Ripping Time

by Robert Asprin

  Humanity, he thought darkly—watching a giggling woman in her fifties plunking down a wad of twenties for a set of commemorative china plates with hand-painted portraits of victims, suspects, police investigators, and crime scenes—humanity is a sick species.

  “Is she honestly going to display those hideous things in her house?”

  Kit glanced around at the sound of a familiar voice at his elbow. Ann Vinh Mulhaney was gazing in disgust at the woman buying the plates.

  “Hello, Ann. And I think the answer’s yes. I’m betting she’ll not only display them, she’ll put them right out in the middle of her china hutch.”

  Ann gave a mock shudder. “God, Ripperoons . . . You wouldn’t believe the last class of them I had to cope with.” She glanced up at Kit, who gave her a sardonic smile. Kit had seen it all—and then some. “On second thought, you probably would believe it. Have you seen Sven yet? He came up before I did.”

  “No, I just got here. Robert said something about finding a spot to watch Primary go and said he wanted my opinion on something.”

  “Really?” Ann’s eyes glinted with sudden interest. “That something wouldn’t have anything to do with Peg Ames, would it?”

  Kit blinked. “Good God. Have I missed something?”

  Ann laughed, pulling loose the elastic band holding her long dark hair, and shrugged the gleaming tresses over one shoulder. She’d clearly just come from class, since she still wore a twin-holster rig with a beautiful pair of Royal Irish Constabulary Webley revolvers. Unlike the big military Webleys, which came open on a top-break hinge for reloading and were massive in size, the little RIC Webley was a solid-frame double-action that loaded like the American single-action Army revolver through a gate in the side, and came in a short-barrelled, concealable version popular with many time tourists heading to London. At .442 caliber, they packed a decent punch and were easier to hide than the much larger standard Webleys. Kit had shot them several times during his down-time escapades—and had cut his finger more than once on the second trigger, a needle-type spur projecting down behind the main trigger.

  As she pocketed her hair band, Ann glanced side-long at Kit. “You really have been moping with Margo gone, haven’t you? Honestly, Kit, they’ve been thick as mosquitoes in a swamp for days. Rumor has it,” and she winked, “that Peg had a line on a Greek bronze that was going up for auction in London and Robert was just about nuts, trying to find somebody to snitch it quietly for him the night the auction warehouse goes up in smoke. Or rather, went up in smoke. It burned the night of Polly Nichols’ murder, in a Shadwell dry-dock fire.”

  Kit grinned as he escorted Ann through the crowds. Robert Li was engaged in an ongoing, passionate love affair with any and all Greek bronzes. “I hope he gets it. Peg Ames will make him the happiest man in La-La Land if he can lay hands on another one for his collection.”

  The IFARTS agent and resident antiquarian had personally rescued from destruction a collection of ancient bronzes that most up-time museum directors would’ve gnashed their teeth over, had they known about them. Rescuing artwork from destruction was perfectly legal, of course, and constituted one of the major exceptions to the first law of time travel. Collectors who salvaged such art could even sell it on the open market, if they were willing to pay the astronomical taxes levied by the Bureau of Access Time Functions. Many an antiquarian and art dealer made a good living doing just that.

  But Robert Li would sooner have sold his own teeth than part with an original Greek bronze, even one acquired through perfectly legitimate means. Of course, snitching one from a down-time auction warehouse before it burned did not qualify as a “legitimate” method of acquisition. To rescue a doomed piece of art, one had to rescue it during the very disaster destined to destroy it. Li was a very honest and honorable man. But when it came to any man’s abiding passion, honesty occasionally went straight out the nearest available window. Certainly, many another antiquarian had tried smuggling out artwork that was not destined for down-time destruction. Hence the existence of the International Federation for Art Temporally Stolen, which tried to rescue such purloined work and return it to its proper time and place of origin. Robert Li was the station’s designated IFARTS agent, a very good one. But if he had a line on a Greek bronze that was scheduled to be destroyed by some method it couldn’t easily be rescued from, or one that had just disappeared mysteriously, he wouldn’t be above trying to acquire it for his personal collection, whatever the means.

