The Hindenburg Murders

DAY TWO:


TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1937





FIVE


HOW THE HINDENBURG MISPLACED A PASSENGER, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS WALKED THE PLANK





BY DAWN OF WHAT WOULD be the airship’s first full day of travel, sailing along at 2,100 feet on a course designed to outmaneuver the churning storm system, the Hindenburg cruised above the English Channel, past the Scilly Islands. The swastika-tailed silver ship flew somewhat south of Ireland and the familiar landmark that was the Old Head of Kinsale, heading toward the endless lonely gray-blue expanse of the Atlantic. Aboard were ninety-six people (passengers and crew), as well as a considerable cargo including mail, fancy goods, airplane parts, tobacco, films, partridge eggs, and Joseph Spah’s dog. As the time for breakfast neared—serving began at eight A.M.—the airship gradually lowered to the accustomed altitude of one thousand feet.

Surprised and vaguely concerned when—upon awaking—he discovered himself alone in the cabin, Charteris shaved and washed up at the tilt-down basin, frowning all the while.

An innocent reason for Knoecher’s absence might present itself. Perhaps the undercover S.D. agent had followed his cabin mate’s suggestion and requested one of the numerous unoccupied berths on the airship.

But Charteris knew that was unlikely: the S.D. man had been placed in the author’s quarters specifically to keep tabs on a potential troublemaker.

The other obvious possibility—that Eric Knoecher had gotten lucky with a female passenger, spending the night in another cabin—seemed equally unlikely. The only two unattached females aboard were Margaret Mather and Hilda Friederich. Charteris felt Miss Mather made an improbable paramour for the handsome bounder, and besides which, if the spinster had spent the night with anyone, it would have been that college boy who’d been plying her (and himself, in loin-girding preparation) with white wine.

As for Hilda, Charteris was confident that he was the only man in her shipboard life.

A remaining prospect was that Knoecher had stayed up all night, either in conference with Erdmann and the other two Luftwaffe “observers,” or perhaps sat up talking, maybe falling asleep, in a seat in the lounge or on one of the observation decks (the bar closed at three A.M., so that was not a possibility).

Charteris slipped into comfortable, sporty attire—a single-breasted gray herringbone sport jacket with white shirt, plaid tie, darker gray slacks, gray-and-white loafers—and followed the seductive scent of coffee to the portside dining room, like a cobra heeding a snake charmer’s flute.

He was able to collect a cup of steaming aromatic coffee from a steward (taking it black), but breakfast proper wasn’t to be served for another forty-five minutes. A number of passengers were already seated having coffee and rolls, and others were seated on the two-seater benches jutting from the wall of windows, enjoying light conversation or writing a letter or postcard. They were mostly ignoring the view, which wasn’t much: a gloomy overcast sky, when the ship wasn’t caught within a gray cloud.

Knoecher wasn’t among them.

Sipping at his coffee, the author strolled around to the starboard lounge, where he found himself alone, the other passengers preferring to be nearer the pending food. The long row of slanting windows and the gray landscape of the sky was all his, if he wanted it. Idly, a thought nibbling at the back of his brain, he went to where he’d seen Knoecher and Spah standing, chatting civilly, last night. He didn’t know what he expected to find.

But he found it.

Not at first. At first, having set the coffee cup on the ledgelike sill, he leaned against the aluminum bar separating one window from another and looked down through the closed Plexiglas portal at the stirred-up sea, the agitated swells trailing tendrils of foamy white. For the sea to be that angry, the wind had to be strong—but up here, in the Never-Never Land of the Hindenburg, all was calm. No steamship propeller shafts to vibrate you, no handgrips needed to protect you from the lurch of the ship as it rode the choppy waves.

The aluminum window frame was polished and smooth under his palm, which was how he came to notice the tickle of silk threads.

Frowning, he lifted his hand and spied—caught alongside and between aluminum window frame and its jamb—orange threads, silk threads….

No, more than just threads, a tiny piece of cloth had been caught there. Holding the edge of the trapped scrap of silk in the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, Charteris used his left to lift the handle on the window, which raised like a lid on the world below.

