Max Collins - The Hindenburg Murders

“It is a lovely sight,” Hilda sighed.

“Yes it is,” Charteris said, but he was looking at her.

She wore a white silk shantung tunic dress with black buttons that angled across her full bosom and then marched down the side of her skirt in a straight line. He found her utterly bewitching, her braided blonde hair and deep blue eyes and creamy complexion, and full lips and full figure, rounding as it did, and narrowing, and flowing, at the precisely correct places….

She caught him staring at her. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong. Not on the earth or in the heavens.”

“Well, you look very nice, yourself, Leslie-you seem to be the only man who bothered dressing for dinner.”

He was in his tuxedo, which seemed none the worse for the half day it had spent folded up in his valise. “Less would have been an insult to such charming company.”

She laughed, a throaty, endearingly unfeminine laugh at that. “What is it the Americans say? Baloney!”

He laughed, too. “Coincidentally, I think that’s what we’re having for tonight’s late supper.”

Stewards were setting up a buffet of cold meats and cheeses and salads in the nearby dining room, which-like the lounge on the starboard side-was separated from the observation deck only by an aluminum railing.

“Shall we sit for a few moments?” Charteris asked, gesturing to the nearby orange-upholstered bench for two, which made a right angle to the row of windows.

“Why don’t we?” she said, and sat.

Settling in next to her, Charteris said, “We don’t really know much about each other, do we? Except that we’re both terribly attractive.”

The teeth in her smile were perfect and white; beneath all her sophistication, she had the beauty and form of a healthy farm girl. “I gather from remarks I have overhead that you are a famous author.”

“So famous you’ve never heard of me.”

“Others obviously have. But I am afraid I do not read mysteries.”

He slipped an arm behind her along the top of the two-seater. “Since I’ve already stolen a kiss, I feel rather awkward asking, but… who are you, Hilda Friederich? Germany’s biggest movie star, perhaps, or are you her most lovely Mata Hari?”

“Nothing so romantic. I am a secretary, a private secretary, to a vice president at Bundesbank in Frankfurt.”

“Ah-and you’ve sampled some of the goods, and have a bag of hot cash back in cold storage, and you’re heading to America for a new life.”

“Nothing so daring. I have a sister in New Jersey-Trenton. She married an American businessman last year, and has just had a baby. I am using my vacation to visit and help out for a few weeks.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know-that sounds romantic and daring to me. Are you political at all, Hilda?”

The dark blue eyes flared, eyelashes flying up like a window shade. “Heavens no.”

“You have no opinion on the current upheaval in your country.”

“What good would it do me if I did?”

“A very practical attitude.”

Passengers had begun to line up at the buffet; it was rather crowded.

“Do you mind if we just sit here awhile, my dear?” he asked her. “And let that queue thin out a bit?”

“I don’t mind in the least. The company is pleasant and you are keeping your hands more or less to yourself.”

“I’m not much for buffets. They make me feel rather like a barnyard animal squeezing in at the trough.” He frowned, sensing something. “I say-have we stopped?”

“I don’t know.” Hilda narrowed her eyes, cocked her head. “It is so hard to tell on this ship. But it does seem as though we are floating….”

“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.