A woman’s voice, behind him.
Glancing up, he saw the two terrified little boys, the Doehners, climbing out the sill. Their frantic mother pushed them out, one at a time. Charteris caught the boy, and in one fluid motion flung him with all his force, the child sailing in an arc, landing beyond the fire zone. The other boy landed in the sandy earth, not so near by; another passenger—it was the cotton broker, Hirschfeld!—snatched up the lad by the hand and sprinted with him through the obstacle course of flames and debris.
Charteris had seen Hilda drop like a bundle, get to her feet, gather the blanket around her like an Indian and dash into and through the flames.
Now it was his turn to navigate the gauntlet of flaming framework and burning linen and glowing beams and red-hot wires. Covering his head with his sport jacket, he ran a zigzag path through the wreckage; around him others were doing the same—some falling to the earth screaming, burning.
But Charteris emerged from the smoke and flames fairly unscathed—he’d sucked in smoke, and his hair and mustache were singed, though his monocle was gone.
The Saint might have gone back in, looking for it.
Charteris, a ground-crew member taking him by the arm and leading him away, would let it go.
Margaret Mather had watched the men and women leaping from the promenade windows, but she just remained where she’d fallen against the bench, lapels of her coat shielding her face. Flames were flitting all around her, like butterflies, and occasionally they’d land on her sleeves and she would brush them off with her bare hands. The scene around her seemed out of a medieval picture of hell, and she had remained detached, composed, while all around her gave in to hysteria.
She kept her eyes covered and decided that she agreed with whoever it was who was screaming, “Es ist das Ende!” and quietly waited to die, hoping it would not be too prolonged and painful an experience, waiting for the crash of landing.
Then someone was yelling through the window: “Come out, lady!”
She opened one eye, then another.
Framed there in the window was an American—a sailor boy!
She stood primly, looked around for her handbag, finding it between two corpses; then she did her best to crawl out the window in a ladylike fashion, the sailor helping her down.
And then the nice young man walked her out through the bits and pieces of burning this and that.
All but one of the officers in the control car walked away from the burning wreck. Captain Pruss emerged from the curtain of smoke, hatless, his hair burned away; badly burned, but alive.
Charteris—who was wandering the periphery, looking for Hilda—saw Ernst Lehmann stagger from the black billowing smoke, looking stunned but not seriously harmed. The author ran to the dying ship’s former captain, to see if he needed help. Lehmann was walking along as if strolling through a park, or so it might have seemed if his face hadn’t been fixed in such glazed confusion.
“Are you all right, Ernst?” Charteris asked.
Lehmann looked right through him, eyes unblinking despite the smoke, saying, “I don’t understand…. I don’t understand…”
Then the director of the Reederei moved past Charteris, revealing that the clothes had been burned from the back of him, leaving the naked skin from the top of his head to the heels of his feet a charred black blistered mass.
An American officer ran to Lehmann’s side and walked him to the waiting ambulance.
Charteris turned to look at the ship, whose linen skin was almost gone now, fire erasing the Gothic red letters spelling Hindenburg, leaving a glowing skeleton trailing white-hot entrails and streaming smoke as black as the coming night.
Somewhere, within that colossal smoldering corpse, were the cremated remains of Colonel Fritz Erdmann. And probably those of Eric Spehl, as well.
Then, coughing, he sought out one of the navy boys, to see if he could hitch a ride to the base hospital.
Maybe Hilda was there.
SIXTEEN
HOW THE HINDENBURG SMOLDERED, AND LESLIE CHARTERIS BURNED
AT THE LAKEHURST NAVAL AIR Station’s small, single-story hospital, Charteris roamed the corridors like a man in a trance. His sport jacket had been lost en route, and his yellow sport shirt and tan slacks were scorched and torn; he looked like a hobo who’d had a particularly rough night of it.
