Chasing the Wind

by C. C. Humphreys

  “Is that an order?”

  “No, Fräulein Lille. We would merely like your company.”

  “Then I’d prefer my own company, thanks.”

  She picked up the electric lighter from their table, went to another on the opposite side, lit up. The barman came with her coffee. She sipped, smoked and brooded.

  She was just about to stub out when the smoke around her swirled. Someone had entered. She didn’t look up until the someone loomed above her.

  “May I join you?”

  She stared at him for a moment. “I’m expecting someone, Munroe.”

  “Who?”

  “Anyone who could pass for a human.”

  “Roxy!” Munroe lowered himself onto the chair. “Is there any reason for this unpleasantness? Wouldn’t it be much easier for you to just sign the land over to me? Save all the fuss in court?”

  She stubbed the butt out, stood, took a step.

  He caught her hand. “Are you going on the tour?” he asked.

  “Are you?”

  “I am.”

  She jerked her hand free as she answered. “Then I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “This on which we stand is called the middle, or axial, gangway. It is, if you will, the spine of the whale.”

  Though the ship’s officer—Lieutenant Glaumann was his name—had obviously conducted the tour many times, Roxy could hear in his voice the same pride, the same enthusiasm that all the personnel aboard displayed. They loved their ship in a way she, a pilot, completely understood.

  He had already ascertained that most of his guests worked in feet and inches, not metres, and continued, “Here, we are exactly in the middle. Seventy-five feet up—” all looked, to the roof above, crisscrossed with wires and struts “—and seventy-five feet down.” All looked down.

  They’d climbed up ladders from the lower gangway, which also ran the length of the ship along the keel. That’s where all the passenger and crew areas were, the storage, the control rooms.

  She glanced around at her fellow tourists. Theirs was a small party, the second of the daily tours. The first, conducted by Captain Lehmann himself, had drawn a much bigger crowd. The dark-haired family—Mexican, it turned out—were all there. The father and mother were rapt; the daughter looked like she had vertigo and clutched the thin guardrail; the elder of the two boys fidgeted, obviously bored; the younger grinned widely at everything. Willie had a similar expression on his face that went with all the whistles and folksy expressions he’d let out. “Gosh, darn!” he’d said. “Outstanding!” She wondered if he ever let slip a German expression. Break the act. Apart from that one mistake in the dining room, he’d maintained his front.

  And there was Munroe. He’d arrived late, sweating, and he still didn’t appear comfortable. His bulk made ladder climbing hard, and he’d tripped a couple of times because the sneakers he’d been given—everyone had to wear the soft rubber soles to protect the gangways—were too large. She studied her enemy now, as he listened to their guide. She noticed that the front of his white suit had dark spots on it, as if he’d slurped and spilled his tomato soup.

  Roxy didn’t hear the next stats about the engines, one of which was at the end of a side gantry they stood upon. Because she was suddenly thinking about lunch. How Willie had so enthusiastically eaten his soup at lunchtime. Which had been green as a pond.

  The spots on Munroe’s suit were scarlet.

  She took a step toward him, to confirm, but he noticed her and pivoted away, back to the guide. “And these,” Glaumann said, laying his hand on the very bottom of a giant balloon, “are what keep us in the air.”

  Was that Ferency’s blood on Munroe’s jacket? Had there been a falling-out of thieves?

  Roxy turned, her mind reeling. She looked along the length of the ship, at the sixteen giant bags that filled the upper half of the interior all the way to the front. They seemed sinister to her now, alive, like chrysalides waiting to hatch. Their lower halves rippled as if a creature within was breathing.

  “When fully inflated,” Glaumann continued, “the sixteen bags contain seven million cubic feet of hydrogen. That is enough to lift 236 tonnes.” He emphasized the word.

  “Outstanding,” Willie said. Then added, “But with the weight of the frame, the engines, all the fuel tanks, ballast, electrical generators, the cabins, the crew…how much more weight can you carry?”

  “Twenty tonnes.” Glaumann smiled at the whistles that came. “Yes. It is why we have the pleasure of your company and can make your voyage pleasant with all that good wine and food.”

