April 1939
Cardington Airship Field
Bedfordshire, England
The purser of the passenger airship Improvement Era stood with clipboard in hand, waiting like a crisply uniformed Cerberus at the base of the airship mooring tower. His sand-and-sky-blue uniform matched the colors of the gargantuan helium-filled dirigible moored overhead, the famous “DesPac” livery of Deseret Pacific Airship & Rail.
The great gasbag was being loaded with fuel and victuals for its scheduled Atlantic crossing: London, New York, and finally Salt Lake City.
Or so the travel brochures would have it.
Ground facilities for aerial beasts like the Era required open countryside. London’s airship-embarkation point was actually Cardington Field, Bedfordshire—50 miles north of London. New York’s used Lakehurst, New Jersey. Only Salt Lake, the capital city of the independent Republic of Deseret, with its great open salt flats to the city’s east, had an airship field within streetcar distance of its metropolitan downtown.
Airship companies like Deseret Pacific or the British Overseas Airship Corporation ran charter motorcoaches between central London to Cardington, but the motorcoach for today’s flight had not yet arrived.
That was only one of two reasons the purser frowned at the approaching Obidiah Smoot.
The other was Smoot’s shabby appearance.
Battered valise in hand, a well-worn muddy overcoat, and a fedora that had seen better days. Unlike Zeppelin which catered to the yacht set, Deseret Pacific prided itself on providing affordable travel for the common businessman, but a ragamuffin tramp was a bit down market even for DesPac.
The purser slapped a courteous-but-stern look on his face. “I’m sorry, sir, but this area is restricted to passengers.”
Smoot set his valise down. “Just as second, I’ve got it in here somewhere…” He fished inside his torn jacket as if for a ticket.
The purser’s face remained professional if still doubtful. “Even so, sir, we’re not accepting passengers until after loading is completed.”
“I’m not a passenger,” Smoot said, finding at last the slim leather wallet he was searching for. He flipped it open, revealing his credentials.
The poor purser snapped to attention as if Smoot were a four-star general and the chairman of the board of directors rolled into one. He stumbled over his tongue apologizing.
Smoot waved him off. “Don’t blame you in the least.” He plucked at his getup. “I suppose I do look like a hobo who rode the rails to get here. I’ve been in the Orkneys sorting out a mess.”
The purser mumbled something about there not being anything in the Orkneys to sort out but sheep.
“That’s right,” Smoot laughed. Nothing but windswept sheep on a windswept island and one doesn’t dress for sheep. “But sheep mean wool and wool means shipping.”
“And shipping means DesPac,” the purser smiled. “I should have thought the Orkneys too windy for airships.”
“That hits the nail on the head,” agreed Smoot, “but some johnny in our engineering department thought he had a dodge so they tried it. The wreckage of the Boneta now lies strewn across half the main island.”
That was one thing about airships. When they failed, they failed spectacularly.
“I’ve another nail they want me to hammer here,” Smoot said. “Need you to take me to the captain at once.”
The purser pointed over to the loading activity. “He’s over there. Seeing to the loading. Some British lord or the next best thing to one is lugging along everything he owns but his castle. We’ll be lucky to get off the ground.”
The captain, resplendent in his braided uniform, seemed less concerned with the impedimenta of travelling nobility and more concerned with a wooden crate of produce. Hands as well as dirty looks were being thrown at a groundside supplier.
The purser snorted. “Looks like cookie is trying to sneak contraband aboard again. Skipper hates boiled cabbage. Says it stinks up the whole ship.”
“He’ll hate what I have to say to him even more, then. It stinks worse.”
The three of them, Smoot, Captain MacPherson, and Purser Grimes, stood on the honeycombed duralumin decking of the Era’s control cab in the forward gondola. Not a comfortable place to talk, no chairs, but with the hatch closed as private as Smoot could hope for. The gleaming, polished instruments clashed with Smoot’s muddy, disheveled appearance.
The captain, one of that breed of non-Mormon Deseretans known as Gentiles, dug out his briar stem pipe and loaded it up with Prince Albert. He tamped it down. “It’s Deseret Pacific’s policy—my policy, too!—to give your sort every possible assistance,” he said, touching lit match to the bowl of his pipe and puffing noisily to get it going, “but frankly I’m failing to see just what assistance you’re needing.” Blue smoke wreathed round his head. “A passenger is coming aboard. A distinguished one as you said but a passenger nonetheless. You wish to see he arrives in Salt Lake safely. So do we. We wish it for all our passengers. How is this any different?”
“Perhaps I have not explained completely,” Smoot said. “Professor Heisenberger is a wanted man.”
The captain puffed. “I thought you said he was an unwanted man.”
“That’s right,” Smoot nodded. “As a man and a Jew, he was unwanted in Nazi Germany so he fled to London. And now, with Oswald Mosley looking to win the parliamentary elections, he is unwanted in England as well. So, he sought asylum in Deseret, which we are providing.”
