What Alice Knew (11 page)

William sat down on the stool near the bed and addressed the inmate gently. “I want to speak to you about the Whitechapel murders,” he said.

The side of the man’s mouth twitched, but he said nothing.

“I came here in the hope that you might help us find the man responsible.”

Pizer’s eyes darted up for a moment.

William continued. “You were called Leather Apron and suspected of these crimes yourself. Could you tell me why?”

“Bloody sows’ll say anything,” Pizer burst out in a guttural accent.

“You are referring to…?” prompted William.

“Disgusting pigs, the lot of ’em,” Pizer snarled.

William paused. “Is your mother alive?” he finally asked, thinking this might be a way forward.

“Don’ know,” said Pizer morosely.

“Do you remember her?”

Pizer shrugged.

“What about your father?”

“On’y saw the bloody bastard when ’e was drunk and came round t’ beat me.”

“Who raised you?” asked William.

The man gave a shrill laugh. “Bloody pigs raised me.”

“Pigs?”

“Whores. Indentured to whores. I’d kill ’em all if I could.”

“You worked for prostitutes?”

“Washed their chamber pots. Beat me if I didn’t make up their filthy beds. And the gentlemen were worse. Kicked me if they felt like it, bloody, stinkin’ bastards. Saw ’em do filthy things, but they treated me as if I was the one as was dirt.” The man’s eyes darted about the room angrily.

“How old were you when you worked at the brothel?” asked William.

“Who knows? Too young to do nothin’ else.”

William tried to look sympathetic, but the man was so unsavory in his appearance and manner that it was hard to feel sympathy.

“But then I got strong, and they couldn’t do nothin’ more to me,” Pizer continued, having apparently lost his reticence. “I could make ’em do what
I
said. Jus’ show ’em a knife, and they done it.”

“You carried a knife?”

“’Course I did. Everyone feared Leather Apron.”

“Why were you called Leather Apron?” asked William.

“’Cause I wore a leather apron,” said Pizer with what William had to admit was impeccable logic.

“And why did you wear a leather apron?”

“’Cause I was a boot maker,” said Pizer, as though any moron should know that.

“Did you like your trade?”

“I liked usin’ a knife,” snarled Pizer. “Needed to, to cut the leather. But I’d rather ’ave used it to cut somethin’ else. That Ripper has it right, there.”

“Did you…know…Jack the Ripper?” William asked, suddenly taken with the idea that the two might be friends. Did demonic killers have friends?

“Didn’t know ’im, though they say as he wrote my name in one of ’is letters.” He noted this with a touch of pride. He then said scornfully, “But I wouldn’t ’ave done it his way, myself. He’s too fancy for me.”

“What do you mean ‘too fancy’?” asked William, intrigued by this comparative notion.

“All that slashin’ and cuttin’ up. I likes my knife,” growled Pizer, “but I use it spare. Ain’t that the point of a knife?” His eyes darted up at William in stating this professional view of the matter.

“So you feel Jack the Ripper cuts more than is necessary?”

Pizer snorted. “Don’t need to be fancy to cut shoes. Nor throats neither. Cut ’em clean and simple, I say.”

William pondered the idea a moment. What did that signify, to cut more than was necessary? There was something to be said for Pizer’s observation that the point of using a knife was to be economical in the realm of killing. But then, it wasn’t to kill these women that Jack the Ripper had cut them; they were dead when most of the cutting happened. Why, then, the need to cut more, to be “fancy,” as Pizer put it? Pizer had learned to cut sparingly in his trade as a boot maker. Even a surgeon was economical in his use of a knife. Under what circumstances, then, would fancy cutting be appropriate? He was back to the idea that the key to understanding a madman was to find the context in which his madness made sense, became, that is, perversely rational.

Pizer had resumed talking. “Not as I need a knife to do ’em harm,” he boasted. “I could use these.” He flexed his blunt fingers. “Did it once too.”

“You strangled someone?” There had been suspicion among the people of Whitechapel that Pizer was a killer, but no proof of it, as far as William knew.

Pizer did not respond to the question but snarled, “Can’t treat me like a dog! Cleanin’ up their messes, smellin’ their stench, emptyin’ their piss, makin’ me do filthy things so they could laugh at me.”

The man had again returned to the scene of his childhood, and William suddenly had a vivid image of the boy forced to perform all manner of ungodly acts for the amusement of his employers. But what had prompted him to kill later in life? “The person you strangled,” he pressed. “Why did you do it?”