  “And the gas?” It was a harsher, yet higher pitched voice that spoke now, and the officer turned to face the speaker, Munroe. “Isn’t hydrogen highly flammable? You take our lighters, you don’t allow flashbulbs for our cameras. That smoking room, with its airlock?” He grunted. “Aren’t you nervous all the time?”

  Glaumann smiled. “No. Because hydrogen is not flammable. Not at all.” He nodded. “It is only when hydrogen mixes with air that it becomes dangerous. So, we have precautions. But hydrogen is also lighter than air. It is up there.” He pointed to the top of the bulging cell. “It is almost impossible for it to escape this sack and mix with air. Now,” he said quickly, interrupting Munroe’s next query, “if you permit, I will tell more as we progress, and more later in the lounge, if you wish. We must move a little faster to see everything because I have to have you back for dinner. Schnitzel tonight, I hear. Yum-yum. The Hindenburg’s is even better than my wife’s. But please do not tell her I say this.”

  Amid the laughter that followed, he set out down the gangway, Roxy and Willie bringing up the rear of the group. “Gosh, it’s truly amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Outstanding,” she replied blankly. Her mind wasn’t on the ship, its lengths and volumes. It was on the man in the white suit ahead of her, what he might have done and if she could prove it. Because if she could, Munroe wasn’t going to be suing anyone. And Göring would get no planes made with the metal from her mines.

  The tour rolled on, with more amazing statistics and gasps of wonder. They reached the bow, where the lower gantry curved up to meet them. Descending that, Glaumann led them almost immediately down a ladder into the control gondola. This was stuck onto the belly of the airship, like a sucker fish attached to a blue whale. The plane suddenly became a ship, for beneath the tall front windows was a ship’s wheel, a helmsman at it, steering by a gyroscopic compass set before him. Halfway back was another wheel, facing sideways, which Glaumann informed them was the inclinometer. Beyond that was a chart room for navigation, and at the back of that a smaller room with tables. Three officers smiled as the party entered and again when they left.

  They climbed back up. The tour was nearly at an end and couldn’t end soon enough for her. She had to get back to her cabin and think. She had two more nights aboard. Two nights and two days to make something happen. What chance did she have to catch a murderer, prevent an explosion, reclaim a lover? Not much.

  Emerging from the gondola, they could see the gantry stretching ahead back to the passenger areas. Glaumann was making his concluding remarks. “Here you see, Damen und Herren, the tanks for fuel, hydrogen and water—the kind you drink and the kind we collect and vent as ballast. Also some quarters for officers and men and storage—” he waved “—as you can see.” To the left side was a large oilcloth wrapped around the unmistakable contours of a big car. “Your vehicle, is it not, Herr Munroe?” the officer inquired.

  “Mercedes 770,” said the big American. “Like airships, you Germans are producing the best damn vehicles in the world.”

  “Thank you.” Glaumann nodded toward the stairs ahead. “May I show the—” He bent, put a hand on the cloth’s edge.

  “No!” Munroe shouted. “Damn well leave it alone.”

  The officer narrowed his eyes and dropped the cloth. “Excuse me,” he said, and led the way.

  Roxy had lingered at the back. So she was the last to pass M
unroe’s car and the first to notice the smell.

  It was cologne. It was cheap. And she’d smelled it last on Jochen Zomack.

  She stopped, dropped to one knee. Willie, who’d also lingered, turned back. “Need a hand?”

  “No. Laces on these damn sneakers. I’ll follow.”

  “Okay.”

  He caught up with the others, took the stairs. When his legs had gone, she glanced back. No one was around. She lifted an edge of the car’s covering cloth. The scent grew stronger. “Jocco,” she whispered. “Are you there?”

  No reply. But she smelled something else now, mingling with the cheap cologne and oilcloth. She’d smelled it before—in destroyed villages, and bombed-out towns. Iron. “Jocco,” she said again, more urgently, and lifted the cloth.

