The Hindenburg Murders Read online

  “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.

  As they passed the promenade windows, the view froze Charteris and the lovely blonde, and around them other passengers were reacting the same way.

  While they had dined and talked, the Hindenburg had turned in a wide northwesterly arc, flying over the canals of Holland, crossing the narrow waterway that was the Wester Schelde, loping over the sandbars and cold, rugged waters of the North Sea, into an electrical storm.

  Out the observation-deck windows, black clouds swirled and swarmed, billowing like ink cast into water, alive with crackling lightning, the jagged veins of energy periodically lighting up this darkest of nights.

  Hilda clutched his arm, alarmed, pressing herself up against him. It would almost have been worth it, if Charteris weren’t equally alarmed at the thought of what lightning might mean to the seven million cubic feet of hydrogen gas keeping this blimp afloat.

  Captain Lehmann’s voice rang out: “No cause for alarm! You are as safe here as if you were walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin!”

  Charteris hoped Lehmann didn’t mean as safe as a Jew walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin….

  But the airship itself seemed unfazed by the storm; a steamship in this gale would be rolling, its framework groaning, screeching, creaking; but the Hindenburg was gliding through the black clouds, as smoothly as though this were a serene, starry night. The storm sounded like a gently rolling surf, as rain pelted the ship’s linen skin.

  As Charteris walked his beautiful companion to her cabin, the stillness, the quiet, was remarkable. The only sound was a faint drone of diesel, providing a muted, soothing pulse.

  “Difficult to believe the world out there is so torn apart,” Hilda said, as they paused at her cabin door.

  Did she mean the storm, or something else?

  “You were upset at dinner,” he said.

  She frowned. A few other people were passing by in the narrow corridor.

  “Come in a moment,” she said.

  Within her cabin, she bid him sit on the lower bunk. She sat next to him, slumped a bit, hands folded.

  “I did not realize you had noticed,” she said.

  “You were trembling. I thought you might cry. Did you have friends in Guernica?”

  “No… but I lost someone in the war in Spain.”

  “A friend?”

  “… A lover.”

  “When?”

  “Just this January past.”

  “Hilda, I’m so very sorry.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “But, my dear… I thought you weren’t political?”

  She stared into nothing. “Losing him… That is why I have no time for politics. Do you understand?”

  “I think I do.”

  She gave him a small, tender kiss and sent him on his way.

  As she was closing the door, Hilda bestowed him a smile, just a little one, and said, “Knock at nine—we will have breakfast.”

  “Good night, Hilda.”

  Heading to the stairs down to B deck and its renowned smoking room, Charteris noticed Knoecher and Spah standing at the promenade windows, the dark storm clouds swirling beyond them. The two men were chatting and it seemed friendly enough. Charteris wished he could warn Spah of the S.D. agent’s true intentions—at the first discreet opportunity, he would.

  The smoking room, way aft on the starboard side, was entered through the cramped bar, an antechamber little bigger than a passenger cabin. Charteris turned down the bar steward’s suggestion of an LZ-129 Frosted Cocktail (gin with orange juice) and acquired a Scotch and water, double, Peter Dawson of course.

  The bartender granted him admission through the one-customer-at-a-time revolving air-lock door into the pressurized compartment, which Charteris guessed measured at around twelve and a half by fifteen feet. The room seemed larger, though, thanks to the arrangement of black leather settees built into three walls, facing black-and-chrome tables and chairs. The fourth wall paralleled the side of the ship, and a railing allowed passengers to gaze down at a bank of Plexiglas windows set flush in the floor along the edge of the ship. Yellow pigskin leather covered the walls, which were illustrated with images of various hot-air balloons.

  Hot air was apropos, with all the smoking and talking going on by the exclusively male populace of the room, who shared one lighter, housed in the wall on a draw cable. Advertising man Douglas and his little group sat chatting in a cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke—the room was well ventilated, but these were serious smokers. Leonhard Adelt was standing at the rail, a drink in hand, a cigarette drooping from his lips, as he studied the black clouds churning below.

  Charteris was glad to catch the journalist by himself.

  “Mr. Adelt,” the author said, very quietly, “I must advise you to watch what you say around this Knoecher character.”

  Adelt’s handsome, intelligent features tightened, then loosened as he grinned. “Oh, he seems nice enough.”

  Charteris shook his head. “Don’t ask me to say more, because I shouldn’t. Just don’t talk politics around him, no matter how he prompts you.”

  Adelt frowned, and his face fell as he grasped the author’s meaning. “What a fool…”

  “Pardon?”

  “Not you, Mr. Charteris, no not you… I must have allowed myself to be seduced by the elegance and civility of this airship…. This is like another world, is it not? A better world than the one down there—suspicion, fear, jealousy, self-hatred, these are the cancers at the heart of the Reich.”

  “I just thought you should know. But I never said this, understood?”

  “Understood, Mr. Charteris. Easily understood by one who lives in a land of midnight knocks at the door… who exists in a country of rigid structure, rotting from within, morally bankrupt… Excuse me. I’m a little drunk.”

  “You’re articulate, nonetheless.”

  “I only hope…”

  “Yes?”

  Adelt’s eyes were tight with concern. “Did we say too much at the table tonight? I know we spoke of our friend Stefan Zweig….”

  “I can’t judge that. I don’t have to swim in tho
se waters.”

  “Someday you may, Mr. Charteris. Someday you may…. If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll join my wife in our cabin.”

