Flight of Dreams (24 page)

O
nce, when Max was a child, his family toured the ruins of Flossenbürg Castle while on vacation in Bavaria. They arrived early in the morning to find the crumbling stone walls shrouded in a fog so dense Max felt as though he could poke it with a stick. They moved slowly through the ruins, holding hands and trying to restrain the terrified laughter that pressed against their lungs—the irrational, frantic hilarity brought on by the sense of looming disaster. Max loved the foreboding that prickled the back of his neck as they picked their way amongst the rubble. Here and there a dark corner stood in sharp relief against the spectral mist, or a stately pine rose up from the gloom sprawled across the castle grounds, but apart from those occasional landmarks he and his family wandered blindly through the vestiges of a great fortress split asunder during the Thirty Years' War. He sensed as though he was present in some bend in time and if he just took the right turn he might be able to step backwards and witness history with his own eyes. A siege. A slaughter. He was transported. Suspended. Sometime later, when the light began to shift and the sun turned warm enough to burn through the gloom, he felt a gnawing disappointment. By midmorning the air was crisp and clean and the magic had dissipated.

That day, however, was the beginning of Max Zabel's love affair with fog. It is the reason that he wakes early and often volunteers for the first shift in any rotation. Max has been known to pray for fog the way some men pray for deliverance. So it is a great irony that today, of all days, should be the one when the airship flies into a swamp-like bank of mist off the coast of Newfoundland. Max has not seen the like since that day at Flossenbürg Castle. They have been drifting through heavy cloud cover since dawn. But this is different. He can feel the shift in air pressure as they pass through sparse clouds and into the wall of coastal fog. The air around him becomes solid. The roar of engines grows muffled, as though someone has stuffed them with cotton. Everything dulls. Max notes the change in atmosphere and the time on his flight log—force of habit—but no one else in the control car pays the transformation any mind. This is a normal part of flying. It just happens to be his
favorite
way to fly. Half-blind and mute. Max does not pretend this is rational or ideal. It's rather dangerous, in fact—if one wants to take it at face value—but thrilling nonetheless.

Pity he can't enjoy it. The remnants of his spectacular hangover are still present, like ball bearings rolling around his skull. If he moves his head too quickly they clang against one another, making him dizzy, making his eyes water and his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. It's little more than sixty degrees in the control car, but Max is sweating along his lower back, beneath his arms, and across his upper lip as his body works to expel the last traces of alcohol. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Dries his hand on his trousers.

Max is thirsty. But there's little that can be done about that now. It isn't time for his break. He will stay fixed at his station if it kills him. He will not flinch. He will not complain. He will not acknowledge his mistake last night or let it affect his ability to perform his duties today. The other officers must feel the static charge of his determination, for they do not speak to him unless necessary. They avoid eye contact. The gloom outside has permeated the control car and subdued every man on duty.

From where he's standing at his chart table, Max cannot see the rudder wheel at the front of the bridge, though he knows that Helmut Lau is on duty at the moment. He can hear the intermittent calls between Lau, Commander Pruss, and Kurt Bauer, the elevator man, but they recede into background chatter as he watches the instruments on the panel before him. He makes adjustments for altitude and headwinds. Max slips carefully and purposefully into his private zone. This is a world of numbers and precision, a world where you do one thing and there is a specific, predictable outcome. And it is in this moment of deep concentration that he is struck by a thought: it is a pity that he cannot chart the human heart. Were it possible, he would spread Emilie's heart out on the table before him. Smooth out the creases. Measure its latitude and longitude. And then, when he could see the unbroken whole, he would place himself directly in the center. He would draw himself there in red ink. Permanent. That might have been possible before he inadvertently betrayed her trust. But now her papers are confiscated and she is a breath away from being lost to him for good.

Max is broken from this trance by the panicked voice of Kurt Bauer.

“We are only a few kilometers from Cape Race.”

“No,” Max says, “that's not possible. That would put us…” he turns to his chart and flips the pages three at a time. It is one long moment of suspended animation in which Max realizes what has happened. What he has done. And then the
Hindenburg
's newly installed sonic altimeter begins to beep—two bright chirps with a five-second gap between them—indicating that the ground is rising fast.