  “Wonder which bronze?” Kit mused as they threaded their way toward Primary.

  “Proserpina, actually,” Robert Li’s voice said from behind him.

  Kit turned, startled, then grinned. “Proserpina, huh?”

  “Yeah, beautiful little thing, about three feet high. Holding a pomegranate.”

  “Is that what you wanted to ask me about?”

  The antiquities dealer chuckled and fell into step beside them. “Actually, no.” He held up a cloth sack. “I wondered if you might know more about these than I do. A customer came into the shop, asked me to verify whether or not they were genuine or reproduction. He’d bought ‘em from a Templar who came through with a suitcase full of ‘em and is selling them down in Little Agora to anyone who’ll pony up the bucks.”

  Curious, Kit opened the sack and found a pair of late twentieth-century, Desert Storm-era Israeli gas masks, capable of filtering out a variety of chemical and nerve agents.

  “Somebody,” Kit muttered, “has a sick sense of humor.”

  “Or maybe just a psychic premonition,” Ann put in, eyeing the masks curiously. “It’s illegal to discharge chemical agents inside a time terminal, but nothing would surprise me around here, these days.”

  As Kit studied the gas masks, looking for telltale signs of recent manufacture, he could hear, in the distance, the sound of live music and chanting. Startled, Kit glanced up at the chronometers. “What’s going on, over toward Urbs Romae?”

  “Oh, that’s the Festival of Mars,” Ann answered, just as Kit located the section of the overhead chronometers reserved for displaying the religious festivals scheduled in the station’s timeline.

  Kit smacked his forehead, belatedly recalling his promise to Ianira that he’d participate in the festival. “Damn! I was supposed to be there!”

  “All the down-timers on station are participating,” Robert said with a curious glance at Kit.

  Ann’s voice wobbled a little as she added, “Ianira was supposed to officiate, you know. They’re holding the festival anyway. The way I hear it, they plan on asking the gods of war to strike down whoever’s responsible for kidnapping Ianira and her family.”

  A chill touched Kit’s spine. “With all the crazies we’ve got on station, that could get ugly, fast.” Before he’d even finished voicing the thought, shouts and the unmistakable sounds of a scuffle broke out close by. Startled tourists in front of them scrambled in every direction. A corridor of uninhabited space opened up. Two angry groups abruptly faced one another down. Kit recognized trouble when he saw it—and this was Trouble.

  Capital “T” that rhymed with “C” and that stood for Crazies.

  Ann gasped. A group of women in black uniforms and honest-to-God jackboots formed an impenetrable wall along one flank, blocking any escape in that direction. Angels of Grace Militia . . . And opposing the Angels ranged a line of burly construction workers, the very same construction workers who’d been involved in the last station riot.

  “Unchaste whores!”

  “Medieval monsters!”

  “Feminazis!”

  “Get out of our station, bitches!”

  “You’re not my goddamned brothers!”

  “Go back to the desert and beat up your own women, you rag-headed bastards! Leave ours alone!”

  Kit had just enough time to say, “Oh, my God . . .”

  Then the riot exploded around them.

  * * *

  To Margo’s relief, they found the Working Lads’ Institute without f
urther incident. When the doors were finally opened for the inquest into Polly Nichols’ brutal demise, the Ripper scholars and up-time reporters in her charge surged inside with the rest of the crowd. The room was so jam-packed with human bodies, not even a church mouse could have forced its way into the meeting hall. The coroner was a dandified and stylish man named Wynne Edwin Baxter, who arrived with typical flair, straight from a tour of Scandinavia, dressed to the nines in black-and-white checked trousers, a fancy white waistcoat, and a blood-red scarf. Baxter presided over the inquest with a theatrical mien, asking the police surgeon, Dr. Llewellyn, to report on his findings. The Welsh doctor, who had been dragged from his Whitechapel surgery to examine the remains at the police mortuary, cleared his throat with a nervous glance at the crowded hall, where reporters hung expectantly on every word spoken.

