Riptide

She tried not to think about her father while Sirk was out of the room. Instead she got up and examined the photos on the wall. There was a street scene of speakeasies and gambling joints, captioned “Culver City, the Heart of Screenland.” A reproduction of a 1920 newspaper announcing the suicide of Olive Thomas, a silent movie star. A woman in a fur coat at the wheel of a luxury automobile. An obese man, grinning hugely.

Sirk returned with another brimming glass of scotch.

“Just admiring your collection,” she said.

“My museum of horrors?” He raised the glass to his lips. “Delightful, aren’t they?”

She pointed toward the fat man. “Who was he?”

“Dear, dear, you don’t recognize Fatty Arbuckle? One of silent cinema’s biggest stars-biggest in all respects, not least his formidable girth. When he procured a three-million-dollar contract, he took his entourage to San Francisco for an orgiastic celebration, during which he enjoyed violent coitus with a young starlet, Virginia Rappe, whose last name, minus one p, proved tragically prescient. Miss Rappe died of internal injuries. It transpired that Fatty’s prodigious girth had crushed her internal organs. There were darker rumors, however, one of them being that it was not Fatty’s weight that did her in, but his use of a Coca-Cola bottle as a makeshift dildo. Which, you know, gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘product placement.’”

He produced a mellow chortle. She tried not to show her distaste as she took her seat.

“I have a theory about Fatty,” Sirk added, still standing. “I believe he implanted in the public psyche the archetype of the jovial fat man with a sinister side. Thus paving the way for Sidney Greenstreet, Alfred Hitchcock, and, not to make invidious comparisons, myself.”

He surprised her by sitting on the sofa next to her.

“I hope you don’t mind. That armchair is far less comfortable than it looks. It seems to play havoc with my gout.”

She wasn’t thrilled to have him seated beside her. But she couldn’t object, even if the house did seem suddenly hotter than before. From up close, she could hear his stertorous breathing.

“Here are some other things you know about Jack the Ripper that are not true. He was a surgeon. He was a sadist. He was the first serial killer in history. He was the only serial killer in London at that time. He preyed on young, pretty women who had their whole lives ahead of them.”

“And the truth is?”

“He showed no particular surgical skill. His facility with the knife was no more than one might expect from a competent butcher. Did you know that an experienced slaughterman can gut a cow in under four minutes? Butchers and slaughtermen were among the authorities’ top suspects. Of course, Jack may simply have purchased a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. The book was in print by 1888.”

“You implied he wasn’t a sadist.”

“He didn’t make his victims suffer. There’s no reason to suppose he showed the slightest interest in them while they were alive. Most likely, he never engaged them in conversation, never spoke to them face-to-face. He crept up from behind, and they never even got a look at him. Quite possibly no one got a look at him. The few eyewitness descriptions are contradictory and of doubtful merit.”

“If he wasn’t a sadist, why did he kill them?”

“For the postmortem evisceration, of course. He choked the woman to death, cut her throat for good measure, and proceeded to what really interested him. He would take a woman apart, piece by piece, the way a curious child might take apart a clockwork mechanism to see what makes it tick.”

Jennifer wasn’t sure she liked the analogy. It seemed much too wholesome.

“In this respect,” Sirk added, “he differed from most other serial killers who courted the newspapers’ affections, then and since. And of course there were serial killers before Jack-think of the notorious Burke and Hare-and serial killers operating concurrently with him, notably the mysterious Torso Murderer. Merry old England, you know.”

“And the victims?”

“What about them?” Sirk asked, seeming lost for the first time.

“You said they weren’t young or pretty.”

“Oh, quite right. Well, by all accounts Mary Kelly had been pretty enough before Jack’s knife did its work. The others, however, had lived on the street for years, overindulging in drink and debauchery, contracting a variety of diseases, suffering from malnutrition, receiving no medical or dental care. None of them would be, let us say, cover model material for Modern Bride. Their average age was about forty-five-and this in a district of London where life expectancy was only twenty-nine.”

His dismissive tone of voice rankled her. “They were people, though,” Jennifer said. “Their lives mattered.”

“Did they? Perhaps to themselves they mattered. Or perhaps not. It’s doubtful that their continued existence was an issue of poignant concern to anyone else. One might say Jack did those hags a favor. Their names would have been long forgotten had it not been for his kindly dispensations. He made them immortal.”

“I’m beginning to think you’re not a very nice person, Mr. Sirk.”

“Has it taken you this long? I had imagined you would be quicker on the uptake.”

Jennifer was tired of this man. He was sybaritic, odious, amoral. He reminded her of those Roman patricians who would vomit up each course of a banquet before starting on the next. She wanted to be done with him.

“What else can you tell me about Jack the Ripper?” she asked evenly.

“Oh dear, what can’t I tell you? Were I to relate the complete history, we should be here long into the night-and somehow I doubt you fancy the prospect of spending the night with me. So let me summarize.”

He steepled his hands.

“Between August and November of 1888, a serial killer targeted prostitutes in the poorest part of London, the East End, home to nine hundred thousand souls, many of them immigrants, ten percent of them homeless, all of them indigent. Many were children, known colorfully as street Arabs. More than half the children born in the East End died before age five. The rest found work in sweatshops and factories or learned to shift for themselves, shoplifting and pick-pocketing. It was all very Oliver Twist.

“Despite multiplicitous conspiracy theories, most of the evidence suggests that Jack, like Oswald, acted alone. Prior to being immortalized as the Ripper, he was variously known as the Whitechapel Murderer, the Whitechapel Demon, the Whitechapel Fiend, and Leather Apron, this last appellation inspired by the discovery of a butcher’s apron near one of the bodies. The apron in question, however, was owned by a local tradesmen and was not connected with the crime. The killings took place within an area of only one square mile, yet managed to overlap two police jurisdictions-that of Scotland Yard, known officially as the Metropolitan Police, and that of the City of London. Cooperation between the two departments was strained. The victims were killed on weekends and holidays, perhaps indicating that the killer held down a regular job.”

Like a schoolteacher, Jennifer thought.

“Although there was little sympathy for the victims while they lived, the rash of mutilated bodies did catch the public’s attention. Every inquest ended with the same maddening refrain: ‘willful murder by some person or persons unknown.’ The sheer fact that the killer kept getting away with it drove the populace into a frenzy. None of the foregoing is of great interest, though.”

“Isn’t it?” She had found it interesting enough.

“What is of interest,” he said with a languid wave, “are the oddities of the case that make for clever conversation. For instance”-his hand came to rest on the sofa, occupying the space between them, uncomfortably close to her bare leg-“there’s Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. He was living at the Royal London Hospital in the East End, at the very time when Jack the Ripper was on the prowl. Some people even thought he was Jack. Of course, poor Merrick was in no condition to mount violent attacks on women, nor was he likely to blend into the crowd.” His hand twitched nearer. “Then there’s the business of the sneakers.”

“Sneakers?” She tried not to look at his pale, fleshy fingers.

“The first sneakers were improvised by the police in an effort to apprehend the Ripper. Their leather boots announced their approach, so they cut up bicycle tires and nailed the rubber strips to the soles of their boots. The case inspired innovations of other sorts. There were amateurish attempts at psychological profiling. One theory was that Jack had been inspired by a play about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which had recently opened in London.”

“Mr. Mansfield’s play,” Jennifer said, hardly realizing she’d spoken aloud.