The Lusitania Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

was perhaps ten years younger. They both had brown, graying, shoulder-length hair.
    The reporters were thrilled to see the eccentric homespun philosopher, and Rumely didn’t bother identifying the man to me, because Hubbard’s picture had been unavoidable in the press over the years, particularly after the success of his article “A Message to Garcia.”
    “Fra Albertus!” one of the reporter’s cried, invoking a painfully precious nickname the so-called author had bestowed upon himself. As far as I was concerned, self-published books and magazines, and homely little stories and supposedly wry aphorisms, didn’t an author make.
    “Yes, friend?” Hubbard said, smiling beatifically at the reporter, who was one of half a dozen swarming around him like flies near something a horse had dropped. “How may I help you?”
    “Aren’t you afraid of the U-boat threat, Mr. Hubbard?”
    “To be torpedoed,” he said, “would be a good advertisement for my pamphlet ‘The Man Who Lifted the Lid Off Hell.’ ”
    “You mean the Kaiser, don’t you?”
    “I do. William Hohenzollern himself. I intend to interview Kaiser Bill, you know.”
    “You can’t interview him,” another reporter put in, rather snidely, “if the Lucy sinks.”
    Hubbard lifted his shoulders in a theatrical shrug. “If they sink the ship, I’d drown and succeed in my ambitionto get in the Hall of Fame. After all, there are only two respectable ways to die: one is of old age, the other is by accident.”
    The reporters were writing down each glorious word. How I despised this middle-brow malarkey.
    “I believe the drizzle has stopped,” Rumely said.
    “Perhaps—but not the drivel.”
    A brass band had begun to play, drowning out both Hubbard and the reporters; and even John Philip Sousa was a relief by way of contrast.
    The reporters gathered around one last passenger, though with the band blaring, we couldn’t eavesdrop on the questions. I was probably too awestruck to have listened, in any event, because the passenger the reporters were clamoring around was a beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed woman of perhaps forty, graceful, lithe, dignified, in a black dress with occasional white frills and a black bonnet with white feathers. Accompanying her was another tall, shapely woman, a little younger—in her mid-thirties, possibly—in a shirtwaist costume of tan cotton pongee with white linen collar and cuffs and, startlingly, no hat.
    Rumely identified the beauty in black as Madame Marie DePage, the Special Envoy to the United States from Belgium. The wife of Antoine DePage, the Belgian Army’s Surgeon General, Madame DePage had spent several months in America raising money for her husband’s Red Cross-sponsored field hospital.
    “She raised one hundred fifty thousand dollars,” Rumely reminded me.
    “With that face, even I would have made a donation. . . . Who’s her friend?”
    “No idea.”
    Madame DePage’s female companion had highcheekbones and dark blonde hair and pale blue eyes—a striking combination of strength and femininity. She was almost as arresting as Madame DePage herself, and I found her even more fascinating—or was that just her anonymity?
    All five of my prime subjects for interviews were standing in the distinguished line, the reporters having gone off trolling for other prey, when a Western Union delivery boy seemed to materialize, and move among them. The band covered up his questions, but he was clearly seeking the recipients of the wires.
    Then all five—Vanderbilt, Frohman, Kessler, Hubbard and DePage—were curiously opening up the little envelopes, probably expecting a cheery bon voyage from a friend . . . though I could not imagine the mutual friend that might have sent telegrams to these five. Of course, Western Union may have had missives from five separate senders and they were just delivered at the same time. . . .
    And yet all of their reactions were the same! Frowns of disgust—even the sweet,