The Hindenburg Murders (25 page)

“An accident,” Charteris said, almost tasting the word. “I believe I heard this song-and-dance before….”

Insistently Spehl went on: “Willy was angry with me, for getting him in trouble, when he found out the Luftwaffe agents were investigating; he knew the wound on his leg would give him away. He was going to give himself up and tell them what I’d asked him to do and…”

“You killed him.”

“No! We… we
did
struggle. We were talking in his gondola, screaming at each other over the engine, and when he went out to that little gangway between the gondola and the ship, to go tell on me, we struggled and… he just slipped. I swear to God and all that’s holy, he slipped!”

“I’m sorry, boys,” Charteris said, shaking his head. “I can’t come over to your side. You’re just too… untidy a bunch, much as I might sympathize with your goals. That jerry-rigged bomb of yours could go off while people are still on this ship, and you’re endangering untold numbers of American military and civilians at Lakehurst.”

Spehl shook his head, violently. “No! It’s set for eight o’clock. Everyone will be off the ship. Casualties will be minimal.”

“Don’t you think it’s rather bad taste,” Charteris said pointedly, “to fight a war on another country’s soil? German casualties are one thing: Americans are another.”

“Then you’ve made your decision?” Erdmann asked, raising the Luger so that it was trained upon the author’s heart.

“So what’s the plan, boys? Disappear into America? Wait… Eric, that’s
your
plan. But, you, Colonel, you want to go back to your pretty wife, in Germany, and continue fighting from within, don’t you? A noble enough goal… but Eric, here, kind of made a mess of it, with his extra killing, didn’t he?”

“Be quiet,” Erdmann said. “This is your last chance.”

“Eric,” Charteris said, “what do you want to bet that that automatic in the colonel’s pocket wasn’t meant for me? After all, Fritz didn’t know I was going to show up, did he?”

“Quiet,” Erdmann said, teeth clenched.

“Why was he packing the rod, do you suppose? Hmmm, Eric? Do you think he was planning to shoot up random crew members—or maybe he had just one in mind… maybe a prisoner who had fled his custody, who could die and with his death seem to answer many, many questions… allowing the good colonel to go back to the fatherland, to his wife and his mission.”

Spehl’s hand clasped onto Erdmann’s shoulder. “What
were
you doing with that Luger in your pocket?”

Erdmann’s eyes and nostrils flared as the boy reached around. “Eric!”

“Give it here!”

And Spehl spun Erdmann to him, grabbing for the gun, trying to wrest it from the colonel’s fingers, the two men tottering on the narrow catwalk. The automatic in hand was high over Erdmann’s head now, as if he were trying to keep a toy from a child; and as Spehl wrestled Erdmann for it, Charteris made a hasty exit, running down the rubberized gangway toward the passenger quarters.

He was halfway to the doorway when he heard the gunshot.

FIFTEEN

HOW THE HINDENBURG ALIGHTED AT LAKEHURST, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS DEBARKED

C
HARTERIS HAD A FRACTION-OF-A-SECOND GLIMPSE
of the two men, as they stood frozen, like dance partners startled when the music stopped, the tiny black gun in Erdmann’s hand still held high as Spehl clutched the colonel’s arm and wrist, the gun up, angled toward the back of the ship, where the weapon had dispensed a wild bullet.

The sound of the gunshot had been a small pop—almost like a cap pistol—harmless sounding; but Erdmann’s bullet, a small silver pellet whose shape was not unlike the airship’s, had traveled down the hollow body of the dirigible and into a billowing hydrogen-filled gas cell, the center of which flared brilliantly, red and yellow and blue spreading out beneath the fabric like colorful spilled liquid, before the gas cell dissolved in crackling flame.

Then the
whoom
of detonation announced blossoms of orange fireballs that rolled inexorably, hungrily, down the length of the zeppelin, expanding as they came, scattering scraps of
white-hot aluminum and raining down scorched fragments of fabric along the way.

