The Lusitania Murders

by Max Allan Collins

  “Just so we understand each other,” McClure said, his hard gaze travelling from Rumely to me. “I suppose you know that I consider myself a Progressive.”

  “I do,” I said, and I did—from backing Teddy Roosevelt to extolling the virtues of health foods, McClure was if anything a freethinker.

  “So is my friend Edward here,” McClure went on, and placed a hand on the bulldog’s shoulder. “We share many interests. . . . We met when my son was attending the Montessori school Edward ran for a time in LaPorte, Indiana . . . Edward agrees with my current campaign, for example, to form an international organization that would guarantee peace among all nations, world round.”*

  “How interesting,” I said, not really caring. Politics were anathema to me.

  “You see, my sympathies in the current struggle are with Great Britain . . . and Edward’s are with Germany. As reasonable men who can agree to disagree, we have struck a bargain—the News will air both points of view, but ban the propaganda of both.”

  “I wish more newspapers would take a neutral position on the war,” I said. “I’m appalled by these crude British-slanted atrocity stories—Belgium children mutilated, women raped, shopkeepers murdered . . . tasteless rabble-rousing trash.”

  “I agree wholeheartedly,” McClure said. “But I will not tolerate a pro-German point of view, either . . . is that understood, sir?”

  So that was the real heart of tonight’s matter.

  “I will take the same neutral stance as the News,” I assured him.

  He took a final sip from his stein. Too casually, he said, “I have learned that a book of yours is about to be published.”

  I shifted in my chair. “That is true.”

  “The Teachings of Nietzsche? Huebsch is bringing it out, I take it.”

  “Actually, sir, it’s entitled What Nietzsche Taught . . . and much in your tradition, I seek only to guide the general reader to a better understanding of an important philosopher’s much-maligned, much-misunderstood writings.”

  He dabbed a napkin at himself, cleansing his mouth and mustache of beer foam. “There are those who say Nietzsche is to blame, in some degree, for this war—that he was the Prophet of the Iron Fist and the Teutonic Superman . . . the enemy of common, decent people.”

  “Which is why my book is so important, Mr. McClure. Nietzsche wasn’t interested in the acquisition of land for the state, or glory for the Kaiser . . . but in each man’s ability to find within himself strength, confidence, exuberance and affirmation in life . . . a life intensified to its highest degree, charged with beauty, power, enthusiasm. . . .”

  I didn’t realize it, but I was sitting forward now, my voice raised somewhat, and what seemed at first an awkward silence followed . . . until McClure’s grim countenance broke into an unexpected grin.

  “I like the sound of that,” he admitted. “And I like your spirit . . . and your mastery of the English language.” He gathered his coat and hat, stood and offered me his hand, which I shook. He shook hands with his publisher, and then pressed through the bustle of waiters and patrons, on his way to see D.W. Griffith’s eighteen thousand actors and three thousand horses.

  We didn’t even have time to rise, and Rumely smiled on one side of his rumpled face, rumpling it further, saying, “He’s a rather brusque fellow, our McClure.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I do admire his frankness.”

  “Shall we have the Luchow’s fabled sliced pancakes?”

  “Certainly.”

  And we did. While we ate them, my squat companion pointed out a sort of celebrity to me—a stocky, square-jawed man in his sixties, wearing an unprepossessing black suit with string tie and a bowler hat which he left on while he ate at his solitary table.

  “That’s the captain of the Lusitania,” Rumely said. “Bowler Bill himself.”

  “That’s this Anderson I’m to check in with?”

  “No. Turner’s the captain, the top man, but his second in command, Staff Captain Anderson, really runs the ship. Turner’s an old salt some say is past his prime . . . bit of a martinet, a taciturn type who dislikes socializing with the passengers.”

  “But doesn’t that come with the job?”

  “It does, and you’ll see him from time to time—but Anderson will be your contact. The Cunard people themselves recommended we deal with him.”

  “We have their full cooperation?”

  “Oh yes,” Rumely said, and there was something sly in that smile into which he was currently shoveling pancakes, and a twinkle in his eyes that wasn’t fairy-like. “We have their full cooperation for a fine set of articles—pure puffery about their famous passengers.”

