Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  Her victim was out there, up there. She hoped she would be able to have a few words with him in advance of the final event. Those who claimed the right to rule simply because of their birth should understand the need for their death. She was no ideologue, but she wanted him to understand. The traitor’s wife in Moscow had understood.

  Olga rose, suddenly and silently, like some wild night creature from its nest. After pausing at her door, she opened it a few inches, then, hearing nothing, slipped outside into the corridor. No one was there.

  She calmed herself. She was rightfully in this place. A steward had led her to her cabin early that morning. But she dreaded being seen. She did not feel comfortable in second class. It was a mistake for her to be here. The old Pole had made a major mistake, maybe a deliberate mistake, in booking these accommodations, and it could cost her life.

  Hurrying out to the forward staircase, she ascended it in a great rush and reached the door leading out onto the promenade deck. Pausing again, she waited to make sure the way was clear, then stepped out into the brisk air. The ship was nearly up to speed, furrowing the water and leaving a wide wake to glisten in the evening light.

  The full night was nearly upon them, a few stars bright in the murky twilight. The sea was dark. Here and there, spray and wave caps were limned by the fading glow on the western horizon. She moved along forward toward a place where she could get a better view of the first-class decks ahead and above, leaning over the rail to see past the barrier that divided the classes. Not many were about at this hour, as it was nearing time for dinner. They would be dressing, according to class. She saw one couple just ahead, at the rail, still holding cocktail glasses, and laughing. Olga withdrew to a stanchion and pressed herself back against it.

  A man was visible up on the boat deck. He looked to be a crewman rather than a passenger. There was a stairway leading up to that level on the second-class side, but anyone ascending it would be extremely visible. She would be much better off using interior stairs, picking a time of day when she could pass the barrier unnoticed.

  She stepped away from the stanchion, rising on tiptoe to better see the cabin lights of first class forward of her position. Women would be putting on evening gowns, adorning themselves with jewels.

  “Miss?”

  Olga turned to find herself looking into a dark, Oriental face. A steward had come up behind her.

  “Dinner time, miss. They are serving in main dining salon. Also in restaurant aft.”

  “Good. Thank you much.” Olga’s accent was heavy and her English not good.

  The little man was staring at her clothes. “Excuse me, miss. Are you on right deck? Have you become lost maybe?”

  “No.” Olga started walking away. After a few steps, she glanced back, too furtively. The steward had been joined by a ship’s officer.

  She walked faster.

  “Miss,” said a second voice. “Wait, please.”

  The officer was young but wore the emblems of some substantial rank. He had a friendly face, but seemed very suspicious.

  “Yes?” said Olga. “What is wrong?”

  She should not have responded in English. Her accent was thick and horrible, as bad as that with which she spoke French. She should have used German. They would understand German well on a Dutch ship, and she spoke German beautifully.

  “I’m sorry, miss, but this is a second-class section.”

  “Yes? I am second class. I have cabin.” She pulled forth her key from a pocket of her long wool sweater.

  The officer studied the key. His suspicion became mostly nervousness. He seemed unsure how to proceed. All that was required was to apologize and go on his way, but he had some peculiar concern.

  “I’m sorry, miss, but I’m afraid I must ask to see your ticket receipt. I’m sorry, but our captain … well, we have some special passengers aboard, and we … well, I have instructions to make sure all … well, miss, I’m sorry, but I really must …”

  He seemed painfully embarrassed.

  “Okay. Come with me then. I show you.”

  She led them back the way she had come, uncomfortable as she passed other passengers on their way to dinner. They wore suits and fancy dresses, and a few glanced at her curiously. Her hand was trembling as she unlocked her door and stepped into the faint light from that one small lamp. The officer followed her inside, leaving the steward to wait in the doorway.

  Olga hesitated. Her ticket receipt was in her long shoulder bag. So was her pistol.

  “One minute,” she said, turning away so that he could not see as she dug through her belongings.

  “Here,” she said. “You will see is okay.”

