Titanic 2012: Curse of RMS Titanic

FIFTEEN

Private Investigator Alastair Ransom stood before Titanic, now sitting in her slipway at 401. Aside from the enormity of the ship which made him feel the size of an ant, there was the gaping cargo hold looking like the mouth of Poseidon himself.

Ransom studied her graceful and gigantic contours, and he watched workmen at her open cargo bay this evening going in and out with coal cars, filling the lower depths with tons of the black rock. The giant’s needs, like those of her sister ship before her, had kept hundreds of miners working the mines in and around Belfast. Coal to fuel the huge boilers to turn the turbines and give Titanic her power.

But Ransom’s eye was trained on the workmen—miners like McAffey and O’Toole. Not a single workman appeared the least bit sick or wobbly. No one bent over, no one complaining of illness, no one vomiting. Working late due to a push on to launch Titanic as soon as possible, this bunch paid no heed to Alastair or the man suddenly behind him.

Without turning, Alastair spoke to the man at his back, “No doubt it’s a huge expense to have Pinkerton agents being paid each day.”

“Likely as not bleeding the shipping company dry.”

“Atop all the other expenses incurred, you mean?”

Ransom shrugged. “Cost millions to build this monster alone; imagine three.”

Back of Ransom, Chief Constable Ian Reahall watched the man’s manner, the way he looked the ship over, the way he took in every detail, and the timber of his voice. Not the least shaky. Nor had this Wyland fellow made an attempt to flee Reahall’s jurisdiction.

As if he had eyes in the back of his head, Ransom said to the Belfast constable, “She’s a wonder, isn’t she, Constable?”

“That she is.”

“What a target for anarchists, eh?”

Reahall came to stand alongside the man he suspected of being a fugitive from the US. The two career detectives stood silent for a time, rocking their heels, studying the monster ship now, side-by-side. “I am giving you fair warning, Wyland… or Ransom… whatever your name is. Leave Belfast before I get reports back from Chicago.”

Ransom looked at the other man, realizing it was indeed a fair warning he was being given—and that if he did run from Reahall’s jurisdiction there would be no chasing him after a point. It was an alluring option.

The fact was that Ransom had used the alias Wakely in London during his time there. “Still fishing, Constable? You’ll find nothing on me in Chicago. Boston, yes, Chicago no,” he lied with a slight chuckle. “But I admire your tenacity.”

“With the Marconi wireless and Morse code at my disposal, you do realize that I will have information in my hands in a matter of hours—sometime tomorrow. Best get out ahead of it.”

“I’m impressed, Constable; I didn’t know you’d gotten the wireless. Smart of you.”

“One must keep up with technology.”

“Protective of your city; you remind me of someone.”

“I’m no fool, Ransom; I know it’s you, and I know your crime, but I’m Protestant, you know.”

“Whatever does being an Orangeman to do with it?” Ransom had to ask.

“The murder of a priest, of course! Look, I’ve no love lost for that faith or their bloody priests, so why should I care that you dismembered one in Chicago?”

“I’ve done no such thing to no man ever.”

“I know about the Catholic priest you killed there in Chicago.”

“Priest killed? Dismembered? I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about and my only name is Wyland. I know no Ransom.”

“What was it you called yourself while in Edinburgh? Cameron was it? Like Smith in America. Not awfully original. As for the rest, we shall see… we shall see—unless you should heed me and disappear.”

It was an old game. All Ransom had to say was yes to Reahall’s suggestion, run, and he’d be giving himself away—admitting guilt. Once he did so, in word or deed, Reahall would by God chase him down like a dog, regardless of whom he had killed. As for the priest, he died of his wounds when someone shadowing Ransom that night finished what Ransom had started, doing what Ransom wanted to accomplish that night the priest was making his escape, but he hadn’t followed through. At the last moment, he’d stopped himself. Someone else had picked up where he’d left off. Ransom’s only guilt was having brought the horse shears to the party.

It might have been anyone in the city whose child had been molested. Everyone wanted a shot at Father Franklin Jurgen. But while the priest was relieved of his offending penis, he’d not been otherwise dismembered, and he’d died not of his wound—which was considerable—but of hospital infection while under the best of care at Cook County Hospital. Due to a cruel twist of fate and the reputation that Alastair Ransom had spent years cultivating and maintaining, he helplessly watched himself be jailed for the Father Jurgen’s murder. His years on the force had come back to haunt him as they had automatically placed him under suspicion. All a perfectly lovely tale in what Charles Dickens would surely have called irony.

“At the moment, sir,” Ransom finally replied to the constable, “we have a more pressing mystery, and Alastair Wyland does not walk out on a mystery unsolved.”

“Then I can count on your being here when I get my answers from Chicago?”

“I am going nowhere, and I will be anxious to prove you wrong, sir.”

“So what do you hope to find here at Titanic, Wyland?”

“Not sure; perhaps nothing. I went to the watchman’s cabin up there.” Ransom pointed his cane at Anton Fiore’s watch tower. Reahall, nodded and said, “Lovely workmanship on your cane; you know this fellow in Chicago had a wolf’s head cane.”

“They are easily found in many a shop the world over.”

“True… true.” Still nodding, Reahall yawned. “Find anything useful in the old man’s shack up there?”

“Nothing whatsoever.” Ransom turned back toward the huge ship he’d been ogling. “But you know, Constable, something tells me he’s somewhere in there.” Ransom indicated Titanic—again with his cane as pointer.

“And that leprechaun-natured Francis O’Toole?”

“You know the man then?”

“Aye, in passing. Ha, yes… I knew them all. Part of me job to know who runs things, who guards things.”

“And they would’ve known one another then?”

“Pretty much so, yes.”

“Then suppose they were hatching something together.”

“Hatching what?”