  “Yes. Well. Five teeth were missing from the victim’s jaw and I found a slight, ah, laceration on the tongue. A bruise ran along the lower part of the lady’s jaw, down the right side of her face. This might have been caused by a fist striking her face or, ah, perhaps a thumb digging into the face. I found another bruise, circular in nature, on the left side of her face, perhaps caused by fingers pressing into her skin. On the left side of her neck, about an inch below the jaw, there was an, ah, incision.” The surgeon paused and cleared his throat, a trifle pale. “An, ah, an incision, yes, below the jaw, about four inches in length, which ran from a point immediately below the ear. Another incision on this same side was, ah, circular in design, severing tissues right down to the vertebrae.”

  A concerted gasp rose from the eager spectators. Reporters scribbled furiously with pencils, those being far more practical for field work than the cumbersome dip pens which required an inkwell to resupply them every few lines.

  Dr. Llewellyn cleared his throat. “The large vessels of the neck, both sides, were all severed by this incision, at a length of eight inches. These cuts most certainly were inflicted by a large knife, a long-bladed weapon, moderately sharp. It was used with considerable violence . . .” The doctor shuddered slightly. “Yes. Well. Ah, there was no blood on the breast, either her own or the clothes, and I found no further injuries until I reached the lower portion of the poor lady’s abdomen.” A shocked buzz ran through the room. Victorian gentlemen did not speak about ladies’ abdomens, not in public places, not anywhere else, for that matter. Dr. Llewellyn shifted uncomfortably. “Some two to three inches from the left side of the belly, I discovered a jagged wound, very deep, the tissues of the abdomen completely cut through. Several other, ah, incisions ran across the abdomen as well, and three or four more which ran vertically down the right side. These were inflicted, as I said, by a knife used violently and thrust downward. The injuries were from left to right and may possibly have been done by an, ah, left-handed person, yes, and all were without doubt committed with the same instrument.”

  A reporter near the front of the packed room shouted, “Dr. Llewellyn! Then you believe the killer must have stood in front of his victim, held her by the jaw with his right hand, struck with the knife in his left?”

  “Ah, yes, that would seem to be indicated.”

  Having watched the brutal attack in Buck’s Row via video camera, Margo knew that was wrong. James Maybrick had strangled his victim, then shoved her to the ground and ripped her open with the knife gripped in his right hand. Criminologists had long suspected that would be the case, just from the coroners’ descriptions of wound placement and surviving crime scene and mortuary photos. But in London of 1888, the entire science of forensics was in its infancy and criminal psychology hadn’t even been invented yet, never mind profiling of serial killers.

  “Dr. Llewellyn . . .”

  The inquest erupted into a fury of shouted questions and demands for further information, witness names, descriptions, anything. It came out that a coffee-stall keeper named John Morgan had actually seen Polly Nichols shortly before her death, a mere three minutes’ walk from Buck’s Row where she’d died. Morgan said, “She were in the company of a man she called Jim, sir.”

  Whether or not this “Jim” had been James Maybrick, Margo didn’t know and neither did anybody else, since they hadn’t rigged a camera at Morgan’s coffee stall. But the description Morgan gave didn’t match Maybrick’s features, so it might well have been another “Jim” who’d bought what poor Polly had been selling, as well as her final cup of bitter, early-morning coffee. If, in fact, Morgan wasn’t making up the whole story, just to gain the momentary glory of police and reporters fawning over him for details.

  Margo sighed. People don’t change much, do they?

  Once the inquest meeting broke up, Margo and Doug Tanglewood parted company. Tanglewood and the reporters, accompanied by Pavel Kostenka and Conroy Melvyn, set out in pursuit of the mysterious doctor they’d captured on video working with James Maybrick. Margo and her remaining charge, Shahdi Feroz, plunged into the shadowy world inhabited by London’s twelve-hundred prostitutes.

  “I want to walk the entire murder area,” Shahdi said quietly as they set out alone. Most of this lay in the heart of Whitechapel, straying only once into the district of London known as The City. Margo glanced at the older woman, curious.

  “Why the whole area now? We’ll be rigging surveillance on each site.”