  His glance at the ticket was almost cursory. But he looked at her very intensely, nervousness, suspicion, and friendliness all mixed together. She was relieved when he handed the receipt back to her. Now he would have to go.

  “It all seems in order, miss. I’m sorry to have bothered you. It was just a routine check, really.”

  Olga shrugged. This was a nice, inoffensive boy. If he had stopped her, others would. At dinner she would be observed, perhaps stared at, because of her clothes, because she so obviously did not belong here. This was a bad idea, a very bad idea, her sailing second class.

  “Wait,” she said. “I am not happy with this cabin. Are there other second-class cabins free, without having to share? Cabins with porthole?”

  “There aren’t all that many passengers aboard, but I’m not sure about a porthole. Those may all be taken. In second class.”

  “What of third cabin? Would there be rooms with porthole?” She sat down on the edge of her bed, making him look away from her handbag.

  “Probably, miss, but fairly close to the waterline.”

  “Are they all occupied? Would I have to share?”

  “I don’t think so. We haven’t many third-class passengers on board at all—because of the delays in sailing.”

  Of course. People traveling that cheaply could not afford to wait all the extra, interminable days in a hotel. They would seek out other ships. Or go back to their old, unwanted homes.

  “I want then to move down to third class, to cabin with porthole. If you have such cabin, could I move tonight?”

  “Certainly, miss. I’ll go to the purser and see what can be arranged. Will you be dining now? In the salon, or in the restaurant?”

  She remembered the beauty of her eyes and used them suggestively in turning them away from him. “No. I am not hungry now. I may eat later. Now I wait for you to come back, so I know when I can move.”

  “Very good, miss. If there is a spare cabin like that, I’ll be back after I make the arrangements.”

  “Good. I thank you much.”

  When he had gone, she lay back and closed her eyes. The old Pole’s premise had been in error. Third class would not restrict her movements. Passengers in reduced circumstances were not the only ones quartered down there. Ship’s crew and the servants of wealthy passengers slept on those decks. There would be a laundry, with fresh maids’ uniforms. As a servant, Olga could go virtually anywhere a first-class passenger could. They were much together in this fashion, the very rich and the very poor who waited on them.

  The party in the prince’s suite got under way merrily enough, with Fruity Metcalfe attending to the gramaphone and the prince’s traveling valet managing drinks. This was considered part of the egalitarian fun of the adventure. The prospective king’s personal manservant was supposedly forbidden to perform service for anyone other than His Royal Highness. He went about this bartending as grimly as the Pope setting to the annual washing of the feet in the Sistine Chapel at Christmas Mass, mixing Manhattans, Bronxes, champagne cocktails, and the occasional gin and It as if logging each one as a transgression to later be avenged. He had forgotten whether Mrs. Simpson had wanted a small glass of American whiskey or her equally favored Vichy water, and so made her a mix of them both. He had learned to fear her wrath, but also relished the causing of it. He had lit
tle fear of the sack, at least until such time as she became Queen of England. In the interim, he had to be treated as a man who certainly knew too much. In service for more than twenty years to Buckingham Palace, he was not the sort to reveal anything to the public. But, as the prince was well aware, he could easily be provoked into a revelatory conversation with Her Majesty Queen Mary. Edward had wanted to dismiss him, but it was now far too late.

  To spite his confinement to quarters for the duration of the voyage, the prince was costumed in flagrant violation of the ship’s dress code for evening—barefoot, and wearing odd trousers and a Cap d’Antibes fisherman’s shirt, with blue-and-white stripes and a widely cut neck. Mountbatten was similarly dressed, but wore shoes and socks. They stood together at the bar, singing a sea chanty badly and trying to get Chips Channon, who was already dressed in black tie for dinner, to join them. The American was usually rather good at this sort of amusement, but now he felt restrained and intimidated to be this intimately in the prince’s presence, despite the long duration of their acquaintance. He had tried turning the conversation to Germany, which required no effort beyond voicing the prince’s prejudices, but Edward was not in a mood for politics that evening. If his guests did not quickly prove livelier company, he gave every evidence of a willingness to seek the entertainment inevitably provided by drunkenness. He was already on his third cocktail. “Chin, chin. Happy days.” It was his evening’s refrain.

