The Titanic Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,10
ablaze with color: daffodils, tulips and narcissus, brilliantly green hedgerows and flowering cherry trees, all flourishing in the April sunshine of a spring that had come early.
“We’re tickled you decided to go First Class,” Henry said, settling back. He had hung up the silly Inverness cape and his considerable girth was encased in brown tweed. “You know how these liners segregate the classes.”
“I’m glad you two are willing to put up with riffraff like us,” Futrelle said.
“We’ll force ourselves,” Henry said with a grin.
“This wasn’t your doing, was it?”
“How so?”
May flashed a look his way, but Futrelle pressed on just the same: “You know, Henry, I do turn an honest dollar, now and then. I haven’t been reduced to taking charity.”
“What the hell are you talkin’ about?”
Futrelle told him about the unexpected gift from Ismay.
“I had nothin’ to do with that,” Henry said with a dismissive wave. “But it doesn’t sound like Ismay’s style, either—I’ve been on White Star liners he was ridin’ before, and he’s one rude, arrogant son of a bitch… pardon my French, ladies.”
Soon the train was traveling through Surrey, domain of the landed gentry with their cottages of dressed fieldstone, half-timbering and thatch, where fields of grass and heather stretched endlessly, interrupted occasionally by clusters of birch, oak, spruce and beech.
“How did your trip go, Jack?” Henry asked. “Come back with some nice fat contracts for stories and books?”
“Be good, Henry B.,” René scolded mildly. “It’s none of your business. Did you, Jack?”
Futrelle chuckled. “I did very well, actually. I’ve contracts enough to hold me through the next year, easily… but I’ve had to revive my old nemesis.”
“More ‘Thinking Machine’ stories?” Henry asked, eyes laughing. “I thought you’d sworn off that cranky old egghead—like Doyle dumping Holmes off that cliff.”
Futrelle worked up half a smile. “Yes, but like Sherlock’s papa, I’m afraid, Mammon tempted me back into the fray.”
May said, “Jack’s written six new ‘Thinking Machine’ stories on this trip—heaven help us if our steamer trunks are lost!”
“How about you, Henry?” Futrelle asked. “Find any British plays worth producing? Got your next Lion and the Mouse lined up?”
“I’ve got a couple honeys under option. But I’m branching out, Jack, into the future.”
“What future would that be?”
“In my steamer trunk are a couple of tin cans that set me back ten thousand pounds.”
“Tin cans?”
“Of motion-picture film, Jack—I’ve got Reinhart’s The Miracle in kinemacolor! Just spoke with Oscar Hammerstein yesterday, and he’s interested in going partners.”
Futrelle made a face. “I’m not an admirer of the cinematograph. I believe in words not pictures.”
“You sold The Hidden Hand for filming,” René reminded him.
“Yes, and they butchered it.”
After a while the landscape rolling by the boat-train window shifted from idyllic rural to harsh urban, sprouting not flowers but corrugated-iron factory roofs, the forests not trees but smokestacks of textile mills and steelworks. Much as he admired the captains of industry, like those on this train, Futrelle could not reconcile their capricious leisure with the quiet desperation of workers such as those who dwelled in the dingy rabbit warren of squalid red-brick row houses gliding by the window like an admonishing vision courtesy of one of Scrooge’s ghosts.
Henry, with that good heart of his, must have felt a twinge himself, because he suggested they repair to the smoking car, where shortly Jack was lighting up a tailor-made Fatima from a gold-plated cigarette case and Harris a Cuban cigar.
“It’s that unpleasant fellow again,” Henry said, waving out a match, nodding toward a table by the window where indeed the ferrety Crafton was seated with none other than that great unmade bed of a man, William T. Stead. The two men had their heads together, Stead listening intently, frowning, Crafton whispering, his smile lifting the ends of the handlebar mustache into black angel wings.
“Not interested, sir!” Stead said suddenly.
Banter in the smoke-filled car fell to a hush, as the white-bearded, massively bellied Stead stood and berated his fellow passenger in a bellow.
“To the dogs with you, sir! The dogs!”
Embarrassed, Crafton smiled nervously, shrugging to the other men in the smoking car and nodding toward Stead, with an expression that encouraged their common knowledge that the old man was mad as a March hare.
Stead understood this patronizing gesture and grabbed Crafton by the front of his striped sack suit and lifted him from his chair like a naughty child.
“Fortunate for you, sir,” Stead said, nose to nose with the frightened little man, “that I am a pacifist!”
And then Stead tossed him back onto the chair,