“If it was my fellow Frenchman who robbed Asprey’s,” Monsieur Apollinaire observed, “your famous detective will be frustrated for once. Arsène Lupin will show him a clean pair of heels.”
“Was it Lupin who looted Asprey’s?” said Monsieur Jarry. “If so, then it must have been Fantômas who burgled St. James’s Palace. The principle is the same, of course; they will both be safe in Paris by now, drinking absinthe with dear Oscar.”
“I fear that you are wrong, Messieurs,” said Monsieur Féval fils. “The unprecedented nature of the double crime strongly suggests that neither Lupin nor Fantômas–nor even the two of them in combination–could have planned and executed it. The coup was undoubtedly the work of the Brothers Ténèbre.”
“The Brothers Ténèbre have not been heard of since your father’s time!” Apollinaire protested. “And they were English, in any case. They merely masqueraded as Frenchmen.”
“Not at all,” said Monsieur Féval. “They are such masters of disguise that one must penetrate far more layers than that to reach their true identities. At bottom, they are personifications of sin itself, just as Mr. Holmes is a personification of intellect, while d’Artagnan and Cyrano de Bergerac are personifications of gallantry.”
“We shall not see their like again,” murmured Mr. Huneker, not entirely regretfully.
“Don’t you believe it!” said the man from the Daily Mail. “There’s a personification of gallantry sitting not 20 yards away, right up there at the Captain’s table between Mr. Edison and the foreign fellow.”
“Count Lugard,” supplied his colleague from the Telegraph. “A Transylvanian, I believe. Old Hearst seems to have taken a dislike to him–can’t think why.”
“I recognize Tom Edison, of course,” said Mr. Robertson, “but I don’t know your paragon of gallantry. Who are the four young ladies lined up with them, though? They seem to be putting old Rockefeller and his chum Carnegie in a very sweet mood, and poor Lillie in the shade.”
“Three of them are the count’s daughters, I believe,” Monsieur Féval said. “The fourth is traveling with Quatermain–his ward, I presume. Her name is Ayesha.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Chambers. “So the Mail’s model of gallantry is Allan Quatermain, the legendary discoverer of King Solomon’s Mines. I thought he was dead.”
“The rumor was exaggerated, apparently,” Mr. Twain put in. “Happens all the time.”
“Didn’t he claim to be something of a coward in his account of the Kukuanaland expedition?” Huneker asked.
“Typical British modesty, my dear sir,” said the Mail reporter. “Being American, you wouldn’t understand that. The man’s a shining example to us all–the perfect embodiment of the Imperialist creed.”
“With men like him at its beck and call,” the Telegraph man added, “who can possibly doubt that the Empire is destined to rule the world in the 20th century as it has in the 19th?”
“Every last one of us,” murmured Monsieur Lorrain, too softly to be heard by any but his immediate neighbors–who were, of course, in complete sympathy with his judgment.
Meanwhile, at the Captain’s 12-seater table, the alleged hero in question was looking around in all apparent satisfaction, while the Count from Transylvania was whispering confidentially in his ear.
“My friend,” the Count was saying, “I cannot thank you enough for directing my attention away from Carfax Abbey towards the farther horizon. You are absolutely right–to take a creaky sailing ship for a port like Whitby would have been utter madness, when there is a vessel like this to carry my precious cargo. It was well worth the wait–and there are 2,000 peasants down below, you say, crammed into their bunks like veal in crates?”
“No trouble at all, my dear chap,” Quatermain replied, magnanimously. “Had it not been for your suggestion of the ingenious trick of carrying the soil of our homeland with us, carefully secreted in the hold, Brother Ange and I might have been anchored to the Great Hungarian Plain indefinitely. You and I have given one another the precious gift of liberty, whose torch-bearing statue and glorious motto we shall salute side by side as we sail into New York while the century fades into oblivion.”
“What motto is that?” asked the Count, curiously.
“Do as thou wilt,” Quatermain replied. “It is the American Dream.”
