The Hindenburg Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,44
jumpsuited crew member—whose presence Charteris hadn’t noticed before—rose from a bench by the slanting windows, where he had apparently been waiting for his friend. A shorter, more burly fellow, he fell in at Spehl’s side, and they made a quick exit.
“Why were you so ill-mannered with that boy?” he asked the braided beauty, mildly aggravated with her.
Her chin was high; she sniffed. “He was intruding. We were having a quiet moment. Why did you keep him here, talking to him, for such a long time?”
He sipped his Scotch. “First, my dear, that young man is a reader of mine. That means he’s a customer. And callow youths all around the world, like that one, keep me in business, and allow me to maintain the high style of living to which I’ve become so accustomed, including the ability to flit about the skies with lovely mysterious women.”
She couldn’t help herself: she laughed at that. Shaking her head, sipping her Frosted Cocktail, she said, “I was boorish. Accept my apologies.”
“No. You’ll have to find some way to make it up to me.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
“You mean a late-afternoon nap in my cabin?”
He yawned again, no more convincingly than before. “I could use a quick one. Snooze, I mean.”
“You are an outrageous, impudent man,” she said.
And stood, and held her hand out to him, and walked with him from the lounge, on the way to her cabin. As they headed for the stairs down to B deck, Miss Mather, seated on the window bench, glanced up from her poetry in progress to smile at him, and ignore her.
He nodded at the spinster and they moved on.
Soon the couple were just outside Hilda’s cabin door.
“O beautiful Viking,” he said to her, “let down thy golden braids and unleash thy Valkyrie spirit upon me, and lift my undeserving soul to the skies.”
And Hilda, bosom heaving with her full-bodied laugh, dragged him inside.
ELEVEN
HOW THE HINDENBURG’S ERSTWHILE CAPTAIN ENTERTAINED, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS HAD A CALLER
AFTER THE USUAL SUMPTUOUS DINNER, as stewards moved in to clear the tables, word spread that Captain Lehmann was going to entertain in the lounge. Most of the passengers gathered there, or along the adjacent promenade, as the fatherly former captain of the airship stood like an itinerant street musician with the accordion slung before him. Charteris (in his white dinner jacket), Hilda (in a low-cut green gown), and the Adelts were seated at a table along the waist-high partition between lounge and promenade. It was fair to say that, with the exception of the die-hard chimneys in the smoking room on B deck below, the Hindenburg’s passengers were gathered nearly en masse.
“Many of you who have sailed with us before,” Lehmann said in German (Charteris finding the word choice of “sailed” rather than “flown” an interesting one), “have inquired about the absence of our celebrated aluminum piano.”
Gertrude Adelt called out gaily, “Oh yes! We enjoyed it so, when you played for us!”
Lehmann smiled, with mixed embarrassment and pride, and said, “And I enjoyed it so when you, Mrs. Adelt, and other passengers sang along. But commerce rules even the skies—the piano weighed more than you, my dear… and we are fully booked on our return voyage with, as you know, so many travelers set to attend the English coronation.”
Heads nodded all around the lounge.
“So,” Lehmann continued, “rather than leave a pretty lady behind—we unloaded the piano.”
Gentle laughter blossomed around the room, and now it was lovely Gertrude Adelt’s turn to react in embarrassment, and perhaps pride.
Hoisting his accordion, Lehmann continued, “This portable ‘piano’ will have to do for the evening. If our German passengers will bear with me, I’ll repeat some of that for our American and English guests.”
Lehmann gave a condensed English version of his spiel, and then—first in English, then in German—assured everyone that he would give equal time to German and American folk songs and English ballads… but said he would keep things neutral by beginning with an instrumental rendition of something by Straus.
The evening evolved into a rather merry sing-along, and Charteris joined in lustily. The author had a pleasant second tenor and liked to sing, though he felt more than a pang or two for the absence of his wife, Pauline, who sang very well, and had been his duet partner in this same lounge just a year before.
Hilda had a pleasant, relatively on-key alto that reminded Charteris enough of Marlene Dietrich to stoke the fires of his infatuation, and