The Lusitania Murders

by Max Allan Collins

  Maybe she was a detective, after all.

  “Well, I am a writer,” I said, “and a damned good one, if you’ll forgive my frankness.”

  “I like your frankness, Van. By the way, what’s your real name?”

  Again, she had startled me.

  “How . . . why . . . ?”

  She smiled and made a breezy gesture with her left hand. “The initials ‘S.S.’ for a man on a steamship voyage—could anything be more absurd? And when I asked you what the initials stood for, you had to think about it! You don’t strike me as a man whose limited mentality does not include a ready retention of his own name.”

  I could only laugh; she had me!

  But I told her, for reasons of my own, I needed to keep my real name to myself; she would have to be content with my pseudonym.

  “I guess I don’t mind, terribly,” she said. “But perhaps I was wrong—perhaps you aren’t a writer.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes . . . mayhap you’re a German spy.”

  I almost choked on my tea. “Please . . . in time of war, that’s not amusing.”

  Still, her expression was one of amusement. “Ah, but America is not at war.”

  “Ah, but . . . we’re not in America any longer. In fact, on this ship, we’re in Great Britain.”

  She nodded. “An astute observation.”

  A burly officer—in the typical white cap and navy gold-braided blazer—was swaggering down the promenade; he had broad shoulders, a shovel jaw and an amiable manner. I had never seen the fellow before, but he smiled and nodded at me, as if we were old friends. On the other hand, the officer was nodding and speaking to other passengers, who lined the rail, so maybe I was imagining things. . . .

  “Do you know that gentleman?” Miss Vance whispered.

  “No.”

  “He seems to know you.”

  And indeed the officer was striding over to us. I touched my napkin to my lips and stood.

  “Mr. Van Dine?” the officer said, his voice a tenor, somewhat surprising coming out of such a formidable figure. He had dark bright blue eyes and rather bushy eyebrows, and was extending a sturdy hand.

  Shaking it, I said, “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage, sir.”

  He had a firm grip, but had stopped short of showing off about it.

  “I’m sorry—you were pointed out to me, on deck,” he said. That struck me as odd: No one knew me to do that!

  He was introducing himself: Staff Captain John Anderson.

  And now I understood—this was the contact aboard ship Rumely had told me about, the Cunard employee aware of my real name, and that I was a journalist aboard to write flattering articles about the ship and its passengers.

  I introduced Miss Vance.

  “We’re honored to have Madame DePage with us,” Anderson said to her. He had the faintest cockney around the edges of an accent he’d obviously worked at to make acceptable to the upper-class passengers. “She’s a great lady, with a fine cause.”

  “I’m so glad you feel that way,” Miss Vance said, not sounding terribly sincere.

  “Would you sit down with us?” I asked him, politely.

  Anderson seemed almost embarrassed, as he said, “I didn’t mean to interrupt, Mr. Van Dine. I’d hoped to catch you after lunch, so I might show you around a little.”

  Miss Vance said, “We’re quite finished with lunch, Captain Anderson.”

  “Well, I’m certainly free,” I said, “if you’d care to take time away from your duties to bother with me.”

  “Not at all. I’m anxious to. . . . Miss Vance, would you care to accompany us?”

  “You’re very kind,” she said, rising, “but I need to join Madame DePage. She likes to write her correspondence after lunch.”

  “Can I escort you to her?” I asked.

  “No . . . I’m a big girl, gentlemen. I’ll find my way.”

  And the individualistic Miss Vance nodded to us, and moved off down the promenade, or actually up—she was heading toward the entryway where an elevator or stairs could convey her to her employer.

  “Interesting woman,” Anderson said.

  “Fascinating.”

  “Probably a suffragette,” he sighed.

  “Probably,” I said. “But then, no one’s perfect.”

  Anderson suggested we sit for a moment, and we did. He told me he hoped to help me arrange interviews, and offered to do whatever he could to make my access to the ship and its passengers as complete as possible, and my voyage a pleasurable one.