“On the cliffs,” Bauer finishes for him.

There is a pause in the control car, no more than four seconds, as every man in the room looks at one another and then at the instruments in front of them. Denial. Shock. Fear. These emotions are evident on their faces, tumbling over one another like falling dominoes. When the next chirp sounds they all fly into action. But now the time between alarms is only three seconds.

The device is new and state-of-the-art and has been on board for less than a year. It measures the distance between the control car and the ground, much like the sounding line on a boat, but with the added benefit of an audible warning system that alerts crew when the distance begins to recede quickly.

There is a nervous tremor in Kurt Bauer's voice. “Ground rising at approximately ten feet per second!”

“Bring it up!” Pruss shouts. “Lau, back at the rudder.”

Pruss takes two quick steps from where he has been stationed since they flew into fog and hovers over Bauer at the elevator wheel. His eyes are locked on the sonic altimeter, watching the needle climb. “Up. Now!” Pruss commands, and Bauer spins the wheel like a mad pirate at the helm of the ship. Max cannot help but think of Blackbeard and the
Queen Anne's Revenge,
and he feels, in his post-drunken state, that he has been transported to a land of make-believe where pirates take to the skies in flying whales. He is brought back to reality when the nose of the
Hindenburg
tips upward abruptly as the fins at the back of the ship respond and direct the structure to rise. Max can feel the weight of his body shift into his heels as he adjusts his balance.

Two seconds between chirps now.

Then one.

“Faster!” Lehmann orders as the alarm merges into one unbroken, shrill tone indicating that they are flying directly into a landmass.

Max does not realize he has been holding his breath until his lungs begin to burn and the pounding of his heart echoes in his ears. He gasps, pulls in a panicked breath, and holds that one as well.

The screeching alarm continues its metallic warning. Max can feel the sharpness of the sound in his brain, like claws on metal. It is the sound of looming disaster. He watches the elevator wheel spin and waits for the sickening crunch of metal against rock. The officers are coiled, waiting for impact. They can see nothing outside the windows. They can hear nothing but the sonic altimeter. They are blind and deaf and hanging vulnerably beneath the
Hindenburg
in a cage of metal and glass.

T
he floor beneath Werner tilts. It's almost imperceptible at first, but after a few seconds he finds that he's leaning forward several degrees to keep his balance, and there is a slight strain along his Achilles tendon, as though he has begun to walk uphill. The airship is lifting at a rapid pace.

He stops in the middle of the catwalk and listens. Werner is fifteen yards from the spiral staircase that connects the keel catwalk to the axial catwalk above, exactly in the middle of the ship. At this distance he can see it shudder against the strain of such a rapid, uneven ascent. All around him the supports and girders begin to groan, low at first, and then deeper as the climb continues. It is the sound of an old man rising from a chair.

Thirty seconds. A minute maybe. He doesn't count, but it can't be longer than that. It's over quickly and the floor levels out beneath him, but it takes another ten seconds before the structure around him ceases to object. There is an echo of metallic tensity, and the gas cells that hold the hydrogen quiver. Then calm. The stillness at the end of a deep breath. But Werner knows something is very wrong. The
Hindenburg
never makes such drastic movements. She is a great lumbering beast, not a jackrabbit. Now the space around him feels different somehow, as though it has lost elasticity.

Only once Werner has started the trek back toward the passenger quarters does he notice that he's been holding the paper bag in his hand so tightly that his fingernails have dug imprints into the heel of his hand. He relaxes his grip on the empty bag, then wads it up. Owens gobbled up all the scraps Werner had taken with him. The dog is a bottomless pit, and Werner is more than a little curious to know who its owner is.

Werner fights the instinct to run. The security door is still far ahead, but rushing will do nothing other than make him clumsy. The last thing he needs is to fall and hurt himself and lose what modicum of respect he has earned.

