Surprised and vaguely concerned when-upon awaking-he discovered himself alone in the cabin, Charteris shaved and washed up at the tilt-down basin, frowning all the while.
An innocent reason for Knoecher’s absence might present itself. Perhaps the undercover S.D. agent had followed his cabin mate’s suggestion and requested one of the numerous unoccupied berths on the airship.
But Charteris knew that was unlikely: the S.D. man had been placed in the author’s quarters specifically to keep tabs on a potential troublemaker.
The other obvious possibility-that Eric Knoecher had gotten lucky with a female passenger, spending the night in another cabin-seemed equally unlikely. The only two unattached females aboard were Margaret Mather and Hilda Friederich. Charteris felt Miss Mather made an improbable paramour for the handsome bounder, and besides which, if the spinster had spent the night with anyone, it would have been that college boy who’d been plying her (and himself, in loin-girding preparation) with white wine.
As for Hilda, Charteris was confident that he was the only man in her shipboard life.
A remaining prospect was that Knoecher had stayed up all night, either in conference with Erdmann and the other two Luftwaffe “observers,” or perhaps sat up talking, maybe falling asleep, in a seat in the lounge or on one of the observation decks (the bar closed at three A.M., so that was not a possibility).
Charteris slipped into comfortable, sporty attire-a single-breasted gray herringbone sport jacket with white shirt, plaid tie, darker gray slacks, gray-and-white loafers-and followed the seductive scent of coffee to the portside dining room, like a cobra heeding a snake charmer’s flute.
He was able to collect a cup of steaming aromatic coffee from a steward (taking it black), but breakfast proper wasn’t to be served for another forty-five minutes. A number of passengers were already seated having coffee and rolls, and others were seated on the two-seater benches jutting from the wall of windows, enjoying light conversation or writing a letter or postcard. They were mostly ignoring the view, which wasn’t much: a gloomy overcast sky, when the ship wasn’t caught within a gray cloud.
Knoecher wasn’t among them.
Sipping at his coffee, the author strolled around to the starboard lounge, where he found himself alone, the other passengers preferring to be nearer the pending food. The long row of slanting windows and the gray landscape of the sky was all his, if he wanted it. Idly, a thought nibbling at the back of his brain, he went to where he’d seen Knoecher and Spah standing, chatting civilly, last night. He didn’t know what he expected to find.
But he found it.
Not at first. At first, having set the coffee cup on the ledgelike sill, he leaned against the aluminum bar separating one window from another and looked down through the closed Plexiglas portal at the stirred-up sea, the agitated swells trailing tendrils of foamy white. For the sea to be that angry, the wind had to be strong-but up here, in the Never-Never Land of the Hindenburg, all was calm. No steamship propeller shafts to vibrate you, no handgrips needed to protect you from the lurch of the ship as it rode the choppy waves.
The aluminum window frame was polished and smooth under his palm, which was how he came to notice the tickle of silk threads.
Frowning, he lifted his hand and spied-caught alongside and between aluminum window frame and its jamb-orange threads, silk threads….
No, more than just threads, a tiny piece of cloth had been caught there. Holding the edge of the trapped scrap of silk in the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, Charteris used his left to lift the handle on the window, which raised like a lid on the world below.
This freed the scrap of cloth, wind-fluttering in his grasp, perhaps an inch across and about as long, tapering to a point, the point having been caught in the window, and the rest torn away, the threads standing up like hair on a frightened man’s head.
He knew at once what it was, and in moments a scenario explaining its presence in that window jamb had presented itself.
Closing the window, slipping the silk fragment in his sport-jacket pocket, Charteris glanced about to see if he still had the starboard promenade to himself: he did. Quickly but casually, he returned to the portside promenade and the dining room, which was filling up. He deposited his empty coffee cup on a passing busboy’s tray, looking around for Chief Steward Kubis, who he knew would be supervising the staff, and mingling with the guests.
And there Kubis was, near a table where sat that wholesome-looking German family with their two well-behaved, properly attired boys (one was maybe six, the other possibly eight). The younger boy-bored, as they waited for breakfast to come-was seated on the floor near the table, playing with a tin toy, a little car with Mickey Mouse driving. When the child ran it quickly across the carpet, the toy threw sparks.
“Lovely boy,” Kubis, leaning in with clasped hands, told the parents, who nodded back with proud smiles over their coffee. “And I do hate to play the villain… but I must confiscate that vehicle.”
“What?” the father said, not sure if Kubis was joking.
Kubis tousled the child’s hair; the boy frowned up at the steward, who with one big hand was lifting the tin car from two small hands.
“Please tell your son,” Kubis said, “why we take no chances with sparks on a zeppelin.”
The father gathered the boy onto his lap and was quietly explaining-the child didn’t cry-as Kubis handed the car to a busboy, whispering instructions.
“My apologies,” Kubis said to the family, “and I’ll see the lad gets it back before we land.”
Charteris ambled over and placed a hand on the steward’s shoulder. “Heinrich, you’re a hard man.”
“Sometimes I have to be, Mr. Charteris.”
“Me, too. I need to talk to Captain Lehmann-it’s important.”
“He’s not come up for breakfast yet, sir.”
“Take me to him.”
The chief steward’s eyes narrowed but he did not question Charteris’s demand-and it had been a demand, not a request.
“I believe he’s in the control gondola, sir.”
“Fine.”
No further conversation followed, not even small talk. The friendliness these two usually shared fell away, the tone of the author’s voice having conveyed a seriousness that the steward responded to dutifully.
Kubis led Charteris down the stairs to B deck and forward through the keel corridor, trading the modern luxury of the passenger deck for the spare reality of a narrow rubber-padded catwalk that cut through a maze of wires and controls, bordered by massive fuel and water tanks. With the gray choppy ocean hazily visible directly beneath, the precariousness of this approach was diminished by the steadiness of the ship in flight, as well as cables and ropes strung along either side, providing tenuous railings.
Rain-flecked windows were spaced along the arching pathway, looking out onto the charcoal cloud in which the airship was currently enveloped, and the trek was rather like crossing a jungle crevice on a rope bridge. But no jungle was so eerily silent: the wind failed even to whisper as it rushed by, thanks to the streamlined design of the ship, and the engines way aft were not even faintly audible.
Then the gangway emptied onto a rubber-floored platform, on either side of which were doorless mail and wireless rooms, a single blue-uniformed crew member at work in either. Just beyond these work areas, and prior to where officers’ cabins began, the platform was breached by an aperture from which a ladder yawned, providing the inauspicious means of entering the control-room gondola below.