City of Darkness

by Kim Wright

  “Come,” said Leanna, yanking her sharply

  But Emma stood stubbornly, facing back. She was about to tell Leanna she was the one who was mad when she saw him. He was nearly a full block behind them, just passing under a street lamp, his shadow moving like a blade of darkness through the circle of the light. There was a moment when she might have seen his face, but then he stepped out of the bright circle, and ceased to exist.

  There was no other movement, just darkness as smooth and vast as an ocean and Emma stared at the next streetlight along the block, waiting for someone to cross beneath it. No one did.

  “Is he there?” Leanna asked desperately.

  Emma shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

  8:17 PM

  Going down one of the main throughfares would have assured that he passed more bobbies along the way and perhaps even, depending upon how steadily they were moving, overtaken the girls. But the back streets were faster and, debating even as he ran, Trevor decided to take the most direct route to the water. His anxiety increased with each block. How could he, not to mention half of Scotland Yard, have missed them? Was he utterly wrong about the reason Emma and Leanna had been lured to Whitechapel? Tom’s blurted confession that his sister was an heiress had stunned Trevor, made him realize that he could have once again misread the situation, that Leanna might indeed the intended target.

  He screamed her name. Then Emma’s. No answer, although there were other noises coming from the alleys. Moans, grunts, giggles, the raw sounds of sex and of life’s neverending needs. The Ripper comes and goes, but London continues.

  The street he’d chosen was considerate enough to slope downhill but it lacked streetlights and Trevor stumbled over the irregular cobblestones, his feet sliding in the ruts and muck. The wind roared through these narrow venues, as loud as water in a river, and once he thought he heard a woman cry out. A sound that could indicate pleasure or pain and how similar the cries are, he thought, how indistinguishable in the dark. “Are you there?” he shouted, waving his light torch, but he saw no one. “Leanna?” he screamed, trying to push down fear and keep his voice low enough to carry. “Emma? Can you hear me?”

  The dim glow of the waterfront drew him onward. The downhill slope, the river, the place where all the threads would be drawn together. And just then he heard the last thing he expected. The sound of a pistol.

  8:17 PM

  Death by gunshot would not ordinarily be his first choice. It is eruptive, imprecise, and noisy but perhaps, upon reflection, the creature before him deserves no better. She has threatened him and tried – what’s the English phrase? Yes, she has tried to turn the tables, and a price must be paid for such impunity.

  He looks at the heap of clothing before him and reflects that it hardly looks human. No one will ever connect this one to him. A different sort of method, a different type of victim. The death of a woman no one liked. They will all say she deserved it, and they will give her not a moment’s thought.

  Nonetheless, he uses his scarf to wipe the gun. He remembers what Trevor said, that the French had means of reading the patterns that swirled about the ends of a man’s fingertips. There might be a chance, however slight, that someone could connect this gun to him, so he cleans it carefully before tossing it on the body of Maud Milford.

  He pulls his knife from his pocket, almost by habit. But he feels not the slightest urge to approach her body, no curiosity about what lies beneath her clothes or beneath her skin. His heart rate is normal. His breath is regular and there is no film of sweat upon his brow. His mind is already somewhere else.

  On the Sunday morning he fled Warsaw he had the clothes on his back and the knife in his pocket, the same knife he is holding now. It had taken him three weeks to get to London. He had huddled in cattle cars, earned his passage across the channel by scrubbing decks. Luckily, he had studied some English at the University and he worked hard to eradicate his accent.

  His first job had been for an undertaker, a position he accepted because it included a room in the back where he could sleep. He found the dead bodies to be soothing company in the evenings after everyone else had left. He spoke to them sometimes, first in Polish and then in English, until he was afraid he was going mad. In time he found his way to the Pony Pub and it was there that he overheard a copper saying the Yard needed coroners. He had not recognized the word in English so he had asked the barmaid what it means. She’d turned to him, all giggles and smiles, and said “But it’s a doctor for dead people, isn’t it?”