  I was willing to write such tripe, particularly under a pseudonym. One’s pride takes second place to the need for nutrition. In recent months I had, for the first time, lowered myself to the hackwork of popular fiction writing, churning out made-to-order adventure stories for pulp magazines. I had even “novelized” (what an abhorrent word) a putrid play, The Eternal Magdalene, into a passably literate work.

  After the pancakes came snifters of Courvoisier. The sweetness of the dessert didn’t really suit this follow-up, but I could never resist that particular cognac, even when ill-advisedly served.

  “Who else besides the estimable Hubbard will feel the feathery brunt of my pen?” I inquired.

  “Well, you’ll be rubbing shoulders with some interesting passengers, there in Saloon.”

  “Saloon Class” was the Cunard line’s designation for first class . . . ah, first class . . . if one were to be a prostitute, let it be on a soft mattress between sweetly-scented sheets. . . .

  “After Hubbard,” Rumely said, “your prime candidate will be Alfred Vanderbilt . . . probably the richest man on earth.”

  “I’ll offer to take his suits to the ship’s cleaner for him,” I said. “Perhaps a million or two will turn up in his pockets.”

  The owner of the restaurant, August “Augy” Luchow—a robust gentleman whose considerable girth was matched only by his bonhomie and perhaps his handlebar mustache—was making a fuss over Captain Turner.

  Rumely said, “This Madame DePage—have you read of her?”

  I sipped my snifter, tasted the cognac, let its warmth roll down my gullet. “The Belgium relief fund woman? She’s been too conspicuous in the press to miss, even for an apolitical lout like myself. Is she travelling the Lusitania?”

  “Yes, she and the one hundred fifty thousand dollars in war relief cash that she’s raised in recent weeks. Her motives seem sincere—she could rate a good human-interest piece.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Frohman’ll be aboard. He’s always good for a story. People love show business, you know.”

  Charles Frohman was the leading theatrical producer of the day—the man who brought Peter Pan to the stage, and Maude Adams to Peter Pan.

  Rumely handed me a manila envelope. “There are your tickets and other materials—using the pseudonym you requested. Is the ‘S.S.’ a reference to steamship, or to Mr. S.S. McClure, your benefactor?”

  “Both,” I said. “As for Van Dine, I believe it suggests in an elegant manner the less than elegant need for nourishment.”

  The bulldog smiled. “Another Courvoisier?”

  “Certainly. And is there anything else we need to discuss, where business is concerned?”

  Rumely seemed almost taken aback. “Why, certainly—you don’t think I sought you out to merely do the conventional bidding of my editor.”

  “Well, I—”

  The publisher held up a stubby hand. “We’ll have another round of cognacs, and then I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  He chuckled. “Why, the real reason you’re boarding the Lusitania tomorrow, of course . . . Waiter!”

  TWO

  The Big Lucy

  Before we get on with the tale at hand, in order to illuminate the nature of various deeds (dastardly and daring), some background seems advisable, r
egarding the Cunard steamship line’s unusual partnership with the British government.

  By the time the nineteenth century dragged itself reluctantly into the twentieth, German liners had become the standard for speed and luxury, which offended the sensibilities of Great Britain, that self-proclaimed “greatest seafaring nation on earth.” Further, collusion between J.P. Morgan (whose White Star Line was Cunard’s greatest rival) and various non-British lines (including Holland-Amerika) set the stage for domination of North Atlantic tourist trade by the upstart American line and its foreign business allies.

  Lord Inverclyde, chairman of Cunard, invoked patriotic pride to convince the British government to lend the line better than two and a half million pounds for the building of a pair of new ships designed to restore Cunard—in terms of both speed and luxury—to a position of pre-eminence in the North Atlantic. Those ships, the sisters Mauretania and Lusitania, were in effect co-owned by the British government.

