The Midnight Watch (6 page)

Where, Stone wondered, was the
Titanic
?

Now Cyril Evans appeared at the top of the bridge stairs, with trousers over his pyjamas and a pullover that was back-to-front and inside-out. He was wearing slippers. He stood for a moment and then announced, ‘The
Titanic
has sunk. Not sinking –
sunk
. I have it confirmed from the
Carpathia
. She is picking up her lifeboats right now.’

Captain Lord seemed to Stone to be made of iron; he did not flinch. For some time he said nothing whatsoever, then he turned to Evans. ‘Go to your cabin,’ he said, ‘and put on your uniform. A ship’s bridge is no place for a man in slippers.’

Before Stone had time to think, the third officer was on the bridge, running and shouting and pointing towards the icefield, his large square jaw thrust forward. On the other side of the field, a ship had drifted into view from behind two icebergs. She was a passenger steamer with a slender red funnel and four masts, perhaps five or six miles away. Groves was crying out, ‘See? She has her flag at half-mast!’ and Stone saw that it was true. He saw, too, that the ship was using her derricks to recover empty lifeboats from the ocean.

The ship must be the
Carpathia
, he thought, and, more importantly, she was on the other side of the icefield – the side from which they had just come, in the very position in which Stone had seen a ship firing rockets during the night. The
Californian
, he realised, had come too far west: they had steamed through the icefield for nothing.

The captain found his voice. ‘Full ahead!’ he called to the man on telegraph, readjusting his cap on his head, and resecuring the buttons on his blazer. ‘Steer for that steamer,’ he ordered.

Slowly the ship’s head came around to the northeast, and began to push back through the ice.

Stone felt a tightness in his chest and he wanted to cry out. The
Titanic
had sunk and he had seen her rockets. He could hardly speak; he could not think what to do next. He felt that he wasn’t in the world any more, that things were passing before him as if on a screen, out of reach.

In half an hour they were at the
Carpathia.
She was a pretty ship, with a gleaming white accommodation and a funnel standing proud and tall in the red and black livery of Cunard. Stone could see people crowding on the decks, staring across the water at him. A derrick was lifting a lifeboat onto the foredeck where perhaps a dozen boats were already stacked. On the bridge, the captain waved his right hand above his head and an officer walked to the rear of the bridge to hoist a signal pennant up the jumper halyard. They were about to semaphore.

Stone heard Captain Lord ask the chief officer to stand by with the flags, and the third officer to run up an answering pennant and read off the
Carpathia
’s replies. The
Carpathia
’s officer took up the bright yellow and red flags and began signalling.

‘D!’ called Groves, then ‘o’ and then ‘y-o-u.’

Do you … Stone watched the outstretched arms adopt their odd angles, and mouthed the letters silently to himself as Groves called them: ‘h-a-v-e a-n-y s-u-r-v-i-v-o-r-s a-b-o-a-r-d?’

The sun rose higher. The water lapped gently at the sides of the ship. Stone knew at once what that question meant: the
Carpathia
did not have all of the
Titanic
’s people aboard. He took a step closer to his captain. How many were the dead? he wondered.

‘What shall I say, Captain?’ asked the chief officer, the flags fluttering in his hands.

Captain Lord spoke quietly. ‘Tell them no,’ he said, ‘and … ask them…’ He faltered.

Ask them how many, Stone thought. How many were they?

‘Ask them what is the matter.’

The chief officer moved his flags quickly – ‘What is the matter?’ – and again Groves called the reply.
‘Titanic
sank here 2.20 a.m.’

Six hours ago, thought Stone. During the midnight watch.

The signalling from the
Carpathia
continued. ‘We have picked up all her boats and survivors.’

There was a pause. Stone looked at the signalling officer on the
Carpathia
through his binoculars. He was holding both flags straight up, the left at a slight angle, indicating that he was about to signal numbers. Stone knew they would be
his
numbers – his and his captain’s. Captain Lord was, he knew, like him, waiting for them. Once they came they would be theirs forever.

