Turner also indulged his passion for German food. He went to Lüchow’s at 110 East Fourteenth Street, an easy walk from the Cunard docks, and dined in its Nibelungen Room, where an eight-piece orchestra played a brisk accompaniment of Viennese waltzes.
THAT EVENING, back at his sister’s apartment, Charles Lauriat showed her and her husband the Dickens book and the Thackeray drawings and explained why he was bringing the drawings to England.
When he bought them in 1914, from Thackeray’s daughter and granddaughter, Lady Ritchie and Hester Ritchie, of London, he paid a bargain price of $4,500, fully aware that he could sell them in America for five or six times as much. To get the best price, however, he had come to realize that he would need to present the drawings in a more appealing manner. At the moment they were pasted into the two scrapbooks, one drawing per page. He planned to have most of the drawings mounted individually and framed, but some he wanted to bind in combinations of three or four, in books with full Levant bindings. His main reason for bringing them back to England was so that Lady Ritchie could see them one more time and write a small note about each, thereby providing authentication and an extra element of interest.
He felt no guilt about paying Lady Ritchie so little for the drawings. That was the way the art business worked, especially if a seller wanted discretion, as the Ritchies did. They insisted that he keep the sale of the drawings as quiet as possible and barred him from attempting to sell them in Britain. He could offer them only in America, and even then he had to do so quietly, without advertising. Lady Ritchie was still smarting from the unexpected sequelae of a previous sale of drawings through a London dealer who had marketed them in a manner that the family found offensive and that had drawn unpleasant publicity and comment.
Lauriat’s sister and her husband inspected the drawings “with a great deal of interest and admiration,” Lauriat recalled. The husband, George, confessed to liking in particular a drawing entitled The Caricature of Thackeray Himself Stretched Out on a Sofa in the Old Garrick Club, and a series of six sketches “of negroes and their children” on the porch of a small house, which Thackeray had drawn while visiting the American South in the 1850s.
Afterward, Lauriat packed the book and drawings back into his extension suitcase and locked it.
ELSEWHERE in the city, a scheduled passenger named Alta Piper struggled through a restless night in her hotel room. She was the daughter of Leonora Piper, the famed spirit medium known universally as “Mrs. Piper,” the only medium that William James, the pioneering Harvard psychologist and sometime psychic investigator, believed to be authentic.
Alta seemed to share her mother’s gift, for throughout that Friday night, as she claimed later, she heard a voice telling her, “If you get into your berth, you’ll never get out.”
ROOM 40
“THE MYSTERY”
THE DEPARTURE OF WALTHER SCHWIEGER’S U-20 WAS watched closely—from afar.
In London, two blocks from the Thames and adjacent to the parade ground of the Horse Guards, stood a five-story building with a facade of pale stone and whiskey-colored brick. Familiar to everyone in the Admiralty, the structure was known, for short, as the Old Building, or, for shorter, O.B. Far less familiar was a secret operation located along one of its corridors in a group of offices centered on Room 40. Here resided “the Mystery” or “the Holy of Holies,” its function manifest only to its staff and to a coven of nine senior officials, including First Lord Churchill and Adm. Jacky Fisher, who by April 1915 had reentered the Admiralty as First Sea Lord, Churchill’s number two. Fisher was seventy-four years old, three decades older than his chief.