  For this reason, the Lusitania was designed—its sister, too—for a dual purpose: Decks bore gun emplacements, coal bunkers ran along the sides of the hull to protect boilers from shells and deep storage spaces were fashioned for easy conversion into magazines. In effect, the Lusitania was a luxury liner ready to metamorphose into a battleship.*

  This blurring, between commerce and combat, must be understood for the Lusitania’s tale to make any sense at all . . . if such is possible.

  Sailing day for the Lusitania was the first of May, 1915, a drab, drizzly Saturday. All sailing days were bustling affairs, what with the processing of hundreds of passengers, and thousands of pieces of luggage to be lugged aboard and stored. But any time the Lusitania set sail (if that phrase could be loosely applied to a mighty turbine-powered ship), a throng could be expected dockside, though she had tied up there more than a hundred times, and was a familiar sight at the foot of Eleventh Street. New Yorkers had embraced the Big Lucy ever since that day, eight years before, when she had docked here upon completion of her maiden voyage; even the stench of the nearby meatpacking district couldn’t keep them away.

  And indeed an even larger than usual crowd had braved the growling gray sky and the sticky spring drizzle to cluster along cement-fronted Pier 54 with its massive green-painted sheds blotting out the Manhattan skyline. This was in part because an uncommon number of Americans would be boarding the Lusitania today, many of them women in second class and steerage—wives on their way to join soldier husbands, and nurses who had volunteered to work with the Red Cross.

  But the primary reason for the dockside swarm of what might loosely be termed as humanity related to a warning from the German embassy that had appeared in virtually every New York newspaper either last night or this morning. In some of the papers, this warning had appeared side by side with Cunard’s advertisement announcing the sailing of the Lusitania today at noon.

  This notice had warned travellers “intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage” that “a state of war exists between Germany and Great Britain”; and that the war zone included the waters adjacent to the British Isles. It went on to remind would-be travellers that should they board “vessels flying the flag of Great Britain,” they did so at their own risk.

  Because of this, a fair share of walleyed rubberneckers had come out for a morbid good time, and a gaggle of hardboiled reporters and photographers, including newsreel cameramen, had converged upon Pier 54. Sidewalk photographers were taking shots of the looming ship with assistants yelling, “Last voyage of the Lusitania!” and taking down orders. Like a grotesque parody of a Broadway opening night, wide-eyed faces bobbed in the crowd to the discordant tune of burbling chatter and inappropriate laughter. Added to this were the smells of sea and oil, almost dispelling the meatpacking reek, and the sounds of a colossal ship coming to life.

  As I stood dockside with my bulldog of an employer, Rumely, I was struck like a schoolboy by the immensity of the hull and the four funnels that reached higher up than my neck could crane back. And looking from left to right, one’s field of vision was consumed by a black field of steel with an army of rivet heads lined up in orderly ranks.* Normally the great ship would have been festooned with flags; but today, under clouds of war, even the brass letters on the bow were painted black, and the formerly scarlet and black funnels were simply black now, to make enemy identification harder.

  Impressive as the Lusitania was, one could hardly deem her a beautiful ship—one man’s tour de force in naval architecture was another’s aesthetic monstrosity. From her ventilator-strewn superstructure to those colossal ungainly funnels, the Lusitania was at once the largest movable object yet built by Man . . . and one of the most maladroit—a top-heavy study in ponderous bulk lacking the slim grace of the Olympic (and her fallen sister, Titanic).

  “There seems to be a bit of a delay,” Rumely said. His broad brow was flecked with sweat; the morning was as warm as it was damp, and his three-piece gray tweed suit was a poor choice for the time of year.

  I wore a gray homburg and a crisply new three-piece light blue suit, part of the spiffy wardrobe the News had sprung for me, to help me fit in with the nobs. I stroked the drizzle off my beard. “Why is that?”

  “I understand the Lucy is taking on extra passengers from the Cameronia.”*

  “Overflow?”

  “No—the British Admiralty has requisitioned her. . . . It’ll probably amount to several hours, at least. Do you want to go on aboard?”

  I shook my head. “I prefer to maintain my ringside seat, and allow those lines to thin themselves out. That way you can point out my interview subjects, in case the photographs you provided don’t do them justice.”

