The Hindenburg Murders (7 page)

“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.