  “We’re grateful to the News for this opportunity,” Anderson said, “to show potential passengers that this war scare is no reason to avoid travel.”

  “Well, that’s a wonderful attitude, and quite the opportunity for a journalist. . . . And I’m happy that you seem willing to give me a sort of Cook’s tour, as I do want to write about the ship itself, and not limit my work to these celebrity interviews.”

  Anderson’s smile was wide and infectious. “That’s good news, Mr. Van Dine. Shall we start?”

  Of course, Anderson wouldn’t have been as cooperative if he knew I was here to search out contraband; so I worked hard to make a friend of him. It’s not a pretty thing, but money was involved—and, anyway, if the Cunard line was using passenger ships to transport war materials, the practice should be exposed. Passengers—like myself, about whom I cared greatly, after all—would be at risk, if this indeed were happening.

  The tour I received was certainly complete, and the company entirely amiable—though I did not press Anderson with overtly prying questions, and neither did the good staff captain duck any of my queries . . . even those of a more sensitive nature.

  “What about these rumored guns supposedly hidden on deck somewhere?” I asked him, about midway in our tour.

  “Like most rumors,” Anderson said, half a smile digging a hole in one cheek, “there’s a certain basis in fact . . .”

  I tried not to reveal the inner excitement I felt at this revelation.

  “. . . but the reality is rather less sinister, as I will demonstrate.”

  At the appropriate moments during my tour, the staff captain pointed out to me four deck platforms—two forward, two aft—with mountings awaiting three- or six-inch guns. Either caliber would require dockside cranes, Anderson assured me, and such weapons could hardly be camouflaged, “much less hidden.”

  This disappointed me, but I instinctively believed Anderson—his frankness seemed obvious, and his character appeared lacking in guile. (Nonetheless, in my spare time, I prowled every foot of deck space above the waterline; peering beneath any recess or overhang, checking under every winch, I saw no guns mounted or unmounted.)

  Though Anderson’s affable candor impressed me, I did not yet feel comfortable enough with him to broach the subject of contraband—that, I felt, might come later. I would make it a priority to establish a friendship with the man, in hopes of learning more.

  Anderson definitely was the man to whom I needed to get close: He admitted that “the internal distribution of the cargo” was very much his responsibility.

  “And I do not take that responsibility lightly,” he assured me. “Faulty cargo planning can materially affect the trim of the ship, you know.”

  “Indeed,” I commented, though truthfully I had not a clue.

  Surely I could have asked for no more friendly nor knowledgeable tour guide. Anderson, anxious to impress the press with the Cunard line’s superiority, began with the fabulously luxurious public rooms of Saloon class, which might have been lifted bodily and set down on the ship out of some splendid hotel or exclusive London club. In addition to the description-defying dining room (about which more later), these included a reception room and various lounges, as well as music, reading-and-writing and smoking rooms. In addition, the ship offered a barbershop, a lending library, a photographer’s dark room, a clothes pressing service, a separate dining saloon for valets and maids, and even a switchboard for its innovative
room-to-room telephone system.

  I don’t consider myself easily impressed, but I felt as wide-eyed as a schoolgirl, strolling acres of deep carpet through first-class lounges extravagantly appointed with plush armchairs, marble fireplaces, grand pianos, rich drapes and expensive (if dull) oil paintings. A man of impeccable taste such as myself, marooned for months in cheap flats and ghastly garrets, could only wonder at this oasis of late-Georgian elegance, this world of silk waistcoats, gold watch chains, double-staffed settees, mahogany paneling, carved maple-topped tables and wrought-iron skylights.

