Hell Gate

by Jeff Dawson

  For a brief moment, the shadowed eyes of the first man were cast up in his direction, unconsciously locked on his. Sammy felt something primal – a terror. His heart thundered. The pulse rapped in his ears.

  The second man rushed to the changing-room door. There was a flash at his hip – a glint of metal as he pulled out a pistol. Sammy recognized it – a Luger – sleek, black. The man hurried into the corridor.

  Sammy used the commotion to twist for relief. He had taken great care, even entering the duct backwards should he need to effect a quick escape. There was no obvious evidence of his passage through the building. But… the prised-off mesh covering the shaft? Should anyone look closely…

  His mind raced. His breath came in sharp pants. There was a foul taste in his mouth.

  The shaft he was situated in was linked to a central vertical one, running up the building like a chimney. There were outlets on other floors. If he could just…

  And then, below, the man returned.

  ‘Rats,’ he said. ‘Just rats.’ And he tucked the Luger away.

  Sammy exhaled his relief in instalments.

  But… the human voices from elsewhere, locked in that distant chant, were beginning to rise in volume. And there was a smell now, of burning… of evergreen… pine… like Christmas…

  He peeked back through the grille. The youths sat glassy-eyed, trance-like. Instructed to rise, they did so wearily. One of them wobbled.

  The two robed men arranged them, each youth with a left hand placed on the shoulder of the one in front. Though it was beyond Sammy’s field of vision, it seemed another door was opened. There was a sudden blast of incantation and smouldering wood.

  To investigate further required Sammy to inch himself backwards, slowly, into the dark and the filth. He heard the scuttle and scrape of rodents. He gritted his teeth and reversed. The further he went, the louder the chanting. He edged his way until he found another grille.

  The room below him was large – the gymnasium. And it was crowded, with maybe up to 100 men, all dressed in the same green robes, heads bowed, gently swaying in unison, issuing the resonant mantra.

  There was no artificial lighting, only candles, which lined a circle of open space in the centre. At one end was a large chair – roughly hewn from dark wood and, in the middle, an imposing wooden slab, chest high, constructed of the same material. Both were adorned with forest greenery – ferns, pine fronds, mistletoe… There was no mistaking their purpose – a throne and an altar.

  A man moved among them swinging an incense holder, wafting more smoke. It was a sign that something was afoot.

  Sammy manoeuvred himself to watch the youths from the League ushered in – some of them seemingly more conscious than their fellows and with noticeable glances of consternation being shared by the more alert.

  Three loud bangs. The room fell silent.

  The blows had come from a wooden staff, a weighty gnarled rod. The man who wielded it wore the same robe, face similarly obscured, but with a V-shaped gold sash that hung about his shoulders. He was stout. Slowly he took his place on the throne, then banged three more times on the ground.

  ‘I command the room to silence,’ he boomed.

  The man’s voice was full, orotund.

  ‘Brothers,’ he bellowed. ‘We are gathered here once again to invoke the spirits of the ancient land of Thule and avow the quest for purity bequeathed by the elders of the Order of Teutons.’

  A call and response ritual followed. It was in German. Sammy couldn’t understand. And then came three sharp blows again. The room fell silent – so quiet you could hear the candles flicker. Sammy held his breath.

  The man rose off his throne.

  ‘Bring in the traitor!’

  Added now was a human whimpering. Directly below Sammy, snivelling, his body bleeding and bruised, was a naked man. Bound at the wrists and ankles by what appeared to be vines of some sort, he was being dragged by two men. The others parted, allowing the poor soul to be flung into the middle, pitched onto his belly.

  The man was possibly in his 30s, his slick dark hair dishevelled. And his white, vulnerable flesh was a contusion of welts, cuts and grazes, particularly on his back. There was some muttering in the ranks from the new initiates.

  ‘Silence!’ came the roar from the throne.

  He turned to the wretch before him.

  ‘This man, prostrate before us, whom we treated like a son, a brother, has chosen to betray us – to strike us low while we are in pain.’

  There were nods, murmurings of assent.

  ‘He must atone for his errors.’

