The Hindenburg Murders

by Max Allan Collins

  Soon Chief Steward Kubis was leading Spah and Charteris down the B-deck keel corridor, unlocking a door that led onto the lower gangway, which the steward illuminated with a flashlight.

  They were traversing nothing more than a blue-painted plank of aluminum. Here within the zeppelin’s dark interior, the thrumming of diesel engines was distinct, a powerful presence.

  “Passengers are never allowed back here unaccompanied,” the steward told them, as his flashlight found the gangway before them. “Afraid there’s not much to see at night, Mr. Charteris.”

  Indeed the bones of the flying whale—struts and arches and wires—could barely be made out in the darkness. There was only a sense of vast black emptiness all around. It took five minutes to reach the stern, where—within a netted-off baggage area—the dog sat in an enclosed wicker basket.

  Spah, speaking baby talk to the police dog, let her out and she nipped playfully at him, barking joyfully. Hugging the dog, Spah almost fell backward, acrobat or not, and Charteris caught him, steadying him on the shelflike floor of the baggage area.

  Swallowing, holding the animal close to him (she was damn near as big as he was), Spah muttered, “What would happen if we fell?”

  The chief steward said, “You would tear through the linen skin, most probably, and hurtle seven hundred feet into the Rhine.”

  They fed and gave water to the dog, and returned her to her wicker basket, then left to rejoin the well-lighted world of the passenger area. It was almost ten o’clock P.M. and humans had to eat, too.

  FOUR

  HOW THE HINDENBURG DELIVERED THE MAIL, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS SLEPT ALONE

  FROM THE PORTSIDE PROMENADE, WHICH had slanting windows identical to those on the starboard side, Charteris and Hilda stood looking down at the glitter and glow of Cologne at night. Before long, silhouetted against the manufacturing center’s expansive profusion of lights, the Gothic towers of the city’s famed cathedral revealed themselves, stretching toward the airship like ghostly fingers.

  “It is a lovely sight,” Hilda sighed.

  “Yes it is,” Charteris said, but he was looking at her.

  She wore a white silk shantung tunic dress with black buttons that angled across her full bosom and then marched down the side of her skirt in a straight line. He found her utterly bewitching, her braided blonde hair and deep blue eyes and creamy complexion, and full lips and full figure, rounding as it did, and narrowing, and flowing, at the precisely correct places….

  She caught him staring at her. “Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong. Not on the earth or in the heavens.”

  “Well, you look very nice, yourself, Leslie—you seem to be the only man who bothered dressing for dinner.”

  He was in his tuxedo, which seemed none the worse for the half day it had spent folded up in his valise. “Less would have been an insult to such charming company.”

  She laughed, a throaty, endearingly unfeminine laugh at that. “What is it the Americans say? Baloney!”

  He laughed, too. “Coincidentally, I think that’s what we’re having for tonight’s late supper.”

  Stewards were setting up a buffet of cold meats and cheeses and salads in the nearby dining room, which—like the lounge on the starboard side—was separated from the observation deck only by an aluminum railing.

  “Shall we sit for a few moments?” Charteris asked, gesturing to the nearby orange-upholstered bench for two, which made a right angle to the row of windows.

  “Why don’t we?” she said, and sat.

  Settling in next to her, Charteris said, “We don’t really know much about each other, do we? Except that we’re both terribly attractive.”

  The teeth in her smile were perfect and white; beneath all her sophistication, she had the beauty and form of a healthy farm girl. “I gather from remarks I have overhead that you are a famous author.”

  “So famous you’ve never heard of me.”

  “Others obviously have. But I am afraid I do not read mysteries.”

  He slipped an arm behind her along the top of the two-seater. “Since I’ve already stolen a kiss, I feel rather awkward asking, but… who are you, Hilda Friederich? Germany’s biggest movie star, perhaps, or are you her most lovely Mata Hari?”

  “Nothing so romantic. I am a secretary, a private secretary, to a vice president at Bundesbank in Frankfurt.”

  “Ah—and you’ve sampled some of the goods, and have a bag of hot cash back in cold storage, and you’re heading to America for a new life.”

