Flight of Dreams (36 page)

G
ertrud can feel the heat of the fire only in her palm but she can smell it everywhere: in the smoke and the wisps of burnt hair that drift toward her nose. She can smell the bodies. She can smell urine and vomit on the stumbling forms she and Leonhard pass in the field. Gertrud can smell the despair.

A man in a white Panama hat—so startling and clean compared to everything around him—appears to sprout from the ground in front of them.

“This way!” he yells and grabs Leonhard's sleeve.

This bizarre, pristine stranger leads them toward a limousine that idles at the edge of the field. The car was meant to ferry the passengers from the landing area to the hangar, but it's being used as an ambulance instead.

The man opens the car door and motions them to get inside, but a wild, desperate voice screams at him from within.

“There's no more room in here! Go away!” It is female. German. Deranged.

Gertrud braves one glance and sees Matilde Doehner crouched in the otherwise empty vehicle, a badly burned son tucked beneath each arm. She is a fierce, feral lioness protecting her children.

H
angar No. 1, the closest structure to the wreck, has been set up as a makeshift infirmary. It was a spontaneous decision made by whatever rescuer pulled the first broken body from the airship. A matter of practicality. Less distance to drag, carry, pull the wounded.

No,
Max thinks, as he limps toward the hangar,
not everyone within is wounded.
That word implies survival. And he knows that some of the people he has seen being carted through the wide, gaping doors no longer exist on this side of eternity.

Max does not know how long he sat there in the field. He only knows that it was damp, because of either the rain or the water ballasts, and that he couldn't move or think or function. He simply sat, hunched over, head lolling to the side as the ship consumed itself.

No one should have survived. And yet here they are, wandering around like scattered sheep after a storm. Passengers. Crew members. Ground crew. Reporters. Spectators. All here in the field together. All of them disoriented. All of them horrified. And there are cars zooming about. Not just military jeeps but civilian cars as well, ferrying the survivors hither and yon. Who the hell can tell where anyone is in this mess?

Max has never had to think about setting one foot in front of the other before. He has never had to give his body specific, simple instructions. But he does now. And it seems an age before he reaches the hangar and stumbles inside.

Someone yells for help, then wraps a blanket around his shoulders. Asks a series of nonsensical questions in English. Who cares what year it is or what his name is or who the president is?

“Where is Emilie?” He croaks the question out. Coughs.

The overly talkative, curious stranger shoves a cup of water into his hands. Urges him to drink. And he does, marveling at the miraculous properties of water. The coolness. The wetness. The perfect satiating
waterness
of it.

It takes only a moment for the stranger to assess that the worst damage Max has suffered is shock. He's led to a cot that immediately collapses the moment he puts his weight on it. He's yanked to his feet, as though this is his error and not the fault of poor assembly. He wanders away while the man tries to make the cot sturdy enough to hold his weight.

The hangar is huge, almost twice the size of the
Hindenburg,
and is filled with cots and bedrolls and people shouting, wandering through its cavernous belly. People lie everywhere. Others stand in groups talking in hushed whispers. Doctors call for help. Nurses rush from one victim to the next, substituting busyness for help because really, there is nothing that can be done for most of them.

Max picks an end—it doesn't matter which one—and begins to work his way down the row of cots. He stops. Looks. Searches the ruined faces. And at every bedside he asks one question: “Emilie?”

I
t's a hangar. She knows that much. And it has been turned into an infirmary. There are people sprawled across cots and on the floor. There are people running around and shouting directions. A handful of young, fresh-faced girls in white nurse uniforms look on, horror-stricken.

Someone has found a chair for Gertrud and she sits still and quiet, watching Colonel Erdmann dying at her feet. Leonhard has gone to get help for her hand, but she has lost sight of him. A priest stands ten feet away giving last rites to a crew member. The priest has been going down the line, attending these men by order of who is closest to dying.

“My shoes are too tight,” Erdmann says.

His skin is singed black in patches. Portions of his clothing are burned off and others are melted to his skin.

“My shoes are too tight.” He says it again, and Gertrud realizes that he is speaking to her. His single functioning eye is fixed on her, and she can no more refuse him than she could leave the Doehner boys behind.

