“Not like this,” he said.
“What’s he drinking?”
“Scotch and soda. Heavy on the Scotch.”
“Shall I try talking to him?”
“Please, Annie. See what you can do. Turn on the charm.”
I mixed a strong Scotch and soda and set off across the dance floor. I should probably mention that Jayson wasn’t asking me to bat my eyelashes at Arthur Furman. He wasn’t asking me to use my feminine wiles. The very idea would have embarrassed him. The fact is that I’m a good twenty years older than Jayson, and he has a quaint notion that people above the age of fifty speak a secret language. He still talks about the cover letter I sent him with my résumé all those years ago, which I’d typed on an IBM Selectric. He once told Mags that he wanted to put my flip phone on Antiques Roadshow. Mags, I should probably also mention, is my wife. That’s another reason Jayson wouldn’t have asked me to go all “come hither” with Arthur. I’m not wired up that way. Which is not to say that I’m without charm. Or so I’m told.
I sat down next to Arthur, who accepted the drink with a curt nod. I leaned in, straining to be heard over the Bee Gees. “I didn’t especially care for this music the first time around,” I said. “You?”
He shrugged.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s quieter in the back.” He shrugged again and followed me back to the half-built surgical amphitheater on the construction floor. We took a seat on the horseshoe benches. “Listen,” I began, “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About the medical examination being too gory.”
“I’m thinking of the children,” he said. “Somebody has to.” God, he was a prick.
“Do you have children, Arthur? I can’t recall.”
“Never married,” he said. “Not that it’s any concern of yours.”
“No,” I said. “You’re right. But what if we put up a parental advisory? We could let parents and educators make up their own minds.”
He swirled his drink. “They’d see it anyway, wouldn’t they? All the rooms are connected.”
“No. People go where we tell them to go. We put colored arrows on the floor. It’s how we manage the traffic flow. You’ll follow the blue arrows if you want to see the autopsy. Follow the red arrows if you don’t.”
He grunted. “That won’t work.”
“We do it all the time,” I said. “During peak periods some museums have to speed up the dwell time. They change the arrows so people will bypass one or two rooms. It couldn’t be simpler. Believe me, I can make them go anywhere I want.”
He took a noisy swig of his drink. “Even if that were the case, I’m not sure I would trust the average educator to make an informed decision.”
“Oh, come on. That’s a bit—”
“Look,” he said sharply, “I just don’t see why this is necessary. Not just the so-called forensic module. Any of it. You’ve gathered a few good resources, you’re obviously a very capable researcher, but I can’t see what’s to be gained by this so-called Ripper Experience. I simply don’t hold with the idea of history as entertainment.”
“Museums have to turn a profit, Arthur. Just like universities.”
“Sometimes it’s just a matter of making better choices. Making cuts. Trimming the fat.”
“I remember,” I said.
He looked at me strangely. “What?”
I set down my wine glass. “I’m just saying that Jack the Ripper is a cultural phenomenon. For better or worse. Always has been. You know this as well as anyone.”
He sighed. “That doesn’t mean we should turn it into a piece of dinner theater. You said it yourself. Jack the Ripper murdered five women—”
“At least five,” I said.
“All right, if we must. At least five. So let’s not romanticize it. In my day we were more concerned with—”
“In my day? Did you just say that?”
“Well, it’s true. You people are just profiteering.”
“Seriously? People have been turning a profit on these murders since the beginning. Even before the blood had dried. That book you’re so eager to see? The Whitechapel Murders? It came out in 1888! The bodies were still dropping!”
He gave a tight smile. “My interest is in simple data. Microjournalism as a mirror of national identity. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
My fingers tightened on the stem of my wine glass. “I’m just saying—my point is that we’re not the first to exploit the public’s interest in the Ripper. Not by any stretch of the imagination.”
“I’ll grant you that. Perhaps these things are cyclical. But there’s no academic rigor here. It’s just cheap titillation. That’s where you went wrong.”
