The Lusitania Murders Read Free Page B

McClure, your benefactor?”
    “Both,” I said. “As for Van Dine, I believe it suggests in an elegant manner the less than elegant need for nourishment.”
    The bulldog smiled. “Another Courvoisier?”

    “Certainly. And is there anything else we need to discuss, where business is concerned?”
    Rumely seemed almost taken aback. “Why, certainly—you don’t think I sought you out to merely do the conventional bidding of my editor.”
    “Well, I—”
    The publisher held up a stubby hand. “We’ll have another round of cognacs, and then I’ll tell you.”
    “Tell me what?”
    He chuckled. “Why, the real reason you’re boarding the Lusitania tomorrow, of course . . . Waiter! ”

TWO

The Big Lucy
    Before we get on with the tale at hand, in order to illuminate the nature of various deeds (dastardly and daring), some background seems advisable, regarding the Cunard steamship line’s unusual partnership with the British government.
    By the time the nineteenth century dragged itself reluctantly into the twentieth, German liners had become the standard for speed and luxury, which offended the sensibilities of Great Britain, that self-proclaimed “greatest seafaring nation on earth.” Further, collusion between J.P. Morgan (whose White Star Line was Cunard’s greatest rival) and various non-British lines (including Holland-Amerika) set the stage for domination of North Atlantic tourist trade by the upstart American line and its foreign business allies.
    Lord Inverclyde, chairman of Cunard, invoked patriotic pride to convince the British government to lend the line better than two and a half million pounds for the buildingof a pair of new ships designed to restore Cunard—in terms of both speed and luxury—to a position of pre-eminence in the North Atlantic. Those ships, the sisters Mauretania and Lusitania , were in effect co-owned by the British government.
    For this reason, the Lusitania was designed—its sister, too—for a dual purpose: Decks bore gun emplacements, coal bunkers ran along the sides of the hull to protect boilers from shells and deep storage spaces were fashioned for easy conversion into magazines. In effect, the Lusitania was a luxury liner ready to metamorphose into a battleship. *
    This blurring, between commerce and combat, must be understood for the Lusitania ’s tale to make any sense at all . . . if such is possible.
    Sailing day for the Lusitania was the first of May, 1915, a drab, drizzly Saturday. All sailing days were bustling affairs, what with the processing of hundreds of passengers, and thousands of pieces of luggage to be lugged aboard and stored. But any time the Lusitania set sail (if that phrase could be loosely applied to a mighty turbine-powered ship), a throng could be expected dockside, though she had tied up there more than a hundred times, and was a familiar sight at the foot of Eleventh Street. New Yorkers had embraced the Big Lucy ever since that day, eight years before, when she had docked here upon completion of her maiden voyage; even the stench of the nearby meatpacking district couldn’t keep them away.
    And indeed an even larger than usual crowd had bravedthe growling gray sky and the sticky spring drizzle to cluster along cement-fronted Pier 54 with its massive green-painted sheds blotting out the Manhattan skyline. This was in part because an uncommon number of Americans would be boarding the Lusitania today, many of them women in second class and steerage—wives on their way to join soldier husbands, and nurses who had volunteered to work with the Red Cross.
    But the primary reason for the dockside swarm of what might loosely be termed as humanity related to a warning from the German embassy that had appeared in virtually every New York newspaper either last night or this morning. In some of the papers, this warning had appeared side by side with Cunard’s advertisement announcing the sailing of the Lusitania today at noon.
    This notice had