Riot Most Uncouth

by Daniel Friedman

  But here is the truth: On the third of May in 1810, I visited the place where Hero’s tower stood, and I looked into the treacherous strait between the Aegean and the Propontis. It was mostly white-capped churn slamming against jagged rocks, and from my perspective, there was only one rational thing to do. I stripped my clothing off, and I walked into the water.

  In my youthful imaginings, Leander was propelled by his ardor the way a strong headwind and a full sail drive a boat. I pictured him skimming across the waves like a lusty porpoise; his engorged ventral appendage slicing through the surf, and the pale-green sea froth lapping at his swollen purple bollocks.

  The actual experience of swimming the Hellespont is somewhat different. The waters are swift and treacherous and black, even when the sun is high. The surface current and the undertow run in opposite directions, so if you push too deep trying to cut through the ten-foot swells, the undercurrent will drag you into the depths, and hold you there, and squeeze the breath from your lungs. The distance from the European side to the Asiatic is only about a mile, straight across, but the current is so powerful that I traveled a distance of between three and four miles on a diagonal to make it from one shore to the other. If you aren’t a very strong swimmer, the Hellespont is an easy place to die. Trying to swim across it is an insane thing to do; nobody with any sense of prudence or moderation would ever even attempt it. My aim was to prove such a feat was possible, a thesis that was subject to some doubt until I accomplished it.

  It took me an hour and ten minutes to make the crossing. Though the weather was warm, the fast-moving water was frigid, and I lost feeling in my extremities halfway through the swim, when I was quite far from either shore. Finishing the journey sapped me of my strength, and, unlike Leander, when I dragged myself onto the beach, I was in no condition to express any amorous urges. I just sprawled on the gray sand and vomited seawater for a while, and I was quite ill for several weeks afterward.

  When I was a child, my mother told me the story of Leander and Hero, but she didn’t tell me all of it. It wasn’t until I got to Harrow that I learned how it ended; how all the legendary love stories end.

  Leander made his swim each night throughout the summer, but when the seasons changed, the waters grew more violent and unendurably cold. I swam the strait in the daytime, and I could clearly see my destination on the European shore. Leander swam at night, when the sunless sky melted into the dark water. With the waves tossing him upward and the current sucking him down, he had only Hero’s guttering lantern to show him which way was up, and which way to swim. When the raging winds blew her light out, he lost the shore, lost his equilibrium. He lost hope. And the sea swallowed him.

  Hero saw his drowned body wash up on the beach, and full of grief, she threw herself from her window and smashed against the rocks.

  Mad Jack said that death is only for fools, and maybe it’s foolish to die for love like Leander and Hero. But maybe it’s also foolish not to dive into black waters if there’s a perfect girl waiting on the other side. Maybe it’s better to die for her than to live without her.

  And maybe it’s foolish not to dive into black waters if there’s a chance to explore the sparkling shore on the other side of them. Maybe it’s foolish not to run and swim as far as one can, to push oneself to the limits of one’s physical capabilities, to make a grasp for the horizon.

  Vampires must shun the light and cower in their crypts. Where’s the fun in that? What good is eternity if you can’t spend it dashing after the rising sun? I’d rather my candle burn briefly but brightly than dwell eternally in darkness.

  Chapter 35

  Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil.

  —Lord Byron, “Fragment of a Novel”

  I must have drifted to sleep on the grass, for when Knifing’s singsong greeting roused me, the stars had changed.

  “My congratulations, Lord Byron!” the investigator shouted at me across the heath as he approached.

  I lifted myself into a sitting position, which caused me no small amount of pain. “For what?”

  “For your deliverance,” he said. “For your vindication. For your exoneration.”

