“Little early in the voyage to find much to write about,” Charteris said to the journalist.
Adelt half smiled and replied, in that perfect but heavily accented English of his, “I should probably hire you to ghost this piece-it would seem to require a fiction writer. So far this is the most uneventful journey I ever undertook in an airship.”
“Not counting the presence of our friend Eric Knoecher, of course.”
Adelt smirked humorlessly. “I don’t think Ernst would appreciate my mentioning undercover S.D. spies being aboard. But I must thank you again, for the warning.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“Though, to tell the truth, I haven’t yet had to watch what I say around him. Haven’t even seen the son of a bitch today.”
Charteris shrugged. “He’s sick in our cabin-fighting a cold.”
“Wouldn’t it be sad if he lost.”
“It’s a nasty cold, all right, but I doubt it’ll prove fatal…. Do you and your wife play bridge, by any chance?”
Charteris and Hilda spent a lively morning playing bridge with the Adelts in the lounge, the author and his pretty partner taking two rubbers in a row, including a grand slam, Charteris finessing the queen. Luck had been involved, and the Adelts played well themselves, but Charteris was pleased to be able to demonstrate to Hilda that his claims of bridge proficiency had not been entirely “baloney.”
At eleven, Chief Steward Kubis served bouillon (in the fashion of the best ocean liners), and the couples rose from the lounge’s canvas-and-aluminum chairs to stretch and sip the soup.
“You and the lovely Miss Friederich make a good team,” Adelt said to the author.
They were standing at the promenade windows. Though the sky remained overcast, the ship was no longer traveling through gray clouds.
“We had the right cards,” Charteris said.
“I think she had the right partner.”
“I don’t think you should complain about yours. You’re a very lucky man, Leonhard.”
“Oh, I know. I know.”
They were looking down upon an ocean liner that was dwarfed by, and lost within, the huge shadow of the dirigible, making its distinct black stain on the gray-blue sea.
“I haven’t seen Ernst all morning,” Adelt said, as the foursome reassembled at the table. “Where do you suppose he could be?”
“I wonder,” Gertrude said, shuffling cards. “And I don’t believe Captain Pruss took breakfast in the dining room, either.”
“Perhaps that storm was trickier to manage than we might imagine,” Charteris put in lightly. “I believe it’s my deal….”
Charteris and Hilda took a third rubber, and Gertrude commented that she was glad they weren’t playing for money; then the two couples had lunch in the dining room, a sumptuous feast of Rhine salmon, roast gosling meuniere, mixed salad, and applesauce, and pears conde with chocolate sauce.
Fortunately the rescheduled ship’s tour gave them a way to walk off the wonderful but heavy meal. Gathering in the starboard lounge, the Adelts joined Charteris and Hilda, as did Margaret Mather, with Joe Spah tagging along as well. Normally Captain Lehmann conducted the airship tours personally; but it seemed today he was otherwise occupied. The ship’s doctor, Kurt Ruediger, slender, youthful, blond, was standing in for Lehmann, this afternoon.
Charteris had met the young doctor on the maiden voyage, and found him pleasant enough, if somewhat callow. Ruediger-the first doctor ever to regularly serve aboard a commercial aircraft-was just a year out of his internship at Bremen, and had snagged this plum position due to a sailing-club friendship with Lehmann.
Speaking in German, Dr. Ruediger informed the tour group that everyone would have to don special slippers-crepe-soled canvas sneakers with laces whose grommets were of reinforced cloth.
“You will be walking on the metal gangways and moving up and down the aluminum shafts of our ship,” Ruediger said, his voice an uncertain second tenor. “A spark struck by a hobnail or static caused by the friction of steel or wool might have an adverse effect.”
“He means the ship could blow up,” Charteris whispered in English to Hilda, whose big blue eyes grew bigger.
A steward had deposited a large box of the slippers on a table, and Dr. Ruediger said, “Please find something in your size.”
This proved a task easier said than done, as the shoes were unmarked, and nobody seemed able to find a pair that fit properly. The slippers were floppy and oversize, and to Charteris it seemed a scene from a circus-clown shoes all around.
In his sweater vest, bow tie, and gabardine slacks, Joe Spah, the smallest participant, proved the biggest clown, immediately falling into a soft-shoe routine, a buck-and-wing evolving into a ballerina’s pirouette. Then he placed two fingers under his nose as a makeshift mustache and did a Charlie Chaplin walk right up to Ruediger, and gave the Nazi salute.
“Seig heil, Herr Doctor! Ready when you are!”
Ruediger smiled politely, as did the entire group, a few of them even laughing a little; but this feeble comedy did not provide a light moment, rather cast something of a pall.
As the group trooped down to B deck, Margaret Mather-in an aqua-blue crepe dress with a bow at the waist (too young for her by twenty years)-sidled up to Charteris.
“I do hope I can take you up on your offer to read my poetry,” she said, almost giddily.
Charteris, who didn’t exactly ever remember making such an offer, said, “Ah.”
“I have a notebook filled with them. I think some publisher could do nicely putting out a complete volume of my work.”
“Have any of them been published?”
“Not yet.”
It seemed to Charteris that everyone he met had the notion that he or she could write a book; and of course one of the troubles of the literary world was that so many of them did.
The spacious, gleaming metal kitchen was the first stop, with its ultramodern aluminum electric stove, baking and roasting ovens, and refrigerator; delicious smells vouched for another fine evening meal ahead. Dark-haired, bucket-headed Chief Cook Xavier Maier-properly outfitted in white apron and high cap-took time out to welcome the little group, while an assistant tended the steaming pots and sizzling pans, and a teenaged cabin boy peeled potatoes.
The chef demonstrated the dumbwaiter that conveyed dishes to the dining room above, saying, “We will go through four hundred forty pounds of fresh meat and poultry on this crossing, eight hundred eggs, and two hundred twenty pounds of butter.”
The expected ooohs and ahhhs greeted these statistics, and a few questions about storage were asked and answered. Then, as the group was filing out, the affable chef came over to the author, Hilda on his arm, and said, “Mr. Charteris, welcome back to the Hindenburg.”
Charteris knew the man from the Ritz in Paris, where Maier had been head chef.
“Pleasure to be back, Xavier, with you providing the cuisine.”
The chef’s face dimpled in a smile. “Are you still threatening to write your own cookbook?”
“It’s not an idle threat, Xavier. There’s no better reading than a cookbook-no complex psychology, no dreary dialogue, no phony messages.”
“Well, I am still willing to contribute a few recipes.”
“I’ll be taking you up on that.”
As they moved aft down the keel corridor, Hilda asked Charteris, “So do I gather you’re a gourmet cook, on top of everything else?”
“Learning that was simply self-defense, dear.”
“Oh?”
“The odds of finding a woman as beautiful and charming as you who can also cook are long indeed. And I told you, I don’t like to gamble.”
Hilda smirked at him. “Have I just been insulted? Or complimented?”
“Yes.”
Soon they had left the passenger area, passing a handful of new larger cabins (the only ones on B deck), into the belly of the beast. Moving single file down the narrow, blue-rubberized Unterlaufgang-lower catwalk-the passengers (ship’s doctor in the lead) were craning their necks, eyes wide, mouths open but not speaking, as the enormity of the airship made itself known to them.