Deck Z - The Titanic

by Chris Pauls

  “You don’t understand,” Weiss protested. “I need protection—”

  “Ack,” interrupted Lockerbie, grabbing the cane back. He held the stick in one hand, grunting to get the German’s attention, and tossed what was left of the apple on the floor. With a quick twist of the handle, a cruel six-inch blade sprung from the cane’s end and locked into place with a satisfying metallic thunk. The old man stabbed the apple clean through and offered it to Weiss.

  Weiss removed the apple and inspected the sturdy blade. In close quarters, a blade might prove more dependable than a pistol. He was not much of a shot, and guns could misfire. Hidden inside the cane, the knife was certainly more discreet. “Yes,” he said, “this should do very nicely indeed.”

  Now Weiss leaned on his new stick as he surveyed the enormous crowd of passengers, gawkers, and well-wishers. Motor cars full of trunks honked their way through the assembly, while men in bowler hats checked their pocket watches and hurried to the proper gangways. Then with a start, and cursing his complacency, Weiss suddenly hurried to blend into the throngs of people. Tugging his cap down and shuffling toward the boarding lines, he thought, I must remember to be more inconspicuous.

  7

  ROOFTOP. SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND.

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 1912. 10:10 A.M.

  The Agent stood atop a building overlooking the Southampton harbor. His perch was the perfect vantage point to watch a line of fidgeting third-class passengers boarding the ship. Gawkers clapped along with the band, competing with screeching gulls and the cheering crowd to create a boisterous din.

  It had been seven years since the pogrom in Kishinev destroyed his life. He hated Weiss for delaying his revenge even one day longer. The wait would end today. The traitor hadn’t shown himself as yet, but he would.

  The Agent was confident he could spot Theodor Weiss in the black of night during a thunderstorm, and on this morning, the bright sun shone in a clear blue sky. Weiss would travel as a third-class passenger: scientists were logical to a fault. To disappear, he’d pick the most unassuming form of passage. Weiss was among this crowd; of that, the Agent was certain.

  No one who knew the real Vitaly Jadovsky would mistake the Agent for the propagandist, but a bit of disguise went a long way. The Agent was now a fair match for the Russian’s grainy passport photo. Dressed in a black top coat with black tie and gray whiskers (attached to his chin with spirit gum), he should easily pass through customs. Then again, perhaps he wouldn’t need to …

  For there was Weiss!

  The Agent established the vial’s hiding place instantly—in the worn black satchel the scientist clutched tightly in his left hand. Even from the rooftop, the Agent could see the tension in Weiss’s fist and forearm.

  The Agent swiftly made his way to street level and entered the moving current of the crowd, keeping Weiss in his sights. The scientist was clearly traveling alone, with no companion to call for help or play the hero. Perfect. The raucous mob scene provided sufficient cover, but also a logistical problem: How to snatch the bag with the least fuss and fewest witnesses?

  Closing in on his target, the Agent quickly considered his options. Killing Weiss was best, but it was unlikely to go unnoticed or unchallenged in such a crowd. It was also risky to murder the defector before the Agent was certain he had the Toxic. After the ruse with the dummy vial on Brocken Mountain, the Agent could not dismiss the possibility that Weiss might pull the trick again. The simplest ploy was to knock down Weiss from behind, then grab the bag in the confusion and quickly disappear into the masses. If the Agent couldn’t steal and authenticate the Toxic before the ship sailed, he’d finish his business on board.

  A steam whistle let out a blast. His whole body went taut. He was within thirty feet of Weiss—only to be brought to a dead stop by an unacceptable development.

  8

  BOAT DOCK. SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND.

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 1912. 10:35 A.M.

  “Boy.”

  Weiss beckoned to a scruffy youth standing alone on the dock, peering up at Titanic’s imposing stacks from beneath an oversized newsboy’s cap. The child’s hands were stuffed inside a dingy, charcoal-colored coat that was too large by a third. Only scuffed leather boots were visible beneath the worn black cloth.

  “Who are you calling ‘boy’?”

  Weiss held out a few dull coins in the palm of his hand. “You, if it’s not too much bother. I’m offering a paying job. It’s simple enough, unless you have no use for money?”

