by Will Thomas
“He needed to save face. He couldn’t be completely trounced in front of his compatriots. Besides, we are guests here. If we humiliated him in public, sympathy would lean in his favor. One good punch on my chin did me no harm, it restored his dignity, and it turned the favor in our direction.”
“But we don’t even know the man. Why should I care whether or not he feels better?”
“You shouldn’t and I don’t. However, it matters how the other inspectors feel about our conduct. We are being judged every day. We wouldn’t want to undo the good you’ve done supplying tea and biscuits all around, would we?”
“I suppose not.”
“Good.”
“But you could have trounced him.”
“Easily. Did you see how slow that punch was?”
“You could have had a pipeful while you waited.”
Barker chuckled, then winced at the cut on his lip. “Droll. Very droll.”
Just then, Abberline rushed in, looking concerned.
“What happened?” he asked.
“A minor altercation,” the Guv said.
“What was the cause?”
“Sir Henry barred him from the palace, I assume. The inspector was of the opinion that it was my doing.”
“And was it?”
“No. I’m only here temporarily. I have no interest in slicing a piece of the pie for myself.”
“Someone said you flipped him about with some of your Asian mumbo jumbo, as if he was a rag doll.”
“It was less violent than hitting him. If I’d hit him, he’d still be unconscious.”
“You recall what Warren said about staying out of trouble?” Abberline asked.
“That was me staying out of trouble. He’s not being carted out in a hand litter, bound for Charing Cross Hospital.”
“I’ll try to keep the commissioner mollified,” the detective chief inspector said.
“Thank you, Frederick,” Barker said, taking the liberty of using his first name.
“How is the case coming on?”
“We are still hunting leads from six in the morning until midnight, isn’t that so, lad?”
“Yes, sir,” I responded.
“Are you making any progress?”
“I had PC Llewelyn type up a full report to the commissioner this morning. I’m sure he will make it available soon.”
“Hmmm,” Abberline said. “I hear you twirled Littlechild around like a baton. Sorry I missed that.”
“If you’ll call him in for a demonstration, I’ll show you how I did it.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Abberline said dryly. “How did things go at the palace yesterday?”
“There were several issues over which Sir Henry was concerned. I convinced him we were taking matters in hand.”
“And are we?”
“We are. Aren’t we, lad?”
“Of course,” I responded.
“There, you see.”
“Very well.”
Abberline left the room.
I turned to my employer. “About that, sir. We are, aren’t we?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
We were walking about the docklands that evening when Barker put a foot on top of a low piling and looked out upon the black waters of one of the basins.
“Thomas,” he said, “I am pulling you from your duties at Scotland Yard. Those menial tasks are a waste of your time.”
I agreed with him, but wasn’t going to admit it.
“What will you have me do instead, sir?”
“I want you to take the position at the Goulston Street mantle factory. Do you recall the notice in the window? We passed it a half hour ago and it is still there.”
“Does that mean you think Aaron Kosminski is the Whitechapel Killer?”
“I cannot say for certain, but he is like a persistent itch; an irritant. If we can dismiss him, we can get on with our work.”
“I can’t guarantee that my skills are good enough to get the position, but it is possible the owner has grown a little desperate.”
“Aye, well, he is not the only one.”
“This is a devil of a case,” I said.
“I suspect whatever mental malady the Whitechapel Killer suffers from is growing steadily worse.”
“I have heard of tumors in the brain, sir, which cause a change in behavior.”
“At some point, he shall lose his grip on reality and draw attention to himself. We must be placed at the best advantage when that occurs.”
Somehow, I had expected that being hired would be more difficult. I had prepared answers to possible questions, explanations for my current circumstances, and was prepared to argue, if necessary, because I wanted to succeed for Barker’s sake. All that working into the night had been for naught. He barely glanced at my letters of recommendation. Instead, he had given me a little test that spoke volumes.
“Sew me a buttonhole,” Wolfe Kosminski said. Apparently, he was the older brother of Aaron.
A letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury would have meant nothing if I hadn’t been able to do it. I couldn’t wait to tell Barker I had succeeded on the strength of my sewing skills.
“Not bad. This is where we do our piecing,” he said, pointing to some tables where men were rolling out fabric and pinning paper patterns to them. I noticed there were no women working there. I would have thought the seamstresses would outnumber the seamsters, but such was not the case.
“No women work here?” I asked.
“I don’t hire women,” Wolfe Kosminski said. “I don’t much like mixing the sexes on the factory floor. It only leads to unwanted drama and distraction, which causes injury. I have seen it happen before.”
He came to a narrow stairway in a corner and called out to the room above.
“There is only one woman here, my wife, Sarah,” he explained. “She cares for our child upstairs. Little Herschel is the first Kosminski born in England. I hope my brothers will marry someday and raise more boys so that our name can prosper here.”
Kosminski’s wife came down the stair then, holding the baby over her shoulder. She seemed rather shy and concerned with her own duties.
“This is Thomas,” he said, referring to me. “I have just hired him. I am showing him around.”
“You have a handsome baby, Mrs. Kosminski,” I told her.
“Danke,” she said, carrying her baby back upstairs.
