The Titanic Murders (19 page)

“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 time 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.”

The men exchanged glances and smiles, but they were still in his thrall.

Harry Widener, the independently wealthy bibliophile, spoke up. “Do you think you might hold a séance aboard this ship?”

Stead shook his head, no. “I have no plans. This is as serious as church to me, gentlemen—not a parlor trick.” He withdrew and checked his gold-plated pocket watch. “It’s getting on toward midnight, gentlemen… perhaps we have time for one more example, to show you the power that can extend from the other side.”

Archie laughed. “A ghost story?”

With a grandiose shrug, Stead said, “Call it that if you like—a tale told ’round our ocean campfire… but a true one.”

And the men at the table, however powerful and wealthy they might be, were like children, exchanging breathless glances, as the storyteller began.

“There is currently on exhibit, in the British Museum in London, a certain Eygptian relic—a mummy, the wrapped embalmed corpse of a priestess of the God Amen-Ra. The vividly painted coffin cover of this mummy is unlike any the curator of the museum had ever seen—the figure painted had anguish-filled eyes, a terror-constricted expression.”

This melodrama had the men smiling—but they were listening. They were listening…

“Experts on Egyptology were called in; their opinion was that this priestess had lived a tormented life, perhaps even an evil life… and the coffin cover’s portrait was designed, perhaps, to exorcise an evil spirit that possessed her soul.”

The smiles faded.

“To learn more, of course, a translation of the hieroglyphics inscribed on the sarcophagus was necessary. And the translation of the inscription on that frightful mummy’s coffin carried a tragic narrative of a beautiful young priestess who fell in love with the pharaoh. She poisoned the wife of the pharaoh, and all of the pharaoh’s children as well, in a misguided, malevolent attempt to become the pharaoh’s new queen. But she was discovered in her evil acts, gentlemen, and the vengeful pharaoh embalmed her alive, with screams that echoed through her pyramid…”

Every man at the table was hanging on Stead’s words.

“… but the inscription warned that should the priestess’s body be disturbed, should it ever be removed from her tomb, and most importantly should her story ever be translated and spoken aloud—the evil she had once within her would be again unleashed, in a torrent of sickness, death and destruction, rained upon those who translated the sacred inscription, and even upon those who passed along the story… as I have just done.”

Stead cast a grave look around his listeners, even as he crushed out his cigar in a White Star ashtray.

The lawyer Seward asked, “What… what became of those who translated the hieroglyphics?”

“Within months, dead to a man. The mummy and its coffin lid remain on display at the British Museum, gentlemen—but there is of course a new curator. And for reasons of safety, they do not post the translation; in fact, it has been burned.”

Archie was leaning so far forward, he was all but sprawled upon the table. “Good God, man—you don’t believe in this curse?”

Stead roared with laughter. “Of course not! That, my friends, is superstition, pure and simple. As Christians you should be ashamed if you even pondered the possibility. I have told you this tale to make a point—not the point you expected—but as proof that I am not superstitious.”

And again Stead removed his gold pocket watch from its resting place in the shabby tweed suit and he announced, “I call to your attention, gentlemen, that it was Friday when I began this story, and the day of its ending falls on the thirteenth.”

“But,” Seward said, “if the curse is true—”

“Why,” Stead said grandly, ridiculously, “this ship is doomed, and the first corpse should appear by morning.”