Read Online The Hindenburg Murders by Max Allan Collins - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Max Allan Collins
Tags: Disaster Series
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awaking—he discovered himself alone in the cabin, Charteris shaved and washed up at the tilt-down basin, frowning all the while.
An innocent reason for Knoecher’s absence might present itself. Perhaps the undercover S.D. agent had followed his cabinmate’s suggestion and requested one of the numerous unoccupied berths on the airship.
But Charteris knew that was unlikely: the S.D. man had been placed in the author’s quarters specifically to keep tabs on a potential troublemaker.
The other obvious possibility—that Eric Knoecher had gotten lucky with a female passenger, spending the night in another cabin—seemed equally unlikely. The only two unattached females aboard were Margaret Mather and Hilda Friederich. Charteris felt Miss Mather made an improbable paramour for the handsome bounder, and besides which, if the spinster had spent the night with anyone, it would have been that college boy who’d been plying her (and himself, in loin-girding preparation) with white wine.
As for Hilda, Charteris was confident that he was the only man in her shipboard life.
A remaining prospect was that Knoecher had stayed up all night, either in conference with Erdmann and the other two Luftwaffe “observers,” or perhaps sat up talking, maybe falling asleep, in a seat in the lounge or on one of the observation decks (the bar closed at three A.M ., so that was not a possibility).
Charteris slipped into comfortable, sporty attire—a single-breasted gray herringbone sport jacket with white shirt, plaid tie, darker gray slacks, gray-and-white loafers—and followed the seductive scent of coffee to the portside dining room, like a cobra heeding a snake charmer’s flute.
He was able to collect a cup of steaming aromatic coffee from a steward (taking it black), but breakfast proper wasn’t to be served for another forty-five minutes. A number of passengers were already seated having coffee and rolls, and others were seated on the two-seater benches jutting from the wallof windows, enjoying light conversation or writing a letter or postcard. They were mostly ignoring the view, which wasn’t much: a gloomy overcast sky, when the ship wasn’t caught within a gray cloud.
Knoecher wasn’t among them.
Sipping at his coffee, the author strolled around to the starboard lounge, where he found himself alone, the other passengers preferring to be nearer the pending food. The long row of slanting windows and the gray landscape of the sky was all his, if he wanted it. Idly, a thought nibbling at the back of his brain, he went to where he’d seen Knoecher and Spah standing, chatting civilly, last night. He didn’t know what he expected to find.
But he found it.
Not at first. At first, having set the coffee cup on the ledgelike sill, he leaned against the aluminum bar separating one window from another and looked down through the closed Plexiglas portal at the stirred-up sea, the agitated swells trailing tendrils of foamy white. For the sea to be that angry, the wind had to be strong—but up here, in the Never-Never Land of the Hindenburg, all was calm. No steamship propeller shafts to vibrate you, no handgrips needed to protect you from the lurch of the ship as it rode the choppy waves.
The aluminum window frame was polished and smooth under his palm, which was how he came to notice the tickle of silk threads.
Frowning, he lifted his hand and spied—caught alongside and between aluminum window frame and its jamb—orange threads, silk threads….
No, more than just threads, a tiny piece of cloth had been caught there. Holding the edge of the trapped scrap of silk in the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, Charteris usedhis left to lift the handle on the window, which raised like a lid on the world below.
This freed the scrap of cloth, wind-fluttering in his grasp, perhaps an inch across and about as long, tapering to a point, the point having been caught in the window, and the rest torn away, the threads standing up
An innocent reason for Knoecher’s absence might present itself. Perhaps the undercover S.D. agent had followed his cabinmate’s suggestion and requested one of the numerous unoccupied berths on the airship.
But Charteris knew that was unlikely: the S.D. man had been placed in the author’s quarters specifically to keep tabs on a potential troublemaker.
The other obvious possibility—that Eric Knoecher had gotten lucky with a female passenger, spending the night in another cabin—seemed equally unlikely. The only two unattached females aboard were Margaret Mather and Hilda Friederich. Charteris felt Miss Mather made an improbable paramour for the handsome bounder, and besides which, if the spinster had spent the night with anyone, it would have been that college boy who’d been plying her (and himself, in loin-girding preparation) with white wine.
As for Hilda, Charteris was confident that he was the only man in her shipboard life.
A remaining prospect was that Knoecher had stayed up all night, either in conference with Erdmann and the other two Luftwaffe “observers,” or perhaps sat up talking, maybe falling asleep, in a seat in the lounge or on one of the observation decks (the bar closed at three A.M ., so that was not a possibility).
Charteris slipped into comfortable, sporty attire—a single-breasted gray herringbone sport jacket with white shirt, plaid tie, darker gray slacks, gray-and-white loafers—and followed the seductive scent of coffee to the portside dining room, like a cobra heeding a snake charmer’s flute.
He was able to collect a cup of steaming aromatic coffee from a steward (taking it black), but breakfast proper wasn’t to be served for another forty-five minutes. A number of passengers were already seated having coffee and rolls, and others were seated on the two-seater benches jutting from the wallof windows, enjoying light conversation or writing a letter or postcard. They were mostly ignoring the view, which wasn’t much: a gloomy overcast sky, when the ship wasn’t caught within a gray cloud.
Knoecher wasn’t among them.
Sipping at his coffee, the author strolled around to the starboard lounge, where he found himself alone, the other passengers preferring to be nearer the pending food. The long row of slanting windows and the gray landscape of the sky was all his, if he wanted it. Idly, a thought nibbling at the back of his brain, he went to where he’d seen Knoecher and Spah standing, chatting civilly, last night. He didn’t know what he expected to find.
But he found it.
Not at first. At first, having set the coffee cup on the ledgelike sill, he leaned against the aluminum bar separating one window from another and looked down through the closed Plexiglas portal at the stirred-up sea, the agitated swells trailing tendrils of foamy white. For the sea to be that angry, the wind had to be strong—but up here, in the Never-Never Land of the Hindenburg, all was calm. No steamship propeller shafts to vibrate you, no handgrips needed to protect you from the lurch of the ship as it rode the choppy waves.
The aluminum window frame was polished and smooth under his palm, which was how he came to notice the tickle of silk threads.
Frowning, he lifted his hand and spied—caught alongside and between aluminum window frame and its jamb—orange threads, silk threads….
No, more than just threads, a tiny piece of cloth had been caught there. Holding the edge of the trapped scrap of silk in the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, Charteris usedhis left to lift the handle on the window, which raised like a lid on the world below.
This freed the scrap of cloth, wind-fluttering in his grasp, perhaps an inch across and about as long, tapering to a point, the point having been caught in the window, and the rest torn away, the threads standing up
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