  Shahdi Feroz gave Margo a wan smile. “It will be important to my work to get a feel for the spatial relationships, the geography of the killing zone. What stands where, how the pattern of traffic flows through or past the murder sites. Where Maybrick and his unknown accomplice might meet their victims. Where the prostitutes troll for their customers.”

  When Margo gave her a puzzled stare, she said, “I want to learn as much as I can about the world the prostitutes live in. To me, that is the important question, the conditions and geography of their social setting, how they lived and worked as well as where and why they died. This is more important than the forensics of the evidence. The basic forensics were known then; what is not known is how these women were treated by the police sent undercover to protect them, or how these women coped with the terror and the stress of having to continue working with such a monstrous killer loose among them. We have studied such things in the modern world, of course; but never in Victorian England. The social rules were so very different, here, where even the chair legs are covered with draperies and referred to as limbs, even by women who sell their bodies for money. It is this world I need to understand. I have worked in middle class London and in areas of wealth, but never in the East End.”

  Margo nodded. That made sense. “All right. Buck’s Row, we’ve seen already. You want to do the murder sites in numerical order, by the pattern of the actual attacks? Or take them as we come to them, geographically? And what about the murder sites on the question list? The ones we’re not sure whether they were Jack’s or not? Like the Whitehall torso,” she added with a shudder. The armless, legless, headless woman’s body, hacked to pieces and left in the cellar of the partially constructed New Scotland Yard building on Whitehall, would be discovered in October, during the month-long lull between confirmed Ripper strikes.

  “Yes,” Shahdi Feroz said slowly, narrowing her eyes slightly as she considered the question. “With two men working in tandem, it would be good, I think, to check all the murder sites, not just the five traditionally ascribed to the Ripper. And I believe we should take the sites in order of the murders, as well. We will follow the killer’s movements through the territory he staked out for himself. Perhaps we might come to understand more of his mind, doing this, as well as how he might have met his victims. Or rather, how they met their victims, since there are two of them working together.” Her smile was rueful. “I did not expect to have the chance to study such a dynamic in this particular case. It complicates matters immensely.”

  Even Margo, with no training in psychology or criminal social dynamics, could understand that. “Okay, next stop, Hanbury Street.” Margo intended to get a good look at the yard behind
number twenty-nine Hanbury. Seven days from now, she’d be slipping into that yard under cover of darkness, to set up the Ripper Watch team’s surveillance equipment.

  Number twenty-nine Hanbury proved to be a broken-down tenement in sooty brick. It housed seventeen souls, several of whom were employed in a nearby cigar factory. It was a working-man’s tenement, not a doss house where the homeless flopped for the night. Two doors led in from the street. One took residents into the house proper and another led directly to the yard behind the squat brick structure. Margo and Shahdi Feroz chose this second door, opening it with a creaking groan of rusting hinges. The noise startled Margo.

  And brought instant attention from an older woman who leaned out a second-story window. “Where d’you think you’re going, eh?” the irate resident shouted down. “I know your kind, missies! How many times I got to tell your kind o’ girls, keep out me yard! Don’t want nuffink to do wiv the likes o’ you round me very own ‘ouse! Go on wiv you, now, get on!”

  Caught red-handed trying to sneak into the yard, Margo did the only thing she could do, the one thing any East End hussy would’ve been expected to do. She let the door close with a bang and shouted back up, “It’s me gormless father I’m after, nuffink else! Lager lout’s said ‘e ‘ad a job, workin’ down to Lime’ouse docks, an’ where do I see ‘im, but coming out the Blue Boy public ‘ouse, ‘at’s where! Followed ‘im I did, wiv me ma, ‘ere. Sore ‘im climb over the fence into this ‘ere yard. You seen ‘im, lady? You do, an’ you shout for a bottle an’ stopper, y’hear?”

  “Don’t you go tellin’ an old woman any of your bloody Jackanories! Off wiv you, or I’ll call for that copper me own self!”

  “Ah, come on, ma,” Margo said loudly to Shahdi Feroz, taking her arm, “senile owd git ain’t no use. We’ll catch ‘im, ‘e gots to come ‘ome sometime, ain’t ‘e?”