The Hindenburg Murders d-2

by Max Allan Collins

  The smell of burned human flesh and burned clothing hung like a foul curtain; odors of alcohol and Lysol added to the nasty bouquet. Charteris began to cough-apparently he’d inhaled more smoke than he realized-and suddenly a gentle hand was on his arm, as a nurse shuffled the dazed author into an examining room and onto its white-papered table.

  A fleshy, bespectacled, kindly-faced doctor in his thirties gave Charteris a quick exam.

  “You’re one of the luckiest I’ve seen,” he told Charteris, who was putting his scorched shirt back on. “The nurse will apply some picric acid to your hands-couple of nasty little burns.”

  “Is everyone being brought here?”

  “To the first-aid station? Yes, but we immediately shuttle the worst cases to Paul Kimball Hospital-it’s close by in Lakewood.”

  “Does anyone have a list?”

  “Of who’s injured and who’s survived?”

  “Yes.”

  A commotion in the hall, accompanied by louder howls, signaled the arrival of more injured, who were still being carted over from the crash site by ambulance and auto.

  “No list I’m afraid,” the doctor said, already halfway out the door, “much too early for that… if you’ll excuse me.”

  Almost immediately a nurse came in with a small bottle of picric acid and some gauze and wet down his palms. She was a brunette of perhaps twenty-five, with a gentle plain face.

  “Nurse, do you remember treating or even just noticing a pretty German girl with braided blonde hair, blue eyes?”

  “Why yes-I didn’t deal with her personally, but I’m fairly sure she’s fine, just minor burns, like yourself. Your wife?”

  “Is she still here?”

  “I’m not sure. As negligible as her injuries are, she was probably discharged… is that better?”

  “It’s fine. Where did you see her?”

  “Down the hall to the left-she was standing next to a boy on a stretcher who was very badly burned, comforting him, sweet girl. He may have been taken to Paul Kimball Hospital, or… he may have died.”

  Then she produced a clipboard and asked Charteris if he could sign his name; either the burns weren’t bad or he was in shock, because he had no trouble.

  In the hallway he ran into Leonhard and Gertrude Adelt; their clothes were scorched rather worse than his, Leonhard’s nearly in tatters. Both of them had severe burns on their arms and faces, and Leonhard’s scalp looked to be burned to the bone.

  “Thank God you’re all right, Leslie!” Leonhard said, over the moans around them.

  “Have you seen a doctor yet?”

  “No. We’re just on our way out-getting out of this madhouse!”

  “You two need to see a doctor.”

  The journalist shook his head. “My brothers are just outside and they’ll take care of us.”

  Gertrude reached out, not touching him-her hand was too burned for that. “We’ll be fine, Leslie. Did you see Hilda?”

  “No, I was just looking for her.”

  “She’s barely scratched.” Smiling wearily, Gertrude gestured with her head. “She’s down at the end of the hall. Go to her-I think she’s in shock.”

  As if the Adelts weren’t.

  He told them good-bye, said, “Get to a doctor!” and made his way down the corridor, lined as it was with burn victims on stretchers, weaving around nurses, doctors, orderlies.

  Shoulders slumped, head down, she was standing next to an empty, bloodstained, smoke-grimy stretcher. Her braids had come untangled and blonde locks dangled alongside her soot-smudged heart-shaped face, her white crepe dress torn here and there, new dabs of black added to its red-and-pink-and-black floral pattern.

  “So they took him away, huh?” Charteris said.

  She glanced up sharply. “Leslie… thank God!”

  “You’ve been looking for me, then? Frantically?”

  Wincing, she said, “What is it?”

  “Good-bye, Hilda.”

  Soon he was standing in the cool, rain-misted evening, his back to the small hospital, where ambulances and autos were still bringing in more wounded. Across the airfield the wailing sirens of fire trucks and police cars and ambulances had mostly died. The voluminous plumes of black smoke were beginning to get lost in the darkening dusk, and-from this distance at least-the orange flames were little more than a campfire, smoldering in the twisted glowing skeleton of the ship, around which the cops and firefighters could warm themselves. The hook-and-ladder trucks had dispensed their water and were disinterested onlookers, now.

