The Hindenburg Murders d-2

by Max Allan Collins

  “Little early in the voyage to find much to write about,” Charteris said to the journalist.

  Adelt half smiled and replied, in that perfect but heavily accented English of his, “I should probably hire you to ghost this piece-it would seem to require a fiction writer. So far this is the most uneventful journey I ever undertook in an airship.”

  “Not counting the presence of our friend Eric Knoecher, of course.”

  Adelt smirked humorlessly. “I don’t think Ernst would appreciate my mentioning undercover S.D. spies being aboard. But I must thank you again, for the warning.”

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “Though, to tell the truth, I haven’t yet had to watch what I say around him. Haven’t even seen the son of a bitch today.”

  Charteris shrugged. “He’s sick in our cabin-fighting a cold.”

  “Wouldn’t it be sad if he lost.”

  “It’s a nasty cold, all right, but I doubt it’ll prove fatal…. Do you and your wife play bridge, by any chance?”

  Charteris and Hilda spent a lively morning playing bridge with the Adelts in the lounge, the author and his pretty partner taking two rubbers in a row, including a grand slam, Charteris finessing the queen. Luck had been involved, and the Adelts played well themselves, but Charteris was pleased to be able to demonstrate to Hilda that his claims of bridge proficiency had not been entirely “baloney.”

  At eleven, Chief Steward Kubis served bouillon (in the fashion of the best ocean liners), and the couples rose from the lounge’s canvas-and-aluminum chairs to stretch and sip the soup.

  “You and the lovely Miss Friederich make a good team,” Adelt said to the author.

  They were standing at the promenade windows. Though the sky remained overcast, the ship was no longer traveling through gray clouds.

  “We had the right cards,” Charteris said.

  “I think she had the right partner.”

  “I don’t think you should complain about yours. You’re a very lucky man, Leonhard.”

  “Oh, I know. I know.”

  They were looking down upon an ocean liner that was dwarfed by, and lost within, the huge shadow of the dirigible, making its distinct black stain on the gray-blue sea.

  “I haven’t seen Ernst all morning,” Adelt said, as the foursome reassembled at the table. “Where do you suppose he could be?”

  “I wonder,” Gertrude said, shuffling cards. “And I don’t believe Captain Pruss took breakfast in the dining room, either.”

  “Perhaps that storm was trickier to manage than we might imagine,” Charteris put in lightly. “I believe it’s my deal….”

  Charteris and Hilda took a third rubber, and Gertrude commented that she was glad they weren’t playing for money; then the two couples had lunch in the dining room, a sumptuous feast of Rhine salmon, roast gosling meuniere, mixed salad, and applesauce, and pears conde with chocolate sauce.

  Fortunately the rescheduled ship’s tour gave them a way to walk off the wonderful but heavy meal. Gathering in the starboard lounge, the Adelts joined Charteris and Hilda, as did Margaret Mather, with Joe Spah tagging along as well. Normally Captain Lehmann conducted the airship tours personally; but it seemed today he was otherwise occupied. The ship’s doctor, Kurt Ruediger, slender, youthful, blond, was standing in for Lehmann, this afternoon.

  Charteris had met the young doctor on the maiden voyage, and found him pleasant enough, if somewhat callow. Ruediger-the first doctor ever to regularly serve aboard a commercial aircraft-was just a year out of his internship at Bremen, and had snagged this plum position due to a sailing-club friendship with Lehmann.

  Speaking in German, Dr. Ruediger informed the tour group that everyone would have to don special slippers-crepe-soled canvas sneakers with laces whose grommets were of reinforced cloth.

  “You will be walking on the metal gangways and moving up and down the aluminum shafts of our ship,” Ruediger said, his voice an uncertain second tenor. “A spark struck by a hobnail or static caused by the friction of steel or wool might have an adverse effect.”

  “He means the ship could blow up,” Charteris whispered in English to Hilda, whose big blue eyes grew bigger.

  A steward had deposited a large box of the slippers on a table, and Dr. Ruediger said, “Please find something in your size.”

