But she merely smiled, faintly. “Did we? Or was it you, interfering in a plan that left unmolested would not have taken a single life? And would have struck Nazism a terrible blow?”
Now he laughed, only it turned into a cough; the smoke taste filming his mouth was nasty. “Maybe you’re right. But you and Eric’ll have to take responsibility for Willy Scheef.”
She frowned, puzzled, apparently genuinely so. “Willy…? I know nothing of this.”
“You know, that’s just possible. You may not even know that Eric threw poor Willy overboard.”
The eyes widened; the whites were bloodshot. “He did what?”
“As I said, Beatrice… Hilda… it was a lot of little things-there’s the irritation you displayed when Eric paid his little unscheduled visit to A deck, for my autograph. Today, discovering that you, like Eric Spehl, were a devout Catholic… you let it slip in our little Ascension Day chat. Then there was the fact you were visiting your sister, to help her with her new baby-yet your address was the Hotel Sterling. That just didn’t sit right…. And of course you were so frightfully worried about the postponed landing-perhaps knowing that a timer was ticking away on a bomb that had been set without those interminable delays factored in.”
Her eyes, still wide, had tightened, now. “Those tiny things told you…?”
“No. One slightly larger thing did. This is how Willy gets involved. You don’t know about the midnight beating, do you?”
Again, she seemed utterly bewildered. “Midnight-what are you-”
And he told her about Willy Scheef, at Eric Spehl’s bidding, coming to the cabin to deliver a message by way of a beating.
“The message Willy delivered was ‘Stop what you’re doing,’” Charteris said, “but I made the mistake of thinking the message meant I should back off my investigation. Why should I be warned so late in the game? Less than a day left? How much detective work might I still do, and anyway, nothing I’d done had been very effective, had it? But the warning didn’t refer to my investigation… did it, Hilda?”
“I do not know.”
“Oh, well, perhaps-but I think you can figure it out. When I spent the night in your cabin, when we had that early-morning interruption by a steward, supposedly wanting to make the room up… that was no steward… that was Eric Spehl, sneaking a visit to his sweetheart.”
She said nothing.
“Eric knew you were going to keep an eye on me, Hilda, but he didn’t think sleeping with me would be part of the bargain… and he was furious with both of us. That’s what I was being warned to stop doing-seeing you… sleeping with you. That’s why Willy Scheef died… not to save the fatherland from Adolf Hitler. Just to cover up a petty little crime of assault, since it might lead to exposure of the bigger crime of sabotage, not to mention Eric Knoecher’s murder.”
She sighed heavily. “Eric was a simple, jealous boy.”
“You and Colonel Fritz Erdmann and others in the resistance molded and shaped and manipulated Eric Spehl into doing your bidding. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with your cause-it’s just that I don’t like being molded, shaped, and manipulated myself… or seeing big dumb clucks like Willy Scheef bumped off for no good reason.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“Of course you did-your young lover is risking everything to sabotage the ship he helped build, and he catches you in bed with another man…. All that stuff about needing adventurous men, wanting to live a larger life through a man of influence, that was the real you talking, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose it was.”
“And I was the perfect type to latch onto-sophisticated, successful, divorced….”
“You flatter yourself.”
He laughed again, managing not to cough this time. “What did Eric think your mutual future held? That he would sneak away from the ship, slip into America-that you and he would traipse through the flowers together, building a new life in the Land of the Free?”
“He would have worked as a photographer.”
“And you would have been a photographer’s wife? How long would that have lasted? It doesn’t sound very… adventurous to me. Also, for a Communist, you seem to have rather refined tastes.”
A tear rolled down her cheek, smearing the soot. “I did love him, in my fashion… and he died with me in his eyes.”
“Looking up at an angel.”
Another trickle of tear; a sniffle. “You’re cruel.”
“No. If I were cruel, I’d turn you in to somebody or other. Trouble is, I don’t particularly care to see this thing get uglier than it already is… or to spend the next several months of my life in court proceedings and other inquiries, explaining what really happened to and on the goddamn Hindenburg.”
She looked pointedly at him. “What did happen?”
Charteris sighed, shrugged; the drizzle was picking up again. “Eric figured out that Fritz was probably going to shoot him over the Willy Scheef blunder-they struggled, a stray bullet caught a gasbag. And the rest is history-or rather isn’t history… because I’ll never tell it.”
Her smile had some sneer in it. “You will never tell it because I am right.”
“You are, Hilda?”
“Yes-you caused this, Leslie. If you had not interfered-”
“I don’t give a damn about that, because I don’t believe it for a second. Those clumsy saboteurs might well have blown us up in any case. No, I won’t tell this story because I wouldn’t give Adolf Hitler the satisfaction of saying anarchist forces, opposing him, took all these innocent lives, on American soil.”
“… Oh.”
A faint crackling of the burning ship could be heard from across the field-like someone was popping corn.
Quietly, he asked, “Is there a real Hilda Friederich?”
“… No. She is an invention. People who share my beliefs, working within the Reich, arranged the false papers.”
“And now you disappear into America. To start a new life.”
“If you will allow.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
She swallowed; her lips trembled. “I did not mean to hurt you.”
“You didn’t hurt me, dear. A damn zeppelin blew up in my face-that’s what hurt me.”
“Then… we won’t see each other again.”
“How can we? You don’t exist.”
Then he turned away from her, his eyes reverting to the glowing, smoldering framework, as he waited for her to go.
Which, before too very long, she did.
Charteris stayed at the New Yorker Hotel for three days, before taking the train to Miami for his birthday festivities. A United States naval intelligence officer had taken a perfunctory interview with him, to see whether or not the creator of the Saint would be needed to testify at the upcoming American inquiry into the crash. The author told the investigator nothing of the plan devised by Erdmann, Spehl, and Hilda/Beatrice, working hard to make it seem he had nothing pertinent to offer; and so he was not required to testify.
Reporters tracked him down at the hotel and, though he normally didn’t shy away from publicity, he gave no interviews, and thus was barely mentioned in the press, though he did follow the story intently himself.
Joe Spah got plenty of publicity, posing with his pretty wife, his three tiny children and a police dog the kids had been led to believe was the late Ulla. Joe’s acrobatic leap from the burning airship was heralded, though he had fractured his heel in the fall, and the Radio City Music Hall appearance had to be postponed.
Margaret Mather and the Adelts were widely interviewed, and it was revealed that Margaret would write her story for Harper’s (prose, not poetry) and Leonhard’s article (which now had an ending) would appear in Reader’s Digest.
Other survivors-none badly harmed-were frequently quoted, including that rootin’ tootin’ Nazi George Hirschfeld (happily in the arms of some showgirl by now, Charteris hoped) and stockyard king Colonel Nelson Morris-though his businessman friends, advertising man Ed Douglas and perfume king Burt Dolan, had perished, as had Moritz Feibusch, though Moritz’s crony Leuchtenberg, who’d been drunk most of the trip, made it. The Doehner boys also survived, and so did their mother, but they lost their father.