[Mark Twain Mysteries 03] - The Prince and the Prosecutor

by Peter J. Heck

  The fish course went away, and the pastry came (apple fritters with hard sauce). Dr. Gillman speculated on medical applications of hypnotism, of which he had made an extensive study. The laughter from the captain’s table was louder than ever, more uproarious than it had been at the young Philadelphians’ table when Robert Babson was their guiding spirit. Mr. Clemens was clearly giving a fine performance, and his fellow-diners were delighted. All but one: Captain Mortimer sat there politely, not unsmiling but not wholeheartedly joining in the general merriment, either. Was he always this stiff? I had to wonder whether he was steeling himself to deny Mr. Clemens his request for an interview with the prince—perhaps he had already done so, and was patiently enduring my employer’s gibes disguised as good-humored teasing.

  Perhaps I was imagining difficulties where none existed. After all, I had not paid particular attention to the captain’s bearing during previous meals, so I had no real basis for comparison. Still, as I sipped my coffee, I began to wonder whether Mr. Clemens’s plan to threaten the captain with a satirical lecture had any chance of working. The captain of a ship on the high seas was supposedly a law unto himself. Would he contrive some excuse for calling off the lecture? For that matter, if he considered my employer a threat to incite the other passengers’ opinion against him or the American Steamship Line, could he confine Mr. Clemens to his cabin for the duration of the voyage? It seemed a far-fetched notion. Still, there was no guarantee that the captain would let us visit a man suspected of murder, no matter how eminent and popular Mr. Clemens might be.

  At last the captain stood, bowing to the ladies and gentlemen at his table, and the meal was at an end. As at the conclusion of one of his lectures, Mr. Clemens was surrounded by a crowd of his fellow diners, anxious for one last moment of intimacy with the famous man. At an actual lecture, it would have been my responsibility to come forward, after a few minutes, with some pretended backstage business to allow Mr. Clemens a chance to pry himself away from the crowd. It was tempting to do so on this occasion, especially because of my anxiety to learn whether the captain had agreed to let him interview the prince. But there was a chance one of the other passengers might drop some morsel of information that would help in our investigation. I reluctantly made my way down the corridor to our cabin, to await my employer’s arrival and learn whatever news he had.

  The wait turned out to be longer than I’d expected. At first I sat on the couch—the book of Tennyson’s poems was still there—expecting him to come in the door shortly behind me. While it was common for him to be inundated with well-wishers after a lecture, it was not at all usual after a dinner. But the wait grew, and grew. I looked around our quarters, admiring how smoothly the ship’s designers had disguised the functional metal hull behind flowered wallpaper and rich mahogany, turning the cabin into a small apartment that, upon first glance, might be located in a fine hotel in any American city. The round porthole was the only obvious sign that we were aboard a ship. And only a light rocking gave any indication that we were moving across the ocean at more than fifteen knots.

  After ten minutes, there was still no sign of my employer, though I had expected him to be right on my heels. Should I go back to the dining room and see if he really did need “rescuing” from the crowd? But Mr. and Mrs. Kipling would be joining us at any moment, and if I were gone, they would have to wait outside in the corridor. Besides, it was not certain that Mr. Clemens would be right where I had left him, and I would have no idea where to search if he were gone. Best to stick to the plan, and wait for him here. I picked up the book and opened it at random, thinking perhaps I would find something of interest.

  I had not read much Tennyson. I remembered hearing the accounts of his death only a short while before, while I was still at Yale. One of the professors had proclaimed him the greatest poet of modern times. The first piece that caught my eye was The Revenge, a rousing sea-ballad of Elizabethan times that swept me away to the era of wooden ships until I was startled from my reading by a knock on the door. I looked at my watch and discovered that fifteen minutes had passed. I went to the door and opened it to admit Mr. Kipling.

  “Carrie’s gone to spy on the Philadelphia ladies some more,” he said. “I think she enjoys it. Where’s Clemens?”

