Max Collins - The Hindenburg Murders

“Is it forty days after Easter already?” Charteris toasted with his teacup. “Ah, yes, another holy day of obligation. Well, we’ve ascended, all right.”

“Are you Catholic too, Leslie?” Gertrude asked.

“Nominally. This is the day we celebrate Jesus telling the disciples to get off their duffs and spread the Good News.”

Hilda blinked twice and smiled at him.

“I’m impressed,” Leonhard said.

“Well, don’t be,” Charteris said, buttering a biscuit. “You see, my brother is a priest. Which, considering the sort of life I lead, would seem to indicate some incredible form of family compensation.”

That amused everyone, but soon Hilda was frowning again, drumming her fingers.

“It’ll be fine, dear,” Charteris told her. “We’ve swung northward again. Look-they’re preparing the table for the customs and immigration men.”

Which Kubis and another steward were in the process of doing, where the promenade emptied into the stairway.

“Have you noticed that sad colonel anywhere?” Gertrude asked them.

“Erdmann?” Charteris said, innocently, “No.”

“It’s funny he’s nowhere to be seen.” The pretty blonde shook her head, her cap of curls shimmering, her big blue eyes wide with thought. “You’d think he’d be sitting here, waiting to be first off the ship.”

“Why do you say that, darling?” her husband asked.

“Well, when we… ascended, to use the word of the day, he seemed so reluctant to be leaving. Remember him sitting just over there, so melancholy? And his wife coming aboard to embrace him so warmly? You’d think they were never going to see each other again.”

Before long the stewards were passing among them again, with sandwiches of cold cuts and cheeses piled on their silver trays. Carafes of Liebfrauenmilch were distributed, as well.

A muffled sound-a steam whistle-caused everyone to turn and look.

Leonhard Adelt said, “We will be landing soon-that was the call for the ship’s crew to landing stations.”

Hilda sighed and smiled, relief dancing in her dark blue eyes.

Charteris touched a napkin to his lips. “If you’ll excuse me.”

“What is it, Leslie?” Hilda asked, reaching out for him, fingertips brushing his hand.

“Little boys’ room. I’ll be back before too long. They won’t let any of us off without going through customs.”

He went up to Kubis, who was supervising the other stewards in their sandwich-serving. “Can you get away for just a few moments?”

“Well, sir, I…”

“Can’t I wring one last imposition out of those marks I bequeathed you?”

Kubis smiled a little. “Certainly, sir. Anything for the man who wrote Saint in New York .”

“Take me to Colonel Erdmann’s quarters.”

Now the steward frowned; he had been made aware of Erdmann’s house arrest of Spehl. “But, sir…”

“No questions, Heinrich. This is an imposition, remember?”

“Yes, sir.”

As he followed Kubis out of the lounge and along the starboard promenade, the slanting rain-flecked windows-cool air rushing in-revealed an early twilight had settled in, though as overcast as it now was, the difference between day and dusk was minimal. They’d be over Lakehurst again, shortly-he wondered if they would land or swing around for another sightseeing jaunt.

As Kubis began down the stairs, Charteris-somewhat surprised by the chief steward’s route-asked, “Does Colonel Erdmann have one of the new rooms down on B deck?”

“Yes-they’re larger, you know. With windows.”

Though the bulk of the Hindenburg ’s cabins were on A deck, where Charteris had been, a handful had been added to B deck since the ship’s successful first season, to increase passenger space. These cabins were aft, taking up space that had originally been tentlike crew quarters.

At the bottom of the stairs, Kubis turned sharply to the left, where the floor itself was the retracted gangway, moving through a newly punched door giving access to the keel corridor. On the Hindenburg ’s previous season of flights, the keel corridor was closed to passengers; but with the addition of this new wing of cabins, that was no longer the case.

The steward turned to the right, down the narrow corridor, and stopped at a door marked B-1, looking to Charteris with a hesitant expression. “Should I knock, sir?” he whispered.

“Please,” Charteris said.

Kubis rapped his knuckles tentatively on the door.

Nothing.

The steward glanced at Charteris, who nodded, saying, “Again.”

Kubis knocked again, louder. Then said, “Colonel Erdmann! Sorry to disturb you, sir! It’s Chief Steward Kubis, sir!”

Nothing.

“Use your passkey,” Charteris said.

“But, sir…!”

“Use it, Heinrich.”

“Yes, sir.”

And the steward did, but the cabin-which was in fact half again as large as the A-deck cabins, with a sloping window like the one in Lehmann’s quarters-was empty, stripped not only of bedclothes, but of Erdmann and Spehl.

“Where are they, sir?” Kubis asked, looking all around, as if the two men might be stuffed under a bunk.

“That would seem to be the question,” Charteris said. “Heinrich, one last imposition-that door at the end of the hall leads into the belly of the ship, doesn’t it?”

“Yes it does, sir.”

“Unlock that for me.”

“Sir, I can’t….”

“You can. And when you have, I want you to go to Captain Pruss and tell him that Colonel Erdmann and Spehl are missing.”

Kubis seemed astounded by this proposition. “Captain Pruss is in the process of landing the airship, sir-he can’t be disturbed….”

“There may be a bomb on this ship, Heinrich. Do you understand? This ship might not land at all.”

Frowning, Kubis somehow managed to digest this notion quickly-but then the steward had been around the periphery of the various disappearances and inquiries afoot over the course of this trip; perhaps Charteris’s statement made it all make sense.

At any rate, there was no further discussion: the steward used his passkey on the door at the end of the keel corridor, opening it for Charteris, nodding to the author in a fashion that said the message would be delivered to the captain, come hell or high water.

Then Kubis was gone and Charteris, the door closing behind him, was like a small child in a vast, otherwise unattended and quite bizarre amusement park. He moved gingerly along the rubber-carpeted keel catwalk (no slippers this time, rather his Italian loafers), the diesel drone much louder back here, building to a roar as he approached one of the precarious, skimpily handrailed access gangways out to an engine gondola. The roar settled back to a drone as he moved aft, walking uphill, slightly, the ship heavy aft, the bow high, as he gazed up and around at the complex array of framework and rigging and netting and other catwalks, crisscrossing girders, struts, and rings, towering gas shafts and-nestled on either side, here and there-gas and water and fuel tanks, amid arches and ladders and wires, and yet most of all so much empty space.

Sun filtered through the translucent linen skin as he moved along, hazy illumination that gave the interior of the leviathan airship a warm yellowish cast, very different from the tour he’d taken Tuesday, when the day was overcast and the world back here was a grayish blue. That the western sky glowered black with the threat of a thunderstorm could not be discerned back here in this unreal mechanical wonderland. There was a strange stillness that might have been reassuring, even soothing, if the huge tan bladderlike gas cells looming left and right hadn’t been fluttering, quavering like flabby cheeks, as if the ship itself were nervous.