“One has to bait the hook, Arthur. Forgive me, but it’s true.”
“We’ll see.” He rattled the ice in his glass. “I need another drink.” He peered into the dim corridor behind us. “Which way is it?”
“Follow the blue arrows.”
He stood up, a little unsteady. “Blue arrows?”
“We use the same system here as in the museums. Arrows on the floor.” I watched as he wandered off toward the bar. “See?” I called after him. “I can make you go anywhere I want.”
His answer came back from the shadows. “We’ll see.”
—
It was late when I left Hawkswood, but I stopped at the hospice anyway. They say she no longer knows if I’m there or not, but I can’t imagine that I’d ever skip a day. I sat for a few minutes in the chair by the bed and listened to the hum and clank of the machines, the tinny buzz of the respirator. I took a copy of Mansfield Park from my bag and read to her for half an hour. At midnight I changed the pad and put some Vaseline on her lips. Her eyes were open, staring. You could just about see the light fading. “What are we gonna do?” I said. “What are we gonna do, kiddo?”
—
I was late again the next morning. Jayson looked grim.
“I’m sorry,” I began. “There was a—”
“I need to talk to you.” He led me over to the coffee and donuts. “We’ve got trouble,” he said in a low voice. “Funding trouble.”
“The Beckworth Foundation?”
He nodded. “I got a call from Gwen Halstram. She says she’s concerned about the direction we’re taking.”
I glanced across the room. Arthur hadn’t arrived yet. “Did she give any specifics?”
“She said something about ‘academic rigor.’ She used that phrase twice. And she wondered if perhaps these resources might be put to better use by the academic community. She used those words exactly.”
I looked over at the wall where the cover of The Whitechapel Murders should have been hanging. He’d taken it down. “This is incredible, Jayson. He’s stabbing us in the back and taking souvenirs. Who does that remind you of?”
“Except the Ripper would have looked us in the eye.” Jayson rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“So what are we supposed to do?”
He shrugged. “We try to change his mind.” He took a sip of his cinnamon latte. “We need this one, Annie. We can’t have another washout. We’d have to shut it all down. I’d be out on my ass. I don’t know where I’d find another—” He caught himself. “Sorry, Annie. Here I am worrying about—how is Mags, by the way?” My face must have gone dark because he looked away quickly. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“No,” I said, “it’s fine. She’s fine. No change. So what’s the plan? How do we bring Arthur around?”
“We’ll show him the really tedious stuff. We bore him to death.” A grin spread across his face. “He’ll love it.”
—
We spent the entire morning going over educational impact reports. We reviewed translation data and accessibility protocols over lunch. In the afternoon we walked through models and programing data for the legacy room, with information kiosks to demonstrate how the techniques pioneered during the Jack the Ripper investigation carried forward to the forensics and behavioral science
s of today. It was deeply conventional, documents-in-glass-cases stuff.
It seemed to be working. “You’ve done some solid work here,” Arthur admitted. He was standing in front of a seventy-inch classroom smartboard, where a painstakingly educational video called ‘A Heritage of Science’ was playing on continuous loop. “With a little work, we might be able to salvage something worthwhile out of this. We might even—”
And that’s when the ghost of Jack the Ripper appeared.
It started with a dimming of the lights. Next, a high, cackling laugh rose up from below. The image on the smartboard flickered away, and a blood-streaked message bubbled up in its place:
I’ve had a grand rest, Boss.
Now it’s back to work for Saucy Jack!
“What the hell?” Arthur gaped the screen. “What are you playing at?”
But it wasn’t over. We heard a sharp scream as a sudden blast of vapor shot up behind us. When the mist cleared, Jack the Ripper stood at the center of the room. It was a thing of beauty, really. We’d built a wax and fiberboard figure about nine feet tall, loosely modeled on Ivor Novello in The Lodger, the Hitchcock movie, with a heavy cloak and a thick muffler obscuring the lower half of its face. The eyes glowed yellow and a gnarled, claw-like hand thrust forward with a glinting knife, blood dripping from the blade. There was also a halo of question marks circling the head on fairy wire. It was not subtle.