Pizer seemed not to hear. “Can’t treat me like a dog. Can’t make me do that no more. Nobody gonna make me!”

William was staring with an expression of curiosity and disgust. “The person you killed…wanted to make you do something?”

Pizer began to twitch, and his speech grew rapid and wild. “Can’t make me! Can’t make me! Can’t shame me like that! Ain’t gonna be shamed no more!” His voice grew shrill with fury. “Ain’t shamed by you neither!” He fastened his eyes on William’s shoes and stared at them fixedly. “Even with yer nice shoes, you don’t shame me!”

“I’m a doctor!” William said sharply. “I’m here to get information about your condition, nothing more.”

Pizer was not listening. His eyes were again darting about the room. “All dressed up in good leather to do filthy things! You’re a stinking, bloody fraud with your fine shoes!”

“I’m Professor James from Boston,” William felt compelled to assert. He could sense that Pizer had lost track of where he was, if he had ever known.

His voice incensed Pizer further. “I can make ’em do as I say if I wants to,” he growled and flexed his fingers again. “I can make ’em, as they made me!” His eyes focused again on William’s shoes, and he stared at them for several seconds in a state of rapt attention. His face then contorted into a grimace.

It was then that William understood his shoes, bought before he left Boston from a very good boot maker at the insistence of his Alice (“A Harvard professor must have a good pair of shoes,” she had scolded), must put Pizer in mind of the men who had scorned and abused him. “Calm yourself!” he said sharply.

The sound of his voice seemed to be a trigger rather than a palliative. The man grimaced again, and William stood up in sudden awareness of the threat, but too late.

Pizer leaped from the cot and placed his hands around his visitor’s neck.

William felt a searing pain from the pressure on his throat, and a thought darted through his mind:
This is how I will die, interviewing a madman, with a policeman standing outside the door
, but the next moment, Abberline and Maudsley rushed into the cell. Abberline adeptly pried Pizer’s fingers from his neck, while Maudsley ran back into the corridor to call for help.

Within a few seconds, a guard twice the size of Pizer and with eyes even more snakelike entered the cell and, with a sweep of his arm, knocked the man onto the bed. “Don’t worry, sirs. I’ll have him in hand in a jiffy,” said the guard. “You best get yourselves out of the way.”

As Maudsley went off to get a compress for William’s neck, and Abberline helped him stagger out of the cell, they could hear the blows falling inside.

***

“So what did your visit do for you besides almost getting you killed?” asked Abberline, when they were once again seated on the train back to London.

William touched his neck and felt the dull ache of the bruise. He had fortified himself with a shot of whiskey in Maudsley’s office and had left Broadmoor with an improved feeling about his host. However much the two men differed in basic precepts, they shared an understanding of the horrors of mental illness. Perhaps more to the point, Maudsley’s guilt regarding the attack had softened him toward his visitors. It seemed that Pizer had never exhibited violent behavior before, despite his reputation for being violent in the East End. It was another case where salient information had been discounted. If the people of his neighborhood were convinced that he was Jack the Ripper, certainly there must be a reason for their conviction. William suspected that Pizer had not been violent at Broadmoor because no one had spoken to him long enough to elicit violence.

“What did the visit do for me?” he mused in response to Abberline’s question. “It taught me that shame is a powerful impetus for action, perhaps the most powerful. Pizer spent his childhood in a brothel, abused by women and men too. I reminded him of the men who frequented that place and used to demean him. His humanity was stolen from him as a child. It seems almost logical that he would become an animal himself, driven to abuse those who shamed and abused him.”

“You’re saying that Jack the Ripper kills out of rage for having been shamed?”

“I’d say killing of the sort he does must stem from extreme humiliation. It’s a frenzied kind of retribution. No knowing whether the initial trauma was even intended as such; it may have been accidental, a matter of circumstance, but I suspect there was shame involving a woman at its origin.”

“A prostitute?”

“Possibly, but not necessarily. Perhaps the women he kills remind him of someone in another sense. But like Pizer, I surmise it’s a pattern of substitution. We substitute in the present for people in the past. What happens with men like Pizer—and I suspect, Jack the Ripper—is that love and hope turn to resentment and hatred. Who knows what instigates this transformation, trauma or abuse or simple abandonment. Whatever it is, the emotions continue to haunt the victim and can be relieved only through violation of something that stands in place of the original source of pain.”

