Titanic 2012

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