“Yes, yes,” MacPherson muttered around the stem of his pipe. “Alaska and all that.” Under J. Reuben Clark’s new initiative, Deseret had thrown open its remote Alaskan territory to European Jews seeking temporary refuge. Those smart enough to get out before the storm.
Smoot frowned. “Unwanted as I said, as a man. But as a mathematician, as a physicist, Professor Heisenberger is a very much wanted commodity. Germany, having come to its senses, wants him back and aims to have him back. Through kidnapping if need be. Failing that, murdering him so no one else can have him.”
“You’re saying one of the other passengers is a German agent bent on killing or kidnapping?”
“According to the best intelligence Beehive Five has.” Beehive Five being the Republic’s intelligence and security agency.
Smoot explained just exactly what he wanted done and what he wanted captain and crew to do.
MacPherson puffed like a chimney. “We can do all that, sure, but it seems to me that if this Heisenberger is so all-fired important, wouldn’t it just be simpler for all concerned for Beehive Five to charter its own flight and bring him over alone?”
Smoot’s frown deepened. “That was the plan with the Boneta. Beehive Five was going to fly Heisenberger out of the Orkneys. It wasn’t wind that brought her down, but a well-placed time bomb.”
Both the captain and the purser blanched.
“Rather than lose another DesPac airship, it’s been determined by the board and by Beehive Five that the safest course of action would be putting him aboard a normal passenger flight. Less risk to a ship that way. Less chance they’d blow up the ship if their agent aboard can bag the professor alive instead.”
“Less chance is not the same as no chance,” the purser muttered.
McPhearson removed his pipe shook his head sadly. “What a trip. First the monkeys and now this.”
“Monkeys?” Smoot asked, his eyes narrowed. “What monkeys?”
“Last minute deal made by the home office,” Purser Grimes said. “The London Zoo is selling a bunch of animals to the Bronx Zoo. Birds, mostly. Toucans and macaws, but also a cage full of ruddy monkeys. Capuchins. The organ grinder kind. Just got them loaded, in fact.”
The captain snorted. “Nasty creatures, always flinging pooh.”
“Organ grinders?” Grimes smiled.
The Captain shot his purser a look. “The monkeys, clod.”
To Smoot he said. “I imagine by the time we reach New York, the aft cargo hold will be one big poo smear. I just hope that zookeeper can keep them in check.”
This was the first Smoot had heard anything about any zookeeper riding on board, either, and said so.
“Oh, yes,” the captain said. “Part of the deal, too. But he’ll be travelling back in the cargo hold. Setting up a cot for him there and bringing him his meals. He’s to keep constant watch on the beasts. I insisted on that, at least.”
Not good. Even ordering a rush job, the Era would be airborne before Beehive Five could vet the man.
The Captain relit his pipe. “Dinnah fash yerelf about it, as my father would have said. I don’t imagine this Arthur character can do much harm back there in cargo. I doubt even a Nazi agent could use monkeys to murder.”
“Not unless he’s read Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Smoot said sourly.
For once the DesPac-chartered motorcoach arrived well early of departure time. A bit too early, perhaps. The Era was still finishing up its loading, so the passengers were chivvied into the terminal lounge, a small outbuilding adjoining the Brobdingnagian airship hangar Deseret Pacific leased from Cardington Field.
There were four of them. Mr. and Mrs. Barrington-Smythe, members of London’s upper crust and dressed to the nines; a corpulent, middle-aged Dutchman whose little black bag strapped to his luggage proclaimed him to be the medical doctor his Dutch passport said he was. Last was a weedy-looking bespectacled young man, an Ichabod Crane in modern-day herringbone. A bookish Deseretan by the name of Simpson, on his way home to Zion.
There was the usual muted commotion as they entered the lounge, porters wheeling their in-flight luggage in from the boot of the motorcoach. The passenger’s other trunks were added to the pile of last-minute cargo to be stowed in the hold.
None of the arrivals batted an eye at Obidiah Smoot sitting there waiting for them. Just one more passenger as far as they were concerned.
Passengers weren’t prohibited from motoring up to Cardington on their own, just discouraged. From the look of Smoot’s neat appearance and expensively tailored Bond Street suit, he looked well able to afford a sporty little roadster, and with Smoot’s compact build and collegiate good-looks, he looked just the sort to slam about the countryside at top speed.
The passengers, strangers who’d just spent an hour on a coach cooped up with other, spread themselves thin across the lounge, keeping their distance. There’d be days of air travel to get to know each other. None of them seemed in a hurry to break the ice.
Mrs. Prunella—yes, that was her Christian name—Barrington-Smythe had that pretty-but-horse-faced look held by so many upper-class English women of society. She looked to be mid-forties yet expected to be taken for late twenties, as is common in most women everywhere of every class but particularly by those of Prunella’s Mayfair set.
