The Hindenburg Murders

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.

“Perhaps Captain Lehmann will disagree with me,” Knoecher said, “but I find this business of the Luftwaffe obliterating that little town in Spain… what’s it called?”

“Guernica,” Gertrude said, frowning, nodding.

“Thank you, my dear,” Knoecher said, nodding back. “I find this bombing attack most disturbing.”

Hilda seemed to be trembling, Charteris noticed; though she said nothing, he felt sure this line of conversation was bothering her. Her eyes seemed to be tearing up….

“Strafing civilians, blowing up buildings,” Adelt said, shaking his head, “it’s shameful.”

Spah was nodding. Between sips of wine, he put in his two cents: “The English say the Luftwaffe destroyed that town for practice. Barbarians!”

“I think the English should concentrate on their own problems,” Charteris said easily. “This bus and tram strike, for instance—the Lambeth Walk will be more than a dance step if they don’t settle it soon.”

“Shall we have dessert?” Captain Lehmann asked, rising. “The stewards have added some awfully sweet surprises to the buffet table, I notice.”

Lehmann traded the barest glance with Charteris; the Zeppelin Company director knew very well what Knoecher was up to, and seemed eager to conspire with Charteris to keep off any dangerous political course.

As the table was being cleared, the chief steward came through and loudly announced, in both German and English, that the smoking room was now open. Many of the men in the dining room practically bolted from their tables, and Charteris would have killed for a cigarette, himself.

Hilda seemed to sense this, saying, “I am afraid all of this food has made me sleepy. Leslie, would you walk me to my cabin?”

“Of course,” Charteris said.

Gertrude was making a similar request of her husband, and the men had soon agreed to meet up in the smoking room.

As they passed the promenade windows, the view froze Charteris and the lovely blonde, and around them other passengers were reacting the same way.

While they had dined and talked, the Hindenburg had turned in a wide northwesterly arc, flying over the canals of Holland, crossing the narrow waterway that was the Wester Schelde, loping over the sandbars and cold, rugged waters of the North Sea, into an electrical storm.

Out the observation-deck windows, black clouds swirled and swarmed, billowing like ink cast into water, alive with crackling lightning, the jagged veins of energy periodically lighting up this darkest of nights.

Hilda clutched his arm, alarmed, pressing herself up against him. It would almost have been worth it, if Charteris weren’t equally alarmed at the thought of what lightning might mean to the seven million cubic feet of hydrogen gas keeping this blimp afloat.

Captain Lehmann’s voice rang out: “No cause for alarm! You are as safe here as if you were walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin!”

Charteris hoped Lehmann didn’t mean as safe as a Jew walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin….

But the airship itself seemed unfazed by the storm; a steamship in this gale would be rolling, its framework groaning, screeching, creaking; but the Hindenburg was gliding through the black clouds, as smoothly as though this were a serene, starry night. The storm sounded like a gently rolling surf, as rain pelted the ship’s linen skin.

As Charteris walked his beautiful companion to her cabin, the stillness, the quiet, was remarkable. The only sound was a faint drone of diesel, providing a muted, soothing pulse.

“Difficult to believe the world out there is so torn apart,” Hilda said, as they paused at her cabin door.

Did she mean the storm, or something else?

“You were upset at dinner,” he said.

She frowned. A few other people were passing by in the narrow corridor.

“Come in a moment,” she said.

Within her cabin, she bid him sit on the lower bunk. She sat next to him, slumped a bit, hands folded.

“I did not realize you had noticed,” she said.

“You were trembling. I thought you might cry. Did you have friends in Guernica?”

“No… but I lost someone in the war in Spain.”

“A friend?”

“… A lover.”

“When?”

“Just this January past.”

“Hilda, I’m so very sorry.”

She squeezed his hand.

“But, my dear… I thought you weren’t political?”

She stared into nothing. “Losing him… That is why I have no time for politics. Do you understand?”

“I think I do.”

She gave him a small, tender kiss and sent him on his way.

As she was closing the door, Hilda bestowed him a smile, just a little one, and said, “Knock at nine—we will have breakfast.”

“Good night, Hilda.”

Heading to the stairs down to B deck and its renowned smoking room, Charteris noticed Knoecher and Spah standing at the promenade windows, the dark storm clouds swirling beyond them. The two men were chatting and it seemed friendly enough. Charteris wished he could warn Spah of the S.D. agent’s true intentions—at the first discreet opportunity, he would.

The smoking room, way aft on the starboard side, was entered through the cramped bar, an antechamber little bigger than a passenger cabin. Charteris turned down the bar steward’s suggestion of an LZ-129 Frosted Cocktail (gin with orange juice) and acquired a Scotch and water, double, Peter Dawson of course.

The bartender granted him admission through the one-customer-at-a-time revolving air-lock door into the pressurized compartment, which Charteris guessed measured at around twelve and a half by fifteen feet. The room seemed larger, though, thanks to the arrangement of black leather settees built into three walls, facing black-and-chrome tables and chairs. The fourth wall paralleled the side of the ship, and a railing allowed passengers to gaze down at a bank of Plexiglas windows set flush in the floor along the edge of the ship. Yellow pigskin leather covered the walls, which were illustrated with images of various hot-air balloons.

Hot air was apropos, with all the smoking and talking going on by the exclusively male populace of the room, who shared one lighter, housed in the wall on a draw cable. Advertising man Douglas and his little group sat chatting in a cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke—the room was well ventilated, but these were serious smokers. Leonhard Adelt was standing at the rail, a drink in hand, a cigarette drooping from his lips, as he studied the black clouds churning below.

Charteris was glad to catch the journalist by himself.

“Mr. Adelt,” the author said, very quietly, “I must advise you to watch what you say around this Knoecher character.”

Adelt’s handsome, intelligent features tightened, then loosened as he grinned. “Oh, he seems nice enough.”

Charteris shook his head. “Don’t ask me to say more, because I shouldn’t. Just don’t talk politics around him, no matter how he prompts you.”

Adelt frowned, and his face fell as he grasped the author’s meaning. “What a fool…”

“Pardon?”

“Not you, Mr. Charteris, no not you… I must have allowed myself to be seduced by the elegance and civility of this airship…. This is like another world, is it not? A better world than the one down there—suspicion, fear, jealousy, self-hatred, these are the cancers at the heart of the Reich.”

“I just thought you should know. But I never said this, understood?”

“Understood, Mr. Charteris. Easily understood by one who lives in a land of midnight knocks at the door… who exists in a country of rigid structure, rotting from within, morally bankrupt… Excuse me. I’m a little drunk.”

“You’re articulate, nonetheless.”

“I only hope…”

“Yes?”

Adelt’s eyes were tight with concern. “Did we say too much at the table tonight? I know we spoke of our friend Stefan Zweig….”

“I can’t judge that. I don’t have to swim in those waters.”

“Someday you may, Mr. Charteris. Someday you may…. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll join my wife in our cabin.”

Charteris finished his own drink and headed up to A deck. In the hallway, shoes had been placed outside most doors, for elves to polish in the night. No shoes outside Charteris’s cabin, though.

No sign at all of his cabin mate.

Shrugging, Charteris undressed, hung up his tuxedo, set his Italian loafers in the hall, slipped into silk pajamas, and slid between fine linen sheets and light woolen blankets, falling quickly, soundly asleep, lulled by the murmur of distant engines.

Blissfully unaware of the storm outside, or that his cabin mate, one Eric Knoecher, would not be joining him on this—or any—night.