Somewhere a voice screamed, “Stay down!” in German, and Spehl abandoned his dance partner, scrambling along the catwalk away from the oncoming conflagration, leaping for the nearest engine-gondola gangway, trying to shimmy out of the path of the surging fire.

Flushed with heat, as if some mammoth oven door had dropped open, Charteris ran, looking back as he did, not wanting to, but—like Lot’s wife—unable not to. And the last thing he saw, in the burning belly of the beast, was Erdmann consumed by the typhoon of flames, the sizzling saboteur turning black and orange, but the colonel did not scream, rather stood and stoically received the fiery fate he’d conceived.

Then the author bolted through the door, running pell-mell down the keel corridor, toward the stairs, knowing damn good and well that the flames, and time running out, were nipping at his heels.

In thirty-seven seconds, the
Hindenburg
would be, for all intents and purposes, as dead as Colonel Fritz Erdmann.

Moments before the first blast, Leonhard and Gertrude Adelt were standing with Hilda Friederich, leaning out over the slanting windows on the starboard promenade deck, by the lounge. It was drizzling again, flecks of rain glistening on the windows like tiny jewels. The airship had just swung sharply into the wind, and they were watching with no little interest from their balcony perch the show below: the ground crew—one hundred and fifty feet down—scurrying toward and beneath the ship, a mixture of American civilians and navy men, the latter easy to pick out in their white sailor caps and navy-blue coats. A pair of ropes that had been dropped from the bow and
stern were latched onto by two columns of these men, who were tugging the ship toward the mooring mast.

Leonhard noted a remarkable stillness had settled over the deck—no motor drone could be detected, no one spoke, not a command, no cry or call, as if the collective ship were holding its breath.

And the ground crew had suddenly stopped scurrying, were instead looking up with wide eyes and open mouths. Some of them were pointing up—Leonhard could not know it, but the members of the ground crew had spotted the small mushroom-shaped puff of flame, high toward the back of the ship, forward of the upper vertical fin, where a tiny unseen bullet had burst through, disappearing into the mist.

Then a muffled, dull detonation broke the silence, seeming to Leonhard no louder than popping the cap of a beer bottle.

“What was that?” Gertrude asked him, clutching his arm.

Hilda’s hands came up and covered her mouth, eyes wide, trembling all over. She was looking out and down.

Leonhard followed her gaze. The crew on the ground were suffused in a rosy glow, as if the sun were rising; the sandy ground itself was basking in the eerie twilight sunrise, spreading from the bow of the ship, banishing its usual blue shadow. And then the men down there were scurrying again—but in a different direction.

Running away from the ship in terror.

“Sweet Jesus,” the journalist told the two beauties. “We’re aflame.”

The second detonation was no mere echo: it overshadowed the first explosion with its force and terrible bellow, as if the airship itself were howling in anguish, and—though no one on the
Hindenburg
could see it—this explosion sent flames erupting
through the skin atop the ship, telling everyone on the ground that the previous tiny burst of flame had been only a hint of what was to come.

Charteris had made it to the end of the corridor by the time of the second explosion, which threw him like a rag doll, tossing him rudely, and when he stopped rolling and careening, he found himself facedown on the floor of the retracted gangway.

He scrambled to his feet, grabbing a quick look out the B-deck windows, seeing the ship was still high over the ground; then he was heading up the stairway to A deck, where the Adelts and Hilda and the others awaited. He could hear the hell that A deck had become, the stampedelike sound of passengers panicking, running back and forth, some yelling, others screaming.

That was when the world upended, the ship tipping back on its stern, dramatically, sitting itself down on its tail, beginning to collapse in on itself in so doing. Spectators would say the ship looked like a Japanese lantern, lighting up from within, showing off the ship’s aluminum framework even as it consumed itself.

Fortunately he’d been holding on to the stair rail, and now he was holding on with both hands, his ears filled with the sound of tables and chairs and other normally friendly objects making deadly nuisances of themselves to the passengers on A deck above, from which reverberated more screams, and the awful sound of human beings tumbling like so many dice.