  “Nothing so daring. I have a sister in New Jersey—Trenton. She married an American businessman last year, and has just had a baby. I am using my vacation to visit and help out for a few weeks.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know—that sounds romantic and daring to me. Are you political at all, Hilda?”

  The dark blue eyes flared, eyelashes flying up like a window shade. “Heavens no.”

  “You have no opinion on the current upheaval in your country.”

  “What good would it do me if I did?”

  “A very practical attitude.”

  Passengers had begun to line up at the buffet; it was rather crowded.

  “Do you mind if we just sit here awhile, my dear?” he asked her. “And let that queue thin out a bit?”

  “I don’t mind in the least. The company is pleasant and you are keeping your hands more or less to yourself.”

  “I’m not much for buffets. They make me feel rather like a barnyard animal squeezing in at the trough.” He frowned, sensing something. “I say—have we stopped?”

  “I don’t know.” Hilda narrowed her eyes, cocked her head. “It is so hard to tell on this ship. But it does seem as though we are floating….”

  “We have stopped. I don’t hear the engines.”

  Again the advertising man, Ed Douglas, flagged down a steward, demanding to know the reason for the delay. The steward—a different one, but equally young and polite—explained that the ship was parachuting a mail sack down.

  “Good Lord, man,” Douglas said, a hefty drink in one hand, “we just came aboard! Who the hell’s had time to write a goddamn letter!”

  The steward merely apologized and the irritable Douglas—This man needs a cigarette! Charteris thought—rejoined his business-magnate friends Morris and Dolan, already seated in the dining room.

  “Look!” Hilda said, pointing.

  A spotlight from the city a thousand feet below had picked up on the parachute-adorned mail sack, floating its lazy way to the ground. It was easy to make out people in the streets gazing up at the drifting mailbag, and at the ship, waving and yelling. The sound of the latter was faint, like a distant radio station fighting to come in.

  “What Mr. Douglas doesn’t realize,” Charteris told her, “is how profitable it is for the Zeppelin Company to make that little mail run.”

  “How so?”

  “Stamp collectors pay pretty prices for cards and envelopes with Hindenburg postmarks. Remember when the Graf Zeppelin went to the Arctic for scientific exploration? Stamp collectors underwrote the expedition.”

  “How terribly well informed you are.”

  He slipped his arm down from the shelf of the seat behind her until his hand was cupping her shoulder. “I’m merely desperate to impress you. We have such a short time for our shipboard romance. We simply must get started.”

  The red-lipsticked mouth pursed into its kiss of a smile. “Do you have any shame at all, Mr. Charteris?”

  “Oh, yes—but it’s safely stowed away for the duration of the voyage.”

  Soon Charteris, with Hilda on his arm, strolled into the long, narrow dining-room area, the buffet table set up just inside and along the promenade railing. The congenial atmosphere was highlighted by colorful images painted directly onto the beige linen wall panels—picturesque views of scenes as seen from a zeppelin flight between Friedrichshafen and Rio de Janeiro. White-jacketed stewards threaded swiftly and silently around tables
draped with white linen and carefully arrayed with sterling silverware and elegant gold-edged china bearing the Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei crest—a white zeppelin outlined in gold on a blue globe; individual lamps on each table cast cones of soft yellow light and small vases held freshly cut flowers.

  The author and his blonde companion moved past a mother and father with two sleepy little boys sitting at a table for four. Along the wall were cozy tables for two, but other couples had beaten them to these prize spots. Perhaps they’d lingered too long at the observation windows.

  The captain—that is, Captain Max Pruss, whom Charteris had yet to meet—sat at the head of a long table with Miss Margaret Mather at his right. A pleasant-looking blond man in his forties, in the crisp midnight-blue uniform that had once been Lehmann’s, Pruss was drinking mineral water and nibbling at a sandwich, and seemed distracted. Miss Mather was the only female at a table seating twenty men, including a rather glum-looking Fritz Erdmann, seated toward the end with his two fellow Luftwaffe officers-in-mufti.

