I, Ripper

“I cannot answer for what the newspapers say. Perhaps you should discuss this with your friend Harry Dam, when he is not busy constructing an auto-da-fé for the Jews. But what you are describing does not seem to me impossible. Remember, he’s slight, and thus the pony won’t shy at him, thinking him a child and fearing no whip from him. He’s slight enough to squeeze between the cart and the gateway and be gone quickly.”

“I suppose,” I said, “but the pony is already alerted, already skittish, by smell. It seems just as likely that the sudden appearance of a figure from the dark, child-sized or not, would have caused the nervous beast to create a disturbance.”

“Who knows the minds of ponies?” said the professor.

“Fair enough,” I said. “But does it not strike you odd, Professor, that we are hard upon the single building in London that is regularly trafficked by revolutionaries, secret policemen, spies, the whole monkey house of Mittleuropean battle between autocratic governments and the men who would overthrow them. This building would be, would it not, full of intrigue, plot, plan, various stratagems and deceits, to say nothing of talents for escape and evasion?”

“Have you been talking with someone?” he asked. “That does not seem like your sort of intuition.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It just came to me in the writing.”

“Ah. In any event, what difference does it make, ultimately? They’re all politicals. Such men would have no interest in a fellow cutting up whores, because it advances no revolutionary cause. They are a hard breed.”

“Indeed. However, all those men, no matter of what faction, have one thing in common, which I would term ‘fear of raid.’ They are haunted by raids, have memory of raids, have themselves escaped raids. The raid spells their apprehension, execution, imprisonment, or exile. It means that all they stand for is destroyed. Theirs is a dangerous universe and a fragile one. So does it not stand that they would have an escape from such a place? They are not the sort to be caught like rats in a trap. Come, let’s examine.”

We walked into the unlocked building, entering by way of that side door onto Dutfield’s Yard, finding ourselves in a dingy corridor, which in one direction, back, seemed to lead to a printing shop from the mechanistic sounds, and in other direction, toward the street, where a kind of foyer must have offered a stairway that presumably led to the large meeting hall upstairs. There the workers were bellowing out a hymn to worker solidarity much sung in radical nests across Europe. It was so loud its vibrations seemed to be banging hard off walls and wood. Instead of joining the chorus of heroes, I took Dare to a door just a bit down the corridor toward the foyer. It, too, was unlocked, after the anarchists’ happy assumption that property is theft and no hindrance should be placed in the way of those in need. I was certainly in need. This in turn took us down a few steps into a cellar, which contained what cellars contain: crates, rusted tools, refuse, scrap, rat holes, spiderwebs, dust, the smell of dankness.

“Hardly a highlight of one’s London tour,” said the professor.

“Let’s see, however, if it contains treasure, which may be found in the most unlikely of spots.”

We poked about, undisturbed. It was rather dark, so the going was somewhat difficult as we bumped and bumbled about until I said, “Hello, what’s this?”

I pointed to the cement floor, where squibs of candlewax had accumulated, as if much illumination had been required on this one spot.

“Very Sherlock Holmes of you, sir,” he said. In a second I pushed aside the nearest crate and found it easy enough going. It slid three feet to the right and, when moved, revealed a ragged but ample hole chopped into the cement, though all its excavation debris had been carefully swept away. The two nubs of a ladder stuck beyond the edge of the hole.

“I would say tunnel. Isn’t this interesting? Built, I’m sure, to save the anarchists from goons hired by the tsarist secret police or foreign agents being hunted by our own Special Branch. Wouldn’t you think that a brilliant tactical mind like the colonel’s would have understood the high theoretical possibility of such a structure existing and looked for it? Perhaps that is why he chose this spot, knowing a secret escape was possible.”

“Capital thinking,” said the professor. “It existed theoretically, now it exists actually. By God, this is a wonderful discovery.”

“Shall we see where it leads?”

“We have a moral obligation to do so.”