True Raiders

by Brad Ricca

  “These were arranged by the hands of men,” Father Vincent said. “Several bodies were placed here, with some fragments of early Canaanitish pottery; some bullets for slinging; a small, shapeless bit of bronze; and a few bones of animals, which may have been offerings to the dead.” Captain Parker was, once again, astounded at the man’s eye.

  Father Vincent knelt down. There was a larger bone here, though he did not know its origin. It was human, for sure. Without touching it, he brushed off the surrounding dust. His face became puzzled.

  “Look,” he said. Captain Parker cautiously walked over. There was another set of old bones. But there was something different about them.

  They were red.

  “Have they been burned?”

  Father Vincent shook his head. “This dark coloring is spotty and flaky but deep. It is ochre. They’ve been stained.” Monty pointed to a few of the bones underneath that were normal in color, and were animal in origin.

  Father Vincent had read of occurrences all over the world of bones having been dyed red; there were theories that it was intentional. To achieve such a rich color, the flesh would have had to been cut off before staining. There was much thought and work behind its execution. It was clearly a symbolic act of some significance.

  But Father Vincent had never seen such a thing in Palestine. And what could explain that only the human bones were red, and not the animal fragments?

  The second tomb looked to be much more intact. Some workers were still working at the opening. Father Vincent asked them for a tool, ducked under a large outcrop of rock, and completed the clearing out of the entrance himself. Once the opening was clear, they handed him a lantern, and he stooped his way in.

  “There is someone here,” he said.

  The low room seemed empty and quiet. Father Vincent saw a small ledge that had been cut out of the wall. On its surface was a dark, smoky stain. He approached it slowly. There were some bowls along the cave wall that looked very much like the red-stained bones he had seen in the previous tomb. He turned back to the rock ledge and knew what it was. He approached cautiously, and began to see that the black dust on the rock’s surface was ash. Poking out of its thick flakes he saw a finger bone, a vertebra, and a rib. Closer inspection found even more of these skeletal pieces.

  Father Vincent paused in the middle of the cave. He took note of the things in the room, what was there and what was not, and began to imagine their purpose, their direction, in both the present and the deep past. He looked at the nimbus of ash. Father Vincent drew an invisible arrow with his eye back down to the floor. There, he saw part of a skull. Father Vincent looked back to the bier. Father Vincent guessed that the dead body was placed on its side, with his knees slightly bent, toward the cave’s interior. The head must have been directed toward the southwest.

  Father Vincent imagined the new body, lain out on the stone. Realizing he had missed something, he slowly scanned the room until he found another small opening in the rock. He saw a few flakes of pottery and the tiny bones that suggested they were offerings to the dead. Father Vincent pictured priests or relatives killing a lamb or a bird and placing it here in the tomb with the body. The image vanished. Father Vincent chastised himself; he knew only some things about this tomb, not all of them. He dropped down and ran his thin fingers through the almost sandy dirt. There, under the offering altar, he found a single, small tooth. Captain Parker, who was watching from the entry, stared at it, even after Father Vincent placed it with the offering.

  When they got to the third cave, Father Vincent could see that it had already been examined. Captain Parker led him in.

  “We went through this one, mostly by accident, but there’s something I left for you.”

  Father Vincent walked in. He immediately saw a small flash of orange from near the far wall, underneath what appeared to be a fallen chunk of rock. Father Vincent crept closer with his heart in his throat. He bent down slowly to carefully examine the space. He saw some shattered pieces inside. Nothing could survive time, not really, as he well knew. As Father Vincent turned his head to look into the opening, he gasped. There, standing almost as if they were in a museum, was a set of colorful pottery. With the exception of one of their number, they were in perfect form, having been protected by the fallen slab of rock. Father Vincent stared at them in disbelief. They had not moved for centuries.

  The quiet pantry numbered nearly twelve pieces. Some were yellow or orange; one was white with a decoration painted in burnt sienna. There was an amphora with handles, a great bowl, and more. One bowl proved to be the key to the whole set. Father Vincent inspected it with incisive care. Its color was dark orange but there was a shading to it that was quite artful. A black border curled around the bowl and its interior glaze was watertight. The curious part wasn’t the expertise by which it had been constructed, but that none of its attributes were local, in any time period. This was not a Palestinian bowl. But Father Vincent knew what it was.

  Egyptian.

  Father Vincent looked around—the whole room in fact had traces of the Egyptian to it. Who had been here? Whatever the answer was, the bowl itself dated the collection, and possibly the room.

  “This is quite old,” said Father Vincent, holding up the bowl to show Captain Parker. He said the next part slowly: “Over three thousand years before Christ.”