  This proved a task easier said than done, as the shoes were unmarked, and nobody seemed able to find a pair that fit properly. The slippers were floppy and oversize, and to Charteris it seemed a scene from a circus-clown shoes all around.

  In his sweater vest, bow tie, and gabardine slacks, Joe Spah, the smallest participant, proved the biggest clown, immediately falling into a soft-shoe routine, a buck-and-wing evolving into a ballerina’s pirouette. Then he placed two fingers under his nose as a makeshift mustache and did a Charlie Chaplin walk right up to Ruediger, and gave the Nazi salute.

  “Seig heil, Herr Doctor! Ready when you are!”

  Ruediger smiled politely, as did the entire group, a few of them even laughing a little; but this feeble comedy did not provide a light moment, rather cast something of a pall.

  As the group trooped down to B deck, Margaret Mather-in an aqua-blue crepe dress with a bow at the waist (too young for her by twenty years)-sidled up to Charteris.

  “I do hope I can take you up on your offer to read my poetry,” she said, almost giddily.

  Charteris, who didn’t exactly ever remember making such an offer, said, “Ah.”

  “I have a notebook filled with them. I think some publisher could do nicely putting out a complete volume of my work.”

  “Have any of them been published?”

  “Not yet.”

  It seemed to Charteris that everyone he met had the notion that he or she could write a book; and of course one of the troubles of the literary world was that so many of them did.

  The spacious, gleaming metal kitchen was the first stop, with its ultramodern aluminum electric stove, baking and roasting ovens, and refrigerator; delicious smells vouched for another fine evening meal ahead. Dark-haired, bucket-headed Chief Cook Xavier Maier-properly outfitted in white apron and high cap-took time out to welcome the little group, while an assistant tended the steaming pots and sizzling pans, and a teenaged cabin boy peeled potatoes.

  The chef demonstrated the dumbwaiter that conveyed dishes to the dining room above, saying, “We will go through four hundred forty pounds of fresh meat and poultry on this crossing, eight hundred eggs, and two hundred twenty pounds of butter.”

  The expected ooohs and ahhhs greeted these statistics, and a few questions about storage were asked and answered. Then, as the group was filing out, the affable chef came over to the author, Hilda on his arm, and said, “Mr. Charteris, welcome back to the Hindenburg.”

  Charteris knew the man from the Ritz in Paris, where Maier had been head chef.

  “Pleasure to be back, Xavier, with you providing the cuisine.”

  The chef’s face dimpled in a smile. “Are you still threatening to write your own cookbook?”

  “It’s not an idle threat, Xavier. There’s no better reading than a cookbook-no complex psychology, no dreary dialogue, no phony messages.”

  “Well, I am still willing to contribute a few recipes.”

  “I’ll be taking you up on that.”

  As they moved aft down the keel corridor, Hilda asked Charteris, “So do I gather you’re a gourmet cook, on top of everything else?”

  “Learning that was simply self-defense, dear.”

  “Oh?”

  “The odds of finding a woman as beautiful and charming as you who can also cook are long indeed. And I told you, I don’t like to gamble.”

  Hilda smirked at him. “Have I just been insulted? Or complimented?”

  “Yes.”

  Soon they had left the passenger area, passing a handful of new larger cabins (the only ones on B deck), into the belly of the beast. Moving single file down the narrow, blue-rubberized Unterlaufgang-lower ca
twalk-the passengers (ship’s doctor in the lead) were craning their necks, eyes wide, mouths open but not speaking, as the enormity of the airship made itself known to them.

  The journey in the dark, last night, to the stern of the ship where Spah’s dog was in its wicker basket, had not prepared Charteris for this staggering sight. On the maiden voyage he and Pauline had not taken the tour, as his wife suffered from vertigo. So he was as much a virgin as the rest of the group.

  They were tiny worshipers in a vast cathedral of wires and arches and rings and girders and struts and yawning open space. Awestruck, they wended their way, surrounded by catwalks, rubber-treaded ladders, crisscrossings of bracing wires, steel-and-wire netting, and-strangest of all-the huge billowing gas cells that were the lungs of the ship. Light filtered in through the ship’s linen skin, providing an eerie grayish illumination that created a sense of unreality.

