Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  “Yeah. Bruised, scared. But Rachel said she’s okay.”

  “Good.” The one-time longbow-man’s jaw muscles bunched. “Charlie Ryan is a pig. He hires us because he does not have to pay, what is the up-time word? Union wages.”

  “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

  “Skeeter . . .”

  He glanced up at the ominous growl in the other man’s voice.

  “Accidents happen.”

  “No.” Skeeter shoved himself to his feet, looked the Welshman straight in the eyes. “No, it’s his right to fire me. And I was doing a lousy job, spending all my time looking for Ianira and Marcus instead of working. I happen to think he’s got his priorities screwed up, but I won’t hear of anything like that. I appreciate it, but it’d just be a waste of effort. Guys like Charlie Ryan are like mushrooms. Squash one, five more pop up. Besides, if anybody’s going to loosen his teeth, it’s gonna be me, okay?”

  Kynan Rhys Gower clearly considered arguing, then let it go. “That is your right,” he said quietly. “But you have earned more this day than you have lost.”

  Skeeter didn’t know what to say.

  “I will see you at the Council meeting,” the Welshman told him quietly, then left him standing in the glare and noise of Commons, wondering why his eyes stung so harshly. “I’ll be there,” Skeeter swore to empty air.

  How many more of his friends would simply vanish into thin air before this ugly business was done? What had Julius seen or overheard, to cause someone to snatch him, too? When Skeeter got his hands on whoever was responsible for this . . . That someone would learn what it meant to suffer the summary justice of a Yakka Mongol clansman. Meanwhile, he had another friend missing.

  Skeeter had far too few friends to risk losing any more of them.

  * * *

  Margo craned forward, so excited and repelled at the same time, she felt queasy. Then she saw the face and gasped as she recognized him. “James Maybrick!” she cried. “It’s James Maybrick! The cotton merchant from Liverpool!”

  “Shh!” The scholars motioned frantically for silence, trying to hear anything the murderer and his victim might say, even though everything was being recorded, including Polly Nichols’ final footfalls. Margo gulped back nausea, watched in rising horror as Maybrick escorted his victim down to the gate where he would strangle and butcher her. When he struck with his fist, Margo hid her face in her hands, unable to watch. The sounds were bad enough . . .

  Then Conroy Melvyn burst out, “Who the bloody hell is that?”

  Margo jerked her gaze up to the television screen . . . and found herself staring, right along with the rest of the shocked Ripper Watch Team. A man had crept up behind Jack the Ripper, who was still hacking away at his dead victim.

  “James . . . enough.” Just the barest thread of a whisper. Then, when Maybrick continued to hack at the dead woman’s neck, as though trying to cut loose her entire head, “She’s dead, James. Enough!”

  Whoever this man was, he clearly knew James Maybrick. More importantly, Maybrick clearly knew him. The maniacal rage in Maybrick’s eyes faded as he glanced around. Maybrick’s lips worked wetly. “But I wanted the head . . .” Plaintive, utterly mad.

  “There’s no time. Fetch me the money from her pockets. Be quick about it, the constable will be arriving momentarily.”

  The Buck’s Row cameras, fitted with low-light equipment, picked up the lean, saturnine face, the drooping mustaches of a total stranger who stepped up to peer at Polly Nichols. As Maybrick stooped to crouch over the dead woman, the newcomer closed a hand around Jack the Ripper’s shoulder, a casual gesture which revealed a depth of meaning to anyone who knew the stiff etiquette of Victorian Britain. These men knew each other well enough for casual familiarities. Maybrick was wiping his knife on Polly’s underskirts.

  “Very good, James. You’ve done well. Strangled her first, as instructed. Not more than a wineglass of blood. Very good.” Voice pitched to a low whisper, the tones and words were clearly those of an educated man, but with hints of the East End in the vowels, hints even Margo’s untrained ear could pick out. Then, more sharply, “The money, James!”

  “Yes, doctor!” Maybrick’s voice, thick with sexual ecstasy, trembled in the audio pickup. The arsenic-addicted cotton merchant from Liverpool bent over the prone remains of his victim and searched her pockets, retrieving several large coins that glinted gold like sovereigns. “No other letters, doctor,” he whispered.