  Since I was travelling first class, Anderson did not bother showing me a sample of the sumptuous cabins. But I quickly became as impressed with the size of the ship as I had been with the luxury of Saloon class—the damned thing seemed to go on forever, interminable corridors with their polished linoleum floors and a dizzying profusion of white, red and blue lights marking exits, fire extinguishers, washrooms, pantries and other shipboard appurtenances, all within a maze of decks and companionways, towering masts and funnels and, of course, self-important people, some of them passengers, others stewards or crew members, the officers with their gold braids and medal ribbons seeming to wear perpetual expressions of faint disapproval.

  Anderson was a pleasant exception to the latter, and I felt his genial nature was not due merely to my status as a member of the press. We passed between first, second and third class with no change in his attitude of friendliness toward passengers—a young man in ill-fitting clothing in steerage, seeking a new life in America, got the same nod and hello from Anderson as a Vanderbilt or Kessler.

  Now and then, however, the staff captain would show a sterner side, if he encountered a crewman whose dress or bearing was not up to snuff. We paused for three or four of these dressing-downs.

  Moving along from one of them, Anderson sighed and said, “It’s a problem, it is.”

  “What’s that?”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Off the record, sir?”

  “Certainly. My goal here is to build up, not to tear down.”

  “We are rather desperately understaffed,”* he admitted. “And some of the staff we have is, frankly, not up to snuff.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Cunard’s style.”

  “It isn’t. But the Royal Navy has scooped up many of our best crew, for the war effort. Finding able-bodied seamen for this trip was a chore, I must admit.”

  “You don’t seem entirely satisfied with the result.”

  “I’m not. There are crew members aboard who’ve never sailed other than as a passenger.”

  This was the staff captain’s only negative remark of the tour, and I must say the meticulous craftsmanship of the ship’s construction carried over into the second and third classes. The public rooms of second class—from dining saloon to smoking room—could have been taken for those of the first class of almost any other ship sailing the North Atlantic. Plainer in style (white remained, gold did not), the public rooms were large and well-appointed; the example of a stateroom—a four-berth—that Anderson saw fit to show me was only a small step down from my own.

  If the Second Cabin staircase may not have been as grand as the one in Saloon, the structure could only be deemed impressively handsome, on its own terms.

  Third Class was no dark, cramped hold stuffed with human bilge, rather a functional if austere succession of bare-bones public rooms—the dining room was like a gymnasium with tables—that made no attempt to fool passengers into thinking they were in a fine hotel or country home. Massive painted expanses of steel bared the ship’s every rivet, every bolt; but the spartan cabins were both spotless and spacious, and on the bunks were bedspreads bearing the distinctive Cunard crest—a lion rampant with a globe.

  “That’s a handsome touch,” I said.

  Anderson grinned and shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not intended to dress up the cabin, Mr. Van Dine. . . . We mean to discourage passengers from helping themselves to the bedding, when they head to shore.”

  The passengers I saw in Third Class, however, were not of the stereotypical sort one might expect in steerage—no tired, poor, huddling masses. No, these travellers seemed to be an Anglo-Saxon lot, Britons mostly, but a good share of Germans, too, skilled or semiskilled workmen. These were practical men, with limited funds, interested not in Grand Staircases and electric elevators and smoking rooms, but clean quarters and edible food and cheap passage.

  The degree to which all of this had been thought through by the ship’s designers could be seen in the very columns throughout the ship—in Saloon, they were (as has been noted) Corinthian; in Second Cabin, an elegant Doric; and in Third Class, the cleanly simple Ionian.

  Though I could hardly be shown every nook and cranny, Anderson’s tour of the Big Lucy was surprisingly complete.* On the lowest deck, from the periphery, I witnessed the care and feeding of the liner’s huge furnaces, courtesy of men in dungarees and boots and blackened faces, using rags knotted round their necks to occasionally wipe their faces, somehow thriving in a cavern of blistering heat and blinding coal dust.

  Anderson pointed out the engineers and firemen and stokers and trimmers—the “dirty gang,” he dubbed them—and over the satanic roar he explained the jobs of each; but I couldn’t make sense of it, just as I couldn’t understand how any man could consign himself to such a hell, in trade for mere existence. It took only moments for the scorching heat and the sticky coal dust to compel me to request that we end this portion of the tour.

