Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 44

If Case Number Ten-dear G.o.d, how many like cases were in that book then?-hated women because they bore children, and James Kelly hated them because he felt it wrong to consort with them-even in marriage apparently, else why would he have stabbed his own wife?-yet he could not resist the prost.i.tutes of Whitechapel . . . then Jack the Ripper was disemboweling women because they were women, whether they were mothers or wh.o.r.es.

My thoughts staggered like a dipsomaniac's stride. Jack the Ripper hated bad women because they were not good, and Case Number Ten hated good women because they were good.

"Krafft-Ebing," Irene said, "calls such cases as Jack the Ripper's 'l.u.s.tmurders.' "

"But isn't the point of l.u.s.t," I burst out, "satisfying it?" Not that I had known either state, l.u.s.t or satisfaction. I considered l.u.s.t a male failing. One could not attribute it to the women of Whitechapel, or even to Pink. Clearly, their deeds were either driven by a need for money for the most basic necessities, or a l.u.s.t for drink, perhaps, or-in Pink's case-from a perverse intent to experience all sides of life, even its most sordid.

"This is l.u.s.t that has . . . relocated its satisfaction," Irene said, eyeing me carefully. "If you were to read further in Krafft-Ebing, you would see that such men often have strange reasons for not seeking the ordinary outlets: marriage or prost.i.tution. They block the usual impulse until it finds expression in the unusual impulse, the unusual act. For such men, murder and mutilation are what marriage acts are for normal men."

"And," said Elizabeth, coming to stand by Irene and gaze down upon the open book, "it is as we concluded the other day when we first confronted the subject matter of this book. Such acts are common, not uncommon. We see the dead woman in the ill.u.s.trated news, we shake our heads, we say who would do such things . . . and all along there have been plenty of clues to who would do such things, only our police have not been able to see them. And those men who have been caught have been shut away as merely mad."

"They are mad!" I said.

"But in a . . . systematic, similar way, Nell," Elizabeth insisted. "If so, is that true madness? There is reason for what they do, that only they know and feel and understand. This book proves that there is as much similarity among the abnormal as there is among the normal."

"This is supposed to be a comfort?"

"No, Nell, but it offers hope of identifying men who may take women's and children's lives. Somehow they need innocents to purge their own guilt." She turned to Irene. "Is it possible they see themselves in their victims?"

"It's possible that they despise weakness in themselves, and seek to disprove it by making other people their victims. Those smaller than themselves, perhaps."

"Mary Jane Kelly was not smaller than the Ripper," I pointed out, "at least not from the majority of Ripper descriptions."

"And," said Irene, "she was the only woman attacked and killed while lying down. He requires a supine, pa.s.sive woman, this killer. He strikes so fast that the women literally faint from blood loss and sink to the ground. Does he see the mother lying to give birth? The wife reclining in the marital bed? The sister or child asleep and helpless?"

"What does it matter what he sees?" I cried, repulsed by the vampire visions these questions raised as if from the dead.

"If we see what he sees," Irene said, her face transformed by a vision of a solution, thanks to her new insight into the crimes, "we will see who, or what, he is."

My heart was thudding like a Salvation Army drum. Notions and images and insights clashed like cymbals in my head. I stared at Elizabeth, unable to imagine her lying on the harlot's bed, a vague dark figure bending over her, his face . . . any man's.

I saw the child in the wood, cringing away from the blade. I saw the woman on the street, screaming into the curtain of her own blood that fell red and heavy from her throat like a glittering garnet cascade.

And always I saw the gaunt dark figure at the corner of my eye, the crow flying, the raven croaking, the ghost moaning, the monster laughing.

He had always been there, and I had always chosen not to see him.

Now he was looking right at me.

Now he was judging me worthy of notice.

Now I must see him in return, to let him know that I am not afraid.

Now it is he, or I.

Last Tangle in Paris

From his early years the [he] fully understood that he was a

man with pathologically corrupt tendencies . . . being both coa.r.s.e

and eloquent, hypocritical, fanatical and holy, a sinner

and an ascetic. . .

-PADENIE

FROM A YELLOW BOOK.

It is worse than I thought.

Which of course suits my ultimate purpose all the more.

Yet, even I am shocked.

It is quite amusing to find myself shocked by such a simple and low creature.

Still, he has a crude force of personality, rather like a Gypsy fortune-teller or an a.s.sa.s.sin. One senses the depth of what he is capable of, great goodness and great evil twined together into an inseparable strand.

Even he cannot see where one begins and the other ends, and thus he justifies them both.