“I dunno, lunch maybe… exchanging moonshine recipes—or explosive timers, perhaps? How much TNT do you imagine required for a ship the size of which no one’s seen before, eh, constable? What a bloody splash it’d make in the headlines as well: Titanic Sunk While in Port!”

“That’s quite a leap.”

“When-when-when,” sneezed Ransom, “do… hear me out.” After using his handkerchief, making sure Reahall saw the initials AW embroidered in green, he continued. “These men clearly had a falling out, the three of them.”

“Over sabotaging Titanic? Look at her. Do you really think that for a moment… I mean really?”

“One charge at her bow timed as she’s being launched man! Can you not picture it? The crowd, the explosion, the damage, death, and destruction. An anarchist’s wet dream, sir—and she—this lovely monstrous creature, she’s doomed before her maiden voyage…”

“Seems you too readily picture it. On the other hand, forms as a good a theory as any so far, I suppose,” conceded Reahall, lighting a pipe now. “Still, I wouldn’t have thought old Fiore or O’Toole for that matter capable of such. The other man, maybe.”

“Perhaps the two ‘weaker links’ wished to impress the stronger man then. We see it all the time in law enforcement, correct?”

Reahall eye-balled him. “Yes, we do.”

“Men are goaded on too easily by a strong voice and a stronger will.”

“That’s borne out many times over, yes. You do have quite a feel for the law, sir.”

Ransom ignored this, scratching his mustache. “So… you think the Pinkerton agents are still aboard?” asked Ransom.

“I’m sure we’ll find out what we need to know from them. If they’ve seen or heard anything strange about the ship yards tonight.” Reahall took a deep pull on his pipe.

“What do you think precipitated the disappearance of one of their number?” asked Ransom. Then he laughed lightly. “I thought those fellows were supposed to be good. If they can’t find one of their own then how good can they be?”

“I imagine he could well have stumbled onto something—some anarchist activity while on board… perhaps killed for it… his body somewhere inside the ship.”

“It’d take all night to search a single deck on that thing; look at it.”

Ransom smiled, thinking how he’d like to keep Reahall busy all night.

Reahall added, “We’d need an army to cover it all.”

“I understand there’re three gymnasiums aboard her.”

“Three?” asked Ransom, amazed.

“One for each level… ahhh class, you see.”

“Of course, segregated quarters, segregated smoking rooms and wading pools, I’m sure.”

“Look, Wyland, I’m going to call for help, and I suggest you make yourself scarce—as in extremely so.” Reahall went to a locked police phone box to make arrangements to get a small army to his location—to begin a thorough search of Titanic. “Constable Reahall here,” he said into the police box phone. I want two of the more modern day police wagons at Slip 401 shipyard. Yes, Harland & Wolfe.” He ordered up the petroleum-powered wagons which would be loaded with twenty-four uniformed officers. “Yes, I need as many men as can be spared and hurry!”

Constable Ian Reahall then turned to again find the man he suspected of being Alastair Ransom gone.

“Ahh… so you’ve taken my advice, Ransom, eh?” he said to the night, imagining it highly unlikely he’d ever see the strange private eye again. Being a steadfast protestant himself, the fact the Irish-American may’ve killed a priest did not particularly concern him, but if word got around Belfast, Reahall feared this Wyland-Ransom fellow would either turn up dead by the hand of Irish Catholic thugs who controlled parts of the city, or worse, the detective’s reputation among the street crowd, regardless of political and religious leaning, might well eclipse Reahall’s own! “I want none of that,” he muttered to the night. “I don’t need that kind of competition here.”

One way or another, he would rid Belfast of Ransom aka Wyland. If the man did not leave of his own accord, Reahall would arrest him and extradite him to Chicago. He was convinced this private investigator was his man. It wasn’t any one thing he’d said or done but an accumulation of remarks made to various sources over a long period of time that added up to a perfect patchwork of circumstantial evidence.

Tonight had only solidified Reahall’s suspicions, and any day now a photograph would arrive in the mail, a photo of the man in Chicago who’d escaped authorities when he convinced his jailers that he just wanted to go home long enough to shower and shave. Obviously, the man could talk his jailers into anything. He’d convinced them that he’d be back in a couple of hours. This after months of card playing with his jailers, appealing to their humanity, telling them he wanted to be ‘presentable before the judge’.

This fellow Ransom was as sly as Aesop’s fox. He’d had a police escort but he also had the help of friends who secreted him away through an underground passage found in the home of a Dr. Tewes. When they stopped for a tooth extraction, which was in fact a distraction, ‘supposedly’, the guards were distracted as well by a three-course meal cooked up and served up by another member of the Tewes family—the doctor’s daughter. Meanwhile, another friend named Keane, dressed in Ransom’s clothes, had dropped two stories to the ground and slipped out of the city on a road going north for Canada. This while Ransom himself made for a boat leaving up and out of the Great Lakes for Boston. Escape from America came next. That had been two decades ago.

Far from the shadows of the shipyard and Titanic now, Alastair Ransom had gone home and to bed; enough was enough for one day, and he was no longer a young man. In his sixties, while healthy and strong, his limp and the pain in his right leg troubled him more than ever. The satirist in his mind pictured him a doddering, lonely old man in a rocking chair on the porch of the asylum wondering how he had lost his chance at a family and children. The satirist also told him he’d already outlived the average large-city lawman’s lifespan; in fact the average man! He was indeed old and heavy, and heavily invested in his work, and heavily invested in his scars from the violence and anarchy of the infamous Haymarket Riot of 1876. A labor riot that’d left him with a cane and a limp when a young man on the Chicago police force. Not to mention the number of times Dr. Fenger had patched him up—once when Gabby had shot him, quite unintentionally but the exit wound scar remained despite the girl’s intent.

After all that this local constable had learned of this private eye, Reahall must be feeling fairly confidant if not downright certain of his gut instinct; an instinct that said Wyland and Ransom were one and the same.