  The man had a badly injured right leg – possibly broken. His attempt to claw his way to his feet, clutching at the altar, was pathetic. He collapsed back down, groaning, wincing.

  Sammy fancied he could smell the man’s fear… But it was his own.

  On a nod from a subaltern, the man was scooped up and thrust onto the altar, tied so that he lay face up, arms and legs spreadeagled, rendering him utterly exposed. He shrieked when they bound his broken leg. Sammy could see that one eye was completely shut, swollen and black.

  There were three more blows with the staff. From behind the throne emerged another man, impossibly tall, his cloak barely big enough to conceal him. The pitiful creature on the altar squirmed and squealed.

  From an ornate leather scabbard, the tall man slid out a long, curved knife – shiny and oiled. He raised it high. Upon its rune-etched blade the candlelight glinted. The chanting rose both in pitch and in volume – not controlled now but spontaneous, a lusting…

  He turned to the throne and a head was dipped in approval, at which, with one swift arc, the tall man sliced the victim from breastbone to navel.

  The act seemed frozen in time, a full second or two before near-black blood started rising up through the slash. The man screamed in agony, still alive, but with his life now spurting away rhythmically from just below the ribcage.

  His assaulter turned to salute the room, raising his weapon high. Blood ran down the hilt. The sea of green parted and he extended his hands towards the room’s new recruits… bowing, offering up the blade on open palms.

  And then it dawned on them – he was inviting them each to add his own handiwork. One of the boys fainted, another vomited.

  It was all Sammy could do to stop throwing up himself.

  Chapter 4

  The North Atlantic – two days before disembarking

  Finch lay on his bunk and eyed the opened envelope. He had promised to burn the letter upon reading. That was before he boarded in Liverpool. Technically, the ongoing act of refusal had not just compromised his mission but downright invalidated it. Given the consummate ease with which his controller, Mr Melville, was given to liquidating non-compliant MO3 agents, he considered that he should perhaps take matters more seriously.

  Finch poured himself another shot of Talisker in one of the White Star’s fine crystal tumblers and lit himself a Navy Cut. He turned the paper in his hand, marvelling all the while at how, in the middle of the Atlantic, he should feel only the slightest motion. The engineers had stabilized the Baltic with ingenuity. He wondered if they were of the same opinion down in steerage.

  And then he did what he should have done days ago. He grabbed the ashtray and took his lighter to the letter’s thin paper. Sure that every last scrap had been cremated, he walked into his bathroom and pulled the chain on the embers. Then he donned his camel-hair coat, turned up his collar and stepped through the thick teak door to the first-class passenger deck.

  The cold salt air and a blast of spray shook him out of his reverie. But it was preferable to the stifling steam-driven heat of the interior. On the starboard side he was currently leeward, screened from the whistling wind. He leaned on the wet rail and watched the ocean. How like a landscape it seemed – gentle hillocks and sculpted valleys, mere foothills to the more ominous dark crags on the horizon with their white-capped peaks.

  After the daily long lunch (fol
lowing elevenses, following a cooked breakfast), there were few people about, the first-class clientele having taken to their post-prandial snoozes. It was all so tiresome to Finch – donning a dinner jacket every time he wanted to eat; a constant process of enforced formal dining. Eat and sleep. It was all there was to do in the rarefied air of ‘luxury travel’. No wonder the rich grew fat and lazy.

  The deck chairs were stacked and tied down, a sign of bad weather ahead. On deck, with the horizon visible, the ship was pitching more than he had felt. He took a stroll regardless, the better to flex his problematic knee. A middle-aged couple bade him a queasy good afternoon. The woman looked like she’d just been sick. If Finch were wearing a hat he would have doffed it, but he knew better by now than to sport one on deck.

  Towards the bridge, beneath the telegraph office, was a noticeboard. In the absence of newspapers, the daily bulletins were of interest. Beyond reading H. G. Wells or Jules Verne in his cabin, they were the only diversion – the rest of his time aboard spent stoically ignoring every invitation for a hand of bridge or to sit through the third-rate cabaret acts in the lounge.