  Dr. Ruediger pointed out fuel and water tanks bordering the gangway, saying, “We start with 137,500 pounds of diesel fuel for our four Daimler-Benz V-8 engines. As the fuel is consumed, the ship becomes lighter…. In fact, as you consume and use food for energy, the ship loses weight, and the captain compensates by valving off hydrogen.”

  His voice echoing, the doctor rattled off more facts and figures, about maintaining the ship’s trim, the collecting and discarding of water ballast, and other matters. But the passengers weren’t really paying much attention-they were Jonahs wandering through a whale, and were busy being awestruck.

  The postponing of the morning tour had, quite obviously (Charteris knew), been to allow a search for the absent Knoecher. But despite its cavernlike interior, and the plentiful pleats and crevices and overlaps of fabric, as well as the shafts designed to allow leaking gas to escape, and the network of girders and ladders and the framework skeleton itself, the Hindenburg provided few if any hiding places for a human.

  On the other hand, concealing a small bomb would be child’s play.

  As they traveled the narrow walkway to the stern, the engines-so barely noticeable on the passenger decks-built to a roar; other sounds fought for attention, including the whir of ventilation units. Now and then a gray-coveralled crew member would be spied on a ladder or perched above them, attending to a valve or other controls.

  For the most part, these crew members ignored the intruders threading through their domain. But one of them-a tall, pale, baby-faced young man-was staring down. Charteris couldn’t shake the feeling that the young crew member was staring down at him, in particular.

  “There’s Ulla!” Spah cried, pointing. He was just in front of Charteris.

  “Who’s Ulla?” Hilda asked Charteris; she was following his lead.

  “His dog.”

  “Doctor,” Spah was saying, “I want to stop and say hello!”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Spah, but our group needs to stay together. Those are my instructions.”

  “Well, that’s fine-then we can all visit my Ulla. But do keep in mind she’s young and excitable.”

  “Joe,” Charteris said, “your Ulla almost knocked you into the ocean last night. Let’s just move on, shall we?”

  “Leslie! Don’t tell me you don’t like my dog!”

  “I have nothing against dogs except that they are dirty, parasitic, and only too happy to lick any hand that feeds them.”

  Spah grinned back. “Oh, Saint-you’re joking again!”

  Actually, he wasn’t.

  The group was stopped on the gangway, now.

  With a strained smile, the doctor said, “Mr. Spah, you can come back later with a steward as your escort. We’re on a strict schedule, so that I may take another group out at three o’clock. Please come along, sir.”

  But Spah was breaking off to climb a ladder up to the freight platform, saying, “Then go on ahead without me-I’ll catch up.”

  “Mr. Spah, I can’t allow-”

  Spah paused on the ladder and sneered over at the young doctor. “So the Germans are even running their zeppelins like concentration camps these days, huh?”

  The young doctor looked stricken. Then he said, “All right, Mr. Spah. Please be careful.”

  The group pressed on, descending two flights of stairs into the tail, where Ruediger-his voice weary-explained the emergency steering controls under the massive rudders. From here they could look out the tail fin’s windows at the Atlantic, eight hundred feet below, milky white in the afternoon mist.

  By the time the doctor had led them back up the stairs, Joe Spah was waiting. The acrobat fell back into line, in front of Charteris, to whom he said, “I’m going to report that doctor for cruelty to animals.”

  Ruediger either didn’t hear that or chose to ignore it as he led the group up a ladder to a higher gangway, where they headed back, walking single file through a jungle of lines and wires, the immense tan gas cells billowing like loose, sagging flesh. Shortly they came to a lateral crosswalk that led out to an engine gondola.

  “Would anyone like to visit gondola number three?” the doctor asked over considerable engine noise. “Mr. Spah, perhaps?”

  A gangway with a thin guide rail stretched over the sea to the small gondola, where a single mechanic tended one of the ship’s diesel engines.

  “No thank you. I am an acrobat but not a fool.”

  The doctor paused, as if tempted to disagree.

