“With all due respect,” Anderson said to her, “I must request that you refrain from sharing with the captain any of these far-fetched theories.”
“I thought he’d requested my presence,” she said, “for me to make a full report.”
Anderson twitched a humorless smile and shrugged. “Use your own judgment, then.”
The captain’s suite of rooms took up the forward end of the Boat Deck, adjacent to the raised officer’s house on the navigating bridge. Anderson knocked on the middle of three unlabelled doors and a deep voice from within bellowed, “Come!”
We entered.
This was a day room-even if it was three in the morning-with white walls relieved by oak wainscotting and the occasional framed nautical print and a ship’s wheel clock; the furniture was Colonial and the effect spartan. A round maple table with four chairs was central, and on the table was a tray with tea service.
The old boy-though in his late fifties, he seemed nearer seventy-was smoking a pipe and pacing; he was wrapped up in a dark blue dressing gown, which somehow conveyed a military bearing, an effect undercut by his white pajama trousers and brown leather slippers. His thinning white hair was mussed from sleep-he had not bothered to brush it, apparently-and his jutting jaw, flat nose and slitted eyes combined to convey distinct grumpiness.
“Thank you for coming,” he said to us, his tone at odds with his words. There were no introductions, no ceremonial handshakes. He simply gestured to chairs at the round table, and offered everyone tea-“Coffee would defeat sleep,” he said, “and we do hope to have some yet, tonight, don’t we?”
No one pointed out to him that night was long since gone; but everyone accepted his generous offer and Miss Vance volunteered to do the serving, which Captain Turner took her up on, with a gruff, “Thanks.”
Turner’s big blunt-fingered hands lay on the table like fists waiting to happen, the pipe in one of them; the smoke smelled no worse than burning refuse. His grizzled countenance seemed to accuse, even as his words claimed otherwise: “I want you people to know I appreciate your efforts.”
“Thank you, sir,” Anderson said.
Miss Vance and I thanked him, as well, and sipped our tea.
“These are dangerous times,” the captain said, “and I don’t take them lightly.”
Had anyone suggested he had?
“I have a boy serving in France,” he said. “Artillery officer. And my other boy is in the Merchant Marine. . also an officer.”
There was an implied “of course.”
“Seems to me I’ve spent my life racing Cunard ships against these. . Germans,” he was saying, pausing for a few puffs of his pipe, as if stoking his personal boiler. “Their Deutschland. . Kronpriz Wilhelm, Kaiser Wilhelm II, even this new one, Kronprizessin Cecile. . hah! My girl Lusitania has shown them all her stern.”
Miss Vance and I smiled politely; Anderson, too.
“Now here we are racing their goddamned U-boats,” he growled, shaking his head. To Miss Vance he said, “Pardon a sailor’s salt, ma’am.”
“Don’t think of me as a woman,” Miss Vance said, making an impossible suggestion. “I’m a Pinkerton agent, Captain-and your ship’s detective.”
The weathered face smiled, but the cold eyes indicated his true opinion of Cunard having hired a female detective.
I risked a question. “How much danger are we in from U-boats, Captain?”
“None.” He puffed the pipe. “Even at our reduced speed, we’ll have no trouble outrunning them.”
“Reduced speed?”
One shoulder shrugged, and contempt curled his upper lip, a bit. “The powers that be have ordered me to get by on three of my four boilers-to save coal, and to suit our reduced crew. That takes our top speed down from twenty-six knots to twenty-one. . cruising speed from twenty-four to eighteen.”
“Still, no steamer cruising at even that speed has been torpedoed yet,” Anderson said, with an unconvincing offhandedness, shifting in his chair.
“That’s reassuring,” I said, but it would been more so without the “yet.”
Anderson locked eyes with me and said, “Mr. Van Dine, you do understand we’ve taken you into our confidence. Normally we wouldn’t share such information quite so casually. .” And here the staff captain shot a look at his superior officer. “. . in front of a newspaper man.”
But this point seemed lost on the old boy, who rattled on, “Anyway, even if we were struck by a torpedo, we’d never sink. . not with our watertight bulkheads.”
“That’s reassuring, as well,” I said.
Anderson had a dazed expression.
“And if we should sink,” Captain Turner said, with a fatalistic shrug, “the sinking would be so slow, we’d have plenty of time to get the passengers away in the lifeboats.”
“This is all encouraging information,” Miss Vance said, “but might I be so bold as to inquire how it relates to the murders of these stowaways?”
Turner sighed smoke, then gestured with the pipe in hand. “My understanding is that they aren’t ‘murders’ at all-it’s a falling-out among spies, and they’ve killed each other, and we’re all the better off for it.”
Her eyes wide, Miss Vance said, “I suppose that’s one way to look at it.”
“Young lady,” the captain said, “it’s the only way. The passengers on this ship, God bless them, came aboard despite alarmist talk of U-boats and sabotage and war. I do not want them unnecessarily burdened with further trepidation.”
“Captain,” she said, setting her tea cupdown with a clatter, “these men may have an accomplice on your crew-it’s no secret the Lusitania had to settle for second best, and worse, in assembling-”
“That’s a gross exaggeration,” Anderson said, bristling.
I was surprised she had broached this-but I noticed she continued to guard her hole card carefully: the cyanide poisoning of the two stabbed cell mates.
Turner patted the air with his pipe in hand. “Let her talk. Let her talk.”
Crisply she said, “Someone had to help smuggle those men aboard. And when the stowaways were captured, perhaps that same someone butchered all three, to cover his tracks.”
“Suppose he had,” Turner said. “Suppose we have a greedy boy who invited those Krauts aboard. . If so, he’s no spy, he’s no German, just. . a greedy boy. He’s killed our spies for us-our passengers are hardly in any danger now.”
Miss Vance seemed stunned by this response, as well she should have been: Its absurdity was worthy of Lewis Carroll, and the captain did after all vaguely resemble Alice’s walrus.
“Captain,” I said, trying to do my part, “a new piece of troubling evidence has come to light-Mr. Anderson? The list?”
Anderson showed Turner the list from Klaus’s shoe, and the captain frowned and asked us what significance we gave it.
Miss Vance presented the two theories-an assassination agenda, or a blueprint for shipboard robbery. Turner listened, entertaining himself with sips of tea and puffs from his pipe.
Then he made an expansive gesture with one hand, saying, “How does this change anything? Don’t we still have three dead Germans, who can neither kill nor steal? Don’t we still have passengers who deserve to make this crossing without undue trepidation?”
No one had answers to any of that.
So Turner went on: “And here is what we’ll do. Those bodies will be moved from the hospital to a refrigeration compartment on the lower deck. . See to it, Anderson, that these cadavers are kept quite separate from the beef, mutton, vegetables and so on.”
News of that might upset the passengers more than German spies!
“Yes, sir,” Anderson said. “We’ll store them in ice, sir.”
“They have to make the full journey, after all,” Turner said, “before we turn them and this entire situation over to the British Secret Service.”