  Charteris finished his own drink and headed up to A deck. In the hallway, shoes had been placed outside most doors, for elves to polish in the night. No shoes outside Charteris’s cabin, though.

  No sign at all of his cabin mate.

  Shrugging, Charteris undressed, hung up his tuxedo, set his Italian loafers in the hall, slipped into silk pajamas, and slid between fine linen sheets and light woolen blankets, falling quickly, soundly asleep, lulled by the murmur of distant engines.

  Blissfully unaware of the storm outside, or that his cabin mate, one Eric Knoecher, would not be joining him on this—or any—night.

  DAY TWO:

  TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1937

  FIVE

  HOW THE HINDENBURG MISPLACED A PASSENGER, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS WALKED THE PLANK

  BY DAWN OF WHAT WOULD be the airship’s first full day of travel, sailing along at 2,100 feet on a course designed to outmaneuver the churning storm system, the Hindenburg cruised above the English Channel, past the Scilly Islands. The swastika-tailed silver ship flew somewhat south of Ireland and the familiar landmark that was the Old Head of Kinsale, heading toward the endless lonely gray-blue expanse of the Atlantic. Aboard were ninety-six people (passengers and crew), as well as a considerable cargo including mail, fancy goods, airplane parts, tobacco, films, partridge eggs, and Joseph Spah’s dog. As the time for breakfast neared—serving began at eight A.M.—the airship gradually lowered to the accustomed altitude of one thousand feet.

  Surprised and vaguely concerned when—upon awaking—he discovered himself alone in the cabin, Charteris shaved and washed up at the tilt-down basin, frowning all the while.

  An innocent reason for Knoecher’s absence might present itself. Perhaps the undercover S.D. agent had followed his cabin mate’s suggestion and requested one of the numerous unoccupied berths on the airship.

  But Charteris knew that was unlikely: the S.D. man had been placed in the author’s quarters specifically to keep tabs on a potential troublemaker.

  The other obvious possibility—that Eric Knoecher had gotten lucky with a female passenger, spending the night in another cabin—seemed equally unlikely. The only two unattached females aboard were Margaret Mather and Hilda Friederich. Charteris felt Miss Mather made an improbable paramour for the handsome bounder, and besides which, if the spinster had spent the night with anyone, it would have been that college boy who’d been plying her (and himself, in loin-girding preparation) with white wine.

  As for Hilda, Charteris was confident that he was the only man in her shipboard life.

  A remaining prospect was that Knoecher had stayed up all night, either in conference with Erdmann and the other two Luftwaffe “observers,” or perhaps sat up talking, maybe falling asleep, in a seat in the lounge or on one of the observation decks (the bar closed at three A.M., so that was not a possibility).

  Charteris slipped into comfortable, sporty attire—a single-breasted gray herringbone sport jacket with white shirt, plaid tie, darker gray slacks, gray-and-white loafers—and followed the seductive scent of coffee to the portside dining room, like a cobra heeding a snake charmer’s flute.

  He was able to collect a cup of steaming aromatic coffee from a steward (taking it black), but breakfast proper wasn’t to be served for another forty-five minutes. A number of passengers were already seated having coffee and rolls, and others were seated on the two-seater benches jutting from the wall of windows, enjoying light conversation or writing a letter or postcard. They were mostly ignoring the view, which wasn’t much: a gloomy overcast sky, when the ship wasn’t caught within a gray cloud.

  Knoecher wasn’t among them.

  Sipping at his coffee, the author strolled around to the starboard lounge, where he found himself alone, the other passengers preferring to be nearer the pending food. The long row of slanting windows and the gray landscape of the sky was all his, if he wanted it. Idly, a thought nibbling at the back of his brain, he went to where he’d seen Knoecher and Spah standing, chatting civilly, last night. He didn’t know what he expected to find.

  But he found it.

  Not at first. At first, having set the coffee cup on the ledgelike sill, he leaned against the aluminum bar separating one window from another and looked down through the closed Plexiglas portal at the stirred-up sea, the agitated swells trailing tendrils of foamy white. For the sea to be that angry, the wind had to be strong—but up here, in the Never-Never Land of the Hindenburg, all was calm. No steamship propeller shafts to vibrate you, no handgrips needed to protect you from the lurch of the ship as it rode the choppy waves.

  The aluminum window frame was polished and smooth under his palm, which was how he came to notice the tickle of silk threads.

  Frowning, he lifted his hand and spied—caught alongside and between aluminum window frame and its jamb—orange threads, silk threads….

  No, more than just threads, a tiny piece of cloth had been caught there. Holding the edge of the trapped scrap of silk in the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, Charteris used his left to lift the handle on the window, which raised like a lid on the world below.

  This freed the scrap of cloth, wind-fluttering in his grasp, perhaps an inch across and about as long, tapering to a point, the point having been caught in the window, and the rest torn away, the threads standing up like hair on a frightened man’s head.

  He knew at once what it was, and in moments a scenario explaining its presence in that window jamb had presented itself.

  Closing the window, slipping the silk fragment in his sport-jacket pocket, Charteris glanced about to see if he still had the starboard promenade to himself: he did. Quickly but casually, he returned to the portside promenade and the dining room, which was filling up. He deposited his empty coffee cup on a passing busboy’s tray, looking around for Chief Steward Kubis, who he knew would be supervising the staff, and mingling with the guests.

  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 Charte
ris 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.