Flight from Berlin Read online

  Brundage removed his spectacles, his eyes narrowing with irritation.

  ‘Didn’t I make myself clear? I said you will disembark at Hamburg and return immediately—’

  ‘I heard what you said. If you’ve fired me from the team, that’s my hard luck, but you have no further rights over me.’ Her eyes glistened, but her voice held. ‘I’m from a free country, and if I want to be in Berlin to support my friends, there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop me—unless you want to make an ass of yourself in the thirty daily newspapers of William Randolph Hearst.’

  Brundage opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. For a moment he seemed ready to yell something that far exceeded the strict parameters of his own code of conduct.

  Eleanor walked to the door with her back straight and her head held as high as it would go, keeping her hands in her jacket pockets so they would not see her shaking.

  ‘See you at the opening ceremony,’ she said.

  Chapter Six

  Zeppelins had been a part of Denham’s life for as long as he could remember. The serene giants first floated into his imagination in pictures on cigarette cards. Every day after school he’d walk home to Pound Lane, a quiet row of terraced houses along the river in Canterbury, daydreaming of airships—imagining fleets of them in the sky over the cathedral, humming like giant bumblebees. He’d draw them and make models from household litter. He wanted to know everything about them. Luckily his father, Arthur, a mechanical engineer, had caught the Zeppelin bug, too.

  Even in those pioneer days there was no doubt in Arthur Denham’s mind that lighter-than-air ships were the future of long-distance travel. Aeroplanes, he said, were flying hedge-cutters. They’d never be good for anything but deafening, hair-raising hops. ‘Not for sailing through the clouds,’ he’d say with a twinkle in his eye, ‘across continents and oceans.’

  The Great War was into its second year when Denham finally saw a Zeppelin. He was eighteen. He and his younger brother, Sidney, were on a day trip to London with their mother’s sister Joan, a nervous, childless woman who doted on them. Her surprise treat for them at the end of the day was a musical revue at the Strand Theatre.

  Over the years the events of that night would assume a luminous clarity in Denham’s memory. It was a chill evening in October and an air raid blackout was in force. Only the yellow lights of trams and taxis lit the faces of the crowds along the pavements—the theatregoers, the office workers heading home, the soldiers on leave from the Front. Hollow-eyed lads lost in a gloomy limbo. Above the grand buildings of the Aldwych the constellations stood out as keen as diamonds.

  The show was Sunshine Girl, and the audience was encouraged to join in the songs.

  When the final curtain call ended, the audience rose and began making their way along the rows towards the exit. They hadn’t quite reached the auditorium doors when the floor shook and an ominous rumble sounded from outside.

  ‘And here’s us come without a brolly,’ Aunt Joan said.

  The next rumble silenced the crowd and stopped them cold. Fragments of plaster dropped from the ceiling, and the stage curtains swayed. Sidney looked up at him wide-eyed, wanting reassurance.

  When it came, the explosion was almost a direct hit.

  A blast ripped through the foyer, sending rolls of plaster dust into the auditorium. The crowd fell to the floor, clutching their hats to their heads. In the commotion outside a man yelled, ‘It’s a Zepp! It’s a bloody Zepp!’ A woman screamed, and unrestrained panic broke out as the crowd surged towards the exits. Sid began bawling and hid in the folds of his brother’s overcoat.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies—and—gentlemen—please,’ a voice boomed from the stage. Mr George Grossmith, the show’s star, was addressing them. ‘Remain inside until the danger has passed over, I beg of you.’ His peremptory tone seemed to take control of the crowd, making the panic subside somewhat. People hesitated, and one by one, they began to sit. ‘Now, all of you, sing along with me to calm yourselves down.’

  The orchestra played ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,’ and slowly people joined in the singing. Aunt Joan’s voice came in short, rattled breaths, but she persevered, as if fearful of bringing on her asthma if she succumbed to hysteria.

  As the explosions and rumbles outside grew fainter, voices that had sung out of terror sang out of defiance, and by the time the orchestra played ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ the audience was a chorus of patriotic fervour. Soon, a Boy Scout appeared in the emergency exit to call the all-clear, and they ended with ‘God Save the King.’

