The Titanic Murders

by Max Allan Collins

  “That’s right. But I prefer Jack.”

  “Pleasure, Jack.” The millionaire offered his hand, which bore several jeweled rings, a diamond here, a ruby there. “Ben Guggenheim.”

  They shook, and Futrelle said, “Is this elevator one of yours?”

  Guggenheim, pleasantly surprised by Futrelle’s question, said, “Why, no—I do business with White Star, but thus far they’ve not done business with me.”

  Futrelle had read a newspaper article about Guggenheim’s new company, International Steampump, building the elevators at the Eiffel Tower.

  “Sporting of you to give them your business, then,” Futrelle said.

  Guggenheim chuckled. “No choice—all the Cunard liners out of Paris were delayed because of the damned stokers’ strike.”

  Soon they were poised at the rail of the open portion of the promenade, Guggenheim indulging himself with a Havana, Futrelle lighting up a Fatima. Stars seemed to have been flung like diamonds against the black velvet of the sky; brilliant as they were, the stars cast no reflection on the obsidian waters, far below. The cold was bracing and a pleasant contrast to the intake of tobacco smoke.

  “Were you in Paris on business, Mr. Guggenheim?”

  “It’s ‘Ben.’” The millionaire’s handsome features had a softness to them, an almost baby-faced quality, his mouth as sensual as a woman’s. “No, my business has its headquarters in Paris, and I have an apartment there…. Do you have children, Jack?”

  They were alone on the deck, with only the night and the breeze to keep them company; even the deck chairs were folded up and neatly stacked against the wall.

  “I do,” Futrelle said. “A son and a daughter, both in their teens.”

  “I’m on my way home for my daughter Hazel’s ninth birthday.”

  “There’s a coincidence,” Futrelle said. “I just had a birthday, and celebrating it without having my children around made me so homesick we hopped this boat.”

  Guggenheim blew a blue cloud of cigar smoke into the breeze for it to carry out to sea. “I really love my three little girls.”

  “It must be difficult, business keeping you away from your family so much.”

  “I miss my children; my wife and I…” He turned to look at Futrelle and his eyes were half-lidded; he was tipsy, all right. “As you may be aware… Jack? Jack. As you may be aware, since gossip seems to run rampant on this floating Vanity Fair, the attractive young woman with whom I’m traveling is not my wife.”

  “Madame Aubert is quite beautiful.”

  He sent another wreath of blue smoke out to sea. “I know I have a reputation as a playboy, and it doesn’t bother me. It bothers my brothers—all except William—but I’m not in the family business anymore, not directly. Do you know that my brothers made an outcast of William because he married a gentile?”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.” Futrelle wondered if Guggenheim had made the assumption he was Jewish because he and May regularly sat with the Harrises and Strauses in the Dining Saloon.

  Guggenheim was saying, “My wife wanted to divorce me last year and they talked her out of it, my brothers. Said it would be bad for the family name. Family business.”

  “Ben, were you by any chance approached by this blackmailer—this fellow Crafton?”

  Guggenheim looked at Futrelle as if for the first time; perhaps the millionaire realized he’d been rambling, somewhat drunkenly, and wondered if he’d said too much.

  “I only bring this up,” Futrelle said, “because he attempted to extort money out of me.”

  Guggenheim’s oval face had turned blank, and still had a puttylike softness; but the eyes were hardening, if still half-lidded. So talkative before, Guggenheim now fell mute.

  So, briefly but frankly, Futrelle told Guggenheim what John Crafton had threatened to reveal, and that he had refused to pay.

  “I also refused to pay the bastard,” Guggenheim said, won back over to Futrelle by his candor. Then he laughed. “For a blackmailer, he wasn’t very well informed.”

  “How so?”

  “First, he threatened to go to my family with my ‘philandering.’ To my brothers! Who know I’ve been friendly with ladies of ill repute since my days in the Rocky Mountains. And to my wife! As if she weren’t already well aware of my proclivities…. She has her gossip and tea and bridge and stocks and bonds, and I have my redheads, brunettes and blondes. Jack, do you know why you should never make love to a woman before breakfast?”

  “Can’t say I do, Ben.”

  “First, it’s tiring. Second, over the course of the day, you may meet somebody you like better.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Ben.”