“I speak French, and a very little German,” I said. “What language do your shop workers speak?”
“Mostly Yiddish and German. But we all need to learn English, so I hope you can help them to speak and understand it.”
“Of course. What shall my hours be?”
“Seven to seven. We lock up promptly at eight.”
I suddenly saw the flaw in Barker’s plan. I would work twelve hours. There would be no more time to make tea or study files at Scotland Yard, and I would probably be too exhausted to march all over Whitechapel with Barker.
“We close at five on Friday, of course, and are closed on Saturday.”
“And Sunday?” I asked.
“Seven to seven, like any other day.”
“Of course.”
“There is one more part of the position I must explain to you before you begin. Let me take you to the back of the shop and I’ll explain as we go.”
We began to pass along the tables and I nodded to the workers sewing there who were naturally curious about a new employee. They seemed an unhappy lot, some past their working prime, others nearly children. A sweatshop. That’s what this place was, exploiting its workers to make a profit.
“My brother Aaron is the night watchman,” he said. “He is troubled mentally, subject to bouts of extreme excitement. He does not talk much, and only to us. He does not like strangers or changes of any kind. He finds change threatening.”
As we neared the back, I encountered an odor: pungent, primal, and very potent. I couldn’t help but raise a hand to my nose.
&nbs
p; “I know,” Wolfe Kosminski said. “It is terrible. Aaron refuses to bathe. He is guided by voices in his head, which tell him what to do. Aaron!”
He opened a door. The smell inside made the bile rise in my throat. I saw a young man sitting on a cot, who sat up when we arrived. Our eyes locked for only a second before he looked down and away.
“Aaron, this is Thomas. He starts today.”
The younger Kosminski was near my own age, with light brown, greasy hair, the dawn of a mustache on his lip, and wispy side whiskers. His eyes were large and watery. The most remarkable feature was how his skin was stretched tautly upon his face. The man was nearly skeletal. Though possibly a few inches taller than I, I doubted he weighed seven stone. He seemed preternaturally aged; there were commas carved into each cheek by starvation. He pulled up his feet, which were bare and gray with grime, in order to bury his face in his knees.
“Now, now, little brother, that is no way to act toward the new man. Do you remember your English? Say hello to Mr. Llewelyn.”
After a moment a sound came out. I could not call it a word. It was like a sigh, a muffled sound that had no obvious origin, and which one could not understand. I had heard such sounds in the asylums I had visited in this case. It was something in between a buzz and a moan.
“No, now, Bruder, be nice. Thomas is new here and willing to overlook your nasty habits, but I won’t have you being uncivil to him.”
Perhaps Wolfe was trying to produce an apology from his relative, but he was not succeeding. Aaron Kosminski turned away and lay down on his bed, which consisted of several burlap sacks and blankets thrown on top of one another. He wore a none-too-clean shirt and braces and an open tweed waistcoat over a pair of baggy trousers.
“We’ll leave you then. I’ll see you after dinner.”
Wolfe led me out of the room and closed the door behind me. I let out a breath and drew in another one, but I was still too close to the source of it.
“To tell you the truth, we almost don’t notice the smell anymore—the family members, I mean. We grew up with it. Aaron has always been as you see him.”
“He is touched in the head?” I asked.
“Aaron is just Aaron. There is no other way to describe him.”
“Forgive me, but are there not places where he could be treated? I mean, with the factory needing to be run, and a new baby. You must be overbusy.”
“You cannot imagine. But no, we must look after him ourselves. He is family. I could not imagine him locked up in a cell and mistreated. He is so fragile, you see.”
“I hope I did not speak out of turn.”
“No, no, of course not. I brought you to see him because I cannot hide it for long. If you wish to turn down the position, I understand. You see now why no women will work here. Sometimes Aaron must be restrained. But he means no harm, you understand.”
“I suppose I can take it if I am not seated too close to the back. But why is your brother so thin?”
“He hears the voices and does what they tell him to. They tell him not to eat food prepared by others, only what is left in the street.”
“But this is Whitechapel,” I argued. “Almost no food is left in the street.”
“Precisely. We control him by giving him his walk in the evenings after dinner. He must eat two bites before he can go out: two full bites. Oh, he distresses himself atrociously, but he’ll eat a little, or he won’t get to go out.”
“Go out? You let him out?”
“Oh, yes. He’s harmless. We let him out around five. He sleeps during the day, you see, and is awake all night. It is his natural schedule. He returns around seven-thirty. Then we lock him in for the night. That way, he acts as night watchman, but also we know where he is all night.”
“What does he do while he is out?” I asked.
“He grazes. That is my little joke, you see. He walks and picks up as much food as he finds on the ground. He’s a great walker. He’ll go as far as Mile End in one direction, and Cheapside in the other.”
“Does he interact with anyone?”
“Not to my knowledge. He doesn’t go into any buildings. They’d toss him out because of the smell. Mostly, he just wanders about in his own little world, listening to what the voices tell him.”
“How sentient is he? Does he communicate with you?”
“Of course. He understands Yiddish, German, and some English, though he doesn’t speak the latter. He cannot read, but when Sarah bought him a primer to learn his letters, I think he was insulted that it was for a child. He gave it back to her immediately.”
