The grayish man returned to his prior position and busied himself with his book. The commotion was clearly distracting him, because a moment later he set his book aside and, stretching out in a leisurely position, shut his eyes. He remained that way for a long time, and a chance observer might have assumed he had fallen asleep.
After some time he took a fountain pen from his pocket and jotted a few words on a piece of paper torn from a notebook. Then he got up and went downstairs with a decisive step.
Finding himself in the telegraph cabin, the grayish man asked the man on duty to send an urgent coded message to New York. The telegrapher nodded respectfully. The machine tapped away.
A moment later, the grayish man bumped into the corpulent gentleman with horn-rimmed glasses in the cabin doorway.
“Ah, Mr. Lingslay!” the gentleman in glasses said jovially. “I’ve been searching for you everywhere. We’ll be there in three hours. Is everything in order?”
“Absolutely. At any rate, I showed you the response. Everything’s set. Just to be totally certain, I sent one more telegram to my secretary a moment ago.”
“Splendid,” said the gentleman in glasses, rubbing his hands.
David Lingslay glanced at his watch.
“In less than three hours we’ll be crossing the perimeter where US ships patrol the coast. Please make sure all my instructions have been followed to the letter. You haven’t forgotten to raise the Egyptian flag?”
“Everything has been done according to your instructions.”
“There might be an admiral on one of the ships who is not privy to the plan. If this is the case, they will be forced to fire on us. Using blanks, of course. Be so good as to inform the passengers of this, to avoid unnecessary panic. Let’s not have anyone running for the lifeboats in the confusion! The sector commanders have been fully briefed, and they will fire a few rounds of blanks at most, to keep up appearances. We’ll be sailing under blackout conditions and should be through the perimeter in about five minutes.”
“Can we rule out any complications?” asked the man in glasses anxiously.
“Absolutely. I showed you the bulletin. Everything has been prepared to the smallest detail. My presence on board is, I believe, the best guarantee. You don’t suppose, perhaps, that I would expose myself to uncertainties.”
“Of course not. I’m just asking to make sure. You sent one more wire?”
“That’s right. The reply should come at any minute.”
A boy appeared on deck:
“Wire for Mr. David Lingslay.”
Lingslay scanned the telegram.
“My secretary says that everything is prepared,” he said, crumpling the paper. “Please be so kind as to inform the passengers what I have said and to give the final instructions. We’ll meet on deck the moment we arrive.”
David Lingslay climbed back upstairs.
Dusk fell quickly. In the gloom, Lingslay bumped headfirst into two figures dressed in white, carrying a bundle of some kind. He hastily made way and pressed himself against the furnace. A cigarette lighter flickered in the darkness. Lingslay held the telegram up to it, and then used the burning paper to light a cigarette. The slender flame illuminated his face for a moment – pale, harsh, almost stony. The fire went out. The face melted into the darkness.
It was midnight when the lights of the first cruisers appeared on the horizon. The deck sprang to life. Human figures darted here and there in the darkness and short bursts of commands punctuated the air. The Mauretania was sailing under blackout conditions and at full steam.
The twinkling lights on the horizon were getting closer every minute. The monumental black contours floating in the dusk were already visible to the naked eye. A spotlight sprayed from one tower. It anxiously groped the sea, resting on the hull of the Mauretania, blinding the crowd on deck with its shaft of light.
A second spotlight simultaneously illuminated the deck from the north side. In the hollow silence, a siren wailed mournfully, continuously, and the wail was picked up and joined by others further along, one by one. The tension on board reached a crescendo.
A whistling pillar of fire tore from one of the cruisers and soared in an arc over the Mauretania.
“They’re firing blanks,” the gentleman in glasses whispered in confidence to the group of corpulent men surrounding him.
“Isn’t it possible for a real one to slip in among the blanks by mistake?” a gentleman with a pointy black beard asked nervously.
“Impossible,” said the man in glasses with a forbearing smile. “When we’re dealing with Mr. David Lingslay there can be no room for mistakes.”
The Mauretania was sailing at full steam. Now pillars of fire streamed upward from three sides simultaneously, and roaring projectiles shook the overhanging sheet of the air like a sail. A scream rang out from the far end of the deck, followed by the rumble of crashing shrapnel. The ship erupted in pandemonium. Cannons blasted incessantly. A red shaft of smoke exploded from the middle deck of the Mauretania, propping up the collapsing sky. At that same moment the old shammes, his robes flapping, appeared on the spotlit deck and ran around screaming and flapping his arms.
“Killed! Rabbi Eliezer has been killed!” shrieked the delirious shammes.
“Mr. David Lingslay! Where is Mr. David Lingslay?!” screamed the man in the horn-rimmed glasses, seizing every gentleman he found by the lapels and staring him in the face.
An explosion of floorboards and smoke threw him onto the barrier.
The man in glasses tried to get up, but a gigantic, invisible load was pushing him to the ground. The old, disheveled shammes bent down over him. The man in glasses was trying to say something. He managed to draw a scratchy whistle from his throat. The shammes bent down lower.
“A message… Today he sent a new message to New York… ,” coughed up the man in glasses.
The shells crashed down relentlessly. The Mauretania’s rear hull, utterly pulverized, was submerging with lightning speed. Only the prow still protruded from the waves, pointing straight upward.
Mr. David Lingslay hung over the rail of the prow. An ample stream of blood was pouring onto the deck from his hand, which had been severed along with part of his torso.
Mr. David Lingslay felt no pain. He felt he was slowly spiraling downward, but not into the water; it was more of a soft, ambling elevator that was lowering him somewhere into the depths, past shifting floors of consciousness. Other glass elevators flew past him going up, filled with familiar, half-blurred faces. In the foreground, Lingslay made out the unnaturally enlarged face of his nephew Archie, with those good hazel eyes and curls of chestnut-brown hair on his wise, broad forehead. Archie was smiling. David Lingslay tried to reflect that smile with the corners of his lips, now oddly stiff. He felt pride at having just carried out some immensely important work, for which he had never found time in his life till then, and which should have made his nephew Archie very satisfied, but he could not even recall what this work was exactly. Fewer and fewer illuminated floors flashed by in the impenetrably black tunnel of the shaft.