The Hindenburg Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,70

sandy earth, not so near by; another passenger—it was the cotton broker, Hirschfeld!—snatched up the lad by the hand and sprinted with him through the obstacle course of flames and debris.

Charteris had seen Hilda drop like a bundle, get to her feet, gather the blanket around her like an Indian and dash into and through the flames.

Now it was his turn to navigate the gauntlet of flaming framework and burning linen and glowing beams and red-hot wires. Covering his head with his sport jacket, he ran a zigzag path through the wreckage; around him others were doing the same—some falling to the earth screaming, burning.

But Charteris emerged from the smoke and flames fairly unscathed—he’d sucked in smoke, and his hair and mustache were singed, though his monocle was gone.

The Saint might have gone back in, looking for it.

Charteris, a ground-crew member taking him by the arm and leading him away, would let it go.

Margaret Mather had watched the men and women leaping from the promenade windows, but she just remained where she’d fallen against the bench, lapels of her coat shielding her face. Flames were flitting all around her, like butterflies, and occasionally they’d land on her sleeves and she would brush them off with her bare hands. The scene around her seemed out of a medieval picture of hell, and she had remained detached, composed, while all around her gave in to hysteria.

She kept her eyes covered and decided that she agreed with whoever it was who was screaming, “Es ist das Ende!” and quietly waited to die, hoping it would not be too prolonged and painful an experience, waiting for the crash of landing.

Then someone was yelling through the window: “Come out, lady!”

She opened one eye, then another.

Framed there in the window was an American—a sailor boy!

She stood primly, looked around for her handbag, finding it between two corpses; then she did her best to crawl out the window in a ladylike fashion, the sailor helping her down.

And then the nice young man walked her out through the bits and pieces of burning this and that.

All but one of the officers in the control car walked away from the burning wreck. Captain Pruss emerged from the curtain of smoke, hatless, his hair burned away; badly burned, but alive.

Charteris—who was wandering the periphery, looking for Hilda—saw Ernst Lehmann stagger from the black billowing smoke, looking stunned but not seriously harmed. The author ran to the dying ship’s former captain, to see if he needed help. Lehmann was walking along as if strolling through a park, or so it might have seemed if his face hadn’t been fixed in such glazed confusion.

“Are you all right, Ernst?” Charteris asked.

Lehmann looked right through him, eyes unblinking despite the smoke, saying, “I don’t understand…. I don’t understand…”

Then the director of the Reederei moved past Charteris, revealing that the clothes had been burned from the back of him, leaving the naked skin from the top of his head to the heels of his feet a charred black blistered mass.

An American officer ran to Lehmann’s side and walked him to the waiting ambulance.

Charteris turned to look at the ship, whose linen skin was almost gone now, fire erasing the Gothic red letters spelling Hindenburg, leaving a glowing skeleton trailing white-hot entrails and streaming smoke as black as the coming night.

Somewhere, within that colossal smoldering corpse, were the cremated remains of Colonel Fritz Erdmann. And probably those of Eric Spehl, as well.

Then, coughing, he sought out one of the navy boys, to see if he could hitch a ride to the base hospital.

Maybe Hilda was there.

SIXTEEN

HOW THE HINDENBURG SMOLDERED, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS BURNED

AT THE LAKEHURST NAVAL AIR Station’s small, single-story hospital, Charteris roamed the corridors like a man in a trance. His sport jacket had been lost en route, and his yellow sport shirt and tan slacks were scorched and torn; he looked like a hobo who’d had a particularly rough night of it.

The scene was one approaching battlefield horror. Doctors, nurses, and orderlies swarmed like white blood corpuscles fighting infection, hallways lined with burn victims on stretchers; in small doorless rooms, other casualties slumped in chairs and sat on examining tables, as doctors had a look and nurses dressed wounds. One somewhat larger room had badly burned bodies littering the floor like unearthed mummies.

Some of the victims had “M’s” written on their foreheads with grease pencil—an orderly with a syringe the size of a Roman candle was administering morphine, and hastily marking those who’d had