The Cutthroat

“Look again, you idiot. She was already dead.”

Jimbo leaned over the body. He fumbled a match from his clothing and raked it across his belt buckle. The Cutthroat closed one eye and slitted the other. Sulfur flamed, half blinding them both.

“I’ll be damned. He cut her head almost off.”

“And look what he did to her—”

The Cutthroat’s cane hung from a strap looped around his wrist. When the match went out, he drew his sword from the cane and whipped the bloody blade to the bigger man’s throat. “Do exactly what I tell you, Jimbo.”

Jimbo’s hands shot up in the air. “Easy, mister. Easy. Take it easy. We’re not telling anyone, we’re just going to—”

“Do exactly what I tell you, Jimbo. Are you ready?”

“Yeah, yeah, just don’t—”

“Punch that man in the mouth as hard as you can.”

“What—”

“Don’t hold back. If you hold back, I will slash your throat wide open.” He could have said “like hers” but did not have to. Jimbo had seen plenty in the flare of the match. “Now!”

The smaller man didn’t move. He just gaped in disbelief. Jimbo’s fist struck him full in the mouth, knocking in teeth, and slamming him half conscious on his back.

Jimbo said, “I’m sorry, Vern. He made me—”

“Turn around, Jimbo.”

“You said you wouldn’t stick me.”

“I will not ‘stick’ you. Turn around!”

The Cutthroat swung his cane with all his strength. Reinforced with steel, heavier than it looked, it caved a shard of bone into Jimbo’s temple, dropping him on top of his groaning friend. The Cutthroat sheathed his sword in his cane and picked up a chunk of heavy track ballast in each hand and pounded at both men’s heads. When they were dead, he felt in their clothing for their rotgut bottle.

He raised it by the neck, high to the stars, and smashed it down on Jimbo’s shattered temple. Broken glass and whiskey sprayed the bodies. Then he stepped back and cast a shrewd eye on his handiwork. Whether or not a train ran them over in the dark, if Sherlock Holmes himself discovered them in the daylight, even the great detective would deduce that Jimbo and Vern had killed each other in a drunken fight.

He wrapped the girl in his cape again and lifted her tenderly into his arms and continued walking to the coal wharf, marking its location by ghostly shadows that trees growing out of the long-abandoned structure thrust against the stars. Closer, he saw the silhouettes of mooring bollards. The dock planks were rotten, and he took care to walk where underlying joists would take their weight.

Her hair was bright as straw, and when he lowered her into the Ohio River, the water splayed it like a halo. Air captured in the cape held her afloat. An eddy formed a patch of still water beside the wharf, and it took a while before the current bit a hold and swept her into the dark.

“Good-bye. You were everything I hoped for.”

18

“Poor Detective Roberts.”

Wayne Barlowe laughed.

Isaac Bell had found the illustrator’s loft in a spacious Chelsea garret with a skylight in the north-sloping roof. While retired Scotland Yard C.I.D. Detective Sergeant Roberts could pass as an artist, with his long silver hair and glittery spectacles, the actual artist Wayne Barlowe resembled a policeman — squat as a fireplug, with an expressionless face pockmarked like a firing squad wall.

“What do you find funny about ‘poor Detective Roberts’?” asked Bell. Barlowe had already struck him as another game player like Roberts, and the tall detective was fed up with game players.

“Just when Roberts is finally on the verge of giving up identifying the ‘greatest monster of the Victorian Age,’ Mr. Isaac Bell, insurance adjuster and amateur sleuth, arrives from America with a beguiling theory that the ‘greatest monster’ is going strong abroad.”

Barlowe had works in progress on several easels, blank sketch pads on others. On the biggest, he was drawing, in fine-lined pen and ink, a sperm whale ramming a boat with its head and splintering another with its tail. Bell had never seen a whale more malevolent, and he said as much, reckoning that such skills might reproduce accurately a description of Jack the Ripper’s face.

Barlowe ducked his head modestly and thanked him for the compliment.

“Nigel Roberts heard a rumor that you interviewed a woman who saw Jack the Ripper up close. I’ve studied your drawings in the newspapers, but I have never seen one that includes his face.”

“I never drew his face.”

“But did you hear him described by the woman who saw him?”

“The rumor is true.”

“May I ask why you won’t tell Roberts what she said?”

“Roberts thought I was daft. But Roberts was a copper. So he couldn’t speak to the people who trusted me. He obviously did not admit it to you, but the fact is, I did tell him what she said. I just wouldn’t draw it.”

“What did he look like?”

“What did he look like?” Barlowe mused. “Angelic.”

“Angelic? Are you joking?”

The sketch artist picked up a pencil in his blunt fingers and walked to another easel. In seconds, a face was alive, its features and some hints of character distinguished by a few swift lines.

“A boy?”