She fitted a Players cigarette to her slim black cigarette holder and held it for her husband to light. “I thought you said, darling, that this airship carried simply oodles of passengers.” She flicked cigarette ashes in the direction of the others. “This ragamuffin lot seems to be it. I can’t imagine a ghastlier time, rattling around some ghastly airliner, nobody to talk to.” Nobody who mattered, her upper-crust accent seemed to suggest.
“And look there—” she pointed out the window at the ongoing loading “—we’re travelling on a cargo boat.”
Barrington-Smythe the husband, a slicked-back upper-class idler, lit his own cigarette and clacked his Zippo closed. “I don’t understand it myself, darling. Last month when I flew the Era to New York there were fifty people aboard, including the Walpole Gibbs. You remember them, of course, darling?”
His wife sniffed. Whatever she remembered about the Walpole Gibbs, it wasn’t pleasant.
The bookish little Deseretan piped up. “It’s on account of it’s a Class D crossing.” Simpson held up his ticket. “See? Says so right on the ticket.”
Mrs. Barrington-Smythe looked at him like he was talking offal she’d suddenly discovered on the floor. “Whatever are you talking about, little man?”
Simpson stepped to the window and pointed. “Class D,” he repeated as if that answered everything. “They’re all modular, you see. The airships I mean.” He pointed at the huge cigar-shaped airship. “See, the main lifting body—the girders and support rings, the helium ballonets, the doped canvas skin-cladding—that’s the hard part to build. So they build one big lifting body for each ship and then they build modular gondolas for different purposes and swap them out as needed. Sometimes the Era is a Class A ship, strictly passengers, like your ride last year. Sometimes it’s all freight. Our trip happens to be mixed-use flight. Class D, mostly cargo with only four passenger cabins and one suite, with the big cargo hold aft taking up most of the gondola.”
The Dutchman shifted his ample bulk. “You seem to know quite a bit about these aerial monstrosities, young man.”
Simpson flushed. “Aw, every kid in Deseret is nuts about airships. I can’t tell you how many balsa wood models I made as a kid.” He looked around the room. “So, for a Class D, we’re the next best thing to full up. There’s you two in the suite, I take it,” he said, pointing at the couple, “and the doctor here,” he pointed at the Dutchman, “and myself and the new gentleman here,” a nod at Smoot. “That only leaves one cabin empty.”
“And that’s taken, too,” the purser said, entering the lounge. “Right this way, gentleman,” he called over his shoulder.
Two London Bobbies, the silver badge gleaming on their tall custodian helmets, led a bedraggled elderly Jew in manacles into the room. The gray-bearded prisoner wore a rumpled tweed jacket that marked him as a man of more than modest means, but like its wearer the jacket had been severely mussed about by the police before and during the journey up from London.
“Isaac Heisenberger,” the more senior of the two policemen recited in a sing-song voice, “by order of His Majesty the King and by direction of a duly appointed court of law, you are hereby to be forcedly deported as an undesirable from the shores of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and remanded into custody by the Accepting Power who have agreed to carry out your disposal.”
The younger cop held out a receipt book for Purser Grimes. “Sign for him.” Grimes scribbled his name.
The handcuffs were unlocked. Professor Heisenberger rubbed his chafed wrists.
The senior Bobby leaned his face close. “See that you do get on that blimp, old son,” he warned. “Or else we’ll have another go at you with our truncheons and this time we’ll finish the job, don’t think we won’t.” He spat at the floor in front of the professor’s feet. “I’d pack all your kind onto a gasbag if I could. You and these Mormons deserve each other, you do.”
As the policeman raised back up to his full height, a glint of light sparked from a small unofficial lapel badge the senior policeman wore: an encircled bolt of lightning that marked him as a Mosely supporter, a member of the British Union of Fascists. So certain did Mosely’s election seem, his followers—even those in official government positions—were openly wearing their Party badges now.
The police toughs sauntered out.
The Barrington-Smythes, who had frozen like statues at first glimpse of that badge, stared holes in the back of the departing Bobbies. “Swine,” the husband spat. “The ruddy swine,” his wife echoed.
Professor Heisenberger smoothed out his clothing as best he could. “The time to make those insults was when they were starting out and still weak and could be stopped. Back when you could say it to their face.” He tried to re-block his battered hat and failed. “Now—on the cusp of power, on election eve!—you can only safely mutter it to their backs. And once they take power, you won’t even be able to think it. So did we Germans learn to our sorrow.”
He turned to the purser. “I am Professor Heisenberger. I believe you have me on your passenger list. I am ready to go home, a home I have never seen. To Deseret, whereas the words of your hymn would have it ‘none shall come to hurt or make afraid.”
He lifted an imaginary glass in toast. “To Deseret. L’chaim!”
Weight is the great enemy of an airship. A truism every airshipman feels in his bones.
