Carpathia (17 page)

  "But to have fought so hard to survive in those icy waters and then to take your own life?" Lucy shook her head. "It just doesn't make any sense at all."

  Doctor Griffiths piped up then. He'd come to check on Quin and Lucy and had already declared them to be in respectable health. Quin even seemed to be recovering from his frostbite symptoms well. "Survivor's guilt can be a devastating thing. The thought that it should have been you who died instead of those who did can eat away at a man's psyche until there's little left to use in your own defense."

  "But to go from guilt to suicide?"

  Quin held her tighter. He could tell she couldn't believe this explanation, and he wasn't sure how much sense it made to him either. They'd had such a surreal voyage to this point that anything seemed possible.

  "The guilt comes from the feeling that your survival was a fluke of fate, some kind of horrible mistake. You believe that good people should have lived instead of you, and it destroys your sense of self-worth. It's not surprising then that those who suffer horrible cases of it might decide to rectify that mistake by finishing the job that fate failed to complete."

  "That seems like madness," Quin said.

  "And so it is." Doctor Griffiths affirmed this with a nod of his head. "I've had a number of chats with Mr Dragomir about this over the past couple days, and he concurs."

  "Dushko?" Lucy said, surprised.

  "Yes. He's a bit of an amateur psychologist, or so he claims. I find his arguments to be intriguing."

  "Do you have any other explanations?" the captain asked.

  The doctor shrugged. "None that come to mind. If the loss of the
Titanic
teaches us anything, it's that we live in a senseless world."

  "You're right, in that none of this makes any real sense," said Lucy. "I helped pull Brody Murtagh from the water myself. He was not a man who wanted to die."

  "That's another matter we should discuss," the captain said. He waved one of his officers forward, a man with sharp, black glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. "Mr Blum? Were you able to find this Murtagh on the
Titanic
's manifest?"

  "I'm afraid not, sir. There's no record of him."

  Lucy leaned forward, concerned. "But that's impossible."

  "What does that mean, sir?" Quin asked the captain. "Are you trying to say this man just popped out of nowhere in the middle of the North Atlantic?"

  Captain Rostron raised his eyebrows at that. "Of course, not. There are a number of possible explanations for this."

  "And they are?"

  The captain ticked off the ideas on his fingers as he spoke them. "He could have been a stowaway. He could have given a false name. He could have been a last-second addition to the staff. He could have entered the ship under someone else's name, either using their ticket or assuming their position on the ship's staff."

  "Perhaps he was a time traveler who'd decided to bear witness to the sinking of the ship." All eyes turned to focus withering glares at one of the other officers, a broad man with a sharp Van Dyck beard, standing in a corner of the bridge, a tattered book in his hand. He cringed at their attention.

  "Mr Shubert, I don't think you're treating this situation with the gravity it deserves," Captain Rostron said. "You need to put away that HG Wells trash I've seen you reading, at least until we reach port. It's coloring your imagination."

  "Yes, sir." Shubert stuffed the book onto a nearby shelf, next to several rolled charts, and sealed his lips.

  "But what about the gentleman who Mr Murtagh threw over the railing?" Quin said. "Do we have no way to find out who he was?"

  The captain shook his head. "That we might be able to do. Mr Shubert over there will put his spare time to better use by overseeing a full headcount of the passengers and crew aboard this ship. By a process of elimination, we'll figure out who's missing. From there, we can hope to have a good chance to learn exactly what happened."

  "Thank you, captain." Lucy's shoulders slumped with relief. "It's all just so…"

  "Overwhelming?"

  Lucy threw up her hands. "Insane! I can barely believe it."

  "You've had enough happen in the past few days to last anyone a lifetime," Doctor Griffiths said with a sage nod. "I suggest you get some rest. In the morning, this may all seem like a bad dream."

  "Yes." Quin stood up and helped Lucy to her feet. "I think that sounds like an excellent idea."

