‘Of course.’
‘You may just have saved a father’s reputation with an eight-year-old.’
Jorg 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 Jorg 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,’ Jorg explained, ‘maintained around the clock by duty riggers.’
Denham touched one of them with the palm of his hand. That such a delicate membrane separated safety from catastrophe was unimaginable. What risks man takes in order to fly.
Soon the corridor intersected with another airshaft.
‘Wait here,’ said Jorg. ‘I must pass an instruction to the duty rigger.’ With that he disappeared down the shaft.
Seems a good moment to give him the slip, Denham thought. He continued alone along the axial corridor, eventually reaching a bay in the very tip of the ship’s nose, where huge coils of mooring rope were stacked on the floor.
Outside the bay window, fields of cumulus billowed, brilliant and numinous in the afternoon sun. The ship had gained considerable height while he was inside its hull and was now beginning its descent through the clouds. A minute later his vision filled with grey, and the rain of a summer squall flicked at the window, fanning across the glass in the headwind.
Suddenly, there was Berlin, vast and sullen.
The metropolis spread out in every direction. He hadn’t even realised they were near. The sun broke through for an instant, casting a shaft of gold over the eastern outskirts. He saw the River Spree snaking around the landmarks, opalescent in the metallic light. He saw coal barges, trams, and traffic moving.
The Hindenburg maintained its downward tilt and was soon gliding over the rain-washed streets and rooftops, casting its shadow. As it slowed, the propeller engines changed gear into a deep, pulsing drone.
He could see the entire Olympic route: all the way from the Brandenburg Gate, through the Tiergarten, where the road was hedged with flag-waving crowds, along the Kaiserdamm and the Heerstrasse between double rows of sycamores, until in the distance to the west he saw it: the granite colonnade with banners flying, the thousand-year stadium of the new order.
Within minutes he could make out the brazier on the Marathon Gate and the top-hatted heads of officials. The athletes, in their blazers and white shoes, stood in long rows, preparing to parade onto the track behind their flags.
Now the airship was passing slowly over the stadium’s stone rim, and Denham’s line of vision dropped into a vast crater seething with life, deeper than the surrounding ground. Half the bowl was plunged into shadow by the ship, and a hundred thousand people raised their heads towards him.
‘My God,’ he whispered.
The ship hovered for a moment, the engines humming so that the propellers seemed to caress the air.
A fanfare sounded faintly, distorted through loudspeakers, and then the movement of a wind over a field of barley passed through the hundred thousand, which rose as one, right arms raised, and he realised that the man himself was making his entrance, the tiny, striding figure in brown.
High in his vantage point, Denham heard the crowd’s roars, like waves crashing on a shingle shore.
Chapter Seven
The roar of propeller engines set Eleanor’s teeth on edge.
‘Ain’t that something?’ shouted Paul Gallico, his mouth full of bratwurst. The crowd applauded in a frenzy. He was sitting next to her in the Associated Press box, rather too close for comfort. They were really crammed in on these benches.
She didn’t even look up as the Zeppelin droned overhead. She felt slightly sick to her stomach, imagining she still sensed the tilt and sway of the Manhattan beneath her. Of more interest to her was a shouting match going on nearby between some guards and a tough-looking young woman in flared slacks who seemed to be in charge of a camera crew positioned near the rostrum. According to the AP reporters in front of her, the guards had been ordered by Dr Goebbels to remove the cameras. The woman insisted she had permission to film.
‘See, these guys put on a great show of order,’ Gallico said, ‘but their whole setup is chaotic. The country is a jungle of personal empires.’
Eleanor said nothing.
‘Aw, cheer up, sweetheart. It’s not like you’ve never won an Olympic gold before.’
‘Buddy, I’m okay,’ she said, sharper than she’d meant. She squeezed his hand. ‘You boys have been swell.’
He offered her the bratwurst, and she took a bite.
‘Hey…,’ she said, chewing. ‘I always knew I’d go from bad to wurst.’
That gave Gallico helpless giggles at the moment of Hitler’s entrance.
They’d guessed the great man was near. Loudspeakers around the stadium had kept up a hyperactive commentary on the progress of his motorcade across the city, and the crowd simmered with excitement. Contingents from five continents were singing football-terrace songs and a dozen national anthems that boomed around the bowl in a cacophony of competitive cheer. Soldiers in uniform; members of hundreds of sporting and youth organisations in their white shirts; diplomats, the press, socialites, and families of Berliners with children waited in high spirits, enjoying the Olympic truce that lay over the city.
Eleanor was a stone in a field of waving grass, consigned here to the bleachers to look down on all she had lost. To hell with her newspaper column. She considered slipping away while she had the chance, and before her ex-teammates marched in.
Too late.
An earth tremor of applause. The loudspeakers rose to a shriek, and the crowd stood to greet the distant figure entering between the towers of the Marathon Gate. At the same moment sunshine dazzled on the wet granite, as if the elements were in abeyance to some diabolical luck that accompanied him. A fanfare sounded, drowned out by yells of Heil! — the first few shouted with hysteria before finding their measure in a deep chant.
