Nevermore (3 page)

The front room was a kitchen. An oak icebox dripped in one corner. A coal scuttle stood between the blackened range and a bathtub covered by a worktable. This was an Old Law tenement with a single toilet in the hall serving all four apartments on the floor. The men pushed inside, finding the place a shambles, broken furniture strewn like pieces of kindling. An overturned flour bin powdered most of the floor but the detectives failed to find a single white footprint.

The back room was in even greater disorder. Twenty-dollar gold pieces lay scattered about, along with a bundle of silver spoons tied with silk ribbon and several broken bits of costume jewelry. A cotton mattress torn from the bed was bunched against the wall. Mother-of-pearl grips smeared with gore, a gleaming straight razor lay on the only unbroken chair, pointing to the blood splattering the cheap patterned wallpaper. The shattered window frame gaped with night. A gusting breeze sent several torn clumps of gray hair drifting across the bare floorboards like tiny spectral creatures.

Lieutenant Bremmer turned the central gas jet higher. At first glance the room looked unoccupied, a fireplace on the side wall seemingly unused, as no ash collected on the grate. Oddly enough, considerable quantities of soot had fallen onto the hearth. Bremmer bent over for a look. A long strand of blond hair hung out of the flue.

“Christ almighty,” he muttered, reaching up to tug a slender arm down from the chimney. The head and shoulders of a young woman followed, badly scratched and mauled. Discolored bruises banded her pale throat. Hanging upside down, her staring blue eyes and wide-open mouth spoke of a final uncomprehending horror.

Damon Runyon leaned forward among the detectives. “I’ll be damned,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Rue Morgue …”

“What’s that?” asked Heegan, standing at his elbow. He thought he’d heard him say “rumor.”

“Just like the Poe story.”

Sergeant Heegan didn’t know what the newspaperman was talking about. He had never heard of Edgar Allan Poe.

T
HE KNIGHT AND HIS
lady stood arm in arm at the stern rail of the
Mauretania,
watching the long white line of wake describe their course across a blank and nearly motionless sea. It was very cold. Bundled in heavy overcoats, she with her ermine stole wrapped tightly around her neck, they remained the only couple on deck under a moonless, cloud-free sky. The clarity of the air magnified the myriad stars and rendered the horizon sharp and straight as a razor’s edge, the obsidian sea abruptly divided from the silver diadem of sky.

He drew her close and whispered into the fur-muffled ear. “It was on just such a night as this that the
Titanic
went down. And not so very far from here, I should reckon.” His voice rumbled gently with a laconic Scots burr.

“Is it only a decade ago?” she said. “It seems absolute centuries.”

His heart surged with emotion, not because of what she implied: a whole world swept away; each of them losing a beloved brother to that devastating war; his son, Kingsley, gone as well. They had been through so much together, yet he felt neither sadness nor loss. He no longer believed in the finality of death. If there was such a thing as eternity, he knew in some mysterious way it was connected to the profound love he shared with this fair, stalwart woman who had remained by his side through it all.

He was sixty-three years old, his wife fourteen years younger, although she looked to be still in her late thirties. Theirs had been a love at first sight during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee more than a quarter century before, and the fire of it burned more fiercely now than on that first damp spring morning so long ago.

She interrupted his musing: “Will there be any danger of ice?”

“I should think not.” The knight wrapped a bearlike arm around his fair lady. “They steer a somewhat more southerly course these days. Still, it’s all fate, isn’t it, really?”

“At least we should be together.” She nestled tenderly against him and he knew she was thinking of Mrs. Isidor Strauss, who had refused to enter a lifeboat, saying she had spent forty years with her husband and would not part from him.

“I wonder how poor old Stead spent his last moments…?” He referred to W. T. Stead, once editor of the “Review of Reviews,” his Boer-sympathizing adversary back in the days of the South African War, later a friend and companion on the spiritual path, lost along with more than fifteen hundred other souls in the
Titanic
disaster. “Perhaps at tonight’s meeting we might make contact.”

She smiled up at him. “I know if we don’t, it shan’t be from want of trying.”

