The Hindenburg Murders (17 page)

They sat and chatted, and then their drinks came and they sat and drank and chatted—all the while Charteris wondering if Miss Mather had been so easily forthcoming about her aid to German Jews with that nice-looking young Eric Knoecher.

“Excuse me, sir?” piped up a voice just to his left, a male voice, rather high-pitched, almost as if it had not quite changed yet. The English words were precise if heavily German-accented.

Looking up, swiveling slightly, Charteris saw respectfully standing there, in gray coveralls and crepe-soled slippers, a young crew member—the boy couldn’t be older than twenty-five—fresh-faced, blue-eyed (weren’t they all?), a tall, pale lad whose wholesome good looks were offset by ears that stuck out slightly from the elongated oval of his head, features somewhat embryonic, his lips puffily feminine, his jaw a bit weak.

“Excuse me for interrupting, sir.”

Suddenly Charteris realized this was the baby-faced crew member who had stared down at him from the rafters of the ship, on yesterday afternoon’s tour.

“Not at all. It’s rather a treat to see one of the crew invade our sacrosanct little world.”

But Hilda seemed annoyed by this intrusion, openly frowning, and Charteris gave her a quick sharp look, and she softened.

“I was hoping you might sign my book.” From behind his back the boy withdrew a well-read-looking copy of
The Saint Overboard,
the Hodder & Stoughton British edition, its dust jacket protected in the manner of a lending library, one of whose cast-off copies this apparently was.

“Well, it would be my pleasure,” the author said. “Everyone on board seems to know who I am, and some even claim to read me, but you’re the only one with proof. Do you have a pen?”

“I came prepared, sir.” The boy rather stiffly handed forward both the book and a fountain pen.

“This particular work has been translated into German,” Charteris said, as he thumbed to the title page. “But you have an English copy, I see.”

“I prefer to read American and British books in the tongue they were written in, sir.”

“You speak very well. What’s your name, son? So I can it inscribe in the book?”

“Eric,” he said. “Eric Spehl.”

Another Eric. Another blue-eyed Eric, at that.

“No joke intended, Eric, but could you spell Spehl?”

The boy didn’t smile; well, it hadn’t been much of a joke and he’d probably heard it a thousand times.

“S-P-E-H-L,” he said.

Charteris signed it—“To Eric Spehl, with Saintly best wishes”—and added the stick figure with halo that was the “sign of the Saint,” a logo that had risen out of Charteris’s own
limited artistic ability but which had added enormously to the success and recognizability of his swashbuckling creation.

He handed the book back to the lad, who held it open, letting the glistening black ink dry. Strangely, Spehl’s expression remained blank, with little of the die-hard fan’s glowing-eyed pleasure. Obviously a shy one.

Hilda was frowning again, tapping her finger on the table. Embarrassed, Charteris made conversation with the young crew member.

“Do you like mystery fiction in general, Eric? Or are you strictly a Saint fan?”

The boy seemed to brighten a little. “Oh yes, I like detective stories and Wild West novels. Biographies, too.”

“That’s an interesting combination—escape fiction and biographies.”

“Well, sir, in both cases they represent lives more interesting than mine.”

“What could be more interesting than working on a zeppelin? What’s your job, by the way?”

“Rigger.”

“That sounds more like duty on a sailboat.”

“I use a sailmaker’s needle, sir, and heavy thread that can stand up to weather like we’ve been having.”

“You work mostly with your hands, then.”

He nodded. “I was an upholsterer’s apprentice before I came to work for the
Reederei
. But I am no seamstress.”

This last seemed vaguely defensive.

“I’m sure you aren’t, Eric.”

“I have to climb high up into the ship to patch a gasbag tear, or repair the linen skin over the frames.”

“Exacting work. Dangerous. And of course you get to travel.”

Spehl nodded. “I like that very much. I’m just a farm boy, and now my world is so much bigger.”

“Where were you raised?”