The sun grew smaller and more intense as it climbed the sky. It poured such a torrent of white light onto the bridge that it seemed to wash the colour from things. There was no subtlety of shading; the scene appeared to Stone at a uniform saturation, like an overexposed photograph. Even the black pitch between the planks at Stone’s feet glistened as if wet with light. Under the black rim of his cap, Captain Lord was squinting. Stone thought of
Moby-Dick.
‘Oh, my Captain! my Captain!’ he said to himself. ‘Away with me! Let us fly these deadly waters!’

At last the numbers came. ‘One,’ he heard Groves call. Then, ‘Five.’

Fifteen? Could it be only fifteen?

Groves called, ‘Zero.’

One hundred and fifty, then.

Raising his hand to shield his eyes, Stone waited for the signal that letters were to follow, but instead the officer held his arms perfectly still – one flag pointing straight up, and the other pointing down and to the right. It was unmistakable, and the bright image of it burned itself into Stone’s mind. It was another zero, and Groves called it, calmly, firmly. And then the letters l-o-s-t.

Captain Lord spoke. ‘Was the zero signalled twice, Mr Groves?’

‘Yes, Captain. He repeated it.’

‘Very well.’

The light bore down on Herbert Stone. He thought, for some reason, of his first day at sea, and the narrow, stinking pump room into which he had been sent to clean the bilges, and the caustic sludge that had scalded his hands. He wished he were there again now. At least it had been dark; there was not this burning, unforgiving light. He took a step backwards, looking for some shade. There was none – not even the flimsy bridge awning cast shadow. Light filled every corner.

On the starboard bridge wing he saw the captain standing alone, erect and still, pulling his cap tighter on his head, lest it be blown off by the wind. ‘I told him,’ Stone whispered to himself. ‘
I told him
.’

CHAPTER 5

Harry Houdini stared at me. His hair was parted in the middle above a high forehead that told me he was intensely clever – so clever he was most likely insane. In a few weeks, I knew, he was going to lock himself in a packing crate with two hundred pounds of lead and have himself thrown into the East River from a tugboat. He blazed with a fearsome intelligence; he seemed to know that life could only be tasted in its most concentrated form at its boundary with death. But there was something about his face that was pained. This man, I thought, was a prisoner of his own brilliance, his own incessant thoughts. His was a brain that never stopped. Every packing crate, steel box and vault he escaped was an enactment in the outer world of an escape he could never achieve in the inner. His mind was a straitjacket. Behind those eyes, that furrowed brow, that non-compromising intensity, was someone trying to get out.

A man’s own soul can be the very worst sort of prison, I supposed.

At least, that was how I read the face in the framed photograph above my table as I drank my beer, waited for my train and thought about things. I am good at reading faces. ‘Show me a face and I’ll give you a story’ was my promise, and I almost always got it right. Often I could sum one up in a single word. For Harry Houdini, the handcuff king:
trapped
. For my wife, all those years ago in Venezuela:
empty
. For my daughter, who waited for me in Boston:
life
.

But what word for Philip Albright Small Franklin, Vice President of the International Mercantile Marine? I drank a straight bourbon chaser, closed my eyes and conjured his face as I’d seen it in the freight office. I saw one thing very clearly: pride. Pride in his company, in his staff, in his ships, and especially in the
Titanic.
Or even more than pride – love, perhaps. But there was something else, too. His face began to appear before me in the finest detail, and I could see now the slight tightening of the lips, the almost imperceptible pulsing of the eyelids, the strange quiver of the tongue, the sweat that showed itself as a smooth sheen rather than collecting in drops. Shapes emerged, colours clarified, and I knew what I was seeing. I had another word for Philip Franklin:
fear
.

Philip Franklin, that great empire of a man, the tycoon of American shipping, was afraid.

‘Waiting for a hooker?’

Dan Byrne slid into the chair next to mine. He wore the same stale overcoat he’d been wearing when I was in New York a year ago. He was smoking a cigarette and he exhaled the smoke directly into my face.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve just had one.’

Byrne smiled. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Your mother was in fine form, as always.’

Byrne gave a violent, snorting laugh and dropped his cigarette. He picked it up, snubbed it out, and lit another. ‘I’ve come to get you,’ he said. ‘You’re leaving too soon. Everybody’s rushing down to number 9. Franklin’s about to say something big.’

