The Midnight Watch (19 page)

‘Then she would not have been misled by the wrong position.’

‘Exactly.’ I leaned back a little in my chair. ‘She would have gone straight there. It all fits.’ As I say, I felt rather triumphant.

Krupp lit a cigarette. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Go back aboard. But I want the story to run tomorrow. And make sure it’s an exclusive. Stories like this always leak.’

I agreed. I had to move quickly. If I was right – and I knew I was – it would be a difficult secret to keep. And we needed an exclusive. While the New York papers told the same tired tales of brave millionaires shooting cravens and helping women into lifeboats, we would be the only newspaper in the nation telling a different tale: of a man who watched it all happen from across the sea and lifted not one finger to help.

But how to get aboard? Jack Thomas was, at least for the moment, no longer helping me. I wondered whether I might somehow use my daughter – ask her to play a prostitute, perhaps, or, safer, a suffragette collecting money for The Cause. If she could walk alone among Negroes she could certainly hold her own among sailors, creating just enough of a diversion for me to get aboard. I braced myself for another visit to Charles Street, but as things turned out it was unnecessary. An envelope was brought to me at my desk a short while later, dirty and torn, and oddly addressed: ‘To the Reporter Who Talked to the Wireless Operator of the
Californian’
. Inside was a short note:

Dear Sir,

Mr Cyril Evans, who you tricked, told me that you write for a newspaper and wanted to know what happened on our Ship. I will tell you what I Saw and All that Happened if you like but I will lose my Berth if I do tell. It is a well-paid Berth so perhaps you could help me with that. If you are interested I will be at the same place you met Mr Evans, at one o’clock this afternoon. This will be your only chance.

Yours truly,

Ernest Gill

Assistant Donkeyman

Half an hour later I was on the ferry, chugging across the harbour once again to the East Boston wharves. The saloon, when I arrived, had drawn its blinds against the afternoon sunshine: inside was dark and humid. Dogs barked and the air stank of horse manure.

I waited. I felt the story close and warm, like a woman’s body.

Just after one o’clock, a young man entered. I knew at once it was my informant. He was dressed in a neat brown suit, as if going to church, but there was a hint of coaldust about him. He wore his cloth cap at a jaunty angle; his moustache was thick and straight, his eyes clear and grey. I waved him over and stood to shake his hand. When I heard the strange lilt of his accent, I asked him where he was from. He said Sheffield, although he now lived in Liverpool.

‘It isn’t right,’ he said as we took our seats, ‘for the captain to try to hush up what happened.’

‘What did happen?’ I asked.

‘See, that there’s the whole point of the matter, isn’t it? It’s why I’m here, to see if you’re interested in knowing just that: what did happen.’

‘I am interested.’

‘I expect a whole lot of people are interested. But the moment the skipper gets wind of what I’ve done, I’ll lose my berth as sure as I’m sitting here – and it’s a good berth too, one of the best I’ve had – and I’ll be on the Boston streets with my dunnage quick as a shot with nowhere to go and no way of getting back home.’

I knew where this was heading, of course, and was prepared for it. I had discussed it with Krupp. We knew what labourers on ships earned: not much more than twenty-five dollars a month. So we would offer him thirty.

‘And me with no mother or father to my name, and my lady in Liverpool expecting to be married as soon as I clear the gangway inbound – she said if we aren’t getting married, don’t bother coming back.’

‘Then tell me, what would be a reasonable figure?’

‘Well, I hear all sorts of things about Mr Hearst and this and that, and
The
New York Times
and Mr Bride of the
Titanic
being paid a thousand dollars for his story.’

I coughed up a little of my drink, then laughed. ‘We can’t give a thousand dollars. You weren’t
on
the
Titanic
, you know. We could perhaps go to fifty.’

‘And I could perhaps go to another newspaper, if I had a mind to.’

I eyed him carefully. ‘I am sure there are other men on your ship who could tell the story for a great deal less than a thousand dollars.’