  Munroe’s Mercedes was vast and red, but it was a different red from the blood that covered the body of her lover, which stank of metal. He was sprawled on the back seat. His eyes were half-open, glassy—like the eyes of a man lying under a streetcar. Like the eyes of a bishop dying in a cellar.

  The cathedral wasn’t just quiet now. There was no sound. None. No vibrating wires, no faint hum of engines. No people moving, speaking, laughing. There was death, again, and it took all the sound away.

  Letting the cloth fall, she sank down.

  And then pushed herself up. Because there was sound. A voice, calling. She saw him ahead, blurred, until her eyes focused. Lieutenant Glaumann was coming toward her. She stood, swayed, walked. He asked her something, but she didn’t hear it. She didn’t want to be questioned. She knew she wouldn’t be able to explain the blood on her hands, the horror on her face.

  The murder in her heart.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  KILLER, LOOSE

  ROXY THREW UP TILL THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT, TILL ONLY bile filled her mouth. Staggering out of the toilet and across the corridor to her cabin, she made it to the sink there, yet only retching came now. Reeling, she fell face down onto the bed, but when she closed her eyes, the world spun even worse. She dragged herself into a corner of the narrow bunk and drew her knees up. Gradually, the spasms subsided, the world steadied, she could think.

  Jocco.

  She’d let him go. She’d thought she had no choice except to do so since she’d had no news of him after Berlin and the crash. Then to have him back? It had revived a fire she’d thought was extinguished. She’d let the thought of him—of them—back in. She knew they’d never be the “white picket fence and a parcel of kids” kind of pair. But if they’d got off the Hindenburg, if her friends had come to their rescue? Maybe they’d have made it. Found another war where life, if not simple, was at least a simpler kind of complicated.

  Now all that was gone. Her guts twisted into knots, but she knew she couldn’t give in to sickness or to grief. There was still a madman on board with a bomb, and no Jocco restraining him.

  That thought had her swinging her legs off the bed. Of course! Jocco had the mechanism for the bomb. If he still had it and she got it, they were safe. If he didn’t…

  She had no choice. She had to go and check a dead man’s pockets. The thought, the image of him, made her breaths come more quickly. But she stood up anyway.

  The dead. They upset most people, of course. But the first doc she’d talked to, in that brief time she’d spent in Montreal with Aunt Estelle after her dad’s death, had noted that it appeared more advanced in her; it froze her, took away her senses. He’d called it shell shock because he’d been in the war and had seen a lot of that. He referred her to a psychiatrist, who’d given it a fancier name: acute stress disorder. But it only occurred when she first saw the body. In New York under a tram car. In a Madrid cellar. In the back of a car on an airship—

  The knocking, sudden and loud, made her cry out.

  “Madeleine? You okay?”

  “I’m…I’m sick, Willie.”

  “Shall I fetch the doctor?”

  “No. It’s not that bad. I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.” There was a pause. “First seating for dinner is about to start.”

  “You go ahead. I don’t think I can make it.”

  “I’ll, uh, I’ll check in on you later.”

  “Thanks.”

  She heard him moving away. Maybe she should join him. Willie Schmidt was a heap of questions she needed to answer. Had he killed Ferency? Did he have a bomb?

  Other voices came from the corridor, speaking rapid Spanish. Kids laughing, parents hushing. The Mexican family were passing. Roxy thought of the boys, the one bored, the one enthused by the airship. All doomed if the madman could arm the bomb. She should go to the authorities, tell them, let them deal…

  She sat down. Wait, she ordered herself. If I lead them to Jocco’s body, I’ll be the first one they arrest. I’m a suspect in Ferency’s murder. Schreiber, the Gestapo officer, already said that the police stateside would want to interview me. And what good can I do locked in a brig, or in my cabin? No. I need to try and figure this out myself.

  Who was the killer? Or was there more than one? Munroe for Jocco, and the anarchist for Ferency?

  The more she thought it the more likely it became. Munroe had shouted at Glaumann, the tour guide, not to lift the car cover because he’d known that Jocco’s corpse was there. And he’d joined the tour late, with spots of blood on his suit front that hadn’t been there when she’d seen him in the smoking room.