  All he knew, according to that letter, was that someone on board was supposed to make direct contact. Meanwhile he was to keep up a pretence. He was Mr Bradley Collins of London, an importer/exporter of some unspecified produce.

  He thanked his new coat for its deep pockets. He pulled out his whisky bottle, squeaked out the cork and took a generous swig. The latest telegraphs, he noted, had come via St John’s, Newfoundland. This was the sixth day at sea. By tomorrow, Wednesday, they would be skirting the eastern seaboard. By Thursday morning they would be in New York.

  The pinned notices made for sombre reading. In Russia, the proletariat were in open revolt. The strikes, the civil disorder, had spread even sooner than Melville had predicted. In response, the Imperial cavalry showed no mercy, chopping down protestors at will, signs that this great Russian uprising – or this stage of it – was going to be short-lived.

  Incredibly, in the ongoing Russo–Japanese War in the Far East, the Russian fleet was still labouring in the Pacific after the long journey from its Baltic base. It had been its passage across the North Sea five months earlier – mistakenly firing upon British fishing trawlers – that had set in train the series of events which had brought Finch here today. If the Tsar’s military forces were that incompetent, it seemed the old regime could ultimately be overthrown. If not this time, then later. Melville had foreseen that, too.

  Elsewhere, Morocco was shaping up to be a new crucible of confrontation. The Germans were backing its independence from France, with a pledged royal visit by the Kaiser to underscore the claim. On seemingly every international issue, positions were becoming entrenched: Germany on one side; Britain and France, the Entente Cordiale, on the other… with a weakened Imperial Russia to be added, if it survived.

  ‘Mr Collins?’

  It was a steward, a fresh-faced, straight-backed young man, whiffing of health and vitality. Finch tucked away the bottle. He hoped he hadn’t seen it.

  ‘Sir,’ he added and whipped out a small silver salver, his thumb securing a piece of white card upon it. Finch read it. It was an invitation to dinner this evening, in the Versailles lounge, at the behest of Lady Belinda Brunswick.

  Finch was already regretting his stroll.

  ‘Would you like me to respond, sir?’

  Finch let out a sigh.

  ‘Very well. Tell Lady Brunswick…’

  The steward produced a notepad.

  ‘…that it will be my pleasure. I look forward with great…’

  ‘Great what, sir?’

  ‘Great… enthusiasm. Yours sincerely, etc.’

  The steward didn’t budge.

  ‘Oh, of course…’ said Finch and retrieved some pennies.

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said the young man and marched off briskly, untroubled by the ship’s motion.

  Finch wandered back, reaching occasionally for the rail. The canvas awnings of the lifeboats rasped in the breeze. He wondered, in an emergency, whether they could realistically accommodate 3,000-plus passengers and crew.

  Above him, the two yellow funnels pumped their smoke into the air. At the stern, the blue ensign flapped furiously. The sky was leaden.

  Back in his cabin, Finch ran a bath – salt water but piping hot. He took his dinner suit off the hanger, lay it on the bed, and swore that he would get rid of it at the earliest opportunity.

  Then he took another swig of Talisker and wondered why an elderly grande dame should have sought him out… particularly as ‘Mr Collins’ didn’t exist.

  * * *

  What Finch knew of Lady Brunswick came from the society pages. She was a textbook Dowager Countess, one of that new Anglo-American upper class, a friend of the Astors and the Gettys; one who summered with the Vanderbilts, took Thanksgiving with the Rockefellers, and whose trans-Atlantic status was secured by the dinner parties that continued in transit on liners like the Baltic.

  The door to the Versailles lounge was opened by a steward dressed unnecessarily in tropical whites, with gloves to match. It could have been a salon lifted from any of Europe’s courtly homes – Queen Anne chairs, a chaise longue, bucolic landscapes on the walls, potted palms, a baby grand piano, and a tail-coated young man running through some muted Debussy upon it.

  There was a huddle of guests, the hum of polite conversation, though when Lady Brunswick saw Finch she greeted him personally and enthusiastically and pressed a champagne flute into his hand.

  ‘Mr Collins, so delighted you could join us.’