Still, despite the circumstantial evidence and all of the good constable’s guesswork, the man would proceed with caution, no doubt. He must be certain. He wouldn’t want to look the fool among his peers—arresting an innocent man.

Ransom felt a profound weariness come over him. He was tired of running. He also knew deep down that no matter how far he ran, no matter where he chose to hide, what with modern police sciences such as the skillful use of the Marconi wireless, photography, and fingerprint labs, he could easily be found out these days.

Still he’d always wanted to see more of the world, and he loved sailing; he’d like to see the Swiss Alps some day. He’d read all of Mark Twain’s travel correspondences gathered in books and recalled how Twain said the two most beautiful places on Earth were Lake Tahoe, Nevada and Lucerne in Switzerland. From these thoughts of where to run to, he began thinking of those long ago days when he was a uniformed officer, how his training officer had pulled him away after a bomb blast at Haymarket—an event that seemed nowadays lost to history. His friend and training officer was himself wounded, and moments after pulling Ransom away from the blast area, this good man died with five other policemen. Six known anarchists were rounded up—the usual suspects—and executed: one each for every murdered police officer.

Nowadays in semi-retirement and full-time hiding in plain sight, Alastair needed his drink, the occasional morphine, his card games, and he needed his sleep. Life in Belfast and other cities in Europe since arriving abroad had grown stale and boring until the two young interns had brought him this interesting case. He genuinely believed this case would end in a clear determination: anarchists at work both in the mines and around the shipyards—as they’d been at Haymarket in Chicago not so long ago. This case would determine again that normally good, rational, hard-working men, if made to feel they’d been cheated and disenfranchised, fell easy prey to talk of vengeance and destruction. These missing men had surely been hatching some insidious plot to destroy Titanic. To strike a blow at the rich and powerful in the name of the poor and powerless.

But in the end what would be accomplished if victory came to him for solving such a case as this here in Belfast? “Any wonder the Alps are calling?” he said to the empty room.

Still the Alps seemed a world away from Belfast, whose streets reminded him of his home—of Chicago. In fact, he had been seriously contemplating the idea of returning to America, perhaps New York, Titanic’s destination if the ship ever made it out of its slip. Still a first class ticket was out of the question; he’d have to go second or perhaps even third class. The money from the two interns was more than he had earned at the card table, and he believed now he had money enough for a berth somewhere in the bowels of the ship.

“But can I be away before that damned constable puts me in irons?” he mused. An extremely important consideration for a man with a murder charge hanging over his head.

It’d make a fine upstanding dramatic escape indeed to board Titanic as a crewman. Still, while he certainly knew his way around a merchant ship, this monster cruiseliner might be another matter altogether. He laughed aloud here in his room, head to pillow, imagining himself in a waiter’s vest and shirt, one of those scrawny neckties choking him.

Perhaps he could sell himself as a bartender; he certainly knew enough about drink and the difference between rye, bourbon, vodka, and brandy. He imagined himself in this role aboard Titanic, serving drinks to the richest men on the planet. Titanic’s passenger lists were already legend and printed in the papers for the quality of the names aboard—the heads of industry, commerce, transportation, and state. It was to be a rich man, poor man voyage indeed. The poor down in steerage, second class passengers in the middle sections of the ship, and the rich sleeping up in spacious compartments above. With the size of the ship and descriptions he’d read and heard, even in advertisements, he imagined it not unlike the rungs in Hell or Perdition for anyone with no money in pocket. All her glamour and beauty and size in a sense made Titanic the ultimate floating representation of society with its pearls and its warts intact.

Indeed, the ship was a perfect metaphor for social hierarchy. The first class people with the fattest pocketbooks enjoying every amenity and having full reign over the upper decks; they had access to the gymnasium, a wading pool, the ballroom, and a billiard and smoking room where he might find some card players with deep pockets, and as mentioned in brochures and advertisements, all the amenities: the best food and drink, along with a gymnasium, a thirty-yard swimming pool, a Turkish bath, a live band, and the attention of the staff, the officers, and the captain.

Further down the ‘wedding cake’ of decks, the second-class ticket holders, followed then by the third-class ticket holders, who were lucky to have berths at all. For them, the equation was: the lower in the ship your bed, the more areas on the ship denied. They faced locked gates and one of the 900 crewmembers to remind them of their place. The second-class ticket holders were also denied access to the upper decks. The middle decks for them. And if something untoward were to happen—like a boiler exploding, what then? The ship, after all operated on steam and lots of it. It had not been so long ago that a steamboat on the Mississippi had exploded, killing almost all aboard.

Ransom imagined that first on the lifeboats would be first class women and children; a good reason to hold onto one’s stubs. Those in the lowest reaches of the ship did not stand a chance should there be an emergency aboard such a gargantuan vessel.

These were the last thoughts Alastair Ransom had before the pounding at the door came. A most demanding pounding. Raehall, no doubt, with backup, come to haul him in. He had half expected it and fully imagined it. Reahall and his thugs in uniform breaking in and placing him in irons, hauling him to the Belfast jail where he’d await extradition to America and Chicago. The place from which he had indeed fled in order to escape a sure hanging as a disgraced Chicago Police Inspector. While innocent of the crime, he had cultivated so many enemies in the system and in the city that a bandwagon load of them saw his being jailed on the charges as their chance for revenge. They had all pounced at once.

Dr. Jane Tewes and her daughter, Gabby, along with a handful of friends had saved him but for what—this life in Belfast? It had not been easy all these years since 1893. In fact, he had pretty much lived at a subsistence level. He’d lost Jane and Gabby along with any chance of having a home and family; the family he’d once thought was his for the asking. All of it gone now. Gone along with Ransom’s city—his Chicago. All of it and its people going on without him in pleasant ease, his absence causing no pain… as if he’d never existed, he supposed, that the likes of Inspector Alastair Ransom was gone from their midst was, in the end, a good thing indeed.

