Win Some, Lose Some

by Mike Resnick

  The others didn’t know what had happened, and of course Cotter wasn’t about to tell them. They reported what they saw, told the world that its prayers were answered, and only three of them even mentioned the Butterballs’ special talent.

  I thought about the Butterballs all during the long flight home. Every expert said they weren’t sentient, that they were just mimics. And I suppose my Butterball could very well have heard someone say that God lived in heaven, just as he could have heard someone use the word “very.” It was a stretch, but I could buy it if I had to.

  But where did Julie Balch’s Butterball ever hear a man begging not to be eaten? I’ve been trying to come up with an answer to that since I left the farm. I haven’t got one yet—but I do have a syndicated column, courtesy of the conglomerate that owns the publishing company.

  So am I going use it to tell the world?

  That’s my other problem: Tell it what? That three billion kids can go back to starving to death? Because whether Cotter was telling the truth or lying through his teeth, if it comes down to a choice between Butterballs and humans, I know which side I have to come down on.

  There are things I can control and things I can’t, things I know and things I am trying my damnedest not to know. I’m just one man, and I’m not responsible for saving the world.

  But I am responsible for me—and from the day I left the farm, I’ve been a vegetarian. It’s a small step, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

  INTRODUCTION TO “REDCHAPEL”

  Kevin J. Anderson

  Mike Resnick is full of it.

  Imagination, that is. A creative mind that plants an odd assortment of seeds in a fertile story garden—some of the seeds might be irradiated or mutated, others might be alien species sporting bright flowers and sharp thorns. And he doesn’t mark that garden with neat, tidy rows; he likes to mix it up.

  In a recent novel, The Buntline Special, Mike has the audacity to add clanking robot call girls, Thomas Edison, Wyatt Earp, zombies, giant bats, electric lights, and Indian curses. (Shake well. Serve.) Here in “Redchapel,” Mike revisits the dark days of the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel…but as far as I know, no other author has ever thrown Teddy Roosevelt into the mix. (Roosevelt is a Resnick perennial favorite; six other stories of his have featured the character.) Roosevelt’s solution—okay, credit where credit is due: Mike Resnick’s solution—to the Ripper’s identity is ingenious and delivered with forehead-slapping logic.

  Maybe Mike relates so well with Roosevelt because the two have a lot in common: widely traveled, curious about countless subjects and knowledgeable about even more, competent to a fault, and forward-looking. Heck, Mike even drinks coffee all the time, and Teddy Roosevelt purportedly proclaimed that the cup of Maxwell House coffee he’d been served was “good to the last drop.”

  Unlike other seasoned authors who rest on their laurels—and Mike has plenty of those—he works to be on top of trends, pursuing sales in audiobooks, e-books, podcasts before many of his peers had bothered to look. In addition, Mike is always ready to give advice and answer questions for newbie writers as well as old pros (yes, I’ve asked him quite a few things myself).

  Yes, he’s full of it—full of the good stuff.

  Back in the 1960s I wrote an article about Jack the Ripper, in which I offered my opinion as to the Ripper’s identity. I waited a third of a century for some writer to pick up on it, and no one did.

  By then I’d written a few alternate histories featuring Theodore Roosevelt, including one that appears earlier in this volume, and I realized that he would be the perfect protagonist for a Ripper story. At the time the Ripper was terrifying Whitechapel, Roosevelt was in his physical prime, he’d already captured some murderers in the Dakota badlands, and as an internationally-famous ornithologist there was every likelihood that he would have been invited to speak to a group of British bird-watchers at that time.

  So I wrote it, and sold it to my primary short story market (Asimov’s), and it was a Hugo Nominee for Best Novelette of 2002.

  REDCHAPEL

  “From Hell, Mr. Lusk—Sir, I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman, prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that too it out if you only wate a whil longer signed Catch me when yu can Mishter Lusk”

  —Jack the Ripper

  October 16, 1888

  “I have not a particle of sympathy with the sentimentality—as I deem it, the mawkishness—which overflows with foolish pity for the criminal and cares not at all for the victim of the criminal.”