He paused a moment and then added, “There’s something else as well. Pizer’s attack was triggered by my shoes. He had worked as a boot maker, and his job became a conduit for his rage. Minor’s case is an example in reverse, of how gratifying work can relieve and rechannel destructive tendencies. Our vocation, in large part, makes us who we are. Pizer learned to use a knife as a boot maker, and it gave him his name, Leather Apron. One would want to know what this murderer did for a living and how it informs his crimes.”

Abberline considered this information. “There may be something to your ideas,” he acknowledged, “but I can’t say I’m convinced. Who among us hasn’t been shamed in some way? Or frustrated in work? I have, and I daresay you have too.”

“And both of us might have become murderers had our shame and frustration been great enough,” asserted William. “We were fortunate to have been loved enough to counteract our shame, and to have our work become a source of gratification and pride. Had that not been the case, who knows? Evil men are not born, but made.”

“You Americans think tolerance and justice can change things,” said Abberline with a touch of scorn in his voice. “It’s a pretty theory, but I’ve known plenty of evil men in my time, and it’s my opinion they came into the world that way.”

They had arrived at an impasse and, realizing that no amount of talk was going to make them budge in their views, retreated into silence for the remainder of the journey back to London.

No sooner did William walk in the door of Henry’s flat than his brother announced that a man had been by to report an arrest in the Whitechapel murders. William was half inclined to ignore the message. He was tired from his journey and had become familiar with false leads and the sort of mistakes the police were prone to make. He had just spent the day with Abberline, who had not mentioned that anyone was under investigation. And since when would a serious suspect be apprehended when the inspector was out of the office?

Henry insisted that the man had come directly from Abberline, though, who had made a point of requesting that William report to police headquarters at once to observe the interrogation.

When William arrived at Scotland Yard, he found that, indeed, an interesting scene was in progress. A swarthy young man with disheveled hair, hollow cheeks, and dark, flashing eyes stood flanked by two officers in one corner. He was wearing a long, shabby coat that suggested that he was a university student, a Jew, or an anarchist, and since the uniform of these groups overlapped, the young man could conceivably belong to all three.

On the other side of the room, some four or five officers were attending to an older man in uniform with a puffed-up manner. He was barking orders, and they were scurrying in and out of the room, handing him notes and official documents.

In the midst of this scene, William spotted Abberline seated alone in a corner. He walked over to the inspector. “Is it possible that you have a suspect?” he asked.

“
I
don’t have a suspect,” replied Abberline testily, “but our assistant commissioner, Sir Robert Anderson, apparently does. He has just come back from the Continent and assumed control of the case. Commissioner Warren is perfectly satisfied to hand over the reins, so long as he isn’t bothered. The result is that Sir Robert,” Abberline spit out the honorific, “has arrested someone who suits the cut of his prejudices. I thought you might find his methods of interest, given your work in psychological deviance.”

He made this assertion with a sneer but seemed disinclined to say more, and William felt it best to leave him alone and mix among the officers nearby. He did this, as he sometimes did at professional meetings when he wished to get a sense of prevailing opinion or pick up salient facts. He walked about with an indifferent air, peering casually over the shoulders of the milling officers, glancing at the documents in their hands, and eavesdropping on their conversation.

After an interval of perhaps a quarter of an hour, Anderson suddenly spoke to the assembled group. “Welcome, gentlemen,” he began in the pompous, affected tone that William had come to associate with higher ranking officials in this country. “In the short time I have been back on English soil, I am pleased to have made significant headway in the Whitechapel case that, until now, has baffled some of our allegedly best officers.” He glanced superciliously at Abberline, who glared back at him. It was clear that the two men loathed each other.

“I now present to you Mr. Benjamin Cohen, a suspect whom we apprehended only this morning.” Anderson gestured with a flourish in the direction of the young man in the long coat who had been led to the center of the room.

“Upon what evidence do you arrest this man?” demanded Abberline angrily.

Anderson turned to the inspector and spoke slowly, as though to a dimwit. “A plethora of evidence, sir, which I will now enumerate for you.” He gave a nod to one of his officers, who handed him a sheet of paper. “First, Mr. Cohen’s knowledge of medicine. He is said to have helped a local physician with stitching and dressings and to have accompanied the local midwife on some of her cases.”

