Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  “My mother was a very good cook,” Mrs. Simpson said icily. “One of the best in Baltimore. A number of prominent gentlemen of the city came to our house to eat, and they left money with my mother to compensate her for her grocery purchases and her efforts.”

  “I see,” said Dagne, glancing to the still-impassive prince. She was sure he had heard. It would come to him shortly.

  “Why do you ask?” Mrs. Simpson demanded. “What concern is it of yours?”

  “Oh,” said Dagne, with her wickedest smile. “It is because we have something in common. My family owns a number of inns. They are the central part of the many villages on our estate.”

  “How nice,” said Wallis, a sweetness and heavy drawl returning to her speech. “You are in Poland, are you? You’re Polish?”

  “We are German! Wir sind von Ost Prussen! And you? You are Jewish, yes? You have an Uncle Solomon?”

  “Wallis is certainly not Jewish!” the prince exclaimed suddenly.

  “Dagne!” said the count. “Komst du hierher! Jezt!”

  Smiling gleefully now, Dagne did as bidden. She was sure she had done it. With just a few words, a brief but potent exchange, she had revealed what she was certain was the Simpson woman’s most horrible secret. She had planted the seed in the prince’s mind. He was as much an anti-Semite as anyone in the Reich. The seed would flourish and grow. His passion would turn to wound. It would fester.

  Von Kresse had left Edwina, to draw Dagne away from this awful exchange with Mrs. Simpson. The countess pursued her brother, moving awkwardly along the center aisle of the rocking boat, the clever smile still in place.

  “I have administered the poison,” she said in a heavy whisper when they finally took a seat. “I should have thought of doing this days ago.”

  “What poison?”

  “She’s a Jew. Or she could be. He must come to believe this. Her dark hair. Her large nose. Even if she isn’t, he will come to think so. I’ve planted it in his mind.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. She has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  “Unlike your darling Jewish Edwina.”

  “Be quiet!”

  “We have triumphed, Martin. It took only a moment. I just went up to her and said a few words and it’s done. They will never be married. He will never leave the throne.”

  “Are you mad, Dagne? Look at them. You upset her and his response is to comfort her. She could be wearing a yellow star of David and he would only pull it off like some offending piece of lint. You could have the word ‘Jewess’ or ‘Negress’ branded on her forehead, and he would kiss it. Can’t you see that? If we are to perform any service for our disgusting government, it will be to report that they are inextricably attached, that the German nation must accommodate itself to this reality and plot its foreign adventures accordingly. Germany and Great Britain will never be allies.”

  The countess’s triumphant expression turned to one of confusion and worry, but she would not speak such feelings. “You are wrong, Martin. You have been wrong about what is happening in Germany and you are wrong about this.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more. You make me want to get up and jump into the sea.”

  He rose stiffly and went back to Edwina. Dagne stared after him coldly, then asked Duff for some wine. She took a cupful, drank it in a few gulps, and then asked for more.

  If Martin was correct, she would try again. She would find some way to provoke this Mrs. Simpson into a self-destructive act. She would not let glorious opportunity pass unused. They still had hours left, perhaps another day, trapped together on this tiny boat. If Dagne could not accomplish what had been asked of them, everything she believed about herself would be wrong. She was a superior person. She and Martin were the best. Mrs. Simpson was cabbage.

  Kees fired off another flare, then set the Very pistol back into its place in the wheelhouse.

  “Is there anyone here who knows about engines?” he asked, coming forward to the center of the group again.

  “I know everything about engines,” Lord Mountbatten said.

  “I need some help with the motor,” Kees said. “Now that the weather’s cleared, I want to take out the spark plugs and distributor—all the electrical parts—and dry them. I think our trouble may be simply that they got wet in the storm.”

  “I’ll be more than happy to undertake this,” Mountbatten said. “Do as I instruct you and we can have it done in twenty minutes.”

  “Quel sangfroid,” said Diana. “Our dashing Dickie.”