  Margaret Mather, clasping her hands like a schoolgirl, said, “How I wish I had the temerity to try.”

  Brightly, Gertrude Adelt said, “I’d like to give it a go!”

  “Dear, are you sure?” her husband asked.

  And indeed it was a treacherous proposition-Charteris was rather surprised the doctor had suggested it. The wind had to be barreling by at something like eighty knots.

  Gertrude unpinned her leghorn hat and handed it to her husband; then she scrambled across the gangway, whipped by wind, and was gathered inside at the gondola’s door by a gray-uniformed mechanic.

  Hilda said, “She is braver than I.”

  “Or maybe just more foolish,” Charteris said.

  Perhaps a minute later, Gertrude made her way quickly back, taking her husband’s hand, clearly shaken, saying, “The view was spectacular, but the noise! The noise was like the hammers of hell!”

  As they resumed their Indian file way down the gangway, someone was moving up toward them: Chief Steward Kubis.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” the steward said, “but Captains Pruss and Lehmann have requested Mr. Charteris’s presence.”

  “You stay with the group,” Charteris told Hilda, touching her arm. “And I’ll see you at supper.”

  She nodded, but looked less than thrilled at being left behind.

  Then Charteris went with the steward while the tour headed toward the bow, for a look at the control gondola, which the author had, after all, already visited earlier this morning, when he had met with the two captains to tell them of their missing passenger.

  And somehow Charteris didn’t think the captains were summoning him now to inform him Eric Knoecher had been found.

  SEVEN

  HOW THE HINDENBURG LOST CONTACT WITH HOME, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS WAS RECRUITED

  The Chief steward delivered Charteris to the officers’ mess, forward on portside B deck. The cozy room, decorated by a few framed nautical prints, was divided into two oversized booths, and Captain Pruss, Captain Lehmann, and Luftwaffe undercover man Fritz Erdmann were seated in the slightly smaller of these, by the wall of slanting windows (a continuation of the promenade deck), through which the gray overcast day filtered in. The other booth was empty.

  Charteris took the single chair at the round table the L of the booth encompassed. By the window sat the crisply uniformed if blandly handsome Captain Pruss, his cap on the table before him, crown down, like a soup bowl waiting to be filled. Next to him (and directly across from the author) was the Hindenburg’s previous captain, stocky and unprepossessing in his rumpled brown suit; beside him slumped the glum Erdmann, graying blond hai
r slicked back, an unconvincing tourist in his tan sport jacket over a yellow sweater with a gold-and-yellow tie.

  No one rose but they all nodded to Charteris.

  “Thank you for joining us, Mr. Charteris,” Lehmann said, in English, forcing a smile out of the melancholy mask that had once seemed so genial. He was tamping tobacco into a meerschaum pipe-Charteris knew the Reederei director was an inveterate pipe smoker, to the point of holding its unlighted bowl in his palm, and clasping its cold stem in his teeth.

  But Erdmann, apparently not realizing the pipe was a sort of prop to the captain, said, “Is it safe to smoke in here?”

  “Oh yes, yes, certainly.” Lehmann dug into his pocket and tossed a book of Frankfurter Hof matches onto the table. “Go ahead, gentlemen-I think we could all use a smoke about now, and the smoking room would not provide the privacy we need.”

  Charteris-his suspicions now confirmed that the officers on an airship were held to less stringent precautions than its passengers-withdrew his silver cigarette case from his sport-jacket pocket and offered a Gauloise to Captain Pruss, who waved it off, and to Erdmann, who accepted. Lehmann was lighting his pipe, getting it going on a single match; Erdmann fired up the French cigarette and shared a match with Charteris. The sweet fragrance of the pipe smoke mingled with the harsher blend of the cigarette’s, forming another gray cloud, like those outside the slanting windows.

  A steward poured coffee for all of them and disappeared.

  “I’m going to make a wild guess,” Charteris said, “and say Eric Knoecher hasn’t turned up.”

  Erdmann twitched a weary smile, and Lehmann said, “The entire ship has been searched-every cabin inspected. There is no sign of him.”