It is not a pleasant task but Werner will keep his promise. He finds Irene Doehner laid out beside her father, arms crossed over her chest, a blanket laid across her body. Their names are written on cardboard signs at the base of their cots. There are almost three dozen bodies in the room, and hers is the smallest of them. Werner does not see her mother or her brothers, either on the cots or anywhere else, and he wonders where they might be. He wonders, but he doesn’t go in search of them to offer his condolences because his business is with Irene alone.
“I told you that I would bring you flowers today,” Werner whispers over her still, slender form. He lays them on her chest, then presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and rubs. The tears spill around then. Down his cheeks. Over his chin. Werner stands beside the body of Irene Doehner and cries until his throat is dry and his nose is red.
THE NAVIGATOR
Twenty-four hours ago Max was kissing Emilie for the last time and now he’s standing inside the burnt skeleton of the Hindenburg. The sight is confounding. This is the ship he has lived in every day for almost two years, but it’s only an echo of the ship he knew. The bones are here but the flesh is gone. The shape is broken. Twisted. Warped by heat and impact. And yet he knows exactly where he is. The axial catwalk is usually forty feet in the air and hangs directly over the keel catwalk. But they lie parallel on the ground now, and Max stands between them, hands in the pockets of a borrowed U.S. Navy petty officer’s uniform. It’s the best they could do on short notice, and judging by the uneasy glances he has received for the last three hours, they’re eager for his clothes to be laundered and returned.
The fire started here, somewhere in the vicinity of gas cell number four. That’s what the witnesses on the ground reported to Pruss. Now that Lakehurst is swarming with reporters and cameras and gawkers, the crew will be called upon to give an answer. There is a rumor, though he can’t believe it is true, that the explosion was recorded and broadcast over the radio and that the entire wreck was filmed for a newsreel. They are saying this disaster made history.
The questions are coming from all directions. Why? How? No one knows. Not yet. But Max is here, picking through the rubble like every other crew member who can stand without crutches, in an effort to give his commanding officers an answer to these questions.
Airships crash sometimes. And they’ve been torn apart by storms, but Max has never heard of one exploding for no reason. During battle, yes. But the Hindenburg wasn’t taking fire and it wasn’t under duress—the strain of their near miss off Newfoundland and again during landing might have torn a gas cell, but still, there would need to be a spark to ignite the hydrogen. It couldn’t have been lightning. That happens often enough. And the ship was built to withstand it. He can think of no plausible explanation for how the ship exploded. So he looks for one instead.
For an hour Max searches the rubble, at times focusing on the larger, twisted skeleton for clues, and then digging through the ash itself. The wicker cages that held the dogs are gone but he finds a collar—little more than burnt leather and a melted nameplate that reads ULLA. There are charred bones as well, but he can’t bear to look at them, so he walks away.
Max misses the object at first. It appears to be nothing more than a lump of blackened metal caught on the twisted girders at the rear of the ship. But something catches in his mind and he turns to look at it again. Bends lower. He nudges it with the toe of his shoe and it slides loose, clatters across the metal, and comes to a stop three inches from his foot.
It is a pistol. A Luger. He knows the shape of this gun because he owns one himself. Or he did until it was taken from his cabin. He doesn’t have to check the serial number stamped on the side to know that this is his weapon. With a detached calm, Max opens the chamber and counts the bullets inside. One round is missing. A single shot. He has seen muzzle flash on countless firing ranges. It’s not just a spark, but a small bolt of flame large enough to ignite an airship carrying two hundred thousand cubic meters of combustible hydrogen.
Max Zabel stares at the weapon in his hand with the stupid, horrified expression of a man who is slowly coming to a terrible conclusion. The gun issued to him brought down the Hindenburg.
U.S. COMMERCE DEPARTMENT BOARD OF INQUIRY
HINDENBURG ACCIDENT HEARINGS
May 19, 1937
Naval Air Station, Main Hangar, Lakehurst, New Jersey
Though sabotage could have produced the phenomena observed in the fire that destroyed the Hindenburg, there is still in my opinion no convincing evidence of a plot, either Communist or Nazi inspired. The one indisputable fact in the disaster is that the Hindenburg burned because she was inflated with hydrogen.
—Douglas H. Robinson, Giants in the Sky: A History of the Rigid Airship