“Your charming ward assures me that you’re an excellent storyteller, Mr. Quatermain,” Captain John Rowland broke in, as he refilled his whisky-glass. “Not just the tale of how you discovered King Solomon’s Mines, she says, but any number of other ripping yarns. I hope you’ll entertain us with a few of them during the crossing.”
“Ayesha flatters me, as always,” Quatermain told him. “I’m afraid that my accounts of elephant-hunting and the many lost races of Africa’s dark heart have grown a little stale by now. They are unable to compete in the nascent modern era with Dr. Watson’s accounts of the amazing ingenuity of Sherlock Holmes–not to mention those delightful ghost stories Mr. James tells. Ah, if only they were with us, we should certainly be obliged to rescue them from the oblivion of the writers’ table! Perhaps we should invite Mr. Twain to join us one evening–he’s said to be a dab hand with a tall tale, I believe.”
“If we ask Mr. Chambers nicely,” Mrs. Hugo de Bathe–the former Lillie Langtry–put in, “he might revert to his old self and favor us with another account of The King in Yellow.”
“We don’t allow fellows like that on this table, Miss Langtry,” Andrew Carnegie said.
“Not our sort at all,” echoed John D. Rockefeller. “Two of them are newspaper reporters, you know.”
“If there were one of my reporters on board,” said William Randolph Hearst, “I’d make damn sure that he traveled second class, but these British journalists are too genteel by half. If you want good stories, it’s no good looking at them.”
“I fear that I’m only a humble white hunter myself,” Quatermain said, with a sigh. “But I’ve been fortunate enough to lead a adventurous life, and to see some passing strange things. If they make good stories, it’s generous fate that must be credited with their authorship. I couldn’t make anything up to save my life.”
“You’re not so humble any more,” the Captain observed. “You’ve as many diamonds as were stolen from Asprey’s and St. James’s put together, so they say. The produce of King Solomon’s Mines has made you rich.”
“I’m just one more soldier of fortune living on my capital,” Quatermain said, with a sigh of regret. “There was one haul and one only–and I still feel guilty about having the monopoly. Such a pity that Good and Curtis never made it back! I might never have made it myself, if not for the loyal devotion of dear old Gagool! I can’t compare with people who make money day by day by means of their industry and ingenuity, like Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Carnegie, Mr. Hearst and Mr. Edison.”
“Money makes itself, dear chap!” Rockefeller assured him, “If you let it have its way. Hard cash does hard work.”
“That’s the wonder of Capitalism,” Carnegie added.
“With a little help from the ads,” Hearst supplied. “You have to maintain demand to keep the cash registers ringing–but they’ll ring in the new century with a mighty peal.”
“I’m just a humble inventor,” Edison assured the hunter. “Haven’t a penny by comparison with these chaps. The utility of my inventions is its own reward. I’m content simply to have given the world such electrical wonders as the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the telephone, the perfect woman and the chair, not to mention the machine for communicating with the dead. I need no more financial reward than is adequate to fund my further experiments.”
“A machine for communicating with the dead?” the Count queried. “We have not heard of that device in Eastern Europe.”
“It’s still in the last phase of its development,” Edison confessed. “I have the pieces of the prototype carefully lodged below, with all the fragile goods. I put the final touches to the design in London, but I didn
’t have time to assemble the demonstration model. I thought of taking it to the exhibition in Paris, but I’d rather give the first glimpse of it to American eyes.”
“There’s no need to wait until New York, then,” said Hearst, who had leaned forward attentively as soon as Edison had mentioned his new machine. “You have a better audience in this dining-room than you could hope to get in any exhibition hall in Manhattan. Even if we have to let the British reporters in, they won’t be able to get their copy home before my papers hit the streets. Why not bring the machine ashore to a real blaze of publicity?”
“So that Mr. Hearst can steal yet another march on Joe Pulitzer,” Rockefeller murmured to Carnegie.
“Be a damn sight more amusing than tales of shooting lions in Africa, at any rate,” was Carnegie’s whispered reply.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Edison said to Hearst. “I’m not sure that the mid-Atlantic’s the best place for that kind of chat. I’ve an idea that the dead might prefer to hang out in cities, just as we do.”
