Death of a Century

by Daniel Robinson

  Joe did not answer. Each person’s world turns on its own axis, and his axis had once again been knocked from its plane. He sat and watched the officers depart in their descending order following in the Captain’s wake. They took nothing with them, leaving the photograph and note on the table and not asking for his passport. Gresham’s passport.

  He remembered the note informing the ship’s passengers that Cherbourg would be the initial docking, that the ship would not dock in Plymouth as originally scheduled. Once more he thanked the heavy and rough seas and the broken turbine for that bit of fortune. Joe knew enough to know that there was always a bit of a push once the ship docked for disembarkation. In that rush of movement he hoped for another quiver of fortunate possibility.

  After they had all left the room and the room had returned to its silence, Joe retrieved the trunk, stripped, and cleaned himself with the water on the washstand. He felt his jaw tighten as his mind mulled the situation. He felt like a lesser Theseus having muddled his way deep into a maze not of his making, only he lacked his Ariadne with her length of saving thread.

  Huntington’s murder further muddled things for Joe. He knew who had killed Gresham—the Frenchmen from the accident—and he knew why. That incomplete knowledge traced a slight frown across his face. The two Frenchmen who had died on the rain-slick road outside of Greenwich were not alone and had been working for someone else, the someone who had since killed Huntington. Joe knew the shape of that man, but not the man himself.

  He dried himself and set aside a clean gray wool suit, packed the rest of his clothes in the steamer trunk, locking it as best he could with its one broken hasp. He piled all of his money, the photograph and notes, revolver, and passports, his and Gresham’s, on the bed next to his overcoat. Standing next to the bed, he looked over the things he had arranged. With them, he might make it. If he could get off the ship all right, then he could make it. He could leave everything else behind if he needed to.

  He sat for a moment but felt claustrophobic and decided to leave, for fresh air on the deck. He wished he could keep his trunk of clothes once he left the ship, for if he did get to Paris after landing at Cherbourg, the clothes would be nice to have. He patted his pockets. He had the necessities, money and a gun.

  When he opened the door of his cabin, he saw an opportunity. Standing like silenced sentinels outside the cabin doors to two other rooms in the wide hallway were steamer trunks. He pulled his own trunk out into the corridor, leaving it outside his cabin and walking across the hall to knock on the first door.

  A woman answered, her face hidden behind a heavy layer of makeup that made her age difficult to guess. Somewhere between seventy-five and dead, Joe thought, and probably closer to the latter.

  “Well, can I help you?” the woman demanded in a burnished New England accent.

  “I’m sorry ma’am. I must have the wrong room. I was looking for the Blaines, Amory and his wife.”

  She looked him up and down and curled her upper lip. She did not like what she saw. “You do have the wrong room.”

  “I do. I apologize.” He bowed and motioned as though to tip his hat had he been wearing one and apologized again. The woman shut her door without responding. She would not do. He needed someone who might not be as suspicious or as aware. While she had not recognized his faux nom, she was too quick to her skepticism.

  The next cabin had two trunks outside its door. He knocked and another woman answered. She looked to be dressed more for an opera than for leaving the ship. She even raised her lorgnette glasses to her face in order to study Joe.

  Joe repeated his lie, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I must have the wrong room. I was looking for Amory Blaine and his wife.”

  “Sorry,” the woman said. “We are the McKees.”

  “Who is it, dear?” her husband asked from inside the room.

  “Just someone looking for the Blaines, darling.”

  “The who?”

  “Blaines—Amory and his wife. You remember them.”

  After a pause, the husband answered, “Oh, yes-yes. Good fellow. Drinks a bit much, but still a good chap. Don’t know their cabin number, though.”

  The wife turned to Joe. “I’m sorry. We can’t help you, but when you find them, please give them our regards.”

  “I will do that, Mrs. McKee,” Joe said, bowing and thinking how people are easily fooled when played to their vanity.