The donkeyman met my comment with surprising speed. ‘But all they could tell you is what they’ve been told or what they’ve heard in the nature of gossip – so-and-so told me this, or so-and-so heard that – but I can tell you what I saw
with my very own eyes.
’

I stared hard at him – at the red flecks in his brown hair, at his focused grey eyes – and tried to read his face. ‘Come along, then,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you saw with your very own eyes and I’ll tell you what we can pay with our very own money.’

‘All right, then.’

And Ernest Gill, without further ado, told me that with his very own eyes he had seen the
Titanic
firing her rockets. He hadn’t known it was the
Titanic
at the time, of course – he’d thought the ship a ‘big German’ – but he had seen the rockets very plainly. They burst into stars that ‘spangled out and drifted down’. He saw them, and the officer on the bridge also saw them, but the
Californian
didn’t go to them.

Rockets! I was pleased. I’d been wrong about bodies being aboard, but I was right about the rockets. Provided, of course, this man was telling the truth.

‘The men are angry,’ Gill went on, ‘but they’re scared of losing their jobs. We had a meeting and I said we should form a committee of protest and go up to the captain, but they were against it. The carpenter said it was a mutiny and we just best keep our mouths shut. Big tall man he is, the carpenter. Says he’s from Liverpool but his skin’s browner than a Spaniard’s and I don’t think he’s proper English at all. But I didn’t want to cause any trouble. It isn’t right, though, and something ought to be done about it.’

Gill paused and I sat for a moment, thinking. The saloon door drifted open. I heard a horse pulling against its reins outside and the distant clatter of freight cars.

‘You didn’t think to report the rockets to the bridge yourself?’

Again his answer was immediate, and perhaps a shade defensive. ‘That isn’t my job. Ships in the distance have nothing to do with me. They’re for the bridge, and I’d get no thanks for interfering.’

‘But you did see them?’

‘I did. I swear.’

I continued to watch Gill carefully as he spoke. The sinking of the
Titanic
was the story of the century so far, and this man was saying he had watched it happen. If he
was
speaking the truth, his story was worth hundreds of dollars. But was he?

I asked him about his own story – his life, his thoughts, his hopes. He spoke easily, telling me of his childhood amid the glowing forges of Sheffield, the death of his mother and father, and his work as a glassblower’s assistant. He opened his right hand as far as it would go, showing me striated pink scars – like the folded flesh of some exotic fruit – where hot glass had burned through to the bone. There were very few nerves in that hand, he said, pressing a fingernail deep into the scars. If he got burned again it would not hurt.

I asked him to stay where he was while I telephoned my office. In ten minutes I returned with a simple but bold plan. We would buy his story. I would, this very afternoon, take down verbatim his detailed statement, and overnight I would have it typed up as an affidavit. Gill would return to the ship, collect his possessions and report to my office tomorrow, Wednesday, 24
th
April, at noon sharp, where he would swear the affidavit before a notary public. I would then wire the affidavit to Senator Smith in Washington, and Gill would stand by to travel there by train if he were needed – as I expected he would be – to testify before the Senate committee. Gill’s affidavit would be published in full in the
Boston American
the following morning. It would cause a sensation.

Most importantly of all, Gill must give his solemn promise not to speak to any other newspaper. For his troubles he would receive five hundred dollars: one hundred in banknotes and the remainder wired to an account of his choosing. With this much money, I thought but did not say, he could invite half of Liverpool to witness his nuptials and buy a gold plaque for the grave of his poor dead mama and papa.

The assistant donkeyman agreed and we shook hands. I had my scoop. This was better than a body story.

As we prepared to begin our work – Gill to dictate, I to transcribe – I asked him a question. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘the officer on the bridge you spoke of, who also saw the rockets, who was he?’

‘The second officer.’

As I had thought. ‘And his name?’

‘Stoney. Mr Stone, I mean.’ He gave a quick snigger. ‘Or sometimes we call him Old Mattress-back, on account of his close relations with his bunk.’

‘Had he fallen asleep, then, when the rockets were fired?’

‘Oh no. Stoney loves his bunk, but he’d never sleep on watch.’

‘Was he drunk, then?’

Gill shook his head. ‘He’s sober as they come – just a bit timid is all.’

‘Then why didn’t he do anything? About the rockets, I mean.’

