“Yes sir,” the captain said, slipping away.
Dettmer looked back to me. “We’d brought these things for the other man. The overalls and the fur coat and the felt overshoes and so forth, the extreme cold weather things, these can wait until we are at a higher altitude. Your flying jacket will immediately make you one of us.”
He laughed at this thought.
Courteous words from Wolfinger came to my mind. A comradely laugh even formed in my throat, ready to employ. I could make myself say or do none of it.
I was getting too close to these boys once again.
Dettmer paid no attention to my unresponsiveness.
He said, “The woolen underclothes you should take time now to put on. To sweat with the rest of us.”
He laughed again, a softer one, this one while searching my face, suddenly afraid he was getting too familiar.
I could manage nothing but blankness for him.
He cut off his laugh.
This was Klaus von Wolfinger’s likely response anyway. So be it.
The executive officer arrived with two contrasting articles of clothing folded one on top of the other, one rough-ribbed wool and one soft-cured leather.
Dettmer said, “You will need to put on the woolen underclothes at once, Colonel. There is privacy in the keel. In the crew space aft.”
I was glad to have a chance to get away to myself.
I began to reach for the clothes.
Dettmer intervened. He said, “But first, please allow me.” He took the leather flying jacket from the captain.
He held it up and spread it open for me.
He said, “You’ll need to remove your pistol, Colonel.”
I hesitated. As myself, and as Wolfinger.
Dettmer picked up on the hesitation. He said, quite respectfully, almost gently, “For the jacket. Of course you will retain your weapon. Though we ourselves carry none, for safety’s sake.”
“I promise not to discharge it, Major,” I said.
He nodded to me.
I undid my pistol belt and laid it at my feet with the dispatch case.
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
The air was cleared.
He lifted the coat a little.
This was a ritual I dreaded now. The bond of a uniform. The bond of personality, of camaraderie. I dared not bond with these men.
I had to focus.
These men were the enemy tonight.
They were the instruments of mass murder.
I made myself smile. I turned my back to him. I slipped the dispatch case off my shoulder and laid it on the floor at my feet.
Dettmer put the jacket on me.
I felt it like a second skin.
That was the danger.
And my mother slipped into my head. The mother she had always been, training her son the way she always had. In and around theaters. This was not a skin upon me. It was a costume. I was playing a role. I was an actor. I was a spy.
I shot my cuffs.
I began to button the jacket. With each button, a flourish of the hand.
I did not even need to turn to Dettmer for this. The gesture was for me. Working on my character.
My qualms were quickly dissipating.
I stopped buttoning about halfway.
Dettmer said, “There. You are now senior officer on the LZ 78.”
I turned to him. I doled out one more faint smile. The smile of a superior officer pleased with his inferior for recognizing the appropriate protocol in an unusual circumstance.
He saluted. He held it.
I saluted him.
“You notice that the fit of your jacket is good,” Dettmer said.
It was, indeed. Nearly perfect. “I do,” I said.
“We’d heard that the Englishman was a larger man.”
Albert was certainly larger than me. I had a flash of that first sight of him outside his castle, towering over my mother, leaning down to buss her on the cheek.
Even more dangerous than to think on these Germans at this moment was to think on my mother.
“We did not expect the jacket to fit him so well,” Dettmer said.
He let that settle in for a moment.
They’d arranged for him never to be one of them. His uniform would not fit.
And then Major Dettmer actually worked up the courage to give Colonel Klaus von Wolfinger a small, conspiratorial wink.
Wolfinger chose to overlook Dettmer’s transgression. I said, with a large dose of duty and only a faint, condescending hint of faux camaraderie, “Things are as they should be.”
58
I pitched my airship underwear behind a fuel tank.
I thought simply to stay here in the keel for the takeoff and on through my incendiary improvisation. But Dettmer expected me. He could conceivably do something officious if I didn’t show up for the launch, could send someone to see if I’d found my way all right in the dark.
The walkway suddenly shifted a little beneath my feet. The airship trembled, and I felt a twinge of uplift in my chest.
I knew we’d thrown off our hangar ballast and had lifted from our bumper blocks and outside we were surrounded by two hundred ground crewmen holding hard at the handling lines, letting us hover but reining us in, keeping us centered in the hangar doorway.
I went forward and down the ladder and onto the bridge.
Dettmer was at the front window of the gondola, his back to me, framed alone against the sky beyond the hangar door. The sky was off white, as if it were packed with cotton wool.
He scanned outward and downward, from far left across to far right. And he commanded, “Airship march!”
The executive officer, leaning from a side window, cried, “Airship march!” and the order was taken up outside to port, to bow, to starboard.
At once, almost imperceptibly, we began to move.
Major Dettmer looked over his shoulder.
He saw me. I was where he’d hoped I’d be.
“Colonel,” he said. “Please join me.”
I stepped forward, stood beside him on his right.
Dettmer kept his eyes ahead.
Two wide-set guiding rails led from the hangar mouth out three hundred yards into the maneuvering field. Arrayed ahead were eight handling lines stretched forward by a hundred bent and straining feldgrau backs.
And the movement was clearly perceptible now.
We were floating into the daylight.
And from all around us — front and sides — a sound rose up. Men’s voices — two hundred men’s voices — rising as one. They sang. They sang of thunderbolts and clashing swords and crashing waves. They sang loud even though they strained hard to drag this vast machine of war into the oncoming night.
And when they began to sing the chorus, the men around me, Dettmer and the executive officer and all the others, joined in. Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein! Dear Fatherland put your mind at rest. Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein! Firm and true stands the watch, the watch on the Rhine.
Colonel Wolfinger sang as well. He sang louder than them all. Indeed, I have a pretty good tenor and so Wolfinger even drew an admiring turn of the head from the commandant of the LZ 78. Major Dettmer smiled at this powerful officer who had graced them with his presence. And I nodded my head to Dettmer, even as I lifted my voice with all these good Germans and entreated the dear Fatherland not to worry about a thing.
When the chorus was done, the men outside went on for another verse, though the officers on the bridge stopped singing and focused on their tasks.
Wolfinger was ready just to keep a stoic, watchful silence. He’d been warmer to Dettmer and his men than he’d been to anyone in perhaps his whole career. And his clamming up now suited Christopher Cobb just fine. Because I wanted simply to get through the next twenty minutes and on to my business.