Never noticing their burnished reflections in the gleaming cherry-wood paneling, so intensely did they stare into each other’s eyes, the dignified couple made their way along the first-class passageway. Steam heat transformed the interior of the great ship into a balmy summer evening, and they removed their topcoats, he gallantly carrying both over his arm.

The knight was a tall man, well over six feet, with the burly build of a heavyweight boxer. In spite of his years, he moved with an athlete’s innate grace. Carefully trimmed now, his thick, white walrus mustache had swept to dark, dashing cavalier points when first they met. She thought him then the most handsome man she had ever laid eyes upon and nothing in all the years spent together had ever altered her original opinion.

Their stateroom was on the port side of A Deck. It was spacious, yet dainty in its “posh” appointments. Although not bound for the Indian Ocean, they had shared a quiet laugh about “port out, starboard home” upon embarking. He hung up their coats. She sat at the vanity, brushing and rearranging her dark gold hair. She caught his reflection over her shoulder and smiled.

Her husband was one of the most famous men on the planet, his beloved books translated into dozens of languages; his plays, the toast of the West End. He received his knighthood not for these literary accomplishments but for service to Crown and country during the Boer War, something altogether more noble. Far from being a bookish chap, he was an avid sportsman, an expert amateur boxer, and a champion cricketer. She admired him enormously.

The smiling knight rested his powerful hand on his lady’s pale shoulder. She pressed her cheek against it, kissing his fingers. Neither her pride in the man nor her admiration for his varied abilities compared to the enormity of her love. When they met she was a girl of twety-four with a passion for singing and fast horses. She still craved a spirited mount and galloped fearlessly through the woods surrounding their Sussex estate. And her fine mezzo-soprano voice, trained at Dresden and Florence, continued to give her husband great pleasure.

She sang for him on that first rainy afternoon so long ago and she remembered the joy in his bright blue eyes. He was in his prime then, a jovial bull of a man, bursting with energy and ideas. Already celebrated, he wore his fame lightly, taking more joy in scoring a century on the cricket field than in all the kudos of the literary establishment. He was also married, “Touie,” his wife, an invalid. She loved him anyway: utterly, completely.

If he had been a different sort of man, one to whom honor mattered little, he might have divorced his ailing wife, or baser still, taken his new love for his mistress, and she surely would have followed his lead. But, he did neither, compelled by a code he’d honored all his life. He would not abandon his wife; neither did he deny his love. Although wiser heads counseled her never to see him again, no romantic heart ever argued with her choice. For the next decade, their relationship remained platonic. They saw each other often, chastely, and with discretion. And whenever he stormed at the unfairness of it all, she smiled and said she didn’t mind as long as they were together.

Nine years went by with dignity and decorum, and when Touie succumbed peacefully to the tuberculosis that doomed her long before, he mourned for another twelve months. He was now a knight of the realm. This meant little to him. The happiest day of his life was when at last his lady became his bride. And although the “Flaming Youth” of a more cynical postwar generation might smirk at the thought, she took pride after such a long and secret courtship in being still a virgin when she stood beside him at the altar.

A passenger liner at sea provided a succinct microcosm of the society left behind on land. Down in the depths of the stokehole the black gang toiled in sweat and misery, shoveling coal round the clock into furnaces under the great boilers that drove the ship. Over them, the steerage passengers dwelt in dormitories little better than prisons. The spare, efficient quarters on the next level housed the crew. No frills or fancy ornament here. Servants were not expected to aspire beyond their station.

High above the throbbing engines and catacombed human hive, the stately corridors of wealth and privilege surpassed a humble immigrant’s most extravagant dreams. The steamship companies provided fantasies as grand as any concocted in the motion picture studios of Hollywood. Shielded by riveted iron plates, surrounded by teakwood decks, magnificently arrayed beneath the four looming red stacks, the
Mauretania’s
hand-some public rooms included cafes modeled on the Orangery at Hampton Court, tiled Turkish baths with marble columns, a gentle-men’s smoking chamber in the manner of Renaissance Italy, grand ballrooms and dining rooms spanning every French style from François I to Louis XVI.

