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loose from bollards, splashing into the slip’s scummy waters before the sailors drew the ropes up onto the decks.
    Leaning on the rail, I asked her, “May I inquire what’s become of your companion, Madame DePage? I gather you’re travelling together.”
    She nodded past me, looking up, and I followed her eyes to the bridge; on the deck beneath the row of windows, Captain Turner—all arrayed in his gold-braided finery, looking rather more distinguished in his commodore’s cap than he had in his bowler at Luchow’s—was holding court with five of his most distinguished first-class passengers.
    Gathered about him in a semicircle were Miss Vance’s companion, Madame DePage, impresario Frohman, the “Champagne King” Kessler, and the richest man on any ship, Vanderbilt, as well as his lanky dark-haired friend, whose name I had not yet ascertained. The group consisted of every illustrious passenger who had received one of those mysterious telegrams—with the exception of the homespun Elbert Hubbard.
    Miss Vance gave me a look that I understood at onceto mean we should move closer, which we did, until we were near enough to overhear Turner’s remarks to his guests.
    But it was Frohman who was speaking at the moment, the half-crippled producer leaning on his cane with seemingly all of his weight. “Tell me, Alfred—is it true you cancelled your passage on the Titanic the night before she sailed?”
    The frog-like Broadway czar’s tone was genial enough, but the question had a certain edge.
    Vanderbilt, with the face of a somewhat dissipated boy under that jaunty cap, said, “It’s true—I had a feeling about it.”
    Kessler asked, “Any premonitions this time?”
    The multimillionaire shrugged, and the crusty captain put a hand on Vanderbilt’s shoulder, and gestured down toward where Miss Vance and I stood . . . but he was really invoking the swarm of passengers clustered along the rail. He said, in a blustering way (which was easier for Miss Vance and me to hear than the previous exchange), “Do you honestly think all these people would have booked passage on the Lusitania if they thought they could be caught by a German submarine? * Why, that’s the best joke I’ve heard all year, this talk of torpedoing!”
    Captain Turner laughed, and so did Vanderbilt. Iexchanged glances with Miss Vance—neither of us was smiling, much less laughing.
    The same could be said for Madame DePage, who—in a musical voice touched with that accent shared by France and her native Belgium, so fetching in a woman, so obnoxious in a man—said, “I do not find this war a subject fit for the . . . joking.”
    The smiles vanished from the faces of Vanderbilt and Captain Turner, both men apologizing.
    “I am concerned not for me myself,” Madame DePage said, her pretty dimpled chin lifted, “but for the wounded in this tragic atrocity.” The latter word, divided by her accent into four lilting syllables, had a poetry at odds with its meaning. “If this ship, she goes down, t’ousands will suffer in hospital.”
    Madame DePage was referring to the $150,000 she had raised; this implied the cash was on board with her—a dangerous state of affairs even in peacetime.
    “I have to say I share madame’s concern,” Vanderbilt’s slender friend said. “These warning telegrams are most alarming.”
    I had thought that was the reason for this little gathering—for the captain to reassure his guests. But he was a ham-handed old salt, wretchedly awkward with people.
    Still, he tried his best: “Mr. Williamson, I’m sure, when we trace them, these messages will be the work of some publicity hound. Please . . . my friends . . . think nothing of these things.”
    The captain was gesturing with one of the telegrams.
    Vanderbilt said, “I’m sure it’s just someone’s idea of humor. A tasteless joke.”
    “Germany could concentrate her entire fleet of subs on this ship,” Turner blustered (this seemed a strange