  “Come in and have a seat,” I said. “I’m afraid Mr. Clemens isn’t back yet—I thought he’d be here before now. Can I fix you drinks? We have whisky and soda. . .”

  “That sounds good, but I think I’ll wait for Clemens,” said Mr. Kipling, strolling over to the couch I’d just vacated. “If he comes in with word that we can go talk to Ruckgarten right away, I’d either have to gulp it down or have it go to waste, and either would be a pity with such good whisky.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “I can’t imagine what’s taking him so long, but I hope it isn’t bad news. The captain seemed very stiff at the table tonight.” I walked over and looked out the porthole; outside the sky was clear, and a bright moon was just visible towards the prow of the ship.

  “Well, it needn’t have had anything to do with our business,” said Mr. Kipling. “Captains come in all sorts, but the majority of them fall into two classes: the ones who care most about their ships, and the ones who care most about the passengers. Mortimer’s one of the first sort, or I’m no judge of character. That’s probably why he wanted to get Clemens for his table every night. It saves him from trying to make clever talk with a bunch of people with whom he has nothing in common.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” I said. “Still, Mr. Clemens should’ve been back by now. I can’t help but think there’s something the matter . . .”

  The door flew open with a bang, and Mr. Clemens stomped into the room. “Damn right there’s something the matter,” he said. “Fix me a whisky, will you, Wentworth? You boys better have one, too. These no-account bastards are trying to bar the doors on us, and we’re going to have to connive like thieves to figure out a way around them.”

  “Why, what happened?” said Kipling, standing up. “I take it we can’t talk to Ruckgarten. What grounds did Mortimer give for refusing us?”

  Mr. Clemens had walked over to look out the porthole while I poured the drinks. “No, he’s smoother than that. First, he put me off until after dinner—during which I regaled our fellow diners with every ludicrous misadventure that’s happened aboard a ship since Jonah’s time, just as a little sample of what I could tell about the City of Baltimore, if I put my mind to it. I figured a little advertising couldn’t hurt when I gave him his choice of Mark Twain lectures. He didn’t like it one bit, though the others at the table were begging for more. It took me a quarter of an hour to get away to Mortimer’s office to talk to him.

  “That’s when he pulled the dirtiest trick I’ve ever been bit by. He allows as how he don’t object to our talking to the prince, but he wants to wait until Jennings has finished his investigation. That way, we don’t inadvertently tell Prinz Karl something that would help him wriggle off the hook—assuming he’s guilty. So we’ve got to wait until Jennings hands in his report. Which will probably be ten minutes after we land in England, damn the rotten luck.”

  “At which point the captain can simply hand Ruckgarten over to the British authorities, and we’ve no standing at all to question him,” said Mr. Kipling. “Not that we really do here, to tell the truth. Sailors are always jealous of their domain. In their eyes, we landlubbers have no right at all to participate in the ship’s business. It would be a courtesy to let us talk to Ruckgarten, but the captain has no obligation to grant it.”

  I brought over their drinks, then went back to retrieve my own. “It’s too bad the prince’s cabin is guarded,” I said, thinking of a couple of college pranks that required breaking into the room of a classmate who had gone on vacation early. “If he was just locked up with nobody to watch the door, we might contrive some way to pick the lock.”

  Mr. Kipling had been about to take a sip of his drink, but at my comment he put down his glass and said
, “By Jove! You know, Clemens, if you really want to talk to the fellow before the captain gives his permission, there is a way.”

  Mr. Clemens turned around, a weary look on his face. “Don’t tell me you’re going to lower Cabot on a rope and let him in through the porthole. That’s fine for him, but you’re not going to dangle me over that cold water. For starters, there’s nobody aboard I’d trust to hold the rope.”

  “No, no,” said Kipling. “The weak link is the guard. I’d wager anything it’s a common seaman, especially on the night watches. Those fellows are the worst-paid and the least principled men aboard—I know the breed of old. For a ten-dollar gold piece and a bottle of your whisky, they’d throw their own mothers to the sharks. For no more than the price of a good dinner in New York, we could be inside that room in five minutes, and nobody the wiser.”