  “Leslie…”

  Hilda’s husky voice.

  He didn’t turn. “My condolences.”

  Then she was next to him, as he stood staring out at the fuming, smoldering wreckage across the airfield. The sky was a vast emptiness, overcast, no stars.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Funny.” He patted his cigarette case of Gauloises in his shirt pocket. “These things made the trip, and I could use a smoke right now… but I haven’t got a light.”

  Wind blew the strands of hair. “Why are you mad at me?”

  Not looking at her, Charteris said, “I’m surprised he lived through it long enough even to make it to this first-aid station. I’m surprised there was anything left to identify.”

  “Who?” Her brow was knit. “Who are you talking about?”

  Now he turned to her, looked down into the deep blue eyes in the lovely black-splotched face. “Eric Spehl-your boyfriend.”

  She frowned-and he realized she was deciding whether or not to continue the masquerade; but the day, the evening, had gone on too long, and they had been through too much, together and apart. And, most of all, they were both just too damned tired. Sighing, her eyelids at half-mast, she all but said, No games, no more games.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “I write mystery stories, remember?”

  “How, Leslie? How do you know?”

  He shrugged. “No one big thing-several small things, Beatrice… That is your real name, isn’t it? Beatrice Schmidt?”

  That he knew this much unsettled her, clearly; but she recovered, saying, “Yes… but I have rather come to like ‘Hilda.’”

  “I… I’d rather come to like Hilda, myself.” He twitched half a smile. “I am a little disappointed. You’d think a German girl, at least, would be a natural blonde. You’re the ‘older’ woman, the dark-haired leftist ‘tramp’ who turned young Eric Spehl political.”

  She laughed but no sound came out; then she said, “I should have hidden my leftist beliefs.”

  “You tried, but you must feel them very deeply-there really was a patriotic lover who died in the Spanish Civil War, wasn’t there?”

  She nodded. “Our cause is just.”

  He glared at her. “You killed and hurt a lot of innocent people tonight, trying to make some stupid grandiose point.”

  But she merely smiled, faintly. “Did we? Or was it you, interfering in a plan that left unmolested would not have taken a single life? And would have struck Nazism a terrible blow?”

  Now he laughed, only it turned into a cough; the smoke taste filming his mouth was nasty. “Maybe you’re right. But you and Eric’ll have to take responsibility for Willy Scheef.”

  She frowned, puzzled, apparently genuinely so. “Willy…? I know nothing of this.”

  “You know, that’s just possible. You may not even know that Eric threw poor Willy overboard.”

  The eyes widened; the whites were bloodshot. “He did what?”

  “As I said, Beatrice… Hilda… it was a lot of little things-there’s the irritation you displayed when Eric paid his little unscheduled visit to A deck, for my autograph. Today, discovering that you, like Eric Spehl, were a devout Catholic… you let it slip in our little Ascension Day chat. Then there was the fact you were visiting your sister, to help her with her new baby-yet your address was the Hotel Sterling. That just didn’t sit right…. And of course you were so frightfully worried about the
postponed landing-perhaps knowing that a timer was ticking away on a bomb that had been set without those interminable delays factored in.”

  Her eyes, still wide, had tightened, now. “Those tiny things told you…?”

  “No. One slightly larger thing did. This is how Willy gets involved. You don’t know about the midnight beating, do you?”

  Again, she seemed utterly bewildered. “Midnight-what are you-”

  And he told her about Willy Scheef, at Eric Spehl’s bidding, coming to the cabin to deliver a message by way of a beating.

  “The message Willy delivered was ‘Stop what you’re doing,’” Charteris said, “but I made the mistake of thinking the message meant I should back off my investigation. Why should I be warned so late in the game? Less than a day left? How much detective work might I still do, and anyway, nothing I’d done had been very effective, had it? But the warning didn’t refer to my investigation… did it, Hilda?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Oh, well, perhaps-but I think you can figure it out. When I spent the night in your cabin, when we had that early-morning interruption by a steward, supposedly wanting to make the room up… that was no steward… that was Eric Spehl, sneaking a visit to his sweetheart.”