Launched five years before the
Titanic,
sister ship to the
Lusitania,
the
Mauretania
first won the Blue Riband for speed in 1907. The prized ensign remained affixed to her foremast fifteen years later. Still the swiftest craft afloat, she was a stately survivor from a grander and less gaudy age. The same might well be said of the knight and his lady ascending the main staircase, so completely did they embody the virtues of a lost time. The year before, he had been made an Earl and Knight of the Garter. They were known, at least by sight, by all the passengers. Everyone on the stairs nodded an amicable greeting.

In the Louis Seize library, where the bookcases were so like those in the Trianon, they paused to chat briefly with the Duchess of Marlborough, whom they’d met at a séance in Kent. Knowing that her friends, the Burlieghs, were among their guests, they invited her to join their party, and she accompanied them into the adjoining writing room.

The rest of the group had already assembled. “Here’s Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle just now,” barked bluff Brig. Gen. Sir Nevil Soames. After genial greetings, the knight introduced the duchess to those she didn’t know: a couple from the United States, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Randell; and the spirit medium, V. T. Podmord, a noted clairvoyant. The steward brought drinks and refilled coffee cups. Lady Jean chatted with the duchess and the Randells, who owned a chain of “drug stores” in some improbable place called the Midwest.

Sir Arthur joined General Soames, Lord and Lady Burliegh, and the ethereal Mr. Podmord, a thin young man so pallid as to be nearly translucent. “Dreaming true is the only psychic power I possess, outside of healing,” Sir Arthur said, replying to a question from Lady Burliegh. “Thank God for that.”

“What? No desire to have ectoplasm oozing from every pore?” The brigadier fixed young Podmord with a dubious eye. “Tell him what he’s missing, tell him of the rapture and the joy.”

The clairvoyant’s cheeks flushed. “Perhaps Sir Arthur possesses powers of which he is unaware …” His reedy voice piped in suppressed indignation. “Or wishes to deny.”

“Of whatever small talents I lay claim to, Mr. Podmord, I can certainly assure you that there are none which escape my attention.” Sir Arthur’s cerulean eyes danced, lively with imagination. “It’s the responsibility I couldn’t bear. To be so close to the spirit realm, to hear all those pleading voices, greet so many distant shades… . It would quite consume my life, I’m afraid.”

“It already has,” Soames remarked. “Lecture tours in Australia. America, again. And book after book on spiritualism. Give us more of
The White Company
and
Micah Clarke.”

Sir Arthur felt secretly pleased. The brigadier had praised the historical fictions, his own two favorites among his work. Unlike most enthusiasts, Soames did not urge him to produce more bombast about the odious Sherlock Holmes.

“Might not one be insensitive to his psychic gifts and, at the same time, unconsciously make use of them?” Lord Burliegh wondered.

“Rubbish!” snorted General Soames.

“I shouldn’t be so quick to condemn.” Sir Arthur smoothed his mustache. “First, hear the evidence. In a long life touching every side of humanity, far and away the most intriguing character I have ever encountered is Houdini.”

“The music hall magician?” chirped Lady Burliegh, anxious to demonstrate her familiarity with popular culture, although unsure of the reference.

“The same. I have never met his equal in courage. All the world knows of his daring. Why, he has performed feats the average man trembles to contemplate. Moreover, it is impossible to think of his many miraculous escapes without imagining some form of dematerialization has taken place.”

“Is not this same trickster leading a campaign against spiritualism?” pouted V. T. Podmord. “Is he not the greatest medium-baiter of the age?”

“He has lately embarked on a very public vendetta, attacking every medium, whether false or true, with equal fervor.” Sir Arthur sighed. “I believe this serves Houdini a two-fold purpose. First, he has never been adverse to publicity, however lurid. But, more importantly, there is no better smoke screen than just such an antispiritualist posture, not if you are trying to conceal being the greatest physical medium ofall time.”

Brigadier General Soames swirled his brandy and shook his head. “Why should an entertainer wish to conceal his greatest selling point? Especially one who so courts the press?”

“Houdini is a great student of the history and literature of magic. He, more than anyone, is aware of the fate suffered by those conjurors whose tricks were found to be accomplished through supernatural means. The stake awaits the warlock.”