Gertrud slides off the chair and onto her knees. The concrete floor is hard and cool and oddly soothing. She carefully unties the colonel's boots and slips them off. She pulls off his socks as well and lays her hands on his feet to comfort him. They are the only part of his body not covered with lethal burns. He trembles a bit at her touch but does not complain.

“Dorothea.” It's the barest whisper of a word.

The priest drops to his knees beside her. “You are a kind woman.”

When Erdmann sees him he begins to speak frantically, but Gertrud notices that he has slipped into a rare dialect unknown to the American priest. But the priest hesitates for only a moment. He does not let on as the colonel gives his final confession, but rather bends low and receives the words with mercy. The priest whispers comfort into dying ears.

Only God understands him now,
Gertrud thinks.

Soon the words have stopped and he is still. The priest straightens with a weary look and searches the row of patients for the next to die. He ambles away, leaving Gertrud alone with the body of a man she barely knows.

T
he airfield is dotted with hangars of various shapes and sizes, all of them dwarfed by Hangar No. 1. It's a glorified garage, large enough to house the biggest of zeppelins in the event of a storm, but this is not where Wilhelm Balla leads Werner.

“You don't want to go in there,” Balla says, steering him away. “That's where they're taking the bodies.”

He takes the boy instead to a low-hanging, rectangular structure that looks to Werner like a barracks. Wilhelm explains to the older gentleman who greets them, in English, who Werner is and why he's soaking wet. At the first sign of comprehension Balla hands the cabin boy over to the ministrations of this stranger and leaves. The stone-faced steward does not offer a single look or word of farewell, but Werner understands now, after all this time and after what has just happened, that it is because, once summoned, Balla has no capacity to control his emotions. The solution for him is simply to not give in to them at all.

“Come with me,” the old man says.

Werner follows, too tired to object, through the hangar, down a hall, and into a small living quarters where an old woman sits at a table with a stricken expression. The man hands him over to the care of his wife, speaking so rapidly that most of the words are lost to Werner. And then he too is gone, slipping out the door to help where he can.

The woman pulls a bundle of clothing out of a closet and sets it carefully in his arms but he can barely lift it. Werner's arms feel as though they are weighed down with lead. And then she takes him back through the building to a long, narrow room filled with bunk beds. He changes into the dry clothes once she's gone, then sinks into the nearest bed. He grabs the heavy woolen blanket and rolls to his side. And then the boy is gone, lost to sleep and grief and trauma before his eyes have fully closed.

T
he skin has blistered off Gertrud's right palm, leaving the exposed flesh red and weeping. She cannot close her hand. She can't focus on anything apart from the burning fire still cradled in her palm. It is as though her entire body has drawn inward to that one spot. She feels nothing else.

Her fingers are splayed open on her lap, her gaze still fixed on them when a young medic arrives.

“Are you badly hurt?” he asks.

“No.” She lifts her hand an inch and inclines it toward him. “Just this.”

He is remarkably gentle for such a large man. He lifts her hand in one of his own, pulling it close to his face. “It's a bad burn. But it's clean. I can wrap it and give you morphine for the pain, but time will have to do the rest.”

The medic pulls a syringe the size of a bicycle pump from the bag at his feet and she recoils.

“Don't worry. It won't hurt once the medicine hits your bloodstream.”

“No morphine. I've misplaced my husband, and he won't be able to find me if I'm lying here asleep.” The medic gives her such a look of pity that she rolls her eyes. “Oh, good grief. Leonhard's
alive.
He just wandered off.”

“Of course he is.” The medic pats her shoulder in pity and begins to clean her hand.

Gertrud cranes her neck in search of Leonhard instead. It's a bad habit of her husband's, this wandering off. She has often accused him of being part Aborigine because of his penchant for going on walkabout. Sometimes he's gone for hours. Other times it's no more than a few minutes. Leonhard insists it's his way of finding time to think, to sort through a problem. But problem or not, Gertrud is getting increasingly upset about his absence.

