Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

Spencer was the victor of the next hand with two high pair. The next round went to Channon, who held a full house of two queens and three tens, but no one else had bet very much and the pot was quite small.

  The game continued another forty-five minutes. Spencer remembered something his father had said about the stock market, the same stock market that had ruined the man: “Bulls win. Bears win. Pigs lose.” He played as conservatively as possible, yet managed to win enough pots to be £63 ahead of his expense-money funds. Duff’s early luck diminished and then fled, compelling him to borrow from Chips. Metcalfe lost consistently and looked glum, though, like Channon, he was married to one of the richest women in the empire.

  Cooper bet heavily on a straight, only to lose to Spencer’s heart flush. Channon won the next three hands.

  “Now I know why you’re called Chips,” Duff said, throwing down his cards. “We need more players. An infusion of capital. Fruity, go find that young Parker fellow. He’s an American. He must play poker. If he doesn’t, we’ll teach him.”

  “Duff,” said Metcalfe, who was his friend. “Don’t you think you’ve lost quite enough?”

  “The game’s hardly begun, old cock. Now fetch this young sport and I’ll arrange for another infusion of strong drink.”

  The major was still gone on his errand when Lord Mountbatten appeared at the doorway, dressed in pajamas, slippers, and dressing gown, his ear and forehead bandaged. He looked about the smoking room, ignoring them at first.

  “Mon Dieu,” said Spencer. “Voilà President Deschanel.”

  Duff laughed, excessively. Channon only stared. “Deschanel? Do I know him?”

  “He was elected president of France after the war—a handsome fellow, the amiable symbol of the happy times to come. Lost his mind almost immediately after taking office. He fell off a train and was found wandering along the tracks in his pajamas. ‘You may not believe this,’ he supposedly said to the first railroad worker he came upon, ‘but I’m your president.’ I think he ended his term of office the next year in a mental home.”

  “Do you think Dickie’s become deranged from the blow he suffered?”

  “Not at all,” said Duff. “He seems very much himself.”

  Mountbatten came up to their table looking much like a man reporting a theft to the police.

  “Are you all right, Dickie?” Channon asked. “I thought you were still in hospital.”

  “After the blows you took, old sport, I’m surprised to see you up walking,” Duff said. “The old Royal Navy spirit, what?”

  “I’m quite fine,” said Mountbatten. “Have you seen Edwina? I can’t find Edwina.” He addressed the last sentence to Spencer.

  “I’ve not seen her since the dinner party last night,” Spencer said.

  “None of us has, laddy buck,” said Duff.

  “She was with me this morning,” said Mountbatten. “But now she’s gone. I can’t find my sleeping powders. She put them some bloody place and now I can’t find them.”

  “Try the ship’s doctor,” said Cooper.

  “He’s the one who gave them to me in the first place.”

  “Dickie,” said Cooper, with slightly clenched teeth. “Go back to him and get some more. Or send a steward to fetch some.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Duff.”

  “I’m not patronizing you, Commander. I’m trying to bring you and sleeping powders back together again, if not you and Edwina.”

  Mountbatten’s eyes were cold but a little bleary. He was perhaps not himself after all. No one invited him to join the poker game, but he seemed uninterested in it. Without another word, he turned and marched off, his slippers making a flapping sound.

  “To think that man commands a destroyer,” Cooper said.

  “He told the captain what to do to stop the ship from listing last night,” Channon said. “It worked. He may have saved us from capsizing.”

  The seas had become noticably heavier and they could hear the wind whistling through some nearby aperture.

  “Dickie our savior,” said Duff as liquor slopped over the side of his glass. “We may need him again.”

  “It’s not a storm,” Spencer said. “We’ve crossed a cold front and have passed into a high-pressure area. Clear skies and stiff breezes.”

  “And stiff passengers,” said Channon. He drank.

  Young Parker came more than willingly, but appeared badly disappointed that there was no royal personage at the table.

  “Doesn’t His Highness play cards?” he asked as Duff ordered him a drink.