The scene was one approaching battlefield horror. Doctors, nurses, and orderlies swarmed like white blood corpuscles fighting infection, hallways lined with burn victims on stretchers; in small doorless rooms, other casualties slumped in chairs and sat on examining tables, as doctors had a look and nurses dressed wounds. One somewhat larger room had badly burned bodies littering the floor like unearthed mummies.
Some of the victims had “M’s” written on their foreheads with grease pencil—an orderly with a syringe the size of a Roman candle was administering morphine, and hastily marking those who’d had theirs. Screams and whimpers and howls and moans resounded, and men with bloody burns, clothes in charred tatters, wandered vacant-eyed like zombies, looking for friends and loved ones. The wounded cried out, in German mostly, for their mothers, their wives, their husbands, their priests. And a priest was threading through the carnage, delivering last rites like a postman does the mail.
The smell of burned human flesh and burned clothing hung like a foul curtain; odors of alcohol and Lysol added to the nasty bouquet. Charteris began to cough—apparently he’d inhaled more smoke than he realized—and suddenly a gentle hand was on his arm, as a nurse shuffled the dazed author into an examining room and onto its white-papered table.
A fleshy, bespectacled, kindly-faced doctor in his thirties gave Charteris a quick exam.
“You’re one of the luckiest I’ve seen,” he told Charteris, who was putting his scorched shirt back on. “The nurse will apply some picric acid to your hands—couple of nasty little burns.”
“Is everyone being brought here?”
“To the first-aid station? Yes, but we immediately shuttle the worst cases to Paul Kimball Hospital—it’s close by in Lakewood.”
“Does anyone have a list?”
“Of who’s injured and who’s survived?”
“Yes.”
A commotion in the hall, accompanied by louder howls, signaled the arrival of more injured, who were still being carted over from the crash site by ambulance and auto.
“No list I’m afraid,” the doctor said, already halfway out the door, “much too early for that… if you’ll excuse me.”
Almost immediately a nurse came in with a small bottle of picric acid and some gauze and wet down his palms. She was a brunette of perhaps twenty-five, with a gentle plain face.
“Nurse, do you remember treating or even just noticing a pretty German girl with braided blonde hair, blue eyes?”
“Why yes—I didn’t deal with her personally, but I’m fairly sure she’s fine, just minor burns, like yourself. Your wife?”
“Is she still here?”
“I’m not sure. As negligible as her injuries are, she was probably discharged… is that better?”
“It’s fine. Where did you see her?”
“Down the hall to the left—she was standing next to a boy on a stretcher who was very badly burned, comforting him, sweet girl. He may have been taken to Paul Kimball Hospital, or… he may have died.”
Then she produced a clipboard and asked Charteris if he could sign his name; either the burns weren’t bad or he was in shock, because he had no trouble.
In the hallway he ran into Leonhard and Gertrude Adelt; their clothes were scorched rather worse than his, Leonhard’s nearly in tatters. Both of them had severe burns on their arms and faces, and Leonhard’s scalp looked to be burned to the bone.
“Thank God you’re all right, Leslie!” Leonhard said, over the moans around them.
“Have you seen a doctor yet?”
“No. We’re just on our way out—getting out of this madhouse!”
“You two need to s
ee a doctor.”
The journalist shook his head. “My brothers are just outside and they’ll take care of us.”
Gertrude reached out, not touching him—her hand was too burned for that. “We’ll be fine, Leslie. Did you see Hilda?”
“No, I was just looking for her.”
“She’s barely scratched.” Smiling wearily, Gertrude gestured with her head. “She’s down at the end of the hall. Go to her—I think she’s in shock.”
As if the Adelts weren’t.
He told them good-bye, said, “Get to a doctor!” and made his way down the corridor, lined as it was with burn victims on stretchers, weaving around nurses, doctors, orderlies.
Shoulders slumped, head down, she was standing next to an empty, bloodstained, smoke-grimy stretcher. Her braids had come untangled and blonde locks dangled alongside her soot-smudged heart-shaped face, her white crepe dress torn here and there, new dabs of black added to its red-and-pink-and-black floral pattern.