Consequentially, the elegance of the great and spacious sky lounge aboard the Improvement Era was in fact a mirage. The slanted windows running down the length of the outer hull, affording passengers a bird’s eye view of the ground below, lent the room more volume than it actually had. The walls which featured Minerva Teichert murals, depicting scenes from the stirring story of the Mormon pioneers, were actually artfully stretched cloth themselves. Writing tables were lightweight tubular duralumin, and the comfortable lounge chairs were wicker. What looked like teak paneling was actually claddings of balsa wood.
To the passengers, though, the Era delivered what her advertising brochures promised: millionaire luxury at businessman prices.
The passengers sat spaced apart, wary of each other as strangers thrown together often are. The Barrington-Smythes languidly smoking their cigarettes, the doctor his Indonesian cigar, and the bookish Simpson not smoking anything but brain cells as he poked and prodded his surroundings with childlike fascination. Smoot managed to keep an eye on each of them while seemingly reading a magazine.
The Chief Steward entered from the circular stairwell leading down to the crew deck. Dressed in immaculate whites, he softly banged a small hand-gong. “Dinner,” he intoned, “is served.”
An A-configuration gondola would have offered a truly voluminous dining hall seating a hundred passengers. The modest D-configuration dining room, a cozy little affair, held only a single eight-person table. The Captain, as was customary on the first night of the voyage, was already seated at its head.
The passengers, dressed elegantly for dinner, seated themselves as arranged by table placards. Mrs. Barrington-Smythe on the Captain’s right, and proceeding counter-clockwise, her husband, young Simpson, and then Smoot at the table’s foot. Running up the table’s other side was the poor zookeeper—underdressed and blinking in embarrassed confusion at being plunked down in a formal setting, then the Dutch doctor, and finally Professor Heisenberger on the captain’s left.
A tall fluted champagne glass had been set at each place. White-clad stewards quickly poured champagne or non-alcoholic club soda according to passenger preference.
The captain stood, glass in hand. “Ladies and gentlemen, honored passengers. I give you a toast. To the good ship Improvement Era. May she see you safely to your destination and may all your travels be happy ones.”
Glasses clinked. “To the Era.”
The captain seated himself, with the rest following his lead.
But Captain MacPherson wasn’t quite finished with formalities, though. He tapped his glass with his spoon.
“It will take the Improvement Era forty-eight hours to reach New York. While that may not seem long in terms of one’s lifetime, it can seem like forever travelling in the company of strangers. I propose you remedy that by each of you introducing yourself and perhaps why you’re taking this voyage.”
The passengers all glanced at each other.
Barrington-Smythe shrugged. “I’ve no objection to going first.” He adjusted his white cravat. “I’m Evelyn Winfred Barrington-Smythe of the Barrington-Smythes and to put it bluntly, my wife and I are worth a packet, a packet that odious Mosely has pledged to cheerfully confiscate should he and his fascists win office. To put it in the vernacular, we’re scarpering with the lolly to Canada to get out of his grubby reach.”
“Canada,” his wife Prunella hissed disdainfully as she flicked ashes from her long cigarette holder. Smoking at dinner was a breach of decorum but she was Prunella Barrington-Smythe. Rules did not apply to such as she. “Provincial, but there you have it.”
“Not that we plan to have it long,” Barrington-Smythe sighed. “Canada looks set to put in her own home-grown Mosleyites. We may need to seek refuge from our refuge. What was that place your purser mentioned? Alaska? We might well end up neighbors, Professor.”
All eyes followed the table down to the bookish Simpson. His dinner dress consisted of the same ZCMI herringbone jacket with a different colored tie.
The young man cleared his throat. “Hard to follow an introduction like that, but I’ll try. I’m Parley P. Simpson. I write mystery whodunnits. Death Takes a Trolley Car, Death Takes an Escalator, Death Takes a Taxi…”
“Never heard of you,” sniffed Prunella.
Simpson smiled ruefully. “My publisher said the same thing. That’s why he sent me on a whirlwind book tour to New York and London.” Simpson frowned. “It didn’t go as well as he’d hoped.”
“Coo,” the zookeeper butted in, skipping past Smoot. He had on a bargain-floor ready-made sack suit with sleeves two inches too short. “Would you Adam and Eve it? Writing a book! That’s using your loaf! Me, I ain’t never even read a whole book in me life. Animals won’t let me. Keep me on the hop so’s I don’t even have time to bread and cheese. Always needing fed, always needing cages cleaned. The macaws and Two-cans ain’t quite so bad, just pour ’em their seed and clean their cages. But them monkeys. Poo-flinging devils they are, and dead cert to jimmy open their cages if you don’t keep your mince pies on ’em.”
“Arthur, here, is from the London Zoo.” Captain MacPherson translated. “He’s accompanying some zoo animals we have in our hold so you won’t be seeing much of him this journey, but I thought still right and proper for him to attend tonight’s dinner.”