  When Denham, Sidney, and Aunt Joan followed the crowd in single file through the wreckage of the foyer someone was again screaming. Outside, they stared in disbelief. People bloodied by flying glass were being tended on the steps until ambulances arrived. The grand crescent of the Aldwych, lit by the blazing roof of a building, was strewn with masonry and cobblestones. An acrid stench of cordite hung in the air. In his shock Denham was not certain what he was seeing among the flames and shadows. An omnibus overturned, its axle shattered. A dying horse’s snorting and whinnying. A number of clothed forms, limbs at unfamiliar angles, sprawled over a mosaic of smashed glass.

  ‘Oh, gosh, look,’ said Sidney.

  In the distance to the east were the cigar shapes of four Zeppelins, golden in the lights of the fires, the drone of their propeller engines clear on the night air. Arc lights swept the sky, holding one gleaming ship, then another, in the fingers of their beams. Artillery fire boomed, making chrysanthemum blooms of flame in the sky beneath them, but nothing touched them.

  ‘It’s a battlefield,’ said Aunt Joan, holding a handkerchief to her mouth. ‘London’s a battlefield.’

  Denham continued to stare, after his aunt and Sidney had turned to leave. He could not take his eyes off the four magnificent messengers of death.

  He awoke clammy with sweat. Sheets writhed around his body, leaving striations and gullies across his neck and chest, like an artist’s impression of the canals on Mars. His dream of the Zeppelins had merged—as his dreams often did—into one of the trenches. After a few weeks’ training in the London Rifle Brigade he’d been shipped to France. Only a few days after that he’d seen his first man killed. And then more men killed than he could ever count.

  A breeze from the lake moved the curtains, and light bouncing off water played on the ceiling of the elegant room.

  He looked at his watch, and leapt out of bed.

  ‘Damn.’

  He had a Zeppelin to catch.

  At eleven o’clock Denham found the hangar in a frenzy. Beneath the vast tethered bulk of the Hindenburg, hundreds of ground crew were moving through the shadows, preparing the ship for the voyage to Berlin. Surfaces buzzed with the roar of the propeller engine cars, which were running a thunderous preflight test. The ship almost filled the hangar’s cathedral space. From the rows of tall windows along the right-hand wall, shafts of light were given mass and texture by the dust in the air. Where the ceiling could be glimpsed above the leviathan, a galaxy of electric lights twinkled.

  Dr Eckener was directing proceedings from the top of a truck loaded with hydrogen canisters, booming through a megaphone his demands for pressure readings, weather reports, and general haste. How soon all this purposeful mayhem would become chaos, Denham thought, without the concentrating effect of the old man’s magnetism—the force that kept the whole enterprise going.

  Behind him a whistle sounded, and with an echoing clang the building’s great doors began to roll apart. Denham saw rays of sunshine blaze across the ship’s nose and along the streamlined ridges of its hull, and felt his suitcase become light in his hands.

  Eckener spotted him, and climbed down from his perch.

  ‘Good morning, good morning,’ he bellowed, without the megaphone. He was wearing his command
er’s cap, an old leather flying jacket over his tweed suit, and a waistcoat smudged with cigar ash.

  ‘My dear Richard,’ he said, shaking Denham’s hand warmly. ‘I hope everything on board will be to your comfort and satisfaction.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. How are the skies looking?’

  ‘A low drizzle over the Reich capital this morning. Also a stiff northeasterly. So we’d better depart before the weather plays any dirty tricks—and hope the clouds clear for our moviemakers. They’re on board, together with a pair of our local Party big shots, along for the champagne and the free ride.’

  Eckener held up his pocket watch for all to see and shouted, ‘Ten minutes.’

  ‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ Denham said.

  ‘Richard, my boy, just come back and see your old friend soon. I hope you get the story you want. You’re in Captain Lehmann’s hands now.’