When the medic finishes cleaning her hand and wrapping it in gauze she thanks him and slips off the table. It takes some effort but she finally locates Leonhard in a small room at the back of the hangar with Captain Lehmann. The captain is sitting on a table—
like a child,
she thinks—dabbing at his burns with a wad of gauze. Every few seconds he dips the gauze in a tin of picric acid, then braces himself before applying it to his skin. The medicine is astringent—the very smell burns her nose. She can't imagine how Lehmann manages to use it on such terrible wounds. Leonhard solemnly bears witness to the gruesome ritual. He does not speak to the captain or touch him, but Gertrud knows his presence is a comfort.

After several more moments, the wounds on Lehmann's chest and thighs are all covered with the fatty-looking yellow salve, and he turns pleading, apologetic eyes on Leonhard.

He is looking for absolution, Gertrud thinks.

Leonhard bends his head down so that his cheek rests against the captain's. It is the closest he can come to giving his friend a reassuring embrace.

“What happened?” Leonhard asks.

Lehmann has the blank-faced expression of a man given over to shock. He offers a shrug and even that small movement pains him. Lehmann winces, pulling air through his teeth. Gertrud can see him searching for an answer, something, anything that makes sense.
“Blitzschlag,”
he finally says, and then doubles over in a fit of coughing. It sounds liquid and raw. She cringes at the sound.

Blitzschlag
.

Lightning.

Leonhard's shoulders begin to quiver, and Gertrud eases away from the door. He is not a man who weeps easily, and he would be furious to know she has witnessed this quiet, intimate moment between friends. There is only one thing she can do to help, so she goes in search of her medic. She finds him on the other side of the hangar, covering a body in what appears to be a wool blanket. The hand that slips out from underneath is decidedly delicate and feminine. He tucks it back under the blanket and looks at Gertrud with a detached expression known only to those who have witnessed disaster and then been called upon to tend the carnage.

“Did you find your husband?”

“I did. Do you still have the morphine?”

“Yes. Are you in pain?”

Gertrud swallows. Clears her throat. “I am. But it's not for me.”

She leads the young medic to Captain Lehmann and watches from the door as he receives the ghastly needle with gratitude.

I
t is hours after the crash. Night has fallen. Portions of the ship still glow in the field even though the ground crew has tried their best to douse it with water hoses. Lights blare across the airfield. Jeeps race back and forth as military personnel gather and disperse and respond to orders. Max has circled the hangar at least four times, but he can't be certain if he has been to every bed. People won't stay still. They keep moving. They wander off. Even the patients stand and walk away. They sit. They move from a blanket on the floor to a cot against the wall, and hell if he knows whom he has spoken to and whom he hasn't.

Max knows it's a flawed search method, but it's the only one he has. He would continue with it straight until dawn if he didn't feel the firm grip of Xaver Maier's hand on his jacket sleeve.

Max looks at the chef in wonder. “You're alive.”

He grins sadly. “I'm not so easy to get rid of.”

“What do you want?”

Maier pulls at his sleeve. “You need to come with me.”

“I can't. I have to find Emilie.”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you. We found her.”

The chef has turned before Max can search his face for clues. He doesn't know whether Maier's eyes are filled with relief or sadness or pity. He knows nothing. He simply follows him through Hangar No. 1 and out into the night.

G
ertrud Adelt turns in her seat to take one last look at the
Hindenburg.
It is well after dark, but the airfield is lit up like a macabre circus. Floodlights illuminate the wreckage, and parts of the ship still glow menacing and red. The fabric covering has burned completely away, leaving the gruesome skeleton. As men pick through the rubble their shadows are cast long across the field by the harsh lights. They look like carrion birds picking at a carcass.

The driver glances at Gertrud in the rearview mirror. He does not bother to hide his concern. “Where should I take you?”

Leonhard has laid himself across the backseat, his head in her lap, and she rests her good hand upon his forehead. He hasn't breathed easily since the wreck, but the wheezing started to grow worse an hour ago and the coughing began shortly afterward. A slow, pained gurgle emanates from his chest now.

“To a hospital,” Gertrud says. “Quickly.”

The car maneuvers its way across the airfield and then through the cordon, bouncing through every rut and track and pothole along the way. Gertrud holds Leonhard's head steady on her lap. She listens to his shallow breathing. Within minutes they are on the highway heading toward Toms River and Lakehurst is nothing but a strange and lurid glow behind them.