buy him a beer.  Reporters were
arriving, flashing their cameras and shouting questions. He couldn’t see,
couldn’t think.  Would they not all face away and leave him alone?  But he did
note that the police had roped off the area, that they were holding the press
back while they combed the pier for fibers and hairs, chips of mortar, the
remnants of the struggle.  His legacy to the Yard. That’s something, he thought. 
Maybe it’s enough.

“An ending, but not a conclusion,” he
said aloud.

“Beg your pardon, Sir?”

“Nothing.  Get me my pipe.”

Davy nodded and went back to where
Trevor’s coat lay.  The detective must’ve known they would end up in the water,
Davy thought, else why would he have pulled off his coat while he was
running?   He extracted Trevor’s battered notebook from a pocket and gazed at
it for a moment, sadly.  Then he went to the next pocket and found the pipe and
tobacco.  Returning to the shadows, he handed both to his boss, then waited to
give him his coat.  But Welles was already walking back toward the pier. 

Poor Leanna and Emma, he thought,
they had been on foot for an hour but had managed to get, in all their
circling, no more than a hundred leagues from where they had started.  “We’ve
never gone as far as we think,” Trevor informed a gull, who gazed at him
meditatively, then took flight.  Trevor sat down on the pilings and lit his
pipe, surprised that his hands did not shake in the effort.  Inhaling deeply,
he looked out at the water, which, deceptive in the moonlight, was almost lovely. 
He exhaled, and the puff of smoke escaped into the fog.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

9:25 PM

Tom’s frantic pounding brought Gage
to the door with Geraldine right behind him.  They watched in shock as the
girls they assumed were dining out were carried in by John one at a time. 
Geraldine helped Emma get changed into dry clothing while John, with the
unsteady assistance of Gage, rinsed the blood from Leanna’s scalp and stitched
up her cut.  The bruising around her neck would take longer to heal.  Then he went
downstairs to see to Tom, whom he suspected was the most badly injured of all.

The boy had collapsed on the couch. 
It was almost impossible for him to believe that this just this morning he had
awakened naked on the floor with a hangover and that so many strange things
could have happened in the course of a single day.  He had broken into a house,
stolen a knife, sprained his ankle, walked through London in a bloody shirt, gone
on a bender, ridden in an official Scotland Yard carriage, dislocated his
shoulder, witnessed his first birth,  and nearly lost his sister to Jack the
Ripper.  Now that he was safely back within the confines of his aunt’s home the
adrenaline had abruptly left his body and he could not seem to stop trembling. 
John, who was nearly as exhausted as Tom, wrapped his ankle and popped the
boy’s shoulder back into its socket.  The pain was great enough to make him cry
out and afterwards the two men sat on the couch, side by side, staring into the
fire.

“Did you talk to them?”  Tom asked.

“I offered them something to help
them sleep,” John said. “But they both said no.”

He does like it when women go to
sleep, Tom thought.  He is indeed quick to offer the needle.  But he had seen
John’s face as he eased the infant from her mother’s body, the deep and
unfeigned relief when he heard her first cry, and that had told Tom everything
he needed to know about John’s character.  When the women had babbled in the
carriage, all that they could speak off was Trevor.  How he had appeared like
some sort of vengeful god, Leanna said, swooping down unexpectedly through the
air, but Emma thought his arrival was more like a warrior on horseback or
perhaps, no, perhaps more like a locomotive, swift and powerful.  He had been
heroic, certainly, on that they could agree.  Leanna kept repeating “He saved
our lives” in a mechanical fashion while Emma had been so distracted that she’d
lain beneath John’s cloak and allowed him to cut her wet clothes completely off
her body. 

John had worked steadily, moving back
and forth between the two girls, offering what medical care he could in the
darkness of the coach, and he had not spoken during the entire ride.   Tom
considered the man’s profile for a moment and then looked back into the fire. 
It was too early to predict how things would play out.   

Geraldine came down the steps
reporting that both the girls were asleep.  She dropped into the chair opposite
the couch and said “John, I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

John smiled wanly. “I hope you never
have to find out.”

“Please stay the night.” Geraldine
said. “I wish I could offer you the guest room, but - I forgot to tell you Tom,
in the thrash of getting the girls upstairs, but your brother is here.  He just
showed up unexpectedly saying he had news.”

Tom’s heart sank.  “Why did you let
him in?”

Geraldine looked surprised.  “He’s my
nephew, of course.”

“But Cecil won’t rest until he –“

“No, not Cecil.  Of course not.
Cecil’s dreadful.  It’s William.”

A little better, but still
confusing.  “What the devil is William doing in London?”

Geraldine shrugged.  “He said he was
exhausted and would be turning in early.  Should I wake him?”

“Yes,” Tom said.  “And bring Gage in
too. I only want to tell this story once.”

10:10 PM

They all poured brandies and settled
in.  When Tom described the contents of the letter that had been sent to Emma,
Geraldine closed her eyes and wept softly.  William had sat through the tale with
both feet on the floor and both hands at his side, Gage paced, and when Tom got
to the part about stealing the bloody shirt from John’s hassock they all
actually laughed a little. 

“At the time I didn’t know how much
blood there was in childbirth,” Tom said.  “Now I do.”  

But as he had tried to explain how
they’d all wound up at the waterfront, the story grew so complicated that Tom
hobbled over to fetch the pieces of the chess set so that he might demonstrate
the sequence on the tabletop.   He used the queens for Emma and Leanna, the
bishop for John, the knight for Trevor, a rook for Davy and a pawn for
himself.  He would never be able to explain why the Ripper was represented by
the king, but they all bent forward in concentration as he went through his
tableau.  When he finished with the scene of the bobbies fishing the big brute
out of the water, he flicked the king to its side and said “Checkmate.”