  The child’s face brightened a bit. “Call me Lou.”

  The youth approached Weiss tentatively, the way a squirrel might creep toward an old man offering a handful of nuts. Lou appeared to be no more than eleven years old, perhaps twelve, with locks of rust-colored hair attempting to escape the confines of the cap. A patch of skin missing from his nose indicated a spill or a fight. The scrape suited him, either way.

  Weiss eased the urchin a few coins. “Just stand here and talk to me.” And anyone searching the crowd will expect me to be alone, he thought, not traveling with a child. “My stomach is feeling a little unsettled. I’ll gladly pay for a little conversation. It would be a welcome distraction.”

  “Seasick already? We’re not even on the boat!” The boy examined the coins—they appeared genuine. With a shrug, he cleaned his right hand against his cloth coat and offered it to Weiss. “Lou Goodwin. Good to know you.”

  “Hello, Lou,” said Weiss. “I’m G. P. Nosworthy.”

  “It’s a pleasure, G. P.”

  “That’s Mr. Nosworthy to you.”

  Lou arched an eyebrow. “High class, I get it. A real Guggenheim.”

  Weiss stared blankly. “A real Googen … ?”

  Lou pointed to a parade of first-class passengers making their way across a gangplank six stories up. “Guggenheim,” the kid said, noting a gentleman in an expensive straw hat. “He’s the one with the hundred-pound mustache.”

  Weiss frowned. “How do you know that’s Mr. Guggenheim?”

  “He’s the Sultan of Smelt!” cried Lou. “Worth millions! Don’t you read the papers?”

  “I generally don’t find gossip and scandal worth reading,” said Weiss.

  “Whatever you say, mister. But I’ll tell you this: I sell fifty copies before noon most days. With good gossip, seventy-five.” Lou sized up the strange gentleman with the odd accent. “What are you in, anyway?”

  “Exports,” the German replied.

  Judging by Weiss’s rather ordinary clothing, Lou decided there must not be much money in exports.

  Weiss was now only ten or twelve people away from the ticket takers. He looked around furtively for signs of anyone following him. All seemed ordinary. He was nearly on the ship, mere steps away from escape.

  “Oh! There’s one for you,” said Lou. “That’s the Lady Cardeza. ‘Lady’ because she used to be married to a Spanish king or duke or some sort. Watched them unload her automobile this morning—how many trunks you wager she’s bringing on board?”

  “I couldn’t speculate,” said Weiss, becoming distracted as the line trickled forward.

  “Would it kill you to make a guess?” asked Lou. “You’re payin’ for this. Fourteen trunks! Enough to fill two houses. All that money and she can’t even keep her hair on straight.”

  Weiss drew his attention to the matron in a polar bear fur coat, slowly making her way into first-class passage. As Lou had observed, Lady Cardeza’s silver-blue hair was traveling southward into her eyes.

  “Spend some of that dough on a hair pin, why don’t ya!” shouted Lou. A firm hand grabbed Lou’s ear and spun the child round.

  “I’ve been looking for you for nearly an hour!” scolded a serious young woman wearing a fancy ruffled hat that didn’t quite match her dress. “Have you lost your mind, Louise?”

  “Louise?” Weiss exclaimed. He took a second look at the waif. Sure enough, it was a girl hidden beneath the oversized cap. Since when are girls allowed to sell newspapers
? Weiss thought.

  Lou twisted to escape the tight grip on her ear, but it was no use. She pleaded to Weiss, “Been here all along, haven’t I, mister?”

  The woman noticed Weiss for the first time. She released Lou’s ear, straightened up, and smoothed her dress with her gloved hands. “Has my daughter been bothering you? She was meant to be back at the hotel changing clothes for the journey.”

  “Told you, it’s too cold for that frilly thing,” said Lou, crossing her arms defiantly.

  “No,” replied Weiss, clearing his throat. “Not bothering me at all.” The woman’s pretty blue eyes still sparked with anger behind perfectly round spectacles. “I must say, she seems to know a great deal about the world.”