  Nora moved closer to Spencer, leaning her head against his shoulder. In private, in some warm and comfortable intimate surrounding, it would be cuddling. Perhaps it was even here.

  “You seem happy,” he said.

  “I am. I am thinking happy thoughts.”

  “Happy thoughts? In the middle of the sea in this little boat? Happy thoughts of what?”

  She grinned, holding him more tightly. “Of our children.”

  Without their ever having been to bed, or even come close to it, she had progressed from goddess to nun to wife. His life had taken him to this small, forsaken boat and this beautiful but worrisome woman. Where were they bound after this?

  “Mother!” Nancy Cunard shrieked. “The sea is calming! We’re going to live! Isn’t that quite quite wonderful! Don’t you just hate it?”

  “Shut up, Nancy!”

  “You look quite quite awful, Mother. You look a sight. Actually ugly. Quite, quite. That’s how you’re going to live the rest of your life. And then you’ll die, Mother! We’ll all die! Not today. This is just a reprieve. But soon enough, Mother!”

  “Oh, Nancy,” Diana said wearily. “Do give it a rest.”

  Captain van der Heyden sat like a great lump in his bridge chair, legs and arms hanging limp with his extraordinary fatigue. The blood that swelled his hands and fingers filled them with pain, but his sense of it was dull and bleary, like his vision. He was tired of frustration, tired of his continuing effort, tired of the unending threat and danger, tired even of drink. If he were to die now it would come as a great relief. To die, to sleep. And not to dream.

  Van Groot’s square face came into the captain’s vision.

  “They’re out,” he said, in a slow voice as weary as the captain’s.

  “What are out?”

  “The fires. They’re all out. Every one. Every single damned one.”

  “You’ve said that before during the evening.”

  Van Groot spoke not in triumph but in fact. “The evening is ended. It’s cold daylight and it’s true. All the fire control stations report everything out. It’s something of a miracle, I admit, but it’s true.”

  The captain sat up, with great effort, his hands held ridiculously up in the air beside him, his eyes blinking against the harsh sunlight. “Every single one, Mr. van Groot? It’s actually all over? I’m not having a dream?”

  “Not about the fires, Captain.”

  “Yes, it seems to be true,” said van Hoorn, coming forward from some shadowy part of the bridge. “I think we’re over it.”

  The quartermaster still stood at the helm, one hand resting on the unused wheel, but the officers on the bridge slouched and slumped. One sat on the floor, back against the bulkhead, snoring.

  Van der Heyden heaved himself further erect, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

  “I want a complete damage report,” he said.

  “That’s relatively simple,” said Van Groot. “Boiler Rooms No. 4 and No. 5 are burned out. Most of the upper second-class cabins were destroyed, along with the second-class galley, dining room, and lounge. The aft funnel and ventilating shafts are burned out; the first-class galley and the after-turbo generating room, too. But the forward three boilers are undamaged. I think we can get under way.” The first officer’s face was blackened from the oily soot and smoke.

  “What about casualties?”

  “Amazingly,” said van Groot, “only Chief Engineer Brinker and two seamen
are dead, and that mysterious man who was shot. Perhaps two dozen are burned, at least ten so badly as to need hospitalization. Including yourself, Captain.”

  Van der Heyden coughed. “Nonsense.” The remark made him feel the pain in his hands more strongly. “At least not yet. What about the electric?” he asked.

  “We’re rewiring what we can. Enough to restore power to the turbines.”

  “The weather is good now,” van Groot added. “Improving.”

  “So?” said the captain, looking at the other’s face quite clearly now. They had not ever really been friends, but they had long sailed together.

  “So the possibility exists that we can continue to New York.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “Captain, to complete the voyage,” van Hoorn said. “Your only purpose.”

  The captain looked over at the chart table, but was doubtful of mustering the energy to walk to it.

  “What’s our position?” he asked.

  “The storm drove us about sixty nautical miles to the northeast, and we’re drifting farther north in the Gulf Stream.”

  “But not much?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And the passengers?”