After all, he had cultivated a reputation as the most dangerous man in a city known as the slaughter house to the nation—the city of big shoulders.

He took his time going to the door and pulling it open on the dingy little Belfast apartment that was home, his hands held out for the irons, tired of running all over Europe, only to find standing before him not Reahall and his burly cops but the two interns, Thomas and Declan. “Lads… what the devil time is it?

“We’ve slipped from the dormitory, detective,” said Declan as he and Thomas rushed past Ransom and into the small billet—aptly named as he must pay a weekly bill for the use of the apartment. “We need your help,” added Thomas, “to break into the lab.”

“We need you as a witness,” explained Declan, trying to soften Thomas’ remarks.

“Break in? Your first thought was me?” Ransom tried to shake off sleep. He groggily added, “What sort of witness?”

“We’ve three bodies now at the morgue.”

“Three? Three bodies in the same condition, you mean?”

“Reahall and his men scoured the ship, even used dogs,” said Declan.

“The coppers ran some dogs into Titanic’s hull; they found my uncle’s remains along with O’Toole’s—” added Thomas. “All three suffered from the same devastation.”

“It has to be chemical in nature—if not biological.”

“If not both,” finished Thomas.

“What of Dr. Bellingham? What does Enoch have to say about it all?”

“He’s frightened. So’s the dean. Hell… so’s everyone.”

“The entire surgical faculty is terrified,” added Thomas.

“As they should be,” said Ransom, placing on a shirt to cover his hefty body.

“Sir, they are cowards! They want to burn the bodies at the steel mill as soon as it opens in the morning.”

“Cremation may be the best avenue,” he cautioned.

“All of them—the constable, the dean, Dr. B, in all their combined intellect, they are acting out of fear,” continued Declan.

Ransom held a hand up to the young intern. “To contain any possibility of contagion is a normal response to any outbreak of disease, quite typical.”

“B-But damn it, man, there needs be some analytical examination of the condition of these men.” Declan paced the small room, bumping his head on an overhead beam that evoked a cry from him.

“You live, sir, rather poorly don’t you?” Thomas observed, taking in the flat,” I-I mean for a man with such a reputation, Detective Wyland, this place looks like an artist’s billet.”

“Thomas, have ye no manners?” shouted Declan.

“Oh come now, Declan? It’s just a question.”

“Not a lot of call for a private detective in Belfast, son—especially one who’s caught the eye of the local officials.”

“Constable Reahall thinks you a menace, eh?” asked Thomas.

“I fear, he thinks me some sort of problem, yes.”

“What sort of problem?”

“He has me confused with some… some murderer.”

“Murderer?” gasped Thomas, shaken by the word.

“Damn fool copper has me confused with someone else, I fear. Irritating is what it amounts to.”

“But a murderer?” Declan’s repeating of the word hung in the air, and now both young interns cautiously eyed Ransom. “Of course, Constable Reahall’s dead wrong about Mr. Wyland, Thomas,” insisted Declan, who then spoke to Ransom. “I’ve come to respect you, Mr. Wyland. So now, sir, will you help us or not?”

“Help you do precisely what?”

“Why break into the morgue,” Thomas replied.

“At Mater Infirmorum? Are you mad?”

“It’s off from the hospital, a separate surgery and morgue for us university students.”

“Separate you say?”

“On the grounds but yes, separate from the main hospital.”

“And there is where the bodies lie in state?”

“If you can call it that—yes,” Declan added with a shrug. “We can take you straight to the corpses.”

“To what end?” he asked the young men.

“We are surgeons!” shouted Thomas.

The passion recalled Jane Tewes to Ransom’s mind—how passionate she was about being a surgeon, and the extreme lengths she’d gone to just for that reason, as fat, white-haired old men stood in her way. Now Ransom saw the same thing was happening here to these lads.

Declan came close and near whispered, “We need to know what’s the root cause of the condition of those bodies. And you know as well as we, there is only one sure way to determine actual cause of death, and it isn’t by cremating the evidence.”

“Is that what they want to do? Burn it? Outta sight, outta mind, is it?”

“That’s about it, yes, sir.”

“But you boys… you want to conduct an unauthorized inquest instead?”

“We want to autopsy the dead,” Thomas continued for Declan, going to the window, peeking out. “You aren’t expecting anyone are you, Mr. Wyland, sir?”

“Why? What do you see out there?”

“One of those nasty steam-powered police wagons—a paddy. Coming this way it is.”

Ransom heard the noisy wake-the-dead clatter of this thing racing toward them. In fact, it was growing deafening with each turn of the wheels. “It’s Reahall come for me now! You boys picked a helluva time to pinch me for a job.”

“I thought Reahall respectful of your opinion,” Declan said, looking over his shoulder at the approaching police wagon.

“Oh yeah…” added Thomas. “He likely just wants to confer with you, Mr. Wyland—on the case.”

“Confer with me behind bars. Look here, lads, if we’re to have a proper autopsy, we need to be out the back—now! Hurry!” He ushered them to the rear room, past his untidy bedroom, out the back door, and into a smelly dank alleyway. Earlier a light rain had futilely tried to wipe Belfast clean but had only succeeded in making the cobblestones glisten like rocks in a stream—and just as slick. As Ransom rushed the boys, Thomas slipped and turned an ankle and moaned like a cat in heat.

“Shhhhh… .you’ll give us away!” shouted Declan, completely on board with Ransom’s plan. They heard the wagon pull up to the front door, heard men leaping from the wagon, heard shouting to circle around back. “Is that Reahall’s voice?” asked Declan as Ransom helped Thomas to his feet. With Thomas leaning on Ransom and Declan taking Thomas’ other arm, they rushed off.

“There—the shadows! Quickly!” whispered Ransom.

“Hold on,” said Thomas. “Tell me why’re we running from the constable again?”