  Several college-age men were seated near Miss Mather, and she was chattering like a schoolgirl, very animated, eliciting expressions ranging from amusement to horror. The boy next to her was keeping her wineglass full, which reminded Charteris how desperate a young love-starved college boy can get.

  Surprisingly, Captain Ernst Lehmann was not seated with Captain Pruss (who within five minutes took his leave, anyway). He was instead ensconced with his new friend Joseph Spah, at a round table set for six. Also seated there was a handsome dark-haired gent in his late fifties, in a dark suit that had been expensive, when purchased perhaps five years before; and next to the gent, in a blue silk gown attractively draped over a nice shape, sat a pretty blonde who (judging by their affectionate, knowing manner with each other) was either his sweetheart or his wife, though she was easily twenty years younger. The group had been served wine but had not gone through the buffet as yet.

  “It’s the Saint!” Joe Spah called out in English. “Come sit with us, Saint.”

  Embarrassed, Charteris guided Hilda to the table, not necessarily eager to join Spah’s party, but wanting to quiet the little man down.

  “Please, you and your lovely friend, please sit, sit, sit!” Spah said as if to his dog. He was on his feet, waving his arms. He’d been drinking, just a bit.

  “Do please join us,” Lehmann said, standing, with all the dignity Spah lacked.

  “Yes, by all means,” the dark-haired gent said in a heavily German-accented but eminently understandable English—half rising to show his respect. “Both my wife and I are avid readers of your stories, Mr. Charteris. We would be honored.”

  “My pleasure, sir,” Charteris said to him, pulling out a chair for Hilda. “We gratefully accept your invitation, particularly since these are about the only seats left…”

  Chuckles and smiles blossomed around the table.

  “… but, Joe, let’s strike a bargain: I won’t call you Ben Dova, and you won’t call me the Saint.”

  Spah laughed at that, rather raucously—about twice the reaction Charteris figured the remark was worth—and lifted his glass of Liebfrauenmilch in casual toast. “Agreed, my friend! Anyone who helps me feed my dog is jake with me.”

  “Jake?” a puzzled Hilda asked Charteris in a whisper.

  He whispered back, “Never mind.”

  The couple introduced themselves as Leonhard and Gertrude Adelt, from Dresden.

  Spah chimed in, “You should take their compliments seriously, Leslie—they’re both writers, too!”

  The genial director of the Zeppelin Company gestured toward Adelt, saying, “Leonhard here has been collaborating with me on my autobiography.”

  “We have publishers in London and Cologne,” Adelt said, “and in a few days we’ll be meeting with prospective houses in New York…. It will be called Zeppelin.”

  “Short, sweet, and to the point,” Charteris said, with an approving nod. “And you’re a writer, too, Mrs. Adelt?”

  “‘Gertrude,’ please,” she said.

  She had enormous blue eyes; all these damn Germans had blue eyes, but she had the best and biggest on the ship, with the possible exception of Hilda’s.

  Gertrude was saying, “I’m working on a film script about zeppelins.”

  “I’m advising,” Lehmann said with a smile.

  She continued: “I have a first draft I hope to show to certain Hollywood people, while we’re in America.”

  “They should admire the subject matter,” Charteris said, testing his own glass of white wine. “Most Hollywood people I know are giant bags of gas.”

  That roused some general laughter, and a male voice behind Charteris said, “I wonder if I might join you? Mr. Charteris here is my cabin mate, after all.”

  Charteris glanced back, where angular Eric Knoecher stood in his tan suit and orange tie with a big friendly smile on his narrow face.

  “More the merrier,” Charteris said. “This is Eric Knoecher—importer, from… where is it?”

  “Zeulenroda,” Knoecher said.

  “Ah,” Gertrude said, “we have family there. Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Knoecher.”

  Knoecher made his way around the table, shaking hands, taking names… the latter a process at which he was no doubt skilled.

  Charteris resisted the temptation to let his fellow diners know that the affable Mr. Knoecher was an undercover S.D. agent. He glanced at Lehmann, the man who’d given him this information, but the Reederei director—who was at the moment shaking Knoecher’s hand, as if they’d never met—betrayed nothing in his expression.

