Flight from Berlin (3 page)

The walls of the narrow street amplified the advancing sound, the drumbeat now underscored by the crunch of marching feet.

He watched from the post office window as the brigade leader passed, holding high a banner with the words
DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE
—
‘Germany, awake.’ Shoppers along the pavement raised their right arms, holding groceries in the other. Row after row of Brownshirts followed the banner, caps strapped under their chins, boots smacking the cobblestones. Each man carried a tall swastika flag of scarlet, white, and black and sang what sounded like a hymn, except that it was about sharpening daggers on kerbstones.

Denham folded his arms and swore under his breath. Warm weather in Germany brought out a tide of shit these days.

Just out of sight, a car horn blared once, and then persistently, causing the marchers to break step. Something must have blocked their way, because as the rows in front came to a sudden halt the ones following collided into their backs, throwing the parade into disarray. Caps were knocked off, flagstaffs whacked into faces, and fronts shoved against rears. The men swore and yelped, shouting, ‘
Halt!
’ to those in the rear.

‘Haaaalt!’

Denham snorted with laughter. What was going on? He pulled his Leica out of the case and tried to get a couple of shots of the farce unfolding.

‘Mister Denham.’

He usually got a better fee for an article with photos.

‘Mis-ter Den-ham.’

Denham froze.

A man’s voice was yelling his name over the commotion outside. It was coming from the direction of the car horn, which sounded again.

‘Mis-ter Rich-ard Den-ham?’

The voice was addressing him in English. So, chances were it didn’t belong to a Brownshirt. In fact, it sounded familiar. He stepped outside into the crowd of uniforms and saw, about twenty yards down the street, a black, open-topped Maybach parked half up on the pavement. The old street was so narrow, however, that it left barely six feet for the marchers to pass. Standing in the car was the tall, plumpish figure of Hugo Eckener, waving with his hand high in the air.

‘My dear Richard,’ he yelled, ‘I saw you go in. Have you just arrived?’

‘Dr Eckener,’ Denham said, unsure how to return such bonhomie with a brigade of aggrieved Brownshirts looking on. He sensed trouble.

‘Come on, get in. I’m giving you a ride to the hangar. You can check into the hotel later.’

Reluctantly the marchers began manoeuvring around the vehicle, casting malign looks at Eckener and Denham.

Self-conscious, he walked to the car, put his case on the backseat, and was about to hop in when an iron hand gripped his shoulder and yanked him around. A thickset, sunburned man glowered into his face. He wore the cap and insignia of a Scharführer. The brown collar strained around a neck that was like a rump of cured ham.

‘You took photographs of this?’ he said.

Denham felt the Leica become hot in his hand.

‘You thought it was amusing?’ The man’s breath came in short snorts. Violence hung in the air like static.

‘Comrade,’ Denham said, attempting a smile. ‘Hasn’t this week before the Games been decreed a Week of Jollity and Cheerfulness?’ He heard the Anglican vowels in his German as if his voice were a recording on a gramophone.

A brown bank of uniforms was moving in around him, penning him with no gap for escape.

‘Your name, sir.’

‘My name’s Denham. I’m a British reporter resident in Berl—’

‘British?’ the man said, parodying Denham’s voice. ‘And what is your business here?’

His mouth began to dry. ‘Your esteemed Dr Eckener has asked me here. I’m writing a piece on the new Zeppelin.’

The Scharführer looked over the heads of the men and stared at the doctor.

‘Our esteemed Dr Eckener closes his heart to our national awakening, yet feels free to do whatever he pleases.’ For some reason the men chuckled, as if this were some local running joke. He turned back to Denham. ‘But you, sir, are coming to the barracks.’

Denham opened his mouth to protest, but it was Eckener’s voice that sounded, filling the length of the street on the warm air.

‘This man is here at my invitation.’

Standing in the open-topped car he towered over the Brownshirts, the chin beneath his goatee wobbling with rage. Elijah addressing the followers of Baal.

‘You’re harassing a foreign guest of the Reich’s, and believe me, that will not go well for you in the week before the Olympic Games.’

The Scharführer seemed to waver. The men glanced at each other.

