Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  If that were the case, then the ultimate catastrophe was inevitable. Edwina had no intention of intervening. Lord Mountbatten might if he could see it coming, but of course he wouldn’t. Edward’s stammering clod of a brother Bertie would be donning coronation robes as George VI before Dickie caught on that he’d been backing the wrong royal.

  Edwina would be discreet. She would say nothing to her husband. She would be helpful and supportive of Wallis and her pathetic little dream. She would be her friend.

  God save the queen.

  Edwina laughed, swallowed down the remainder of her drink, then removed her slip and stood naked and sweaty. She would have another bath before she joined the others. However briefly, she would feel good again.

  Captain van der Heyden had been three times down into the bowels of his ship that morning—once on a ritual inspection of his own to make certain that all was in readiness for sailing, then again to confer with the engineer, Jan Brinker, over a small problem with the steering hydraulics, and now with van Hoorn, the ranking company man from Amsterdam, who had wanted to see firsthand the segment of electrical wiring involved in the last night’s brief fire.

  It was in the long bank of immense electrical boxes that constituted the main machinery supply switchboard in the after-turbo generator room. This equipment extended approximately fifty feet across, and three of the units had been scorched black from the fire and surges in current. Two of these huge boxes would have to be replaced. The surges had also burned out several of the giant resistors in the nearly seven hundred miles of electrical cable that ran through the Wilhelmina’s innards.

  Brinker held an electric torch high to illuminate the burned wiring as brightly as possible. Some new cabling had been installed, its black covering, not yet painted the institutional green that covered the original equipment, standing out starkly, proclaiming the accident, the mistake.

  Van Hoorn peered more closely, examining some splices that had been added.

  “You are certain as to the fire’s cause?” he said, his eyes still on the cables.

  “Ja. Maakt kortsluiting. The resistors at the junction box were the wrong size. We replaced them. Maakt u zich geen zorgen.”

  “I do worry, Captain. Everything now depends on the Wilhelmina, and she is giving us cause to worry.” He frowned and patted the metal, as if trying to placate a huge beast.

  “The radiator and fan circuits on each of these switchboards,” he said. “They’re supplied through a single-pole circuit breaker, yes?”

  “Ja.”

  “And this is controlled from the bridge?”

  “Yes, that is correct.”

  “And in the event of fire, the radiator and fans in the affected area can be shut off from the bridge?”

  “Yes, this is so.”

  “Well, why weren’t they? You could have contained the fire much more easily.”

  “I don’t know, mijnheer. I was dealing with some passengers at the time.”

  “Well, you find out what went wrong, Captain, before we sail.”

  “We are going to replace two of these units and more than a dozen resistors. Our sailing will be delayed, but only an hour or so.”

  Van der Heyden took a deep breath, holding back any outward sign of his increasing anxiety. If van Hoorn was trying to make a case for canceling the sailing, the captain wished he would find the fortitude to resolve the matter quickly. It was not an easy decision. Another postponement of this maiden voyage and the Lage Lander Line could find itself facing bankruptcy again. But the time for departure was nearing, and van der Heyden still had many things to do—whether they sailed or stayed.

  Van Hoorn still hesitated. “You have checked the voltages?”

  “Several times. All is correct.”

  The company man frowned, as if any statement so confident could not possibly be correct. “I want to look at some more junction boxes.”

  “Brinker will show you whatever you want to see.”

  “Please accompany us, Captain. I don’t want to come to any conclusion you do not share.”

  Before van Hoorn was finally satisfied, they passed through the entire length of the ship. After emerging at last by the forwardmost third-class cabins of C deck, they returned up the grand staircase to the navigation deck and van der Heyden’s cabin. The captain poured the man a small congratulatory glass of Bols, following company custom, but none for himself. He would have nothing to drink until after the last watch that night.

  Van Hoorn set the drink aside and asked to see the passenger manifest again. He sat down at van der Heyden’s desk to look through it. At sea, no one would dare do that.

  “Our special American passenger? He is aboard?”

  “Since last night,” van der Heyden said. “He is remaining in his cabin. He will take his exercise at night. This is how he wishes it.”

  “Very good. And the American actress?” She must be aboard by now. We improved her accommodations. Instead of a stateroom, we provided her with one of the suites on the sun deck. The best, actually.”

  “A worthwhile investment of company resources. Anyone else of consequence?” He flipped a page and drew his finger down the next list of names.

  “Cardinal Bloch, the archbishop of Wurtzburg, as you know. Also, an English traveling party booked passage late yesterday.”

  “Yes? Prominent people?”

  “Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Lady Diana Cooper and her husband.” Van der Heyden smiled. “And Emerald Cunard.”

  “What? Lady Cunard? On our ship?”

  “Yes. There’s a vote of confidence.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “They seem to be on a lark. Aristocrats at play, discreetly. With us they might not be noticed.”

  “Anyone else?” Van Hoorn was now looking very nervous.

  If van der Heyden revealed the Prince of Wales’ presence, he was sure it would prompt van Hoorn to cancel the voyage. The captain wanted to give the ship a chance—to give them all a chance.