  She said nothing.

  “Eric knew you were going to keep an eye on me, Hilda, but he didn’t think sleeping with me would be part of the bargain… and he was furious with both of us. That’s what I was being warned to stop doing-seeing you… sleeping with you. That’s why Willy Scheef died… not to save the fatherland from Adolf Hitler. Just to cover up a petty little crime of assault, since it might lead to exposure of the bigger crime of sabotage, not to mention Eric Knoecher’s murder.”

  She sighed heavily. “Eric was a simple, jealous boy.”

  “You and Colonel Fritz Erdmann and others in the resistance molded and shaped and manipulated Eric Spehl into doing your bidding. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with your cause-it’s just that I don’t like being molded, shaped, and manipulated myself… or seeing big dumb clucks like Willy Scheef bumped off for no good reason.”

  “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Of course you did-your young lover is risking everything to sabotage the ship he helped build, and he catches you in bed with another man…. All that stuff about needing adventurous men, wanting to live a larger life through a man of influence, that was the real you talking, wasn’t it?”

  “I suppose it was.”

  “And I was the perfect type to latch onto-sophisticated, successful, divorced….”

  “You flatter yourself.”

  He laughed again, managing not to cough this time. “What did Eric think your mutual future held? That he would sneak away from the ship, slip into America-that you and he would traipse through the flowers together, building a new life in the Land of the Free?”

  “He would have worked as a photographer.”

  “And you would have been a photographer’s wife? How long would that have lasted? It doesn’t sound very… adventurous to me. Also, for a Communist, you seem to have rather refined tastes.”

  A tear rolled down her cheek, smearing the soot. “I did love him, in my fashion… and he died with me in his eyes.”

  “Looking up at an angel.”

  Another trickle of tear; a sniffle. “You’re cruel.”

  “No. If I were cruel, I’d turn you in to somebody or other. Trouble is, I don’t particularly care to see this thing get uglier than it already is… or to spend the next several months of my life in court proceedings and other inquiries, explaining what really happened to and on the goddamn Hindenburg.”

  She looked pointedly at him. “What did happen?”

  Charteris sighed, shrugged; the drizzle was picking up again. “Eric figured out that Fritz was probably going to shoot him over the Willy Scheef blunder-they struggled, a stray bullet caught a gasbag. And the rest is history-or rather isn’t history… because I’ll never tell it.”

  Her smile had some sneer in it. “You will never tell it because I am right.”

  “You are, Hilda?”

  “Yes-you caused this, Leslie. If you had not interfered-”

  “I don’t give a damn about that, because I don’t believe it for a second. Those clumsy saboteurs might well have blown us up in any case. No, I won’t tell this story because I wouldn’t give Adolf Hitler the satisfaction of saying anarchist forces, opposing him, took all these innocent lives, on American soil.”

  “… Oh.”

  A faint crackling of the burning ship could be heard from across the field-like someone was popping corn.

  Quietly, he asked, “Is there a real Hilda Friederich?”

  “… No. She is an invention. People who share my beliefs, working within the Reich, arranged the false papers.”

  “And now you disappear into America. To start a new life.”

  “If you will allow.”

  “I’m not stopping you.”

  She swallowed; her lips trembled. “I did not mean to hurt you.”

  “You didn’t hurt me, dear. A damn zeppelin blew up in my face-that’s what hurt me.”

  “Then… we won’t see each other again.”

  “How can we? You don’t exist.”

  Then he turned away from her, his eyes reverting to the glowing, smoldering framework, as he waited for her to go.

  Which, before too very long, she did.

