The Lusitania Murders by Max Allan Collins Page B

fool passengers into thinking they were in a fine hotel or country home. Massive painted expanses of steel bared the ship’s every rivet, every bolt; but the spartan cabins were both spotless and spacious, and on the bunks were bedspreads bearing the distinctive Cunard crest—a lion rampant with a globe.
    “That’s a handsome touch,” I said.
    Anderson grinned and shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not intended to dress up the cabin, Mr. Van Dine. . . . We mean to discourage passengers from helping themselves to the bedding, when they head to shore.”
    The passengers I saw in Third Class, however, were not of the stereotypical sort one might expect in steerage—no tired, poor, huddling masses. No, these travellers seemed to be an Anglo-Saxon lot, Britons mostly, but a good share of Germans, too, skilled or semiskilled workmen. These were practical men, with limited funds, interested not in Grand Staircases and electric elevators and smoking rooms, but clean quarters and edible food and cheap passage.
    The degree to which all of this had been thought through by the ship’s designers could be seen in the very columns throughout the ship—in Saloon, they were (as has been noted) Corinthian; in Second Cabin, an elegant Doric; and in Third Class, the cleanly simple Ionian.

    Though I could hardly be shown every nook and cranny, Anderson’s tour of the Big Lucy was surprisingly complete. * On the lowest deck, from the periphery, I witnessed the care and feeding of the liner’s huge furnaces, courtesy of men in dungarees and boots and blackened faces, using rags knotted round their necks to occasionally wipe their faces, somehow thriving in a cavern of blistering heat and blinding coal dust.
    Anderson pointed out the engineers and firemen and stokers and trimmers—the “dirty gang,” he dubbed them—and over the satanic roar he explained the jobs of each; but I couldn’t make sense of it, just as I couldn’t understand how any man could consign himself to such a hell, in trade for mere existence. It took only moments for the scorching heat and the sticky coal dust to compel me to request that we end this portion of the tour.
    Part of me knew I should have pressed for a view of the cargo holds down here—this was where, my employer Rumely had speculated, any contraband would be kept—but I preferred to allow Anderson to escort me out of this hades, with the goal of eventually returning to the heaven that was Saloon Class.
    Before completing our tour, Staff Captain Anderson—having shown me around the various classes of the ship—suggested we conclude on Deck C, the Shelter Deck, where many of the services and facilities of the ship were located.

    “A liner is like a city,” Anderson said, “and we have the same sort of needs as any modern metropolis.”
    I was rather tired of this process by now, but not wanting to be rude—and cognizant of the need to stay in the captain’s good graces—I put up with a mundane survey of various offices, the seldom-used brig, the hospitals (male and female) and of course the dreaded nursery.
    The latter included a children’s dining saloon, and we had moved thankfully through that madness of magpies and were heading down a short corridor that opened onto the Grand Entrance and the elevators, when voices behind a door marked STEWARD’S PANTRY caught my attention.
    The voices were speaking in German (one of my several languages), and—though the closed door muffled it, somewhat—I distinctly heard: “We should hide the camera.”
    As I paused, touching his sleeve, Anderson turned to me quizzically, and I whispered, “Do you employ Germans on your staff?”
    Several voices behind that door were audible now, speaking in German, but too soft to make out the words.
    Anderson gave me a sharp look, and motioned for me to stand to one side, which I did.
    Then the staff captain opened the door on three men in stewards’ whites, huddled within the small pantry,