  “In the English party?” van der Heyden said. “I’m not sure about the others. There’s a man named Principus. Edvardus Principus, according to the registry.”

  “Yes, I see it. Sounds Greek.”

  “He’s blond.”

  “Scandinavian, perhaps. That’s all? No other special guests?”

  “Just ordinary passengers, although I think there are a few big bank accounts and noble titles among them. No one else particularly famous.”

  Van Hoorn rose and went to the porthole. “Very few reporters,” he said somberly, as if that were a bad sign. To the captain, it had been an unexpected blessing.

  “Six,” said van der Heyden. “Four Dutch, one French, one British. I have the first officer escorting them, in case any questions come up about the fire or any of the other problems. I think they’re interviewing the American actress in the first-class lounge. I’m not sure they’re even aware the Mountbattens are aboard. They’ll be leaving directly.”

  “Don’t advertise the Mountbattens. We want the publicity to come on the other side of the ocean, after you’ve gotten them across. Then we want the whole world to know about the Mountbattens. And Lady Cunard. If that doesn’t reestablish our reputation, I can’t imagine what could.”

  “Does that mean you want to proceed?”

  “Of course. Did you have any doubt? Bring me my drink, Captain. And pour a little one for yourself. Never mind the regulations. I know you bend them on occasion.”

  “As you say, Mr. van Hoorn.”

  “Just don’t burst the boilers trying to make an express crossing. Safety first, no matter how long it takes.”

  “Safety first.”

  They stood facing each other with the porthole between them. The hazy sunlight was glinting on the water below.

  Van Hoorn lifted his glass. “To your happy arrival in New York, Captain.”

  “To the Wilhelmina.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  They drank, emptying their glasses i
n a swallow. Van der Heyden relaxed. The biggest decision of this voyage had now been made for him.

  Spencer lay on his bed, listening to the sounds on the dock outside as he leafed through the printed directory listing the names of the passengers. There weren’t many. As he had been a late booking, his own name did not appear. He found a few others he thought he recognized, though none were friends or acquaintances. There was certainly no name on the first-class list that might be a variation of Lindbergh’s.

  He dropped the directory onto the night table, hoping an addendum would be published the next day to account for late bookings. He had to find someone to get him into first class. His current situation was akin to purgatory.

  The garden photograph of Whitney was atop his dresser—in this narrow cabin, almost within arm’s reach of his bed. Staring at it brought back such vivid memories. One came now of her beside him in an open car, her leg pressed against his as they sped through the Bois in the dark of a warm Paris night.

  He had lied to her at their last, brief, passionate reconciliation during last night’s party. He had told her he was going back to Chicago to see to his affairs and end his relationship with the Press-Bulletin. Then he would return to Paris and live as she wished—ménage à trois, Spencer a prisoner of her money—in an idyll of museums and recitals and picnics and bistros. And wild, fast drives through the Bois at night.

  Why she had believed him he could not say. But she had, with childlike happiness. In this manner he had purchased time. Whitney was his until he returned to her. If this voyage was to change his circumstances, his life, he would have the time to accommodate it, to do what had to be done.

  The dockside noise outside seemed to be increasing, the activity more purposeful, the rumbles and bangings within the ship more frequent. He had hoped for time to bathe and nap before they sailed, but he’d allowed the interlude to drift away from him.

  He felt the ship begin to shudder and vibrate. The steam turbines were running. Through the open porthole came music from above—the ship’s orchestra playing on deck. It was time to go to work. As he had dragged himself to his airplane in the war, as he had risen from the ditch and returned to the road in China, he rose from the bed and began to change clothes, pulling a creased blue blazer and gray flannels from the closet, getting bloody on with it.

  He stopped at one of the two bars in second class for a gin and quinine, then carried it out onto the promenade deck. With so few passengers, there was plenty of spectator space at the rail. He took a place distant from the merry din produced by the band, watching with some amusement as the scatterings of people on the quay below did their best to create a celebratory noise in farewell.

  The elaborate holdings of hawser and rope were undone and the ship was cast off. She came away from the dock smartly, two French tugs pushing and pulling her in a tight arc until she was pointed at the opening in the breakwater and gathering speed. The water began to hiss at her sides, audible despite the band music and horns and cheering. She was departing Le Havre as a bride might a church. Streamers were being flung gleefully and clumsily from the upper decks, and one fell over Spencer’s head and shoulder. He let it remain, his mind still on Whitney, lifting his glass toward land in a final toast to her. He drank, slowly, the glass as smooth and cool against his lip as her kiss.

  He felt the streamer move, not falling, but as if it were being slowly pulled away. He turned, almost as slowly, and found himself looking into a woman’s staring face. It was a hard face, on the verge of age, with thin, unsmiling lips. But her eyes were extraordinary—huge, a haunting blue in color, and full of madness. She was thin and birdlike, her lower arms all but encased by a multitude of wooden African bracelets. She might have been very attractive once, before her lunacy. She was the kind of woman one encountered in bars rather than cafés—the kind of woman one avoided.

  A large black man stood just behind her, looking elsewhere, as if embarrassed.

  “Do I know you?” she asked Spencer, her voice very British.

  “I do not believe that you do,” he said.

