He waited for Van Dorn’s drink to arrive and toasted him back with water when the Boss said, “Mud in your eye.”
“O.K.,” Van Dorn said. “Spit it out. What intrigues you?”
“There are a hundred theories about Jack the Ripper.”
“At least.”
“The one I find most intriguing is that he stopped killing prostitutes in London twenty-three years ago when he escaped to America.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“What do you think? Did he come here?”
Van Dorn shook his head. “One version had him killing an old woman on the Bowery, if I recall. Didn’t make much sense. She wasn’t young and she wasn’t a prostitute.”
“I read about it,” said Bell. “It didn’t seem at all like his other crimes.”
“And yet you’re ‘intrigued.’”
“Not by that murder. No, what intrigues me is a question: Is it possible that the reason Jack the Ripper was never caught was he fled London in 1888 or 1889 and landed in America? Maybe in New York. Maybe Boston. And laid low for a while.”
“Far-fetched,” said Van Dorn. “How long do you think he laid low?”
“The first killing I’ve found that could be him was in Brooklyn in 1891. But the question is, is he killing again?”
“Now? 1911? That is far-fetched.”
Bell agreed it was far-fetched.
Van Dorn’s oysters were served on a bed of ice. He heaped a few of them on Bell’s bread and butter plate. “That’s exactly the kind of speculation we get in the newspapers.”
“Agreed,” said Isaac Bell, and challenged his own question: “Besides, wouldn’t the Ripper be too old by now?”
Joseph Van Dorn raised a bushy red eyebrow. “Too old?” he asked silkily.
“We’re talking about a murderer who committed his crimes twenty-three years ago.”
Van Dorn said, “I suppose that from your perspective, a man past forty looks ancient.”
Bell said, “You and I both know that past age forty, criminals who haven’t been jailed tend to slow down.”
Van Dorn signaled the waiter. “You see that soup ladle on the sideboard?”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Van Dorn?”
“That big long one.”
“Yes, sir. I see it.”
“Bring it here.”
The mystified waiter delivered the ladle.
Van Dorn asked Bell, “Tell me, young fellow, how would you characterize the poor devils who will soon not see the sunny side of fifty again? Decrepit? Flea-bitten? Feeble?”
With a cold smile for his Chief Investigator, the Boss hefted the heavy silver serving tool in his powerful hands and tied the handle in a knot.
“Too old?”