The Hindenburg Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,27

proved a task easier said than done, as the shoes were unmarked, and nobody seemed able to find a pair that fit properly. The slippers were floppy and oversize, and to Charteris it seemed a scene from a circus—clown shoes all around.

In his sweater vest, bow tie, and gabardine slacks, Joe Spah, the smallest participant, proved the biggest clown, immediately falling into a soft-shoe routine, a buck-and-wing evolving into a ballerina’s pirouette. Then he placed two fingers under his nose as a makeshift mustache and did a Charlie Chaplin walk right up to Ruediger, and gave the Nazi salute.

“Seig heil, Herr Doctor! Ready when you are!”

Ruediger smiled politely, as did the entire group, a few of them even laughing a little; but this feeble comedy did not provide a light moment, rather cast something of a pall.

As the group trooped down to B deck, Margaret Mather—in an aqua-blue crepe dress with a bow at the waist (too young for her by twenty years)—sidled up to Charteris.

“I do hope I can take you up on your offer to read my poetry,” she said, almost giddily.

Charteris, who didn’t exactly ever remember making such an offer, said, “Ah.”

“I have a notebook filled with them. I think some publisher could do nicely putting out a complete volume of my work.”

“Have any of them been published?”

“Not yet.”

It seemed to Charteris that everyone he met had the notion that he or she could write a book; and of course one of the troubles of the literary world was that so many of them did.

The spacious, gleaming metal kitchen was the first stop, with its ultramodern aluminum electric stove, baking and roasting ovens, and refrigerator; delicious smells vouched for another fine evening meal ahead. Dark-haired, bucket-headed Chief Cook Xavier Maier—properly outfitted in white apron and high cap—took time out to welcome the little group, while an assistant tended the steaming pots and sizzling pans, and a teenaged cabin boy peeled potatoes.

The chef demonstrated the dumbwaiter that conveyed dishes to the dining room above, saying, “We will go through four hundred forty pounds of fresh meat and poultry on this crossing, eight hundred eggs, and two hundred twenty pounds of butter.”

The expected ooohs and ahhhs greeted these statistics, and a few questions about storage were asked and answered. Then, as the group was filing out, the affable chef came over to the author, Hilda on his arm, and said, “Mr. Charteris, welcome back to the Hindenburg.”

Charteris knew the man from the Ritz in Paris, where Maier had been head chef.

“Pleasure to be back, Xavier, with you providing the cuisine.”

The chef’s face dimpled in a smile. “Are you still threatening to write your own cookbook?”

“It’s not an idle threat, Xavier. There’s no better reading than a cookbook—no complex psychology, no dreary dialogue, no phony messages.”

“Well, I am still willing to contribute a few recipes.”

“I’ll be taking you up on that.”

As they moved aft down the keel corridor, Hilda asked Charteris, “So do I gather you’re a gourmet cook, on top of everything else?”

“Learning that was simply self-defense, dear.”

“Oh?”

“The odds of finding a woman as beautiful and charming as you who can also cook are long indeed. And I told you, I don’t like to gamble.”

Hilda smirked at him. “Have I just been insulted? Or complimented?”

“Yes.”

Soon they had left the passenger area, passing a handful of new larger cabins (the only ones on B deck), into the belly of the beast. Moving single file down the narrow, blue-rubberized Unterlaufgang—lower catwalk—the passengers (ship’s doctor in the lead) were craning their necks, eyes wide, mouths open but not speaking, as the enormity of the airship made itself known to them.

The journey in the dark, last night, to the stern of the ship where Spah’s dog was in its wicker basket, had not prepared Charteris for this staggering sight. On the maiden voyage he and Pauline had not taken the tour, as his wife suffered from vertigo. So he was as much a virgin as the rest of the group.

They were tiny worshipers in a vast cathedral of wires and arches and rings and girders and struts and yawning open space. Awestruck, they wended their way, surrounded by catwalks, rubber-treaded ladders, crisscrossings of bracing wires, steel-and-wire netting, and—strangest of all—the huge billowing gas cells that were the lungs of the ship. Light filtered in through the ship’s linen skin, providing an eerie grayish illumination that created a sense of unreality.

Dr. Ruediger pointed out fuel and water tanks bordering the gangway, saying, “We start