“What the hell are you people—?”
But whatever Arthur was going to say was drowned out by fresh screams and a second blast of vapor. By the time mist cleared, Jack had been lowered out of sight.
Ajay and Gunter burst out of the control room, slapping each other on the back. “Did you see that?” Ajay shouted. “He’s magnificent! Glowing eyes! They’ll jump out of their skins! They’ll crap their—”
“Guys,” Jayson said, “I thought we agreed that we’d put a pin in Jack’s ghost for today.”
Ajay and Gunter heard the anger in Jayson’s voice. “Sorry,” Gunter said. “We couldn’t resist. We had it all queued up and it just seemed too perfect!”
Arthur’s face had gone very still. “What the fuck was that?” he asked quietly.
Jayson went into spin mode. “We were thinking that the legacy room might be a bit dry—a bit dry for some people, anyway. We wanted to send the crowds out the door with something memorable, so they’d tell their friends. What better than the ghost of Jack the Ripper? As if the Ripper’s spirit were haunting the exhibition?”
“And it would control the dwell time,” I said. “We’d have it on a fifteen-minute cycle, to send them out the door.”
“Give them a good scare,” Jayson added. “So they’ll tell their friends.”
“A scare,” Arthur repeated, shaking his head. “So you actually have a trapdoor over here?”
“It’s a star trap, like in a theater,” Gunter explained, pointing at the faint hinges visible on the floor. “When the smoke cannon goes off, we raise Jack up on a pressure-lift.”
“But only a couple of museums have trap rooms,” Ajay said. “So we’re figuring out how to get the same effect with optics. Convex lenses and fog projectors, like a hologram.”
Arthur looked me square in the face. Whatever glimmers of reason I’d seen earlier were gone. “I’ve seen enough,” he said.
“Arthur—”
But he was already walking away. “A line has to be drawn,” he said.
—
That night the crew guys had done up the sound stage as a Belle Époque café, with music by Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour piped in. Gunter handed everyone a black beret as they came through the door.
Arthur didn’t take a beret. Instead, he went straight to the bar and pounded down a Scotch and soda.
“I’m surprised he’s still here,” Jayson said gloomily.
“It’ll be in his contract,” I said. “He’s very careful about contracts, as I recall.”
Arthur got a second drink and carried it out the door.
“It doesn’t look good,” Jayson said.
“Let’s give it a few minutes,” I said. “Maybe there’s still something I can do.”
By the time I went looking for him, Arthur had found his way back to the benches by the autopsy table. I handed him another drink and took a seat beside him. “You’ve come to reason with me,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have to. You’re being deliberately obstreperous.”
“I’m not.”
“I don’t see why you have such a problem with us. We’re no different from a magic lantern show in the eighteenth century. We engage people’s imaginations; get them interested in the subject. Some of them will work their way upstream to the source material. That’s how it works. You might even say it’s a mirror of national identity.”
His ears pricked up at this. “I know you, don’t I? Before this?”
“I was at Western U. College of Arts.”
He waved a hand, as if batting a mosquito. “I wasn’t responsible for that.”
“No. Cuts had to be made. Fat had to be trimmed.”
“Anyway, it was a long time ago.”
“And yet here we are again. Perhaps these things are cyclical.”
He shook his head. “You seem like an intelligent person. But there are standards that must be upheld. Ms. Halstram entrusted me with—”
“A lot of these people will lose their livelihoods. Their benefits.”
He batted his hand again. “There are always jobs for young people. As for you, you could come back to academe.”
“Simple as that?”
He wobbled to his feet. “Come see me,” he said. “When The Whitechapel Murders arrives. We’ll talk.” He peered behind him. “Blue arrows, yes?”
I nodded. “Unless somebody changed it.”