“They’ll haul us back to the dormitory for being past curfew, for one,” Declan assured him. “So shhh.”

“Don’t be naïve, Declan. Mr. Wyland here’s not hiding beneath this stairwell in a dark alley because we are in trouble. Reahall was asking me all sorts of questions about our hired detective here. He’s come to arrest you, hasn’t he?”

Declan said, “He hasn’t, has he Mr. Wyland. Go on, tell Tommie to push off.”

“Yeah, Mr. Wyland, tell us, if that’s your real name,” said Thomas.

“Thomas, Declan… you help me, lads.” began Ransom, “and I’ll get you boys into that morgue. Deal?”

Declan shook his hand. “Deal.”

“A bargain for sure,” added Thomas.

“Now quiet,” Ransom ordered them where they crouched in a black corner behind trash bins.

Some time had past when from the darkest shadows in the alleyway, Ransom, Declan, and Thomas continued to watch the uniformed officers at rear of the billet come charging round; the Belfast police now surrounded the small house and its street-level apartment—guns drawn. They then listened to the sounds of Constable Reahall’s men break down the front door in dramatic fashion. Reahall then rummaged through the room until he opened the back door and looked down the barrels of six guns trained on him. He uselessly asked, “No one’s come out this way?”

“No one, sir!”

“’Cept that is… you, sir.”

“Find the basement, search the walls! I want that man!”

It was half an hour before Ransom felt it safe enough to slip from the shadows and for the trio to make their way down the alleyway and out onto North Queen Street, heading toward the bottom of Antrim Road, passing a ancient cemetery, the Clifton Street Graveyard with its entry facing them. A sudden noise behind them, a lorry pulled by a horse startled them and made Ransom slip into the cemetery for cover, but it became a moment of mirth for the university boys.

They soon passed Henry Place, continuing onward down Clifton, making their way toward the hospital. In doing so, they must pass the Crumlin Road Gaol, Constable Raehall’s old stone fortress of a prison. There they saw the hub-bub of frustrated men who’d worked late into the night, first at the shipyards and inside Titanic, and then at Detective Wyland’s residence.

The better part of valor may well have been to back away and go around the cemetery or through it, but Ransom instead led them to the rear of the courthouse instead. “You know the streets well,” said Declan.

“I make it my business to know the lay of the land.”

They quickly closed in on the impressive red-brick hospital which had the aspect of a cathedral among the densely packed, terraced residential houses surrounding the medical facility.

Once again the young interns had walked ahead of Ransom to guide him to the separate facilities turned over to the university for dissection and surgery, this separate morgue for university use only. Ransom strained to hear what the boys were whispering about.

“He’s going to make a wonderful witness, Declan—a wanted man, Declan. Are you listening to me, Declan?” complained Thomas in his friend’s ear. The boys walked quickly now, slowing occasionally to look back over their shoulders to check on Alastair’s progress.

Ransom habitually looked over his shoulder as well but he did so for possible attacks on him. An old habit cultivated as a cop in Chicago, a habit that he’d thought himself ready to give up, but apparently not. He’d been fooling himself to think he had finally run far enough. Now all he could think of was hanging for a crime he hadn’t committed, and how much that would please all his enemies in Chicago—like his boss at the time, Kohler, the Chief of Police—and the man who’d set him up for a hanging.

As they found the hospital grounds, the street lamps became fewer and farther between, and soon they were approaching the darkened, locked up basement that the boys pointed to, guiding Ransom to the lock. “How will you get us in?” asked Declan.

“Watch me.”

Ransom worked a sliver of metal he always kept on him into the lock, and in an instant, he had the lock turning but the door would not budge. He fumbled about, a blush of embarrassment coloring his jowls and making him thankful for the deep shadow here so the boys could not see his shame as he knew he didn’t have the necessary torsion wrench to get past this door. “There’s good security here, boys. No way I can get through this door. Sorry. Best we all go home.”

“But there must be a way in.” Declan held up one of Ransom’s picks.

“There’s no way to work this lock with the tools I have, son. Sorry.”

“Surely you have other means of breaking and entering—a man of experience?”

“All right and yes, Declan, I do have other means.”

“Then what’re we waiting for?” asked Thomas. “Someone’s going to spot us here.”

Ransom stared momentarily at Thomas. “Come along. Follow me closely, fellas.”

The interns shadowed the detective to the grassy area beside the door and stone steps leading to this back entryway. “What’re you doing?” asked Thomas at the same time that Ransom, using an elbow with his coat wrapped about it, suddenly broke a window, making the boys leap.

“You’ve broken the window,” said Declan.

Ransom snorted and said, “You are a bright one. All right, one of you climb through and open the door.”

“That’s it? This is your clever way to get us inside?”

“Declan is elected,” said Thomas.

“Me? Why me?”

“You’re smaller, more compact. Careful climbing over those test tubes, by the way. Try not to break anything.”

Ransom looked at Declan, the boy’s face having dropped. “You do want to learn what the victims can tell us, right?”

“Thomas encouraged his friend. “If we don’t go in and have a hard look, Declan, we are merely flailing around in the dark.”

Ransom added, “May’s well be back inside that detestable mine shaft without a lantern—and Thomas, I wish to apologize to you, young man.”

“For what?”

“Well… what with so much going on, I’ve been remiss in failing to offer my condolences on the loss of your uncle.”

Thomas stood stunned for a moment, unsure how to respond. “Thank you, Mr. Wyland, but at the moment, I just want to know precisely what killed him. I want to know what to tell my aunt.”

“Understood.” Ransom and Thomas watched Declan climb though the window and into the darkness where the three bodies lay in waiting.

“No sign of the missing Pinkerton man, Tuttle eh, Thomas?”

“None whatsoever, but it’s a big ship.”

“And it leaves for sea trials tomorrow, and following that, it’s off to Southampton, and from there to America.” They had walked back to the door, and it swung open under Declan’s power. He held up a lit oil lamp and waved them inside.