This freed the scrap of cloth, wind-fluttering in his grasp, perhaps an inch across and about as long, tapering to a point, the point having been caught in the window, and the rest torn away, the threads standing up like hair on a frightened man’s head.

He knew at once what it was, and in moments a scenario explaining its presence in that window jamb had presented itself.

Closing the window, slipping the silk fragment in his sport-jacket pocket, Charteris glanced about to see if he still had the starboard promenade to himself: he did. Quickly but casually, he returned to the portside promenade and the dining room, which was filling up. He deposited his empty coffee cup on a passing busboy’s tray, looking around for Chief Steward Kubis, who he knew would be supervising the staff, and mingling with the guests.

And there Kubis was, near a table where sat that wholesome-looking German family with their two well-behaved, properly attired boys (one was maybe six, the other possibly eight). The younger boy—bored, as they waited for breakfast to come—was seated on the floor near the table, playing with a tin toy, a little car with Mickey Mouse driving. When the child ran it quickly across the carpet, the toy threw sparks.

“Lovely boy,” Kubis, leaning in with clasped hands, told the parents, who nodded back with proud smiles over their coffee. “And I do hate to play the villain… but I must confiscate that vehicle.”

“What?” the father said, not sure if Kubis was joking.

Kubis tousled the child’s hair; the boy frowned up at the steward, who with one big hand was lifting the tin car from two small hands.

“Please tell your son,” Kubis said, “why we take no chances with sparks on a zeppelin.”

The father gathered the boy onto his lap and was quietly explaining—the child didn’t cry—as Kubis handed the car to a busboy, whispering instructions.

“My apologies,” Kubis said to the family, “and I’ll see the lad gets it back before we land.”

Charteris ambled over and placed a hand on the steward’s shoulder. “Heinrich, you’re a hard man.”

“Sometimes I have to be, Mr. Charteris.”

“Me, too. I need to talk to Captain Lehmann—it’s important.”

“He’s not come up for breakfast yet, sir.”

“Take me to him.”

The chief steward’s eyes narrowed but he did not question Charteris’s demand—and it had been a demand, not a request.

“I believe he’s in the control gondola, sir.”

“Fine.”

No further conversation followed, not even small talk. The friendliness these two usually shared fell away, the tone of the author’s voice having conveyed a seriousness that the steward responded to dutifully.

Kubis led Charteris down the stairs to B deck and forward through the keel corridor, trading the modern luxury of the passenger deck for the spare reality of a narrow rubber-padded catwalk that cut through a maze of wires and controls, bordered by massive fuel and water tanks. With the gray choppy ocean hazily visible directly beneath, the precariousness of this approach was diminished by the steadiness of the ship in flight, as well as cables and ropes strung along either side, providing tenuous railings.

Rain-flecked windows were spaced along the arching pathway, looking out onto the charcoal cloud in which the airship was currently enveloped, and the trek was rather like crossing a jungle crevice on a rope bridge. But no jungle was so eerily silent: the wind failed even to whisper as it rushed by, thanks to the streamlined design of the ship, and the engines way aft were not even faintly audible.

Then the gangway emptied onto a rubber-floored platform, on either side of which were doorless mail and wireless rooms, a single blue-uniformed crew member at work in either. Just beyond these work areas, and prior to where officers’ cabins began, the platform was breached by an aperture from which a ladder yawned, providing the inauspicious means of entering the control-room gondola below.

“A moment, sir,” the steward said, and climbed down an aluminum, hole-punched ladder not unlike the ones in the passenger cabins.

After some muffled conversation, Kubis climbed back up, returned to the platform, and gestured grandly toward the ladder as if presenting Charteris to the Queen.

“Captain Lehmann says he’ll be walking you back, sir,” Kubis said. “So I’ll take my leave.”

Charteris nodded his thanks, and climbed down the rather shaky ladder into the aft portion of the gondola, a three-chambered shoe-shaped control car whose aluminum framing might have been the work of an industrious youth with an Erector set (which Kubis would no doubt have confiscated). Surprisingly small, only the openness of the flimsy construction and the tall, slightly slanting Plexiglas windows on all sides kept the long narrow affair from seeming a claustrophobe’s nightmare.

