T A B L E_T A L K A stroll through the jardins, perhaps? It's always springtime in Paris in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk   Find a world of travel books -- new, rare and out-of-print -- at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y Korea's no-man's-land By Rolf Potts The DMZ is one of the planet's oddest tourist attractions, where visitors can pick up everything from propaganda to perfume (02/03/99) Suite liberties By Chris Haines A travel magazine employee gets free luxury hotel rooms and four-course feasts -- but there's always a price to pay (02/02/99) The new great place By Jeff Greenwald Luang Prabang has been discovered -- and once laid-back Laos will never be the same (01/31/99) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news from across the globe (01/29/99) "My Mexico" By Diana Kennedy Mexico's foremost food writer celebrates the culinary traditions of Campeche (01/28/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		DEAD ENDS IN LONDON | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - The tour starts about a quarter-mile from the Tower of London at one of the remnants of the old Roman wall that once surrounded the City of London. In August of 1888, any misbehavior within the wall (or imaginary wall, since much of it had crumbled away) fell under the jurisdiction of the City of London police force; crimes on the other side were in the domain of Scotland Yard. No love was lost between the two department heads (think: Simone and Sipowicz vs. the feds). By leaving bodies on both sides of the wall, Rumbelow explains, and pitting rival forces against each other, the murderer managed to avoid detection. His other stroke of genius was murdering five lowly prostitutes in the worst part of London before the advent of fingerprinting and DNA testing. None of us would be here, after all, if he'd been caught. And judging from the number of ladies present, I'd guess a good number of us wouldn't be here if Michael York hadn't once been cast as the elusive eviscerator. Rumbelow refers to these crimes as "the Jack the Ripper murders," but he has such a deliciously stentorian British accent that it comes out as "the Jahck the Rippah murrr-dahs." The creep show pronunciation makes us huddle a bit closer against the setting sun. He warns us that we may have been a bit misled by the media treatment Jack the Ripper has received (particularly the "Star Trek" episode in which the Ripper's evil spirit takes root in Scotty, who beams down to a peace-loving planet and goes on a murder spree). For instance, contrary to the notion I had conjured as a kid, his victims were not milk-fed beauties in pastel silks who danced on pub tables and tossed back whiskey shots with saucy abandon. Instead, they were hopeless women, bloated from drink and bony with disease. They wore all the clothes they owned at once, skirts piled upon skirts, their hems dragging through mud and dung. They had very few teeth. Which makes it all the more pathetic that his first victim, Polly Nichols, had just several hours before her death been heard boasting that her "jolly new bonnet" was sure to lure many new customers. I realize with a shiver that this is the first time in my long association with Jack that I'd spent more than a moment thinking about what he really did to these women. Somehow I'd always been more riveted by the notion that he came out of the shadows and sank back in again, undetected, an evil genius, a modern-day Dracula. I wasn't thinking body count. As the tour starts, my cohorts and I seem to be viewing the events from a comfortable distance. We laugh when Rumbelow describes a victim named Catharine Eddowes, who had drunk so much the night of her death that she was seen racing around a traffic circle and imitating a fire engine ("as one does," our guide adds, his comic timing dead on). But as we move deeper into London's East End, and as the darkness falls, the evening grows grimmer. In Mitre Square, an old patch of cobblestone now limned with corporate high-rises and parking structures, we stop on the spot where Eddowes was found, the tip of her nose sliced off, her intestines tossed over her right shoulder. "God, I didn't expect this to be so, like, gross," I hear an American exchange student tell her British boyfriend. As the bloody narrative builds ("Here the victim was found like the others, ripped from the breast bone to the vagina!" Rumbelow shouts over the car traffic), I notice that some of the other women are looking just as uncomfortable as I feel, and we acknowledge each other with grim little smiles. At the old doss house where at least one victim was turned away the night she met up with Jack the Ripper, several Miss Marple-esque English ladies line up to take flash photos of themselves in front of the women's