Gritting his teeth, sucking in air not yet tainted by smoke, Charteris dangled there, the stairs above him taking quite the opposite tilt proper stairs could take. Dirty bedclothes, piled at the end of the hallway above, plummeted past him, spilling down as the dying dirigible did its topsy-turvy backstand, blankets and sheets fluttering like the wings of dying birds.

Pulling himself up and along, with only the railing to keep him from plunging to injury or death, he yanked himself upward, where he might help his friends.

Moments earlier, before the second explosion, with the knowledge that the ship was in flames—flames that had not yet reached them, though they could hear the fire’s deep deadly hissing, like a thousand stirred-up snakes—Leonhard Adelt, on the starboard side, had taken his wife by one arm and Hilda by the other.

“We have to get out through the windows!” he told them. “It’s our only chance!”

“It’s too high!” Gertrude said, eyes huge with horror.

“We’ll go lower, believe me! Wait a bit….”

They were at a distance of perhaps one hundred twenty feet now—the distance to the ground diminishing by the second, but not quickly enough to suit the two women, who looked terrified; and so was Leonhard, but he did his best not to betray that.

“I’ll go get some bed linen,” he told them confidently, “to soften our fall!”

But he didn’t go, because that was when the second explosion shook the ship like a naughty child, sending Adelt and Gertrude and Hilda and every other passenger on the starboard promenade tumbling backward, toward the bulkhead by the stair corridor, slamming into it, even as tables and chairs pitched forward, crashing down on them, barricading them in.

Their world almost upside down, Leonhard quickly acted to ascertain the condition of his little group. Thank God for this lightweight furniture! He brushed aside a chair, pulled a table off the two women, who were stunned but that seemed to be all, merely shaken, clothing torn, but no blood visible.

That could not be said for others around them. Elsewhere on this upended deck, George Hirschfeld was clinging to a bench, hanging down the deck’s steep incline, a bloody gash on his forehead, and Ed Douglas had slammed into a wall of the lounge, pinned behind a stack of tables and chairs, unconscious. In the corner, where the bulkhead met the slanting windows, Herman Doehner, father of the two boys, was similarly unconscious, head bloody from banging it on metal railings as he tumbled down the treacherous slide the deck had become; but his wife was awake and the two boys—very wide-eyed but not crying—were fussing over the papa.

And Moritz Feibusch lay unconscious, dying, his head cracked open against a metal railing, with forty-three unaddressed, unsigned postcards in his pocket, the rest still in the mailroom, waiting to be posted, waiting to burn.

The officers in the control gondola, in their forward position, were perhaps the last on the ship to know of the tragedy they were piloting.

Ernst Lehmann, observing in the gondola, had felt an odd tremor, rather like an ocean wave lapping onto shore.

“Is a rope broken?” he asked Captain Pruss.

“No,” Pruss said, unconcerned.

“I felt a heavy push, Captain….”

That was when someone on the ground yelled, “Run for your lives!”

And the rudder officer began to moan, “Oh, no, oh, no!”

Somewhere a fire bell was ringing, and a red glow was spreading on the ground, like a rosy rash.

The watch officer said, like a man sleepwalking, “I should get the logbook.”

Lehmann barked his first official order of the voyage: “Drop the water ballast!”

The second explosion came just then.

That one they heard, all of them, and it shook them, physically, and otherwise—but they could see or hear no flames, could smell no smoke, not yet. The captains of the
Hindenburg
stood helpless, impotent, the red reflection of unseen flames like a blush of embarrassment on their dazed faces.

On the portside deck, by the dining room, a chaos similar to that on the starboard had ensued. Fewer passengers on this side, though all of the stewards were over here, in part for the sake of distributing weight, but also for Kubis’s staff to put away dishes and such, including placing leftover sandwiches in the pantry dumbwaiter.