  The bowl was not from the City of David but from Jebus, the ancient city conquered by him. This was, Father Vincent knew, the most important find of the expedition, because it would tell much about a culture about which little was known. Father Vincent guessed that this wasn’t the grave of some lost Egyptian, but of a Jebus nobleman who had developed a liking for Egyptian art. This could have been the man’s home just as easily as it was his tomb. Although Father Vincent enjoyed such guesswork, all they had was the bowl. But it was enough; it told him that this place was not beholden to one era or people. He turned the bowl around in his hands. Here was a find that bled across centuries. Here was something that had lasted. This, thought Father Vincent, was the true form of the past.

  Thirty-Two

  Charles Warren

  WHITECHAPEL, SEPTEMBER 30, 1888

  TWENTY-TWO YEARS EARLIER

  Charles Warren was being bumped around his stagecoach like a bruised potato, but he was grateful because it was keeping him awake. The bumpy old stones of London were at least good for that, and it was welcome for once, at this hour and in these circumstances. It was before five in the morning and everything was quiet. He saw the sign for Goulston Street. The shops were closed, the carts empty, the long swimming house quiet and still. He hoped they had beat the press.

  “We’re here,” said the driver.

  The wheels creaked when Warren got out. He had thrown on his police coat. Providing light were the streetlamps and, somewhere behind them, he supposed, the indiscernible stars.

  “Show me,” he said.

  A policeman led the way toward a doorway about halfway in the middle of the block on the right. In the dark, it looked like one of the countless such openings along the streets of Whitechapel. The policeman showed him toward the door with an outstretched arm. There was a small crowd of police who parted for their captain.

  A white trellis dressed the brick vault of the door. Warren looked up at the stone arch; it was very gentle. Not bad work at all.

  “Captain Commissioner sir, over here.”

  These men, these boys, were jumpy. He would see the victims next; one was right around the corner. But he wanted to see this first.

  “Here it is, sir.”

  Several policemen stood about, staring at the door and at something that appeared to be on the ground. The sky seemed to be getting darker, but it was only because it had some color to it now, a thin vein of red. Warren knew they didn’t have long now. One of the cops held his club, rapping it into his other hand.

  “He’s not here, son,” said Warren.

  Another man showed him a piece of apron on the ground. It wa
s stained and looked ripped out of some larger piece. Warren held back a sigh.

  “What’s that? On the surface?” asked Warren.

  “Blood and shit, sir.”

  Warren looked up at the sky again. Dawn was barreling down. Blast the timing.

  “And the writing?”

  “Right here.”

  Warren approached the door and stood under its arch. He saw naught but shadow. One of the policemen trained his light on it. There, on the flat, thick doorjamb, were words in English. The writing was visible from the street.

  It was an inscription.

  Warren did not move. It was written in chalk, on brick, and was ethereal and dusty, but real. Warren, who had stared at inscriptions before, now stared at this one. It was still but seemed almost transitory. The light moved back and forth. The man’s hand who was holding the light was shaking.

  “Is it him, sir?”

  Warren squinted, as if confused. He murmured something to himself. He stared at the wall again. He took out his pencil and wrote something down in his notebook. Some of the men discussed what was to be done.

  After a few minutes, Warren turned and headed back to his buggy, only turning back once before he got in.

  “Wipe it clean,” he said.

  The policemen looked astonished.

  “But sir, the photographer is on his way.”

  “No,” Warren said. “Wipe it. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Warren looked around. He heard some activity down the street. A detective copied the inscription down again, then Warren watched as the words were wiped down, away from the stone, as if they never were.

  “Let’s go see them.” Warren sighed.

  Later that morning, Warren was back at his heavy desk. He held his head in his hands. These sights. These horrors. He had already been asked to submit a report on the strange writing, the graffito on Goulston Street, and why he had ordered it taken down. He called on Chief Superintendent Arnold to brief him on the details. Warren handed a sheet of paper to him. Arnold, young and with a close-cropped beard, had the same confused look. He handed it back.

  “Tom,” said Warren slowly, “we were right. If that writing had been left there, there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost.”

  Warren went back to his office and read what he had transcribed from the dark wall.

  The Juwes are

  The men That

  Will not

  Be Blamed

  For nothing

  One of their suspects, a few weeks back, was a local man named “Leather Apron” by the press. The Star was adamant that the man was Jewish, which had caused a great deal of tension in the neighborhood. When the man was finally found, along with his two alibis, the matter was dropped. But the feelings, as they always did, persisted. Warren knew that the message, regardless of who wrote it, would have acted as a match upon an already-sparking ember.

  But as Warren looked at the words, they began to twist in his mind. They were of a most curious construction. Almost like a cipher or a riddle.

  Whether “Juwes” was misspelled or not (someone said it might be Yiddish), its meaning was clear to anyone who read it or had it read to them. Maybe it was meant to be heard or performed.