  He shrugged. “Even my children know of Daddy’s lady friends—I’m sure they all remember the live-in nurse we had around the house for several years. I’ve always been honest about my dishonesty, Jack.”

  “Not every man can say that.”

  “How well I know.”

  “Tell me, Ben—how did Crafton take your rejection of his ‘services’?”

  Guggenheim snorted a laugh. “He threatened to reveal my ‘secret’ to the newspapers. I told him to go ahead—the respectable publications won’t touch it, and the yellow press doesn’t matter.”

  To a man of Guggenheim’s stature, a minor impropriety like a mistress could be common knowledge as long as he himself did not publicly confirm it. Sexual hypocrisy was a privilege of wealth, and even John Astor and his child bride would eventually be accepted by the nobs.

  “Have you talked to Crafton since, Ben? Seen him around the ship?”

  “No.” He exhaled more smoke into the night. “Not that I was looking for him. There was a time…”

  “Yes?”

  “A time I might have shot him.”

  “Really?”

  A faint smile touched the sensual lips. “Happiest time, best days of my life.”

  “When was that?”

  “Leadville, Colorado,” he said fondly. “Ten acres of land, three shafts and one hundred men… Sitting with a revolver strapped to my belt, by the shack near number-three mine. Keeping track of income and expenses, making out the payroll myself. Going down to Tiger Alley in the Row, dancing with the fancy girls for fifty cents a dance, three-card monte with the mule skinners and miners at Crazy Jim’s… corn whiskey at the Comique Saloon—twenty cents a glass. You know, I’ve made love to some of the most beautiful women in Manhattan, the loveliest ladies in Europe… and I’d give it all up for one night with any one of those saucy belles at Peppersauce Bottoms.”

  Then Guggenheim sighed, pitched his cigar over the side, and said, “Shall we go back down to civilization, Jack?”

  “If we must,” Futrelle said, tossing his spent Fatima overboard.

  When they returned to the concert (the little orchestra was playing the whimsical idyll “Glow-Worm” from Lysistrata) they found May sitting with Madame Aubert; so was Maggie Brown, in the shade of a wide-brimmed hat covered with pleated pink silk, her bosomy body bedecked in a pink silk gown with a silk posy at the white lace bodice.

  Guggenheim introduced Futrelle to Madame Aubert and vice versa. In a French accent as thick as hollandaise, the blonde goddess said, “You have a charming wife, monsieur.”

  “Sit down, you two,” Maggie said. “You’re blocking the show for the suckers in the cheap seats.”

  Guggenheim laughed, following her command. “You haven’t changed a bit since Leadville.”

  “You have, Goog,” Maggie said. “I remember when your hair was brown and your belly flat as a washboard… but to tell more would be indiscreet.”

  Futrelle borrowed a chair from a nearby abandoned table, and joined the little group. He whispered to Guggenheim, “This is civilization?” and the millionaire chuckled.

  “Get a load of us now, Goog,” Maggie said. “You look like a waiter at a fancy restaurant that wouldn’t seat either one of us, and me, I’m wrapped up in the drapes and pretendin’ to be a lady. Once upon a ti
me you were a young buck who come west, leavin’ Wall Street behind…” She spoke to Madame Aubert, May and Futrelle. “Too depressin’, he told me, too gloomy…”

  “And you were a feisty little red-haired blue-eyed number looking for a man with a gold mine,” Guggenheim said.

  “An uppity Jew and a hardscrabble Irish Catholic,” she said, shaking her head. “How do you think we made out?”

  She was smiling, but Futrelle had a hunch she missed Leadville at least as much as “Goog” did.

  “You did fine, Maggie,” Guggenheim said. “I haven’t made my mind up about myself, just yet.”

  Madame Aubert didn’t seem to take offense at Maggie’s vulgar gregariousness, or begrudge the warmth between Guggenheim and the gaudy Denver matron; but Futrelle, studying Maggie’s pleasant, slightly irregular features, could suddenly see her as she must have been, age nineteen, busty, blue-eyed, red-haired, in mining camp days. Years and pounds melted away, and there she was, in Futrelle’s writer’s imagination, a beautiful doll.

  Which was the song Wallace Hartley’s band began to play.

