pretty much on his own. No handcuffs or leg irons, and the colonel seemed confident enough in his charge to keep his back to his captive.
“Hello, boys,” Charteris said, working his voice up above the diesel drone. He was perhaps twenty feet from them.
“Charteris,” Erdmann said, frowning, halting. “What are you doing back here? It’s dangerous—we’re about to land!”
They could feel the ship slowing, even turning.
Charteris strolled toward them. “I’d ask you and your, uh, prisoner the same thing, Fritz… if I didn’t already know the answer.”
Behind Erdmann, who remained calm and collected in the face of this intrusion, Spehl was openly distressed, eyes wide, mouth hanging open, arms extended, hands splayed, as if caught in the lights of an oncoming truck.
“Know what answer?” Erdmann asked calmly. But he did run a hand over his slicked-back blond hair, a nervous gesture of sorts.
“Well, perhaps ‘know’ is a bit strong.” Charteris was facing the Luftwaffe colonel now, Spehl moving in closer behind Erdmann, peeking up over his shoulder, making a two-headed man of him. “My surmise is that you and young Eric are on your way back after tucking your bomb into place.”
Neither man, crosshatched by the shadow of ladders and struts, found a response to this.
So Charteris continued, casually: “If it had already been planted, you would need to reset the timer, because of the weather delays. Or, if you were planting it for the first time, now is of course the ideal time to do it… minutes before mooring, with the crew occupied and at their landing stations.”
“This is quite the most absurd thing I ever heard,” Erdmann said, managing to put some quiet indignation into it.
Behind him, Spehl was sweating, trembling, his face drained of blood.
“I am assuming, of course,” Charteris said, “that you don’t wish to blow yourselves or for that matter any of the passengers to kingdom come. You’d like this great symbol of Nazi power to blow itself up when it’s at the mooring mast, and no one is aboard, and no one, or hardly anyone, is standing near enough to be harmed. Very humane, Fritz. Commendable thinking, for a saboteur.”
Erdmann sighed. “All right. You are partially correct. Rigger Spehl is a member of the resistance—”
“Ah, so there is a resistance. That’s nice to know.”
“He admitted to me that he had planted a bomb, and we went to retrieve it.”
“Well, let’s see it, then.”
“All right,” Erdmann said, and reached in his pocket and withdrew a small black automatic, a Luger.
“Fritz, Fritz… do you really want to fire that thing and blow all of us up?”
“No. But I am hoping you will listen to reason.”
“Ah! An offer to join the resistance? And I’m not even German! What an honor.”
Erdmann chuckled dryly at that; the little black automatic in his fist was like a toy—reminding Charteris of the chief steward taking the Doehner boys’ tin toy into custody, for making sparks.
“How in hell did you know?” Erdmann asked.
“Well, I should have known much earlier. But all these delays gave me so much time to ponder. And another passenger made a stray remark about you, just now—Gertrude Adelt—reminding me of that touching scene the first night, when your wife bid you good-bye. You knew better than anyone that this ship had been thoroughly searched, and that every last stitch of baggage would be exhaustively inspected. But in your capacity, you could allow your wife to come aboard for a last-minute good-bye—she had to stand for no security procedure, at all, did she? And I’m sure she wasn’t pretending, when she embraced you on deck, I’m sure the tears were very real, because she knew the dangerous journey you were about to begin—that if things went awry, she might never see you again…. She passed it to you, didn’t she, Fritz? Your wife handed you the bomb, didn’t she?”
Erdmann’s haggard smile and faint sigh said yes.
“It must be a fairly small and simple device,” Charteris said.
The colonel nodded. “Yes. You may have learned in your own… investigation… that Eric here, is something of a photography buff.”
“Actually, it didn’t come up.”
“I forgot—you’re not much of a detective.”
“Enough for us to be standing here like this, Fritz. So Eric’s an amateur photographer—so what?”
Erdmann shrugged. “One flashbulb added to a small dry-cell battery, with a pocket watch attached.”
“Ingenious,” Charteris said, rather impressed. “A flashbulb is perfect—a tiny glass sphere filled with pure, dry oxygen, exploding into dazzling light by a split-second combustion of aluminum foil.”
Another nod from Erdmann. “Enough to melt steel,