  Unable to keep up with Mountbatten’s nasal singing, he halted the number they were performing and went into his bedroom to find his ukelele. When he returned with it, Mrs. Simpson, observing from a settee across the room, winced and looked away.

  She was seated next to Edwina Mountbatten, but her friend was much taken up by a conversation with Lady Emerald about her daughter Nancy—making Wallis a little jealous. The two women were supposed to be her best friends in the Prince of Wales’ set—indeed, her protectors. They should be protecting her now from boredom and worry, and from inattention.

  Mrs. Simpson’s other companions were Duff and Diana Cooper, who were not living up to their reputation as one of London’s brightest and most glamorous couples. Diana, in evening gown and tiara, looked tired and bored. Duff, in black tie, seemed merely irritable. Lord Brownlow could have joined them, but he kept to himself over by the door, sipping whiskey and peering from time to time through the porthole curtains. Inspector Runcie was stationed outside, but Brownlow was taking no chances. Until this voyage was done, he feared the monarchy was in dire jeopardy.

  Diana took a sip of champagne, looking pained, as if from a headache.

  “We were in Devon,” Wallis said, “before coming over to France.”

  “Yes, dear dull little Devon,” said Diana, steadying her glass. The ship was rolling slightly but making good speed through the water without much pitching of the bow.

  “We didn’t come upon it,” said Mrs. Simpson, “but I hear there’s an ancient fertility statue, a Celtic thing, somewhere in Devon. It shows a gentleman in a state of profound passion. The townspeople were so embarrassed that they planted a hedge around it.”

  “Privet?” said Duff, as if on cue.

  Wallis paused, and then gave her naughty-little-girl smile. “No, I think it’s honeysuckle.”

  Diana smiled back vaguely. Duff stared grimly at his soft, pudgy hands, a drink in one and a cigarette in another. He wanted to get down to dinner, to meet the American actress Nora Gwynne; he wanted, too, to partake in the usual first-night-out shipboard drunk and also get a card game going, if Chips would advance him an adequate sum. Instead, he was being assaulted by all this prattle. The trouble with this party, with this entire crossing, was that they had already been in each other’s company for far too long. Mrs. Simpson had attempted this feeble honeysuckle joke just two or three days before. Duff should have tried to talk the prince out of this lunatic voyage at the outset. That they were now at sea in a strange, new ship was testament to Duff’s irresponsibility and fecklessness. It shamed him. To think he still flattered himself with hopes of being named minister for war.

  Edwina was far more distressed than her empty chatter indicated. She’d been overjoyed to learn that her old friend Nancy Cunard had joined their traveling party, and subsequently devasted to hear from Emerald that her reconciliation with her daughter was far from complete and that Nancy was keeping herself to the second-class decks, playing the exile. Edwina and Nancy were odd as well as old friends, sharing an ardent socialism and a few mutual lovers but seldom together socially—not really since Nancy had disappeared into Paris back in the 1920s. As much taken with leftist causes as Nancy, Edwina had always come upon her trail too late—whether in Juan Miró’s Montmartre or Henry Crowder’s Harlem—held back by her husband Dickie and his leechlike adherence to the royal family and the Mayfair set.

  “It’s utterly impossible,” said Emerald, jeweled fingers nervously rattling against her champagne glass. “She promised me she wouldn’t bring him along. She promised me we could devote this time together to working out the problems that have come between us. Instead, she plays Desdemona to his beastly Othello. I daresay he’s the blackest man I’ve ever seen.”

  Edwina glanced at the prince, who was strumming and singing an approximation of “Moon Over Miami.” “This is not the most congenial atmosphere for what I’m sure is going to be a painful process for you,” she said.