Or the windows would have served that function had they not been rain-pearled views on a gray cloud.

Captain Lehmann—again in civilian attire, a brown three-piece suit with a darker brown bow tie—helped Charteris down from the ladder, greeting him with a smile and tight, puzzled eyes.

“What a pleasant surprise, Mr. Charteris.”

“Well, a surprise, anyway. I need to talk to you and Captain Pruss.”

The eyes tightened further, then eyebrows in the fatherly face lifted in a shrug. “Come with me, please.”

The center section was the chart room, a uniformed navigator on duty there. Lehmann led Charteris into the next and largest segment of the aluminum pod, which held the zeppelin’s equivalent of a steamship’s bridge, with its mass of telegraphs, gauges, control panels, and other gizmos, including of course a pair of wheels, standing almost at right angles to each other, the elevator pilot at one, the rudder pilot at the other.

Lehmann introduced the author to Captain Pruss, the pleasant-looking blond man in his middle forties an unexceptional figure made impressive by the crisp dark blue of his uniform and cap.

Still, just as Lehmann carried melancholy in his eyes, the new captain of the Hindenburg had tiredness in his, the features of his oval face touched with a surprising softness.

“A smooth ride, Captain,” Charteris said in German, and the conversation that followed remained in that language.

“One of the worst trips we have ever made,” Pruss said, his voice a pleasing, mellow baritone at odds with his words. “We like to give our passengers better sightseeing weather than this.”

“Weather charts determine our course,” Lehmann put in. “But it’s a science very much in its infancy—the captain had a long night.”

Both men, polite and even solicitous as they were, were waiting for Charteris to explain and justify his intrusion.

Glancing about him at the various blue-uniformed officers in the control car, Charteris said softly, “I wonder if we might repair to some private area? I have a subject to discuss, gentlemen, that is unlikely to improve Captain Pruss’s opinion of how this voyage is going.”

Soon they’d gone back up the ladder and forward to the officers’ cabins, ducking into Lehmann’s, which was somewhat larger than a passenger cabin, with room for an aluminum desk; a small, sloping window looked out on the grayness of sky and sea. Lehmann’s trademark accordion—which had so enlivened the maiden voyage—rested on the floor, leaning against a beige-linen-paneled bulkhead. On the single cot lay unrolled architectural drawings.

“Been working on our house,” Lehmann said, rolling up the plans, slipping a rubber band around them, setting them aside to make room for Charteris on the cot.

“Ah,” Charteris said, sitting. “You and Marie moving to Zeppelinheim with the rest of the Reederei family, eh, Ernst?”

“We have a lovely parcel of land,” Lehmann said, nodding, gesturing for Captain Pruss to take the chair at the desk, which Pruss did. “Beautiful beeches and firs all around us… Now, what has you concerned, Leslie?”

Lehmann remained standing, a quiet assertion of his authority.

Charteris asked, “May I assume Captain Pruss is aware of Eric Knoecher’s true background?”

Pruss glanced sharply at Lehmann, who nodded, saying, “You may speak freely.”

Charteris told the two poker-faced captains of Knoecher’s overnight absence in their cabin, and ran through his reasoning as to the unlikelihood of the “importer” having spent the night with one of the airship’s two unattached ladies.

“Of course, if Mr. Knoecher likes boys, rather than girls,” Charteris said, “that might require a new line of thought.”

“Impossible,” Lehmann said.

“Ah,” Charteris said. “I forgot: there are no homosexuals in Germany. It’s against the law.”

Pruss said, “What are you suggesting, Mr. Charteris?”

“I don’t think I’ve suggested anything just yet, gentlemen. But before I do, is there something pertaining to Mr. Knoecher of which I’m unaware? Do you know of his presence elsewhere on the ship, perhaps in the crew’s quarters, or in another passenger cabin, or even in sick bay?”

The two captains exchanged a solemn glance, and both shook their heads.