  I squinted to see the thin, dark form approaching from the highway, some two hundred yards distant. Knifing had come in a black carriage pulled by black horses, and driven by a rather severe-looking gentleman clad, predictably, in black. I thought this was a fitting conveyance for the wraithlike investigator, because it looked like a hearse. Then I realized it actually was a hearse; Knifing had come out with the undertaker to collect the remains of Fielding Dingle and his driver. I was unhappy about having to ride back to town in the same vehicle as those ripening corpses, but it was better than riding in the prison-carriage, so I decided not to complain.

  Instead, I asked: “Am I no longer suspected of murder?”

  Knifing jauntily adjusted his bush hat. “My God, no. That preposterous proposition perished with its ponderous proponent.”

  I was nursing a rattled skull and a belly full of rotgut whisky, so it took some calculation on my part to figure out that he was talking about Dingle. Knifing seemed bizarrely chipper for a man who had been summoned from bed in the dark hours of the morning to examine the corpse of a colleague who’d been shot in the face and crushed beneath a stagecoach.

  “You said you’d march me to the gallows, regardless of my guilt or innocence, to assuage your clients’ uncertainty.”

  The investigator let out a peal of his singular, unpleasant laughter, and I realized why the carriage-horse’s death-wail had sounded so familiar. “That’s certainly something I’d say, but it’s not something I’d do. I’ve got standards, you see, and you’ve got lawyers. Such threats were only a ploy; a stratagem designed to intimidate you into disclosing facts, and to scare you away from my crime scenes. Arresting you is something only Dingle would be fool enough to do, and in fact, it’s something Dingle did, before Dingle died.” The alliteration set him off into his disconcerting giggles again.

  Though it caused some pain in my sore neck, I turned my head to see how Angus was reacting to his hero’s strange behavior. The constable’s eyes were bulging and his mouth hung slightly open. I wouldn’t describe his expression as one of astonishment, however; Angus just always looked like that. “Are you drunk, Mr. Knifing?” I asked.

  “That’s quite a thing for you to ask me,” Knifing said, and then he made his horse-scream noise, because he was so amused with himself.

  “Have you seen the corpses, sir?” Angus asked.

  “What was left of them,” said Knifing, who had closed the distance between the road and the wreck of the prison-coach, and was looming unpleasantly over me as I lay sprawled in the dirt. “Quite a mess it was. I was greatly entertained to watch Bartholomew scraping Mr. Dingle off the road.” He pointed with his thumb back at the hunched figure on top of the corpse-wagon.

  “That’s a queer thing to derive pleasure from,” I said.

  “I’ll defer on that question to your experience, Lord Byron. You’re our reigning authority on the subject of queer pleasures.” He poked me in my bruised ribs with the end of his umbrella. “I will say that I like to see a bad man get what he deserves. That’s part of why I do this job.”

  Angus scratched his jowls. “If you think Dingle’s death establishes Byron’s innocence, does that mean that you believe the Cambridge killer shot Dingle?”

  “It’s not likely that there are two killers about, is it?” Knifing asked.

  “I don’t suppose I know whether that’s likely or not,” Angus said. “Why would the killer rescue Byron from Dingle?”

  “I don’t think he meant for me to be rescued,” I said. “How was he able to shoot them both? I’ve never met a man who could hit a fast-moving target at any great range with a musket.”

  “He didn’t use a musket,” Knifing said. “He used a rifle.”

  “I’ve heard of those,” Angus said with a touch of awe. “Never see
n one.”

  “They’re supposed to be hard to load,” I said.

  I must confess I’d been as confused by the killer’s uncanny marksmanship as Angus was, but I probably should not have been. Forgetting that the alley gate at the Modest Proposal was open at night was an egregious observational failure, but my inability to recognize a rifle shot was nearly as embarrassing.

  I was quite familiar with the Baker infantry rifle because I’d tried on several occasions to purchase one. In every case, the seller had either refused to part with his weapon or had demanded an exorbitant price. It was a remarkable toy and a difficult one to obtain, and so I lusted after it with a fervor that was, in other circumstances, reserved exclusively for beautiful women.