“Do you really think so, Mr. Edison?” Ayesha asked, sweetly. “One hears as many tales of haunted wildernesses as of haunted houses–and there’s no shortage of tales of haunted ships.”
“If they’re just like us,” Captain Rowland put in, after taking another draught from his whisky-glass, “they probably love the Titan. Give them a change of scene, what?”
“Absolutely,” Quatermain put in. “We have four more nights at sea ahead of us, and I doubt that my meager ability to emulate Scheherazade can possibly keep a company like this on tenterhooks for all that time. I’d dearly like to see Mr. Edison’s machine in operation.”
“I’d prefer to see his perfect woman!” the Duke of Buccleuch muttered.
The remark did not seem to be addressed to anyone in particular, but Edison heard it. “That was a private commission,” he said, frowning. “And besides, we have five perfect women of flesh and blood seated at this very table, have we not?”
“You’re far too kind,” Ayesha said–although Mrs. de Bathe, who was now 47 years old, merely acknowledged the compliment with a slight nod of the head. The Count’s companions, who did not seem to have a word of English between them, smiled vaguely as they were carefully surveyed by seven pairs of male eyes.
“Well, I guess it might be a good idea to try the machine out before we reach New York,” Edison said. “It’ll take some work, mind–I’ll need to borrow a couple of your crewmen, Captain Rowland.”
“Granted,” Rowland said, generously. “I’ll instruct them to set it up in the first-class saloon–under your supervision, of course. When can you have it ready?”
“Not tomorrow or the next night,” Edison said. “It’s a very tricky assembly. Might be ready on the 29th, I suppose.”
“Excellent,” said Captain Rowland, refilling his glass yet again. “What a fine voyage this promises to be!”
John Rowland was sleeping dreamlessly, as only a hardened drinker can, when he was awakened by his first officer, Mr. Hodgson.
“I’m afraid there’s trouble in steerage, sir,” Hodgson reported.
“There’s always trouble in steerage,” Rowland growled. “Anybody dead?”
“Five, sir–and talk of worse than murder.”
“Five!” Rowland sat bolt upright in bed. Deaths in steerage were not uncommon in the course of a westbound journey, because the wretches that huddled into the accommodation in the lower decks by the thousand were often suffering from malnutrition and disease–conditions frequently exacerbated by the sacrifices they had made to purchase their tickets to a new life. To make thing worse, the Irish, in particular, tended to be exceedingly quarrelsome. To lose five on the first night out was, however, highly unusual. “And what the devil do you mean, worse than murder?” Rowland added, belatedly.
“Three of the victims are young men, sir, and two of them young women. All were said to be in relatively good health before boarding, although they looked damnably thin to me–but the point is, sir, that they’ve been exsanguinated.”
“What on Earth does that mean?”
“It means they’ve been drained of all their blood, sir. Each of them has a ragged wound in the throat, in the vicinity of the jugular vein and carotid artery. There’s talk of vampires, sir.”
“Bats?” said the befuddled Rowland.
“No sir–human vampires, like Sir Francis Varney, who was said to have been hanged several times over, or that Hungarian countess who cut a swathe through Paris when Napoleon was first consul.”
“Five bodies, you say?” Rowland repeated, pensively. “Do they think we have five vampires aboard?”
“Yes sir, that’s the theory,” Hodgson confirmed. “There are vigilantes roaming the lower decks already, sir, saying that if the vampires can’t be caught, staked through the heart and beheaded today there’ll be five more bodies tonight, and five more every night till we reach New York.”
“Staked through the heart and beheaded? What kind of barbarians are these people?”
“Mostly Irish, sir. In fact, that’s the moderate view. Some are saying that the five victims will rise from the dead to become vampires themselves, so that there’ll be ten victims tonight, 20 tomorrow, 40 on the 29th, 80 on the 30th and a further 160 on New Year’s Eve. If we were to be delayed at sea until the 2nd–which isn’t so very improbable, if the weather report is to be trusted....”
“Nonsense,” said Rowland. “Storms in the Atlantic are water off a duck’s back to the Titan. We’ll be in New York shortly after dawn on New Year’s Day, come hell or high water!”
