by Tom Slemen
When it was safe to move, Mandarin sneaked along the boat-deck and decided to approach the first passenger he met, a spectacled middle-aged man, leaning on the rail, gazing at the stars. He asked this man what the date was, and after a pause, the perplexed man said, ‘The fourteenth isn’t it?’
‘Great,’ Mandarin muttered, and asked: ‘there’s probably still time. Do you have the time?’ And the passenger examined his fob watch and said: ‘Almost eleven o’clock.’ Mandarin recalled the time when the Titanic would hit the iceberg: 11.40pm – 14 April.
‘You’re from Liverpool?’ asked the passenger, recognising the distinctive accent.
Mandarin nodded. ‘Yes. Good luck,’ he said, and the spectacled stranger watched the peculiar long-haired beatnik in the chocolate-brown corduroy jacket and pink shirt hurry away down the deck, and he yelled after him: ‘Would you like to join me for a game of cards sir?’
No reply came.
Paul Mandarin literally bumped into another passenger, and asked him how he could reach the bridge. The passenger drew the attention of an officer, and this officer, looking Mandarin up and down with a smirk because of his bizarre attire, said, ‘Why do you need to go to the bridge?’
‘Because this ship is about to hit an iceberg!’ Mandarin shouted, alarming several passengers within earshot.
‘Be quiet sir,’ the officer said through the gritted teeth of his thin mouth.
Mandarin was taken to the bridge of Titanic and searched in rather a rough manner by a young overenthusiastic officer as the eminent journalist named William T Stead kept watch on the proceedings. Stead had been invited up onto the bridge as he was in the process of writing an article on the running of the ship from the captain to the stokers. An officer named Fleet was handed the contents of Mandarin’s pockets – a sixpence bus ticket, half a crown and a ten-shilling note – and immediately Fleet puckered his brow at the sight of the unknown female monarch featured on the strange currency – Queen Elizabeth II. ‘A stowaway – or a spy…’ Fleet whispered, and Stead took the ten shilling note from him and scrutinised it.
‘Better call Mr Dalton,’ said Fleet, and the young officer who had searched Mandarin left the bridge straight away. Not a word was said to mandarin until the officer returned with a tall impeccably-dressed man of about forty with oily slicked-back hair and piercing iron-grey eyes. He was the only man on Titanic who was not registered on the list of passengers and crew – James Dalton, a Whitehall intelligence agent. Just before the Titanic had left Southampton, British Intelligence had captured three spies who had been shadowed for a long time. The treacherous trio had taken photographs and made sketches of Titanic and her sister Olympic at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. Those three men – an English traitor calling himself Samuel Torry, a Dutchman named Karl Denig, and a German by the name of Karl Grassall had been arrested on the Isle of Wight last month with photographs of the Titanic as well as plans and drawings made of Spithead and Bembridge Harbour. These plans and photographs would come in very handy in the next war – the war the politicians promised would never come – but every agent in Whitehall and every military officer in Sandhurst knew a war between the rival nations of Britain and Germany was now inevitable and long overdue.
‘Where’s your ticket, sir?’ Dalton asked Mandarin, who shook his head and replied: ‘I haven’t one, and I’m not a stowaway. I’ve come from the future to warn you that this ship will hit an iceberg soon with a great loss of life.’
‘You sound more Irish than Liverpudlian,’ Fleet remarked, ‘Sinn Féin?’
‘Let me deal with this,’ Dalton advised Fleet, and the intelligence man took out a sleek black pistol which naturally startled the visitor from the future.
In a cold monotone voice Dalton warned Mandarin. ‘Unless you tell me who you really are and why you’re here, I will treat you as a possible foreign saboteur and as such I am invested with the power to take your life.’
‘I told you,’ Mandarin gazed at the mouth of the barrel, and began to perspire, ‘I come from the year 1960, from Liverpool. I’m not from Sinn Féin, and I am not a German spy. The money you took from me is from the future; that’s surely proof isn’t it?’
The safety catch was removed by Dalton and the gun aimed at Mandarin’s forehead. ‘Counterfeit money to confuse us. What’s your game sir? Have you planted a bomb on this ship?’