The cabin boy lengthens each stride and reaches the access door in record time. He swaps out the felt shoes for his loafers and steps back into B-deck, expecting there to be pandemonium. Instead he finds two stewards and a cook's assistant loitering in the corridor between crew cabins. They have the restless look of men who would like to be on a smoke break but can't afford cigarettes. One of them has made a lewd joke—the boy can tell by the color in their cheeks and the coarse laughter—but they do not look troubled about what has just happened. Nor do they share the punch line.

“What are you doing back there?” Severin Klein asks.

He lifts the empty bag. “Feeding the dog.”

“I thought that stupid mutt was going to bite me when we boarded it. I'd sooner shoot it than waste my time feeding it breakfast.”

“Do you know who it belongs to? Not the white one. The mutt.”

“No idea. I didn't check. Why do you care?”

Werner doesn't answer. He simply shrugs and continues down the corridor. But his adolescent mind has found a puzzle, and, as is typical of boys his age, he is fixated on solving it. He doubts Kubis will let him look at the manifests, but Werner has long since learned that the chief steward cannot be everywhere at once. The manifests are kept in his stateroom, and anyone with a bit of time and a master key can get in to take a look.

E
milie feels as though she is wound tight, ready to spring. She is a jack-in-the-box, locked inside a floating cage, waiting for disaster. She has grown familiar with calamity over the last decade, but still, this is too much. Bomb threats and confiscated papers. Arguments and intrigue. Every fiber of her body feels keyed up. Tuned in. It is exhausting. If she were at home, away from curious eyes, she would pace the walls and pick at her cuticles. As it stands, however, she forces herself to sit with the Doehner family, to stay relaxed. Amiable. Feet crossed at the ankles. Hands in her lap. Expression languid and unperturbed.

Yet it is this heightened state of awareness that enables her to notice the pencil. It falls, rolls to the edge of the table, and drops to the floor. Emilie stares at it, nearly oblivious to the shoving match that has ensued between Walter and Werner Doehner.

“You owe me five marks!” Walter shouts.

“Liar! It was my turn. You owe
me
!”

They roll on the floor like ferocious little octopi, arms and legs flailing. Something white—teeth maybe—flashes in her peripheral vision. One of them throws a punch, and Matilde Doehner rises with a sigh. She does not raise her voice, merely bends over the children, her fists propped on her ample hips. Emilie can barely hear her over the tumult.

“Stop it. This moment.”

Emilie once heard that a whisper is more effective than a scream when dealing with children, and this must be true, for the boys come apart and look at their mother warily.

“Sit on your hands. Both of you. And if you so much as blink before I give you permission…”

Matilde Doehner doesn't finish the threat. She doesn't have to. The boys drop to the floor like sacks of grain, their hands covered by their tiny rear ends. Matilde returns to her novel without giving them a second glance.

Matilde didn't see it,
Emilie thinks. Neither of the boys touched that pencil. Neither of them breathed on it. It fell on its own.

Emilie rises from her chair, walks to the observation windows, and leans over the glass. The view looks exactly as it has all morning; they are little more than a gray object in a gray mist over an invisible sea. But then something breaks the fog not twenty feet below the observation windows, like the arched back of a breaching whale. But this is dark and solid with a sharp edge and a soft green surface.

A cliff.

Moss.

Granite.

The floor tilts a bit beneath her feet. Emilie takes an involuntary step back and gasps. She turns in a circle, expecting a cry of alarm from the passengers at any moment. But they are all absorbed in their reading or writing. Curled up in chairs. Several of them are napping. A few converse in the low tones of a dreary morning. In seconds the fog has swallowed whatever ground lies beneath them.

A teacup clatters to the floor at Matilde Doehner's feet and she turns her fierce gaze upon her sons. “Ten more minutes on your hands and then you'll clean up every sliver of that broken cup. Do you understand?”

Walter looks wounded. Emilie can tell he wants to argue, to explain that they haven't moved, but the child knows better. He will not cross his mother, not even when he's justified. He nods his head and blinks back a film of tears instead.

Emilie could intervene on his behalf. She ought to. But she doesn't want to alert the passengers to what is happening. All across the reading room she can see items shifting on the tables. A neatly stacked deck of cards spills out like an accordion across the polished wood surface of an end table. A book slides a few inches from the elbow of its owner. She wouldn't feel this movement at all if she weren't standing. She wouldn't see it if she weren't paying attention.

