Titanic 2012

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.”