‘If you are from the future,’ the respected journalist Mr Stead chipped in, ‘then let us in on a little future history.’
‘This ship will hit an iceberg any minute, over fifteen hundred men women and children will die,’ said Mandarin, and Fleet shook his head and looked through the bridge windows. ‘Not a berg in sight sir.’
Then officer Fleet saw something much more terrifying approach Titanic. Out of the glass-like plane of the calm waters, 500 yards in the distance, a 300-foot-long submarine emerged slowly from the glittering starlit ocean. Onboard Nemesis were highly-trained agents of Aquarius – a secret world-dominating agency of the sort that internet forum conspiracy-mongers of today ignorantly refer to as the Illuminati. By now, Titanic’s Captain Smith had been informed of the suspected spy being grilled by Dalton of Whitehall and of the unknown submarine stalking the ship. Smith decided to increase the liner’s speed in a vain effort to outrun the sub – even though Titanic was entering an ice field. The time was 11.38pm – and the lookout in the crow’s-nest saw something zip away from the submarine. The sub sank into the waves and the torpedo it had fired left a scintillating wake of starshine and seafoam as it accelerated towards Titanic. Offcer Fleet rang the ship’s bell three times. First Officer Bill Murdoch moved the Bridge telegraph to ‘Stop’ – then ‘Full Astern’. ‘Hard starboard!’ he screamed, and pressed a button to seal all watertight doors down below. The momentum of a ship of such gargantuan proportions was almost impossible to control by the helmsman Bob Hichens. On the starboard side of her hull, Titanic was struck with a torpedo tipped with spars of artificial diamond which opened the steel plates of the hull like an incandescent knife slicing through butter. A low-explosive charge in the torpedo head ripped out a 12-foot-square section of the hull – and the rest is history now. Paul Mandarin felt strange as he gripped the ship’s rail and awaited his execution. He looked at his hands and arms and saw them shimmer, become partially transparent, and his head felt light as a soap bubble. The purple heart was wearing off, and with it the focus of attention was waning. Intelligence agent Dalton pressed the barrel of his pistol against the back of Mandarin’s head – then fired. Mandarin heard a ringing sound in his eardrums – but he felt no pain, because he had faded away from 1912 for a second as the shot was fired. His own time was trying to reclaim him. Dalton stood there in a state of complete shock at the momentary vanishing act, and when Mandarin reappeared, he turned and seized the agent by his collar and pushed him over the ship’s rail.
‘Oh no, he’ll die,’ Mandarin muttered, watching the pallid face of Dalton looking up at him as he thrashed about in the freezing waters. Mandarin ran off, confused, and tried to focus his concentration so he would remain anchored in 1912.
Just after midnight, Captain Smith issued orders for the lifeboats to be uncovered. Some of the ship’s officers were never told of the torpedo, and Smith told his closest officers that there would be a world war if the truth got out, for he believed a long-range German sub had attacked Titanic; the motive – professional jealousy between the rival naval powers. An iceberg was blamed instead, and at 12.15 am the first wireless distress message mentioned this imaginary iceberg. By 2.20am, as Titanic slid to the bed of the North Atlantic and over 1,500 souls were left to die in the waters, the sub returned. Everyone saw its searchlight – a light that appeared to come up out of the water. Drowning people believed it was a ship, and wondered why it wouldn’t come to their aid. Then the light faded as the sub dived and headed home. A liner similar to Titanic – the Liverpool-bound Lusitania, would meet a similar fate in three years – torpedoed by a Germa
n U-20 submarine commanded by the notorious Kapitänleutnant Walther "Baby-Killer" Schwieger. Over eleven hundred men women and children perished on that occasion.
And so the Hope Street time-traveller, numbed by the icy waters, clutched a crying baby floating in a basket among the drowning hundreds, and he tried to swim away from the vast screaming scrum of the doomed. A woman who looked to be about twenty-five grabbed at Mandarin’s shoulder and tried, in desperation, to climb onto him to save her own life. Mandarin swore at her and said she would drown him and the baby, but the woman’s nails tore into his face as she attempted once again to climb onto him to avoid drowning.