  ‘You’re not commanding the ship?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no . . .’ The old man hesitated. ‘It seems I’m being moved aside for incurring the wrath of the Propaganda Ministry once too often.’ Eckener chuckled, but there was worry in his eyes. ‘I have apparently “alienated myself from the Reich,” and you reporters are no longer to mention me in the newspapers.’

  Before Denham could respond, a young steward was beside them, pointing at the leather case hanging from his neck.

  ‘No personal cameras permitted on board.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, man,’ Eckener barked. ‘He has my authorisation to take his camera on board.’ The young man stepped back, smarting, and Denham noticed the small Party pin in his lapel. ‘Make yourself useful by offering Herr Denham whatever information he requires to write his article.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Eckener smiled at Denham apologetically. ‘You will have to hand him your matches, however. Not even you are exempt from that rule.’

  The noise of the engine test stopped, filling the hangar with an iron silence. Eckener leaned towards Denham’s ear.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t need to advise caution to you of all people. The Party has members among the crew. They’ll be watching you . . .’

  Denham winked. ‘Don’t you worry. I won’t tell them your joke about a little girl going up to Hitler and—’

  ‘Till we meet again,’ Eckener said in a loud voice, cocking his head towards the offended steward, and then giving a wheezy laugh despite himself. ‘That was a good one. If you hear any more, remember them for me . . . now hurry.’

  Denham turned and climbed the narrow aluminium stairway, thinking of the joke Eckener had told him. A little girl approaches Hitler and his entourage with a bouquet of flowers but stumbles. Hitler catches her, cups her face in his hands, and kneels down to say a few quiet words. Afterwards people crowd around her. ‘What did the Führer say to you?’ they ask. The little girl is puzzled. ‘He said, “Quick, Hoffmann, a photo!” ’

  He was concerned about Eckener. Why did he have to go on making a stand like that, jeopardising his life’s work? It would not make one iota of difference.

  Denham continued up into the belly of the ship. It was like boarding a flying ocean liner. He nodded to a bust of old Hindenburg on the landing, then turned the corner into a lounge furnished with modern, comfortable armchairs. On the wall a large mural map of the world traced the routes of the great expeditions, from the voyages of Magellan to the globe-trotting flight of the Graf Zeppelin.

  The lounge was separated by a low rail from a long promenade, where wide windows slanting outwards offered panoramic views. Most improbable of all in a craft where everything was designed to save weight, a baby grand piano built of aluminium stood at the far side of the lounge. Above it hung the obligatory portrait of the dictator, whose hyperthyroid glare followed Denham across the room. The soft red carpet deadened his footsteps. The area was deserted.

  The Hindenburg was truly an airborne hotel, and a luxurious hotel at that. It was the mother lode of his fantasies, and even greater than he’d imagined—more beautiful, more spacious. He touched the Plexiglas window, almost expecting it to dissolve as he woke from a dream.

  ‘Zeppelin marsch!’

  Outside, Eckener shouted the order to move, and the hundreds of ground crew picked up the ropes and pulled, walking the giant craft out through the hangar doors like Lilliputians heaving Gulliver into the sun.

  In the open, as the men waited for the signal from the control car, Denham caught himself wondering whether a thing so large was really going to fly.

  ‘Schiff hoch!’

  The mooring ropes were thrown off, and together the men gave a mighty upward shove, pushing the ship into the air. He heard laughter and a smatter of applause from a crowd of bystanders as water ballast was released from the prow, dousing some of the men.

  Within seconds the ground was receding at an alarming speed. At about three hundred feet the ship slowly stopped rising and drifted in silence for a few moments, over the Zeppelin field and towards Lake Constance. Sunlight danced among the sailboats, and rippled like satin over the distant foothills of the Alps. Among the gabled roofs of Friedrichshafen, cars seemed like toys moving among matchbox houses.

  Suddenly the four diesel engines sputtered into action; the propellers churned the air and pushed the great ship forwards.

  Denham swept his hat off and laughed, holding his arms wide. He was charged with an electrifying freedom, as though he were slipping the world’s chains, floating free of all its fear. How sublime, he thought, how miraculous, how—

  ‘Hello, Richard,’ said a voice in English.