I have always believed more in sinners than in saints, but in my beast I believe that they both meet.

The combination is demonic.

I will allow him some last . . . excesses in this City of Light, and then we must withdraw. I begin to see how to use him in a larger plan of mine. Certainly he has attracted the attention of some I am most interested in . . . annoying.

And he has distracted the attention of those who will pay dearly for that fact.

What more could one ask of a wild beast?

A Map of Murder

The public would find those people who occupied their attention reproduced with a scrupulous respect for nature.

-CATALOGUE-ALMANACH DU MUSeE GReVIN

FROM A JOURNAL.

I tossed and turned half the night on the daybed in the alcove off our dining room.

When I dreamed, Indian warriors on horseback pursued me along the Champs-Elysees and then toward the Eiffel Tower on the Champ de Mars. I tried to escape into the catacombs, but followed the winding tunnel down only to find James Kelly laughing maniacally among piles of old bones and skulls as he upholstered the cavern walls where the lone dead woman had been found with a William Morris pattern.

I awoke still hearing the implacable tap-tap-tap of his small metal upholstery hammer.

Then I realized that the sound I heard was far more subtle and was occurring in the waking world.

I parted the heavy tapestry drapes that curtained off my sleeping area. The double doors to the dining room were shut, but a thread of light gleamed under their edges like gilt.

I didn't bother finding my slippers, but tiptoed barefoot over the wood and carpets until I could peer through the tiny s.p.a.ce between the two baize-curtained doors.

Someone sat at our round worktable in the main room, tapping a clogged pen point on a thick pad of paper over and over.

I slipped through the doors in my long lawn nightgown, feeling cold, but too fascinated by who was burning the midnight oil to find a shawl.

Irene looked up from the layers of paper basking in lamplight. She glanced at Nell's closed bedroom door and put a finger to her lips.

"Something secret?" I whispered, coming to her side. I saw that a large map of Paris underlay the various scattered top papers.

"Not secret," she whispered back, "but Nell has just gone to sleep. I could hear her tossing her bed linens into knots."

"I have been riding stormy sleepless seas as well," I admitted, quietly drawing out a chair next to her and sitting.

"We have all heard more than we wish to know about these vicious crimes," she said.

"Not I. I wish to know all! I simply can't sleep for wondering what will happen to Kelly now that Sherlock Holmes has escorted him into French custody. I suppose our role in this investigation is done. If the English detective is right, and I do hate the British a.s.sumption of lofty rect.i.tude, Kelly will vanish into the madhouse at Charenton and never be heard of again. Certainly the French Siirete will not allow a public trial that would embarra.s.s Paris's most t.i.tled London visitor, the Prince of Wales."

"No. Events and personalities conspire to bury the Ripper as utterly as he has erased his victim's lives. And the concealment is nothing new. I have the impression that this is exactly what the London police would prefer for Jack the Ripper: permanent, anonymous incarceration, so that he remains an unsolved mystery to the world forever."

"Surely they cannot safely ignore the curiosity of the public?"

"The public will be onto another curiosity in half a heartbeat. No one is more fickle than the mob, even when it most screams for justice and vengeance. We are in a city celebrating that very fact as it occurred one hundred years ago."

"That's right. This is the centenary year of the French Revolution. I keep forgetting that."

"The World Exposition manages to overshadow that fact, especially since the Eiffel Tower has replaced the notion of a guillotine of the same height."

I shuddered at the macabre idea. "It is hard to imagine such sophisticated and delightful people as the French being that bloodthirsty," I admitted, curling my toes under the tent of my hem so they'd escape the room's nighttime frostbite.

Irene's fingertips were white against the pen she wielded, but she seemed insensitive to such distractions as cold. She was making a tracing of the map, only marking certain sites.

"What are you drawing?"

"A map of mystery."

"The mystery has been solved."

"No. A murder or two may have been solved, but not the overall mystery."

I must have looked doubtful, for she glanced at me grimly. "Who shot at us near Notre Dame cathedral? A demented upholsterer? I hardly think firearms are likely to be his weapons. Who followed us from this same demented upholsterer's lodgings when he himself was firmly in the custody of Sherlock Holmes and Inspector le Villard? Who watches this hotel, and our windows in particular, now?"

"No!"

"See for yourself, but be as discreet as a peaceful death."

I rose and hastened back to my alcove. The heavy velvet drapes were drawn over my single window, but I could kneel on the daybed's foot to peek out ever so slightly at the side . . . and so I did.