  Part of me knew I should have pressed for a view of the cargo holds down here—this was where, my employer Rumely had speculated, any contraband would be kept—but I preferred to allow Anderson to escort me out of this hades, with the goal of eventually returning to the heaven that was Saloon Class.

  Before completing our tour, Staff Captain Anderson—having shown me around the various classes of the ship—suggested we conclude on Deck C, the Shelter Deck, where many of the services and facilities of the ship were located.

  “A liner is like a city,” Anderson said, “and we have the same sort of needs as any modern metropolis.”

  I was rather tired of this process by now, but not wanting to be rude—and cognizant of the need to stay in the captain’s good graces—I put up with a mundane survey of various offices, the seldom-used brig, the hospitals (male and female) and of course the dreaded nursery.

  The latter included a children’s dining saloon, and we had moved thankfully through that madness of magpies and were heading down a short corridor that opened onto the Grand Entrance and the elevators, when voices behind a door marked STEWARD’S PANTRY caught my attention.

  The voices were speaking in German (one of my several languages), and—though the closed door muffled it, somewhat—I distinctly heard: “We should hide the camera.”

  As I paused, touching his sleeve, Anderson turned to me quizzically, and I whispered, “Do you employ Germans on your staff?”

  Several voices behind that door were audible now, speaking in German, but too soft to make out the words.

  Anderson gave me a sharp look, and motioned for me to stand to one side, which I did.

  Then the staff captain opened the door on three men in stewards’ whites, huddled within the small pantry, surrounded by shelved canned goods and other foodstuffs. They were young men—a skinny tallish brown-haired one, a shorter broad-shouldered very blonde fellow and a rather average one, whose hair shade was somewhere between that of his companions—and two of them froze, chatter ceasing. The shorter one had his back to Anderson, and as he turned, he began, in German, “About time—”

  But Anderson was clearly not who these fellows were expecting.

  And the wide-eyed fellow who had just swivelled indeed held in his hands a camera.

  Before Anderson could pose a question, the man with the camera barrelled at him, thrusting him out of the doorway and against the corridor wall, staggering the staff captain with both surprise and power.

 
The brawny blonde fellow, clutching his camera, moved right past me—or tried to: I stuck my foot out, and he tripped, diving gracelessly into the linoleum, his precious cargo flying. I fell upon him, inserting a knee in his back and looping an arm around his neck, incapacitating him.

  From the corner of my eye I witnessed Anderson deliver a fist to the chin of the skinny one, who’d come scrambling out after his compatriot’s break for it, knocking him back into the pantry, presumably into the other fellow (this I adjudged from sounds, as I could not see that action from my vantage point).

  Reinforcements seemed to appear immediately, including the master-at-arms, whose name was Williams, and a steward named Leach—the pantry was his province, and the young man was shocked to find it crawling with German stowaways.

  For that, apparently, was what the trio was—and spies to boot, if the camera meant what it seemed to.

  The master-at-arms took my prisoner off my hands, and hauled him back to the pantry, where soon all three were locked inside, awaiting further decisions.

  The first one came from Anderson, who said to Williams, “Fetch the ship’s detective.”

  Breathing hard, I said, “I wasn’t aware the ship had a detective.”

  Anderson explained that no detective was on staff; Cunard hired Pinkertons and sometimes made arrangements with travelling Scotland Yard or New York Police Department men. On this trip, however, it was a Pink.

  “You’ve already met her,” Anderson said, eyes atwinkle.

  And I didn’t need the deductive powers of Philomina Vance to figure out whom he meant.

  FIVE

  Tourist Trade

  Within five minutes, Miss Vance had arrived, still fetchingly hatless and attired in tan cotton pongee. Her first request was to gain access to the pantry, behind the closed door of which the three stowaways were at the moment stowed.