“I just hope that ship’s geezer you got watching the cages keeps giving them monkeys the butcher’s, that’s all I hope,” Arthur muttered. “Devils, they are, and too smart by harf.”
The portly Dutch doctor seated next to Arthur took a long cigar from his jacket pocket, a fine Jemba from the Dutch East Indies almost as long as the cigars the late Winston Churchill used to famously smoke before his plane crash. He looked longingly, then remembered his protocols and slipped it back in his pocket for later.
“I suppose I’m next. I’m afraid I can’t compete with authors, Arthurs, and monkeys.” He simulated a bow from his chair. “I am Dr. Hans Zimmerman, a mere country doctor. I have a practice is in a bucolic little Dutch village near the German border, one with more cows than people, so unlike friend Arthur here I am left with plenty of time to both read and write. I’m on my way to New York to present a modest little paper at a medical conference.” He shrugged. “Dat is alles.”
After the doctor wasn’t more forthcoming, all eyes turned at last to Smoot at the foot of the table.
“I appear to have been skipped,” he said, “which is somewhat appropriate. I’m here under false pretenses. The name’s Obidiah Smoot, and I’m not really a passenger, I’m with the airline. Special Assistant to the Board of Directors. What we call in the trade a ‘belt-and-braces’ man. Sort of a troubleshooter and inspector general rolled into one. I travel the line sorting out problems, seeing that Deseret Pacific standards are kept up. That your coffee’s served hot, your beds get turned down, that there’s enough helium in the bag, and that the engines are bolted on sufficiently to stay on. Sundries like that. Like Arthur, you won’t be seeing much of me. I’ll be crawling the superstructure or down in crew quarters checking up on the lads for most of the flight.”
Prunella Barrington-Smythe sniffed. “I must say! Dining with the help. You colonials do do things your own way, Captain, that’s all I can say.”
Prunella liked her dinner less than her dinner companions. She picked at her pineapple ham. That homey Mormon Sunday staple was a bit too exotic for her refined taste. Her silver fork aimlessly scraped across Wedgewood fine china as she pushed her food about like a sulky little girl.
Captain MacPherson, doing his best to conceal his amusement, turned to Heisenberger. “I trust your substitution is satisfactory, Herr Professor.”
The Jewish professor stopped his forkful of mutton halfway to his lips. “I appreciate the courtesy.”
“We’ve laid on a selection of Kosher meals for you, sir. You’ll find Deseretans no strangers to dietary laws ourselves.”
“All that don’t drink, don’t smoke Mormon nonsense?” Prunella asked archly.
“Please, darling—” her husband urged, sotto voice.
“I was totally against our travelling aboard a Mormon ship,” she continued, ignoring her husband’s attempts to quiet her. “One simply can’t live without one’s cigarettes and one’s drinky-poos, can one?”
“I explained to my darling wife that a Mormon vessel was the one airship you can smoke aboard. Helium gas and all that.”
“Not technically, true,” Simpson, the self-appointed dirigible expert, butted in. He dapped pineapple off his chin with a linen napkin. “They do make provisions for smoking aboard German and British hydrogen ships.”
“A pressurized asbestos goldfish bowl?” Prunella spat, “With a steward confiscating your cigarettes and matches before you can leave?” She gave a mock shudder at the mere thought of a mere menial having control over her person.
“Well, I for one, am quite amazed to find you allow us our heathen vices at all,” the good Dutch doctor said. “I was under the impression that like modern-day Mohammedans you Mormons cut the heads and hands off any infidel infractions in your Great Basin Kingdom. This Deseret-flagged vessel is by legal convention Deseret soil, is it not?”
Simpson, a Mormon himself, couldn’t let this slide. “Deseret’s not like that at all. Just because us Mormons don’t partake doesn’t mean you Gentiles can’t.” He nodded at both the captain and Professor Heisenberger, “Besides, we’ve plenty of Gentiles.”
“And now, one might say even plenty of Jews,” Zimmerman. “Soort zoekt soort.”
The weedy Simpson balled his fists and stood halfway out of his chair. “I don’t speak Dutch, but that didn’t sound too friendly, Doc.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Captain MacPherson smoothed. “Let’s all try to have a pleasant journey.”
Dinner resumed fitfully. Eventually, the ordeal was over and stewards began to clear away plates.
The dinner party broke up, the passengers retreating to their respective corners of the sky lounge. As an attempt to forge bonds of comradery, the captain’s little soirée had failed spectacularly.
“As soon be with me animals,” Arthur muttered as he slunk out of the dining hall back to his charges, “The dumb brutes ain’t as vicious. Them toffs is murder.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Smoot said as the zookeeper passed him by.
Serene in the knowledge that no attempt would be made on Heisenberger on the first night, Smoot slept the sleep of the dead. Traipsing about the Orkneys had really taken it out of him and he’d need to be top form as they neared New York. That’s when the murderer (or kidnapper) would strike.