Mandarin threw punch after punch into the woman’s face. Her front teeth were knocked out, and with blood pouring from split lips she murmured the words: ‘Help me; what have I done to deserve this fate?’
And then she slid under the water.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Mandarin said, kicking his legs and holding onto the buoyant basket containing the crying baby. And then he grunted, and tried to make this godforsaken time go away. And then the North Atlantic fell away with the rest of 1912, and Paul Mandarin cartwheeled through the space-time continuum, back home – but he arrived back at his bedsit in Gambier Terrace in the wee small hours of the morning, clutching the basket with a blue baby in it as he knelt on the hearth-rug, soaked to the marrow. Luckily, the fire was roaring and Georgina and Giles were still awake. Blankets and hot coffee were brought to the fire, and Georgina cradled the baby as if it was her own. Well now, it was hers, a little baby girl they would name Hope.
Christina and Matthew found themselves back in the persent day, back in England...
‘I wish I could go back in time,’ Matthew said, thinking of the way Paul Mandarin went back to the Titanic.
‘You can’t, it wouldn’t be allowed,’ Christina told him, ‘because you could affect some event in the past and change the future so that thousands of people could die. I saw it on some documentary, and they said it isn’t possible.’
‘Time travel’s possible but you have to be responsible if you start visiting history,’ Rhiannon said, matter-of-fact. ‘Have you two ever heard of Leonardo da Vinci?’
‘I have,’ Christina said, putting her hand up as if she was in class. ‘he invented submarines and robots and parachutes and all sorts hundreds of years ago; was he a time traveller?’
‘No, Leonardo wasn’t, ‘ Rhiannon replied, ‘but that woman he painted, Lisa del Giocondo, was. She was an Italian witch.’
Matthew and Christina returned blank expressions.
Rhiannon Tanglewyst enlightened them a little. ‘You may know her as the woman with that enigmatic smile?’
‘Oh – the – the um,’ Christina struggled to recall the name of the most famous portrait in the world. ‘The Mona Lisa! Was she a witch?’
Rhiannon nodded. ‘Lisa was a Florentine witch. She could see into the future, centuries beyond her own time, which was the fifteenth century, and she used to describe the things she saw to Leonardo da Vinci, and sometimes she even visited the future. She was banished to a picture too, just like me.’
‘By whom?’ Christina wanted to know.
‘A coven of witches in Tuscany. They said Lisa was misusing her powers, interfering with the very course of time itself.’
The anecdote captured Matthew’s imagination. ‘Wow, the Mona Lisa was a witch. I always thought there was something strange about that picture, the way she is smiling and that. Like she has a secret.’
‘She’s been stolen from the Louvre a few times,’ Rhiannon told the young couple, and already, they knew a tale was about to commence. The walls of the room melted away and the din of traffic in the middle of Paris grew in intensity as Matthew and Christina found themselves in the midst of a busy French boulevard…
The Thinking Cap
Alain Chabrol walked along the ever-busy Boulevard St-Germain re-reading the front page of the morning newspaper. The forty-year-old Parisian shook his head a few times as he savoured the audacious facts headlined by Le Monde as 'The Crime of the Century'. The Societe Generale bank down in Nice had been robbed. The thieves had tunnelled from a sewer into the bank vaults and emptied safe-deposit boxes crammed with jewellery, bonds and ready cash. Owners of the strong-boxes had put in claims totalling fourteen million francs, but police believed the haul had been much greater, and insinuated that most of the victims of the bank job had claimed much less than they had lost for fear of attracting the attention of tax inspectors and the law.
Alain folded the newspaper and sat at a rickety table outside the Cafe de Flore. He ordered nothing but a straight black coffee and waited. He glanced at his watch and saw the time was now 10.35 a.m., but there was still no sign of his friends. They should have been waiting here ten minutes ago.
A shadow flitted across the table. It belonged to Jean-Louis Deveau, a small corpulent hawk-nosed man from Marseilles who had lived in Paris for three years. By day he haunted the bookmakers and by night he played the piano at a seedy Left Bank nightclub called La Kismet.
"Where's Claude?" asked Alain.