  Phillips, with his shaky hands, had been amazed at how fast he could drain a body. Was amazed at how neatly he could suture a wound, how unperturbed the young man was by the endless gore of the Scotland Yard mortuary. And so he became a doctor of the dead.

  He hadn’t been meant to overhear that bit about the fingerprints, but nor did they bother to keep secrets from him. Over the last few months, he had learned many things and filed them away in his mind, information to be used at some future point. They considered themselves men of science and thus without prejudice, but the first time he’d been introduced to Trevor Welles the man stumbled over his last name, as all the English seemed to do. Despite the round of hearty handshakes that followed, it was clear he’d been discounted in their eyes. Had been put in a certain category, lumped with the Michas and Lucys, the ones who could not understand, who never would.

  Trevor had mispronounced his name, had shaken his hand, and from that point on had behaved as if Severin Klosowski were deaf.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  8:17 PM

  Tom had warred within himself as he followed John into the shabby room. He felt he should explain that Leanna and Emma might be in danger… but then again, Trevor had undoubtedly intercepted the girls by now and was transporting them home to Mayfair while this woman writhing on the bed was most clearly in need of assistance. So he had pushed up his sleeves and worked beside John and within minutes the two of them managed to maneuver the child feet first into the world. They left the baby and mother in the care of the other woman, who had turned out to be her sister, and stepped back into the misty night.

  “Come with me,” Tom said. “We need to walk and I’ll tell you where we’re going on the way.”

  “You’re limping,” John said. “Why?”

  Tom told John an abbreviated version of the story and when he got to the part about Leanna and Emma, John jerked to attention. “My God, you’re just now telling me this?”

  “They’re undoubtedly home as we speak, sleeping in their beds. I just want to go back to the pub and see if I can find Trevor or Mabrey, explain to them why I disappeared.”

  “You shouldn’t be on that ankle.”

  “It doesn’t hurt as bad as my shoulder, to be truthful. I think I dislocated it trying to break down the door.”

  “Do you want to ride on my back?”

  Tom looked at him, surprised and offended. “Of course not.”

  8:22 PM

  “Emma,” Leanna said breathlessly “What’s that smell? It’s fish, is it not? Dead and rotting fish, thank God, and it may as well be roses. That means we’re getting close.”

  8:22 PM

  It would seem impossible to lose a man as large as Micha, but Cecil had managed to do just that. He had followed his lumbering shape for several blocks and then lost sight of him. Leanna and Emma were trodding along as steadily as lambs to the slaughter, but the man he’d paid to slaughter them seemed to have disappeared. Cecil could only assume he’d elected to take another street and lie in wait for them down by the waterfront. At least that’s what he hoped. For all he knew the man had taken his coins and was drinking Polish champagne in a bar somewhere.

  But just as Cecil had stepped into one of those infernal streetlights, something unexpected had happened. The girls stopped and the Kelly chit had turned on her heel and faced him. The sight of her staring up the street so directly and boldly startled Cecil and he had stood frozen in the circular light beneath the lamppost
like an actor on a stage. If it had been Leanna who had whirled about to look, she doubtless would have recognized him, and then what would he have done?

  He was following far too closely. Best to slip into an alley for a second and let them get a bit farther down the street.

  Cecil had no sooner stepped into the shadows before he realized he was not alone. A man was standing there. Ah, the man from the bar, the one with the mustache. The one who was dillying and probably beating the barmaid, the one who stayed sober while everyone around him drank, the one who had so obligingly sent Leanna to the waterfront and to her doom. Now this was a strange coincidence. Why was this man lurking in an alleyway, and not Micha? Was he supposed to greet the fellow?

  “Hello,” he said. “Fancy finding you here. Name’s Severin, isn’t it?”

  And then Cecil saw the knife.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  8:23 PM

  “I’m not sure where he went,” Emma said. “Perhaps our nerves have gone so bad we’ve imagined every man in the street is following us.”