  “We have all the lifeboats in view except three. The passengers appear to be all right, though they may have lost some overboard during the night.”

  “And the starboard steel motorboat?”

  Van Groot cast his eyes down. “I am afraid, Captain, that the Prince of Wales’ party is one of the three that are missing.”

  “You can’t lose him,” said a voice from across the bridge. The tall, curly-haired man had removed his raincoat and was standing in shirtsleeves, his too-short tie askew. He came up to the group gathered around the captain. “You have to go after him first.”

  “I will retrieve them all,” said van der Heyden, rising clumsily. He touched the chair back for support and winced with the hurt. “Every passenger. But you are right. That one first. If possible.”

  “I’ll help you with the navigation,” said the tall man. “I know something about drift.”

  “I guess you do, sir,” said van Groot.

  His steps dragging, the captain went to the sliding door that opened onto the starboard bridge wing. When Ladewijk shoved it back for him, he stepped into the cold, reviving, brisk air, his eyes burning from the dazzling dancing light upon the sea. Turning slowly, he looked toward the stern. From the aft funnel to the second-class promenade, the superstructure of the Wilhelmina was a blackened ruin. In many places the steel had been twisted by the heat and there were still small, wispish columns of smoke rising here and there, blown back by the wind.

  “Have we taken on any more water?”

  “Only from the fire hoses. Otherwise, no sir. The hull’s not damaged.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, sir. We have the water from the hoses to pump out, but there’s been no significant leakage.”

  “Very well. As soon as you have power, get the pumps going and see if you can get some steam up.”

  “There’s an Italian warship within forty miles of us, sir. Coming as fast as she can.”

  “Luister naar mij. I did not become master of this vessel to be hauled off the ocean by the Italian navy. If it comes to that, we’ll wait for the Dutch navy.”

  The others laughed, including the tall, curly-haired American.

  It took nearly an hour, not the twenty minutes Lord Mountbatten had boasted, but he and Kees managed to dry and reassemble the engine parts with great precision and, after several coughs and sputters, get the motor started again. After running it at high revolutions for several minutes, Kees then turned it off.

  “What the hell?” Duff said.

  “I don’t want to waste fuel,” Kees said. “We’re not going anywhere until I can get a fix on our position and have a reasonable idea there’s a ship in our vicinity.”

  “The Wilhelmina should be just to the northwest,” Duff said.

  “We don’t know where she is,” Kees said. “We don’t know if she’s even afloat.”

  “He’s quite right, don’t you know,” said Mountbatten.

  Kees fired off another flare with the Very pistol, the sound startling a number of those aboard the motorboat. Their mood had diminished from cheer to solemnity as the horizon continued to remain empty.

  Spencer found Mrs. Parker suddenly kneeling before him, her tears dried but her eyes still full of sadness—and a little craziness. She placed her hands on his.

  “You saved my life,” she said. “I must thank you for that. You’re a very brave man. I might have drowned. You might have drowned.”

  He moved his hands to take hers. They were extraordinarily beautiful hands despite all the wind and salt water, lovelier even than Nora’s. Her face was reddened, though. She’d been thoroughly beaten, by more than the sea.

  “I’m glad I was able to help you.”

  “But we killed him, you and I,” she said. “By saving me, we abandoned him. We made him drown, you and I.” She began to cry again.

  “It was an accident, Mrs. Parker. It was no fault of yours. Or mine.”

  “We might have saved him,” she said, sobbing. “We could have. We could have.”

  Nora, transforming herself from wife to mother, reached and drew Mrs. Parker up on the seat beside her, putting both arms around her.

  Spencer took himself away. The only available seat with easy reach was by Count von Kresse. Edwina had gone aft to the wheelhouse.

  “Wozu,” said the count.

  Spencer had not heard the term since the war days. It was the German version of the phrase that had come to be the theme of 1918. The French talked of “la Gloire” and “la Victoire.” The British and Americans in the trenches said “What’s it all for?” And their German foes said “Wozu?”