Lehmann said, “Where do you think he is, Mr. Charteris?”

“Not on this ship—not anymore.”

Lehmann’s eyes widened and Pruss’s narrowed.

Charteris reached in his sport-jacket pocket and displayed the fragment of silk, holding it between thumb and middle finger like a little bell to be rung. “I found this caught in a window jamb on the starboard promenade.”

Lehmann took the silken tidbit, examined it briefly, passed it on to Pruss, who did the same. Then the two captains looked to Charteris with a shared unspoken question.

“It’s the tip of Mr. Knoecher’s tie,” the author said.

“Are you certain?” Lehmann asked.

“Certain enough. I don’t remember anyone else wearing an orange silk necktie yesterday. It’s not exactly the rage, is it?”

“It does appear to be the tip of a tie,” Pruss said quietly.

“You can keep that,” Charteris said. “I don’t really have any use for an inch of neckwear.”

Lehmann said, “Are you suggesting he jumped?”

“Hell, no! That manipulative, arrogant son of a bitch was anything but despondent. I do think someone may have done the world the favor of pushing him out a window.”

“Good God,” Pruss said, whitening. He dropped the fragment of necktie onto Lehmann’s desk, as if the fabric had turned suddenly hot.

Lehmann didn’t whiten: it was more a greening.

“It’s possible he was killed on board, then disposed of,” Charteris continued cheerily, as if describing the plot of a Noël Coward play, “but my money would be on a scuffle that got out of hand. In the middle of the night, in the early morning hours, those observation promenades are no doubt deserted.”

“That’s true,” Lehmann admitted.

“No witnesses, no problem. A quick shove, and slam shut the window—muffling any scream, but unfortunately catching the tip of the tie… The drop itself would’ve killed him, don’t you think? If not, he’d have certainly drowned in the Channel, or maybe frozen to death. I say, are there sharks in those waters?”

“You don’t seem terribly upset at the prospect of Eric Knoecher’s murder,” Lehmann said dryly.

“I believe Western civilization will survive the loss—though the sharks are probably in for some nasty indigestion. Still, I felt a responsibility to let you know. Besides which, however deserving a victim Knoecher may have been, this does mean we have a murderer aboard.”

Lehmann leaned against the bulkhead; he appeared woozy, a rare occurrence on a ship famed for not causing seasickness.

“And having a killer among us certainly could make for a less relaxing trip than advertised,” Charteris added.

“We don’t know that Mr. Knoecher has been murdered,” Lehmann said, rather numbly.

Pruss swallowed, nodded. “He may well still be on this ship.”

Charteris shrugged. “He might. So I would suggest your first course of action is a search.”

Lehmann sighed heavily, then straightened; his expression was businesslike but not unfriendly. “We will do just that. Mr. Charteris… Leslie… we… I… would ask a favor.”

“Certainly, Ernst.”

“I ask it as a friend… but also, as director of the Reederei, I can offer you free passage, every year hence, a lifetime ‘pass,’ so to speak… if you will cooperate.”

“Cooperate how?”

“Keep this to yourself. Share this information with no other passenger—until we indicate otherwise.”

Charteris smiled half a smile. “All right. I can understand that you don’t want to alarm your passengers.”

“Yes.”

“And I understand how damaging this could be to the reputation of the Zeppelin Company… not to mention how embarrassing to Nazi Germany.”

Lehmann said nothing; he was looking at the floor.

Pruss stood. “We will have to discreetly search the ship, beginning as soon as possible.” To Lehmann, the captain said, “We will instruct our stewards and our stewardesses, in their daily housekeeping duties, to check every cabin for this stray passenger.”

Lehmann nodded firmly. “And we’ll search the interior of the ship….” To Charteris, he added, “Which will not be as difficult as you might think. For all its size, the Hindenburg has scant hiding places.”

“Balloons tend to have relatively few nooks and crannies,” Charteris said. He slapped his thighs and rose. “Well, that’s all I have to report, gentlemen. Just one passenger mislaid; everything else would seem in place, as best I can tell.”

Pruss was frowning, a little. “No offense, Mr. Charteris—but your flippant attitude does seem inappropriate. A man, apparently, has died.”