  —Theodore Roosevelt

  Autobiography

  THE DATE WAS SEPTEMBER 8, 1888

  A hand reached out of the darkness and shook Roosevelt by the shoulder.

  He was on his feet in an instant. His right hand shot out, crunching against an unseen jaw, and sending his assailant crashing against a wall. He crouched low, peering into the shadows, trying to identify the man who was clambering slowly to his feet.

  “What the devil happened?” muttered the man.

  “My question precisely,” said Roosevelt, reaching for his pistol and training it on the intruder. “Who are you and what are you doing in my room?”

  A beam of moonlight glanced off the barrel of the gun.

  “Don’t shoot, Mr. Roosevelt!” said the man, holding up his hands. “It’s me—John Hughes!”

  Roosevelt lit a lamp, keeping the gun pointed at the small, dapper man. “You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”

  “Besides losing a tooth?” said Hughes bitterly as he spit a tooth into his hand amid a spray of blood. “I need your help.”

  “What is this all about?” demanded Roosevelt, looking toward the door of his hotel room as if he expected one of Hughes’ confederates to burst through the door at any moment.

  “Don’t you remember?” said Hughes. “We spoke for more than an hour last night, after you addressed the Royal Ornithological Society.”

  “What has this got to do with birds?” said Roosevelt. “And you’d better come up with a good answer. I’m not a patient man when I’m rudely awakened in the middle of the night.”

  “You don’t remember,” said Hughes accusingly.

  “Remember what?”

  Hughes pulled out a badge and handed it to the American. “I am a captain of the London Metropolitan Police. After your speech we talked and you told me how you had single-handedly captured three armed killers in your Wild West.”

  Roosevelt nodded. “I remember.”

  “I was most favorably impressed,” said Hughes.

  “I hope you didn’t wake me just to tell me that.”

  “No—but it was the fact that you have personally dealt with a trio of brutal killers that made me think—hope, actually—that you might be able to help me.” Hughes paused awkwardly as the American continued to stare at him. “You did say that if I ever needed your assistance…”

  “Did I say to request it in the middle of the night?” growled Roosevelt, finally putting his pistol back on his bed table.

  “Try to calm yourself. Then I’ll explain.”

  “This is as calm as I get under these circumstances.” Roosevelt took off his nightshirt, tossed it on the four poster bed, then walked to an ornate mahogany armoire, pulled out a pair of pants and a neatly-folded shirt, and began getting dressed. “Start explaining.”

  “There’s something I want you to see.”

  “At this hour?” said Roosevelt suspiciously. “Where is it?”

  “It’s not far,” said Hughes. “Perhaps a twenty-minute carriage ride away.”

  “What is it?”

  “A body.”

  “And it couldn’t wait until daylight?” asked Roosevelt.

  Hughes shook his head. “If we don’t have her in the morgue by daylight, there will be panic in the streets.”

  “I’m certainly glad you’re not given to exaggeration,” remarked Roosevelt sardonically.
<
br />   “If anything,” replied the small Englishman seriously, “that was an understatement.”

  “All right. Tell me about it.”

  “I would prefer that you saw it without any preconceptions.”

  “Except that it could cause a riot if seen in daylight.”

  “I said a panic, not a riot,” answered Hughes, still without smiling.

  Roosevelt buttoned his shirt and fiddled with his tie. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “6:20 AM.”

  “The sun’s not an early riser in London, is it?”

  “Not at this time of year.” Hughes shifted his weight awkwardly.

  “Now what’s the matter?”

  “We have a crisis on our hands, Mr. Roosevelt. I realize that I have no legal right to enlist your help, but we are quite desperate.”

  “Enough hyperbole,” muttered Roosevelt, slipping on his coat.

  “You really hunted down those murderers in a blizzard?” said Hughes suddenly.