Denham saw his moment, shoved his way through the uniforms, and jumped into the passenger seat. The Maybach’s engine roared. He took a ten-reichsmark note from his wallet and held it towards the Scharführer.

‘Here. No harm done,’ he shouted. ‘Buy your men some beers.’

The man snatched the note just as the car jerked forwards and accelerated up the street, forcing the men bunched at the back of the brigade to step quickly out of the way.

‘Do you often ruin their parades?’ Denham said over the noise of the engine.

‘Criminals and gangsters,’ Eckener shouted. He was furious.

Denham leaned back in his seat and laughed, pulling the brim of his hat over his eyes. ‘Always keep your head down and stay out of fights. I should have learned that lesson from the war.’

He had to admire the old man’s effrontery, but then Hugo Eckener enjoyed an immunity afforded to few other opponents of the regime. In 1929 he’d become the most famous German in the world when he circumnavigated the globe as commander of the
Graf Zeppelin—
the first voyage of its kind in an aircraft. Immense crowds turned out to greet the silver machine when it landed in Tokyo, San Francisco, and New York, fulfilling his dream that the Zeppelin should forge links of friendship among nations
.
He was an ebullient, courageous, driven man, an enormous personality who counted kings and presidents among his acquaintances. So high was his standing at home and abroad that the Nazis dared not touch him, and he knew it.

‘It’s wonderful to see you again,’ Eckener yelled. ‘How long has it been?’

Denham saw familiar houses, gables, and barns speeding by. ‘I haven’t been here in six years. Not since we flew with you on the
Graf
to Brazil.’

‘Ha! Yes. Your dear father saved our skins on that one . . .’

But Eckener’s mind, Denham sensed, was still seething with Brownshirts.

‘You told those devils that you’re living in Berlin. Is that true?’

‘It’s true.’

The old man shook his head.
‘Unglaublich.’
Incredible. ‘You mean you
choose
to live in this lunatic asylum? What about your family?’

Denham shrugged. ‘My wife said I was more intimate with the typewriter than with her, and left me. Besides, Berlin is where the news is. I sell a lot of stories from there.’

‘You have a son, though, yes?’

‘That’s right. Tom. He’s eight years old.’

‘Surely you miss him?’

‘Of course. But . . .’

‘The British,’ Eckener said with admiration, ‘are intrepid.’

Denham’s other reason for living in Germany was harder to explain, but he knew it had something to do with the hysteria gripping the country. The shrieking, stamping monstrousness of it had the odd effect of making him feel sane and normal. There’d been times in the quiet civility of Hampstead, in the difficult years after he’d returned from war, when he’d felt he was losing his mind.

They motored out of the town and along lanes where the air was sweet with mown hay. In the far distance across the lake he saw Säntis, the nearest of the Swiss Alps, still blue with snow, its peak hidden in a thundercloud.

‘
Hindenburg
is a good name for the airship,’ Denham said.

‘It was a compromise. The first name they gave me was
Adolf Hitler
.’

T
he maiden flight of the D-LZ129
Hindenburg
to New York in May had made headline news. Denham had followed the story of its construction, sending cuttings for Tom’s scrapbook. At 804 feet in length—one-sixth of a mile long—it was only a few feet shorter than the
Titanic
. At its middle, widest point, it was the height of a fourteen-storey building, and had a gas volume of more than seven million cubic feet.

Possessed even with these statistics, he gasped at his first sight of it, moored to its mast under an azure sky. The ship was a giant, the largest flying object ever made. Streamlined perfectly from nose to fins, it lay facing into the breeze, sheathed in a silver fabric that reflected the early-evening sun. The shadow of a summer cloud passed slowly over its hull, giving Denham the impression of watching a vast fish basking in the shallows of a warm sea.

For several minutes he stood next to Eckener in silence. The ship’s side was adorned with the Olympic rings in honour of the Games. Two of the four propeller-engine cars were visible, sticking out of the lower body like flippers. A row of promenade windows ran along part of the midship, where the luxury passenger accommodation—the lounges, bar, cabins, and dining room—were recessed entirely into the body. The control car was the only part of the structure that hung below the hull, like a single eye, resting on its landing wheel.

‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ Eckener said. ‘Even with those filthy black spiders they made us put on her.’ He gestured to the enormous swastikas emblazoned on the upper and lower tail fins.

‘Sublime,’ Denham mumbled. It was the most marvellous thing he’d ever seen.

‘I wish your father could see her.’

‘How fast is she?’

‘Top speed is a hundred and thirty-five kilometres per hour,’ said Eckener. ‘Faster with a tailwind. She’s the quickest vessel over the Atlantic. Frankfurt to Rio de Janeiro in one hundred hours and forty minutes; to New York in fifty-nine hours. Not as quick as I’d have liked, but we can’t take a direct route. The French don’t want us over their rooftops . . .’

They walked towards the
Hindenburg
. To the left of the field, the doorway of the nearest hangar was open, revealing the vast nose of the
Graf Zeppelin
. The tiny figures of some mechanics were making checks on a propeller-engine car, but otherwise the field and two hangars were deserted, giving a deep stillness to the place.

As they reached the ship the contours of the immense hull spread out above them like the surface of another planet. Eckener led Denham to a small ladder hanging down from the control car, and up they climbed into the nerve centre of the Zeppelin.

Inside, the fittings were of gleaming aluminium, like those of a rocket ship in
Flash Gordon
. An array of instruments controlled the ship’s course, speed, and buoyancy. Eckener pointed out each in turn. At the front of the bridge was the rudder wheel that steered with the aid of illuminated gyrocompasses; on the left was the elevator wheel, which maintained altitude and trim. Above these were the ballast control levers, and a gas-cell pressure gauge with warning lights that flashed—the very latest in long-distance airship-flight technology. A telegraph, like those on ocean liners, sent messages to the propeller-engine cars. But most dramatic of all, high, slanted windows surrounded the bridge, giving a superlative view onto the world: left and right, below, and far into the horizon, so that any approaching lightning storms could be circumnavigated. Everything smelled metallic and new.

Denham felt as if he were in a dream. In another life he’d have been a Zeppelin commander, he realised. The age of fast, luxury Zeppelin travel had begun. He imagined fleets of these giant ships linking the distant continents of the earth. Their time was at hand. They were the future.

‘How about a spin over the lake,’ he joked, knowing the ship couldn’t go anywhere without some three hundred ground crew present.

‘How would you like to fly next Saturday?’ Eckener said, slapping his shoulder. ‘The
Hindenburg
will make a pleasure trip over the opening ceremony of the Olympiad in Berlin. And in the meantime, enjoy a few days here on the lake, as my guest of course.’

‘I would like that very much,’ Denham said.

‘Excellent. There will be a movie crew on board, too.’

This man is the other Germany,
Denham thought. The Germany of decent, kind people who stand like rocks against the flow of the times.

In the navigation room next to the bridge, Eckener motioned for him to sit at the chart table. A golden light burnished the dials and switches of the radio instruments. The old man’s face seemed rejuvenated in the sunset. At sixty-eight he had the appearance of a man years younger, though his hair and goatee beard were white. His face was large, jowly, and intelligent, with flinty blue eyes, one of which, disconcertingly, was higher than the other.

‘Let’s have a schnapps,’ he said, unlocking a drawer and taking out a bottle and two glasses. ‘I sometimes permitted the night watch a nip on board the
Graf
at the end of the shift. It gets very cold over the Atlantic in spring.’ They toasted each other in silence, and knocked it back. ‘And now, my dear Richard, I have something for you.’ He opened a cupboard beneath the table to reveal a small safe. ‘I keep a precious relic in this chest, but by rights it belongs to you.’ He turned the dial slowly. ‘The combination is five-ten-nineteen-thirty.’

Denham was puzzling over why the doctor should give away the numbers to his private safe, when it struck him. They made the date of his father’s death. Eckener removed a small felt bag and handed it over with what seemed to Denham a look of earnest pity. He opened it and a pocket watch fell into his hand.

‘I’ve been waiting for a chance to give it to you in person,’ Eckener said.

For a fleeting moment he had a sense that his father was present in the room, as though he’d slipped in through some fissure in time. The watch lay cool in his palm. He turned it over and saw in tiny engraved italics the words:

For Arthur Denham—On his retirement—Royal Airship Works—Cardington