A well-dressed woman and her daughter were standing to one side of the wide but human-clogged stairway, tucked against the slanting wall, the child saucer-eyed and clinging to the dark-haired, blue-eyed mother, whose chin was high.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked the woman.
“No, thank you,” she said proudly. “There is nothing you can do. . We will wait for these. . people. . to pass, before taking our turn.”
“That’s probably wise,” I said, with a movement of my eyes that was meant to convey to the mother that her child would not fare well in that struggling mob.
“The captain says the ship cannot sink,” she said, like a Christian convinced of Heaven. “We have no intention of becoming alarmed.”
I was standing there-the incline so steep now that I had to work to regain my balance, especially amid all the jostling-like a boy waiting for the right moment to hop a carousel. Only a few seconds had gone by when a bloody-faced figure in stewards’ whites stumbled into me, coming up from the shelter deck, and I grabbed on to him, because he seemed barely conscious, and would otherwise have fallen and been trampled.
It was Williams, the master-at-arms!
I dragged the sturdy fellow from the crowd, and positioned myself against the wall, supporting him. He’d suffered a terrible blow or had taken a fall, his forehead bloody, one of those thick black eyebrows badly cut, and streaming blood.
“Get your breath,” I said, “and we’ll get you up to the Boat Deck.”
“Mr. . Mr. Van Dine. .” he said, eyes wide with recognition and. . what else? Humiliation? “I was a fool, a damned fool!”
“Williams, what-”
“I tried to do the right thing, sir, the humane thing. . but the bastard took advantage! Jumped me, goddamn him!”
I asked, but I already knew. “Who did this?”
“That bastard Williamson-he was my responsibility, and I couldn’t leave him to drown, could I?”
“Of course not,” I said, though I could have, easily.
“That’s not the worst of it, sir! He. . he’s got my revolver!”
Time was too precious for recriminations, so I merely hauled the bloody fool up the companionway; he seemed to have regained a clear enough head, and his balance, and he disappeared off toward the deck, muttering that he would find “the blighter.”
The Boat Deck’s Grand Entrance area, like the one below, had its furniture and potted plants upended; but the passengers were no longer thronging the area, having found their way to the decks.
And then my heart sank, because there was no sign of Miss Vance-I had been gone too long, apparently, or she had been swept up in the melodrama.
As I looked around, I saw something that at first struck me as quite absurd: Alfred Vanderbilt and Charles Frohman were seated side by side in wicker chairs, and they were surrounded by a pile of life jackets and five wicker baskets filled with slumbering babies! They were tying the life jackets to the baskets, and Frohman was bending to do so, and his discomfort must have been considerable.
I was not surprised to find Frohman staying aloof from the mass of hysteria-with his severe rheumatism, how could he hope to survive? But what in the hell were they up to? As I went over to them, Vanderbilt’s imperious valet, still in full livery, materialized with a basket in either hand, a slumbering infant in both.
“This is the last of them, sir,” the valet said.
“Good-now see what other kiddies you can round up, and we’ll help them into the lifeboats.”
“Very good, sir,” and the valet again disappeared.
I stood before this preposterous tableau-amazingly, not a child was awake and squalling! — and asked, “What in God’s name are you up to, Vanderbilt?”
“Ah,” Vanderbilt said, as casual as if he were attending a race at Ascot, “Mr. Van Dine-I’ve had my man Ronald raid the nursery. Moses’ baskets-they should float nicely.”
“Gentlemen, I don’t believe this steamer could be far from her final plunge-”
The millionaire stayed at his work, tying a life jacket to a basket. “Mr. Van Dine, it’s a wonderful irony, isn’t it? I have a white marble swimming pool at my farm, but I’ve never been in for a dip. All my time’s gone to my horses, and of course the ladies. . Never did learn to swim.”
“Let me help you get these out kids out on deck, and we’ll get you into a lifeboat, then.”
“No, Charles, Ronald and I can manage-we need to keep this precious cargo away from that rattled rabble out there. . when the water comes up, we’ll drop the wee ones in.”
I turned to Frohman. “C.F.-can I help you onto deck?”