And then it's over as quickly as it began. The floor beneath her levels out and her balance shifts in response. Nothing else moves on the tables. And beneath them she can once again see the faint, glassy reflection of the ocean's surface between strips of cloud. Emilie lays her hand flat on her breastbone, right beneath the clavicle, and takes a deep, calming breath.

For an entire decade Emilie has been left on her own to handle crises. She has long since fallen away from the habit of turning to a man to fix things. She must find the landlord when the pipes burst in her apartment. She must pay the bills. She must read the maps and translate directions when she travels. At first this was a strange burden to bear, an uncomfortable load for a woman who always had a father and then a husband to look after her. But as time has gone on Emilie has grown into this way of living. She has learned to enjoy it. To be proud of herself. So she is alarmed and not a little angry at the thought that fills her mind like a blaring alarm: she has to find Max.

Her feet propel her out of the reading room even as her mind objects. Max betrayed her. She is furious with him. She vowed last night that she would never speak to him again. And Emilie hates this last bit of truth: when it comes to lovers, anger and passion are the same emotion. A kiss is all that separates the two.

Emilie slips into the corridor. There are no emergency alarms blaring. No flickering lights. No sense that danger is near or has recently passed. But she wants an answer nonetheless. She finds Max squatting outside the radio room, head buried in his hands, breathing as though he has just sprinted one hundred yards only to run smack into a brick wall. He's sweating. Trembling. And she can see his pulse hammering staccato in his throat.

“Max?” Emilie kneels next to him, sets her palm lightly on his shoulder. His shirt is damp. “What just happened?”

When he lifts his face Emilie can see the results of another long, hard night in his bloodshot eyes. His voice is ragged when he answers. “I need water. A lot of it.”

She's down the corridor and darting around the gangway stairs toward the kitchen before she even stops to consider what she's doing. Too late now. If he needs water she'll get him water, and then she will get her answers. Emilie hasn't spoken to Xaver since the incident yesterday afternoon, so she is irritated to feel the flush of heat in her cheeks when she knocks the kitchen door open with the heel of her hand. Xaver looks at her with trepidation, and then at the door as though expecting Max to follow her in.

“No,” he says, holding up one finger. “Not that again.”

For one brief moment she is tempted to crack a joke about him not being man enough to handle her, but she decides against it. “I need a pitcher of water. A glass. And a bottle of aspirin wouldn't hurt either—” She can tell Xaver is about to make some smart-ass retort, so she interrupts him. “It's not for me.”

His surname might be German, but Emilie has long suspected that Xaver possesses a good bit of French blood. He's dark-haired but light-skinned, slender, and his eyes have that hooded, seductive look the French are so notorious for. Not to mention the fact that he is better in the kitchen than anyone she has ever known.

“I don't recall,” he says, waving an arm in exasperation, “that taking orders from you is part of my job description.”

Emilie steps around him and lifts a pitcher from the drying rack. She fills it with water from the sink. She picks a glass tumbler—the largest she can find—and reaches up on her tiptoes to retrieve the aspirin from the top shelf in the cabinet. And all the while Xaver glares at her, arms crossed.

“You are too comfortable in my kitchen.”

“You love me.”

“I tolerate you.” There is no animosity in his voice. “Bring it back when you're done. I just lost a pitcher during that near miss. Slid right off the counter and shattered on the floor.”

“You saw that?”

“Didn't everyone?”

“No. Thankfully. But I'm going to find out what happened.”

Xaver eyes the pitcher tucked into the crook of her arm. “I wouldn't have guessed water would make a good means of bribery.”

“Call it a peace offering.”

“Oh,” he says. “Max.” And then, “Don't tell me. I don't want to know.”

Max is exactly where she left him, but he's no longer panting. He lifts his face when she stops beside him.

“Can we talk?” she asks.

He pushes off the floor and rises, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet. “Not here. Come with me.”