  He went back to his room, leaving the door open, and waited. He waited for the count of one hundred after the McKees left their cabin before pulling his steamer trunk across the hallway to exchange with one of theirs. He left his tags attached and pulled their trunk into his room, cutting their tag with his penknife and sitting back to wait for the steward.

  Joe lay back on the bed and closed his eyes and felt the movement of the ship. After a knock on the door woke him from his past, Joe drew in a long breath as in silent prayer. He opened the door to find a small, almost fragile old man standing next to a hand dolly. The man wore an ill-fitting uniform, too long in the sleeves and too large in the waist, and a rigid hat tilted back on his head with tufts of graying hair shooting out at angles.

  The man looked at a piece of paper in his hand. “Mr. Gresham?” he asked, Cockney accent winking out the words.

  “Yes,” Joe answered, standing to the side and motioning for the steward to enter. “Come in. It’s all packed and ready for you. You will take care of it, won’t you?”

  Joe knew officers well enough to know that they would never tell a man in the trenches more than was absolutely necessary. That was something Joe was counting on. The ship’s officers would have told the steward to pick up Joe’s trunk and place it in a special hold. They would not have told him why, and the man would be more prone to think the trunk held a rich man’s valuables instead of a supposed murderer’s possessions, especially after Joe tipped the man a sawbuck for his troubles. Which Joe did with minimum flourish.

  The steward, startled maybe from the size of the tip, hesitated. For a moment Joe thought he had underestimated the ship’s officers or that in his confidence he had overplayed his hand.

  “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.” The man beamed and his body seemed to inflate.

  Joe smiled and felt a loosening in his breathing, a loosening of the noose.

  The steward asked, “You spending the Christmas in Paris, sir?”

  Joe knew the question was more a mannered response to his tip than anything else, for from his job with the newspaper in Greenwich he had seen the effect that money could have. A few greenbacks could easily open doors as well as open a working intimacy. The rule held true in the middle of the Atlantic as it had in Connecticut.

  Joe smiled and answered the steward’s question, “No. I’m going across into Germany.”

  The steward nodded and busied himself with a strap to hold the trunk tight to the dolly. After pulling the slack from the strap, he said, “I been there once, to Heine-land. Right after the war, it was. Them Heines weren’t none too nice, neither.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Joe said.

  The steward never bothered to check the trunk for a nametag, and Joe thought, Why should he? He was doing as he was ordered and that was all, retrieve the trunk and not ask why. That ingrained European caste system had maddened Joe during the war, watching the Brits or French unable to as much as dig a deeper latrine without an officer telling them, but that mindset would prove his ally in his departure from the ship.

  The steward groaned and pulled on the dolly’s handle and worked the heavy load into the hallway. Joe followed, glancing at his real trunk in position down the hall. It might actually work, he thought. His clothes, Gresham’s clothes, might make it into Cherbourg, but he still needed to find his own release from the ship’s officers.

  The steward lowered the trunk and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “You don’t needs to ’company me, sir,” he said, leaning against the handle of the dolly. “I’ll see it reaches the Head Steward’s of
fice right quick.”

  Joe smiled, “Thank you.” He carried his overcoat, weighted with a pistol in the right hand pocket and stood outside his door.

  “He does this on ’cassion,” the steward added. “Has someone’s trunk put in his office so’s he can take it through customs himself. Quick as a flame, that way, especially with as slow as them Frogs can be.”

  Joe nodded and stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind him. Then, as though he had suddenly thought of it, he stopped and faced the steward. “Would you be so kind as to return for my friends’ trunks here? The loading dock is fine.” He pointed to the two trunks outside the McKee’s cabin.

  The steward looked at the trunks with a heaviness. “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  Joe unfolded another sawbuck and handed it to the steward.

  “Don’t give it another thought, sir,” he said, bowing and pocketing the bill in one fluid motion. “Quick as an arrow, I’ll be.” He hefted his load and pushed it down the hallway.

  Joe watched until the man had turned a corner and was gone, then he opened his cabin door again to make one final check through the room before leaving it to spend the remainder of the voyage on deck. With that tip he had given the porter, he knew that his trunk would be among the first off the ship and waiting for him to claim in customs.

