Anatomy of Evil (40 page)

“Aaron, how are you?” I asked, trying to calm him down. He was trembling as if he would shatter at any moment.

“Dybbuk,” he murmured. It was the only word he ever said to me. It was one of the few Yiddish words I knew. It meant demon
.
What twisted thoughts were swirling about in his head after slaughtering a young girl that he should call me “demon”?

“It’s going to be all right. I’ll send for help.”

From his pocket, he pulled a pair of scissors. But no, now that I looked at them, I saw it was only half a pair. It had been unscrewed, and he held a half. One very sharp half. Then another part of the puzzle fell into place. He had attacked his sister-in-law with broken scissors. A pair of scissors without their connecting bolt is still broken, is it not? This was the Ripper’s blade, a single scissor ground to the sharpness of a scalpel. He jabbed at me and I jumped back.

In a trice he came forward, and the fingers of his left hand seized me by the throat. Even Barker, I believed, did not have the finger strength of that skeletal hand about my windpipe. I tried to break his hold, but as I did so, I saw him cross his arms, preparing to slash my throat deeply from right to left. He hoped to be drenched in blood yet again.

He wouldn’t, not if I had something to say about it. He may have fared well against overweight, middle-aged prostitutes, but I was another matter. That’s why I jammed my knee where it would do the most good. It made him scream. That’s the thing about multiple murderers, I think. They’re cowards, and they have a low threshold for their own pain, while loving to inflict it upon others.

He fell back and rolled on the floor howling while I figured what to do next. I was in a room with possibly the most dangerous man on earth, alone, and unarmed. I circled him and absently patted my pockets. One waistcoat pocket held my threaded needles, but the other held something more promising. A small brass tube. My police whistle. I took a breath, brought it to my lips and began to blow.

It echoed in the small room and Aaron clasped his hands over his ears, continuing to howl. Then, without warning, he launched himself off the floor at me. I could not believe how quickly he moved. He was like a gibbon, all sinews and tendons, and shrieking hysteria. He leaped on me and knocked me over onto the bed, and before I had the chance to react, I felt the point of the blade pierce my shirt and slice into my side.

I grunted, and for a moment I lost the breath I was pushing through the whistle. But I still had the needle in my hand. I jabbed it toward his eye. He turned just in time to avoid it, but the needle entered the skin just beside it and was pulled from my weak grip. Blood dribbled from the pin sticking out of his skin, and I took another breath, ignoring the pain of my own wound, and I began blowing again.

There was no way for me to know whether Aaron understood that the whistle would summon the police, or whether he merely could not stand the sound. He began clawing me, and scratching me with his filthy nails, but I seized the wrist which still held the blade slick with my own blood and then we rolled off the bed onto the floor.

He was in a manic state and fighting for his life. But he was clever as well, devilishly clever. He seized the blade from the trapped hand and I gasped as the blade entered between my ribs on the other side.

That was it. The gloves were off. Someone was snarling, and I think it was me. I turned and thumped him hard with the bottom of my fist over the socket of his left eye. His head bounced off the floor. He stopped moving. Pushing myself up off him, I sat back and pulled the whistle from my mouth, panting heavily. My trousers were soaked in blood. Where was a policeman when you needed one? Where was Cyrus Barker? Surely he knew what sort of trouble I might find here.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement, and just managed to catch Aaron’s wrist before the blade he held in his fist ripped my jugular. We rolled onto the floor again. Aaron’s feet were dug into my sides, trying to injure me further with his jagged nails, as with one hand I held his wrist while trying to jam a thumb in his eye. It was the ugliest, dirtiest fight I had ever been in. He was quickly reducing me to the same kind of animal he was in order to survive.

Surely his strength couldn’t hold up forever, I thought. How can I best him? For if I didn’t best him I would become his final victim. Perhaps I was on the wrong side. If I could get behind him, and wrap myself around him, he couldn’t get at me with his makeshift knife.

I had wrestled a good deal in our antagonistics classes, though never with an opponent wielding a blade. I latched onto his forearm and tugged and pushed and kicked and dragged until I was nearly behind him, and then clasped my limbs about his waist. I fell onto the floor and held him as he squirmed to release himself. Then I wrapped my right arm around his neck, squeezing, and inserted the whistle into my mouth again. Finally, I blew for all I was worth and held on as he buckled. He jumped and flailed and screeched over the wail of my regulation Metropolitan Police whistle.