  He turned, embarrassed, as if he’d been caught pulling faces in the shaving mirror.

  ‘Ah. Hello there.’

  The young man he’d met at the bar, Friedl something, stood at the entrance to the lounge in knickerbockers and a sleeveless cricket sweater over a white shirt. His mop of black hair was swept under a Basque cap, as though he were a weekend guest of the Great Gatsby.

  ‘We’ve almost got the ship to ourselves,’ he said with that hustler grin. ‘Just a few guests, my colleagues in the movie crew—and you.’

  ‘Yes, it’s rather a privilege.’

  ‘Tell me something . . . do you listen to swing?’

  Surprised, Denham said, ‘I do.’

  ‘Good. I want to know what grooves these days’—he raised a hand to the side of his mouth in a mock whisper—‘and about all the other things that are banned here . . .’

  Again, he was struck by the man’s candid nature. It seemed hard to believe that it hadn’t got him into trouble. And he listened to swing. If there were two things utterly anathema to National Socialism, they were Jews and hot jazz.

  ‘We’ll do an exchange,’ Denham said. ‘I’ll tell you what’s hot and you can tell me any gossip you’ve heard about the Games—and I mean real news, not official stuff.’

  On the port side of the airship a long dining room filled the length of the space, separated by a low railing from another promenade, also with panoramic views.

  Tables were laid with white linen, fresh-cut flowers, and silver cutlery; the china plates bore a Zeppelin motif. White-jacketed stewards were arranging ice buckets and dishes of cured ham and roast venison for a buffet lunch. Halfway along the promenade Friedl’s crew was adjusting a rig holding a telephoto-lens movie camera pointed through an open promenade window. Denham recognised the men from the bar at the Kurgarten. The two Party big shots Eckener had mentioned—for whose enjoyment the sumptuous lunch was provided—were admiring the view with their wives and two young children, a boy and a girl. Both were colourless men in their late thirties, complacent in their light brown tunics, gold-trimmed swastika armbands, and booted legs, set wide apart. In any normal society they’d be town clerks or farm inspectors, Denham supposed, but in Germany the Party could elevate the most humdrum official into a Caesar, free to buil
d an empire from which to draw homage and fealty.

  ‘A pair of golden pheasants,’ Friedl said.

  They walked to the windows at the opposite end of the promenade from the Party men and watched the Rhine wind its way into the horizon through steep, wooded valleys. The castle tower of Meersburg passed below. As it gained height, the ship tilted gently, and a broad patchwork of cabbage fields and hamlets filled the view for as far as the eye could see. Horses pulling a hay cart reared their heads at the sight of the giant ship looming above; a farm dog chased its shadow across a field, barking.

  Corks popped and champagne was poured, and shortly after, lunch was announced. Denham joined Friedl at a table for two.

  ‘That’s our director of photography, Jaworsky,’ Friedl said, pointing at an older man talking to the captain. ‘The best cameramen in Germany today—made his name shooting Alpine movies, our equivalent of the western, you could say. And over there is Gerhard, our gaffer.’ He nodded with a flash of shyness towards a tanned lad in shirtsleeves who was lifting reels. The lad smiled back at them.

  ‘He’s your boyfriend?’ Denham asked, before he could stop himself.

  A change of pitch in the propeller engines and the ship picked up speed.

  Friedl stared at his plate, reddening, as though he’d been slapped across the face. When he looked up, his fine features hardened.

  ‘No, he is not.’ After another pause, he said, ‘As you yourself might have said, is it that obvious?’

  Denham wanted to kick himself.

  ‘Please forgive me. It’s a reporter’s bad habit. I spend too much time with hard-nosed hacks. I hope you’ll excuse it.’

  Friedl was about to speak when his eyes froze on something over Denham’s shoulder. He turned to see a dull-eyed, freckled boy of about ten, the son of one of the Party men, standing near their table, watching them. The type of boy who’d stone birds for fun. He wore the Jungvolk uniform. The belt around his shorts had a dagger hanging from it.