“No, I prefer to stay with my friend Albert,” he said, grunting as he worked. “This will be a close call-we’ll have a better chance here than by rushing to the lifeboats.”
I had no time to argue; such choices were for each man to make for himself. “Have you seen Miss Vance?”
“Why, yes,” Vanderbilt said. “A lot of these fools had their lifebelts on incorrectly-heads through armholes. upside down around their waist and the like. Last I saw her. .” He pointed toward the starboard exit onto the deck. “. . she was helping as many of them as she could, in putting them on correctly.”
“Some,” Frohman said, “scurried away-must have thought she was trying to take their life jackets! Cowards.”
“You have enough for yourselves?” I asked, meaning the life jackets, feeling somewhat guilty bearing a pair of them myself, for Miss Vance and me.
“Certainly,” Vanderbilt said cheerfully. “Good luck to you, man!”
“Mr. Frohman-C.F.? I can help walk you along-we are moments away from. .”
He smiled up at me, that homely face a beautiful thing. “ ‘Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ ”
“What’s that, a Hubbardism?”
Frohman seemed a little offended. “Hardly! James Barrie-Peter Pan.”
And the froggy producer returned to his slumbering infants in their Moses’ baskets, who unknowingly awaited far worse perils than mere bulrushes.
Disturbed though I was to have lost track of Miss Vance, I had confidence in her competence-her cool head and professionalism would rise well above the mad scramble. Or so I told myself, to hang on to hope and sanity. On the promendade, however, the rush was over, confusion replacing panic-people were milling, thronging the deck waiting for a discipline or order to be imposed upon them. .which seemed unlikely to be provided.
The Hubbards were nowhere to be seen-they had vacated (or been pushed away from) their position at the rail. In the undiscriminating mix of passengers from all three classes, I saw the occasional familiar face. Miss Pope and her Friend dove from the deck, choosing not to get involved with the lifeboats at all. Madame DePage, I noted, was bandaging the wounded with strips of cloth torn from her own dress; Dr. Houghton was aiding her. No sign of Miss Vance, though.
The lifeboat situation was hopeless.* Crewmen and male passengers were striving without luck to lower the boats, and were placing women and children into them. Horror-struck, I realized these boats would never be cleared, and would go down with the steamer. . which surely would make her final plunge any second now. Better to leave these poor souls on the deck, where they might have a chance, might find a piece of wreckage to use as a makeshift raft, a table, a deck chair, a wooden grating.
A bit aft of the main entrance, a lifeboat filled with women and children-Miss Vance not among them-waited patiently for help that would probably never come. No one was even attempting to free the craft from its davits. With the steamer sinking so rapidly, the boat would have to be cleared at once, if they were to be saved.
Staff Captain Anderson-in his shirtsleeves, his affable manner replaced by a tense grim demeanor-was doing his best to supervise the ill-advised launching of the boats. I went to him and suggested that the ship was sinking so fast, they might be better off waiting till the water reached the ship’s keel, and simply cut the ropes, a
nd simultaneously knock the snubbing chains loose.
He was ahead of me; he pointed to a boat nearby where seamen were poised to do exactly what I’d suggested.
And at this moment a man in white who was not a crew member approached one of those seamen, and was speaking to him.
“Christ!” I blurted. “That’s Williamson!”
Anderson’s gaze flew to the man, who was snarling at the seaman, “Launch this boat, now!”
Williamson obviously planned to leap inside the craft.
“Can’t do it,” the seaman said, a young blonde lad. “Captain’s orders.”
And Williamson thrust a revolver toward the seaman-that gun he’d taken from the master-at-arms-and said, “To hell with the captain-do it!”
I stood frozen-all this ship needed right now was a madman shooting off a gun! But Anderson was edging forward, moving closer to Williamson, whose back was to the staff captain.
The young seaman complied with Williamson’s demands, freeing the snubbing chain.
