The Hindenburg Murders (9 page)

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.”