  “Shall I sit down,” Knoecher asked, “or shall we all fill our plates first?”

  As the little group made their way to and through the buffet line, Charteris continued chatting with the Adelts, and learned that both husband and wife were journalists, or at least they had been. Leonhard had covered the Austrian front during the Great War, and went on to work for several well-known newspapers and magazines in Germany. Gertrude had been an arts editor for the Dresden paper. All of this was couched in the past tense.

  “What made you move into books and film scripts?” Charteris asked them, as they all settled back into their chairs with their plates of cold meat and salads before them. “It sounds as though you had very successful careers in journalism.”

  Surprisingly, it was Knoecher who responded. “You must forgive my cabin mate—he is naive in the ways of the New Order.”

  “I am?”

  Knoecher nodded. “These are two very fine journalists. Mr. Adelt, I followed your work as Munich correspondent for Tageblatt, and your aviation column in the Deutsche Allgemeine.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Adelt said, nodding, applying butter to a fresh-baked biscuit, unaware he himself was being buttered up.

  Nibbling at a piece of Swiss cheese, Knoecher said, “Several years ago, Mr. Charteris, the press in Germany was declared a public institution. Journalists like the Adelts were ruled to be government officials—answerable to the state, not their publishers.”

  Gertrude Adelt paused between bites of salad to say, “Dr. Goebbels, our esteemed propaganda minister, has a list of subjects that are to be kept out of the press—because they might weaken the Reich at home or abroad.”

  “What exactly is on the list?” Hilda asked.

  “Let us just say it’s ever-expanding,” Adelt said.

  “The contents of the list aren’t public knowledge,” Knoecher said. “And any reporter who reveals anything on the list is considered to have committed treason. And the penalty for treason… well, not while we’re eating.”

  “Beheading,” Gertrude said.

  “Fortunately you both seem to have retained your heads,” Charteris said. “In your case, Gertrude, quite a lovely one.”

  “Thank you, Leslie. I have my head, but not my press card. Like my husband’s, it was lifted.”

  “I lost mine because I’m a Catholic,” Adelt said.

  “I lost mine,”
his wife said, “because I had the bad form to point out to my editor that banning mentions of the ‘Jew’ George M. Cohan was nonsensical, due to ‘Cohan’ being an Irish name.”

  The silliness of that made them all laugh—but just a little; it was the kind of laughter that caught in the throat.

  Smiling, Knoecher asked the Adelts, “Aren’t you friends with Stefan Zweig?”

  “Close friends,” Adelt said. “Brilliant writer.”

  “Brilliant writer,” Knoecher echoed.

  “The universities threw his books on the fire,” Gertrude said. “He’s a Jew, so his words must be burned.”

  Charteris was quietly burning, too. This fellow Knoecher was as smooth as he was sinister—getting into the good graces of the Adelts, and prying from them admissions of continuing contact with a banned, Jewish writer.

  “These biscuits are delicious,” Charteris said, nibbling one, changing the subject innocuously.

  “I understand they’re a specialité de la maison,” Gertrude said, spreading grape jam on another.

  “I think you’ll find the cuisine on this ship,” Lehmann said, quietly proud, “comparable to that of any first-class hotel or restaurant.”

  “Well, nevertheless, I do have a complaint,” Charteris said, lifting one of the numerous cups, goblets, and glasses provided for coffee, wine, cola, and what have you.

  “Yes?” Lehmann asked.

  “Can’t we rid ourselves of a few of these glasses? What is in this one, anyway—water? What are you trying to do, Captain, poison us?”

  Light laughter followed, and Charteris then did his best to steer the little group away from overtly political topics, at least not dangerously political ones—the upcoming wedding of the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Wallis Simpson, and the coronation of King George VI, seemed a safe subject. Captain Lehmann mentioned that the Hindenburg’s return trip was fully booked, many of the passengers prominent Americans who would be guests at the coronation.

  But Knoecher, from time to time, would try to shift onto the sort of political topic that seemed to Charteris designed to reveal any anti-Nazi tendencies among those at the table.