Titanic 2012: Curse of RMS Titanic

FOUR

The Harland & Wolff Shipyards, Belfast, April 3, 1912

Veteran shipyard watchman, Anton Fiore had, seconds before, seen what appeared to be a drunken sod in miner’s apparel mucking about below. Anton had just stepped out of his small office atop a scaffolding some twenty-five feet from the ground, not even close to Titanic’s second level. Anton had stepped outside in hopes of having a quiet smoke on his pipe and a gander at the stars overhead. As always, he didn’t look forward to a slow night going by in painful boredom with little more to do than play chess with himself.

Anton once had a second man on duty but those in charge had unreasonably deemed a second man suddenly to be an unnecessary extravagance. The poor fellow, George Pines, was unceremoniously let go—fired. So now Anton played the game alone until his replacement at daybreak should relieve him. Pines had, been an awful opponent anyway… still the place was lonely without him.

Now Anton’s star gazing was interrupted by the sight of the stumbling miner or derelict far below. The man was extremely near the new ship the builders were talking up as an ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner, its hull made of the finest ore to be double-plated, its compartments built so as to cut off any flooding from one another. The thing was mammoth—gargantuan in fact to the point it could not be exaggerated. To be sure it was beyond anything Anton Fiore had ever seen in the shipyards; in fact, it had humbled him on the one hand and made him proud of mankind at the same time.

He hoped the figure he’d seen at the base of the ship stumbling about was just a derelict, but suppose he was one of those madmen with an incendiary device—an anarchist who lived to terrorize god-fearing people, a fellow who lived to disrupt normal society and progress. What a headline it would make to blow up Titanic before she even got out of dry dock.

Anton rushed to catch up to the man and to apprehend him if need be. He had a club, and he knew how to use it. They did not give him a firearm. After all, he was no Pinkerton agent. He had read something in the papers about the shipyard hiring private security in the form of Pinkertons; their reputation had spread far and wide since the days of their having broken up so many strikes across the globe, and having been the model for the US Secret Service since Lincoln’s presidency. Every Irishman afoot was proud that Alan Pinkerton was one Irishman who’d made something of himself and his now famous two sons as well. They’d made something of a dynasty of their agency with the motto: We Never Sleep. All due to an Irish trait—an innate sense of intuition and tracking.

As he worked his way down from his perch, athletically scaling down the stairs like a circus performer, the strong, muscular Anton did his level best to keep the intruder in his sights. So he saw when the fellow entered Titanic at her still gaping hatch where cargo would one day be taken aboard at someplace like Southampton, England—so far the only port mentioned around Anton.

Thus far, the retractable gangplank-like gigantic door to this hold had not been attached, riveted, and sealed. Anton wondered how they hoped to have it ready for her scheduled launch. However, he hadn’t time to do any ciphering. Instead, he rushed for the black passageway. The passageway was so large that Anton imagined the wagons in Southampton loaded with supplies able to pass side by side twice over.

He wondered why this figure had chosen to duck into the ship. If not up to some mischief, then what purpose had he? Who was he? The fellow and his dress marked him as a local for sure. For a moment, Anton thought it might be the disgruntled, fired Pines but no, this fellow was shorter, stockier than Pines. Anton knew that some of the lads here, once liquored up, were capable of some madness. A sure thing that.

Titanic’s monstrous size created a black, sleeping giant of a backdrop for Anton here in the dimly lit shipyard that had given birth to her. An eerie fog that seemed like so many ghosts at play added to the creepiness of this night. Anton was used to the fog but hardly the gigantic ship or strange men stumbling in from nowhere. He had lived in France, Canada, and now Belfast—all shipbuilding countries. After he’d given up the physically draining work of a shipwright to take on the job of watchman here at the yards, he’d become bored but it got him home most nights in safe and sound fashion.

The wife was far happier as he spent less time drinking and in taverns only to wind up in fights and eventually jails. Being chief night man at the yards was a safe life to be sure. As safe and as boring as what he imagined milking cows would be. Before taking on this job, he’d taken great pride in his work. Although forty-two now, he’d been only a boy of thirteen when he took his first job in a shipyard, carrying a rivet bucket as an apprentice. He’d heard Harland and Wolff used the best ship builders in the business, and so he migrated to Belfast years before, but when an accident left him with a perpetual limp, and the limp had taken its inevitable toll, he had to step away from the hard work and heavy lifting; still he had not stepped off too far—accepting the watchman’s post. A post he took seriously, and so he entered Titanic in pursuit of the intruder.

Working relations between the men and the company hadn’t been exactly harmonious lately, so Anton’s first guess was that the derelict was in fact a distraught, possibly drunken worker who had decided to act on some of the threats that had been circulating. Anton had warned that the men were restless and angry at not being paid a higher wage, and that perhaps putting on more guards rather than fewer would be a good idea—but it appeared to have fallen on deaf ears. Rumors ran about that the Orangemen working at the yards didn’t care to do their best work for the British Star Line or any British company for that matter, and they didn’t care for Harland and Wolff contracting with the Star Line. Some even joked that the rivets would pop on her maiden voyage as a result of shoddy work. Anton had heard on more than one occasion a riveter say something to the effect, “Rivets is rivets till you punch ’em in cold like a washer woman.” Anton didn’t believe the talk anything other than talk, yet he knew there was a core group capable of the worst kind of thinking—and that they just might convert thought to sabotage.