  Mr. Clemens beamed like a man who has just opened the mail to find a bank check made out: in his favor. “Kipling, I knew you were a genius! Now, which of us is going to go down and offer the bribe?”

  24

  Predictably, Mr. Kipling and Mr. Clemens chose me to bribe the guard outside Prinz Karl’s cabin. Back when Mr. Clemens had interviewed me as a candidate for the position of traveling secretary, he had intimated that a familiarity with bribery was one of the job qualifications. At the time I had to confess a total lack of experience in that esoteric art; but I soon learned to consider slipping a carefully folded banknote to a hotel desk clerk, theater manager, or other such functionary as natural as tipping a porter or carriage driver. On this occasion, my employer simply said, “Nobody will even notice Cabot, let alone suspect him of anything. He’s the perfect man for the job.”

  And so I found myself strolling down one of the ship’s walnut-paneled corridors, hoping that none of the passengers who passed, nodding pleasantly to me, would think it strange that I was in this section of the ship. I knew Prinz Karl’s stateroom was somewhere nearby—he had told Mr. Clemens the number when we first met on shipboard—but I had not been in this section of the ship before and had no idea of how the cabin numbers ran.

  Before long, I realized that Prinz Karl was in one of the larger suites at the very front of the deck I was on. I came round a corner and the sight of one of the ship’s crew seated on a stool in the hallway outside the door told me that I had found the cabin I was looking for. Coming closer, I recognized the seaman as one of the crew who had been with First Mate Gallagher when he mistook me for a steerage passenger trespassing on the first-class deck. What had their names been? Jones and Watts, if I remembered correctly. But which one was this? Well, no matter, I would find out soon enough.

  “Hello,” I said cheerfully. The fellow looked up from his reading—I saw it was Mr. Smythe’s book, A Christian’s Duty—and gave a wary nod in response to my greeting. A shadow of a doubt suddenly came upon me. Was this fellow going to be the inevitable exception to Mr. Kipling’s confident prediction that the crew members would be easily corrupted? Or had the seaman merely picked up whatever reading matter fell into his hands, out of boredom?

  “I remember you,” he said, in a thick Cockney accent. “You’re the gentleman Gallagher was about to ’aul off to the brig, afore you showed us you ’ad a key to that cabin. You’re Mr. Mark Twain’s man, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’m glad to meet you under less anxious circumstances, this time.”

  “Aye, I suppose they are, for you,” he said solemnly, still not rising from the stool he sat on. “Any way you look at it, it’s all in a day’s work for me. First mate or an officer gives me my orders, and I follows ’em, and that’s an end to it.”

  “Yes, you were just doing your job the other day. I knew better than to take it personally.”

  “Good, then,” he said, relaxing a bit. “I ’oped there wasn’t any misunderstandin’, but a man can’t always tell.”

  I moved closer to him and lowered my voice; there was nobody in sight in either direction, but nonetheless I thought it prudent not to take a chance on anyone’s overhearing me when I offered a bribe. “Well, I’d have been in worse trouble if it hadn’t been for that German gentleman who came along in the nick of time. He certainly saved my bacon by reminding me that I could prove I wasn’t trespassing by showing my key.”

  “Aye, that he did,” said the sailor. He glanced quickly over his shoulder at the door of the cabin behind him—if I hadn’t already been certain that Prinz Karl was confined within, that would have been all the clue I needed.

  “He did me a good turn then, and I feel I ought to thank him for it in some way,” I continued. “This is his cabin, isn’t it?”

  Abruptly, the sailor rose to his feet. Looking at him face to face, I remembered how tall and broad-shouldered he was. “You can’t go in there, now. Nothin’ personal, but I ’as my orders. No visitors.”

  “Yes, I see you’re here to guard the door,” I said. “Do you know what he’s supposed to have done?”

  “Aye, they say he pushed somebody overboard,” the seaman said. “Say—weren’t it that same gentleman as came along and told us you were botherin’ the first class? I mean, the gentleman who’s gone missin’. That was an awful cheeky thing to do. Or was that some kind of joke?”