  Unlike the wide, smooth barrel of a musket, a rifle’s was narrow and grooved inside; when the gun fired, the grooved track caused the bullet to come out spinning, which allowed it to maintain a straight trajectory over a great distance. Because the rifle bullet fit so tightly into this special barrel, it took more than twice as long to load as a standard-issue Brown Bess musket.

  Muskets were an excellent weapon for infantry who marched in formations, since, though the accuracy of any single shot was poor, a volley from an infantry line could cut through an opposing force. But even a skilled soldier armed with a musket would miss a target at fifty paces twice as often as he’d hit it. A good rifleman could put a chunk of lead through a man’s eyeball at two hundred yards.

  Since the Baker took so long to reload, it was an unsuitable weapon for infantry; a slower-firing weapon couldn’t lay down the devastating hailstorm of bullets that was the specialization of the British Army. So, riflemen fought as skirmishers, either running out ahead of the advancing line to pick off targets before the main forces engaged each other or taking positions near the battlefield to shoot officers from the side or the rear.

  Two years after the events in Cambridge, the Baker rifle would become famous when a sharpshooter named Thomas Plunket used one to kill a French general from a distance of six hundred yards. Then he reloaded and killed a second officer at the same range, just to prove he could do it twice. The killing of Fielding Dingle never garnered the same level of publicity, but it required similar prowess; though the range was likely closer, the targets were moving.

  Knifing and Angus had both been soldiers, so either of them could conceivably have the expertise to make such a shot, but it was unlikely that either of them did. Angus’s service predated the use of rifles by British forces by a number of years, so it seemed unlikely he’d been trained to use one. Also, he’d needed two tries to kill a fallen horse at point-blank range with his musket.

  Knifing probably could have obtained a rifle without much difficulty, but his infantry days were long past and he had no professional reason to have made the effort required to become a master marksman with a new kind of weapon. And he only had one eye. Even with a tool as precise as the Baker rifle, it’s difficult to shoot with accuracy from great range when one lacks the ability to perceive depth. It seemed a folly, however, to underestimate Archibald Knifing. He was diligent and blessed with a monstrous intellect. Perhaps with skill and practice, even a one-eyed man could calculate distance and hit his target. And if there was a potential hobby he might take up that would make him one of the deadliest men in the world, it seemed like the sort of project Knifing might find appealing.

  “There cannot be more than a few men in Cambridge with access to a Baker rifle and the skill to shoot two men off a moving carriage from great range,” I said. “The killer has finally made a fatal error. We need only identify those men who are likely to possess the rifles, and we can begin to interrogate them.”

  Angus looked shocked for a moment, and then he got quite excited. “I’ll begin canvassing at once.”

  He started to climb to his feet, but Knifing settled him with a wave of his gnarled hand. “That’s a better thought than any you’ve had with regard to hunting this killer. Better than anything that passed through the head of Fielding Dingle in the entirety of his career, excepting the bullet that killed him, which was quite impressive. But it’s a futile pursuit.”

  I clenched my fists. “Why?”

  “This perpetrator isn’t from Cambridge.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” Angus asked.

  Knifing braced his weight on his umbrella and carefully sat on the grass. He reached into his snug jacket and produced a slim silver flask. This one was polished and sleek in the same way that the constable’s was battered and scuffed, but both were welcome in my company, so long as they were full of whisky.

  He took a drink from it, and passed it to Angus.

  “Why would a Cambridge resident with no criminal history decide one day to start butchering professors in alleyways, or climbing into high windows to murder women? I don’t think one would. And how would such a person become an expert rifle marksman? I don’t think one could. So, rather than narrowing the focus of our inquiry, the use of the Baker rifle eliminates any chance of tracing the crimes back to any Cambridge resident with a cognizable motive.”

  “But someone has killed these people, and the perpetrator must be caught,” I said.

  “What good will that do? Do you think the revelation of the killer’s identity will explain anything? Do you think whatever you might discover will help you to cope with the fact that a slew of people died horribly at his whim? He’ll be a stupid person, who did these things for stupid reasons.”