  She was dressed in widow’s black, a long evening dress, offset by an ostrich feather in her blue-rinsed hair and heavy pearls around her neck. She was in her 70s, Finch supposed – short, stoutly built, with a soft, kind face and a pair of lorgnette spectacles, whose stick she wielded with long black velvet gloves.

  Finch stooped to kiss her hand. The collar studs dug into his neck.

  ‘The pleasure is all mine, Lady Brunswick.’

  He was introduced to the others, a selection of dinner suits and gowns, British and American, whose names he forgot instantly. He wondered whether one of them was his contact.

  Lady Brunswick had saved her best guests till last.

  ‘May I introduce Mr Morgan.’

  Finch shook his hand. He was a short, bald man with a bulbous nose and a droopy moustache. It was only when she added his initials ‘J. P.’ that Finch understood the kind of company the fictitious ‘Mr Collins’ evidently kept.

  For the most famous financier in all of America, John Pierpoint Morgan cut a modest figure.

  ‘The new owner of our White Star Line,’ added the man next to him.

  ‘Now now, Bruce,’ joshed Lady Brunswick and introduced: ‘Mr Ismay, the White Star chairman.’

  He was a man of around 40 with a mischievous face and handlebar whiskers.

  ‘I’ve been hearing all about it,’ lied Finch.

  ‘Not too much I hope,’ quipped Morgan. ‘You in the shipping business yourself, Mr Collins?’

  Finch pulled at his collar. He couldn’t remember clothing as uncomfortable. And it was making him sweat.

  ‘Indirectly. You know… importing… exporting…’

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Ismay and placed his arm around Finch’s shoulder. ‘You must tell me more.’

  The round dining table was through a set of double doors and laid for ten. Were it not for the chandelier that swayed gently over it, its movement reflected in the mirror over the fireplace, you would never know you were at sea.

  Finch found himself honoured with a seat next to Lady Brunswick herself. To his great relief, he was one space removed from the inquisitive Ismay, who tapped on his glass and proposed a toast to his hostess.

  The chair to Finch’s right was empty, though barely had the first course been served – salmon mousse – than the late arrival was announced. It was the ship’s skipper himself, Captain Smith – ‘Edward John’ as La
dy Brunswick called him – who hustled in, still in uniform, carrying with him the cold and tang of the sea. He was greeted with enthusiastic applause and seemed embarrassed by it.

  Smith had a bushy white beard with a genial yet pragmatic air about him – one not of the social class by whom he was being feted, but indulging its company all the same. In his sing-song Potteries accent, he excused himself in advance should he be called away.

  Finch survived dinner – a sublime batch of Maine lobster – by parrying interrogations as to Collins’s professional dealings with a faux-dismissive, ‘Please, let’s not mix business with pleasure,’ or variants thereof, a tactic which worked rather well.

  Politics and world affairs got their inevitable outing. Mention of the Boer War brought the usual opinions out into the open. Captain Smith recognized Finch’s wince of a veteran – even though it was never stated. He discreetly tapped a red-and-blue ribbon on his chest, the Transport Medal. When he confided that he, himself, had been involved in the conflict, running supplies to and from South Africa, Finch warmed to him further.

  Ismay, who’d been availing himself of the Bollinger, declared that with J. P. Morgan’s investment, White Star would soon be able to announce it was laying down hulls at Harland & Wolff on two new super-liners, whose size would eclipse even this vessel. They were to be called Olympic and Titanic.

  He clapped the skipper on the back.

  ‘As fleet commodore, of course, Captain E. J. Smith could have his own pick.’

  ‘Well,’ blushed Smith. ‘I do say I’ve got one big command left in me.’

  There was still no hint of a contact. But, when it came time for the gentlemen to adjourn for cigars and brandy, with the ladies heading for the lounge, Lady Brunswick laid her hand on Finch’s arm.

  ‘Mr Collins, if I might have a word.’

  She led him into a smaller parlour, a private room with a pair of high-backed chairs, a roll-top desk… and, eyed Finch, a drinks cabinet.

  ‘Whisky, Mr Collins?’