They rushed in and closed the door behind themselves. Declan led Ransom and Thomas through this closet-sized back anteroom and into an interior where they felt safe to turn on the electric lights, filling the room with brightness. In fact, the electricity lit up a huge operating theater. Along a large back wall refrigerator units stared back at them.

“I’ll never get over electric light, fellows,” Ransom said as he gazed about the well-lit room.

“Bodies are in there,” said Declan, pointing at the wall of doors.

Ransom covered his nose with a handkerchief. “From the smell of things here, I’d say your coolers need a good repairman.”

“The refrigerator units are fine; it’s these particular bodies, Mr. Wyland. They smell of sulfur if you ask me.”

Each of the unusual bodies discovered tonight was pulled from its unit, and using leather gloves going up to their elbows, the boys placed each of the oddly light bodies onto a steel slab designed specifically for dissection. Directly over the table hung lights on swivel arms, magnifying glasses on another swivel arm, a hose to keep a constant flow of water to run off excess fluids and blood to a drainage pipe that took such unwanted matter to the floor and the sewer pipe at their feet. Meanwhile, Thomas switched on a huge machine in one corner of the room, and a lulling whoosh answered—air conditioning. Belfast’ Sirocco Works factory had pioneered air-conditioning for hospitals and such rooms as this to create Plenum ventilation, which nowadays was being applied to all such interiors dealing with medicine. Nearby Victoria Hospital had been the first building of such size to enjoy air-conditioning some six years before. Humdity control and choice of temperature. How wonderful, Ransom thought, trying to imagine a time when any hotel or home might enjoy this advanced industrial technology.

The night’s work stared at the excited young interns, who seemed—as Ransom took in their long, doubtful gaze into one another’s eyes—to be thinking of their efforts as having the potential of becoming a monumental and complicated failure. At the very least, the secretive night work would surely prove difficult and time consuming. Ransom had certainly thought so as Thomas pulled open the cold storage unit where his uncle’s body lay in repose. Both Declan and Ransom held back, allowing Thomas a moment alone with his Uncle Anton’s corpse.

The light illuminated three bodies now lying beneath sheets on three slabs in the wide open space of the operating theater. Looking around and up, Ransom studied the impressive operating theater and the large gallery where students like Thomas and Declan would be perched on a normal day to observe an autopsy conducted by Bellingham or another faculty member. He could just imagine the boys intent on watching every cut, every organ lifted during an autopsy from on high, safely behind the glass, but here they were on the front lines, dealing with God knows what, putting fear aside to determine cause of death, while disappointed in Bellingham for not guiding them this night.

The room brought back bad memories for Ransom. Being a police detective in Chicago with his reputation, he’d on more than one occasion gone under the knife, his life saved twice by the famous Dr. Christian Fenger during emergency surgery. The same doctor who failed to save that contemptible priest, Father Franklin Jurgen.

Ransom cautiously went to each body in turn and slipped the sheet from each distorted face. McAffey, looking like the dead beast from the mine with his horrid grimace and barred teeth. O’Toole, looking nearly the same, and Fiore, who had somehow retained the look of a pleasant little fellow despite the rigid grimace distorting his features. Ransom recognized the grimace as a natural phenomena of traumatic death.

“That’s Uncle Anton,” said Thomas who’d remained rigidly frozen in place at Ransom’s side. “What’s left of him. I could tell you so many wonderful stories about my uncle.”

“Perhaps another time, when we have more of it.”

“He was such a storyteller… loved to relate a tale over a pint—had such a knack for a twist or shot to the senses at the end!” Thomas laughed to recall a certain moment with his uncle. “Lovely man, wickedly funny and always with a kind word and a broad—”

“Enough with the sentiments, Thomas! We haven’t time right now,” Declan warned, moving about the room, preparing instruments, “and dawn is fast approaching. Dr. Bellingham is going to come crashing through that door, and when he does—”

“He’s going to have a cow.” Thomas finished for Declan.

“And he’s going to want answers. Hell, I want answers! Ready the Petri dishes for culturing samples, Tommie, while I prepare some slides. I want to see this thing under the microscope as soon as we do the incisions on our friend here, Mr. McAffey.”

“Why McAffey first?” asked Ransom, curious.

“We—or rather I—suspect he was the first to die of this thing, down in that mine.”

“That beastie found with McAffey is most likely what contaminated the man,” Thomas explained. “So we begin with him.”

“O’Toole was with him in the mine,” continued Declan, “but he managed to get out, and Reahall agrees that Anton—Mr. Fiore quite possibly crossed paths with O’Toole sometime later at the shipyard—as both men’s bodies were discovered inside Titanic.”

“Where inside Titanic? What deck?”

“Lowest deck. Mr. O’Toole here, he was found stuffed behind a bulkhead in the manner of a ragdoll, jammed between the interior and exterior iron walls. Mr. Fiore was jammed into a locker where he would’ve suffocated had he not died of this black disease.” Declan worked as he spoke. “Constable Reahall’s quite smart to’ve ordered Titanic searched.”

“Yes—quite brilliant deduction.” Ransom assumed his sarcasm was lost on the young men. Musing further, he said, “Obviously, someone hid their bodies in an attempt to conceal the crimes.”

“Not clear on that; Reahall says they could have just curled up in there to die.”

“But the missing Pinkerton agent, this man Tuttle… was not found on Titanic although he was there with others to guard the ship?”

“We spoke to Tuttle,” said Declan, removing the elbow length leather gloves and putting on the more comfortable and agile white cloth gloves. “Asked him if he’d seen Mr. Fiore. Said he had not.”

“He was on Titanic, yes,” added Thomas, placing on cloth gloves as well, “Tuttle shouted down to us from what seemed a mile overhead. Can you imagine the lifts on Titanic?”

