Free Flight from Berlin by David John Page B

lithe and silken-haired, pointing her foil, arm straight. She was one of the greatest athletes Germany had ever produced, whose fighting style had an extraordinary grace.
    He’d have to reach her in private somehow. An approach through the official channels would almost certainly be refused. In fact, Willi Greiser would surely expel him for this one. No doubt about that . . . Was it worth it?
    He was sitting at the baby grand piano, looking up at the portrait of the tramp turned dictator, trying to remember the notes for that Bessie Smith number ‘ Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,’ when he saw the red jug ears and ginger hair of that steward approaching from the far end of the lounge. The one who’d asked for his camera earlier. The Party pin in his lapel glinted like an evil eye.
    ‘Herr Denham? I’m at your disposal.’ He spoke with a marked Swabian accent. ‘Captain Lehmann suggested you may like a tour of the ship.’
    ‘You read my mind,’ Denham said. ‘Could we start with the smoking room?’ He was dying for a cigarette.
    They descended to B deck. The steward, who introduced himself as Jörg, led him to a small bar, which connected via an airlock to an intimate smoking room, pressurised, he explained, so that no hydrogen could seep in. It had small café tables and a comfortable leather bench running around its walls.
    He lit Denham’s HB. On the far side of the room was a wide window set into the floor. Wisps of white cloud passed beneath the glass, filling the room with a pale light reflected from forests and valleys below. Surely this must be the acme of all smoking experiences, he thought.
    ‘Do you have mail to post?’ the steward asked.
    ‘Mail?’
    ‘We drop a postbag when we reach Berlin. Letters are franked in the mailing room.’
    ‘With Hindenburg stamps?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘You may just have saved a father’s reputation with an eight-year-old.’
    Jörg grinned and fetched a blank postcard from behind the bar. Denham scribbled:
Dearest Tom
Here are the stamps I promised. Your old dad’s writing this from the smoking room of the ‘Hindenburg.’ To answer your question, my cigarette was lit with a car lighter attached to the wall. How about that? Be nice to Mummy.
Love, Dad
    He handed the postcard to the steward, stubbed out his HB, and the tour continued. The young man gave him a pair of canvas shoe coverings in case his heel should make a spark on the metal grill floor, and they entered the keel corridor—no more than a narrow catwalk—which led deep into the stern of the ship. Denham took notes in shorthand of the statistics Jörg gave him as they passed storerooms with space for two and a quarter tonnes of fresh meat, poultry, and fish and 250 vintage wines; and the freight room, which was large enough to hold an aeroplane and the huge duralumin tanks filled with diesel fuel.
    As they neared the end of the corridor the steward did an extraordinary thing. Beneath them stretched the silver fabric of the airship’s outer cover. To demonstrate its strength he leapt twelve feet off the catwalk and bounced up and down like a boy on a trampoline. For an instant Denham glimpsed the unremarkable lad beneath the Nazi persona he’d acquired like a greasy sheen on his skin.
    Onwards they went until they reached a vertical shaft, which they climbed for what seemed like half a mile until it joined the main axial corridor, the bone that ran through the centre of the vast ship from fins to nose.
    ‘Amazing,’ Denham said, laughing.
    It was like a film stage built from an Erector set. A gargantuan spider’s web of bracing wires and girders radiated out from the central axis, and looking along the corridor’s length was like seeing infinity reflected between two mirrors. The air was much colder.
    Together they walked along the corridor between towering gas cells, which hummed quietly with the vibration of the engines.
    ‘There are sixteen of them,’ Jörg explained,