Max Collins - The Titanic Murders

“I agree with you,” Futrelle said, “but I’d be more impressed if they’d anticipated the problem.”

“How so?” Baumann asked.

“I fear it’s a sobering indication that no one’s quite sure what a ship this size can do.”

“It wasn’t so long ago,” Mr. Straus said in his softly resonant voice, raising a glass of red wine near his lips, “that Ida and I took passage on the New York ’s maiden voyage.”

“The last word in shipbuilding, it was, they said,” Mrs. Straus added. She had lovely dark blue eyes in a smooth kindly face whose matronly beauty was accentuated by the backward sweep of her still mostly dark hair into a bun. Both the Strauses were conservatively dressed, but-witness Mr. Straus’s golden-brown silk tie and Mrs. Straus’s dark blue silk and lace shirtwaist-expensively.

“Did I tell you about that mysterious stranger who accosted me?” Rene asked suddenly.

“Did some man bother you?” Henry said, looking up sharply from his veal-and-ham pie.

Henry’s concern might have been a bothersome insect, the way Rene waved him off, continuing her tale in wide-eyed animated fashion: “Shortly after the incident, when we were coming down off the boat deck, still in a state of shock, a stranger… tall, with a trim mustache, and piercing dark eyes… you’d have hired him at once as a leading man, Henry B…. asked me, ‘Do you love life?’”

“My goodness!” Ida Straus said, cutting her corned beef.

May’s laugh was a tiny squeal. “And what did you say?”

Henry was frowning.

Rene giggled. “Well, of course I said, ‘Yes, I love life.’ And do you know what he said then?”

“Go ahead and tell us,” Futrelle said. “I can’t stand suspense unless I’m dispensing it.”

“He said, ‘That was a bad omen. There’s death on this ship. Get off at Cherbourg-if we get that far. That’s what I’m going to do!’”

Everyone laughed at this melodramatic story, if uneasily.

“Superstition is the enemy of any thinking man,” Mr. Straus reminded them.

“Well, I’d feel better about this trip,” May said, daintily cutting her fillet of brill, “if Jack hadn’t just finished a tale with a great ship sinking in it!”

“Is that right, Jack?” Henry asked.

“I write about a lot of things,” Futrelle said with a shrug, and sipped his iced tea.

“It’s his new novel,” May said. “ My Lady’s Garter-The Saturday Evening Post has taken serial rights, already.”

“Let’s not boast, May,” Futrelle said, spearing a piece of rare roast beef.

“Will it make a good play, Jack?” Henry asked.

“Don’t change the subject, Henry B.,” his wife said. “I just want to know if Jack here has psychic abilities.”

Over his soused herring, Mr. Straus was studying Futrelle with keen interest, but then everyone at the table had their eyes on him.

“I’m probably no more prescient than any writer,” Futrelle said. “I think all of us who write fiction tap into something, if not mystical, certainly akin to the dream state.”

Young Baumann, so fascinated with this he’d completely forgotten his grilled mutton chops, asked, “Have you ever made up a story and had it come true?”

Nodding emphatically, May said, “One of the first stories he ever published! Based on the notorious suitcase murder in Boston…”

“I read about that,” Brandeis said, pointing with a knife. “Grisly affair….”

“Don’t ask for details over luncheon,” Futrelle said, with a smile, but meaning it.

“Sound thinking,” Straus said, saluting Futrelle with his wineglass.

May rattled on: “Jack solved the case, completely, weeks before the police, who were holding an innocent man.”

“Do tell!” Rene said. “Jack, how did you do it?”

“No crystal ball-simply logic. Applied criminology.”

“Sound thinking indeed,” Mr. Straus said.

Henry whispered, “Better not let old man Stead hear them callin’ you a psychic, Jack-he’ll recruit you for one of his seances.”

Two tables over, the white-bearded old boy was hunkered over a huge plate of food, shoveling the fine fare in like so much coal, while his stunned tablemates did their best to avert their offended eyes.

“They say he’s half-mad, half genius,” Futrelle said.

“Well, he’s an entire slob,” May said.

May’s frank comment elicited an outburst of laughter from all at the table, though Mrs. Straus seemed somewhat embarrassed.

Young Baumann asked, “Would a spiritualist like Stead call a rocky start like this a bad omen? Could we be on an unlucky ship?”

“No, I’d say the odds are in our favor, John,” Harris told the importer. “We’ve already had our accident-whoever heard of a ship havin’ two in one trip?”

Sometime during luncheon, the ship’s three giant propellers had begun to churn and the Titanic set out on the channel crossing, bound for Cherbourg, France. But the diners had been unaware that their voyage was finally under way, so subtle was the motion of the ship and the sound of its mighty engines.

Futrelle and May didn’t realize the boat was moving until they were outside, having taken one of the trio of electric elevators (“lifts,” in the ship’s British terminology)-lavishly paneled in exotic bird’s-eye curly maple-up to A deck. They walked up the stairs and out onto the boat deck, where a brisk breeze ruffled the writer’s hair and the black and white feathers of his wife’s chapeau.

Off starboard the high chalk cliffs of St. Catherine’s Bay, the last landmark of the Isle of Wight, were receding into memory.

Futrelle, noting the curving wake of the ship, said, “The captain must be testing his compasses, shaking his ship down after that near collision.”

“How’s that, dear?”

“He’s steering quite the irregular course-S-turns and other maneuvers, trying to get the feel of handling this barge, I’d say.”

“Jack, how can you call this lovely ship a barge?”

“Because that’s a ship,” Futrelle said, pointing portside, where a gloriously old-fashioned three-masted schooner with its sails and lines was pitching and rolling, water breaking over her bow. “Probably heading for the West Indies…”

May hugged her husband, cherishing the romance of that thought. “I never knew the water was so rough, today.”

“It isn’t. We’re stirring up that chop. That schooner’ll be fine when we’re out of her hair…. Shall we try out the enclosed promenade, before this wind knocks us off our high perch?”

May nodded, and they crossed to port and took a steep flight of metal stairs down into the enclosed First-Class promenade, moving aft down the unadorned deck, their feet echoing off the wood. Navy-blue-jacketed, jauntily capped White Star stewards were setting up the varnished folding wooden deck chairs against the gleaming white walls; the smell of fresh paint mingled with fresh sea air. The deck was fairly deserted, most of the passengers taking advantage of after-luncheon ship tours the purser’s office had offered.

Soon they were at the point where the windows of the enclosed promenade stopped and the open promenade began, though steel-beam window frames and a cable for canvas shades would allow this section to be enclosed as well. Fresh salty breeze streamed in, and golden sunshine, while white-touched rippling blue water stretched to forever; it was one of those moments any couple treasures, when the world seems vast and lovely and theirs alone.

The promenade emptied onto the aft end of A deck, where massive cargo-loading cranes bookended the main mast. This small portion of open deck, with its benches and railings ideal for open-air lounging, was unusual in that the First-Class passengers were literally looked down upon by Second-Class passengers, from the railing along the end of their promenade portion of the boat deck.