  “Letters?” Pavel Kostenka muttered, leaning closer to the television monitor to stare at the stranger’s face. “What letters? And Dr. Who?”

  Across the room, the British police inspector Conroy Melvyn choked with sudden, silent laughter for some completely unfathomable reason. Margo resolved to ask him what he could possibly find funny, once this macabre little meeting in Bucks Row had ended.

  On the video monitor, the stranger muttered impatiently, “No, of course there won’t be any other letters. She said she’d sold them, drunken bitch, and I believed her when she said it. Come, James, the H Division Constables will be along momentarily. Wipe your shoes clean, they’re bloody. Then come with me. You’ve done well, James, but we have to hurry.”

  Maybrick straightened up. “I want my medicine,” he said urgently.

  “Yes, I’ll be sure and give you more of the medicine you need, before you catch your train for home. After we’ve reached Tibor.”

  Maybrick’s eyes glittered in the low-light pickup. He gripped the other man’s arm. “Thank you, doctor! Ripping the bitch like that . . . she opened like a ripe peach . . . so bloody wonderful . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” the narrow-faced man said impatiently. “You can write it all down in your precious diary. Later. Now, you must come with me, we haven’t much time. This way . . .”

  The two men moved away from the camera’s lens, walking quickly but not so fast as to arouse suspicion should anyone happen to glance out a window. The crumpled body of Polly Nichols lay beside the gate where she’d died, her disarranged skirts hiding the ghastly mutilations Maybrick’s knife had inflicted. Margo stared after the two men who—clearly—were conspirators in some hideous game that involved unknown letters, payments made to prostitutes, and murder. The game made no rational sense to Margo, any more than it did to the openly stunned Ripper scholars. Who was this mysterious doctor and why was Maybrick involved with him? And why hadn’t Maybrick’s diary even once hinted at such a turn of events? That diary, explicit as to detail, with its open, candid mention of the many people in Maybrick’s life—his unfaithful American wife, their young children and the little American girl staying with the Maybrick family, his brothers, employees, murder victims, friends—that diary had never even once hinted at a co-conspirator in the murder of the five Whitechapel prostitutes Maybrick had taken credit for killing.

  Who, then, was this dark-skinned, foreign-looking man? A man who, Margo realized abruptly, fit perfectly some of the Ripper eyewitness descriptions. And Maybrick, with his fair skin and light hair and thick gold watch chain, fit other eyewitness descriptions to the last detail. The many witnesses questioned by London police had described two very different-appearing men—for the perfectly simple reason that there’d been two killers. “The eyewitness accounts,” Margo gasped, “no wonder they differed, yet were so consistent. There were two of them! A dark-haired, foreign-looking man and a fair-haired one. And Israel Schwartz, the Jewish merchant who’ll see Elizabeth Stride attacked, he saw both of them! Working together!”

  She grew aware of startled stares from the Ripper Watch scholars. Shahdi Feroz, in particular, was frowning; but not, Margo sensed, in disapproval. She looked merely thoughtful. “Yes,” Dr. Feroz nodded, “that would certainly account for much of the confusion. It is not so unheard of, after all.”

  Margo gulped. “What’s not so unheard of?”

  Shahdi Feroz glanced up again. “Hmm? Oh. It is not unheard of, this collusion between psychopaths. A weaker psychopathic serial killer will sometime
s attach himself to a mentor, a personal god, if you will. He worships the more powerful killer, does his bidding, learns from him.” She was frowning, dark eyes agitated. “This is very unexpected, very serious. It is, indeed, possible that more of the murders during this time period should be attributed to the Ripper, if the Ripper was, in fact, two men. Two very disturbed men, working as a team, master and worshiper. They might well have struck in different modus operandi, which would explain the confusion over which women were killed by the Ripper.”

  “Yes,” Inspector Melvyn broke in, “but what about these letters? What letters? And just who is this bloke? Doesn’t fit any of the known profiles. Not a bloody, damned one of ‘em!”