  She went to the sink, ran the cold tap and splashed her face again and again. She had to take this step by step. Munroe could wait. First she had to find out if the anarchist had just acquired the means to blow up the ship.

  She decided to allow the cabins to empty and the corridors to clear before making her move. After a while, all noise reduced to the faint rumble of engines, and she left her cabin. The corridor was empty. She walked quickly toward the chief steward’s tiny office and opened the door onto the gantry. No one was on it.

  It had been half an hour since the end of the tour. But night had already fallen, and the electrical lights were on, throwing the vast interior into shadows where the spill did not reach. The gantry was well lit, though, and she marched down it fast. She could smell the blood from ten feet away, but she didn’t hesitate—she knew she couldn’t. She bent, grabbed a tarpaulin edge and, taking another deep breath, jerked it up.

  The corpse was gone.

  She gasped, looked wildly around. But the front seat was as empty as the rear. She reached in and pulled a lever to spring open the trunk. It was huge. There was no body in it, but it wasn’t empty. Wrapped in a grey cloth was a rectangular object. Pulling the cloth aside, the first thing she saw was Daedalus’s screaming face.

  Munroe had been back and cleared away the evidence.

  Voices from the gantry. Roxy jerked down the tarp then ran around to crouch behind the passenger’s-side wheel arch. Two crew members passed by. She turned to peer into the gloom behind the car, into the deeper storage areas. Jocco’s body was not there either.

  But her name might be. Because she was looking into storage nets, and in them were piled about twenty black belongings bags with the name of the airship line—Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei—embroidered on them. Each had a label tied around the neck. The mesh was wide enough to let her slip her hands in, move the contents about. In half a minute she found the one with Madeleine Lille written on it.

  She pulled her penknife from her purse and used it to cut through the twined rope. Once she’d parted three strands she was able to slide her bag out. Reaching into it, she felt among the few objects, seeking the one she was looking for. “Hello, baby,” she said, lifting her derringer into the light.

  She had the bullet in her cabin. Singular. One wasn’t much to use against two murderers. But it was one more than nothing.

  More voices on the gantry. She stayed low as two crewmen passed back the other way. When their voices had faded, she reached again into the bag and drew out her lighter before shoving her bag back into the netting. Then she stepped out
and hurried back to the passenger area of the ship. The chief steward’s office was still empty and shouting could be heard from the kitchen. She still wasn’t hungry—at least, not for food.

  The bartender greeted her. “Same again, chère mademoiselle?”

  “Make it a double.”

  “Of course.”

  There was no one else beyond the airlock; the smoking room was empty. They all had to be in their cabins, at supper or on the promenade deck awaiting their seating.

  The bartender came in and set down her drink. As he left, she lit up, and raised her glass. “To Jocco, old comrade. Wherever the hell you are.” She took a sip, raised the glass again, made a second toast.

  “And to revenge.”

  She woke to screams.

  At first she thought they were in her tortured dreams. Then they penetrated sleep and she was awake, shooting up, focusing…realizing that the screams did not come from the corridor. No one was fleeing a bomb blast. A seagull was flying parallel to the ship. But the Hindenburg was faster and soon left the bird, and its harsh cries, behind. Roxy looked down and saw icebergs. If these were below, that meant the airship couldn’t be that far from North America. The first landfall would be Newfoundland. She’d recognize that. It was the route every flyer took, the shortest hop between the continents.

  It was May 5. The last full day of the flight. Tomorrow morning, they would dock in New Jersey. If—she remembered with a lurch of her heart—a madman didn’t blow them up first.

  She checked her watch—8:33 a.m. She’d slept long and hard. Her mouth was like an ashtray that had been poorly washed in whisky. Only coffee and more nicotine could take that taste away.

  The shower was free. Remembering Willie’s warning, she turned it on, soaked herself fast—no easy feat in the ensuing dribble—applied soap, scrubbed and rinsed. Got the last of the suds out of her hair just as the shower clicked off.