The Hindenburg Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,36

afraid I have an appointment to keep before supper.”

“It is getting about that time.” Hirschfeld half rose. “Perhaps we’ll talk some more, later on—and I promise I won’t bore you with cotton talk.”

The men shook hands again.

“You haven’t bored me at all, George. I never thought of cotton in quite this light, before.”

Charteris had two appointments, actually. The second was with Hilda, at her cabin, to fetch her for an eight o’clock supper; and the first was with a shower.

The shower, to be precise, as this was the only one on the airship (or for that matter on any airship, this being a true first), and Charteris had signed up for 7:15 P.M. Morning reservations for this choice B-deck convenience were well nigh impossible, but at least freshening up before supper—a late supper, anyway—was an achievable goal.

He waited politely for the previous occupant to exit, then he went in, used the toilet in the adjacent changing room, hanging his clothes up on the hooks, leaving his monocle on a shelf, and headed into a cubicle where he stood naked and cold awaiting an unseen steward to turn on the wasser. Above him was a nozzle that seemed big enough to bathe everyone on the ship in one blast.

But he had been warned by Chief Steward Kubis to “be quick about it,” because the spray cut off automatically after three minutes, in an effort to conserve water, and if you were all soaped up at the moment, that was your problem.

“Airships must ration everything by weight,” Kubis had told him. “Even the shower water is gathered and stored as ballast in dirty-water tanks.”

Despite the shower’s rather limp-wristed water pressure, he had managed to soap up and rinse off by the time the nozzle dribbled to its preordained stop.

When, half an hour later, Charteris left his cabin to fetch the lovely Hilda, he was bathed, shaved, trimmed and waxed (mustache only), cologned, pomaded, and clothed in his white jacket and black tie, black shoes shiny as mirrors, looking at least like a million bucks.

Hilda, of course, looked like two million. She, too, had managed to book a shower, and smelled of lilacs, her blonde hair flowing to her shoulders now, shoulders that were beautifully bare thanks to a slim sheath of a dress that was all pleated black romaine, ruffled with pink and green satin ribbon.

“We are a pair,” Charteris said, as he walked her to the dining room, where a table for two along the wall awaited.

“I never saw a more handsome man,” she told him, as they waited for their Beaume Cuvée de l’Abbaye 1926, a fine red wine from the airship’s “cellar.”

“It would take a better writer than yours truly,” he said to her, “to do your beauty justice.”

Pretty corny stuff, he knew, but it felt very good, and even very real. They were holding hands and the look in her deep blue eyes promised a memorable evening.

They ate lightly if thoroughly of mixed green salad, cheese, fresh fruit, pâtés à la reine, and roast filet of beef, medium rare. Both declined dessert and sat drinking coffee, listening to the rain beat its insistent but trivial tattoo on the ship’s skin, watching lightning-flecked charcoal clouds roll by.

The storm had kicked up again, the ship on a wild ride into pelting rain and torturous head winds—if they were doing fifty knots now, Charteris figured, they were lucky—but the mood it lent to the romantic evening could not have been better conjured by Merlin himself.

“I love the rain,” he said.

“So do I,” she said.

“I love it in Malaya—the tropical storms sheet down like a waterfall, they beat the roof like a drum, stream from the eaves in a hundred miniature Niagaras. I’d sit at an open veranda and watch it come down, with great dewdrops condensing on the glass of wine I held… the air suddenly cool, fresh, temporary relief from a steaming heat.”

She squeezed his hand.

He went on: “I love it in Corsica, too—spluttering on the taut cloth of a tent top, peering out from that precarious shelter to watch the drops dancing on the rocks, running down to drench a parched ravine.”

Now she was holding his hand with both of hers.

“I’ve watched thunderheads,” he said, “building over the mountains in Tirol, bursting over the green valley where I didn’t even have a tent, just a ground sheet to pull over my sleeping bag and hope that not too much of it would creep in… which it invariably did.”

“I love