Hirschfeld chuckled, draining the last of his beer. “I don’t know Knoecher very well-your cabin mate? He just came up and introduced himself to me, here in the smoking room.”
“Really? When was that?”
“Fairly late last night. Maybe one, two in the morning. Wasn’t keeping any closer track of time than I was the number of beers I was putting away…. And you know, I could use another right now, and you seem to have drained both your drinks. Shall we risk havin’ our ears pop to go out and order up some more?”
“No thank you, George.” Charteris stood. “I’m afraid I have an appointment to keep before supper.”
“It is getting about that time.” Hirschfeld half rose. “Perhaps we’ll talk some more, later on-and I promise I won’t bore you with cotton talk.”
The men shook hands again.
“You haven’t bored me at all, George. I never thought of cotton in quite this light, before.”
Charteris had two appointments, actually. The second was with Hilda, at her cabin, to fetch her for an eight o’clock supper; and the first was with a shower.
The shower, to be precise, as this was the only one on the airship (or for that matter on any airship, this being a true first), and Charteris had signed up for 7:15 P.M. Morning reservations for this choice B-deck convenience were well nigh impossible, but at least freshening up before supper-a late supper, anyway-was an achievable goal.
He waited politely for the previous occupant to exit, then he went in, used the toilet in the adjacent changing room, hanging his clothes up on the hooks, leaving his monocle on a shelf, and headed into a cubicle where he stood naked and cold awaiting an unseen steward to turn on the wasser. Above him was a nozzle that seemed big enough to bathe everyone on the ship in one blast.
But he had been warned by Chief Steward Kubis to “be quick about it,” because the spray cut off automatically after three minutes, in an effort to conserve water, and if you were all soaped up at the moment, that was your problem.
“Airships must ration everything by weight,” Kubis had told him. “Even the shower water is gathered and stored as ballast in dirty-water tanks.”
Despite the shower’s rather limp-wristed water pressure, he had managed to soap up and rinse off by the time the nozzle dribbled to its preordained stop.
When, half an hour later, Charteris left his cabin to fetch the lovely Hilda, he was bathed, shaved, trimmed and waxed (mustache only), cologned, pomaded, and clothed in his white jacket and black tie, black shoes shiny as mirrors, looking at least like a million bucks.
Hilda, of course, looked like two million. She, too, had managed to book a shower, and smelled of lilacs, her blonde hair flowing to her shoulders now, shoulders that were beautifully bare thanks to a slim sheath of a dress that was all pleated black romaine, ruffled with pink and green satin ribbon.
“We are a pair,” Charteris said, as he walked her to the dining room, where a table for two along the wall awaited.
“I never saw a more handsome man,” she told him, as they waited for their Beaume Cuvee de l’Abbaye 1926, a fine red wine from the airship’s “cellar.”
“It would take a better writer than yours truly,” he said to her, “to do your beauty justice.”
Pretty corny stuff, he knew, but it felt very good, and even very real. They were holding hands and the look in her deep blue eyes promised a memorable evening.
They ate lightly if thoroughly of mixed green salad, cheese, fresh fruit, pates a la reine, and roast filet of beef, medium rare. Both declined dessert and sat drinking coffee, listening to the rain beat its insistent but trivial tattoo on the ship’s skin, watching lightning-flecked charcoal clouds roll by.
The storm had kicked up again, the ship on a wild ride into pelting rain and torturous head winds-if they were doing fifty knots now, Charteris figured, they were lucky-but the mood it lent to the romantic evening could not have been better conjured by Merlin himself.
“I love the rain,” he said.
“So do I,” she said.
“I love it in Malaya-the tropical storms sheet down like a waterfall, they beat the roof like a drum, stream from the eaves in a hundred miniature Niagaras. I’d sit at an open veranda and watch it come down, with great dewdrops condensing on the glass of wine I held… the air suddenly cool, fresh, temporary relief from a steaming heat.”
She squeezed his hand.
He went on: “I love it in Corsica, too-spluttering on the taut cloth of a tent top, peering out from that precarious shelter to watch the drops dancing on the rocks, running down to drench a parched ravine.”
Now she was holding his hand with both of hers.
“I’ve watched thunderheads,” he said, “building over the mountains in Tirol, bursting over the green valley where I didn’t even have a tent, just a ground sheet to pull over my sleeping bag and hope that not too much of it would creep in… which it invariably did.”
“I love the rain,” she said.
“Ah, but you live in the city. Rain is just a nuisance in the city. To feel the excitement of the rain, you have to be where the rain belongs-out in the open, where you can see it falling all around you, separated from it by the least possible protection necessary to keep you dry-and sometimes not even that.”
“I love it, too,” she said.
“I’ve always been a sucker for rain-but, you know, I never loved the rain more than I love it right now. Right this moment.”
“I love it.”
They made love in her cabin, twice that night, and then they slept snuggled together in the lower bunk-the sound of rain nowhere near them, but they imagined they heard it.
They imagined they heard it clearly and well, though the only real thunder was the muffled sound of snoring from the cabin next door, leaching through the linen-covered foam panels of the wall.
DAY THREE
NINE
Well out over the atlantic, the Hindenburg loped along, stoically battling forty-five-knot head winds. Severe electrical disturbances continued to create a radio blackout, though occasional messages did get in and out-at six A.M., thirteen kilometers east of St. John’s, Newfoundland, one thousand kilometers southeast of Cape Farewell, the airship sent a message reporting continued electromagnetic storms and requesting weather information. Two and a half hours later, a transmission made its way through from Canada, informing the Hindenburg radio operator that lighter rains waited ahead.
Outside the slanting promenade windows, a cold, gray morning glided by even as Chef Xavier Maier’s fabled fresh rolls warmed the tummies of the airship’s pampered passengers.
Leslie Charteris and Hilda Friederich were latecomers to breakfast, barely beating the ten A.M. cutoff. They had slept in, cuddled in the lower bunk of her cabin, Charteris in his T-shirt and boxers, Hilda in a lacy slip. She had sent him off, a little after nine, to his own quarters, mortified by a knock at her door.
Charteris had slept through it, but apparently a steward had come by to make up the cabin-seemed Hilda had neglected to hang the little “Do Not Disturb” placard on the door handle-and she was suddenly embarrassed.
“Who cares what some steward thinks?” he said to her, pulling his trousers on. “If they have the poor manners and lack of sense to come around at such an ungodly hour, they can-”
But he hadn’t finished his thought, and had barely buckled his belt, when she jostled him out into the hallway. Shoes and socks in hand, he told the door, in a firm voice, that he’d return in half an hour, to escort her to breakfast. A noncommittal, nonverbal response from behind the door was just ambiguous enough for him to take as a “yes.”