Furnace doors banged shut. Darkness fell. The firemen lunged for water buckets. Sweating trimmers manhandled wheelbarrows into the fire aisle and tipped them on the deck, heaping new coal beside the furnace doors. The trimmers raced back to the bunkers for more. Inside the bunkers themselves, Bell could see passers shifting coal from the back to the front. The gongs rang again, and the stoking indicator showed the number of the next furnace to be fed.

“How are long are their shifts?” Bell asked the chief engineer.

“Four hours on, eight off.”

Bell led the steward and the swindler along the fire aisles of all four boiler rooms, past one hundred and ninety-two furnaces under twenty-four boilers, in and out of bunkers, then by trimmers greasing machinery and shoveling white-hot cinders from ash pits into ejectors. Finally, he walked them through the fetid passers’ and trimmers’ barracks on the lower deck and the firemen’s on the main deck, where exhausted men sprawled on tightly stacked berths. Not a single glowering face of those awake or those unmasked in dreamless sleep sparked a memory that swindler Block or the steward would admit to.

RETURNING FROM THE WEDDING feast, Hermann Wagner opened the door to his Regal Suite. Truly fit for a king, he smiled, with two bedrooms, a parlor, his own dining room, and a second entrance through a pantry for the servants. Oddly, the lights were out. On previous nights a well-lit cabin had welcomed him after dinner with his bed turned down, a pot of his favorite hot chocolate on the nightstand, and a brandy beside the chocolate. Well, if the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Bell’s wedding had thrown the entire ship into a tizzy, it was worth the trouble. It had been a wonderful party with a dazzling bride and groom, excellent food and wine, great dollops of love in the air, even a whiff of mystery. It was rumored that half the ship’s company was knocking on doors searching for a passenger who had gone missing from Second Class.

Strange, too, was a scent hanging in the air, a heavy, acrid odor, as if the smoke billowing from the Mauretania’s stacks had drifted down the vents into his quarters. He had never smelled coal smoke in his stateroom while crossing the Atlantic in First Class. With British and German and French ships competing for the wealthiest passengers, every detail was de luxe.

He felt cautiously for the light switch. The champagne had made him clumsy. He bumped into a lamp and lunged to rescue it before he realized that it was anchored securely against the motion of the ship. Behind him, he heard a metallic click. What had he knocked over, he wondered? Then he realized the sound had been the door being locked. Something brushed close to him. A steely hand closed around his arm. He felt himself dragged backwards against a rock-hard body.

Another hand clamped his mouth shut before he could even yelp in surprise, much less shout for help. Hermann Wagner was young and athletic. He fought hard to break free. But his captor held him with astonishing strength. It was the man crushing the life out of him who reeked of coal.