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 Santis, 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
An overpowering sense of love and loss welled inside him. His eyes filled, and hot tears rolled freely down his cheeks. Eckener put his arm around Denham’s shoulders.
‘You were young to lose your father.’
‘Not that young. I am forty next year.’
Denham fell silent for a while, staring at the watch as he turned it over in his hand.
‘I thought there was nothing…’
‘It was found near the site,’ Eckener said. ‘Somehow it must have been thrown clear.’
Later, as they walked back across the Zeppelin field in the gloaming, Denham turned to look again at the Hindenburg. Dully it reflected the purple light.
Chapter Three
Eleanor, paddling her legs as hard as she could, strained against the rope that attached her waist to the side of the tiny swimming pool on deck. But it was no use. As the ship pitched and rolled, she found herself flailing in two feet of water at one end of the pool, with six feet at the other end, before it all slopped back the other way. She stood up and undid the rope.
‘Another twenty minutes, please.’ The women’s swimming coach was pacing the edge of the pool.
‘I can’t train like this.’
‘It’s the only pool we’ve got for the next few days.’
‘Yeah, with water straight from the goddamned icebergs.’
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘For a shower,’ Eleanor said, plucking up a towel. ‘And a cigarette.’
She headed along the deck, leaving a trail of wet footprints. A fresh wind had been blowing all afternoon,