At one point his body was bowed with only his head and his feet on the ground and I was nearly off the ground myself. Both of us were jigging about as he gyrated in a kind of mad fury, a beast captured and cornered. If I could just hold on to him for a few minutes, surely help would come from somewhere.

Then I looked up and there was a dark shape in the doorway. It was Barker in his coat and bowler hat. He bent over slowly and lowered the barrel of a pistol to Aaron Kosminski’s forehead. I felt the strength suddenly go out of him.

“Look out!” I cried, as something moved beside him.

Wolfe Kosminski had materialized out of nowhere. He seized Barker’s wrist that held the gun. Barker did not hesitate. His elbow swung out horizontally as if it were on a hinge, and it clipped the elder brother on the point of his chin. Wolfe Kosminski dropped like a stone. The Guv’s pistol returned to his brother’s head.

“Mr. Kosminski,” he growled. “My name is Cyrus Barker. I am an inspector from Scotland Yard. You are under arrest.”

Then before I knew it, the room was full of constables, and things began to get confused. There was a doctor, and Barker told me not to move, and I think he told me I had done well, but perhaps I just dreamed that part. A handcart was brought and then I was being wheeled down a very bumpy road; the residents were watching me as I went by. That was the last that I can recall.

CHAPTER FORTY

I awoke sometime later in London Hospital. I was in a casual ward, which I shared with at least two dozen other patients. It was the middle of the night and the gas was low. I remembered I had been stabbed twice. Gingerly, I felt for the heavy bandages about my abdomen. They had been wrapped from my chest to my waist. The wounds had been stitched closed, I assumed. It hurt to move, so I did so as little as possible. Simply lying on a small hill of pillows seemed to be enough for the moment.

My neighbors were asleep. My thoughts were slow. I suspected I had been injected with opium. I had just helped capture Jack the Ripper, I told myself, but it seemed largely academic at that moment. There were no emotions currently attached to the statement. In my condition, it might just as well have happened to someone I did not know.

A nurse came in carrying a candle, making her rounds in semidarkness. She came along slowly, stopping to study a chart by one patient’s bed. Not feeling sleepy, I watched her move about the room. She was a stout woman, with a personality that seemed to brook no nonsense. Not a woman to chaff.

“Awake, are we?” she asked, when she reached my bed.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. My voice came out in a whisper.

“Are you in pain?”

“No.”

She lifted my chart. “You were in a fight of some sort. Two stab wounds. Tsk.”

“I’m with Scotland Yard. I was in Whitechapel.”

“Did you forget you are a man and not a pincushion?”

They are like that, you know, nurses: not satisfied until one is put in one’s place. If there was one thing I had learned from my previous visits to hospital it is that it is best not to argue. It only incites them to further discipline.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She gave me the gimlet eye, making certain I was not being sarcastic. Actually, I was, but I had not the energy it required. Also, the opium was still working, as if my mind was a chalkboard and I was writing down sentences, but just as quickly a hand was erasing them again.

“Get some sleep, Constable,” she said, and moved on. I did not answer because the few words I said had left me exhausted.

For the next hour, I carried on a long soliloquy in my head. I have no recollection of what it was about, merely that I must remember it when I awoke again. It might have been as deep as a cohesive philosophy for the universe, or as common as remembering to look for my notebook in the morning. At some point, I fell asleep again.

The next I knew, it was morning. Sunlight was streaming in from some windows high in the wall. Cyrus Barker was there, looming over me as he had the day before. At least, I hoped it was the day before. Instead of a pistol, he held a bouquet of carnations in his hand. For a moment, I wondered if I were hallucinating.

“For me?” I asked, my voice sounding raspy in my throat.

“They are from Philippa,” he explained. “She said she hopes you will be well again soon. But I see these are not the first.”

I tried to turn my head, but it barely moved, as if it weren’t constructed to move from side to side. There was another bouquet there, of mixed flowers, not large, but tasteful.

“Who is it from?” I asked.