  The strangeness was really in the meaning of it all. The Jews “will not be blamed” was simple. It was “for nothing” that complicated things. This could be read in two ways: that the Jews will not be blamed for nothing (meaning they will be blameless), or they will not be blamed for literally “nothing”—meaning they will be blamed for everything. The double negative of “no” and “nothing” could cancel each other out this way, resulting in “The Jews will be blamed for” the murders and everything else.

  “Blamed” in the context of where and when the writing was found could not be “for nothing.” It had to mean the murders. But “blamed” has nothing to do with actual guilt. Was the writer angry that the Jews had not been blamed? Or arguing that they should be? Or was there a much more sinister way to read that last word “nothing.” Such a terrible word, more like the absence or void of one, almost entirely stripped of meaning. Was he arguing that whoever is blamed—the Jews, or perhaps the man—was not worthy of blame because the crimes themselves, the murder of women, was “nothing”? Was their murder a matter so unimportant that the word itself was merely a placeholder?

  Five days earlier, the Central News Agency had received a letter. Like all of them, it was initially dismissed as the nonsense of persons who have nothing but nonsense to add to their nonsense lives. But after the writing on the wall was found, the letter took on new meaning. Warren read it again.

  Dear Boss

  I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits.

  How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck. Yours truly

  Jack the Ripper

  Dont mind me giving the trade name

  PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha

  The letter was written in a reddish, ochre-colored ink. And, in fact, part of Kate Eddowes’s ear was missing when they found her. Warren could see her face frozen in his mind’s eye. Small, open terrible triangles had been cut into her face. Like arrowheads.

  Warren began to wonder if the letter was true. If the graffito writer was the same person and also took part of her apron, it might have been done to make the same statement he was trying to make in the letter: he was mad that the Jews were being blamed, not because he feared for their well-being, but because he wanted the spotlight alone. Warren looked at his transcription again. He was a man of languages, of translation, and he may have seen something that everyone missed.

  The Juwes are

  The men That

  Will not

  Be Blamed

  For nothing

  As a good translator does, Warren searched his memory for a word to substitute, one that might make more sense. The most infuriating word of the whole sequence was “nothing.” But if the monster thought of these murders as trifles, as nothing, then there was another word, a saying, that perhaps might fit.

  The Juwes are

  The men That

  Will not

  Be Blamed

  For nothing

  Jack

  In the days that followed, Charles Warren, by all accounts public and private, seemed to become overwhelmed by the futility of his task. As letters were leaked, more arrived, one even marked “From Hell.” Warren, who was out of his depth, fell back on what he knew from Palestine: science. He tried using bloodhounds in a last-ditch effort to exert reason over a situation that had become pandemonium. Conspiracies began surfacing of Russian spies and secret men. In October, a psychic named Lees went to the police and offered his services, claiming he had a vision. He was turned away as a madman. When the bloodhound experiment failed, a chorus of public voices finally called for Warren’s dismissal. Once it became public that he ordered the sponging out of the writing, it became inevitable. Someone wrote to the papers, claiming that “The sooner this is done, the better for his peace of mind, as his present position must be infinitely worse than digging for lost cities in Palestine.” Warren resigned on November 8, 1888, his authority having been undermined on several fronts. The very next day, th
e fifth and final murder occurred, of Mary Jane Kelly, in her rented room.

  As Warren left London to return to the army, a place of order and rule, the murders had stopped. But the myths about them continued to grow well beyond England’s shores and even beyond reason. Warren was sent to Singapore, but the story even circulated there. It spread like plague. Some dared search for higher meaning, such as Hugh B. Chapman, a local London vicar at St. Luke’s, who wrote in “The Moral of the Murders” in October, 1888 (quoting Emerson), that “The remedy of all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love.” Others, such as the Brooklyn detective quoted below, were less certain:

  Mark my words, sir, we have not yet heard the last of this ultra morbid misogynist, this demon incarnate, whose unholy delight it is to dye his hands in the blood of his foully murdered victims. He has a nature which Moloch might have envied.

  The police are not to blame, my boy; they are doing the best they can, but all their efforts are as nothing when pitted against the superhuman cunning of this combination of Nero and Mephistopheles. He was born under a flat star, and such as he (there is not more than one in a century, thank goodness) have always turned out to be utterly and irretrievably bad.

  The press lit the world on fire with daily, almost hourly stories about the murders, drenched in speculation and fancy, born of true communal fear and the whiff of commercial opportunity. The victims—Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—labeled with effortless words like “whore” and “drunk,” were pushed into a mire of lies that would take more than a hundred years to begin to drain.

  The creature, the anonymous evil that everyone had a theory about, was more fictional. He became his own double negative, an empty function, a vessel instead of a person. Like the graffito, if all the stories about him were true, then none of them could be.

  PART FOUR

  RAIDERS

  Thirty-Three