Max Collins - The Titanic Murders

“Were you in Paris on business, Mr. Guggenheim?”

“It’s ‘Ben.’” The millionaire’s handsome features had a softness to them, an almost baby-faced quality, his mouth as sensual as a woman’s. “No, my business has its headquarters in Paris, and I have an apartment there…. Do you have children, Jack?”

They were alone on the deck, with only the night and the breeze to keep them company; even the deck chairs were folded up and neatly stacked against the wall.

“I do,” Futrelle said. “A son and a daughter, both in their teens.”

“I’m on my way home for my daughter Hazel’s ninth birthday.”

“There’s a coincidence,” Futrelle said. “I just had a birthday, and celebrating it without having my children around made me so homesick we hopped this boat.”

Guggenheim blew a blue cloud of cigar smoke into the breeze for it to carry out to sea. “I really love my three little girls.”

“It must be difficult, business keeping you away from your family so much.”

“I miss my children; my wife and I…” He turned to look at Futrelle and his eyes were half-lidded; he was tipsy, all right. “As you may be aware… Jack? Jack. As you may be aware, since gossip seems to run rampant on this floating Vanity Fair, the attractive young woman with whom I’m traveling is not my wife.”

“Madame Aubert is quite beautiful.”

He sent another wreath of blue smoke out to sea. “I know I have a reputation as a playboy, and it doesn’t bother me. It bothers my brothers-all except William-but I’m not in the family business anymore, not directly. Do you know that my brothers made an outcast of William because he married a gentile?”

“I wasn’t aware of that.” Futrelle wondered if Guggenheim had made the assumption he was Jewish because he and May regularly sat with the Harrises and Strauses in the Dining Saloon.

Guggenheim was saying, “My wife wanted to divorce me last year and they talked her out of it, my brothers. Said it would be bad for the family name. Family business.”

“Ben, were you by any chance approached by this blackmailer-this fellow Crafton?”

Guggenheim looked at Futrelle as if for the first time; perhaps the millionaire realized he’d been rambling, somewhat drunkenly, and wondered if he’d said too much.

“I only bring this up,” Futrelle said, “because he attempted to extort money out of me.”

Guggenheim’s oval face had turned blank, and still had a puttylike softness; but the eyes were hardening, if still half-lidded. So talkative before, Guggenheim now fell mute.

So, briefly but frankly, Futrelle told Guggenheim what John Crafton had threatened to reveal, and that he had refused to pay.

“I also refused to pay the bastard,” Guggenheim said, won back over to Futrelle by his candor. Then he laughed. “For a blackmailer, he wasn’t very well informed.”

“How so?”

“First, he threatened to go to my family with my ‘philandering.’ To my brothers! Who know I’ve been friendly with ladies of ill repute since my days in the Rocky Mountains. And to my wife! As if she weren’t already well aware of my proclivities…. She has her gossip and tea and bridge and stocks and bonds, and I have my redheads, brunettes and blondes. Jack, do you know why you should never make love to a woman before breakfast?”

“Can’t say I do, Ben.”

“First, it’s tiring. Second, over the course of the day, you may meet somebody you like better.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Ben.”

He shrugged. “Even my children know of Daddy’s lady friends-I’m sure they all remember the live-in nurse we had around the house for several years. I’ve always been honest about my dishonesty, Jack.”

“Not every man can say that.”

“How well I know.”

“Tell me, Ben-how did Crafton take your rejection of his ‘services’?”

Guggenheim snorted a laugh. “He threatened to reveal my ‘secret’ to the newspapers. I told him to go ahead-the respectable publications won’t touch it, and the yellow press doesn’t matter.”

To a man of Guggenheim’s stature, a minor impropriety like a mistress could be common knowledge as long as he himself did not publicly confirm it. Sexual hypocrisy was a privilege of wealth, and even John Astor and his child bride would eventually be accepted by the nobs.

“Have you talked to Crafton since, Ben? Seen him around the ship?”

“No.” He exhaled more smoke into the night. “Not that I was looking for him. There was a time…”

“Yes?”

“A time I might have shot him.”

“Really?”

A faint smile touched the sensual lips. “Happiest time, best days of my life.”

“When was that?”

“Leadville, Colorado,” he said fondly. “Ten acres of land, three shafts and one hundred men… Sitting with a revolver strapped to my belt, by the shack near number-three mine. Keeping track of income and expenses, making out the payroll myself. Going down to Tiger Alley in the Row, dancing with the fancy girls for fifty cents a dance, three-card monte with the mule skinners and miners at Crazy Jim’s… corn whiskey at the Comique Saloon-twenty cents a glass. You know, I’ve made love to some of the most beautiful women in Manhattan, the loveliest ladies in Europe… and I’d give it all up for one night with any one of those saucy belles at Peppersauce Bottoms.”

Then Guggenheim sighed, pitched his cigar over the side, and said, “Shall we go back down to civilization, Jack?”

“If we must,” Futrelle said, tossing his spent Fatima overboard.

When they returned to the concert (the little orchestra was playing the whimsical idyll “Glow-Worm” from Lysistrata ) they found May sitting with Madame Aubert; so was Maggie Brown, in the shade of a wide-brimmed hat covered with pleated pink silk, her bosomy body bedecked in a pink silk gown with a silk posy at the white lace bodice.

Guggenheim introduced Futrelle to Madame Aubert and vice versa. In a French accent as thick as hollandaise, the blonde goddess said, “You have a charming wife, monsieur.”

“Sit down, you two,” Maggie said. “You’re blocking the show for the suckers in the cheap seats.”

Guggenheim laughed, following her command. “You haven’t changed a bit since Leadville.”

“You have, Goog,” Maggie said. “I remember when your hair was brown and your belly flat as a washboard… but to tell more would be indiscreet.”

Futrelle borrowed a chair from a nearby abandoned table, and joined the little group. He whispered to Guggenheim, “This is civilization?” and the millionaire chuckled.

“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.