Even so, Smoot arose just before the dawn. He padded aft past to the regular cargo crates and boxes to the section of the cargo hold where the zoo animals were being kept.
Weight was the great enemy of airships, but even so, it was surprising how little space of an airship’s great hollow interior was taken up by the cheese-wheel shaped ballonets filled with helium. The bulk of the vessel’s interior was a vast cavern punctuated by an occasional honeycomb duralumin girder.
The hold space was no different. The only difference this trip was that the whole area stank of monkey feces. Flung feces at that. From the look of things, the zookeeper had done his level best to clean up what he could.
Two large cages stood side by side, presumably one for birds and one for monkeys. The monkeys he could see—all curled up together asleep on the floor of their cage. The other cage must be for the macaws and toucans as it was covered with a dun fitted cloth the same way one would do a household budgerigar cage.
Arthur was dossed out blanket-less on a folding canvas cot. Smoot tapped the cockney’s stocking feet.
The zookeeper started awake, blinking in sleepy confusion. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. S.”
“I’ll spell you for a moment,” Smoot whispered, not wishing to stir up the monkeys.
“Right. I’ll hit the crew’s bog fer me constitutional.”
Smoot busied himself looking over the flimsy sliding bolt that held the monkey cage door shut. Instead of a padlock, a twisted bit of flimsy wire any monkey could untwist had been inserted through the hasp.
Shrugging, he picked up a clipboard hanging off a girder, the inventory listing the contents of each cage. He was silently counting sleeping monkeys for the fourth time when Arthur came yawning back, pulling his braces over his long johns.
“You noticed it, too.” Arthur whispered. “There’s one extra monk.”
“Do you know which one?”
Arthur pointed at the brown one. The rest of the capuchins were black with silky white faces. “That weeper. Cebus brunneus. The rest of that lot’s yer bog-standard white-faces. Cebus capucinus.” Arthur had no trouble pronouncing the Latin tags. When it came to his job, Arthur wasn’t the doltish dullard he seemed to be on every other matter in life. “I call the extra monk Beelzebub. The rest’re devils, but he’s king devil, he is.”
“Lord of the fleas, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Didn’t anyone notice there was an extra? Your zoo for one?”
Arthur thumbed his chest. “Pointed it out to the super of primates, I did. Told me to shut me piehole. Far as he was concerned, the Yanks could have every ruddy monk in the shop. No skin of our beak-and-hose if the Yanks get a bonus, he says.”
“Hmmm.” Had it been the supervisor speaking, or somebody in back of him ordering him? “This ‘super’ of yours—”
“Blakely?”
“—this Blakley, he wouldn’t happen to sport a lightning bolt lapel pin, would he?”
Arthur looked at Smoot open-mouthed as if Smoot were some super-mind-reader or something. “More than just wear it. He’s always at them rallies when he’s supposed t’be on the clock. Always having to pick up his slack, I am.”
“Hmmm.” Somebody up in the ranks had wanted that extra monkey shipped and had gotten this Blakely to slip it in. Just why, however, Smoot couldn’t even begin to guess. Or rather, he could guess but the guess was just too utterly fantastic.
He pointed at the hasp. “Can’t you at least put a padlock on that?”
Arthur woefully shook his head. “Zoo regulations. Animals what’s in transport on airships can’t be padlocked in case of fire.”
“Surely that’s written for hydrogen ships, not for a helium one.”
Arthur shrugged. “Makes no never. I got read out personally t’follow that. Be more than me job to lock it proper.”
“Blakely again?”
Arthur shrugged.
“Well, I’ll try to dig up a padlock from the crew all the same,” Smoot told him. Or at least find a sturdier wire to twist round.
“I’d sleep better with it locked, and that ain’t the harf truth,” Arthur agreed. He looked over his sleeping charges. “What’s it all mean, Mister S.? This extra monk and Mosley badges I mean.”
“I wish I knew.”
“But what am I supposed to do with the monk?”
“If it were up to me, I’d chuck it overboard at three thousand feet.”
Arthur looked at him aghast. Deliberately harm a furry little creature, monkey devil or no!
“But what I’m supposed to do?”
“Brush up on your Edgar Allen Poe,” Smoot said, walking away. “I plan to.”
Smoot had a few other things to take care of as he made his rounds in the crew decks and other parts of the ships. He grabbed some bacon and eggs down in the crew mess rather than suffer through another meal with the passengers.
The inner man refreshed, Smoot ascended the stairs leading up to the sky lounge. Morning sun slanted through the gallery windows running down the side of the hull, drenching the gathered travelers in the golden promise of a new day. Smoot carefully took a corner seat where he could keep vigil on all of them behind the facade of a held-up glossy magazine.