I finished off my bourbon. ‘Something big?’

‘That’s the rumour,’ Byrne said.

I stood up and breathed deeply, trying to sharpen my thinking. Byrne helped me steady myself as we left the station saloon and wandered south. Broadway was clogged with automobiles. Women, I could see, had come straight from the opera to White Star in black and silver furs. Police lurched perilously on horseback and a gasoline dynamo had been placed in the middle of Bowling Green Park to electrify a temporary instalment of large light globes. Police standing guard made announcements through megaphones: there was no access to the White Star offices at the current time; information was available at Times Square on the
New York Times
bulletin boards.

‘I’ve heard,’ Byrne said in my ear, ‘that there are more than four thousand people up there.’

This, I thought, was turning out to be quite a story.

Byrne’s maxim was ‘Lie to police whenever there is chaos’, so we told the policemen at the great revolving door that we were Mr Burlingham and Mr Underwood – Mr Franklin’s lawyers, no less – whom he had called upon urgently. No, we did not have our cards because we had come direct from our restaurant. The police seemed not to believe us, but they let us in anyway. Perhaps they had their own maxim: ‘Whenever there is chaos, let in the press.’

The passenger and general offices of the International Mercantile Marine were even more crowded than they had been in the afternoon. The radiator cocks were fully open and the rooms were stuffy and hot. Women standing in queues fanned themselves with theatre programs. A rack of hooks had come free of a hallway wall and coats lay in a heap like a giant dead animal. In the freight office reporters jostled for space. They had become dishevelled, unruly and impatient. Deadlines for the next morning’s editions loomed but nobody could file – not if ‘something big’ was in the wind.

‘Follow me,’ I said to Byrne as I walked past the freight office to the elevators at the end of the hallway. I pushed on an adjacent door and we slipped into a stairwell. In a moment we were in the second-floor general offices. It was after seven o’clock but there were people everywhere: telephonists, stenographers, bookkeepers, clerks. We walked straight to Philip Franklin’s office, a large room separated from the general offices by frosted glass. Two cable boys stood waiting outside the door, fiddling with their caps. We knocked and a voice from inside invited us to enter.

The office was enormous. Franklin sat at a great mahogany desk, flanked on either side by two men I recognised as Frederick Ridgeway, Head of Steamships, and Frederick Toppin, Assistant to the Vice President. Toppin saw at once that we were press and demanded we leave. He walked towards us, placing himself between us and Franklin’s desk, as if he thought we might try to lunge at the man. But Franklin called him back. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Just wait.’ His face was drawn, his eyes red. ‘Let them stay. In fact, go down and get the others – tell them that I will see them here, in this office.’

Toppin set off on his errand, and as we waited for him to return I thought about all that I had read of Franklin – of his beginnings as an eager office boy in Baltimore, his rapid rise to become the ‘ablest shipping executive on the Atlantic seaboard’, his ‘positive genius in the handling of difficult situations’, his unwavering loyalty to John Pierpont Morgan in that man’s battle against Cunard and quest to dominate the North Atlantic. On the wall behind Franklin were hung perhaps twenty photographs of IMM ships, in neat rows in gilded frames, each with a small brass name plaque – Atlantic Line ships, Leyland Line ships, Dominion Line ships, and others. To the far right were the White Star ships: the
Baltic
, the
Cedric
, the
Majestic
, the
Olympic
. As I looked at Franklin sitting at his desk, framed by these photographs, I knew what the ‘something big’ was. I knew it absolutely. I was staggered by its immensity and took a step backwards. Byrne propped me up.

I knew, too, why Franklin wanted the press to come to his office for the announcement. When he said what he had to say he wanted to be backed by his precious ships, like a man surrounded by his family.

I noticed for the first time that he was holding in his hand a Marconigram. He stretched it tight between his hands, perhaps to keep it steady, perhaps to help him focus when the time came to read it. I could see a pattern of tiny printed words in blue ink. The fragile yellow paper seemed about to tear.

‘Mr Steadman, isn’t it?’ Franklin said softly, looking up at me with tired eyes as we waited for his assistant to return.