  The day opened around him as he walked onto the deck, a gray coolness eddying in the wind, crisp and fresh and filled with promise. The horizon blended into the sea with a smooth alchemy as the day lifted easily from its own shadow. His spirits lifted with it. While he could not tell the future, he felt himself within an even chance of leaving behind something of his past.

  Joe avoided his deck chair, with its folded wool blanket, and instead stood near the bow of the ship, mentally hastening its progress. He faced into the ship’s wind with the day rising cool but not cold, overcast but not threatening. The ocean continued to lay dark blue and silent all about and gulls flew in tightening circles around the ship, noisy harbingers of land. France was just beyond Joe’s sight. His stomach tightened at its approach, the approach of a landscape of freedom but also a continent of destruction.

  He remembered the similar tightening in his stomach five years earlier when he had sailed into Cherbourg for the glory of war, nervous at the thought of battle but filled with the expectations of youth and honor on the battlefield. Then, eighteen and filled with the romance of youth, dressed in his green wool and carrying a pack on his back and Springfield rifle with twelve clips of .30 caliber bullets in a cloth bandolier over his shoulder, the approach to France had felt like an entrance, an adventure, a coming-into of his life. At the railing of the Berengaria, with all those lies of the past century proved so wrong on the battlefields of France, he could not help but wonder what further lies might await him there.

  Leaving France following the end of war, he had stood at the stern of the ship to watch the Cotentin Peninsula and the town of Cherbourg disappear into the line of a gray horizon. The French city, as gray as the cloudy day that shrouded it, had then looked like a tombstone sinking into the sea.

  He walked the deck several times, had an Irish whiskey in the Gentleman’s Reading Room, walked the deck again, sat in another patron’s empty deck chair, walked, stood along the rail of the ship at the stern and the bow and on both sides, and walked, all the time feeling as though a clock were running against him. As the day’s shadows shortened to noon and then again lengthened, the ship’s deck became busier. More people, dressed in overcoats and hats and some even in evening wear with long furs or top hats and shining black canes with silver handles, lined the railing to watch the ship’s arrival into Cherbourg.

  Joe lost himself in the crowd near the gates to the ship’s secondary boarding bridge. In the tightening compression of the growing and moving crowd, Joe kept his hands in his coat pockets to keep hold of the pistol as well as the money split between the pockets. He patted himself once to make sure the photograph and lists were safe within his inner pocket. He returned his hand to his side pocket in time to feel another hand move inside it. He turned to face a man who quickly ducked his way through the crowd, empty of anything of Joe’s.

  “Bastard,” Joe cursed.

  Then he smiled. Maybe his running clock had again gained a minute of time or maybe that swift pendulum of fortune had swung back in his favor.

  He looked around the crowd, watching the men closer to the gates, several of them already fingering their papers and passports. Seeing his life as something from a Beadle’s Dime Novel, he elbowed toward them until he stood close to one who was near him in size and age and face. As the man returned his passport to the pocket of his fur overcoat, Joe lifted it clean and backed away, letting the crowd fill in like a ship’s wake. He smiled and breathed deep, feeling as though he were born to a life of petty larceny.

  The ship docked. Passengers waved to lovers or family waiting on the pier, some threw streamers and confetti, some drank from champagne glasses and tossed the empty bottles into the water. The atmosphere was near that of a carnival.

  Standing near the railing and with their backs to the approaching pier stood Dapper and the Turk. Dapper busied himself with the lapels of his coat. The smile flat across the face of the Turk was imminent and menacing. His eyes were hard and colorless in their darkness, and they fixed solidly on Joe. The Turk moved his mouth and Dapper looked up at him then followed his glassed gaze to Joe. He then also smiled, nothing friendly in his smile as well.