“So they took him away, huh?” Charteris said.
She glanced up sharply. “Leslie… thank God!”
“You’ve been looking for me, then? Frantically?”
Wincing, she said, “What is it?”
“Good-bye, Hilda.”
Soon he was standing in the cool, rain-misted evening, his back to the small hospital, where ambulances and autos were still bringing in more wounded. Across the airfield the wailing sirens of fire trucks and police cars and ambulances had mostly died. The voluminous plumes of black smoke were beginning to get lost in the darkening dusk, and—from this distance at least—the orange flames were little more than a campfire, smoldering in the twisted glowing skeleton of the ship, around which the cops and firefighters could warm themselves. The hook-and-ladder trucks had dispensed their water and were disinterested onlookers, now.
“Leslie…”
Hilda’s husky voice.
He didn’t turn. “My condolences.”
Then she was next to him, as he stood staring out at the fuming, smoldering wreckage across the airfield. The sky was a vast emptiness, overcast, no stars.
“What do you mean?”
“Funny.” He patted his cigarette case of Gauloises in his shirt pocket. “These things made the trip, and I could use a smoke right now… but I haven’t got a light.”
Wind blew the strands of hair. “Why are you mad at me?”
Not looking at her, Charteris said, “I’m surprised he lived through it long enough even to make it to this first-aid station. I’m surprised there was anything left to identify.”
“Who?” Her brow was knit. “Who are you talking about?”
Now he turned to her, looked down into the deep blue eyes in the lovely black-splotched face. “Eric Spehl—your boyfriend.”
She frowned—and he realized she was deciding whether or not to continue the masquerade; but the day, the evening, had gone on too long, and they had been through too much, together and apart. And, most of all, they were both just too damned tired. Sighing, her eyelids at half-mast, she all but said, No games, no more games.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I write mystery stories, remember?”
“How, Leslie? How do you know?”
He shrugged. “No one big thing—several small things, Beatrice… That is your real name, isn’t it? Beatrice Schmidt?”
That he knew this much unsettled her, clearly; but she recovered, saying, “Yes… but I have rather come to like ‘Hilda.’”
“I… I’d rather come to like Hilda, myself.” He twitched half a smile. “I am a little disappointed. You’d think a German girl, at least, would be a natural blonde. You’re the ‘older’ woman, the dark-haired leftist ‘tramp’ who turned young Eric Spehl political.”
She laughed but no sound came out; then she said, “I should have hidden my leftist beliefs.”
“You tried, but you must feel them very deeply—there really was a patriotic lover who died in the Spanish Civil War, wasn’t there?”
She nodded. “Our cause is just.”
He glared at her. “You killed and hurt a lot of innocent people tonight, trying to make some stupid grandiose point.”
But she merely smiled, faintly. “Did we? Or was it you, interfering in a plan that left unmolested would not have taken a single life? And would have struck Nazism a terrible blow?”
Now he laughed, only it turned into a cough; the smoke taste filming his mouth was nasty. “Maybe you’re right. But you and Eric’ll have to take responsibility for Willy Scheef.”
She frowned, puzzled, apparently genuinely so. “Willy… ? I know nothing of this.”
“You know, that’s just possible. You may not even know that Eric threw poor Willy overboard.”
The eyes widened; the whites were bloodshot. “He did what?”
“As I said, Beatrice… Hilda… it was a lot of little things—there’s the irritation you displayed when Eric paid his little unscheduled visit to A deck, for my autograph. Today, discovering that you, like Eric Spehl, were a devout Catholic… you let it slip in our little Ascension Day chat. Then there was the fact you were visiting your sister, to help her with her new baby—yet your address was the Hotel Sterling. That just didn’t sit right…. And of course you were so frightfully worried about the postponed landing—perhaps knowing that a timer was ticking away on a bomb that had been set without those interminable delays factored in.”
Her eyes, still wide, had tightened, now. “Those tiny things told you… ?”
