The Hindenburg Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,20

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