  “Don’t be alarmed by this elaborate boarding procedure,” Rumely said, nodding toward the three separate lines leading to three separate gangways (for Saloon Class, Second Cabin and Third Class) where all the passengers and their baggage were being carefully inspected.

  “I’m sure the documents you gave me will do quite nicely,” I said. “And if they don’t, you’ll bail me out of the pokey.”

  Rumely frowned at my levity. “I hope you appreciate the seriousness of your mission.”

  “I do, I most certainly do.” Actually, what I appreciated was the one-thousand-dollar bonus that Rumely had promised me for taking his sub-rosa assignment.

  Pinkerton men and U.S. Immigration officials aided Cunard staffers in what was obviously a serious security effort. Pursers at tables screened each passenger and said passenger’s luggage, then marked them (the luggage, not the passengers) with chalk before Cunard deckhands in starched white sport jackets carried the bags aboard.

  Still, for all of this—and the carnival-like hawking of “final” photos and little British flags on sticks, and the handing out of leaflets quayside by men warning against travel—the passengers who had run the security gauntlet, and were now sauntering up the gangways, seemed happy and at ease. Why should the war interfere with their travel plans? Wars were, after all, the enterprise of armies—soldiers took the battlefields, while politicians negotiated, and civilians stood on the sidelines.

  I was aware, however, that the passengers boarding the Big Lucy were at least as naive in the ways of politics as I was—or at least as I had been, prior to signing on as Edward Rumely’s journalistic spy.

  The evening before, after S.S. McClure had left us alone, Rumely had informed me that I had been chosen for this job because of my pro-German sympathies. I had explained that while I considered Germany a diverse and culturally progressive modern state—and not the British-concocted caricature of the press—I had no interest in politics.

  And Rumely had only smiled and said, “Well, I am content that you are, at least, aware of the preponderance of British propaganda, and the need for balance.”

  I really wasn’t interested, but he was picking up the check, so I said, “That’s certainly true.”

  “Are you aware of the recent scandal on the very pier from which you’ll be sailing?”

 
I admitted I was not, and Rumely, in some detail, told of German cargo ships that were trapped in port by British ships lying in waters outside the three-mile zone. In violation of President Wilson’s neutrality proclamation, a group had been supplying food and fuel to those British ships.

  “I have credible reports,” Rumely told me, “that the Cunard line itself is involved in this criminal effort.”

  “Really,” I said, and tried to put some indignation into it.

  “Further reports indicate that the Cunard line is using its passenger liners to transport contraband—including ammunition, weapons and perhaps even high explosives.”

  “Mr. Rumely, that would seem patently ridiculous—the Lusitania is a passenger ship, not a freighter . . .”

  “Exactly why Cunard hopes she will be given a free pass by German U-boats. And there are other reports that the Lucy is heavily armed—three- or possibly even six-inch guns.”

  “Wouldn’t these be apparent?”

  “Not if they were effectively disguised in some fashion.”

  I was beginning to see what Rumely expected of me. “You’d like me to ascertain whether these big guns exist . . . and whether guns and ammunition are secreted away in the cargo hold.”

  “Exactly . . . and, of course, you must conduct the interviews Mr. McClure has requested.”

  “And how will Mr. McClure react if I come back with a story of American collusion with the British in smuggling contraband through the war zone?”

  Rumely’s expansive face expanded further in a wide smile. “For all his pro-British leanings, he will be delighted—he made his reputation on publishing exposés. You, of course, will have stumbled upon these facts innocently, in the course of pursuing your shipboard interviews.”

  I said nothing; the likelihood of arranging an interview with Alfred Vanderbilt in a cargo hold seemed distant, but the promise of a trip to Europe to fetch my brother—plus a handsome check—made mentioning this seem imprudent.

  Now Rumely and I were dockside, well-positioned to watch as reporters buttonholed prominent passengers who waited in the security line, the war threat having temporarily made equals out of all men. One of those queued up was, in fact, Alfred Vanderbilt himself . . . travelling with a valet but without his wife or other family members. Judging by the familiarity of their conversation, Vanderbilt and the slender fellow in line behind him were friends.