  “He does, but not in public,” said Channon. “On this trip he does nothing in public, as we explained.”

  “Then why don’t we join him?”

  “Because, dear boy, we’ve not been invited.”

  “Deal,” said Duff.

  The boy said he had played poker at Harvard, and indeed he showed not a little skill. He began winning almost immediately, mostly by raising bets so extravagantly as to drive others out. Once Duff tried to outraise him, presuming a bluff, but was devastated when Parker laid out four eights to his three jacks. Cooper had borrowed £100 from Chips but now it was gone. He turned to Spencer, who was now quite comfortably ahead.

  “I say, old boy,” said Cooper, “could I impose …”

  “Duff,” said Channon. “Borrow from me. Then you’ll only have to write one check.”

  “I shan’t have to write anything,” Cooper said, accepting two stacks of counters. “My luck is going to change.”

  It didn’t. Within the hour he was in need of money again. As all were at least a bit tipsy, it seemed a good time to end the game, but before they could agree to do so they were joined by yet another player. It was Mrs. Simpson, dressed as if for some afternoon’s high social function and glittering with rings, bracelets, earrings, and an enormous necklace.

  “Wallis,” said Metcalfe, glancing about at the other men in the room, “do you think this wise?”

  There was no longer the rigid separation of the sexes that applied to many of the public rooms of the old pre-war liners, but even in 1935 women were almost never seen in the first-class smoking room. On some ships it was still called the gentlemen’s lounge.

  “I can’t be penned up in there a moment longer,” she said. “And no one’s going to make much of a do over a little old Baltimore lady like me. Now will one of you gentlemen bring me a chair, or must I stand?”

  Chips lurched from his own to drag one over from the next table. He left it adjoining their own, but not brought quite up to it.

  “I’d like to join your little game,” Wallis said, her soft Southern speech hardening. “Will you please make room?”

  They hesitated, looking at each other, then shifted their chairs obediently. “Why not, Wallis?” said Duff. “You’ll change my luck.”

  She changed Spencer’s instead. The hands he was dealt thereafter were never quite good enough and he was compelled to fold time after time. Frustrated, he began to play more recklessly, drawing cards to outlandish combinations. His great horde of chips began to diminish.

  Spencer pushed the glass at his elbow aside. Young Parker was now quite drunk and Chips had become a bit silly, prattling on about gossipy matters to which no one was paying any real attention. Major Metcalfe had stopped drinking, as well, and kept glancing at his watch. Duff Cooper had consumed a vast amount of brandy and creme de menthe but seemed sober, even grim.

  Mrs. Simpson drank only Vichy water. She was winning quite handsomely with her disconcerting style of play—the fragile Southern lady confused and helpless in the midst of skilled gamblers, taking her cards with much fluttering of fingers and drawled exclamations of “Oh me, oh my.” She would look at her cards, and then at the backs of the others’ cards, repeating this several times before making her draw and bet. When her mind was finally made up, she had the habit of flicking the bottoms of her cards against one of her rings.

  She wore four. In China there had only been one, a wedding ring, though she
was then separated from her husband. One night in Shanghai’s Palace Hotel, she had beat Spencer out of $225. Spencer remembered the sum exactly. He now remembered this woman, as well, and very well. He tended to remember those he lost to in poker. He had forgotten the names of half the girls he had dated as a young man in Chicago but could recall almost photographically the police lieutenant who had taken him for his every cent the first time he had joined in the perpetual card game that was the principal activity in the press room at police headquarters. Half Greek and half Irish, the shrewd and bullying man had been, with meaty hands too big for his shot glass and an enormous pistol on his hip. It was said he’d killed a dozen or more Negroes with it, usually on Saturday nights.

  “Why, I believe I’ll raise you a pound note, Mr. Spencer,” said Mrs. Simpson. “That’s not too daring, is it? A pound note?”

  He saw her raise when the bet came round to him and called to see her hand. She beat his three tens and Metcalfe’s pairs of kings and jacks with three queens.