  “Perhaps he thought it was a joke,” I said, shaking my head. “At the time, I saw very little humor in it.”

  “Neither did I, if you don’t mind me sayin’ so. Live and let live, that’s always my motto, but I don’t ’old with goin’ about and spreadin’ slander or false rumors, just for amusement. The Lord commanded against it, and that’s an end to it.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” I said, shaking his hand. “The truth is—I’m sorry, I realize I don’t know your name. I’m Wentworth Cabot.”

  “Watts, sir. ’Erbert Watts.” His grip was firm as he shook my hand.

  “I’m glad to know you, Herbert,” I said. “Now, the fact is, Mr. Twain and I believe that the fellow inside that cabin is a victim of a false accusation, just as I was the other day. Except it’s much more serious, because he’s been accused of murder. . .”

  Just then, I heard approaching footsteps, and I stepped away from Watts a moment. To my surprise, it was Mrs. Susan Martin, the lady whose parents had befriended Mr. Clemens in California, who came around the nearby corner. Seeing us, she said, “Excuse me, I do believe I’ve gotten onto the wrong deck. Oh, hello, Mr. Cabot, how fortunate to find you here. Could you tell me the shortest way to the Grand Saloon?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Martin,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m a bit out of my usual territory, myself, but perhaps this crewman knows the best way.”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Watts, doffing his cap and pointing. “You’re one deck down from it, and a bit aft. You go straight along that passageway, to the second crossing, and you’ll see a ladder to the port side. Go up that, go forward two doors on the starboard side, and you’re there.”

  “Why, thank you so much,” said Mrs. Martin. “I should be able to find it now, I think.” She smiled brightly and turned back the way she’d come.

  I waited until she had turned the corner before resuming my attempt to persuade Watts to relax his vigilance. “As I said, the gentleman inside here has been accused of murder, and Mr. Twain and I aren’t sure he really did it. We’d like to find out the truth. But to do that, he and I—and another gentleman, Mr. Kipling—need to talk to him. Do you think we could have half an hour with him, undisturbed? You have my word of honor we wouldn’t do anything to help him escape. You wouldn’t have to leave your post or let him out of the room. The door would stay closed, and we’d make certain nobody ever learns you had any part in letting us in to see him.”

  Watts rubbed his chin, a doubtful look on his face. “I don’t know, sir,” he said slowly. “I’d find myself in ’ot water if the first mate came to ’ave a look inside, unexpected like. Gallagher’s got a nasty temper, ’e as—and a right long memory. It could cost me my berth, you know.”

  �
�I doubt there’s much chance of that, this late at night,” I said. “You probably won’t see Gallagher or anyone else until it’s time for your relief—when’s that, midnight?”

  “Eight bells, aye. Still, it’s a dreadful risk for a fellow to run.”

  “Maybe this will make it a little easier to run the risk,” I said, reaching into my pocket and extracting a ten-dollar gold piece. I held it out for him to see.

  A smile came over his face, and he reached down and took my hand, covering the eagle. “Now that could make a fellow sleep more soundly,” he said. “If you’ve got the twin to that, I think we can strike a bargain.”

  “I’ve got the twin,” I said, “and it’s yours when I come back with the other two gentlemen and you let us all in the door. Do we understand each other?”

  “I believe we do, Mr. Cabot,” he said, with a grin. “ ’Erbert Watts at your service, sir!”

  When I returned with news of my success at bribing the guard, there was a brief discussion as to whether we ought to go separately or in a group. Mr. Clemens argued that we ought to leave his cabin separately and take separate routes to the prince’s stateroom, so as to attract the least attention.

  “That won’t do,” said Mr. Kipling. “Unless we coordinate our movements precisely—and I doubt we three can manage that—we’ll arrive at separate times. Then we either have to wait outside, or our man has to open the door three times. Either way, if anyone comes by, we’re likely to arouse curiosity.”