The Guv set down the flowers, then rooted about in the other bouquet for a card.

“Here it is. ‘Get well soon. Mrs. A Cowen.’”

Rebecca.
Who had told her?
I wondered. Israel, perhaps? Word travels fast in the East End. It felt good that she had sent them.

“How are you feeling?”

“Thirsty,” I said.

He poured water from a pitcher into a tumbler, then lifted my head to drink. Normally when he seizes my head it is to show a pressure point, or the proper method to break a neck.

“I’m having you moved to a private room,” he continued.

“Can’t I go home, sir?”

“The doctor wants to be sure your wound is knitting and that there is no foreign matter in it.”

“Then here is fine enough,” I said. “Save the room for someone who needs it. What happened to Kosminski?”

“He has been moved to Colney Hatch, and is being watched carefully. The manic state he exhibited when he killed Mary Kelly and tried to kill you has given way to lethargy. He sits in his cell unmoving for hours. He ignores any conversation or command. He doesn’t appear to notice that anyone is in the room, even when he is shaken. I cannot guarantee that his reason, if he ever had any, will return.”

“Oh, he had some,” I said. “Remember the rat.”

“Aye.”

“So, it’s over?”

“I believe so. The government has decided to keep the matter out of the newspapers, since he was a Jew. They fear there would be riots. Their fears are not groundless, I suspect.”

“I was just standing there when he came down through the coal chute, covered in gore.”

“And wrestled with him and was stabbed twice in the process.”

“I couldn’t let him hurt anyone else.”

“Well, he won’t now, thanks to you. Exemplary work, Mr. Llewelyn.”

Normally, he reserved my surname for when I’d done something boneheaded. Exemplary? I was just trying to restrain the fellow until someone got there.

“It was you who deduced the Ripper’s identity, sir,” I said. Then I realized I had called the killer by that name.

“Aye, in spite of the
Illustrated Police News
’s attempts to sensationalize what were actually just a few murders.”

“As I said several weeks ago, sir. They instilled panic in the streets merely to sell newspapers.”

I stopped and settled back on my pillows. The conversation was draining me.

“I suppose it is time for some laudanum,” he said.

“No, no. I still have some questions. What’s going to happen at Scotland Yard?”

“I hear the order has come through for constables to be returned to their regular beats. There will be no more patrolling Whitechapel.”

“So they agree that Aaron Kosminski is the Whitechapel Killer?”

Barker nodded. “They do. There is a small chance we are all wrong. There is no way to prove the blood that covered him belonged to Mary Kelly. However, there was no other bloody occurrence yesterday and no obvious way for him to be found covered with blood otherwise. The only way to know for certain is if no more similar murders occur. This conclusion is logical. We went in looking for a madman, and we found one, right on Goulston Street where I expected him to be.”

“Occam’s razor.

“Precisely.”

“Do you suppose Warren is satisfied?”

“Yes and no,” my employer said. “He believes Kosminski is the Whitechapel Killer. However, he holds himself responsible for not capturing him sooner, or so Abberline tells me.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He’s responsible for running the Yard, not finding the killer himself. That was Swanson’s and Abberline’s duty. And yours, too, I suppose.”

“So many letters from the public and articles in the newspapers have been published, pointing to the inefficiency of the Yard, that in order to circumvent a vote of no confidence for the government and for the Metropolitan, in particular, Warren may decide to resign.”

“But wouldn’t that be exactly what Munro wants? He would be a natural for the position. It would be uncontested.”

“Abberline says by Warren taking the blame, a new and better Yard may grow from the ashes, or at least that is what Warren believes.”

“But, I—ah!”

Barker frowned and stepped forward. “What is it, Thomas?”

“A pain, sir. A sharp pain in the ribs.”

“Your medication has worn off. I shall return in a moment.”

I sat back and tried to relax, but I was angry. It wasn’t fair. Barker had solved the case on Warren’s watch, and he deserved to share in the success therein. To take the blame merely because he hadn’t caught the Ripper sooner was simply unfair. At the same time, I had to admire his stamina and resolve. He would eventually take the blame and sail off with it, leaving Scotland Yard to expand in reputation and move into its new buildings. It was like Moses not being able to enter the land of Canaan.