“Upper decks near the forecastle and bridge,” Declan narrowed it down. “But he’s disappeared completely now.”

Thomas was rattling around with instruments and microscopes before finally declaring, “I’m ready.”

At this point, Thomas and Ransom turned to find that Declan was well underway, having sliced into McAffey with that ready scalpel of his. He had some trouble, however, as the darkened skin was like leather, but in short order, Declan managed to begin a classic Y-incision. Diagonally from each shoulder to the solar plexus, and from there straight down to the navel. The skin ripped like cord wood against the axe—creating a nerve-shattering noise as it split apart. Declan remarked on this, adding, “I can’t believe our teachers and the dean simply want to burn the bodies.”

“So you’ve said, and by whose authority? I mean who has ordered it?”

“Local judge awakened by Reahall and on recommendation of Dean Goodfriar and Dr. B.”

Thomas chimed in with, “But they have no idea what might result from burning the bodies in those ovens.”

“Yeah… what if this disease is spewed out with ash from those chimneys at the mill and it goes airborne?” asked Declan. “Well… who knows how far it might spread?”

“They have no idea what they’re dealing with,” added Thomas, but Declan stood frozen, staring into the open carcass he’d begun to autopsy. “Look at this, Thomas. Tell me what you see… or rather what you don’t see.”

Thomas went closer to stare into the open chest and abdominal cavity. Ransom looked over Declan’s shoulder. Together, Ransom and Thomas Coogan gasped at what they saw.

Ransom asked, “Where’re the bloody organs?”

“And for that matter, where’s the blood?” Thomas wanted to know.

“The man’s organs are here just… well…”

“Where?”

“Camouflaged against the backdrop of his insides—all discolored inside as well as out.”

“And dehydrated, reduced in size and weight as a result.” Thomas’ voice quivered with his nerves.

“And bloodless, drained of it along with any bile or fluids usually found in a decaying corpse.” Declan reached deep into the open chest cavity with forceps and easily pulled forth a shriveled heart through the ribcage. He spoke as he did so, taking his eyes off his work for a half second, saying, “Don’t even need the rib cutters to get it through the bones.” His hand unsteady, his forceps banged against a rib, which immediately gave way, informing them of just how brittle the bones had become. It was unnatural.

This froze Thomas in place. The breaking of normally sturdy bone via a mere bump that would typically cause no more than a casual scrape made Thomas shout, “Damn it! God blind me. Did you see that, Declan?”

But Declan and Ransom were staring at the tiny, shriveled heart about the size of a plum. Totally deflated. Shriveled ridges and tiny threads that were once major veins like the vena cava now indistinguishable in color and too small to be believed. “What could possibly do such damage in… in…”

“In so short a time,” Ransom finished for Declan. “To an otherwise healthy man?”

Declan laid the prune of a heart onto a scale; it weighed a mere third of its normal 300 grams. “No water, no weight,” he muttered, then added, “and the other organs are the same, one after the other.”

Ransom could not believe what he was looking at. Hiding within the body cavity were the other organs, so shrunken, misshapen and discolored as to be unrecognizable.

“And look here, the bone!” shouted Thomas “Empty—empty within, not so much as a trace of marrow.” Thomas had cut a section off the broken bone, and he held it up to the lamp they worked under.

“What’s it all mean?” Ransom asked, astonished.

“It appears… no—it is a fact that whatever this thing is… it utilizes every ounce of fluid in the body—to the absolute final degree.”

“But how? Shriveling every organ… and-and the bone marrow?” Thomas sounded and looked as if he might bolt.

“Hold it together, Tom… Tommie!” shouted Declan, steadying his own nerves.

“I don’t think I can take this, Declan!” Thomas tossed his forceps and the bone segment he’d cut onto a steel tray, creating a clanging metallic response so loud it felt as if the room shook. Then he started for the door, but Ransom grabbed him.

“Hold on, son. You’re seeing this thing through; you came to me, remember?”

“I need a drink… water, absinthe, whiskey, something… .”

“There’s the sink—running water. Have at it, but you get straight; we’re all seeing this through till dawn.” Ransom remained a barrier before Thomas.

Declan went to his friend and placed a hand on his back. “We’ve two more bodies yet to go, Tommie. Buck up. This thing… whatever it is… it could devastate all of Ireland if not Europe. We’ve got to confront it here and now.”

“You want to die like them?” he nodded at the petrified corpses. Suppose we’re already… that it’s already inside us, Declan, draining us like… like it did to Uncle Anton and the other two?”

“We have to put slivers of the organs beneath the scope, Tom—all of them, and document the condition of the body and the bone with photographs to… to document what we do here for others to know, to learn, and to understand.”

“And if it kills us?”

“And yes, if it kills us in the bargain, then… well then so be it. We are men of science after all. Dr. B says men of science must be brave beyond compare.”

Thomas snickered at this. “So where the hell is he?”

“No matter he can’t live up to his theories, he made us scientists, Thomas.”

“A fine speech, Declan, but I’m scared—damn scared—and no braver than Dr. B. Seeing the condition of McAffey’s heart… his insides. Suppose we have it, and it’s eating us alive as we speak, from the inside out, and we haven’t time to see our mothers, our family, and we die alone like these poor bastards did? What then?”

Ransom stepped forward and slapped Thomas across the face. “Declan is right. We make a stand. Here, now!”

The slap to his face sobered Thomas who now nodded repeatedly and looked sheepishly into Declan’s eyes. “You’re right—the both of you. I’m all right. You needn’t worry.”

“Then get to work; get that camera Dr. B keeps tucked away; we have to document everything, Tommie—each step we take.”

Thomas snatched open a metal cabinet and located a compact, state-of-the art camera and began working to bring it to bear on the bodies. “Absolutely,” he muttered, looking as if pleased he had something solid to hold onto and something to focus on. “When Dr. B comes in tomorrow morning, we’re going to show him what we’re made of.”