Abberline mumbled under his breath, “No good deed goes unpunished,” but Anderson ignored him and moved on. “Secondly, Mr. Cohen has frequented Zionist meetings and, not satisfied with the extreme forbearance of our government toward his people, has protested at various rallies regarding what he deems the ill use of his race. This deep-seated hostility toward Christian society conforms to the message that was written on the wall near the site of the Eddowes murder.”

Abberline seemed about to speak, but Anderson continued without pause.

“Thirdly, there is the suspect’s socially incendiary tendencies. I have the exhibits here of the books found in his room.” He again nodded to the officer next to him and was handed a number of books that he held up by way of demonstration. “Darwin, Marx, Fourier. He is also a member of a Masonic society and is a known freethinker.”

Abberline muttered, “First a religious zealot; now a freethinker,” but was ignored.

“Finally,” pronounced Anderson, casting a triumphant glance at Abberline, “we have an irrefutable piece of material evidence in our possession.” He motioned in the direction of another officer, who came forward and handed him an envelope. Anderson opened it and extracted its contents. “I will pass among you these two photographs, one that was found on the premises of Mr. Cohen’s business and the other that you may recognize from the newspapers if you did not see it here already.”

He handed the photographs to the officer to his right, who passed them to Abberline. He and William looked down at the photographs together.

The first was of a woman seated on a chair. She was naked, though her posture was rather formal and unrevealing, the body positioned sideways, so that only one breast was discernible, and the legs crossed in what might even seem like a prudish posture. The face, however, was turned directly to the camera and registered no embarrassment. The woman was not pretty and not young, but her expression commanded attention, as though, for the purposes of the photograph, she held herself in some esteem.

The other photograph was of a woman stretched out on a slab in the London morgue, her eyes closed, her head thrown back. A line of stitches across the throat indicated where the head, almost severed by the knife’s incision, had been stitched back into place. It was not immediately evident that the two photographs were of the same woman, but a moment’s inspection made clear that they were. It was Polly Nichols.

Anderson stood in smug silence as the photographs were passed around the room. Finally, he spoke again. “If more evidence is needed, we also have a witness. Mr. Nathan Rosenzweig, greengrocer, has provided us with an excellent description of the man who conferred with Polly Nichols on the night of her murder. ‘A thin individual, five foot seven or five foot eight, with dark hair.’ Benjamin Cohen to the letter. We have Mr. Rosenzweig here to make the identification.”

A small, neatly dressed man had been led into the room and was pushed forward.

“You saw the perpetrator speaking to Polly Nichols on the night of her murder?” asked Anderson.

The man looked about him nervously. “I saw someone speaking to someone who might have been Polly. I knew her only in passing. She sometimes sold flowers near the Aldgate Market. Can’t say I knew her.”

“But you thought it was Polly.”

“It might have been Polly. She weren’t the most distinctive-looking girl, and it was dark.”

“And you saw the perpetrator talking to her,” said Anderson, ignoring this caveat.

“I saw her talking to a gentleman. Whether or not he was the perpetrator is another matter,” clarified Rosenzweig.

“A somewhat slight individual of medium stature, dark hair.”

“I suppose that’s right,” said Rosenzweig sulkily.

“This man?” The assistant inspector pointed to Cohen.

Rosenzweig looked at the suspect for a moment. “The man I saw was light complected,” he finally noted. “This man is dark.”

“You said he had dark hair.”

“Dark hair, but fair skin,” Rosenzweig insisted. “It’s not an unusual combination.”

“It
is
unusual among your people!” snapped Anderson and then motioned for the suspect and the witness to be ushered from the room. Once they were gone, he blithely addressed the gathering. “I rest my case, gentlemen. The final proof is in this man’s recanting of his former testimony in the face of a Jewish perpetrator. It is clear that he knows the man is guilty but will not turn against one of his own race.”

William had been watching Abberline’s face as Anderson made his comments and could see that it had gone from being very pale to very red and that his lips were trembling with anger. He seemed about to voice his objections and, one could tell by the livid expression on his face, that the result would be impolitic—or worse.

William cleared his throat and rose to his feet. “Excuse me for interfering, sir.” He addressed Anderson with exaggerated deference, having found that a bumbling manner, when combined with his gangly, unkempt appearance, could disarm more belligerent sorts of people. “Do you know me? I don’t know if you do, but I’m Professor James from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was summoned here to help with this case by Sir Charles Warren, who seems, for reasons I hardly warrant, to have a high opinion of my abilities.” He shrugged and assumed a puzzled air, as if to demonstrate his humility.

