The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

“Mr. Bell, no one can ever accuse you of not doing a thorough job. This has cost us time and money enough, and let’s not forget poor Tony’s injury. We’ll let the matter rest just as surely as those men now rest at the back of the Little Angel Mine.”

Bell finished the last of his coffee and stood. He resettled his hat on his head and took up his leather suitcase in his left hand, leaving his right free to shake both men’s hands. “I would prefer to stay and chat, but I have a very tight schedule to get back to New York.”

“A pressing case?”

“A long-abandoned wife.”

Bloeser chuckled. “Even more pressing, sir. Safe travels, Mr. Bell.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bloeser. While the task was certainly not a pleasure, meeting you was.”

Bell strode across the open concourse and found his way to the proper platform. He mounted the stairs onto the dark green Pullman car and eased into the saloon from the outside vestibule. He noted immediately that his Pullman was at least twenty years old and woefully out of date. The benches were dark, overstuffed affairs with deep-set buttons that reminded him of a spinster aunt’s front parlor. Also, the car didn’t have electric lighting but was lit by Pintsch gas globes mounted on the ceiling.

Most of the passengers, he saw, were tired men, returning home from sales calls or meetings, or brighter-faced men heading off to call on potential sales prospects or attend big meetings. However, there were two families. One had a single child in a basket that appeared just months old. The other had two towheaded boys of about six. That was what his eyes took in. His ears told him something altogether much worse. The infant was wailing at the top of its lungs, a high-pitched scream that waxed and waned as it drew breath and protested some outrage that its mother could not appease.

As for the two boys, they were in a full-on argument consisting of the phrases Are too and Am not shouted back and forth while their mother tried to shush them and the father had his nose buried in his paper and seemingly didn’t hear.

“David, do something,” the long-suffering wife intoned as Bell threaded past.

“About what, dear?”

“The boys, David. The boys.”

“Hmm?”

Bell and Marion knew they wanted children when they could both devote more time to a homelife rather than their current vagabond existence. Isaac vowed that he wouldn’t become one of those disengaged fathers who left childrearing to his wife. His own father had been as much a part of his upbringing as his mother, and for that he was grateful.

He was less grateful that this leg of the trip was seventeen hours. The boys would eventually wear themselves out and rest just fine, but the baby was far too young to sleep through the night. Come nightfall, when the porter reconfigured the bench seats into the upper and lower sleeping berths, the child’s midnight cries would wake them all.

Bell shook his head, recalling one particular night in his pursuit of the circus thieves. He’d been in the open section of a Pullman car like this with a drunk who snored loudly enough that the porter had to finally roust him from his berth and have him sleep it off in the empty dining car.

During the first part of the journey, Bell left his seat to relax in the lounge car and enjoy a whiskey and soda while he wrote out copious notes about his recent investigation into the Little Angel disaster, the subsequent confrontation, Tony’s injury, and the revelations laid out by Colonel Patmore. He ate supper with several single travelers at a table in the twin-unit dining car.

By the time he returned to his car, the porter had converted all the seats for sleeping. Bell at least had a lower bunk. The car was quiet, the gas lamps dimmed to a faint glow. Outside, the moon shone bright silver across the featureless prairie. Bell thanked the porter. He detested the practice of calling them all George, after the founder of the company, George Pullman. If he knew the man from previous trips, he’d call him by his given name. Otherwise, he’d converse in such a way that avoided using a name at all.

He crawled into his berth and then stripped out of his clothes and changed into sleeping attire. The heat had been turned down, so he did this quickly and slid under the blankets. Everything was quiet save for the rhythmic tempo of wheels over rails, a mechanical lullaby that usually put Bell to sleep in seconds.

The baby began crying just before he slid into unconsciousness and didn’t relent for the next hour.

And on it went across the country. The locomotive wasn’t hauling a particularly heavy load, and the terrain was flat, and this meant fewer stops to take on water and fuel. While the stops themselves were short, and fifteen thousand gallons of water and twenty-plus tons of coal could be loaded in less than five minutes, it took time to slow the train comfortably from fifty miles per hour, and considerably longer to accelerate back up to speed again. Still, they reached Topeka ahead of the California Limited. As before, he slept in an open car since all the private cabins were taken.

Fourteen hours later, the train arrived at Chicago’s Dearborn Station. The New York Central Railroad’s 20th Century Limited left the city via the LaSalle Street Station. The two were only a few blocks apart, but the distance seemed much more formidable thanks to an icy rain slashing the sidewalks and buildings. It was the kind of storm that lofted men’s hats and inverted ladies’ umbrellas and led to a lack of available taxis.

Bell had plenty of time—the 20th Century was an overnight express, after all—but he felt the burden of time growing heavier with each passing minute, and his impatience became unbearable, standing outside the station, watching car after car sweep past on the watery road. Just as he was about to toss caution aside and walk the five blocks, a liveried taxi pulled up.

The ride was brief, but he still tipped the driver well, for driving through such miserable conditions, and headed into the next terminal.

He purchased a ticket and was relieved to learn he had a drawing room to himself. Though he was hungry, he put off eating at the station’s diner counter. He rode the night train from New York at least once a month, on average, and knew the train’s chef was an absolute master. He sent a couple of coded cables to the New York office, updating the staff on his location and making certain someone had booked an express liner to Europe.

As it stood, the major lines—White Star, Cunard, Hamburg America, Dutch-American, and the French line Compagnie Générale Transatlantique—cooperated in such a fashion that there was a sailing to Europe every day of the week, and sometimes more. The trick, Bell knew, wasn’t to get on the first ship out of Manhattan but the fastest one to get him to Le Havre, the closest port to Paris.

At last, Bell walked down the now famous red carpet covering the trackside platform along the length of the express train and boarded his car.

“Mr. Isaac,” he was greeted enthusiastically by a redcap with a wide, friendly smile. “Didn’t know you were traveling with us tonight.”

“Short notice and all, Tom,” he told the Pullman-employed porter. “I’ve got the drawing room tonight.”

“And I’