  Joe moved with the pulse of the crowd, a jerking compression of people moving toward the main gate. The closer he got to the gate, the more difficult it was for him to move his arms. The chatter of people became deafening, the deck silenced in its own cacophony of sound, the crush claustrophobic, the Turk’s hard stare staggering. The humid air filled with the acrid smells of stagnant water and anxious people, body odor and boozed breath. His breathing felt as cramped as his body.

  He looked up toward the gate, at the passengers stopped to identify themselves to a ship’s officer holding a clipboard, at those disembarking and walking with a bounce down the bridge, at those waiting on the pier with their arms ready to enfold a lover in an embrace, and then back at the threat carried in the blackness of the Turk’s eyes.

  Dapper and the Turk were not following. They stood away from the crowd of disembarking passengers, their hands in their pockets and talking to one another, watching Joe’s movements like birds of prey waiting for their lunch to bolt from his cover.

  They were toying with him, letting him attempt an escape and knowing that he, as Wynton Gresham, would not leave at Cherbourg. How they knew that, Joe could not say, but their easy approach revealed their knowledge. Whoever pulled their strings was quite well placed, having the Captain’s ear and being privy to the Captain’s orders.

  What they did not know, however, was what Joe held in the fingers of his left hand.

  As he neared the gate, Joe studied the passport that he had lifted, memorizing his new name and where this man came from. A Princeton man, Joe liked that, ivy-walled eating clubs and traditions extending back to Jonathan Edwards. The passport photograph showed a man wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, banker’s spectacles, trimmed hair, and a pleasant smile. Other than no glasses and hair let grow, Joe figured his resemblance was close enough to pass a cursory inspection by the customs agent. He knew that with any amount of interested inspection, his thin cover of anonymity would be exposed, but the officers at the gates had little reason to elevate their level of scrutiny. The name of Wynton Gresham was on a special list, and he was no longer Wynton Gresham.

  He looked again at his passport. He was, at least for the time being, Harold Braddock of Princeton and every other inch a gentleman.

  He turned when he heard a commotion nearby, expecting to find associates of Dapper and the Turk pushing through the crowd in his direction. Instead, he saw the man whom he had just become pushing people away from him and looking around the deck for his papers, ye
lling about his passport. A few other passengers looked around as well, but most avoided him, probably thinking the man was either drunk or crazy.

  Joe smiled, knowing how hard it was to find, and how easy it was to lose, oneself. Since the war, he had met a lot of men in his generation who were lost. He wished it truly were as easy as lifting another man’s name to change one’s fortunes.

  At the boundary between the ship’s gate and the bridge, Joe answered the necessary questions about purpose and length of stay, and he complimented the officer on the capitol service once again provided by the Cunard line. Then he smiled at the officer and nodded and tipped his fedora to the Turk, turned and strode comfortably down the bridge to the pier, another American ready for the sights of Paris. He felt alone, and it was a splendid isolation.

  Once he reached the pier, Joe turned for one more look. The Turk had pushed himself almost to the gate, pushing aside even the man still searching for his passport, who punched the Turk and ignited a small melee. The Turk outweighed the Princeton man by a good thirty pounds, but the lost Princeton man crouched like a collegiate middleweight and gave the Turk a good turn.

  Joe hurried through customs, using the borrowed passport once again. Because the French officers at the customs table seemed more interested in catching a glimpse of the fight aboard the ship, they rushed everyone through with a minimum of delay. They stopped one man who was trying to smuggle tobacco and pushed him into a back room, but Joe and others moved through quickly. He found a porter, handed him a dollar bill and told him to retrieve Gresham’s trunk and place it on the train for Paris. The man obliged with a formal bow. Joe felt not a little drunk by the power of money.

  He left the Princeton man’s passport underneath a newspaper on a bench—It was difficult enough to remember who he was between two people without adding a third to the mix—and he boarded his train and paid for a compartment seat and sat so that he could watch the station doors for Dapper and the Turk and waited for the train’s departure. He switched bench seats before anyone else entered the cabin so that he sat facing front and relaxed into the padded comfort to let his body heat warm against the leather seat. He closed his eyes and felt as though he had taken his first full breath in over a week.