Freed of its restraint, the boat swung inward like a pendulum and smashed into Williamson, squashing him like a bug against the boat’s gunwale. Any cry of his was obscured by the screams of passengers as the lifeboat crashed to the deck, sliding forcefully into a waiting knot of crew and passengers, Anderson among them. I plastered myself against the wall, the boatload of terrified women and children narrowly missing me, but sweeping the others with them, the unconscious staff captain, too, down the deck and into the rising sea.
Around me screams of horror followed the stunning display of brute stupidity-the author of which, one Charles Williamson, lay a crushed open-eyed corpse beneath the blood-smeared gunwale.
In moments the sea would come up and wash me off the deck, too; so I beat the bastard to it, and dove in. The coldness was a shock, yet somehow bracing, even invigorating, and I swam, despite the bulk of the life jacket, swam a good hundred feet away from the ship before turning, and treaded water. I wondered if anyone, perhaps from that crashed lifeboat, was following, and needed a hand.
I also wanted to see the steamer’s final plunge. The bow already buried beneath the sea, the ship’s fantail loomed a hundred feet into the placid blue sky, revealing four huge propellers, barely turning, and an immense rudder, sunlight glinting off their steel. Sliding into the blue waters, the ship suddenly, bizarrely, froze-the nose of the great ship, its eight-hundred-foot length deeper than the sea, had hit bottom!
A terrible clash and clatter echoed across the water as everything within her collapsed and scattered itself, as if a giant box of broken glass and spare metal parts were being shaken by a playful, nasty god.
Hundreds were mountain-climbing the slanted deck, seeking handholds, some falling into the sea, as the dying beast that was the Lusitania made its final agonized death cries-a boiler exploding, a funnel crashing, one last great moan of tortured steel.
Then she was gone-slipping under the water with no significant suction, no boiling vortex, foam flecking the last glimpse of her superstructure and decks, a few boats still swinging like toys from their davits. . a finger snap, and the big Lucy had disappeared.* She left behind a wide white ring glimmering on the surface of an otherwise smooth sea in the afternoon sun. Within that ring was a snarl of floating wreckage and bodies, on and under the surface, some of them alive, gaggles of men and women and children twisting like flies on some giant fisherman’s hook.
For a while I swam around and helped those I could by pushing pieces of wreckage to them, to which they might cling. After some fifteen minutes of this, I was getting tired, and cold, and was just realizing I was in trouble, when arms hauled me up out of the water and into a collapsible boat, a shallow thing with its folded canvas sides up.
The boat was filled with people-twenty or more, men enough to row but mostly women and children. A voice called out my name to me, and either I was dreaming a sweet dying dream, or had unpredictably enough gone to heaven.
Because the voice was Miss Vance’s, and I was soon, half-conscious, sheltered within the embrace of her damp but wonderful arms.
“I hope Williamson drowned in his cage,” she said, sometime later.
“Oh,” I said, “it was much better than that.”
Not much else is worth the telling. Our lifeboat had a good crew, which included that fellow Lauriat, and we might have headed for land but instead stayed out and, for two hours or so, picked up those who seemed in the most helpless of conditions. I will spare you the tragic images, involving women and children, particularly mothers and their babies. Some of the babies in their nursery baskets, thanks to Vanderbilt and Frohman, were retrieved from the sea.
When we had as many aboard as we dared-thirty-two was the final count, I believe-we finally rowed toward shore, but first encountered a fishing smack. Though they had already taken on two boatloads of survivors, they made room for us, as well.
The old fishermen gave us the blankets from their bunks, started a fire and made us tea; it was a wretched vessel, slippery with fish scales and the filth of fishermen, and no man or woman could wish finer accommodations. The steamer Flying Fish took us to Queenstown, where the rest of this tale is well-known and would only serve to depress the reader, and the book’s author.
Suffice to say, of the key figures involved in the mystery, only Miss Vance, George Kessler (minus his briefcase) and myself survived. The psychic Miss Pope also came through, and Dr. Houghton; so did Captain Turner, who on the rescue ship Blue Bell was bitterly chastised by a mother who had lost her child.