  Charteris stayed at the New Yorker Hotel for three days, before taking the train to Miami for his birthday festivities. A United States naval intelligence officer had taken a perfunctory interview with him, to see whether or not the creator of the Saint would be needed to testify at the upcoming American inquiry into the crash. The author told the investigator nothing of the plan devised by Erdmann, Spehl, and Hilda/Beatrice, working hard to make it seem he had nothing pertinent to offer; and so he was not required to testify.

  Reporters tracked him down at the hotel and, though he normally didn’t shy away from publicity, he gave no interviews, and thus was barely mentioned in the press, though he did follow the story intently himself.

  Joe Spah got plenty of publicity, posing with his pretty wife, his three tiny children and a police dog the kids had been led to believe was the late Ulla. Joe’s acrobatic leap from the burning airship was heralded, though he had fractured his heel in the fall, and the Radio City Music Hall appearance had to be postponed.

  Margaret Mather and the Adelts were widely interviewed, and it was revealed that Margaret would write her story for Harper’s (prose, not poetry) and Leonhard’s article (which now had an ending) would appear in Reader’s Digest.

  Other survivors-none badly harmed-were frequently quoted, including that rootin’ tootin’ Nazi George Hirschfeld (happily in the arms of some showgirl by now, Charteris hoped) and stockyard king Colonel Nelson Morris-though his businessman friends, advertising man Ed Douglas and perfume king Burt Dolan, had perished, as had Moritz Feibusch, though Moritz’s crony Leuchtenberg, who’d been drunk most of the trip, made it. The Doehner boys also survived, and so did their mother, but they lost their father.

  Among the surviving crew members were Chief Steward Kubis, who had jumped from the ship, then turned around and helped the American ground crew rescue passengers and other crew; Chef Xavier Maier and two other cooks; and Dr. Kurt Ruediger, who needed a physician’s help himself, as he had broken his leg on his leap.

  Mechanic Walter Barnholzer died in the Paul Kimball Hospital, as did Captain Ernst Lehmann, who on his deathbed spoke of sabotage causing the disaster. Captain Max Pruss survived, with disfiguring burns.

  It was said Pruss was in far worse shape than Lehmann, but that the despondent Reederei director had simply lost the will to live.

  Thirteen passengers were listed as dead, twenty-two crew members. Charteris noted with wry interest that Eric Knoecher’s name was included on the former list, and Willy Sheef’s on the latter.

  Charteris never regretted his decis
ion to keep what he knew to himself: the American commission blamed a hydrogen leak ignited by a spark of static electricity as the most probable cause of the explosion; and the German inquiry decided essentially the same thing, calling the terrible event “an act of God.”

  Sabotage never was seriously discussed in either tribunal, as America wished to avoid an international incident on her own shores, and Germany did not wish to acknowledge itself vulnerable to sabotage by a resistance movement within its own borders-a resistance movement its government claimed did not exist, at that.

  Still and all, there were interesting scraps of testimony and evidence.

  Such as a number of witnesses who felt they had heard a gunshot prior to the first explosion. A mechanic, Richard Kollmer, said he “heard the ‘pop’ of the firing of a gun, a small gun or rifle.” Chicago stockyards magnate Morris, who had been in the writing lounge, also said he’d heard “a report, not loud,” of a weapon.

  Even Dr. Hugo Eckener, the father of the Hindenburg, had originally stated his belief that his airship was a victim of sabotage, saying, “Only the firing of a burning bullet into the gasbags from a distance would have accomplished it.” But by the time of the official German inquiry, Eckener had changed his tune to the familiar gas-leak-and-spark scenario.

  As the latter explanation settled uneasily into history, Charteris began to think his mystery writer’s mind had imagined it all-at least until he read about two neglected items of evidence found in the wreckage, given no serious consideration by either panel of inquiry:

  A solid black chunk of residue identified by the New York City Police bomb squad as the residue of a dry-cell battery.

  And a charred Luger-one shot discharged.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: fbd-1566ad-072e-564e-1ea6-43ee-c30c-747571

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 27.03.2013

  Created using: calibre 0.9.24, Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6.6 software

  Document authors :

  Max Allan Collins