Hilda sighed heavily. Charteris glanced at her again, trying to convey his unhappiness with her rude behavior. She glanced away.

“Goschweiler, sir—a little village in the upland meadows of the Black Forest. Beautiful there. But just one small corner of the big world.”

“Still, home always has its special place in our hearts, doesn’t it? Well, thank you, Eric, and do keep reading me.”

Charteris held out his hand and the boy blinked, then accepted the handshake, and Spehl’s grip was firm, powerful, more than you might expect of a slender lad like this, if you didn’t know the good and taxing work he did with his hands.

The inscription dry, Spehl closed the cover on the Saint book, nodded, muttered another thanks, and moved quickly off. Another jumpsuited crew member—whose presence Charteris hadn’t noticed before—rose from a bench by the slanting windows, where he had apparently been waiting for his friend. A shorter, more burly fellow, he fell in at Spehl’s side, and they made a quick exit.

“Why were you so ill-mannered with that boy?” he asked the braided beauty, mildly aggravated with her.

Her chin was high; she sniffed. “He was intruding. We were having a quiet moment. Why did you keep him here, talking to him, for such a long time?”

He sipped his Scotch. “First, my dear, that young man is a reader of mine. That means he’s a customer. And callow youths all around the world, like that one, keep me in business, and allow me to maintain the high style of living to which I’ve
become so accustomed, including the ability to flit about the skies with lovely mysterious women.”

She couldn’t help herself: she laughed at that. Shaking her head, sipping her Frosted Cocktail, she said, “I was boorish. Accept my apologies.”

“No. You’ll have to find some way to make it up to me.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“You mean a late-afternoon nap in my cabin?”

He yawned again, no more convincingly than before. “I could use a quick one. Snooze, I mean.”

“You are an outrageous, impudent man,” she said.

And stood, and held her hand out to him, and walked with him from the lounge, on the way to her cabin. As they headed for the stairs down to B deck, Miss Mather, seated on the window bench, glanced up from her poetry in progress to smile at him, and ignore her.

He nodded at the spinster and they moved on.

Soon the couple were just outside Hilda’s cabin door.

“O beautiful Viking,” he said to her, “let down thy golden braids and unleash thy Valkyrie spirit upon me, and lift my undeserving soul to the skies.”

And Hilda, bosom heaving with her full-bodied laugh, dragged him inside.

ELEVEN

HOW THE HINDENBURG’S ERSTWHILE CAPTAIN ENTERTAINED, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS HAD A CALLER

A
FTER THE USUAL SUMPTUOUS DINNER,
as stewards moved in to clear the tables, word spread that Captain Lehmann was going to entertain in the lounge. Most of the passengers gathered there, or along the adjacent promenade, as the fatherly former captain of the airship stood like an itinerant street musician with the accordion slung before him. Charteris (in his white dinner jacket), Hilda (in a low-cut green gown), and the Adelts were seated at a table along the waist-high partition between lounge and promenade. It was fair to say that, with the exception of the die-hard chimneys in the smoking room on B deck below, the
Hindenburg
’s passengers were gathered nearly en masse.

“Many of you who have sailed with us before,” Lehmann said in German (Charteris finding the word choice of “sailed” rather than “flown” an interesting one), “have inquired about the absence of our celebrated aluminum piano.”

Gertrude Adelt called out gaily, “Oh yes! We enjoyed it so, when you played for us!”

Lehmann smiled, with mixed embarrassment and pride, and said, “And I enjoyed it so when you, Mrs. Adelt, and other passengers sang along. But commerce rules even the skies—the piano weighed more than you, my dear… and we are fully booked on our return voyage with, as you know, so many travelers set to attend the English coronation.”

Heads nodded all around the lounge.

“So,” Lehmann continued, “rather than leave a pretty lady behind—we unloaded the piano.”

Gentle laughter blossomed around the room, and now it was lovely Gertrude Adelt’s turn to react in embarrassment, and perhaps pride.