  “Not half as much as she believes,” said the woman. “I’m sorry for the trouble.” She allowed a small smile and firmly took Lou’s hand. “Come on now. Don’t get lost before we can even get to America.”

  “I assure you, there was no trouble,” Weiss said, remembering to tip his cap. “A pleasant journey to you.”

  The young woman acknowledged his courtesy with a polite nod, then yanked Lou’s arm as she turned away. The girl waved back, grinning broadly. “Did you hear that, mister? We’re going to America!”

  9

  TITANIC BRIDGE.

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 1912. 12:40 P.M.

  Taking a moment away from his crew on the bridge, Captain Edward J. Smith crossed callused hands over his broad chest and exhaled. Titanic wasn’t even an hour into her maiden voyage, and already she nearly had suffered a collision. He had hoped for a less dramatic onset to the journey.

  It wasn’t that he believed everything always went according to plan. Quite the opposite. His experience facing the unexpected was what made him such an effective sea captain. Since Titanic’s maiden voyage would also be Smith’s last, he was even more on guard than usual.

  All had looked well as Titanic prepared for launch. It glided out of the Southampton berth easy as you please and out toward sea. Cheering onlookers ran along the docks, chasing Titanic. Two additional ships moored in the harbor, New York and Oceanic, were full of passengers who had paid a fine price, not to sail, but for a deckside view of the world’s largest liner as it embarked for the first time.

  The trouble began as Titanic passed the two smaller ships. Even at a slow launch speed, Titanic’s massive triple-screw propellers created a mighty churn. The wake created by its twenty-six-thousand-ton hull was so powerful that the sturdy ropes tethering New York and Oceanic to the docks strained tight. Then, New York’s ropes snapped loudly enough to be mistaken for shotguns firing, and the ship was slowly sucked toward the side of Titanic.

  Smith had experienced a similar calamitous scenario only seven months prior. That time, a small warship got caught in the wake of Smith’s Olympic. The smaller vessel was dragged into the liner, ripping a serious wound in the larger boat’s side. Smith wasn’t blamed—the docks and harbors simply couldn’t accommodate the new breed of giant liners. “Too big to handle!” proclaimed the naysayers.

  Smith believed otherwise. With New York dangerously close to ramming Titanic, he stood tall in his ceremonial dress whites and calmly ordered Titanic’s port propeller into high gear. The ensuing wash pushed the smaller boat away, and Titanic came to a virtual halt, avoiding impact by a matter of feet.

  There was a fair amount of whooping and back-slapping among the men in the wheelhouse, but Smith put a stop to it. “Back to your posts,” he commanded. “Celebrate on your leave. There’s still work to be done.”

  In the Café Parisien, a luxury saloon for Titanic’s first-class passengers, chatter filled the air. To be sure, between the cheering crowds and the band’s merry playing, most of the travelers had no inkling there had been any danger. Yet several prominent passengers witnessed the near-miss, and J. Bruce Ismay, chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, felt his ears burn at the whispers:

  Is she safe?

  Off to a poor start, I’d say!

  Bad omen!

  Ismay knew it was a habit of the rich to find fault. His marriage to a society girl ensured he never forgot. Quibbling over the color of the cabin walls and the quality of the cutlery—all to be expected. But was it too much to ask that Smith get Titanic out of harbor without incident?

  “All’s well, Bruce?”

  George Dunton Widener, a solidly built man with rimless, nose-pinch spectacles and a waxed moustache, slapped a beefy hand on Ismay’s shoulder. Ismay was a taller man than most, but Widener, a board member of the Philadelphia bank that controlled White Star Line, could still make him feel like a boy.

  “Quite well, as you can see,” replied Ismay. “Why, we’ll be in Cherbourg before you can whistle ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’”

  “Very good,” laughed Widener, lighting a cigar and blowing smoke into the lounge’s ornate fixtures. “We have seven and a half million reasons to wish for a successful voyage, you and me.”

  Ismay managed a humorless smile. He knew full well the cost of building Titanic and how much White Star’s fleet was mortgaged to pay for her. He wasn’t about to give Widener the satisfaction of seeing him perspire.