—
Six and half months later, Saucy Jack: The Ripper Experience opened at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. We were booked there for eight months, followed by a six-month run at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and a full year at the Discovery Cube in Orange County. Queries were already coming in from abroad. If the numbers held up, the show would tour for eight or nine years.
We pulled out all the stops for the preview party in Philadelphia. The serving staff dressed as London bobbies. We had specialty cocktails, including a “Bloody Mary Jane Kelly” and a “Saucy Jack and Coke.” We set up a photo booth so you could put your face on a “Ghastly Murderer Still at Large” poster.
Jayson was beaming as he climbed on top of the autopsy table and delivered his welcoming remarks. He gave extravagant thanks to the sponsors and led a round of applause for several of the private donors in the room. Just as he appeared to be wrapping up, the lights suddenly dimmed and the ghost of Jack the Ripper sprang up at the center of the room. There were screams, there were gasps, but mostly there was applause. We put on a hell of a show.
Afterward, Jayson found me lingering in a far corner of the legacy room. Behind me was a small, black-edged plaque with the words “In Memory of a Valued Colleague” engraved across the top. It featured a small photo of Arthur Furman and an impressive listing of his many accomplishments and publications. It finished on the line: “We dedicate this exhibition to his memory.”
Jayson handed me a glass of “Bloody Bordeaux.”
“He’d have hated this, I suppose,” he said.
“No question about it.” I glanced at the photo. Arthur appeared to be passing a kidney stone. It was the least disagreeable one we could find.
“But I can’t help feeling grateful to him, the bastard.”
I took a sip of wine.
“I mean, I thought it was all over that night. After the accident. Especially when we lost the Beckworth money.”
“It looked bad,” I admitted. My eyes went to a small press clipping beside the plaque. Noted Scholar Dies in Fall. That had been one of the more restrained headlines. Most of the coverage took a “Jack the Ripper Strikes Again” angle. The pres
s kept the story going for days, and one could hardly blame them. Arthur had fallen through the trap door in the legacy room. We found him lying dead at the feet of the Ripper statue. One of the paramedics told the press he’d heard high, cackling laughter at the scene. “It was creepy,” he’d said. “Like the statue came to life. Like a movie.”
Jayson sighed and leaned against a display case. “Does it ever—it still bothers me,” he said. “I still don’t see how it happened.”
“He was drunk,” I answered. “He got lost and fell through the star trap. We’ve been over this a million times.”
“I know, I know—but still. All he had to do was follow the arrows. And why was the trap open?”
“It was an accident. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. God knows the police were thorough.”
Jayson finished his drink. He was drinking quite a lot these days. We both were. “I still feel guilty. Because in the end, it was the best thing that could have happened. For us, I mean. All the publicity about the so-called curse of Jack the Ripper. The donors came out of the woodwork.”
“And everybody wants to see the killer statue,” I said. “Everybody wants to see the ghost of Jack the Ripper.”
“So he was right, in the end. We’re just one of those midnight creep shows.”
I looked away. “So what if we are?” I said. “It’s all a question of knowing where to draw the line.”
The Treasure of Jack the Ripper
EDWARD D. HOCH
Readers have been of several minds when it comes to deciding which of the series characters created by Edward Dentinger Hoch (1930–2008) is their favorite. He created numerous protagonists, including Nick Velvet, the thief who steals only innately worthless objects (the first story was “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger,” 1966); Captain Leopold, the tough but sensitive violent-crime specialist whose most famous case is told in the Edgar-winning “The Oblong Room” (1967), in which he investigates a murder with bizarre religious overtones on a college campus; Dr. Sam Hawthorne, who specializes in solving locked-room and other impossible crimes and made his first appearance in 1974 in “The Problem of the Covered Bridge”; Jeffrey Rand, a British cryptographer-detective; and Ben Snow, an apparently law-abiding drifter in the American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around whom the legend has grown that he is actually Billy the Kid.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 124