"His girlfriend threw him out last night; called him a parasite." Jean-Louis started to giggle as he thought of the tiff. "She wants him to get a job, Wants him to settle down. Can you imagine Claude working?"
"Where the hell is he?" Alain took his lighter out of his inside jacket pocket then replaced it as he remembered he was trying to kick the habit.
"Here he is." Jean-Louis pointed to the wiry long-haired young man in a denim jacket coming down the boulevard from the Metro entrance.
"I take it you know about the big bank job in Nice," said Jean-Louis, ordering coffee and cakes.
"Yes, I've just been reading about it. Whoever staged it must be a genius, “ Alain speculated, watching Claude’s slow-motion approach over the chequerboard road-crossing.
"It was Spaggiari. " Jean-Louis smiled as the waiter emerged from the café with the tray carrying the coffees and three cream cakes.
"Spaggiari?" Alain exclaimed. He waited until the waiter moved away. "How do you know he’s behind it?"
"Everyone knows for Heaven’s sake; it’s all over the grapevine," replied Jean-Louis. He assaulted one of the cakes.
"That's just hearsay, Gossip." Alain unfolded the newspaper and perused the front page yet again.
"Not just hearsay," said a creamy-mouthed Jean-Louis, "The police found Dom Miguel cigar butts in the vaults. Spaggiari smokes that brand of cigar."
Albert Spaggiari was a legendary figure in the underworld; a mysterious handsome genius who had a talent for pulling off seemingly impossible robberies. With every crime he perpetrated, Spaggiari became more and more of a French folklore hero. The police were said to be half-hearted in their attempts to catch the supercrook because he never used violence in any of his capers. Schoolchildren excitedly discussed his exploits in the playground, and a considerable segment of France’s female – and male - population fantasised about him. One of those females who fantasised was Juliette Mirelle, a twenty-year-old art student who lived in the flat above Alain. For months, Alain had been hot on her tail, but she just didn’t want to know. When he once jokingly asked her what her ideal man was like, she told him she'd love to date somebody tall, dark, handsome and a bit of a genius and a daredevil, and she then admitted that Albert Spaggiari would be her dream date. It was then that Alain decided it was time to change his old loser image. He knew it was probably a crazy dream, but if he could become something special, Juliette would see him in another light. He packed in his job as a car park attendant and started to mingle with the nocturnal people of the Parisian underworld. It was so corny and laughable, but it was Alain’s reaction to his mid-life crisis.
"Sorry I'm late. Michelle and I -" Claude was apologizing.
"Yeah, I know, kid. Sit down." Alain cut in.
Claude obediently sat down at the table. "Well, how does it look?"
Alain looked around furtively, and his two friends
studied his face, waiting for him to speak, He nodded.
"That's great. Tonight?" said Claude, excitedly.
Alain put his index finger to his pursed lips as an obvious gesture for him to zip it. "Did you get the book?" Alain enquired. He had designated the word 'book' to mean gelignite.
"Yeah, Look." Claude took a small parcel the size of a 20-cigarette box out of his inside jacket pocket and handed it to Alain.
"You idiot." Alain backed away from the offered parcel. "Why have you brought it here? Are you crazy?"
"It's safe. You need a special detonator to blow it," explained Claude, putting the explosive block back in his pocket. He was amused at the anxiety he had generated and gave a little laugh. No one laughed back and the youth sipped his coffee through the tense silence.
"Don't look now," said Jean-Louis, "but here comes La Sage."
But Claude did not heed his friend’s advice, and he looked along the boulevard to see a policeman approaching.
"Don"t panic. He knows when something's going down," said Alain, pretending to read Le Monde. To Jean-Louis, he said, "If he asks you why you’re in the capital, tell him you’re – you’re looking after your sick sister."
"But my sister doesn't live in Paris anymore. She moved to Rouen," said Jean-Louis. He replaced the cream cake he’d been ready to devour back on the lace doily of the plate. The member of the gendarmerie had ruined his appetite.
"Bonjour," said La Sage. He stopped by the three men and scrutinised their faces, noting their reactions.
"Bonjour. La Sage isn't it?" said Alain, trying to smile at the policeman.