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 those 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:
FIVE
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.