  Dr. Kostenka shook his head, however. “Not one of the named profiles, no; but a profile, yes. He is a doctor. A man with medical knowledge. It is this doctor, clearly, who warned James Maybrick to strangle his victims first, to avoid drenching his clothing with blood from arterial spurts. If Maybrick’s victim had been alive when he slashed her neck and throat, he would have ended covered in the ‘red stuff’ of which he writes in his diary.”

  The passages to which Kostenka referred had been labeled as damning Americanisms, which had caused some experts to call the diary a hoax. Of course, Maybrick had lived for years in Norfolk, Virginia and married an American girl, so he would’ve been intimately familiar with American slang from the late Victorian period. Sometimes, so-called experts could be as blind as an eyeless cave shrimp.

  Kostenka was frowning thoughtfully at the TV monitor. “Whoever he is, the man is foreign-looking and of genteel appearance, just as the witnesses described. A man of education.”

  Margo heard herself say, “And he’s spent time in the East End. You can hear it in his voice.”

  Once again, she was the abrupt focus of startled stares from the Ripper Watch experts. Then Guy Pendergast grinned. “She’s right, y’know, Melvyn. Rerun the tape. Heard it, meself. Just didn’t twig to it quite so fast. Used to hearing that sound, hear it every day, just about, on a job.”

  Shahdi Feroz was nodding. “Yes, whereas Miss Smith has needed to listen very carefully to East End accents, to pick up the vowel sounds and the rhythms of the speech. Very well done, Margo.”

  A warm glow ignited in her middle and spread deliciously through her entire being. She smiled at the famous scholar, so proud of herself, she felt like she must be floating a couple of inches above the floor.

  Dominica Nosette said abruptly, “Well, I intend to find out who our mystery doctor is! Anybody else game to give it a go?”

  Guy Pendergast lunged for cameras and recorders.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” Margo darted squarely in front of the exit to Spaldergate House’s main cellar. “I’m sorry,” she said firmly, “but there will be an official police investigation getting underway in Bucks Row a few minutes from now. And no one, not one member of this tour, is going to be anywhere near that spot when the police arrive. We have remote cameras and microphones in place and every second of this is being recorded.”

  “Listen,” Guy Pendergast began, “you can’t just keep us locked up in this cellar!”

  “I have no intention of locking anybody in this cellar!” Margo shot back, trying to sound reasonable as well as authoritative, when she felt neither. “But there’s no point in leaving Spaldergate for the East End right now. Maybrick has been positively identified. His companion has remained a mystery for nearly a hundred fifty years. We’ll certainly begin working to identify him. Carefully. Discreetly. Word of this murder is going to send shockwaves through Whitechapel. Especially the mutilations, when the workhouse paupers who clean the body tomorrow finally remove Mrs. Nichols’ clothing and discover them. It’s been less than a month, after all, since Martha Tabram was savagely slashed to death in the East End.”

  “August seventh,” Shahdi Feroz put in, “August Bank Holiday. And don’t forget Emma Smith, stabbed to death Easter Monday. To the residents of the East End, April fourth wasn’t all that long ago. Not when women are being cut to pieces and nobody feels safe walking the streets.”

  “Yes,” Margo said forcefully. “So everyone out there will assume this is the third murder, not the first. We are not going to go charging into the East End asking, ‘Say, have you seen a foreign-looking doctor hereabouts, friend of James Maybrick’s?’ The investigators of the day had no inkling that James Maybrick was involved, let alone this other guy, whoever he turns out to be. So we’ll use extreme caution in proceeding with this investigation. Do I make myself perfectly clear on that point?”

  Dominica Nosette looked petulant, but nodded. Slowly, her partner agreed, as well, grumbling and visibly irritated, but compliant. At least for the moment.

  “Good. I’d suggest we analyze the tapes we’ve got for further clues. Inspector Melvyn, if you would rewind one of the backup copies while the master tape and other backups continue running?”

  As they viewed the footage again, Shahdi Feroz pursed her lips thoughtfully. “He is familiar to me. The face is not quite right, but the voice . . . I have heard it somewhere. I would swear that I have.” She shook her head, visibly impatient with her own memory. “It will come to me, I am certain. There are so many I have studied in so many different places and time, over the past few years. I spent several weeks in London, alone, looking into occult groups such as the Theosophical Society and various Druidic orders. And if he is a friend to James Maybrick, he, too, may be a Liverpudlian, not a Londoner. But I know that I have seen or heard him before. Of that, I am completely certain.”