  “To celebrate our successful launch,” Ismay announced with a grand wave of his hand, “our best champagne for everyone!”

  The stewards set corks flying into the air, and Ismay let the applause of Titanic’s wealthy wash away his distress. Perhaps the worst was over. That was the best way to look at it. Ismay wasn’t going to let anything tarnish the glory of his triumph.

  10

  DECK E. THIRD-CLASS CABIN.

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 1912. 1:15 P.M.

  Weiss found his way down Titanic’s winding stairs and narrow hallways. Brass railings gleamed, marred only by their first fingerprints. The cream-colored walls appeared still wet with fresh paint.

  If anything, the ship seemed even bigger on the inside, and its confusing layout didn’t help matters. Once below, passengers couldn’t travel directly from the ship’s front to back—bulkheads bisected the decks at odd intervals, necessitating trips down flights of stairs, through corridors, and then back up again. He’d expected the passengers to be separated on different decks by class, but that wasn’t exactly the case. While first-class accommodations were generally on the upper levels, they sometimes neighbored second-class cabins, which were found on all seven passenger decks. Eventually, Weiss stopped trying to make sense of the layout, winding his way through the maze of second- and third-class cabins on Deck E until he found Cabin 156 toward the back of the ship.

  His ticket demanded that he share the room and its two sets of polished wooden bunks with three other men. The cabin had space for little else. Weiss arrived first and claimed a bottom berth; a proper spring mattress and feather pillows to boot were more than he had expected. He was used to scratchy military-issue bedding that smelled as if it had been boiled in bleach.

  Eventually, his cabin-mates appeared: two down-on-their-luck Bulgarian brothers and a moody Finn—not Weiss’s preferred company, but a suitable group to disappear in for a few days. He eyed them for signs of disease common to steerage folk: typhoid, typhus, cholera. They appeared healthy enough. Weiss grimaced when he realized there was only one shared bathing tub for all the third-class men. The room’s smell promised to ripen. He aimed to spend as little time in quarters as possible.

  Weiss allowed himself a moment of relief and wondered: Had he truly escaped? Except for the fare-thee-well commotion and celebration, boarding the Titanic had been uneventful, more than he’d dared hope. He was proud of his deception with the girl, Louise, but perhaps now that he was safely aboard, more subterfuge wouldn’t be necessary. He could begin planning his next step. The crossing gave him five nights to consider his future in America.

  But such thoughts could wait. What he needed now was a steaming cup of Earl Grey tea. His only luggage was his valise, and for a brief second he considered leaving it locked in the room when he ventured out.
Then he immediately cursed himself for a fool. Perhaps he’d escaped his pursuers, but did he think Titanic lacked garden-variety thieves? The bag’s contents were too important to leave unattended, and his cabin-mates looked just the types to rummage a man’s things if given the chance. His cane would also need to be a constant companion. In fact, it would not be a bad idea to sleep with it at his side.

  Weiss wandered into the third-class general room in search of refreshment and found that seemingly every other passenger in steerage had the same idea. The pine-paneled common area, trimmed in gleaming white enamel, teemed with passengers thrilled to be at sea.

  Weiss settled himself into an empty spot on a smooth teak bench, secured his valise between his shoes, and took in the frenzied surroundings. Men filled their pipes and spun tales. Children chased one another; clucking mothers ran after them. A bagpipe player sat in the corner, playing woeful tunes. The bleating music competed with the sound of boisterous conversation.

  “Mr. Nosworthy?”

  Weiss didn’t respond, lost in all the activity and noise.

  “Mr. Nosworthy? Anyone sitting here?”

  Weiss looked up to find a girl fidgeting in a dark wool skirt and ruffled shirt, threadbare in places but clean. Of course, Lou, the child from the dock. Apparently, her mother had won the wardrobe argument, and the girl didn’t look to like it one bit. Her copper hair fought against the bow her mother had tied, and mad curls struggled to break free as Lou impatiently shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Something about the girl’s piercing gaze reminded Weiss very much of his sister, Sabine, and he felt a shock of recognition. It was a look he hadn’t seen in twenty years.

  The bench was full of passengers, but Weiss shifted to create a space beside him. “By all means.”