“No. You’ll have to find some way to make it up to me.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
“You mean a late-afternoon nap in my cabin?”
He yawned again, no more convincingly than before. “I could use a quick one. Snooze, I mean.”
“You are an outrageous, impudent man,” she said.
And stood, and held her hand out to him, and walked with him from the lounge, on the way to her cabin. As they headed for the stairs down to B deck, Miss Mather, seated on the window bench, glanced up from her poetry in progress to smile at him, and ignore her.
He nodded at the spinster and they moved on.
Soon the couple were just outside Hilda’s cabin door.
“O beautiful Viking,” he said to her, “let down thy golden braids and unleash thy Valkyrie spirit upon me, and lift my undeserving soul to the skies.”
And Hilda, bosom heaving with her full-bodied laugh, dragged him inside.
ELEVEN
After the usual sumptuous dinner, as stewards moved in to clear the tables, word spread that Captain Lehmann was going to entertain in the lounge. Most of the passengers gathered there, or along the adjacent promenade, as the fatherly former captain of the airship stood like an itinerant street musician with the accordion slung before him. Charteris (in his white dinner jacket), Hilda (in a low-cut green gown), and the Adelts were seated at a table along the waist-high partition between lounge and promenade. It was fair to say that, with the exception of the die-hard chimneys in the smoking room on B deck below, the Hindenburg’s passengers were gathered nearly en masse.
“Many of you who have sailed with us before,” Lehmann said in German (Charteris finding the word choice of “sailed” rather than “flown” an interesting one), “have inquired about the absence of our celebrated aluminum piano.”
Gertrude Adelt called out gaily, “Oh yes! We enjoyed it so, when you played for us!”
Lehmann smiled, with mixed embarrassment and pride, and said, “And I enjoyed it so when you, Mrs. Adelt, and other passengers sang along. But commerce rules even the skies-the piano weighed more than you, my dear… and we are fully booked on our return voyage with, as you know, so many travelers set to attend the English coronation.”
Heads nodded all around the lounge.
“So,” Lehmann continued, “rather than leave a pretty lady behind-we unloaded the piano.”
Gentle laughter blossomed around the room, and now it was lovely Gertrude Adelt’s turn to react in embarrassment, and perhaps pride.
Hoisting his accordion, Lehmann continued, “This portable ‘piano’ will have to do for the evening. If our German passengers will bear with me, I’ll repeat some of that for our American and English guests.”
Lehmann gave a condensed English version of his spiel, and then-first in English, then in German-assured everyone that he would give equal time to German and American folk songs and English ballads… but said he would keep things neutral by beginning with an instrumental rendition of something by Straus.
The evening evolved into a rather merry sing-along, and Charteris joined in lustily. The author had a pleasant second tenor and liked to sing, though he felt more than a pang or two for the absence of his wife, Pauline, who sang very well, and had been his duet partner in this same lounge just a year before.
Hilda had a pleasant, relatively on-key alto that reminded Charteris enough of Marlene Dietrich to stoke the fires of his infatuation, and relegate his soon-to-be ex-wife to a distant compartment of his mind. Since he would sing the English and American tunes, and she the German ones, they were trading off, and singing to each other, and it was very romantic and not a little sexy.
He was most disappointed when a finger tapped him on his shoulder and Chief Steward Kubis leaned in across the partition to whisper, “You are wanted in the officers’ mess, sir.”
Sighing, nodding reluctantly, he patted Hilda’s hand, said, “You’ll have to excuse me, dear,” exchanging disappointed glances with his braided amour of the moment.
The officers’ mess was cleared but for the blandly handsome Captain Pruss and the doleful Colonel Fritz Erdmann, seated again by the windows, the grayness of the day replaced by the ebony of the night. A small conical lamp on the booth’s table gave off a yellowish cast, to match Charteris’s own jaundiced reaction.
“You know, Captain,” Charteris said in English, pointedly, not sitting, “I am a paying passenger. I have a right to enjoy myself like any other customer of the Reederei. If you’ve pulled me away from the side of that magnificent blonde country-woman of yours, just for me to give you a report of my amateur detective findings to date… then might I suggest we reschedule for a more propitious time?”
“Please sit,” the crisply uniformed captain said, with a respectful nod.
Erdmann said, “We apologize for the intrusion into your evening. There are developments we need to share with you-and we need your help, your…” Erdmann searched for the English words. “… expert opinion.”
“For God’s sake, I write blood and thunder. I’m not an ‘expert’ on real crime and espionage. Have you people gone mad?”
The melancholy mask of Erdmann’s oblong face twitched a smile. He leaned forward, hands folded almost prayerfully. “There is much madness at large in our world today, would you not agree?”
“Yes, but you may wish to speak to your boy Adolf about that. I’ve had little to do with causing it, personally. In fact I’ll go on record right now by saying that insanity in world leaders is in my view a less than desirable quality.”
Pruss shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and Erdmann sighed heavily.
Then the undercover Luftwaffe colonel said, “A bomb exploded today on the Paris-Marseilles Express. One death, twenty injuries-it could have been worse. Probably should have been worse-the train was at its maximum speed of sixty miles per hour and passengers were showered with shards of glass. The dead passenger could not be identified, so badly mangled was his corpse.”
Charteris sat.
“Apparently the bomb was smuggled aboard the train,” Erdmann continued, “tied to the coupling between passenger coaches. Investigators are convinced it was caused by a… how do you say Hollenmaschine?”
“An infernal machine,” Charteris said.
“Yes. A combination explosive and incendiary device. The Reich’s Ministry of Information cites this incident as further proof that the threat of anarchy hangs over us all.”
“A threat hangs over the world, all right,” Charteris muttered.
“Do I have to remind you,” Erdmann asked dryly, “that a bomb on this ship would do considerably more damage?”
“That Parisian train wasn’t filled with hydrogen, you mean?”
Captain Pruss said, firmly, “Because of your concerns about Joseph Spah’s unsupervised visit to his dog, Mr. Charteris, I have had the ship inspected again-bow to stern. No bomb was found.”
“How reassuring,” Charteris said.
“I believe the time has come to take Joseph Spah into custody,” Erdmann said. “Major Witt and Lieutenant Hinkelbein agree with me.”
“Who are they?” Charteris asked. “The other two Luftwaffe men snooping around in mufti?”
Erdmann frowned in confusion. “Mufti?”
“Out of uniform, Fritz. Undercover. Spies.”
Swallowing thickly, but not showing any pique, Erdmann said, “Yes-they are my assistants in our security effort.”
“Why aren’t they here?”
“Because they aren’t aware of your role in this affair-your undercover role, that is. Your spying.”
“Is that the Nazi way, Fritz? Keep the right hand from knowing what the left is doing?”
Erdmann grinned; it was a sudden, surprising thing. “I didn’t think you were naive, Leslie-that’s the way of all governments, of all spy agencies.”