Gill looked at me for a moment. He seemed puzzled by my question. He drew his eyebrows together in a frown and tilted his head, as might a schoolteacher unsettled by a pupil’s unexpected ignorance.

‘But he
did
do something. I heard from the apprentice, who stood with him.’

‘What did he do?’

Again Gill paused. He seemed to be thinking hard. I wondered whether he was recalibrating the value of his story, now that he knew what I didn’t know. But if he had thought about asking for more money, his honour must have reminded him that we already had a deal, because he offered his final piece of information for free. And it was an astounding piece.

‘He woke the skipper and told him.’

‘The captain was
told?
’

‘Three times. The second called down three times. Even sent the apprentice down.’

‘Wait just a minute:
the captain
knew
about the rockets?
’

‘Yes.’

‘As they were being fired?’

‘As they were being fired.’

‘Did he come up to the bridge?’

‘He stayed below.’

‘So he did nothing?’

‘Nothing!’

I did not understand. Only a few days I earlier I had seen this captain: a powerful British commander with golden epaulettes, as brave as a soldier, telling us how he had pushed his ship to the limits of safety and endurance, how he had twisted and turned through winding channels of ice in fear of ripping off his hull plates.

‘Well, then,’ I asked, ‘was
he
drunk?’

‘No, sir. The skipper’s sober too. He’s never taken a single drop on a ship, by all accounts. Real proud of it, too.’

‘Then … why?’

Ernest Gill shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe he was scared of the ice. Maybe he didn’t want to risk the bergs and such. It was a dark night, and freezing too.’

Was my story, then, not one of hubris after all, but dramatic cowardice? I’d been told that Liverpool men were tough, that they had a special sort of courage. Liverpool was, after all, the city from which England sent the ships to build her empire. So was what I had here a very remarkable and unique creature: the Liverpool craven? Had this man left fifteen hundred people to die because he was scared of the dark and cold? If so, how could he go on living? We all commit shameful acts at some time – my life as a drunken journalist had been one long sequence of moral lapses – but this was of a different magnitude altogether. This was worse than Mr Ismay getting into a lifeboat. This would disgrace a nation.

It was the biggest antihero story of all. My wife would be pleased.

*   *   *

All stories have a kernel that has to be cracked, a knot that has to be untied, a lock that has to be opened. Sometimes it’s the bodies of the dead that give me the clue I need to unravel a mystery, at other times it’s the faces of the living that offer an answer. My problem in this case was that the
Californian
had turned out to be a ship with no bodies, and her captain a man with a face that could not be read. It was a puzzle of the first order. But I intended to solve it, and tomorrow I would have my key: Gill’s affidavit. I had taken down his statement and delivered it to our typists. Now I needed to understand something. What – exactly – did rockets fired at sea
mean
?

It was a lovely afternoon. Women wore blossoms in their hats, and coloured bunting from the annual marathon still floated above the sidewalks. I wandered slowly across town to the pilot house at Lewis Wharf. As a boy I’d been brought here by my father, a keen yachtsman, to talk to the mariners and admire the paintings of pilot schooners. There were only two rooms: an anteroom where the men washed and changed, and a large room with writing tables of oak, and shelves and windowsills stacked with sextants, barometers, spyglasses, dividers, compasses, parallel rulers and harbour charts.

‘Everyone knows what rockets at sea mean,’ said the portly Boston Harbor pilot sitting opposite me on a large red sofa. ‘They mean distress.’

‘But just so that I understand completely,’ I gently pressed, ‘what is meant, precisely, by “distress”?’

The pilot raised an eyebrow. He evidently thought it a stupid question, but I wanted his answer. ‘Just so I get things exactly right,’ I added, pen poised above my notebook.

‘Young man, distress means distress. It means: please come to me because I am in trouble. Simple as that.’

‘But, you see, that’s just my problem. If it
is
that simple, I’m trying to understand why the ship that the
Titanic
saw did not come. There must have been a reason.’

The pilot flattened his great beard to his chest with the palms of both hands, thinking. ‘The watch officer on the ship may have been asleep. Or reading a book below decks, or something of that sort, and he just didn’t see the rockets.’