  The captain looked over them both with kind eyes. "Very good, then. With any luck, we'll have some more answers to your questions by breakfast. If you can stop by the bridge afterward, I'll be happy to bring you up to speed."

  "You're too kind, sir," said Lucy.

  The captain smiled kindly. "Given the circumstances, it's the least I can do."

 
 

 
 
 

Dushko knew the instant Brody entered the hold. He'd been in the Smoke Room in the aft part of the Bridge Deck when some woman had started screaming on the deck below, and he'd been the first man out of the room to go see what had happened. That had procured him a bird's-eye view of the entire incident.

  He'd watched as the idiot had talked with the couple who had seen him do something horrible, and he'd wanted to leap down, grab the bloody little bastard, and wring his neck until his head fell off. If need be, he'd have slaughtered the couple as well and tossed all their bodies overboard to hide the evidence. The woman's screams hadn't gone unnoticed by others on the ship though, and he wasn't prepared to kill each and every person who'd stuck their nose out of the warmer parts of the ship to see what in hell was going on.

  So Dushko had held back and waited. He knew that Brody would get away. The only real question was if he'd kill the young couple as he left or not.

  Then the woman had recognized Brody somehow, and Dushko had buried his face in his hands. This was a disaster beyond any fears he'd had for this journey.

  All he'd wanted to do was transport as many of his kind as possible back to the Old Country to keep them from accidentally revealing their presence to the inquisitive people in the New World. Setting up the trip had been a monumental undertaking, but he had plenty of patience. He had pulled it off perfectly, and he had seen nothing but clear skies and easy seas ahead. And then the
Titanic
sank. He wondered if Brody had somehow managed to trigger the disaster himself. He would not have put it past the man. He had proven a total catastrophe from the first day that Dushko met him. If Elisabetta hadn't had a soft spot for him, Dushko would have ended the man long ago.

  He almost wanted to see the young couple down there pull out a stake and hammer it through the bastard's cold, dead heart. Instead, he'd gasped along with the woman when Brody had leaped off the back of the ship and disappeared.

  Dushko knew what Brody had done. It didn't take a genius to figure out that he'd transformed himself into a bat the instant he'd fallen out of sight. Such a small creature flapping through the night sky would be practically invisible, and he could easily wend his way around the ship until he found a safe place to land.

  Of course, with the woman's testimony as to Brody's identity, every staffer on the ship would soon be looking for him. There were only so many places even a man such as Brody could hide. Dushko picked out the most comfortable of those, went to it, and waited.

  He did not have to wait long.

  The hatch to the part of the deck that included cabins for steerage passengers opened, allowing a crack of light to slice through the darkness in the hold. The shadow of a man cut it off for an instant, and then the door creaked closed behind it again.

  Dushko launched himself at the figure that had entered the room and slammed it into the steel bulkhead beyond. The entire room seemed to ring like a gong from the impact. He knew Brody was as tough as they came. To top it off, if the body he had dumped off the ship was any indication, he had fed recently and would be full of life. To counter that, Dushko hit the man hard and fast and kept pummeling him.

  He rained blow after blow down on Brody, right up until the moment the man backhanded him across the room. He saw Brody tense up and get ready to deliver the attack, but he could do nothing to stop it. The younger man struck with blinding speed and the strength of a bull elephant. The blow would have killed an ordinary man, leaving him little more than a red paste sliding down the opposite wall.

  Dushko, though, hadn't been an ordinary man since long before Brody had been born. He scrambled to his feet just in time as Brody charged at him like a mad bull at a red cape. He then executed a veronica as well as any master matador, using his arm in place of a cape, and Brody smashed into the bulkhead behind him headfirst.

  While Brody lay stunned on the hold's steel floor, Dushko hauled him up into the air by his collar with one hand and clasped his other hand around the Irishman's throat. "I have put up with you for long enough, I think," Dushko said as he increased the pressure on Brody's throat. "How dare you risk exposing all of us?
How dare you
?"