“A man who was in the business of causing misery for others has died. Besides, Captain, it’s my general philosophy that in a world rife with absurdity and cruelty, an arched eyebrow and an ironic aside are sometimes the only defenses against going stark raving mad.”

Pruss considered that remark, for a moment, but chose not to comment on it, saying instead, “Should anyone inquire about your cabin mate’s whereabouts, please say that he is staying in his cabin, with a cold, and does not wish to be disturbed.”

“All right. But I would have preferred to make up my own lie—that’s what they pay me for, after all.”

Pruss ignored that, saying to Lehmann, “A moment with you?”

Lehmann nodded, then asked Charteris to step outside the cabin, which the author did, and perhaps a minute later, the two captains emerged. Pruss nodded to Charteris and walked to the aperture in the platform and the ladder to his control car.

Lehmann waited until Pruss was out of sight, then whispered to Charteris, in English, “Did you tell anyone what I told you? Did you warn anyone of who Knoecher really was?”

“Of course not,” Charteris lied. “Did you?”

“Of course not!”

The two men continued to speak in English, carrying their conversation onto the catwalk as they made their return trip to B deck.

Charteris, following Lehmann, said, “You watched, you heard, how that bastard Knoecher manipulated and charmed our friends at supper last night, backing them into politically damaging corners, wheedling virtual admissions of guilt out of them.”

Lehmann nodded back, glumly.

“Well,” Charteris said, “if I had told one of them, and right now I told you who—what good would it do?”

With another backward glance, Lehmann said, “If a murder has been committed on this ship, we’d have a suspect—we’d have a starting place.”

“I disagree. I think whoever I might have warned—whoever you might have warned—would most certainly have warned others. It would be the humane thing to do, wouldn’t it?”

Lehmann drew in a breath, nodding again, resignedly. Then he paused on the narrow catwalk, turning to touch Charteris’s arm, holding on to a cable with his other hand. His eyes were pleading. “Don’t betray us, Leslie. Help me contain this. The future of my company, the future of zeppelin travel, may well depend upon the outcome.”

“You have my word.”

“Good.”

They walked, the slightly springy catwalk beneath their feet reminding Charteris of an endless pirate’s plank they’d been forced to walk.

“Ernst—do you think this could be connected to that bomb scare?”

Without looking back, but shaking his head, Lehmann said, “I doubt it. There is no bomb on this ship—the search, the precautions, were too thorough. Besides, Knoecher wasn’t part of that effort.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sabotage is Colonel Erdmann’s bailiwick. The S.D. officers who went over this ship, stem to stern, with the finest of fine-tooth combs, were especially trained for antisabotage duty. Knoecher is not in that field.”

“Ah. He was in the business of looking for traitors, not bombers.”

“Yes.”

“But, Ernst, those are hardly exclusive categories. Suppose your Mr. Knoecher discovered that there was indeed a bomb aboard this airship—and discovered, as well, who’d brought it aboard.”

Lehmann’s head tilted to one side as he walked along, considering that. “You have a point…. All the more reason to allow us to contain this volatile situation ourselves.”

“Fine. And, Ernst, should you need my help in the inquiry, say the word.”

“Help in what way?”

“I studied criminology at Cambridge, and I worked for a time as a police constable. Mystery writers don’t just drop from the sky, you know… sorry—unfortunate image.”

Pausing on the catwalk again, Lehmann turned and smiled warmly. “I appreciate the offer, but I rather think Colonel Erdmann will handle any inquiry, should this go more public.”

“Erdmann will be informed of this.”

“Certainly.” Lehmann pressed on. “He will be my next stop.”

“Do you want me to come along, and fill him in?”

“No. That won’t be necessary. Please go about the business of being just another passenger….”

“Another satisfied customer, you mean?”

They had reached the door to B deck.

Lehmann arched an eyebrow, smiled a little. “More satisfied than Eric Knoecher, I venture to say.”

Then the former captain of the Hindenburg reached for the handle, slid the door open, and gestured for Charteris to step on through.