I suppose I would sound like Elbert Hubbard if I were to point out that a disaster brings out the best and the worst in us. The millionaire and the theatrical producer died bravely, helping the helpless; so did the noble doctor’s wife who had sought to raise money for hospitals. The Bard of East Aurora and his bride apparently went down to their cabin to die together, whether to make room for others in lifeboats, or to glorify themselves, who can say? Miss Vance, the heroine of the piece, was rescued in the midst of aiding others.
And the villain died, as he’d lived, a villain.
“It is what we think, and what we do,” Hubbard once said, “that makes us what we are.”
Perhaps, by that sweet fool’s yardstick, all I am is a survivor. . but we need survivors, don’t we? Who else would tell the tale?
A Tip of the Captain’s Hat
As in the previous novels in what others have called my “disaster mystery” series, I have in this book combined the factual with the fanciful. Unlike the first of these books, The Titanic Murders (1999), the mystery herein relates directly to the disaster itself, tied as it is to the political and historical context of the tragedy, and its causes. Nonetheless, some liberties have been taken, though precious few; and what may seem to some readers mistakes may be a reflection of the sometimes contradictory source material.
Before discussing the sources of my research, I would like to share a few historical afterthoughts that I did not feel appropriate to the body of the book.
Contrary to popular belief, the sinking of the Lusitania did not lead to America’s participation in World War One. Of the approximately 1,200 men, women and children lost in the sinking, only 124 were Americans-not enough to go to war over, but plenty to turn sentiment in the U.S. against the German side, undoubtedly paving the way for this country’s entry into the conflict.
Numerous theories have been posited as to the nature of the second-and far more damaging-explosion that followed the undoubted single torpedo that hit the ship, courtesy of the German submarine U-20. Among these are munitions (specifically gun cotton) blowing up, the boilers exploding, coal dust combustion, a second torpedo or even a British sub sinking the ship, to prime the war pump for Winston Churchill. This novel proposes yet another possibility, based upon the factual presence of German saboteurs on the Lusitania.
Captain Bill Turner, incidentally, suffered through several Lusitania investigations but still was given a new command-he lost that
ship to torpedoes, as well, and wound up sailing a desk. Whether he was a scapegoat or just an idiot remains a point of conjecture, and-like the reason for that second explosion-a subject much discussed in the reference sources I used.
The cast of characters in what I intend as a traditional, closed-environment mystery-somewhat in the Agatha Christie manner-consists primarily of real people. (Only Philomina Vance is fictional, and she takes the place of a real detective aboard the ship, one William Pierpoint of Scotland Yard.) The background material about all of these characters is as accurate as possible, though in some instances, with minor figures-Staff Captain J.C. Anderson, for example, or Master-at-Arms Williams-precious little is known.
Warning telegrams were in fact sent to Frohman, Vanderbilt and a number of other prominent passengers. Although in reality they were not murdered, the three German stowaways existed, as did Neil (sometimes “Neal”) Leach, who several authorities believe had been in league with these probable saboteurs and other German agents.
Charles Williamson, of course, was not in real life their murderer-since these murders happened only in my imagination-but he was indeed involved in the suspicious “suicide” of Alfred Vanderbilt’s mistress, and did seem to have blackmailed the millionaire with art investment as a front. Williamson seemed, then, fair game to be this novel’s villain. The incident of a passenger with a gun trying to force the launching of a lifeboat, only to be crushed by it, did happen-sources vary as to the identity of that passenger.
I have again used a real-life writer of detective fiction as my protagonist. Unlike Jacques Futrelle (The Titanic Murders), Leslie Charteris (The Hindenburg Murders), and Edgar Rice Burroughs (The Pearl Harbor Murders), S.S. Van Dine was not a favorite author of mine. I did read his Philo Vance novels as a young man-when I was devouring any mystery that wasn’t nailed down-and was fascinated by the pseudo-reality of his memoir technique, including his use of footnotes to achieve verisimilitude; the style of this novel has, in that regard at least, been an attempt to present a pastiche of his work. I reread one Vance novel in preparation for this novel-The Benson Murder Case-and, while the writing itself seemed highly competent, could not remember encountering a more irritating or less appealing detective character than Philo Vance.
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