  “The Winter of the Blue Snow,” said Roosevelt, nodding his head briskly. “Doubtless exaggerated by every dime novelist in America.”

  “But you did bring them back, alone and unarmed,” persisted the Englishman, as if Roosevelt’s answer was the most important thing in his life.

  “Yes…but I knew the territory, and I knew who and where the killers were. I don’t know London, and I assume the identity of the killer you’re after is unknown.”

  “So to speak.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Roosevelt, adjusting his hat in front of a mirror.

  “We don’t know who he is. All we know is that he calls himself Saucy Jack.”

  The two men approached the police line behind the Black Swan. The night fog had left the pavement damp, and there was a strong smell of human waste permeating the area. Chimneys spewed thick smoke into the dawn sky, and the sound of a horse’s hooves and a cart’s squeaking wheels could be heard in the distance.

  “Sir?” asked one of the constables, looking from Hughes to Roosevelt.

  “It’s all right, Jamison,” said Hughes. “This is Theodore Roosevelt, a colleague from America. He is the man who brought Billy the Kid and Jesse James to justice.”

  Constable Jamison stepped aside immediately, staring at the young American in awe.

  “Now, why did you say that, John?” asked Roosevelt in low tones.

  “It will establish respect and obedience much faster than if I told him you were an expert on birds.”

  The American sighed. “I see your point.” He paused. “Just what am I supposed to be looking at?”

  “It’s back here,” said Hughes, leading him behind the building to an area that had been temporarily lit by flaming torches.

  They stopped when they were about ten feet away. There was a mound beneath a blood-drenched blanket.

  “Steel yourself, Mr. Roosevelt,” said Hughes.

  “After all the monographs I’ve written on taxidermy, I don’t imagine you can show me anything that can shock me,” answered Roosevelt.

  He was wrong.

  The blanket was pulled back, revealing what was left of a middle-aged woman. Her throat had been slit so deeply that she was almost decapitated. A bloody handkerchief around her neck seemed to be the only thing that stopped her head from rolling away.

  Her belly was carved open, and her innards were pulled out and set on the ground just above her right shoulder. Various internal organs were mutilated, others were simply missing.

  “What kind of creature could do something like this?” said Roosevelt, resisting the urge to retch.

  “I was hoping you might be able to tell us,” said Hughes.

  Roosevelt tore his horrified gaze from the corpse and turned to Hughes. “What makes you think I’ve ever encountered anything like this before?”

  “I don’t know, of course,” said Hughes. “But you have lived in America’s untamed West. You have traveled among the aboriginal savages. You have rubbed shoulders with frontier cowboys and shootists. Americans are a simpler, more brutal people—barbaric, in ways—and I had hoped…”

  “I take it you’ve never been to America.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Then I shall ignore the insult, and only point out that Americans are the boldest, bravest, most innovative people on the face of the Earth.”

  “I assure you I meant no offense,” said Hughes quickly. “It’s just that we are under enormous pressure to bring Saucy Jack to justice. I had hoped that you might bring some fresh insight, some different methodology…”

  “I’m not a detective,” said Roosevelt, walking closer to the corpse. “There was never any question about the identities of the three killers I went after. As for this murder, there’s not much I can tell you that you don’t already know.”

  “Won’t you try?” said Hughes, practically pleading.

  Roosevelt squatted down next to the body. “She was killed from behind, of course. She probably never knew the murderer was there until she felt her jugular and windpipe being severed.”

  “Why from behind?”

  “If I were trying to kill her from in front, I’d stab her in a straightforward way—it would give her less time to raise her hand to deflect the blade. But the throat was slit, not punctured. And it had to be the first wound, because otherwise she would have screamed and someone would have heard her.”

  “What makes you think someone didn’t?”

  Roosevelt pointed to the gaping hole in the woman’s abdomen. “He wouldn’t have had the leisure to do that unless he was sure no one had seen or heard the murder.” The American stood up again. “But you know all that.”

