Read Online The Hindenburg Murders by Max Allan Collins - Free Book Online

himself.
    Hilda seemed to sense this, saying, “I am afraid all of this food has made me sleepy. Leslie, would you walk me to my cabin?”
    “Of course,” Charteris said.
    Gertrude was making a similar request of her husband, and the men had soon agreed to meet up in the smoking room.
    As they passed the promenade windows, the view froze Charteris and the lovely blonde, and around them other passengers were reacting the same way.
    While they had dined and talked, the Hindenburg had turned in a wide northwesterly arc, flying over the canals of Holland, crossing the narrow waterway that was the Wester Schelde, loping over the sandbars and cold, rugged waters of the North Sea, into an electrical storm.
    Out the observation-deck windows, black clouds swirled and swarmed, billowing like ink cast into water, alive with cracklinglightning, the jagged veins of energy periodically lighting up this darkest of nights.
    Hilda clutched his arm, alarmed, pressing herself up against him. It would almost have been worth it, if Charteris weren’t equally alarmed at the thought of what lightning might mean to the seven million cubic feet of hydrogen gas keeping this blimp afloat.
    Captain Lehmann’s voice rang out: “No cause for alarm! You are as safe here as if you were walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin!”
    Charteris hoped Lehmann didn’t mean as safe as a Jew walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin….
    But the airship itself seemed unfazed by the storm; a steamship in this gale would be rolling, its framework groaning, screeching, creaking; but the Hindenburg was gliding through the black clouds, as smoothly as though this were a serene, starry night. The storm sounded like a gently rolling surf, as rain pelted the ship’s linen skin.
    As Charteris walked his beautiful companion to her cabin, the stillness, the quiet, was remarkable. The only sound was a faint drone of diesel, providing a muted, soothing pulse.
    “Difficult to believe the world out there is so torn apart,” Hilda said, as they paused at her cabin door.
    Did she mean the storm, or something else?
    “You were upset at dinner,” he said.
    She frowned. A few other people were passing by in the narrow corridor.
    “Come in a moment,” she said.
    Within her cabin, she bid him sit on the lower bunk. She sat next to him, slumped a bit, hands folded.
    “I did not realize you had noticed,” she said.
    “You were trembling. I thought you might cry. Did you have friends in Guernica?”
    “No… but I lost someone in the war in Spain.”
    “A friend?”
    “… A lover.”
    “When?”
    “Just this January past.”
    “Hilda, I’m so very sorry.”
    She squeezed his hand.
    “But, my dear… I thought you weren’t political?”
    She stared into nothing. “Losing him… That is why I have no time for politics. Do you understand?”
    “I think I do.”
    She gave him a small, tender kiss and sent him on his way.
    As she was closing the door, Hilda bestowed him a smile, just a little one, and said, “Knock at nine—we will have breakfast.”
    “Good night, Hilda.”
    Heading to the stairs down to B deck and its renowned smoking room, Charteris noticed Knoecher and Spah standing at the promenade windows, the dark storm clouds swirling beyond them. The two men were chatting and it seemed friendly enough. Charteris wished he could warn Spah of the S.D. agent’s true intentions—at the first discreet opportunity, he would.
    The smoking room, way aft on the starboard side, was entered through the cramped bar, an antechamber little bigger than a passenger cabin. Charteris turned down the bar steward’s suggestion of an LZ-129 Frosted Cocktail (gin with orange juice) and acquired a Scotch and water, double, Peter Dawson of course.
    The bartender granted him admission through the one-customer-at-a-time revolving air-lock door into the pressurizedcompartment, which Charteris guessed measured at around twelve and a half by fifteen feet. The room seemed larger,