The Hindenburg Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,63

aft, taking up space that had originally been tentlike crew quarters.

At the bottom of the stairs, Kubis turned sharply to the left, where the floor itself was the retracted gangway, moving through a newly punched door giving access to the keel corridor. On the Hindenburg’s previous season of flights, the keel corridor was closed to passengers; but with the addition of this new wing of cabins, that was no longer the case.

The steward turned to the right, down the narrow corridor, and stopped at a door marked B-1, looking to Charteris with a hesitant expression. “Should I knock, sir?” he whispered.

“Please,” Charteris said.

Kubis rapped his knuckles tentatively on the door.

Nothing.

The steward glanced at Charteris, who nodded, saying, “Again.”

Kubis knocked again, louder. Then said, “Colonel Erdmann! Sorry to disturb you, sir! It’s Chief Steward Kubis, sir!”

Nothing.

“Use your passkey,” Charteris said.

“But, sir… !”

“Use it, Heinrich.”

“Yes, sir.”

And the steward did, but the cabin—which was in fact half again as large as the A-deck cabins, with a sloping window like the one in Lehmann’s quarters—was empty, stripped not only of bedclothes, but of Erdmann and Spehl.

“Where are they, sir?” Kubis asked, looking all around, as if the two men might be stuffed under a bunk.

“That would seem to be the question,” Charteris said. “Heinrich, one last imposition—that door at the end of the hall leads into the belly of the ship, doesn’t it?”

“Yes it does, sir.”

“Unlock that for me.”

“Sir, I can’t….”

“You can. And when you have, I want you to go to Captain Pruss and tell him that Colonel Erdmann and Spehl are missing.”

Kubis seemed astounded by this proposition. “Captain Pruss is in the process of landing the airship, sir—he can’t be disturbed….”

“There may be a bomb on this ship, Heinrich. Do you understand? This ship might not land at all.”

Frowning, Kubis somehow managed to digest this notion quickly—but then the steward had been around the periphery of the various disappearances and inquiries afoot over the course of this trip; perhaps Charteris’s statement made it all make sense.

At any rate, there was no further discussion: the steward used his passkey on the door at the end of the keel corridor, opening it for Charteris, nodding to the author in a fashion that said the message would be delivered to the captain, come hell or high water.

Then Kubis was gone and Charteris, the door closing behind him, was like a small child in a vast, otherwise unattended and quite bizarre amusement park. He moved gingerly along the rubber-carpeted keel catwalk (no slippers this time, rather his Italian loafers), the diesel drone much louder back here, building to a roar as he approached one of the precarious, skimpily handrailed access gangways out to an engine gondola. The roar settled back to a drone as he moved aft, walking uphill, slightly, the ship heavy aft, the bow high, as he gazed up and around at the complex array of framework and rigging and netting and other catwalks, crisscrossing girders, struts, and rings, towering gas shafts and—nestled on either side, here and there—gas and water and fuel tanks, amid arches and ladders and wires, and yet most of all so much empty space.

Sun filtered through the translucent linen skin as he moved along, hazy illumination that gave the interior of the leviathan airship a warm yellowish cast, very different from the tour he’d taken Tuesday, when the day was overcast and the world back here was a grayish blue. That the western sky glowered black with the threat of a thunderstorm could not be discerned back here in this unreal mechanical wonderland. There was a strange stillness that might have been reassuring, even soothing, if the huge tan bladderlike gas cells looming left and right hadn’t been fluttering, quavering like flabby cheeks, as if the ship itself were nervous.

That was definitely not reassuring.

He saw no crewmen—all of them were at their crew stations, many of them way in the stern of the ship, where yaw lines would be dropped and mooring cable let down, or up at the bow, working the main winch line and nose-cone connections. This was a cavernous world of his own, though he felt dwarfed rather than powerful, and he was just starting to wonder if he knew what he was doing when he saw them.

They climbed down a ladder and onto the narrow rubber-matted keel catwalk—a nondescript figure in a brown suit and a crew member in the standard gray jumpsuit: Colonel Erdmann, followed by Eric Spehl.

Who for a man in custody seemed