  “Then she shouldn’t have come along at all,” Emerald said.

  “Then you shouldn’t have invited her, darling.”

  “Stop it, Edwina. You’re being insurgé. This is really quite intolerable. It’s almost as if she plotted to humiliate me. I’m merely trying to be a mother. It’s not easy, especially for a woman in my circumstances.”

  When Emerald had been mistress to the endearing old George Moore and later to the fiery Sir Thomas Beecham, there was some reason to understand her “circumstances” and her neglect of her only offspring. Spending her days now wilting before the flattery of that pompous dolt von Ribbentrop, playing hostess to mountebanks and arrivistes, and suckling this childlike prince and his surrogate mother in London society were not “circumstances” that excused anything.

  “If she won’t come up here,” said Edwina, “why don’t you go down there?”

  “To second class? My dear, that’s just what I mean, just what she’s about. My humiliation—before my dearest friends.”

  “She’s just looking for common ground. She could have traveled third cabin, you know. She usually does.”

  “‘Common’ ground indeed.”

  The prince, cigarette in mouth, had come over to serenade them. As he leaned near, Mrs. Simpson closed her eyes. Duff Cooper looked at his watch. Diana Cooper smiled, and yawned.

  “I’ll go down and talk to her,” Edwina said to Emerald.

  But Lady Cunard had returned to her public self. “Do be careful of whom you talk to if you go there, my dear. You don’t want to ‘darken’ your reputation any further.”

  The prince returned to Mountbatten’s side. The two linked arms and commenced a clumsy dance.

  “Topping!” Mountbatten shouted above the music.

  Despite the tension between them, Markgraf von Bourke and Kresse and his sister entered the elegant, dimly lit, and largely deserted first-class dining room looking the picture of graciousness and amiability, he in somewhat old-fashioned black tie and she in a sleek black satin gown that handsomely set off her smooth white skin and blond hair. They were late, almost at the end of the serving. They had waited for an invitation to the captain’s table, as befitted their aristocratic rank. They waited for it much longer than the count’s pride normally would have permitted, but he was strongly mindful of their need to make contact with the British group as soon as possible. And that gang, he knew, would be guaranteed the best seats in the house.

  A preposterous honor, such seats, signifying nothing. But von Kresse would seek it. He would do whatever was necessary.

  He inhale
d sharply. Though there was no sign of it in his calm expression, his leg was hurting fearfully from the exertions of the day’s long travel and he had to lean on Dagne for support. She kept her arm around his waist to hold him tightly.

  The maître d’ assigned them a large table near one of the large square windows looking out over the sea, now invisible in the darkness. Dagne was even more indignant than he that they had not been invited to the captain’s table. Judging from the passenger list, there were very few aristocrats aboard, and—except for the incognito royal traveling party—none higher ranking than she and Martin.

  Von Kresse decided to be grateful for the captain’s slight. He was greatly tired, and hardly up to the conversational rigors of a formal dining party and the rituals of the ship captain’s company. Glancing discreetly at the British group, he saw that the captain had absented himself from his table, leaving the ranking place there to be taken by a subordinate who looked to be either the first officer or the ship’s doctor. Some of those there appeared to be Dutch—doubtless officials of the shipping line and their wives, but the rest were ummistakably English. One imposing blond woman looked familiar to him.

  He turned away, gazing for a moment at the blackness of the window. “Dagne. Are those the Coopers, over to the right?”

  She lifted her wineglass, peering over it carefully.

  “Ich glaube das ist richtig, liebchen,” she said. “The aviator’s unerring eye. I don’t recognize the dark-haired man with them, but the old woman next to him must be Lady Cunard. Sicher.”

  “Her laughter is very shrill.”

  “She leads a shrill life.”

  “I was wrong to wait so long in the stateroom, then.”

  “Perhaps not. I don’t see any of the others—the principals.” She turned back to her brother and lighted a cigarette. “His Highness and Mrs. Simpson must be dining in secret.”

  “I’m sure they are staying in their cabins.”