“No. One slightly larger thing did. This is how Willy gets involved. You don’t know about the midnight beating, do you?”
Again, she seemed utterly bewildered. “Midnight—what are you—”
And he told her about Willy Scheef, at Eric Spehl’s bidding, coming to the cabin to deliver a message by way of a beating.
“The message Willy delivered was ‘Stop what you’re doing,’” Charteris said, “but I made the mistake of thinking the message meant I should back off my investigation. Why should I be warned so late in the game? Less than a day left? How much detective work might I still do, and anyway, nothing I’d done had been very effective, had it? But the warning didn’t refer to my investigation… did it, Hilda?”
“I do not know.”
“Oh, well, perhaps—but I think you can figure it out. When I spent the night in your cabin, when we had that early-morning interruption by a steward, supposedly wanting to make the room up… that was no steward… that was Eric Spehl, sneaking a visit to his sweetheart.”
She said nothing.
“Eric knew you were going to keep an eye on me, Hilda, but he didn’t think sleeping with me would be part of the bargain… and he was furious with both of us. That’s what I was being warned to stop doing—seeing you… sleeping with you. That’s why Willy Scheef died… not to save the fatherland from Adolf Hitler. Just to cover up a petty little crime of assault, since it might lead to exposure of the bigger crime of sabotage, not to mention Eric Knoecher’s murder.”
She sighed heavily. “Eric was a simple, jealous boy.”
“You and Colonel Fritz Erdmann and others in the resistance molded and shaped and manipulated Eric Spehl into doing your bidding. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with your cause—it’s just that I don’t like being molded, shaped, and manipulated myself… or seeing big dumb clucks like Willy Scheef bumped off for no good reason.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“Of course you did—your young lover is risking everything to sabotage the ship he helped build, and he catches you in bed with another man…. All that stuff about needing adventurous men, wanting to live a larger life through a man of influence, that was the real you talking, wasn’t it?”
“I suppose it was.”
“And I was the perfect type to latch onto—sophisticated, successful, divorced….”
“You flatter yourself.”
He laughed again, managing not to cough this time. “Wha
t did Eric think your mutual future held? That he would sneak away from the ship, slip into America—that you and he would traipse through the flowers together, building a new life in the Land of the Free?”
“He would have worked as a photographer.”
“And you would have been a photographer’s wife? How long would that have lasted? It doesn’t sound very… adventurous to me. Also, for a Communist, you seem to have rather refined tastes.”
A tear rolled down her cheek, smearing the soot. “I did love him, in my fashion… and he died with me in his eyes.”
“Looking up at an angel.”
Another trickle of tear; a sniffle. “You’re cruel.”
“No. If I were cruel, I’d turn you in to somebody or other. Trouble is, I don’t particularly care to see this thing get uglier than it already is… or to spend the next several months of my life in court proceedings and other inquiries, explaining what really happened to and on the goddamn Hindenburg.”
She looked pointedly at him. “What did happen?”
Charteris sighed, shrugged; the drizzle was picking up again. “Eric figured out that Fritz was probably going to shoot him over the Willy Scheef blunder—they struggled, a stray bullet caught a gasbag. And the rest is history—or rather isn’t history… because I’ll never tell it.”
Her smile had some sneer in it. “You will never tell it because I am right.”
“You are, Hilda?”
“Yes—you caused this, Leslie. If you had not interfered—”
“I don’t give a damn about that, because I don’t believe it for a second. Those clumsy saboteurs might well have blown us up in any case. No, I won’t tell this story because I wouldn’t give Adolf Hitler the satisfaction of saying anarchist forces, opposing him, took all these innocent lives, on American soil.”
“… Oh.”
A faint crackling of the burning ship could be heard from across the field—like someone was popping corn.
Quietly, he asked, “Is there a real Hilda Friederich?”
“… No. She is an invention. People who share my beliefs, working within the Reich, arranged the false papers.”
“And now you disappear into America. To start a new life.”
The Hindenburg Murders Page 20