A good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast had put everyone back on speaking terms. Everyone but Prunella, it seemed.
She was stretched out like a cat on a wicker divan, soaking in the morning sun. She flicked her cigarette holder the way a malicious cat flicked its tail before unsheathing its claws to strike.
She gazed through lidded eyes around the room before deciding on her victim. Her eyes landed cat-like on the mystery writer.
Simpson sat at a writing table laying out a deck of cards, playing at what North Americans called Solitaire but what the British knew as Patience.
If there was anything more boring that watching someone else play Solitaire, Smoot hadn’t encountered it, but Prunella’s husband was one of those back-seat kibitzers who hovered over cardplayers’ shoulders offering advice.
“Black three on the red four,” Barrington-Smythe said..
Prunella, apparently feeling left out, tapped her cigarette holder for attention. “You there! Little man! Shouldn’t you be writing your trashy little novels?” she purred archly.
The skinny Deseretan winced as he flipped up the next card. “So happens, I am writing. I’m plotting my next book the way I always do when I’m plotting. I play solitaire. Keeps my mind limber.”
“And what work will you grace the world with this time?” she sneered. “Death Takes a Perambulator?”
“Ha, ha,” Simpson said. “I was thinking maybe Death Takes a Zeppelin. There’s this crabby Baroness who’s the murderer.” He flipped over a new card and still didn’t get what he wanted.
“Murderess, darling,” Prunella corrected.
Her husband frowned at Simpson’s bad draw. “Whenever I get stuck playing patience, it’s always the sixes. Either you can’t get one or you’ve got too many and can’t fill your fives or sevens. Always the sixes. That chap in the Bible knew what he was about naming them the devil’s mark.”
“Nonsense,” Doctor Zimmerman said. The good doctor sat at a far table composing yet another of his interminable radiograms to New York. Apparently, the medical conference (so he said) had made a last-minute alteration in speaking schedules, a change that slighted (so he strenuously said) the Dutch medico. Radio telegrams flew back and forth every hour on the hour it seemed.
“You’re ascribing sentient patterns to random chance,” Zimmerman pontificated. “You’ve only sensitized yourself to notice them. You’ve no less a chance at drawing a six than you have of drawing an ace.”
“Not necessarily,” Professor Heisenberger said, tossing aside the glossy magazine he’d been idly skimming. He got to his feet. “It’s also a matter of position. Sixes lie in the middle. Add to it dependent fives and sevens and that’s a full middle quarter of the cards blocking a run. Chance is random, but position factors into it as well as Crichton’s work on probability clearly suggests—”
Zimmerman heaved his bulk out of his chair as well. “Bah! Crichton! And you call yourself a mathematician! Chrichton’s a charlatan and anyone who—”
That was as far as the mathematical argument got because at that moment all double-toothpicks broke out.
A cacophony of squawks and shrieks exploded in a zoological frenzy. An entire cageful of technicolor tropical birds shrieked and flapped and fluttered and squawked their way up the stairwell and out of the crew deck. Wings, beaks, and talons filled the room in desperate avian panic.
The reason for their panic followed closely on their heels. A veritable legion of the damned. the simians pursued the frightened bird, gleefully stampeding them like cattle.
Prunella Barrington-Smythe screamed, a high-pitched wail that pierced even this deafening cacophony.
A fat turquoise-and-green macaw hovered, fluttering in her face, mistaking her piled hair for a soft nest, perhaps. Outstretched talons tried to gain purchase on the “perch” of her coiffure. She beat it away with flailing manicured fists.
Arthur and a half-dozen crew members sprinted up the stairs right behind the escaped monkeys. Armed with burlap sacks and broomsticks, they attempted to bag their escaped quarry, but the screeching monks weren’t having any. They danced out of reach, flinging shot glasses from the bar at their would-be captors.
Beelzebub, the lone brown capuchin, launched itself at fat old Zimmerman, looking for all the world like it was trying to nestle itself in the sputtering Dutchman’s arms. He muttered something in his native tongue and tossed it away. The trajectory of the toss aimed it squarely at an open-mouthed Heisenberger.
Heisenberg roared in pain. The shrieking little devil all but clawed his arm off, fingers and toes shredding the sleeve of his tweed jacket and gouging the tender flesh of his forearm underneath. He sank to his knees in pain.
Smoot, grabbing a cushion from off a wicker chair, pinioned the simian assailant in a makeshift padded prison. “One for your bag, Arthur,” he called.
Taking up Smoot’s cue, the capture crew grabbed more cushions and grabbed the other monkeys. They shoved the writhing little miscreants unceremoniously into a waiting burlap bag. Without the monks to terrorize them, the toucans and macaws slowly settled down and came to roost on chair backs and light fixtures, whatever perches they could find. Arthur would have no problem recapturing the exhausted birds.
Smoot knelt beside the wounded professor. His scratches were bleeding pretty good. “You okay, Professor?”
