Vienna, August 1896
Little Fox,
I haven’t strangled a man with my own hands since I was a girl, but I came very close today.
I’m glad you can’t hear what the detectives of Vienna say about you when you’re not here.
As if they aren’t the ones incapable of explaining the scene they found in that apartment!
As if they didn’t send for you in the first place.
Perhaps that is part of their derision: recognizing their own cowardice.
Recognizing their own petty hopes that your inability to explain how, exactly, a woman could disembowel herself and wear her intestines like a pearl necklace before at last bleeding to death somehow excuses the fact that they have no answers themselves.
It makes them feel less incompetent, because they can shift the failure onto a foreigner, and, best of all, a woman.
Does it weary you, knowing so many of the men you work with are secretly hoping you fail?
Though—and I think this would make you laugh—they are now theorizing between drags on their cigarettes that their murderer is none other than Jack the Ripper himself, having made his way to Austria.
Setting aside the fact that nothing in that room aligns with those murders—you would tell them that, if they were capable of listening—it’s lazy and unimaginative.
The detectives’ theory, I mean. Not Jack.
I wonder about him, sometimes. Where did he go?
If he’d had you on his trail, would he have escaped justice?
Now I’m imagining telling you their increasingly wild theories making Jack into a deliberate, brilliant murderer rather than a lunatic opportunist attacking those no one else cared about during a period of heightened violence against women. (Though that is every period ever, isn’t it?)
I’m imagining the way you would half-close your eyes and pinch the bridge of your nose as you do whenever an officer younger than you calls you “miss.”
I’m imagining your laugh as I deliver the finale that both detectives agree they would certainly have caught Jack had they only been put on the case. Meanwhile, while they were smoking and spinning tales of their observational prowess, I watched a young urchin pickpocket both of them.
I might have encouraged the urchin to do it. Even I get bored.
It’s difficult for me to imagine you laughing, though. I’ve seen you smile, those flashes like fish darting beneath clear waters, scales catching the sun in moments of brilliance. But I’ve never heard you laugh. I don’t dare get close enough. You’d see me.
How do you see me?
I want you to again, so desperately, and yet as always I’m leaving this in the care of another as you go to view the horrors awaiting you.
Perhaps I avoid you because I cannot imagine what expression would shape your lovely face upon our reunion.
And so I hold on to the desperation that I drank in as you crouched over your dying father.
Those emotions I understand. Those emotions I can feel.
Perhaps I am as big a coward as those detectives, because what really keeps me away is the fear that when I see you again, I won’t feel anything. What then would I hold on to?
Kind Regards,
Diavola