  “That’s my request!” Maggie squealed with delight. “I sent that up there on a napkin!”

  Up front, tables were being moved aside to make room for dancing. The room was starting to clear out, leaving only the younger and/or more daring passengers.

  Maggie clutched the millionaire’s hand, like she was falling off a cliff, reaching for a branch. “Hey, cowboy—how’s about dancin’ with an old Rocky Mountain belle?”

  He glanced at his blonde companion, who granted permission with a regal nod and smile, and Guggenheim walked Maggie Brown up to the impromptu dance floor.

  As they cut a rug together, fairly stylish at that, Madame Aubert said, “You don’t think it’s possible? Could Ben and that woman, ever have… ?”

  “No,” Futrelle said flatly.

  But in their stateroom, Futrelle said to May, “Oh, they were an item all right.”

  “Maggie Brown and Ben Guggenheim,” she said, shaking her head, pleasantly amazed. “Who’d have thought it?”

  “Well, I don’t think Madame Aubert has much to worry about her meal ticket, tonight. That was too many years, and too many pounds ago.”

  May was sitting on the edge of their brass bed. “Pauline Aubert is quite the beauty. She was very nice, but not too revealing about herself and Mr. Guggenheim.”

  Futrelle sat next to her. “So you didn’t find anything out about Ben and Crafton.”

  “Not from her, but when Maggie sat down, the facts began to fly. Or anyway, they did when Pauline excused herself to use the ladies’ room, and Maggie began rattling off a litany of Ben Guggenheim’s mistresses—there was a Marquise de Cerruti, this showgirl, that secretary, even a slender red-haired nurse who lived in their mansion with them! Just in case his ‘chronically neuralgic’ head needed a massage….”

  “A man never knows when he’s going to need a massage.”

  “Husbands had best get their massages at home.”

  “Sounds like Ben was at home.”

  “Keep that up, and you’ll need a nurse… Maggie says before he married his wife—Florette—he had his way with the most beautiful Jewish girls in Manhattan, and his share of gentiles, too.”

  “I gather it’s a marriage of family fortunes.”

  “Of convenience, yes. I didn’t bring Crafton up, but I doubt a man so openly living his double life can be victimized by any blackmailer.”

  “I agree,” Futrelle said, and he told her of his conversation on the A-deck promenade with Guggenheim.

  May rose to the dresser and took out her nightgown. She began undressing, asking, “Coming to bed, Jack?”

  “Possibly. I’m suddenly getting the urge for a massage….”

  “Maybe tomorrow morning… ‘cowboy.’”

  He decided not to share with her Guggenheim’s opinion of morning lovemaking.

  “I still haven’t spoken to that fellow Stead,” Futrelle said, and went to the door. “Archie Butt told me the old boy’s been keeping to his stateroom. But I understand he’s been down to the Smoking Room, this time of night, once or twice.”

  “Go on and see if he’s there.” She was in her nightgown, a vision. “I’ll read till you get back.”

  “You don’t have to wait up.”

  She drew back the bedspread, the sheets. “I’ll want a detailed report—if nothing else, just to make sure you aren’t out with one of your many mistresses… I’ll be under the covers with The Virginian.”

  He let her have the last word—with two writers in the family, such surrenders were occasionally necessary—and wondered if the Ben Guggenheims of the world would still stray, if they had married for love instead of finance. The only answer he came up with, as he walked down the corridor, was that he couldn’t imagine being with any woman but May; then he was at the aft staircase and walked up the two flights to A deck.

  The private men’s club that was the Titantic’s Smoking Room was filled with blue smoke and drinking men and a dull din of conversation. The frequenters of this mahogany-walled male preserve were still in evening dress, for the most part, having come directly from either dinner or the concert. The marble-topped tables were home to bridge and poker games and, though gambling was not legal, paper money littered the tables like confetti. A few tables were given over strictly to conversation, and at one of these—two actually, which had been butted together—William T. Stead was holding court.

  The absurdity brought a smile to Futrelle’s lips. Not just listening but enraptured were these men of finance and politics and wealth in their white ties and tails, supplicating at the figurative feet of a bushily white-bearded, Buddha-bellied old fellow in a shabby sealskin cap and a yellowish-brown tweed suit as rumpled as an unmade bed.