  “Are you a gentleman of Paris?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Then I must know you.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “A pity, then. Sorry.”

  Her eyes never moved as she spoke, remaining fixed on his. When she finally glanced away, it was as if Spencer was released from an imprisoning grip.

  “Sorry,” she repeated. “Quite, quite. Sorry.”

  She took the black man’s arm and they moved off along the deck. Spencer shuddered slightly but stared after them. Hers would likely be a story of great pathos, sin, the bizarre, and—from the sound of her accent—a high birth squandered. Altogether, it would be a much more interesting story than Lindbergh’s, though that was a truth no editor of the Chicago Press-Bulletin would ever dare admit.

  The shoreline was receding on either side. As they passed through the breakwater, small boats came chasing up, then fell away. The offshore mist embraced them, illuminated ahead by the diffused light from the setting sun. Behind them, the land now faded into dark shadows.

  The ship’s horn thundered with a long, final farewell blast, then fell silent. Spencer lingered, transfixed, his nostrils full of the scent of the sea, his skin fresh with the sudden coolness of the landless air. The Wilhelmina was into the English Channel now, steering sharply west into the orange and pink haze. Other boats’ whistles and ships’ horns could be heard in the unseen distance, and an occasional ghostly shape would pass by. The water was churning and spewing now at the ship’s side. He turned his head to appreciate the full extent of her line, to sense her heavy load of life—cut off from the land as if by an act of God and sent into the limitless void of ocean.

  Spencer suddenly felt himself utterly free of all his ties and bonds, but it was not a feeling of elation—rather, one of loneliness and helplessness. The ship sailed strongly, steadily on, but he was adrift.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Olga Maretzka had turned on only one small lamp in the cramped second-class cabin she had taken a deck below Spencer’s. It was an interior stateroom, more comfortably furnished than many accommodations Olga had called her own in Russia, but it lacked a porthole. In its way it reminded her of a cell, and she had been in too many of those in her short life. She feared she would suffer one of her recurring nightmares in trying to sleep, possibly the dream about the rat.

  It varied each time. The rat never came from the same place. Sometimes it crawled in under the door. Once it came out of her navel. But the ending was always the same. The rat would go to her feet, sit staring at her, then hop on her leg and creep forward, slowly, inch by inch, until its staring, vicious little face was directly over hers, peering into her eyes, blocking out all else. The only way she was able to save herself was by waking, but it was a desperate process. Sometimes she cried out.

  There were other lights she could turn on, enough to make the room quite bright, but she preferred the gloom. In the bright light, she feared she might actually see the rat.

  She was sitting on her bed, her long legs drawn up protectively in front of her, resting her arms and chin on her knees. Her murder of the old Pole was lingering unhappily in her mind. He was a remorseless old rat himself, a weary, used-up, furtive killer who had begun to worry more about his own wrinkled skin than his duty, and of no further use to the special committee for whom he and Olga worked. Rather he had become a danger to it—and to her. She had killed him quickly and necessarily and efficiently, escaping without notice. It should not concern her any longer.

  Olga had killed many, many times now. The first job had made her vomit, though afterward had come a strange elation. But all the rest had been more or less ordinary experiences—routine missions routinely carried out and forgotten. Her last assignment had been the murder of the wife and child of a party official in Moscow who had fled to the West upon being warned that Stalin was about to have him arrested. The woman had struggled and s
creamed and the little boy had tried to run away, yet she had shot them both, calmly, as instructed, leaving the gore for the neighbors to see so that the killings would be talked about and leave a lasting public impression, as intended. Afterward, Olga had gone on holiday at a borrowed dacha near a country beach on the Moscow River. She had drunk too much vodka, found a lover, and thoroughly, almost desperately enjoyed herself.

  Now she sat totally withdrawn in the shadows, nervous and listless, silent and unhappy, guilty over ending the life of that wretched and worthless old man in Paris. Her hands twitched. The door to her cabin represented menace. Beyond it was everything she feared.

  That was her problem—this cabin, this ship. It represented not escape but entrapment. She was locked in a floating box. If she had pursuers, they’d need not find her; they’d need find only the box. Once they opened it, she would be but a skittering insect with no place to go.

  Always in the past she’d been able to escape into great masses of humanity. Now escape was denied her—at least until she had completed the all-important task that had brought her to the old Pole’s flat and to this ship, until they were once again bound fast to the land.

  With escape, the mind could be free of guilt. It was the threat of capture, the threat of judgment, the fear, that brought guilt.

  She was becoming as craven as the old Pole, her thoughts fixed on her survival, not on how to attain the first-class decks and rid the world of this royal parasite. And receive her just and ample reward. They had promised her a Soviet equivalent of wealth and a degree of freedom for this one. When she thought realistically about it, she accepted the chance that her actual payment would be having her brains blown all over the wall of a cell in Lubyanka, just like Fanny Kaplan—or being made to “commit suicide,” and so end like the hero and martyr Jacob Sverdlov, who had arranged the execution of the czar and his wretched family, and thus his own.

  But this was merely a possibility, a speculation she could cope with afterward in better circumstances. The threat against her now was more immediate and certain. Just outside the cabin door.