"You can get the keys?
"Don't need keys," Dennis told him smugly. "Any automobile lock you ever heard of, I can open it up with a bit of wire."
You're sure about that?"
"Try me."
"I intend to. Do you think we can load the stuff now?"
Dennis sniffed, and looked up at the dock on the workshop wall. "I don't see why not. Give it five minutes. That's when Wally goes off for his lunchtime pint. We'll have the place to ourselves then."
Harry cleared a space on the workbench and hoisted himself up so that he was sitting on the edge of it with his legs swinging. "You know something, Dennis," he said. "I think for the first time in my life I've felt like I'm really fulfilling myself."
"You're not scared?" asked Dennis.
Harry glanced at him through the distorting lenses of his spectacles. Dennis had always wondered how somebody who looked so vulnerable could be such a dedicated fanatic. Harry said, "Of course I'm scared. Aren't you scared? Jesus, Dennis, destiny is always scary."
Dennis said, "Yes," in a way that sounded as if he confronted destiny every morning after breakfast. Then he went to the pegs where his raincoat was hanging, and took a paper packet of sandwiches out of one of the pockets. The sandwiches looked decidedly squashed.
"Cheese butty?" he asked Harry. "Might as well have something to eat while you're waiting. It's Cheshire."
Harry shook his head. He was too agitated to think about chewing and swallowing a cheese sandwich. "How do you know when Wally's gone off for his drink?" he wanted to know.
His mouth crammed with sandwich, Dennis pointed towards the window. "Walks past. Has to."
They waited another five minutes; and then a round-shouldered man in a doth cap passed the window on his routine way to the Queen Victoria public house outside the dock area: little realising that he was acting out the most historically important moment of his whole life. "All right," said Harry, "let's get the stuff out and go."
"The stuff" was in a wooden chest about three feet by two feet by two feet, bound with cheap lacquered hinges. Stencilled on the top of the chest in black were the words NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE. Dennis dragged it out from under the workbench, and they both stood looking at it for a moment before Harry said, "Come on, then. We haven't got all day."
Outside, the rain clouds had all rolled eastwards towards Runcorn, and the wet planking of the landing stage had been gilded with morning sunlight. Carrying the wooden chest between them, Harry and Dennis walked between the rows of wet iron bollards to the warehouse where passengers" cars were kept before they were swung aboard by cranes and stowed in the liner's holds.
The air was sharp with the smell of brine and fuel-oil, and seagulls sloped and feathered around the tall funnels of the Arcadia, and dived for scraps. The Arcadia was so huge that she was almost impossible to look at. Harry noticed that the dockers and victuallers who crowded the landing-stage hardly ever glanced at the ship at all. In the same way people who live and work in the shadow of high ranges of mountains never stand back and focus on the massive terrain which on them.
Harry was reminded of the newspaper story of the man who had hurried aboard the Titanic so late that he had no time to take a good look at her. He had promised himself that he would take an appreciative stroll alongside her once she was berthed in New York.
Dennis said, "This is it," and pushed open a green-painted door with his shoulder. Inside, the warehouse was silent and gloomy, irradiated by light that was strained the colour of cold tea. There a thirty or forty automobiles parked there, bumper to bumper, all facing towards the large closed gates through which they would eventually be driven out to the ship.
Harry carefully lowered the wooden chest onto the cobbled floor. There were at least ten Rolls-Royces here, in varying shades of cream and mauve and brown. There were Bentleys, Daimler touring cars, and an Angus-Sanderson. The whole warehouse smelled of motoring spirit, wax polish, and leather. It was the heady aroma of the newly mobile rich.
"The car we want is round the other side," said Dennis. They hefted up the chest again, and carried it between the rows of automobiles, trying not to let it bump against the mudguards and headlamps all around them. Blowing up the Arcadia was one thing; blowing up a few cars and themselves as well wasn't what Harry had in mind.
The Marmon was parked on its own. It was long and black, and its chauffeur had buffed it up to a mirrorlike shine. Harry could see himself and Dennis approaching it in the reflection paintwork of the fenders like two dark dwarfs.
"All right, set the stuff down here," whispered Dennis. He looked around over the tops of the cars to make sure that they were alone. In any event they were quite well hidden, because the custom-built coachwork of most of the cars was higher than usual, to accommodate their owners" top hats.
"Just open the trunk and let's get it loaded," Harry whispered back.
Dennis crouched down at the back of the Marmon, fiddling with the lock on the trunk, while Harry kept a lookout.
"I was talking to the chauffeur about this car when he first brung it in," said Dennis. "Do you know how much this car cost? Nearly twelve thousand dollars, fittings included. It's got a gold vanity by Cartier, built-in, and solid silver ice tongs for the bar, and all the fabric inside is handmade French what-jum-acallit, tapestry."
"Just the goddamned automobile to blow up," said Harry. "I thought you'd appreciate it," grimaced Dennis, still wrestling with the lock.
"Can you hurry it up?" Harry told him.
There was a moment when Dennis, teeth gritted, had to force the last lever of the lock. "Don't break it, for God's sake," Harry warned him. But then the lock gave way with a loud click, and the trunk door came down on well-lubricated hinges. Inside, there were two shooting-sticks, a locked binocular case, and a picnic basket which bore the name of Abercrombie & Fitch. Plenty of extra room for a wooden chest packed with thirty sticks of dynamite.
"Right, drag the stuff over here," beckoned Dennis. "I'll pack it right behind the picnic basket, where it's more difficult for anyone to see."
"What about the lock?" asked Harry, as he shuffled over with the case of dynamite. "How do I get back into the trunk when I want to set everything off?"
"I'll fix it so that you can hook it open with a piece of wire," Dennis told him. "Then all you have to do is connect up the leads of the clock with the detonators inside the lid, and you're away." He suddenly looked abashed. "Well when I say away ..."
"I'm not going to take any more risks than I have to," Harry told him.
Together they picked up the wooden chest and lifted it onto the open door of the Marmon's trunk. But just as they were sliding it past the picnic basket into the inner recesses of the trunk, they heard a door open on the far side of the warehouse, and the sudden sound of voices. They both crouched down, and froze.
"You can load most of them today, can't you?" said a loud voice that echoed around the vaulted ceiling.
"Well some, Mr Pollard. It depends on the lads."
"What do you mean, it depends on the lads? I was down the Queen Victoria ten minutes since, and most of the so-called lads were propping up the sawdust bar, half stewed. The lads can put their backs into it and get these motors loaded by tomorrow, or else they can find something else to do, like delivering letters, maybe, or digging coal."
"I'll see what I can do. That's all I can say."
"Well, do your best. If Mr Keys were still with us, you'd be doing it, and no mistake. See if you can do it for me."