  It had been a dark and smoky room in the Palace. Hotel that they’d played poker in that night in 1924. As now, she’d been the only woman present, and she was the evening’s big winner. He’d danced with her once in the Palace bar that night, then lost her to some minor American diplomat from the consulate, who lost her to an Englishman. Shanghai was filled with westerners then. All of China was, except for the hard lands in the west, the lands and fierce, hard people Spencer had found at the ends of the long roads.

  She told him, in their brief dance to a badly played jazz tune that might have come from a Paris thé dansant, that she had come to Shanghai to arrange for a divorce from her naval aviator husband, a Lieutenant Win Spencer from Chicago. He didn’t realize at the time that she was talking about a very distantly related cousin of his, Earl Winfield Spencer, Jr., of Highland Park, an alcoholic philanderer who spent much of his off-duty time in China at the singsong houses. These were honorable places, but highly obscene. In them was practiced every form of sexual sin known to civilization, along with a few new ones the Chinese were working on.

  Mrs. Simpson had been much more attractive then, almost pretty, though most Caucasian women in China seemed pretty. She had a warm, friendly voice and was flirtatious. She’d been twenty-seven or twenty-eight then. According to some reports he’d heard, she sometimes accompanied her husband to the singsong houses to enjoy the titillation. She had, it was said, a lascivious mind and tongue. The provocation to divorce came from her husband’s drinking. She could not abide drunks, and drunkenness was a fixture in the navy life that Win Spencer had exiled her to.

  Jamieson had learned more about her before he’d finally left China. She’d gone on to Peking, where there were many more westerners and an abundance of unattached men. With no income other than her monthly navy allotment, she’d drifted from newfound friends to newfound friends, a perpetual itinerant house guest, surviving with ingratiating charm and a skill at cards. A wealthy American couple named Rogers finally took her in and made her a permanent resident of their luxurious Peking villa. There was talk of a ménage à trois.

  In later years Spencer had sometimes wondered what had become of that strong, strange, and pathetic woman. Now, here she was before him, bejeweled and the mistress of the next King of England. A hard and aging woman, almost ugly. It was uncanny.

  “Mrs. Simpson,” he said at length as Duff shuffled the cards. “I wonder if we haven’t met before, before last night.”

  She smiled without looking at him, fiddling with her stacks of chips. “Why, I suppose that’s altogether possible, as we’re both Americans and friends of Chips.”

  “No, Mrs. Simpson. I mean long ago, in the Orient. I was in China in the early twenties.” He waited, not picking up his newly dealt cards.

  She lifted her eyes to his. Her smile lingered, but her eyes were defiant and challenging, masking a cold and terrible fear. She had asked Win Spencer about this other Spencer she had met at the Palace Hotel and he had acknowledged the slight relationship.

  “‘There were rich Spencers in Chicago and poor ones,’” Win had said. “We were among the poor ones, and we never ever got to meet the rich ones. I became a flier because of him, though. He was a big hero in Chicago right after the war. He was in all the papers, not just his Daddy’s. Then he went off to Europe. I never did get to meet him.’”

  Wallis had finally removed Earl Winfield Spencer from her life in America—with a divorce decree granted in December 1927 by a judge in Warrenton, Virginia, after a year’s suffocating residence in that Little Blue Ridge county town.

  Now he was back to haunt her, in the form of this strange and forbidding cousin, bound to her until the end of this voyage.

  “I was in the Orient in the 1920s,” she said slowly and sweetly. “And I was for some time in China. But I led the cloistered life of the wife of a naval officer. I doubt that we met there. Surely I’d remember, for you have the same name as the officer I was married to.”

  “Earl Winfield Spencer.”

  “Why, yes. However could you possibly know that? You must have read something about me in the Baltimore newspapers.”

  There was pleading now faintly visible in her eyes, though otherwise her expression had not changed.

  “Your draw,” muttered Duff.

  “Two cards,” said Spencer. He kept two aces and a king. The two he drew were a three and another ace. He won the hand and a sizable pot.