  “How can you know that, if you don’t know who has committed the killings?”

  “But I do know who has done them, at least in general terms,” Knifing said. “And I know that nothing we can do here is likely to further our attempts to identify him, specifically.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  Knifing took his flask back and drank again. “The hostility with Napoleon has gone on for too long. Some able-bodied soldiers are mentally ill-suited for combat. War breaks men’s minds, and long wars test the limits of even the steadfast. The killer is probably a former soldier turned lunatic vagrant, an unreasoning monster trained to kill by the military.”

  “After all this, you think the murders are just the work of some stranger, with no motivation behind them?” I said.

  “What do you expect?” Knifing replied. “Do you want to finish this with some confrontation or catharsis? Do you want to learn that this violence was motivated by some comprehensible rationale? I’ve solved a lot of mysterious crimes, Lord Byron, and I shall save you the suspense. Mystery seduces, but solutions disappoint. The perpetrator of every crime inevitably turns out to be somebody unspeakably banal. He’ll be dumber than you’d expect him to be, given the great deductive and observational effort required to identify him, for brutality is the special gift of stupid men. And he’ll be crazy and delusional. Murderers are great monsters in the imagination, but the reality of them would be pathetic if it weren’t so loathsome.”

  “So what are we to do?” Angus asked.

  Knifing shrugged. “I will stay here until the killings cease, on the slim and unlikely hope that the killer’s identity will be revealed by some lucky happenstance. Maybe when our quarry drains the next victim, he’ll leave a trail of bloody drippings that will lead me back to his lair. I am not optimistic, however.”

  “You said you’d deliver certainty to your clients, even if you had to manufacture false evidence against an innocent,” I said. Though he always sounded convincing when he spoke, Knifing seemed to constantly contradict his earlier statements. Every time I saw him, he was a different person, and it had begun to annoy me. He didn’t even seem to be drunk anymore.

  “My investigation won’t end when I leave Cambridge. When I return to London, I’ll press my military contacts to provide me with the discharge records for any trained rifle marksmen the army deemed mentally unfit for combat. Hopefully, when the killings begin again someplace else, I’ll have better information.”

  Angus reached his hand out, a
nd Knifing gave him back the flask. “What about us?”

  Knifing took the flask back and slipped it back into his jacket. Then he rose to his feet, wincing slightly as his knees bent. “Your service has been appreciated, Angus, but I’ve no further need of it. You may return to your ordinary occupation. Lord Byron, you have sustained more than enough injury and humiliation in your pursuit of this killer, and it’s time for you to stop. You should arrange immediate transport to your home at Newstead.”

  I climbed to my feet so he couldn’t look down at me. The process of standing was painful, but not unbearably so. I rolled my shoulders and flexed my fingers, and found their condition much improved. “That is unacceptable, Mr. Knifing. These killings are not arbitrary. They are related, in some way, to me. I must find out how and why.”

  “I can promise you the perpetrator is not your dead father, nor are the killings the work of some mythical creature,” Knifing said. If his tone had been compassionate a moment before, it wasn’t any longer. Now he was cold and contemptuous again. The man changed his skin like a tropical lizard.

  “Jerome Tower’s corpse was posed at his dining table, a piece of furniture identical to the one I own,” I said.

  “A table crafted by Angus, who sees no need to perceive himself as the fulcrum of recent events,” Knifing countered. He’d always seemed to regard the volunteer constable with a sort of indifference, so I was surprised he’d taken the time to learn about Angus’s trade.

  “You said the tableau might be a message to me.”

  He shrugged. “I was only having a joke at your expense. Angus tells me there are at least two dozen similar tables in Cambridge. I’ve been quite diligent in running down every possible clue. Since I haven’t found anything yet, I feel certain there’s nothing to find.”

  “I sell lots of nice furniture to the dons and fellows, and to the better-off students,” Angus said. “Buying a table from me is a good deal cheaper than hauling one in from London.”