  “I know,” Leanna says. “And listen to those foghorns. We must have come full circle because we truly are near the docks.”

  “Thank God,” Emma said. “When we find the cab we –“

  But as they turned the final corner they came face to face with a man. Strange, Leanna thought, but it seems as if he’s waiting for us. Emma’s mind went even more into the sort of slow-motion abstraction that often accompanies shock and makes it feel dreamlike. Or perhaps she was turning pages in one of her father’s old storybooks. A bear was before them. He was standing with his weight equally on each foot and in a bit of a crouch, the paunch of his belly thrust forward.

  The bear smiled.

  And then he lunged.

  Leanna tried to cry out but, before she could make a sound, the man’s arm swooped down, as swift and mechanical as a sickle, and lifted her straight up by the base of her throat. She gasped for air as she felt herself being pushed skyward until, when she struggled to open her eyes, she found herself staring down into his grinning face. Her feet kicked and dangled below her, as ineffectual as ship sails on a windless day. Emma, snapped free from her shock, let out a shrill scream and pounded at the back of the man. The sound echoed through the streets, and, although no one came to help, someone must have lit a light in one of the rooms overlooking the waterway for a pale yellow glow began to diffuse the darkness, allowing Emma to see. Leanna had stopped kicking and swung about like a rag doll, her feet grazing the rough boards of the dock.

  She’s dead, Emma thought. He’s broken her neck. Using all her strength she leapt on the man’s back and threw both of her arms around his face, gouging her fingers into his eyes and biting the fleshy overhang at the base of his skull. She was not strong enough to pull him down, but the pain in his eyes and neck had the desired effect. He released Leanna to the ground and staggered blindly while Emma crossed her hands, grabbed her own wrists, and simply dropped. The dead weight of her body hanging behind him made the big man sway and she kicked as hard as she could. She was screaming, screaming for every pain she’d ever suffered, every loss, every fear. Her voice echoed up and down the waterfront.

  This time Trevor heard her. He had been pacing the docks since he’d arrived minutes before and now he began running toward the sound of her voice, blowing his police whistle in short hard blasts. Other coppers in the area picked up the signal and began to blow their whistles too, converging on the pier. Davy Mabrey, coming from the west, was among them.

  Micha had regained his balance but, since Emma was hanging down the back of his body, he was unable to reach her. He whirled sharply, a move that nearly sent her spinning off of him, and finally slammed his own back, and thus hers, into a piling. Emma’s head hit the boards and she slid to the ground, her mouth full of blood and her vision gone cottony.

  It was as if she was looking down at herself, as if this was all happening to someone else, a substitute Emma, another person. It would be easy to give into it and just sink from this time and place. Easy to release her grasp on this sad life and fall into some bigger, brighter world. Emma let her head roll back. She had sat at her mother’s bed at the end, had seen the startled look that had come across the woman’s features with her last earthly exhalation. Emma had always wondered what this final revelation had been, but now she knew. Had Mary seen this? Had her father or her brother?

  It is easier to die than to live. That is the great surprise.

  8:25 PM

  Severin drew the blade of the knife lightly across his own palm.

  “You did not know?” He said it as a question but meant it as a statement. “Did not know I was one they are looking for? Looking for a very long time.”

  Cecil inched back, knocking over a trash can, his boots slipping over the piles of fish bones and slimy fruit. He wanted to tell the man he didn’t see him, that he would never tell anyone they had been here, but his voice seemed to have left him. He could do no more than shake his head.

  Severin stepped toward him slowly. “And now at last I am caught,” he said. “What are we to do about this?”

  And then, like the vengeance of angels, a crescendo of police whistles began to rise up all around them. Not one or two but a dozen, coming from all directions. Severin’s dark eyes flickered and he hesitated. Just long enough to allow Cecil to turn.

  8:25 PM

  “What’s that sound?” Tom said. “It’s coming from the water.”