“My professional expertise is in the new field of psychology, which is, you know, something we Americans have pioneered in our limited sort of way. Seeing as I’m here at some expense to your government and would want to be of help, I feel inclined to make a few observations and pose a few questions, if you’ll indulge me.” He looked around innocently, and as no one said anything, proceeded. “First, it would be helpful in the case of an identification of a suspect to arrange a line of men of similar general appearance from whom he might be picked out. It’s something we’ve learned to do regularly on our side of the Atlantic, seeing as we have so much experience with violent criminals, ours being a more lawless and uncivilized society.”

He paused, allowing this observation to sink in, and then continued. “Could you tell me Mr. Cohen’s business?” He had overheard certain details relating to the investigation while mixing among the officers earlier that he now judged to be relevant.

The officer holding the folder coughed before responding. “He is a bookseller,” he finally said.

“A bookseller?” William lifted an eyebrow and looked around him in mock surprise, wondering, as he did so, if he ought to have pursued a career in the law (it was one of the few professions he had not considered, which, by itself, was something to recommend it).

The officer felt prompted to add, “There are quite a number of small book dealers in the Jewish quarter of the Whitechapel district.”

“I see,” said William, nodding encouragingly. “And where was the photograph found?”

The officer coughed again. “It had been found in one of the books in his shop.”

“A book that was for sale?”

The officer acknowledged that it had been in a book for sale.

William appeared to ruminate on this fact for a moment. “It would be odd, don’t you think, for a criminal to place on sale a book with a photograph of his victim in it?” he finally queried no one in particular. “And why were you looking through the books?” he asked abruptly.

There was a good deal of shifting and murmuring among the officers attached to Anderson.

“We were seeking evidence of the man’s conspiratorial activity,” said the officer under interrogation. “He had been involved in a protest against labor practices at a London factory, and we had been asked by the proprietor to investigate.”

“An employee labor squabble, of course.” William nodded. “And you have hit on an excellent pretext to put him out of commission as an agitator for workers’ rights.” He delivered this last observation with a bluntness that he had not displayed until now.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Anderson angrily, “but that is an unwarranted supposition.”

“I beg your pardon,” said William, resuming his previous humble tone. “What I meant to say is that it seems perfectly logical to assume that someone who agitates in one area might have socially aberrant impulses in another. I myself would have assumed as much until I became involved in psychological studies that contradict it. But our research has shown that the social protester, though an impediment to many established interests in society, is of quite a different mental composition from the psychopath. As to the witness you brought forward to support the identification, he never pretended to have seen either the victim or the perpetrator clearly.”

“The clannishness of these people is well-known,” insisted Anderson, whose face had grown as red as Abberline’s.

“Again, that sort of supposition is subject to debate. Indeed, to rely on it is likely, in my opinion, to instigate an insurgency among the Jewish population of the East End that might prove inconvenient and costly to your government.”

“You doubt that the perpetrator is a Jew?”

“Yes,” said William, assuming an authoritative tone. “I believe that the writing near the murder site is the result of Jew baiting rather than Jewish conspiracy.” He had, in fact, as Alice had recommended, queried a professor of Hebraic studies at the University of London as well as a local pawnbroker and been told that the misspelling of Jews had no correlation to any secret spelling in the annals of the race.

Anderson glared at William for a moment and then turned to the officer on his left. “Let Cohen go, but put him under watch. We will see where it leads us,” he instructed curtly and then gave a stiff nod, turned, and left the room, a phalanx of officers following sheepishly at his heels.

As soon as they were gone, Abberline stood up and shook William’s hand. “You have saved me from an outburst that might have ruined my career.”

William brushed aside his thanks, but Abberline insisted on explaining the reasons for his anger. Sir Robert Anderson had a deep-seated distrust of Jews and Catholics and had devoted his career in government to blocking parliamentary efforts to give these groups a greater voice. He had been involved in the false implication of Parnell in the Phoenix Park murders in an effort to thwart Irish Home Rule. His present vendetta against Cohen was probably connected to discrediting the admission of Jews to Parliament. “These people have a network of spies and coconspirators,” Abberline concluded. “Anderson has ties to the foreign office and is probably fed much of his material through that channel.”