Unsinkable

  “But fire at sea?” Alfie persisted.

  “That’s not fire, lad.” He indicated the relentless flames inside the furnace. “That’s fire. Now, you’d best be off. Can’t keep a rich lady waiting for her favorite wrap.”

  Alfie left his father and continued on his errand, passing through Number 6 Boiler Room. As he ducked through the hatch, he imagined the heavy watertight door that would clatter down at the flip of a switch by Captain Smith. Down here, it was easy to visualize the sixteen sealed compartments that made the ship unsinkable.

  A delicious coolness washed over him as he entered the fireman’s passage forward of Number 6. A thermometer on the bulkhead read 88 degrees, but the improvement was measureless.

  It took all his strength to open the heavy iron hatch to his left. Trunks, boxes, and luggage were piled nearly to the ceiling, secured in place by thick netting — the worldly goods of more than six hundred first-and second-class passengers. It would surely take half the night to find Mrs. Willingham’s belongings. And by then, some other fancy-pants would no doubt send him on his next mission — after a watch fob or a makeup mirror this time.

  He yanked open the hatch to his right, hoping against hope to see Mrs. Willingham’s trunk standing alone and unsecured, awaiting his key. No such luck. There was, instead, a vast cargo hold. Crates of all sizes, containing everything from tea to machine parts, were stacked one on top of the other, tightly tied down.

  As if a wave exists large enough to toss a ship this size, thought Alfie. The Titanic rode the Atlantic so sturdily that a pencil could be stood upright on a tabletop. He had seen it several times. It was a favorite game in the first-class lounge.

  He surveyed the hold, his gaze passing over bales of rubber, rolls of linoleum, sacks of potatoes, and barrels of mercury and the scarlet resin called dragon’s blood. In the center of the compartment was parked a motorcar! It was large and bright red, yet it was almost completely hidden by the endless cases and parcels and casks.

  And then something inside the automobile moved!

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  RMS TITANIC

  THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 1912, 8:50 A.M.

  Alfie froze. “Is someone there?” he asked in a high-pitched voice.

  There was no answer and no more movement. He had a small argument with himself. Was it part of a junior steward’s duties, for less than four pounds, to see if anyone was hiding in there?

  Good sense told him no, but curiosity won the day. He picked his way through the piles of cargo and gingerly approached the motorcar. As he peered in through the windscreen, the last thing he expected to see was a pair of eyes looking back at him.

  Twin gasps of shock rose in the hold.

  With surprising speed, a small wiry figure in a rumpled steward’s uniform leaped out of the automobile, sending a stack of hosiery cases toppling. He stood, poised, as if trying to decide whether he should fight or flee. Hemmed in by piles of cargo, escape seemed unlikely, and a struggle might bring half the crew down upon them.

  Alfie stared at him. “You’re the one I saw in the uniform room!”

  “So I was sleeping on the job,” Paddy blustered. “So what?”

  “You don’t work here!” Alfie exclaimed. “You’re a stowaway! I saw the rags you threw off!”

  “You must be thinking of someone else, friend,” Paddy insisted through clenched teeth.

  “Perhaps we should let the captain make that decision. There’s a telephone to the bridge just outside in the fireman’s passage.”

  “You do what you think you have to,” Paddy replied grimly. “And while he’s here, we can also ask him why a lad of fifteen is signed on to his crew.”

  Alfie winced. “How do you know that?”

  “I might have overheard a little father-and-son chat in that same uniform room,” Paddy told him with a slight smile.

  “You’re a stowaway,” Alfie accused again.

  “That I am,” Paddy admitted. “And you’re underage. So we’ll have each other for company when we’re put ashore at Queenstown before the Titanic crosses to America.”

  “I think sneaking aboard a steamer bound for New York is more serious than a wee exaggeration in the hiring line,” the young steward said, a little less certainly.

  “Looks like we’re going to find out, then.” Paddy sensed his advantage and pressed it. “I feel sorry for you, I do.”

  “For me?” Alfie challenged.