dormitory. "Barb, smile!" instructs one. "Just take the picture," Barb hisses. Jack the Ripper tours have become so commonplace in this neighborhood (another tour group of two dozen trails behind us all evening) that the locals make sport of our puerile pastime. Near a brick doorway where the killer once scrawled a clue in chalk, an apartment light turns on and a young man who stands silhouetted against the window pantomimes a knife across his neck, and drops to his knees. Pub crawlers join up at various intervals to share their own theories ("I know who did it!" slurs one. "It was me!"), but our guide tells us tonight is pleasantly uneventful. He says he is often trailed by a blue-faced glue-sniffer who wants to hold his hand. To give us an impression of the murky dark of 1888 London, Rumbelow leads us down a one-horse-narrow street with a single flickering lamp, then through a dark garbage-filled brick passageway behind the doss house. ("Oh, this is authentic all right," jokes one woman. "That smell is genuine human piss.") Having accounted for the violent deaths of the first four victims -- Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Catharine Eddowes -- we arrive at Millers Court, the site of a flat belonging to a sometime prostitute named Mary Kelly. Jack the Ripper was her last customer, and though some neighbors heard a scream, no one came to investigate. In the morning, when the landlord sent a boy to collect her overdue rent, Kelly's body was found eviscerated in such cruel detail that when Rumbelow recounts it, several men and women cover their ears. This leaves a bad taste in our mouths, one that Rumbelow suggests we wash down at the Ten Bells pub down the street, thought to be a favorite watering hole for at least two Ripper victims, and possibly the murderer himself. The pub celebrates the association (it was once renamed "The Jack the Ripper") by creating a mini-murder museum with laminated newspaper clippings of the Ripper murders, and an appropriately maudlin hand-painted placard detailing the women who were killed and the dates of their deaths. Rumbelow quickly sets up behind a table and begins selling copies of his out-of-print book "The Complete Jack the Ripper" for 8 pounds a pop, and the barkeeps do a brisk business selling silk- screened T-shirts of a top hat resting above devilish eyes. The marketing is fascinating to my boyfriend. "OK, you've got about 120 people who pay about 8 bucks for the tour, and then if you sell about 50 books for about $15 apiece," he says, wondering if there is an equally grisly tour we could lead back home in Portland, Ore., to supplement our income. "How about a tour called 'The Trailer Parks of Tonya Harding'?" he offers. But as I sip my pint of stout and look around the room, it becomes clear to me that this is the most ghoulish thing I've participated in since attending junior high school. The sound system is filling the small smoky room with eerily mournful celestial voices. The tourists who buy Rumbelow's book flip directly to a grisly police photograph of Mary Kelly's mutilated body. High school girls in platform shoes and pigtails take turns snapping each others' pictures on the sidewalk where Kelly is said to have looked for customers, and several men hold their fists up in the air, gripping imaginary knives, and aping the incisions the Ripper once made on their delighted female companions. I feel I am in the presence of that weird mechanism that makes girls write letters to convicts, and cry when Ted Bundy got the chair. That makes us root, just a little, for Hannibal Lecter. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I wish I could tell you that that evening in London's East End cured me of this morbid fascination. In fact, it had just the opposite effect. A week after I got home, I found myself in the public library, sitting on the carpeted floor of the reference section, again poring over the "Unsolved Murders" chapter in "The People's Almanac." I ordered Rumbelow's book (which cost twice as much as it would have if I'd bought it in the pub). I spent a few dark and stormy nights reading through the suspect files and weirdly fascinating Web page Casebook: Jack the Ripper. I went to Blockbuster for a copy of "Murder by Decree." Last week a very sensible friend called to find out how my trip had gone, and I confided to her the weird guilt I had been feeling since I'd resurrected this morbid childhood hobby. She told me to cut it out, and I promised I would. She hesitated for a minute. "But I'm just curious," she asked, "what do you think he did with that kidney?" SALON | Feb. 4, 1999 Laura Billings previously wrote for Salon Wanderlust about buying a Turkish rug. _________________________________ For more information: _________________________________ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.