  Thereafter Mrs. Simpson’s game became genuinely confused. She left within half an hour. At the final summing up, Spencer found himself the equivalent of $635 ahead. He could afford passage back to Europe, back to Whitney, without filing a story about Charles Lindbergh—or the Prince of Wales.

  The next fire alarm went off with First Officer van Groot in command on the bridge. The captain had gone for a nap and had not returned, though he was overdue.

  “Fire alarm, sir!” said one of the junior officers, redundantly.

  Van Groot moved quickly to the electrical display board. Only one red light was showing, indicating a fire in the engine room.

  “That’s where the false alarm was when Kees left the bridge the other night,” said the junior officer.

  “Are you sure?” asked van Groot.

  “Yes, sir. I think so. He checked out that entire system. There was nothing wrong.”

  “Call up the engine room. And get Kees. He should know where we should look for the trouble.”

  “But Mr. van Groot, Kees is off duty.”

  “Send a crewman to find him.”

  Van Groot leaned over the display board, staring glumly at the red light, waiting for more, waiting for a chain of red lights to flicker on—each tiny glow a silent representation of spreading flame. But there remained only one.

  He leaned closer still, then swore.

  “Een ogenblik!” he said. “You’re wrong! Kees’s false alarm was in the circulating pumps. This alarm light represents the main machinery supply switchboard. We had two of those units burn out at Le Havre.”

  “U bent juist, Heer van Groot.”

  “Only this time we can’t put the passengers out on the dock.”

  The quartermaster at the helm was staring straight ahead out the bridge windows, keeping the ship on the ordered course despite the serious distraction behind him.

  The junior officer turned away. He had the engine room on the intercom phone. “It’s Chief Engineer Brinker, Mr. van Groot.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “He confirms a fire in the main machinery-supply switchboard. An electrical fire.”

  “Ik ben ziek.”

  “Sir?”

  “This is not good.”

  “No, sir. Chief Engineer Brinker says they are trying to put out the fire with extinguishers, but he thinks they should close down the system until they have found the trouble.”

  “That means shutting down the turbines and stopping the ship.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Van Groot took up
the phone.

  “Brinker,” he said. “This is serious?”

  “Gevaar, Mijnheer,” said Brinker. “The fire hasn’t spread, but it’s stubborn.”

  “Very well,” van Groot said. “I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

  “Where is the captain?”

  “The captain is … sleeping.”

  He returned the intercom phone to its hook. “Full stop,” he commanded. “Rudder amidships.”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. van Groot? Should I sound the alarm throughout the ship?”

  “Certainly not! We’re not in that kind of trouble yet. All that burned at Le Havre were two switching units. That’s nothing to panic all these people over.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Turn out the next watch. I want them on duty now. Just in case.”

  “And the last watch, sir?”

  “Let them sleep for now. We may need them soon enough.”

  “Should I summon Mr. van Hoorn, sir?”

  “I’ll talk to him on my way below. I want you to awaken the captain, however.”

  “The captain, sir?”

  “Yes. Call him to the bridge. There are times when the captain should not be sleeping. I’m going down to the after-turbo generator room. When Kees shows up, send him to me.”

  Kees was down in third class, standing outside Olga Maretzka’s cabin door. Close to staggering from fatigue, he had gone directly from the bridge to his quarters when his watch was over, but he had not been able to sleep. The thoughts that had kept him so painfully awake had brought him here.

  He rapped twice, then two more times. There was no response. He waited a moment more, then rapped again, with more force. If she did not come, he would return at once to his bed. He was sure sleep would not fail him again.

  The door opened with a swift motion. He glimpsed a look of fear on Olga’s face but it vanished quickly. She held him with her eyes, then led him inside.

  She had a book in her hand, printed in a language he did not know.

  “Dear Kees,” she said. “You’ve come again.”

  She was wearing a rough woolen robe. Her legs and feet were bare. She set down the book and pulled him into her arms. She had only one small lamp on. This strange young woman seemed so fond of darkness.