  “Well, if I get the bum’s rush, I’m right about where I started. But you’ve got a job — and your pa …”

  “I won’t tell anybody about you,” Alfie blurted quickly.

  “Now, where would the justice be in that?” Paddy began to pick his way through the maze of cargo. “Perhaps I’ll telephone the bridge myself —”

  “Please don’t,” Alfie pleaded.

  But Paddy did not stop. “All this is weighing on my conscience something terrible. And it wouldn’t hurt to put some food in my belly. Even in the brig, there’s a square meal to be had.”

  “I’ll bring you food!”

  The stowaway turned around and favored Alfie with a grin. “A sandwich would be lovely. And a glass of that nice, rich milk.”

  Light dawned on Alfie. “You blackmailing little gangster!”

  Paddy’s expression darkened suddenly. “A blackmailer I may be, but you’ll not call me a gangster….”

  Alfie took a nervous step back, even though he was a head taller than the other boy. “I —”

  “Gangsters murdered my friend,” seethed Paddy, his eyes glazing over. “Do you think I’d be aboard this ship if Daniel was still alive?”

  “I’m sorry,” stammered the young steward. “I’ll bring you food. But first I have to find Mrs. Willingham’s favorite shawl!”

  Paddy stared at him for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Well, we can’t deprive a rich lady of that, can we? Any search this important demands two pairs of eyes!”

  He followed Alfie out of the cargo hold, through the fireman’s passage, and into the baggage compartment. “I’ve been in here before,” he commented casually. “Everything’s locked.”

  Alfie turned on him sharply. “There’ll be no stealing or our deal is off!”

  “Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” Paddy chuckled. “Why would I need to steal if someone’s bringing me food?”

  “I want your word on it!”

  “Like you gave yours to the White Star Line?” Paddy returned.

  They began to scan luggage tags, which identified each trunk and crate according to the owner’s deck level and cabin number.

  “Look at this!” Paddy held up a leather-bound book thick with inserts.

  The young steward was angry. “Put that back!”

  “I didn’t take it,” Paddy defended himself. “It was just lying here on the deck. It must have fallen out of one of the trunks. I wonder what it is.”

  “It’s none of your business, that’s what it is!”

  “There’s no name on it.” Paddy set the volume on top of a large box and opened it to the first weathered page. “It seems to be some kind of scrapbook.” A newspaper broadsheet was carefully pasted there. The headline read:

  GHASTLY MURDER IN THE EAST END

  Paddy stumbled over the first word, but the second he recognized at once. “Murder!”

  It brought Alfie swiftly to his side. “What murder?”

  Paddy indicated the newspaper. “Read it for yourself! Some lady in London was murdered with a knife! There was blood everywhere! It’s horrible!”

  “This newspaper is old,” Alfie pointed out. “Look how yellow it is. And the date — September second, eighteen-eighty-eight, twenty-four years ago. Mary Ann Nichols — why does that name sound familiar?”

  “It can’t,” Paddy concluded. “She was dead before you were born.”

  Alfie leafed through the scrapbook. There were newspaper stories of dreadful killings on every page, along with maps of London and line drawings of gru
esome crime scenes. “These are the Whitechapel murders!”

  “What-chapel?”

  “Whitechapel — it’s a part of London!” Alfie explained breathlessly. “The whole of England lived in fear for months! People were afraid to leave their flats and houses. When I was a wee lad, my ma used to say, ‘Alfie, I won’t sleep sound in my bed at night until that monster is off the street for good.’ Even now, after twenty-four years, they’ve never found the killer! Ma’s still obsessed with the subject.”

  “So is one of the passengers,” Paddy said. “What sort of person makes a pastime of recording the foul deeds of a terrible criminal?”

  “This is no pastime,” Alfie countered, his face paling as he scanned the pages. “Look at this!” He pointed to a note scribbled by hand in the margin beside an account of one of the murders: Hanbury St. — extinguished gaslights 3 & 4. “No mere scrapbook keeper could know details like these!”