  Dushko didn't get a response from Brody, nor did he expect one. All he wanted out of the man at that moment was for him to be dead. As he prepared to tear out Brody's throat, though, someone else hit him from behind with the force of a speeding car.

  The impact sent Dushko sprawling along the hold. He came to a halt when he smashed into a crate and crushed it, along with the coffin that lay hidden inside it. He lay there for a moment, covered in splinters and dirt, and tried to recover from the blow before whoever had attacked him came after him again.

  The attack he braced himself for never came. Instead, Elisabetta appeared above him, snarling like a rabid wolf. "You stay away from him," she said. "He is not yours, but mine!"

  Dushko gave her such a fierce stare that she took a step back, and he pushed himself to his feet with deliberate and slow grace. "He is a menace to us all," he said. "He will expose our true nature to the people on this ship, and then we will be in for the fight of our lives."

  "And would that be so bad?" She glanced over at Brody, but he was gone, having disappeared into a puff of mist that zipped off toward the hold's still-open door. "It would be the
feast
of our lives too!"

  Dushko sneered at her. "I have not grown so tired of life as you. When we return to the Old Country, you can leave us. Wander far away and implement your mad plans. I do not give a damn any more. But we are in a delicate situation on this ship. I will not permit you to destroy us all!"

  Elisabetta reached up and patted him on the cheek with a condescending hand. "Oh, my dear Dushko. What makes you think what we do is up to you?"

 
 

 
 
 

"You're not actually going to bed already, are you?" Abe took another sip of his whisky and slouched into his highbacked overstuffed chair.

  The first class lounge was subdued tonight. While the survivors of the
Titanic
might have cause for celebration, none of them could bear acting joyfully knowing so many of their fellow passengers on that ill-fated boat hadn't made it to share the moment with them. Instead, they seemed prepared to drown their sorrows in a series of toasts to lost family and friends, honoring their memories one after another.

  It seemed to Quin that they lived in this strange purgatory between what had happened and what would be. When they arrived in New York, their temporary respite would come to an end, and they would be forced to become part of the world again. He wanted to hold on to these horrible, numb moments, to treasure them for the short and fleeting amount of peace they allowed him and the other survivors to absorb the enormity of what had happened, and begin – at least in part – to come to their own terms with it.

  In the meantime, though, Lucy and he had stumbled upon some sort of mystery that his brain refused to let be. Tempting as it might be to slip into a drunken haze and forget about everything that had happened for the past few days, he couldn't help but want to determine what had happened with this strange Brody Murtagh whom Lucy had helped haul out of the frigid sea – only to see him voluntarily return himself to it. A quick glance at Lucy told him she was of the same mind.

  "Of course not," Lucy said. "How could I possibly sleep after what we witnessed out there?" She waved toward the aft end of the ship and the railing from which Brody had jumped.

  "I'm sure if you asked the ship's doctor, he'd be happy to give you something," Abe said. "I've noticed many of the ladies of the
Titanic
looking rather haggard during the daylight hours today, and a good number of them hustled off to their quarters with a dram of something from the good doctor to drag them off to dreamlands, I'm sure."

  Looking around, Quin realized that Abe must be right. The vast majority of the people sitting in the lounge with them were men, even despite the fact that this room was open to both genders while the Smoke Room was not. Knowing that many more women and children had escaped the
Titanic
than men, he would have expected the ratio to be reversed.

  "You're a pig," Lucy said to Abe.

  Quin couldn't stifle the smile that her tone brought to his lips. Abe caught him and arched a mock eyebrow. "See, this is the sort of abuse you open yourself up to as her beau. Are you sure you want to put yourself in the path of such wretched wickedness."

  Quin blushed and found that he couldn't come up with a snappy answer that wouldn't embarrass him even further.

  "What?" Lucy took trumped-up offense at the remark.

  "Do you think our Mr Harker here has just met me for the first time?"