The Cutthroat

“Always— You’re sure nothing for you, Isaac?”

“I am sure.”

Van Dorn ordered oysters and roast beef.

“And for you, Mr. Bell?”

“Pollo Tetrazzini.”

He waited for Van Dorn’s drink to arrive and toasted him back with water when the Boss said, “Mud in your eye.”

“O.K.,” Van Dorn said. “Spit it out. What intrigues you?”

“There are a hundred theories about Jack the Ripper.”

“At least.”

“The one I find most intriguing is that he stopped killing prostitutes in London twenty-three years ago when he escaped to America.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“What do you think? Did he come here?”

Van Dorn shook his head. “One version had him killing an old woman on the Bowery, if I recall. Didn’t make much sense. She wasn’t young and she wasn’t a prostitute.”

“I read about it,” said Bell. “It didn’t seem at all like his other crimes.”

“And yet you’re ‘intrigued.’”

“Not by that murder. No, what intrigues me is a question: Is it possible that the reason Jack the Ripper was never caught was he fled London in 1888 or 1889 and landed in America? Maybe in New York. Maybe Boston. And laid low for a while.”

“Far-fetched,” said Van Dorn. “How long do you think he laid low?”

“The first killing I’ve found that could be him was in Brooklyn in 1891. But the question is, is he killing again?”

“Now? 1911? That is far-fetched.”

Bell agreed it was far-fetched.

Van Dorn’s oysters were served on a bed of ice. He heaped a few of them on Bell’s bread and butter plate. “That’s exactly the kind of speculation we get in the newspapers.”

“Agreed,” said Isaac Bell, and challenged his own question: “Besides, wouldn’t the Ripper be too old by now?”

Joseph Van Dorn raised a bushy red eyebrow. “Too old?” he asked silkily.

“We’re talking about a murderer who committed his crimes twenty-three years ago.”

Van Dorn said, “I suppose that from your perspective, a man past forty looks ancient.”

Bell said, “You and I both know that past age forty, criminals who haven’t been jailed tend to slow down.”

Van Dorn signaled the waiter. “You see that soup ladle on the sideboard?”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Van Dorn?”

“That big long one.”

“Yes, sir. I see it.”

“Bring it here.”

The mystified waiter delivered the ladle.

Van Dorn asked Bell, “Tell me, young fellow, how would you characterize the poor devils who will soon not see the sunny side of fifty again? Decrepit? Flea-bitten? Feeble?”

With a cold smile for his Chief Investigator, the Boss hefted the heavy silver serving tool in his powerful hands and tied the handle in a knot.

“Too old?”

Bell swept to his feet in a fluid motion as swift as it was graceful.

“Thank you for your oysters,” he said, and glided from the dining room.

“Isaac!” Van Dorn called after him. “Where the devil are you going?”

“England.”

ACT TWO

LONDON (SIX DAYS LATER)

14

“Fact-based truth, Mr. Bell,” Joel Wallace told Isaac Bell. “High-and-mighty Scotland Yard never nailed Jack the Ripper.”

When Americans ran into trouble abroad — businessmen swindled, tourists with daughters excited by shady suitors, art collectors worried that bargain-priced Rembrandts and Titians might have been lifted from their rightful owners — the lucky ones landed in Jermyn Street at the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s London field office.

Joel Wallace ramrodded the outfit. He was a short, rugged man in a loud suit, and he had made the Van Dorns a formidable presence in the capital city of the British Empire. The stuffier sort of Englishmen might be put off by his cocksure manner, but his brash ways assured Americans that Wallace was an aggressive detective they could count on, and word soon got around the expensive hotels and four-day ships: See Joel Wallace. The Van Dorns’ll set you straight.

“The Ripper ran circles around Scotland Yard. They won’t love a Yank reminding them.”

Which was precisely why Isaac would not want to present himself as Chief Investigator of a private detective agency. Better to let the high-and-mighty peer down their noses at a humble insurance sleuth who was indulging an eccentric hobby on his day off.

“Toyed with the coppers,” said Wallace. “Played tricks on ’em. You’re looking at his biggest joke right across the street — Metropolitan Police H.Q.”

It was a cold spring day, and the rain that greeted Bell’s ship at Southampton Docks and pelted the boat train was soaking London. Canvas topcoats were in order, for the walk past the cherry blossoms of St. James’s Park and across the Whitehall government district to the Victoria Embankment. Backs to the Thames, they faced New Scotland Yard, a double-wing, four-story building striped in horizontal rows of stone and brick. Soot-black Parliament buildings loomed just upriver. Scarlet trams rumbled on Westminster Bridge. Big Ben was striking two o’clock.

“New Scotland Yard — built the same year the Ripper started killing. One guess what the workmen found where they were laying the foundation.”