  A small cloth envelope was fastened to the cardboard beneath the broadsheet. With a none-too-steady hand, Alfie unfastened it and tapped the contents into his palm. Out tumbled a large, garish jade earring and two tiny objects, lumpy and ivory-colored. His eyes widened in revulsion.

  “Teeth!” Paddy hissed. “Human teeth!”

  Alfie jerked his hand away as if he’d been burned. The three items dropped to the deck of the hold. The earring lay there, but the teeth bounced and skittered, disappearing among the piled trunks and baggage.

  “Trophies!” Alfie rasped in horror. “Souvenirs of the people he’s butchered!”

  “Are you saying there’s a murderer aboard the Titanic?” Paddy asked in amazement. “Who could it be?”

  “The Whitechapel murderer was never identified,” Alfie replied, his voice filled with dread, “but his nickname is well known across England.” He let out a tremulous breath. “Jack the Ripper.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PORT OF CALL: QUEENSTOWN

  THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 1912, 11:35 A.M.

  Ireland.

  Now that he had Alfie sneaking him food, Paddy resolved to pass the voyage in hiding. But he couldn’t resist the chance to come up to the second-class promenade and take in the sight of the land of his birth.

  How beautiful it looks!

  In truth, it was not very beautiful. A misting rain and low overcast sky washed its green into a wet, dirty gray. And anyway, Queenstown was hundreds of miles away from Paddy’s village in County Antrim. To an Ulster boy, Cork, the southernmost county, might as well have been in England or even America.

  So how did he explain the empty space where his heart was supposed to be? Why were his eyes filled with a moisture that had nothing to do with the rain? Why did this alien place feel like home?

  Like Cherbourg, Queenstown’s harbor was too shallow for a large ocean liner. Paddy squinted at the mass of passengers packed aboard the tender that chugged slowly toward the anchored Titanic. Even from this distance he could make out the worn cloth coats and caps, the carpetbags in drab beiges and browns. Alfie had told him that no first-class passengers would be boarding at Queenstown, and only a handful of second class. The rest of the group — more than a hundred strong — was steerage.

  Maybe that was why Queenstown seemed so familiar. These were poor people.

  Like me.

  He felt an almost irresistible urge to get off this floating palace. The impulse made no sense. Ireland meant poverty and hunger, having to steal to survive. How could he choose that over a dream ship filled with millionaires and equipped with luxuries he’d never even known existed?

  Maybe that was the problem. The Titanic was too big, too rich, too perfect. There was something wrong with that. It wasn’t real. He’d been wrestling with the uneasy feeling ever since Southampton, when the enormous ship had sucked the New York into a near collision.

  Now, seeing Ireland within reach again, the solution suddenly seemed simple. If he could stow away aboard the mighty Titanic, he could surely sneak onto the little tender that was bringing out the last contingent of passengers.

  He was Irish. Ireland was where he belonged. When the small ferry unloaded its human cargo and went back to Queenstown, Paddy Burns intended to be on it.

  His feet began to move almost of their own accord. He was being carried toward home by a force he could no longer resist. Before he knew it, he was stepping onto the elevator to E Deck, where the new passengers would be coming aboard.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” the lift operator commented pleasantly.

  “And you’ll not be seeing me again,” Paddy replied. It no longer mattered if he was identified as an imposter. What could they do? Put him off the ship? He was putting himself off.

  “Good luck to you, then. A word of advice. If you’re really leaving us, you’d best change out of the uniform or they’ll hound you to the ends of the earth.”

  Paddy laughed. “They can try.”

  If Alfie Huggins was an example of White Star material, Paddy had nothing to worry about. The young steward seemed a nice fellow, but it hadn’t been very hard to blackmail him into protecting a stowaway. A few months in the neighborhoods of Belfast provided more education than all the schools in England.

  Poor Alfie wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds on Victoria Street. He was too absorbed in a series of crimes from twenty-four years ago to worry about what might be coming around the corner to clobber him right now. Jack the Ripper aboard the Titanic! What next?

