Max Collins: The Titanic Murders

And the door slammed shut, leaving Crafton with the sudden realization that he was blocking the aisle-and that this exchange, the last part of it anyway, had been overheard.

Crafton smiled stiffly, tipped his hat to the ladies, and said to the men, “In business, emotions can run away. My apologies, ladies… gentlemen. Good day.”

And he disappeared down the aisle and into the next coach.

“Who is that character?” Henry wondered aloud.

“A disagreeable acquaintance of my old friend Major Butt,” Futrelle said. “And that’s about all I know of him… except I believe the older gentleman may be Isidor Straus… I noticed his name on the passenger list.”

“Oh!” Rene said, as if she’d been pleasantly struck. “He owns Macy’s department store! Let’s get to know him, shall we, May? A friendship with Mr. Straus may lead to getting our fall fashions wholesale.”

May laughed, as if Rene had been joking, though Futrelle was pretty sure she wasn’t.

The compartment was upholstered in a deep blue gold-braided broadcloth, with lush mahogany woodwork, a nice promise of luxury to come. Futrelle and May settled into the comfortable cushioned seats and the Harrises took the opposite seating.

Promptly at nine-thirty the boat train rolled out of Waterloo Station, its chocolate-brown coaches pulled by a green locomotive, beginning an eighty-mile journey that gave the Americans a picturesque tour of the English countryside. Slate-roofed, red-brick town houses marked Surbiton, Woking and the rest, tidy rows of tidy structures each with its own back garden bursting with blossoms. The countryside was ablaze with color: daffodils, tulips and narcissus, brilliantly green hedgerows and flowering cherry trees, all flourishing in the April sunshine of a spring that had come early.

“We’re tickled you decided to go First Class,” Henry said, settling back. He had hung up the silly Inverness cape and his considerable girth was encased in brown tweed. “You know how these liners segregate the classes.”

“I’m glad you two are willing to put up with riffraff like us,” Futrelle said.

“We’ll force ourselves,” Henry said with a grin.

“This wasn’t your doing, was it?”

“How so?”

May flashed a look his way, but Futrelle pressed on just the same: “You know, Henry, I do turn an honest dollar, now and then. I haven’t been reduced to taking charity.”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about?”

Futrelle told him about the unexpected gift from Ismay.

“I had nothin’ to do with that,” Henry said with a dismissive wave. “But it doesn’t sound like Ismay’s style, either-I’ve been on White Star liners he was ridin’ before, and he’s one rude, arrogant son of a bitch… pardon my French, ladies.”

Soon the train was traveling through Surrey, domain of the landed gentry with their cottages of dressed fieldstone, half-timbering and thatch, where fields of grass and heather stretched endlessly, interrupted occasionally by clusters of birch, oak, spruce and beech.

“How did your trip go, Jack?” Henry asked. “Come back with some nice fat contracts for stories and books?”

“Be good, Henry B.,” Rene scolded mildly. “It’s none of your business. Did you, Jack?”

Futrelle chuckled. “I did very well, actually. I’ve contracts enough to hold me through the next year, easily… but I’ve had to revive my old nemesis.”

“More ‘Thinking Machine’ stories?” Henry asked, eyes laughing. “I thought you’d sworn off that cranky old egghead-like Doyle dumping Holmes off that cliff.”

Futrelle worked up half a smile. “Yes, but like Sherlock’s papa, I’m afraid, Mammon tempted me back into the fray.”

May said, “Jack’s written six new ‘Thinking Machine’ stories on this trip-heaven help us if our steamer trunks are lost!”

“How about you, Henry?” Futrelle asked. “Find any British plays worth producing? Got your next Lion and the Mouse lined up?”

“I’ve got a couple honeys under option. But I’m branching out, Jack, into the future.”

“What future would that be?”

“In my steamer trunk are a couple of tin cans that set me back ten thousand pounds.”

“Tin cans?”

“Of motion-picture film, Jack-I’ve got Reinhart’s The Miracle in kinemacolor! Just spoke with Oscar Hammerstein yesterday, and he’s interested in going partners.”

Futrelle made a face. “I’m not an admirer of the cinematograph. I believe in words not pictures.”

“You sold The Hidden Hand for filming,” Rene reminded him.

“Yes, and they butchered it.”

After a while the landscape rolling by the boat-train window shifted from idyllic rural to harsh urban, sprouting not flowers but corrugated-iron factory roofs, the forests not trees but smokestacks of textile mills and steelworks. Much as he admired the captains of industry, like those on this train, Futrelle could not reconcile their capricious leisure with the quiet desperation of workers such as those who dwelled in the dingy rabbit warren of squalid red-brick row houses gliding by the window like an admonishing vision courtesy of one of Scrooge’s ghosts.

Henry, with that good heart of his, must have felt a twinge himself, because he suggested they repair to the smoking car, where shortly Jack was lighting up a tailor-made Fatima from a gold-plated cigarette case and Harris a Cuban cigar.

“It’s that unpleasant fellow again,” Henry said, waving out a match, nodding toward a table by the window where indeed the ferrety Crafton was seated with none other than that great unmade bed of a man, William T. Stead. The two men had their heads together, Stead listening intently, frowning, Crafton whispering, his smile lifting the ends of the handlebar mustache into black angel wings.

“Not interested, sir!” Stead said suddenly.

Banter in the smoke-filled car fell to a hush, as the white-bearded, massively bellied Stead stood and berated his fellow passenger in a bellow.

“To the dogs with you, sir! The dogs!”

Embarrassed, Crafton smiled nervously, shrugging to the other men in the smoking car and nodding toward Stead, with an expression that encouraged their common knowledge that the old man was mad as a March hare.

Stead understood this patronizing gesture and grabbed Crafton by the front of his striped sack suit and lifted him from his chair like a naughty child.

“Fortunate for you, sir,” Stead said, nose to nose with the frightened little man, “that I am a pacifist!”

And then Stead tossed him back onto the chair, storming out of the car, leaving a smoldering stogie and a chagrined Crafton behind.

“Fella seems to make friends everywhere he goes,” Futrelle said to Henry.

“Maybe I should follow him around with a motion-picture camera,” the producer said.

Soon they were back in the compartment with their wives. The train had begun its long downhill ride to Eastleigh, doing better than sixty miles per hour, shooting like a bullet through the hill tunnels of Hampshire Downs, past Winchester, into Southampton, sailing like a ship through Terminus Station and across Canute Road.

Finally, just before 11:30 A.M., the boat train moved down the side of Central Road and took a slow turn to the right onto the track flanking the platform built on the White Star Line’s ocean dock. Nearby loomed the massive pair of long, narrow sheds, their corrugated steel painted green, where Second- and Third-Class passengers and cargo were processed.

But the boat train delivered its First-Class passengers dockside; they stepped out into the crisp sea air, where the port side of the giant ship towered before them, filling their sight like a vast cliff of steel.