Emilie follows him down the corridor toward the officers' quarters. She has never been in his cabin before but hesitates for only a moment when he holds the door open and nods for her to enter. It's a disaster. The bed is in disarray. An empty liquor bottle is on the floor. Toiletries are strewn across the small dressing table. The closet door hangs open and there is, inexplicably, a bucket filled with wet clothing in the middle of the floor.

Emilie pours him a glass of water and hands it to him.

Max drinks it slowly at first, then tips the tumbler back and drains it. “More. Please.”

They repeat this process until he can speak without cotton mouth.

She holds up the bottle. “Aspirin?”

“Yes.”

He takes four, then offers her a feeble shrug. “I'm so sorry, Emilie.”

It takes her a moment to realize he's talking about her papers and not the near accident. “Why did you do it? I trusted you.”

“I didn't.” He wipes a bead of sweat from his temple with the back of his hand. “Or at least I didn't mean to. I was angry. And desperate. So I told Wilhelm Balla you were leaving, because I needed to talk to someone, and you sure as hell weren't in the mood. And then he blabbed. I never thought he would. Honestly. I'd have never said a word otherwise. But we'll figure a way out of this mess. You
can
trust me. I promise.”

Emilie drops her head. Closes her eyes. “There is no way out of this mess.”

“Yes there is. I've been thinking—”

“Stop—”

“You could marry me.”

The pronouncement drops between them like a thud. It makes her even sadder, that he would do this for her. That he doesn't know the truth.

“You don't want to marry—”

“Stop telling me what I want!”

“A Jewish woman,” she continues, her voice a slow, calm whisper.

Emilie lifts her chin, waiting for him to recoil. Or curse. Or yell. She waits for the accusations and the anger.

Max appears dumbfounded. “You're
Jewish
?”

“Half Jewish.”

“Why the bloody hell do you think that would even matter to me?”

She laughs at this. Hard and mirthless. “Don't you dare tell me that being Jewish doesn't
matter
right now.”

“Not to me.”

“Then you're a fool.”

Max places one steady hand on each of her shoulders. He leans in a bit closer. “I need you to listen very carefully. Are you listening?”

She nods.

“You could tell me that you are half ostrich and I would still want to marry you. Is that clear? Do you understand
that,
Emilie Imhof?”

“No,” she says. “I don't.”

Max slides a hand beneath her collar and lifts the silver chain until the key rests in his palm. “Is it so hard to believe that a German man could want to marry a Jewish woman?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“It was yesterday to hear you speak of him.”

“Max…”

He drops the key back into her blouse and steps away. “You don't have to answer now. God knows I've gotten good at waiting. Just know that this thing you're so worried about does not change my feelings for you.”

This conversation—the damn confounding nature of it—has distracted her from why she came to find him in the first place. She takes a deep breath and changes the subject. “What happened a few minutes ago? With the ship?”

Max groans and presses his fingers against his temples. He rubs as though trying to assuage a headache. Emilie guesses this isn't far from the truth.

“It was my fault,” he says. “I brought us too close to the coast.”

No, it was my fault,
Emilie thinks.
I did this to you.
She has brought him to the edge and left him there, teetering. Emilie has never known Max to be careless before. Never known him to miscalculate or lose control or indulge in excess of any kind.

Where Max was all softness and rounded edges a moment ago, he is changing before her eyes. She sees his anger return, accompanied by shame and disappointment. Violent emotions flood his face.

He picks the empty bottle off the floor. “I
let myself
do this. And damn it if I didn't nearly kill us all as a result.”

There are a dozen questions she could ask, but Emilie settles on one that covers many subjects at once.

“Do they know?”

It's clear what she means. Do they know you have a hangover? Do they know where you are? Do they know it's your fault? Do they know about what happened last night?

He chooses the safest topic. “No. I don't think so. Anyone could have made that mistake in the fog.”

“Except you. You don't make mistakes. Do you, Max?”

“Apparently I do.” His grip tightens on the bottle, and Emilie is afraid it will shatter in his palm. Max gently places it in the wastebasket beneath the sink. He turns back to Emilie and his gray eyes are storm clouds. “But I won't let it happen again.”