  “Get there when you can,” John said. He bent to slide Tom from his back and then he began to run.

  8:26 PM

  The three figures before him were images from a nightmare. The giant at the mouth of the dock was Micha - the man Abrams had served up to him on a platter and that he had been fool enough to release. Micha had thrown Emma’s limp form to the pavement as casually as a man shucks a coat. Even as Trevor ran down the dock with his whistle screaming, Micha did not pause at the sound or hesitate in his task. He left Emma and turned toward Leanna, who was struggling to sit up. Trevor dropped the whistle from his lips and began to simply roar the same word over and over again. The darkness around him had a new name. Jack. Jack. Jack.

  The big man moved with an almost leisurely grace, stooping over Leanna, lifting a shank of her hair, which glowed snow-white in the streetlight, pulling back his hand….but Trevor saw that Emma had somehow gotten to her feet, was running at the man, throwing her small body against his, and in just that moment Leanna also managed to get her knees beneath her, to push up from the dock like a diver from a board. The collective movement of their bodies disturbed the man’s equilibrium. Just for a moment, but it was enough. They weaved and staggered, six arms about each other, in a bizarre triangular dance, and they were moving down the mouth of the pier, over the water. The man’s arm rose, there was a flash of silver in the sky, and then Leanna was slung to his right, toward the dock, and Emma to his left, toward the pier. Trevor was running, pulling off his coat, screaming, and at last someone seemed to hear him. Emma turned, stumbling, and her eyes locked with Trevor’s for a split second, just as she made one final grab at the giant’s arm, just as she was starting to fall.

  Leanna was slowly regaining her breath. She rolled to her back, looked up at the sky. Her throat ached, her vision was blurred, and all there seemed to be in the world was the noise of the whistles, sharp and insistent, and beneath them, another sound. She heard the splash of a body falling into water, then another, and finally, a few seconds later, a third.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  8:34 PM

  Thanks to shouted orders of Davy Mabrey, nearly every bobby in the East End was on hand to fish Micha Banasik out of the Thames. Emma’s final lunge had managed to knock him off balance and the two had gone tumbling into the water below the pier. Trevor dove in a few seconds later and reached Emma just as she was breaking the surface. He had pulled her to the stones where Davy had gone scrambling down the bank to help them both back to land.


  John had found Leanna sprawled on the dock, the back of her hair blackened with blood and for a horrible moment he thought she was dead. But then he heard her cough. “Don’t try to talk,” he said, bending over her, straining to see the marks on her throat in the shadows. “Lie still,” he whispered. “I’m here. We all are.”

  Trevor stumbled up with Emma in his arms and simply said “Doctor?”

  “She’s alive,” John said. “We need a coach.” He unclasped his cape and gave it to Trevor to wrap around Emma while Davy sprinted off in search of the Scotland Yard carriage.

  Tom, who had not only been limping but who had been further delayed by slamming right into a man with a mustache who’d come fairly flying out of an alley, finally stumbled up as well. At the sight of the two girls lying side by side on the dock, he burst into deep racking sobs.

  “They’re all right,” John said hoarsely, for he felt like weeping himself. “Leanna’s got some nasty bruising and we don’t want Emma to get hypothermia. We need to get them to Geraldine’s as fast as possible. You too, Welles. You’re drenched straight through.”

  But Trevor had turned away, was staring toward the bobbies collected around Micha.

  “The carriage is just here, Sir,” Davy said quietly.

  “Tell the doctor,” Trevor said, just as quietly. Within minutes John had Emma, Leanna, and Tom loaded in and the coach rumbled off in the direction of Mayfair.

  Micha was equally battered and wet but not so well-attended. He coughed and sputtered while it took three men to get his dead weight lifted into the back of the wagon. As it rolled away, a shout of glee went up among the bobbies. They would all someday tell their grandchildren of the night they single-handedly collared Jack the Ripper.