  Not all the French talked of “la Victoire.” When the armistice came, Spencer had been flying near the French sector east of Verdun and landed by their war-worn trenchworks to view the awesomely quiet front. There’d been a grizzled old poilu standing atop a breastwork and gazing solemnly out over the cratered moonscape that was no-man’s land. The old soldier shook his head and uttered just one word. He said it softly:

  “Merde.” It was much the same as “wozu.”

  “What was your worst day of the war?” Spencer asked the count.

  Von Kresse shrugged, his left shoulder twisting as he did so. “A day? A single worst day? I suppose I could say it was a day in October 1918 when I was more or less blown apart by a seventy-five-millimeter shell. There was a bloody awful day—two days, during the Meuse-Argonne when I had to kill three Americans in a shell hole with a rifle and bayonet and then spend that night and the next day with them while they died—one slowly after another. I could name a hundred days but they now seem all the same—they were all the worst.”

  “You fought as an infantryman at the end, yes?”

  “For a time, yes.”

  “But you were one of the leading aces of the war.”

  “I gave up the war in the air after—after that unfortunate incident we discussed earlier. The ‘atrocity.’”

  “The schoolteacher and the children. The only atrocity attributed to the German Air Service.”

  “Yes,” the count said gravely.

  Spencer stared down at the floorboards. “You were that pilot?”

  “Yes.” Uttered with the longest of sighs, this affirmative was almost a philosophical statement. “We were strafing an advancing British column that we caught in the village. I was making a firing pass as I came around a church steeple. I thought it was an infantry file. When I made the second pass, I—I saw what I had done. There’s been nothing more horrible in my life.”

  “But you shot them up again!” Spencer restrained himself. “I’m sorry. That’s how the story went.”

  “The story is true. They were in terrible agony, thrashing about on the ground. It was almost as if I could hear their screams, thei
r terror. I wanted to leave them in peace.”

  “Some might have lived.”

  “I had only a few seconds. I was coming apart in pieces over what I had done.”

  The two sat silently for a long moment, listening to the wash and slap of the water against the rocking boat.

  “I’ve never been quite put back together,” Count yon Kresse said.

  “I strafed a trench once,” Spencer said. “I killed sleeping men.”

  “War.”

  “Fucking war.”

  “Wozu.”

  “And you went into the trenches,” Spencer said. “To get rid of your guilt. To expiate your sin. Maybe to kill yourself.”

  “Possibly. I have never been rid of that guilt. I simply didn’t want to fly any more. I wanted no more fighting against those I could scarcely see. I realized how ‘unclean’ the pristine ‘knight’s war’ in the air really was. If I had to kill, I wanted my enemy directly in front of me. I wanted my hands on him. I wanted him to be able to kill me. But you know, with those three Americans in the shell hole, it was just as bad as the French schoolteacher and her children. In a way, worse. I killed those three men with great intent, to save my own life, but then I tried to save them—two of them anyway, the last two—but I could not. They went one, two, three. And when the last one went, it was the worst. I remember the look in his eyes. His eyes are great holes in a musty hunk of bone somewhere, but the last look in them still lives with me.”

  “You fought as a private soldier? You gave up your rank?”

  “In my family, this rank is hereditary. I can never be rid of it. It’s my curse now. In 1918 I simply decided to ignore it.” He pointed to his Pour le Mérite. “This I was awarded after my twentieth kill in the air. I sent it home to my father, knowing it would please him.” His finger moved to the plain Iron Cross beside the more princely medal. “At the end I wanted no medals, of any kind. But they gave me this—for killing in the muck and the filth, when my squad captured an American machine-gun post. I was the only one left of my squad when it fell, so they gave me the simple soldier’s Iron Cross. I think they were handing them out to every other man by then. Corporal Hitler got one, for carrying dispatches in a gas attack, I think. Mine was a pitiful, pointless feat. There were hundreds and hundreds of other American machine guns to come, and tens of thousands more Americans, but my battalion treated this small success like the fall of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War. In all, I think our counterattack in that sector delayed the ultimate German collapse by three hours.”