“It cannot be easy caring for a full-grown adult.”
“It isn’t, believe me. At times he can be manic, too full of energy. He’s harder to control then. For the most part, however, he is docile, like today.”
“Poor fellow,” I said.
“So, will you accept the position?”
“Yes, I will.”
“Good. We could use an extra pair of hands. I’ll show you to your table, and one of our workers will instruct you in how to put together a mantle.”
“It is difficult?” I asked. “Compared to, say, a coat?”
“If it were not difficult, we would not be able to charge so much for one, but I think you are capable enough of the work. This way.”
A mantle, I learned that day, or a mantlelet, as it is sometimes called, is a close-fitting coat for women, generally made of silk, that is longer in the front but gathered in the back to allow a bustle to project outward. The sleeves are either dolman or sling sleeves and are adorned with jet beads or embroidery. They are gilding for such lilies as require it. Younger women may have no need for it, but many who are older have acquired the wherewithal for seed pearls, jet beads, and other ornamentation, working under the assumption that if one cannot be a work of art, one can wear one. I never noticed such a garment before I entered the shop that morning, but I noticed plenty of them afterward.
The owner passed me into the hands of the seamsters, who began to show me the stitches I would need to learn in order to produce the finished product. I still could not believe I was working as a plainclothes police officer. If in my final year in public school I had been able to list a hundred possible occupations for my future that possibility would not have been on it.
As we set to work and I began to build my first mantle, I turned over in my mind what I had learned about Aaron Kosminski, knowing for certain that Cyrus Barker would not care for a single word on the subject of women’s mantle making. What was my opinion regarding Kosminski as a possible suspect in the Ripper murders? I had to admit to having serious misgivings. He was so small, while Jack the Ripper was larger than life. The only thing offensive about him was his odor. He would not speak to anyone in the street, not knowing their language, so how could he approach someone like Catherine Eddowes or Long Liz Stride, who would have towered over him? How could he overpower Dark Annie Chapman who was twice his weight? I could not imagine it. Prince Eddy, Stephen, or someone connected to the palace seemed a much more viable candidate than a speechless immigrant who didn’t bathe and could not even look one in the eye.
Near noon we were given a short break to use a public lavatory down the street, and to eat lunch. I had none, of course, but Mrs. Kosminski was kind enough to feed me a potted meat sandwich, rather than risk that I might go out to some sort of restaurant or public house and not return. After fifteen minutes we returned to work, which continued until seven o’clock. By that hour, all my fingers had bled from being pierced by needles, my shoulders were shivering from exhaustion, and my feet were cramping from standing so long.
It occurred to me then that I must have the best situation in London, working with Cyrus Barker. While others flogged away at work like this, I was sitting in a well-appointed chamber, reading a newspaper necessary for my position, taking light dictation, and typing the odd letter. All right, so occasionally I was shot at; the thing was, I was paid ten times the salary for less than half the work.
It seemed to defy logic. Someone’s mathematical calculations were off. Unless, of course, the difference was simply a matter of address. Whitehall was not Whitechapel and never would be.
Aside from my personal revelations, only one thing of any note happened that evening, and that was that Aaron Kosminski went out for his walk. Those poor words do little to describe the actual event. Wolfe knocked at the door of the youngest Kosminski, who came out in a pea jacket and broken hat not in keeping with a family of mantle makers. After eating a few bites, he seemed so excited, he was shaking. Wolfe crossed to the front door and Aaron shot out of it in a pair of stout boots, leaving behind a ghastly breeze of effluvia that we workers did our best to wave away.
A few minutes later, an old woman entered, who proved to be the elder Mrs. Kosminski. The younger came down from the apartment above, greeted her with a kiss, and they spoke together in what I assumed was Yiddish. Then they went upstairs to finish dinner for the brothers who did not take their nourishment in the street. We continued to work.
Near seven o’clock, Aaron returned, looking a good deal calmer, and Wolfe came down from supper. Windows were locked, projects put away, and the tables cleared of anything valuable that might be viewed from an outside window. We were shown to the door.
“You did good work today, Thomas,” Wolfe said to me. “I’ll see you in the morning at seven.”
While agreeing, I calculated in my head. It was a twelve-hour workday. As I stepped outside, and the door closed behind me, I heard the sharp sound of a bolt being drawn on the door. There would be no mantle stealing on these premises tonight.
The workers wandered away one by one. I proceeded down Goulston Street, wondering whether I might find a hansom in Commercial Road who could take me to the Frying Pan. I could not walk more than a few feet.
Then Cyrus Barker stepped into a nimbus of gaslight from an alleyway and gestured to me. I turned and followed him, hoping our destination was not far away. He led me down a narrow court until he stopped at a door and opened it with a key. The muscles in my limbs jumped as I climbed a flight of steps to the first floor. I didn’t know where I was, nor was I curious. The Guv led me down a hall to a flat and let me in. A room had been set up with two beds and a table and chairs. There was a fire in the grate, and when I looked down, I recognized the boric acid sprinkled on the floor. While I was working, we had changed residences. There was a cold selection on the table, and some bottles of ale.