Max Collins - The Hindenburg Murders

“My pleasure, Walter.” And Charteris made the friendly Nazi an even stronger mix of bourbon and water, having barely touched his own first drink. “Tell me something about your background, why don’t you?”

“Well, I was born in Tettnang, near the Bodensee. My father was a foreman in the Daimler works and that’s where I first went to work….”

Charteris stopped listening, though the pudgy-cheeked mechanic could never have guessed. Barnholzer’s was a story the author didn’t feel the need to hear-after all, he knew it already.

This was a man, like so many of his countrymen, who had been born at exactly the right moment to receive the worst education possible, to endure postwar Soviet government, inflation, and depression. To men like Barnholzer-who didn’t seem such a bad sort-the National German Socialist Workers Party must have seemed like the greatest thing since sliced bread. After the perfidy of Versailles, the perceived greed of Jewish bankers, the ineptitude and anarchy of Catholic and Communist “democracy,” a weak boy like this could only inevitably embrace the strength of Hitler.

It was already an old story, and it sickened Charteris, whose smile did not betray that fact.

“I don’t know if this is what you are looking for, for your article, Mr. Chartreuse.”

“Oh yes, very interesting, very interesting indeed… can I freshen that for you?”

“Please.”

Charteris did so, then said, “Tell me about some of your friends. Steward Kubis mentioned one of the riggers-Eric Spehl?”

“Yes. Yes, Eric is a friend. Maybe not a close friend. Kind of odd, Eric-quiet, reserved. He even likes to read books.”

“Imagine. Is he in the party?”

Barnholzer laughed. “Eric? No, no… You understand I am not S.S., I don’t feel the need to inform. If it were my duty, of course, I would….”

“Of course.”

“But Eric, he’s a Catholic, you know. Very religious. Wears a blessed Virgin Mary medal on a chain on his neck. He’s been complaining about the arrests of these perverted priests, and sex-crazed nuns.”

“Oh, they’re the worst kind. So he has some controversial ideas, this Eric Spehl?”

“He walks a dangerous path. The woman he lives with, Beatrice Schmidt, is on the dangerous citizens’ list. Older woman, dark-haired, a tramp, and a leftist. He frequents coffeehouses, cafes, bars, where these black-shirted Communists talk against the state.”

“Do you think Spehl could be aligned with the resistance?”

Three glasses of bourbon or not, Barnholzer saw the danger in that question. The plump crewman’s eyes raced with the knowledge that he’d been too free with his words.

“There is no resistance in Germany,” he said softly.

“Oh. I forgot. Is your fellow engineer, Willy Scheef, also a friend of Eric’s?”

Barnholzer nodded, grinning crookedly, glad to be back on safer ground. “Willy’s a good man. Everybody’s pal. Fun. Do anything for a friend. Maybe drinks too much.”

“Not in Communist bars, I hope.”

“Willy! No. No, no. He’s not a party member but he is loyal…. I may have misspoken about Eric. I didn’t say he was disloyal. Sometimes a man will do foolish things to get into a woman’s… well, into a woman.”

“Walter,” Charteris said, taking the empty water glass from the mechanic, “you’ve been most helpful to me.”

Barnholzer looked like he was trying to decide whether to frown or cry. “Please don’t put my name in your article.”

“Oh, wouldn’t it be all right to write up your fervent views about the party you love?”

And the crooked-tooth smile blossomed. “That, yes… please don’t say I told you what I did, about Eric Spehl.”

“You will remain an unnamed, reliable source, Walter…. Here-take the bottle with you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Chartiss.”

Before long, feeling every bit the proficient amateur detective, Charteris was heading to the portside promenade, thinking how right he’d been about Spehl. So Willy Scheef was the kind of fellow who’d do anything for a friend? Well that would seem to include attacking someone in the night.

Most troubling were the indications that Spehl was a leftist zealot, an active member of that supposedly nonexistent resistance. Much as he might sympathize with Spehl’s anti-Nazi sentiments, much as he tended to agree that Eric Knoecher had made a prime candidate for casting overboard, Charteris could only wonder if somewhere, tucked in the folds of fabric holding together this ship, a bomb ticked away, waiting to make a great big point about the fallibility of Hitler’s Germany.

He found Hilda saving a seat for him in the dining room at a table for four, shared with the Adelts. The handsome middle-aged journalist wore the same dark suit he’d come aboard in, and his blonde young wife looked typically pretty in a yellow-and-white frock.

“Luncheon’s a bit premature, isn’t it?” Charteris said, pulling up a chair, joining them.

“They’re serving it early,” Gertrude said, “so we’ll all be able to take in the view.”

“We will pass over New York shortly,” Hilda said.

“Ah,” Charteris said.

“Yes,” Leonard said, “and we’ll be flying low enough to get a nice close look. I think after this long, dull crossing, the captain wants to finally give us our money’s worth.”

“I trust that isn’t a sentiment expressed in that article of yours,” Charteris said, pouring Hilda and then himself a glass of Liebfrauenmilch.

“Oh, no,” Leonard said. “I assure you I’ve lied so thoroughly and convincingly that even the Ministry of Propaganda would approve.”

“So you’ve finished it, then? Your article?”

“All but the ending. This brush with the roofs of skyscrapers should provide it.”

The view of New York from the promenade’s slanting windows proved no disappointment. With his arm around Hilda’s shoulder, Charteris stared down as the towers of Manhattan revealed themselves magically, poking up through the mist.

“We’re flying quite high,” Leonhard said, at Charteris’s left. “The skyline looks like a board of nails….”

“We’ll get a closer look. Patience. It’ll be worth the wait.”

“There’s the Statue of Liberty!” Gertrude said.

“Small as a porcelain figure,” her husband muttered, as if writing his article aloud.

Hilda said, “So then you like New York, Leslie?”

“It was love at first sight,” he said.

As the airship dipped lower, and the skyscrapers seemed to reach for them, he thought of how when he had first arrived in America, on that small steamer, with twenty-five bucks in his pocket, he’d found the buildings of Manhattan even taller and shinier than he’d imagined. He remembered sitting in that cheap hotel room on Lexington Avenue, looking across at the soaring white towers of the Waldorf-so clean and graceful compared with the stodgy, smoke-grimy architecture of home, rising sheer and white against a spotless blue sky the likes of which London seldom saw.

When was that? Thirty-two?

And now, after this very gray trip, the sky was that spotless blue again. The sun was out, and the ship was loping low across Times Square, sightseers pointing to the sky, standing frozen on the west side of Broadway. How he loved the electric nervous urgency down there, scurrying crowds on sidewalks, the press of honking traffic in packed streets. The elemental force of it had spurred him to try to match that pace, dazzling him with the prospect of infinite horizons.

But the Hindenburg had the power to bring this frantic city to a standstill, stopping traffic, and that was a delight, as well. On rooftops and firescapes, from windows and sidewalks, thousands of sophisticated New Yorkers gaped like farmers, craning their necks for a look at the vast airship draping its blue shadow over their city.