“Exactly,” replied Declan.

“No matter his and the dean’s reaction, they’ll know we’ve done first rate work.”

The look of the sleek camera and Thomas’ enthusiasm for this work reminded Alastair of his best friend back in Chicago, a photographer named Philo Keane, another good reason to see Chicago again once before he dies. Lately, Ransom had been feeling a strange sense of foreboding creeping in like an unruly fog he could not shake off. Perhaps he’d had some odd and nebulous premonition of this night’s coming for him, but no recognition of befriending the young interns amid this evolving mystery. It’d gone from a missing person’s case to three bodies riddled with a frightening disease organism no one seemed capable of giving a name to. Again Ransom looked from one to the other of the blackened bodies that had only hours before been sentient men full of life. Their skin made him think of blackened, smoked fish without the pleasant odors.

Ransom backed into a wall to lean against something solid, feeling a rush of fatigue trying to take him down. Declan noticed and shouted, “Not you, too! We’ll need every pair of hands.”

“What bloody good can I do? I’m not a medical man.”

“You can assist me; I’ll tell you what to do.”

Ransom shoved off the wall. “Whatever you say, Dr. Irvin.”

“That sounds good, but come sunup, I may be kicked out of the university.”

“In which case, you go to another!” replied Ransom.

“Records follow a man,” continued Declan.

“You will do fine; you, young man, are meant to become a doctor.”

Thomas smirked. “Goes for both of us! We’ll find a little hamlet and set up a surgery and veterinary, won’t we, Dr. Coogan? That’s what and how exciting for us? Shitty deal, and what’ll they do with you, Detective?”

Alastair took in a deep breath of air and immediately regretted doing so as the odors coming off the bodies attacked his senses far worse than when they’d entered the room. “I don’t have so much to sacrifice as you young lads; you have your entire lives ahead of you. Relatively speaking, I’ve lived a life, so what can they take from me that they haven’t already stolen?”

“Stolen?” asked Declan, staring at the big detective.

“Home, my comforts, my geography, friends, loved ones, people I step aside for, dignity, position, my notion of who I am—all gone. Stolen.”

The two interns looked at Ransom as if seeing him for the first time.

“Are you… you know, guilty of what they say?” asked Thomas. “I mean are you on the run after all?”

Declan asked point blank. “Who has stolen your life?”

“I am guilty of being a bastard, boys.” He tried to laugh this off. “Guilty of many a mistake, of murder some would say although I don’t see it that way, but this last bit of trouble, honestly… ironically enough, I am innocent of it altogether.”

“Innocent of what?” asked Thomas, pressing the point.

“Of this charge that they hung on me.”

“You mean if-if Reahall returns you?” asked Thomas. “Perhaps, sir, you should leave now. Since he’s hot on your heels.”

Declan gritted his teeth. “We need all hands, Thomas.”

“Will you be able to live with yourself, Declan, if Mr. Wyland here is thrown into jail and sent back to—where to?” he ended by asking Alastair but did not wait for an answer, rather blurting out, “Chicago—Reahall thinks you escaped from there with a murder indictment hanging over your head. What is it they say in America? Wanted Dead or Alive?”

“How do you know what Reahall thinks?” asked Declan, confused.

Thomas shrugged. “Remember when we first went to the police about my uncle, remember?”

“Yes, so?”

“You were with me, but you got so angry at their lack of interest that you stormed out ahead of me—remember?”

“Yes, but I went out for a smoke and to clear my—”

“Constable Reahall… he took me aside.”

“He did?”

“Told me about a former police detective late of Chicago who might be of help to us.”

“How kind of him,” muttered Ransom.

“And he added that I should take care around the man—you, sir. Said you were reported to’ve killed a priest in Chicago—cut off his gonads, he said.”

“Gonads? You… you cut off a priest’s testicles?” Declan demanded of Ransom.

“Constable Reahall said all that did he?” asked Ransom.

“Yes—yes, he did.”

“And the monies you two gathered from concerned relatives to pay my fee? Did that also come from the constable?”

“Petty cash he called it.”

“Then you are working for Reahall, eh? A snitch, a spy?”

“Damn you sly dog, Thomas!” Declan stormed about in a little circle. “You told me lies atop lies. Why didn’t you confide in me?”

“When have you ever kept your calm, Declan? I couldn’t trust your knowing and tipping off Detective Wyland here.”

“So the highly acclaimed, well-reputed detective from the United States,” began Ransom, “has been made the fool by two young lads with scalpels. Might’ve expected it of gutter snipes, but here, you two?” Ransom laughed heartily at himself.

“All I cared about was finding my uncle, and I couldn’t refuse the money,” began Thomas, his hands raised. “A-And I couldn’t be without your well-reputed expertise.”

“Of course… of course.”

“Sir, I didn’t know you then, but I now know your heart is true. I’ll not give away any words between or among us.”

“A lot of good that does now with Reahall like someone’s hound on my heels.”

“He claimed he just wanted you out of his jurisdiction, but I suppose that was a lie.”

“We’re wasting time on this business!” shouted Ransom, realizing he’d frightened Thomas with his tone. “Let’s get this ghoulish work done, shall we?”

“Yes… yes, of course—” replied Declan, adding, “might say we’re all sacrificial lambs, eh?”

Alastair Ransom’s laugh now filled the operating theater.

“What’s so funny?” asked Declan.

“No one’s ever called me a lamb before! A lion, a tiger, a bear, yes, but never a lamb. And Thomas—”

“Yes, Mr. Wyland?”

“You tried to get me to leave for my own sake; I appreciate that, lad.”

“I don’t wish to see you behind bars, or under Reahall’s thumb, sir.”

“Oh come now, Tommie, so melodramatic!” Declan interrupted. “Once Dr. Bellingham sees what we’ve done here—our sacrifice, the authorities will applaud us all.”