  Paddy navigated the E Deck passageway and reached the gangway just as the tender was tying up. He already had all his worldly possessions — the suit on his back and Daniel’s drawing. Too bad he couldn’t have managed a few fat purses from first class. That would have kept him in meat pies for a long time. But he couldn’t risk missing the tender.

  His plan was simple: He would pose as a White Star employee escorting the Queenstown passengers ashore, and he would simply never come back.

  He melted into the group as the gate was lowered and the stewards began welcoming the new arrivals.

  He saw the bodyguard first — a very tall, rough-looking man with impossibly broad shoulders and a broken nose that wandered all over his face. Next, the houndstooth cloak appeared, and above that, cold, cruel eyes deep set in a stone countenance.

  The blood drained from Paddy’s body and settled in his trembling feet.

  Kevin Gilhooley, the man who had killed Daniel.

  The man who wanted Paddy dead.

  The irony was shattering. To escape this monster, Paddy had sailed from Belfast to Southampton to Cherbourg to here. Yet all this time, Kevin Gilhooley had been traveling by rail across Ireland to embark on the very same ship.

  The man’s eyes locked on him, and widened in surprise and recognition.

  In that instant, the Titanic disappeared, and Paddy was back on the streets of Belfast, where the only thing that mattered was staying alive.

  He fled. Through passageways, anterooms, and salons he dashed, up and down companion stairs, past unadorned iron hatches and opulent entrances. Behind him, he felt the pursuit in the form of heavy, pounding footfalls. But he also heard it — shouted instructions between Gilhooley and his henchman.

  “He went that way!”

  “Don’t let him get away!”

  How can the Titanic’s reception party allow two thugs to run rampant all over the ship, threatening a crew member, even an imposter? he wondered as he ran. The answer was obvious. Stewards were trained to cater to the whims of millionaires and the fears of hopeful emigrants. That sort of treatment did not work well with a gangster like Gilhooley. His ilk did as they pleased. And if someone stopped them, it was usually someone even bigger, stronger, and meaner.

  Paddy hustled through the third-class dining saloon, rows of long tables, the decor pleasant but spare and severe. The passageway continued for a distance, ending at a half-gate, used aboard ship to divide classes of service.

  Paddy leaped over it without stopping. As soon as his feet touched down,
he was aware of the plush carpeting. The paneled walls and subtle lighting told the rest of the story. This part of the deck saw first-class traffic.

  The swimming pool, Paddy remembered. It’s around here somewhere.

  He slipped through an elegant door marked TURKISH BATH and was amazed to find himself in a gorgeous room that looked like an Arabian palace. Lounge chairs lined the dark walls, and a few men reclined, wrapped in huge thirsty towels. Two of them even had towels over their faces. It was a scene of total pampering and relaxation, the kind only a true swell could afford.

  The attendant acknowledged Paddy with a nod, and then stepped into the adjoining steam room.

  Gruff, angry voices sounded in the passageway outside. His pursuers were almost upon him!

  Paddy did the first desperate thing that came to his mind. He jumped onto the nearest unoccupied lounge chair, buried himself from head to toe in warm Turkish towels, and prayed that the attendant hadn’t counted his customers when he’d gone next door.

  A moment later, the hatch burst open and Gilhooley and his man stormed into the bath.

  “He’s not in here!” the bodyguard growled. “This is some kind of posh bathhouse!”

  “The devil he’s not!” Gilhooley roared. He grabbed at the nearest wrapped figure and yanked the towel clean off.

  “How dare you, sir?” came an outraged, authoritative voice.

  At that moment, the attendant came back into the room and took in the scene. “Please, sir! Don’t you know who this is? It’s Colonel Astor! He’s not to be disturbed, nor is anyone in my care!”

  “There’s a thief on board!” the bodyguard growled. “We followed him to this part of the ship.”

  “You are mistaken, I’m sure,” the attendant said stiffly. “This part of the ship is for gentlemen.” The word clearly excluded them. “If you do not leave at once, I shall have to call the master-at-arms.”

  The henchman pulled himself up to a full six feet and four inches. “You do what you must. I can break two necks if necessary.”