  What Shahdi Feroz might or might not have remembered at that moment would never be known, however, because the telephone rang with the news that Malcolm and the search teams had returned for the night. There was no news of Benny Catlin, although from the sound of Malcolm’s voice, there was something worse which he wasn’t telling her. Margo narrowed her eyes and frowned at the monitors where the Ripperologists were studying their tapes. At least Benny Catlin didn’t look anything like their unknown Ripper, thank God. And an American graduate student wouldn’t sound like an East End Londoner, particularly not one who’d taken pains to train poverty from his voice. The notion that they were facing two wrenching murder mysteries, an up-time shootout and the Ripper slayings, left Margo deeply disturbed as she quietly left the vault to meet her fiancé in the house upstairs.

  “What’s wrong, Malcolm?” Margo whispered after he’d hugged her close and buried his face in her hair.

  “Oh, God, Margo . . . we are in a great deal of trouble with Catlin.”

  She peered up into his eyes, alarmed by the exhaustion she found there. “What now?”

  “The men who were killed? At the hotel and the opera? They’re not down-timers, as we’d all assumed. Not Nichol gang members or any other native footpads.”

  Margo swallowed hard. “They’re not?”

  He shook his head. “No. The constables of the Metropolitan police asked Mr. Gilbert and me to come to the police morgue, to see if we might be able to identify either man, since Mr. Catlin had been a guest in Spaldergate for a brief time.” He paused fractionally. “Margo, they’re up-timers. Baggage handlers from TT-86. Gilbert recognized them, said they came through with your group, he saw them earlier in the evening hauling steamer trunks out to carriages for the newly arrived tour group. Then they vanished, abandoned a wagonload of luggage and half-a-dozen tourists at Paddington Station and went haring off on their own. The Spaldergate footman in charge of the wagon thought perhaps they were reporters who’d slipped through as baggage handlers and tried to follow, but lost them within minutes and returned to help the stranded tourists.”

  Margo rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I don’t get it, Malcolm,” she moaned softly, “why would a couple of baggage handlers ditch their jobs to chase halfway across London and try to murder a graduate student at the Picadilly Hotel?”

  “And failing that, chase him all the way to the Royal Opera?” Malcolm added. “I don�
�t know, Margo. I haven’t the faintest bloody idea. It simply makes no rational sense.”

  “Maybe Catlin’s involved somehow with organized crime?” Margo wondered with a shiver.

  “God knows, it could be anything. I don’t want to think about it for a while. What’s the news from the Ripper Watch?” he added quietly, drawing her closer to him and burying his lips in her hair once again.

  “You’re not gonna believe it,” Margo muttered against his coat.

  Malcolm’s face, wet from the rain that had been falling again, drew down into a whole ladder of exhausted lines and gullies. “That bad?”

  “Bad enough.” She told him what they’d just discovered, down in the vault.

  Malcolm let out a low whistle. “My God. A ruddy pair of them? And you’re sure the other chap isn’t Catlin?”

  “Not unless he brought a plastic surgeon with him. And knows how to walk on stilts. This guy’s a lot taller than Benny Catlin.”

  “Well, that’s one breath of good news, anyway. Whatever’s up with Catlin, he’s not a psychopathic serial murderer.”

  “No,” Margo said quietly. “Given what’s happened on station, though, and what you just found out about the guys he killed tonight, quite frankly, I’d feel better if Catlin had turned out to be the Ripper.”

  “My dear,” Malcolm sighed, “I wish it weren’t so distressing when you’re right.”

  To that, Margo said nothing at all. She simply guided her weary fiancé up to bed and did what she could to help them both forget the night’s horrors.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kit Carson was in the back room of the Down Time Bar & Grill, doing his best to beat Goldie Morran at pool—and losing his shirt, as usual—when Robert Li appeared, dark eyes dancing with an unholy glee.

  “What’s up?” Kit asked warily as Goldie sank another ball in the corner pocket with a rattle like doom.