  “Yes, we do,” said Hughes. “Can you tell us anything we don’t know?”

  “Probably not. The only other obvious fact is that the killer had some knowledge of anatomy.”

  “This hardly looks like the work of a doctor, Mr. Roosevelt,” said Hughes.

  “I didn’t say that it was. But it was done by someone who knew where the various internal organs belonged, or else he’d never have been able to remove them in the dark. Take a look. There’s no subcutaneous fat on the ground, and he didn’t waste his time mutilating muscle tissue.”

  “Interesting,” said Hughes. “Now that is something we didn’t know.” He smiled. “I think we should be very grateful that you are a taxidermist as well as an ornithologist.” He covered the corpse once more, then summoned another constable. “Have her taken to the morgue. Use the alleyways and discourage onlookers.”

  The constable saluted and gathered a team of policemen to move the body.

  “I assume we’re through here,” said Roosevelt, grateful that he no longer had to stare at the corpse.

  “Yes. Thank you for coming.”

  Roosevelt pulled his timepiece out of a vest pocket and opened it.

  “No sense going back to sleep. Why don’t you come back to the Savoy with me and I’ll buy breakfast?”

  “I’ve quite lost my appetite, but I will be happy to join you for a cup if tea and some conversation, Mr. Roosevelt.”

  “Call me Theodore.” He shook his head. “Poor woman. I wonder who she was?”

  Hughes pulled a notebook out of his pocket. “Her name was Annie Chapman. She was a Whitechapel prostitute.”

  “Whitechapel?”

  “Whitechapel is the section of the city we are in.”

  Roosevelt looked around, truly seeing it for the first time, as the sun began burning away the fog. “I hope New York never has a slum like this!” he said devoutly.

  “Wait until New York has been around as long as London, and it will have this and worse,” Hughes assured him.

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” said Roosevelt, his jaw jutting out pugnaciously as he looked up and down the street.

  Hughes was surprised by the intensity of the young man’s obvious belief in himself. As they stared at the broken and boarded windows, the drunks lying in doorways and on the stree
t, the mangy dogs and spavined cats and fat, aggressive rats, the endless piles of excrement from cart horses, the Englishman found himself wondering what kind of man who could view a woman’s mutilated corpse with less distaste than he displayed toward surroundings that Hughes took for granted.

  They climbed into Hughes’ carriage, and the driver set off for the Savoy at a leisurely trot. Before long they were out of Whitechapel, and, Roosevelt noted, the air instantly seemed to smell fresher.

  Roosevelt had eaten the last of his eggs, and was concentrating on his coffee when an officer entered the dining room and approached Hughes.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir,” he said apologetically, “but they said at the Yard that this is of the utmost urgency.”

  He handed a small envelope to Hughes, who opened it and briefly looked at what it contained.

  “Thank you,” said Hughes.

  “Will there be anything else, sir?” asked the officer. “Any reply?”

  “No, that will be all.”

  The officer saluted, and when he left Hughes turned back to Roosevelt.

  “What are your plans now, Theodore?”

  “I have two more speeches to give on ornithology,” answered Roosevelt, “and one on naval warfare, and then I board the boat for home on Friday.”

  “Let me tell you something about the murder you saw today,” began Hughes.

  “Thank you for letting me finish my breakfast first,” said Roosevelt wryly.

  “We have a madman loose in Whitechapel, Theodore,” continued Hughes.

  “That much is obvious.”

  “We knew that before today,” said Hughes.

  Roosevelt looked up. “This wasn’t his first victim?”

  “It was at least his second.” Hughes paused. “It’s possible that he’s killed as many as five women.”

  “How can he still be at large?”

  “We can’t watch every Whitechapel prostitute every minute of the day and night.”

  “He only kills prostitutes?”

  “Thus far.”

  “Were they all this brutally mutilated?”

  “The last one—a girl named Polly Nichols—was. The first three suffered less grievous damage, which is why we cannot be sure they were all killed by the same hand.”