  Among Stead’s admiring audience were Major Archie Butt and his artist friend Francis Millet. Futrelle also recognized Frederick Seward, a New York lawyer, young Harry Widener, the book collector, and Charles Hays of the Grand Trunk railways.

  “Jack!” Archie called out. “Come join us! Mr. Stead is regaling us with his supernatural lore.”

  Futrelle found a spare chair and pulled it up next to Archie, which was also right beside the great man himself, who immediately scolded Archie in a resonant, cheerful voice: “ ‘Supernatural’ is your term, Major Butt—mine is spiritualism, where science and religion meet.”

  “Well, sir,” Archie said good-naturedly, “could you take time, first, for Stead to meet Futrelle?”

  “This is Jacques Futrelle?” A spark came to Stead’s piercing sky-blue eyes, and a broad smile—wearing evidence of a course or two from dinner—formed in the thicket of white beard. “Jacques Futrelle—why, it’s an honor, sir!”

  “The honor is mine,” Futrelle said, meaning it. He offered his hand and the two men shook.

  Futrelle joined the unlikely acolytes of this untidy, ruddy, squat man who, in his early sixties now but looking older, was nonetheless a major figure in British journalism. Stead—for all his muckraking, in his Pall Mall Gazette, and with books that in explicitly exposing sin were often themselves decried as obscene—was the father of the New Journalism in England, the man who created the interview format for newspaper and magazine articles.

  “I’m a great admirer of this fellow you work for,” Stead said, eyes narrowed, nodding at Futrelle.

  “Mr. Hearst?”

  “Yes. William Randolph Hearst. The man understands newspapers! He’s fearless.”

  Futrelle had to smile. “Not everyone shares your admiration of Mr. Hearst, sir.”

  “Not everyone understands the newspaper business, as do you and I, sir.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “I must say, however, that you at times disappoint me, Mr. Futrelle.”

  “It’s Jack—and why have I disappointed you, sir?”

  Stead rocked back in his chair; his voice was teasing. “Well, Jack, I’ve read some of these ‘Thinking Machine
’ stories of yours, and this detective you’ve conjured up, he’s a debunker. You contrive tales that are… if I must use your word, Major Butt… ‘supernatural,’ and then your man explains the mystical occurrences away with mundane realities.”

  Futrelle shrugged. “That’s just the pattern of the tales. Some of my stories don’t resolve their otherworldly aspects.”

  “Then you must give me the names of those stories before this voyage ends—I would like to read them.” He tented his fingers and stared over their structure at Futrelle, eyes nothing but glittering slits. “That dim, obscure world of the spirit is very real, Jack. Have you met Conan Doyle?”

  “I have.”

  “Do you respect him, sir?”

  “Of course. He was the inspiration for me to write.”

  “And you know that he shares my views on such subjects as clairvoyance, telepathy, psychometry, automatic writing…”

  Millet spoke up. “What the devil is automatic writing, Mr. Stead?”

  “The devil has nothing to do with it.” Stead withdrew a packet of Prince Albert cigars from his inside pocket and a kitchen match from an outside pocket and lighted up as he responded to the artist.

  “I am one of those certain few gifted individuals who can merely pick up a pen and, with no conscious thought of my own, my hand will be guided by telepathic communication. I write automatically, as it were, as I receive thoughts from the unconscious minds of other people.”

  Intrigued but skeptical, Futrelle asked, “You could receive my thoughts? Perhaps when I was asleep, for example?”

  Stead nodded. “Yes, conceivably. But most of what I receive comes from the other side.”

  Archie was frowning. “The other side of what, sir?”

  “The veil. My most frequent visitor is Mrs. Julia Ames, a departed friend of mine, a Chicago journalist. Now and then I hear from Catherine.”

  “Catherine?”

  Stead blew smoke. “The Second. Of Russia.”

  Smiles and chuckles rippled around the butted-together tables, but no one was bored, and the good-natured Stead took no offense.

  “I understand your skepticism, gentlemen… I would have shared it, not so long ago. I spent the better part of my life in pursuit of charlatans and sinners. But I assure you that I am not mad and not a fraud. Many of the most well-known and well-respected sensitives—mediums—of our day are among my closest friends. We have formed ‘Julia’s Bureau’ and meet regularly, for séances.”