Hoisting his accordion, Lehmann continued, “This portable ‘piano’ will have to do for the evening. If our German passengers will bear with me, I’ll repeat some of that for our American and English guests.”

Lehmann gave a condensed English version of his spiel, and then—first in English, then in German—assured everyone that he would give equal time to German and American folk songs and English ballads… but said he would keep things neutral by beginning with an instrumental rendition of something by Straus.

The evening evolved into a rather merry sing-along, and Charteris joined in lustily. The author had a pleasant second tenor and liked to sing, though he felt more than a pang or two for the absence of his wife, Pauline, who sang
very
well, and had been his duet partner in this same lounge just a year before.

Hilda had a pleasant, relatively on-key alto that reminded Charteris enough of Marlene Dietrich to stoke the fires of his infatuation, and relegate his soon-to-be ex-wife to a distant compartment of his mind. Since he would sing the English and
American tunes, and she the German ones, they were trading off, and singing to each other, and it was very romantic and not a little sexy.

He was most disappointed when a finger tapped him on his shoulder and Chief Steward Kubis leaned in across the partition to whisper, “You are wanted in the officers’ mess, sir.”

Sighing, nodding reluctantly, he patted Hilda’s hand, said, “You’ll have to excuse me, dear,” exchanging disappointed glances with his braided amour of the moment.

The officers’ mess was cleared but for the blandly handsome Captain Pruss and the doleful Colonel Fritz Erdmann, seated again by the windows, the grayness of the day replaced by the ebony of the night. A small conical lamp on the booth’s table gave off a yellowish cast, to match Charteris’s own jaundiced reaction.

“You know, Captain,” Charteris said in English, pointedly, not sitting, “I am a paying passenger. I have a right to enjoy myself like any other customer of the
Reederei
. If you’ve pulled me away from the side of that magnificent blonde country-woman of yours, just for me to give you a report of my amateur detective findings to date… then might I suggest we reschedule for a more propitious time?”

“Please sit,” the crisply uniformed captain said, with a respectful nod.

Erdmann said, “We apologize for the intrusion into your evening. There are developments we need to share with you—and we need your help, your…” Erdmann searched for the English words. “… expert opinion.”

“For God’s sake, I write blood and thunder. I’m not an ‘expert’ on real crime and espionage. Have you people gone mad?”

The melancholy mask of Erdmann’s oblong face twitched a smile. He leaned forward, hands folded almost prayerfully. “There is much madness at large in our world today, would you not agree?”

“Yes, but you may wish to speak to your boy Adolf about that. I’ve had little to do with causing it, personally. In fact I’ll go on record right now by saying that insanity in world leaders is in my view a less than desirable quality.”

Pruss shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Erdmann sighed heavily.

Then the undercover Luftwaffe colonel said, “A bomb exploded today on the Paris-Marseilles Express. One death, twenty injuries—it could have been worse. Probably should have been worse—the train was at its maximum speed of sixty miles per hour and passengers were showered with shards of glass. The dead passenger could not be identified, so badly mangled was his corpse.”

Charteris sat.

“Apparently the bomb was smuggled aboard the train,” Erdmann continued, “tied to the coupling between passenger coaches. Investigators are convinced it was caused by a… how do you say
Hollenmaschine
?”

“An infernal machine,” Charteris said.

“Yes. A combination explosive and incendiary device. The Reich’s Ministry of Information cites this incident as further proof that the threat of anarchy hangs over us all.”

“A threat hangs over the world, all right,” Charteris muttered.

“Do I have to remind you,” Erdmann asked dryly, “that a bomb on this ship would do considerably more damage?”

“That Parisian train wasn’t filled with hydrogen, you mean?”

Captain Pruss said, firmly, “Because of your concerns about Joseph Spah’s unsupervised visit to his dog, Mr. Charteris, I have had the ship inspected again—bow to stern. No bomb was found.”