These musings raced through Anton’s mind as he searched the interior with his John-lantern. He meant to order the man out of the hull and out of the yards, else he’d knock him silly with his club.

From the moment he’d stepped into the belly of Titanic, Anton had noted the sharp, crisp odor of freshly fired and painted iron walls and bulkheads; the odor filled his lungs the deeper he went. The absolute darkness made him think of the biblical story of being in the belly of the beast. In a sense, that was precisely where he stood now… in the belly of a gargantuan metal monster.

“Announce yourself, man!” came a sudden voice behind Anton. “Who is it? What’re you doing here?” The stentorian voice out of the darkness was followed by a second watchman’s lantern now blinding and surprising Anton, who held up an arm to cast off the brightness and study the stranger. No one Anton knew; certainly not the scraggly fellow he’d come looking for.

“Who am I? Who the devil’re you?” Anton immediately fired back.

“White Star Line guard, Pinkerton Agency.”

“What? You? Pinkerton Agency? But…” stammered Anton, taken aback. He’d heard that the Star Line had threatened to put on professional guards with guns to look after the expensive interiors already in place on Titanic, but he had not seen these men come on. Nor had the day watchman said a word about it. The Pinky’s, as some called the hired coppers, were supposed to protect the chandeliers, the teakwood balustrades, all of it, down to the gym equipment on board.

“I’m Fiore, the shipyard watchman,” Anton informed the other man. “Saw a man entering here. Was it you?”

“No… not me.”

“I thought not from outward appearances.”

“Just precisely what did this fellow look like?”

“What’d he look like?” Anton stalled, trying to regain his composure.

“Yes? Details. We must know any facts you have.”

“A shabby little fellow, perhaps in miner’s clothing; else a street derelict—looked to be intoxicated.”

“Good man, Fiore.” The agent pronounced it wrong as Fioree rather than Fior, but Anton didn’t bother correcting the other man who added, “Can’t be too careful. I’ll help you search for this man.”

Together they went deeper into the ship, a winding labyrinth of metal without any niceties at this level. Their lights hit on storage areas, freezer compartments, boiler rooms but still no intruder. “Where the deuce might he’ve gotten off to?”

“It’s a big ship,” replied the Pinkerton agent with a laugh. “Name’s Harry Tuttle,” he offered, “late of Shrewsbury.”

They shook and continued on, deeper into the dark ship, and still they were coming up empty handed. “It may have to wait until morning,” began Anton, shrugging, “but I have no idea what the man’s intentions are—and what with all the rumors… .”

“Yes, we’re aware of them all; it’s why we were hired. Better safe than sorry and all that.” Tuttle rummaged about in the darkness, occasionally lifting his lantern in different directions, creating crazy shadows of them both against one wall, then another when he suddenly raised an alarm: “Found something amiss here!”

Anton turned to find Tuttle lifting a light over the body of Francis O’Toole, and knowing the old miner from the nearby tavern, he gasped.

“You know him?”

“Y-Yes, I do… and he’s got no reason whatever to be here, and look at ’im—dried to the appearance of a corpse escaped its coffin, he does! When-when minutes ago… he was stumblin’ drunk! Spiralin’ on two feet—he was.”

But Anton Fiore only saw the corpse for a second before he felt Tuttle suddenly too close, and then came the painful thunder of Tuttle’s club knocking him senseless. Anton did not hear the faint laughter of the Pinkerton agent, nor see the glint in his eye like that of a man who’d achieved a great victory over his prey.

“I’ll just save you for later, Mr. Fiore—perhaps a crumpet at sea,” said the agent although the man had no clue as to why he said it or what it might mean; or for that matter, why he’d attacked Fiore, or why he was now stowing the watchman’s unconscious body into a foot-locker where he’d surely suffocate once locked in—but lock him in is what Harry Tuttle felt he must do and do now, as if his very existence depended upon it. “But why?” he asked aloud of the dark interior. Somewhere deep within his brain, he heard whispered, a melodic word—“Sus-ten-ance.” And then came the single word in equally sing-song fashion in his head—“Spawn… spawn… spawn.”

All quite strange to Tuttle who’d had an altercation with the dazed and vague miner calling himself O’Toole. Tuttle was not used to either of these two words being plucked from the vaults of his mind—and to make a mantra of them? It made no more sense to him than having hidden O’Toole’s body or contemplating murder, yet he knew he would kill Fiore, and that he had no choice in the matter as his limbs somehow worked independent of his mind, and his limbs were powerful. It was as though his body would not cooperate with the signals being sent. This helplessness made him over, a different man. Staring at a reflected image in the glass of a portal, Tuttle didn’t recognize his own face nor could he recall his own name. The man in the mirror, a stranger to him, made Tuttle rethink all of existence and reality.