“Well sir, even if that’s so, the total casualty figures calculated by the alarmist faction would take a fair bite out of the number of steerage passengers, even though we’re riding full. Even if the numbers turn out to be a wild overestimate, there’s another kind of alarmist wondering what might happen if the monsters were to turn their attention to the upper decks–in which case there might be a real tragedy, if, in fact, there really were any vampires aboard.”
“Which there aren’t, of course,” said Rowland, confidently. “What have you done so far to quell the panic?”
“Mr. Black tried to reassure the frightened emigrants by pointing out that we’ll be burying the five bodies at sea, and that it’d take a damnably clever vampire to find its way back to the Titan from the bottom of the Atlantic,” Hodgson reported. “That might have been a mistake, in retrospect because it seemed to concede the possibility that there might actually be vampires involved, which it might have been wiser to deny point blank. Sorry about that, sir.”
“That’s all right, Hodgson,” Rowland said, as he pulled on his uniform. “Black was only doing what he thought best, although they’re hardly likely to take such assurances seriously from a second mate. It needs a captain’s authority to make such things clear. Hand me that bottle of Scotch, would you? I need a nip to clear my head. Tell Mr. Black and the purser to meet me on the bridge–and find that fellow Quatermain. We may need help on this one, and he’s a heroic sort, if what they say is true.”
Mr. Hodgson hurried off to execute these orders. Rowland finished off the bottle and then made his way forward, lurching slightly in spite of the state-of-the-art stabilizers with which the luxury liner was fitted. Hodgson was already on the bridge, with the second officer and the purser, young Kitchener–but it was to Allan Quatermain that Rowland turned first.
“There’s trouble afoot, Quatermain,” he said. “Five people dead–steerage people, but paid for their passage nevertheless–and wild talk about vampires. It needs to be nipped in the bud. I’d like you beside me when I go down there to address the mob, if you’re willing. It’ll give them extra confidence, you see, you being a big game hunter and all. I’ll tell them you’ll look into the matter personally, if I may.”
“You certainly may,” Quatermain said. “I’ll do everything I can to help, of course.”
At that moment, the door burst open. A young man pushed his way
past the sailors stationed beside it, muttering what Rowland assumed at first to be “murder,” before he realized that this was one of the French contingent who had come over from Cherbourg on the Deliverance to meet the Titan at Southampton.
“Monsieur,” said the Frenchman, “I am Edward Rocambole, the grandson and heir of the Rocambole, and I have come to offer my services as a detective!”
“I never heard of anyone called Rocambole,” said Rowland. “Did you, Hodgson?”
“No, sir,” said Hodgson.
“Nor have I,” Black chipped in.
“Nor I,” added Kitchener.
“Damn cheek, in any case!” said the Captain. “This is a British ship and I’ve already recruited the best possible assistance in Mr. Quatermain here.” He leaned over to whisper in Quatermain’s ear: “We don’t need any help from some jumped-up Frog who thinks he’s Paris’s answer to Sherlock Holmes, do we Mr. Quatermain?”
“I think we can handle the matter between the two of us,” Quatermain murmured. “Bud-nipping’s a job best left to expert fingers, in my experience. Too many hunters frighten the game, you know.”
“Exactly,” said Rowland. Then he raised his voice again to say: “Won’t be necessary, thanks all the same, Monsieur Cricketball.”
“But I am the grandson of Rocambole!” Edward Rocambole protested.
“And I’m very probably the bastard grandson of King George IV, as is every dissatisfied soul in England,” Rowland countered. “Not that it matters, given that we’re in mid-Atlantic. On the Titan, I’m master regardless of my ancestry, grand or humble.”
“If I might be so bold as to ask, Mr. Rocambole,” Quatermain chipped in, “Are you by any chance a second-class passenger?”
Edward Rocambole’s face went scarlet–a sight that would surely have stirred the spirit of any vampire–as he seemed to realize, belatedly, what he was up against. He muttered what might have been an apology, despite featuring the words sang, cochon and chien, and hurried away.
Tales of the Shadowmen 1: The Modern Babylon Page 29