A crewman carrying a first aid kit, the airship’s pharmacy mate, eased Smoot out of the way. “Let me take a look at it, sir. Not too bad, really. Just looks like a Saturday night slaughterhouse. I’ve seen worse.” He dug out an iodine bottle and bandages.
“Let me through,” puffed Zimmerman a bit belatedly. “I’m a doctor.”
“Sorry. No can do, Doc,” the pharmacy mate said. Tooley was his name. “Company policy. Lawyers and liability and all that.”
“But I’m a doctor!”
“And I’m a registered nurse and I served a hitch as a corpsman in the Nauvoo Legion to boot,” Tooley said. “Relax, Doc. I’ve got more experience patching up barroom brawls than you’ll ever have.” He dipped the iodine bottle’s cotton applicator lid into the bottle and got it nice and dripping. “Brace yourself, Prof. This is going to sting and I don’t mean maybe.”
Heisenberger squealed like a stuck porcine beast-of-the-unclean-flesh as Tooley painted the scratches with iodine. “You’re lucky that monk didn’t bite you. Otherwise, you’d be getting rabies shots. Right in the gut and they hurt.”
In between screams, the Jewish professor expressed rather vociferously what Tooley could do with his rabies shots and his iodine and his wisecracks.
Tooley ignored him. On went the sterile gauze, followed by a bandage wrap, spiraled good and tight.
“At least let me administer something for the pain,” Zimmerman insisted, rooting around in his black doctor’s bag.
“Geez, doc,” a wide-eyed Tooley said, looking at the syringe Zimmerman started filling. “You’ve got enough barbiturate there to knock an elephant on its rump.”
Smoot, who’d stepped over the toucan-covered bar, came back with a dark brown bottle and a shot glass. “I think we’ll try this for an analgesic instead, doctor. Hundred-proof medicinal rum.” He administered two tots to the wounded professor, who looked rather cross-eyed halfway through downing his second tot.
“Get him on his feet, Tooley,” Smoot ordered, “and put him in his bunk.”
“I’ll look after him, sir,” Tooley said, half-carrying the now-legless victim to his berth.
Zimmerman sniffed. “I still say you should let a doctor handle things.” He squirted the contents of his syringe down the bar sink drain.
“Maybe some other time, Doctor. Tooley was quite right about company policy.”
By this time, Arthur had gently placed the last of his errant birds, the fat macaw who’d terrorized the flower of British womanhood, into a bag. “Sorry ’bout that, guv’nor. Should’ve let you put that padlock on after all. It was that Beelzebub what done it. Opened his cage, then freed the birds. Regular jailbreak it was.”
Brightly colored feathers still drifted in the air. Between teeth-torn cushions and shattered shot glasses, the lounge was a disaster zone.
“We’ll talk later,” Smoot told Arthur. To the passengers he said, “Gentleman, Mrs. Barrington-Smythe—let’s temporarily relocate to the dining room and let the staff clean this mess up.” A hurricane couldn’t have scrambled the sky lounge more thoroughly, but the staff would manage somehow.
As the shaken passengers began to file out, young Simpson motioned Smoot aside.
“Could I talk to you in private, sir?”
Shrugging, Smoot led him over to the far corner of the picture window gallery. “Shoot.”
Simpson looked around conspiratorially like a character in one of his dime novels. “I think somebody’s trying to kill Professor Heisenberger.”
Smoot affected an amused look. “You mean death by toucan?”
“I’m serious,” Simpson snapped. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I think those Nazis aren’t just going to let the professor float away. I think they mean to bump him off, and on this airship, too!”
“One of our passengers an assassin? Cuare blowguns in the clouds? Arsenic and Old Helium?”
“Laugh all you want. I know I’m right.”
“Just out of idle curiosity, who’s your front runner for this little deed? Dr. Zimmerman?”
“Sure hates Jews, Mormons, and the professor, doesn’t he? An obvious choice. Too obvious. That’s why it’s not him. It’s never the one you think.”
“Is that how it works in your books?” Occam apparently didn’t shave in detective fiction.
Simpson flushed. Red crept up the scribbler’s pale neck.
“Okay, okay,” Smoot soothed. “So, it’s not the doctor. Who then? Prunella?”
Simpson glowered at the name. “I’d like it to be her, but she couldn’t keep her trap shut about it. She enjoys playing cat-and-mouse too much.”
“That leaves her husband then.”
“Right? And what do we really know about him other than he has a harridan for a wife and that he cheats at solitaire.”
“Hardly qualifications for an assassin.” Smoot raised one eyebrow. “But you left one suspect off your list.”
“Who? Arthur?”
“Somebody who’s an expert in murder methods and knows the ins and outs of airships like the back of his hand. Somebody like you.”
Simpson’s Adam’s apple bobbled. “Me?”
Smoot patted him on the shoulder. “You’re the prime suspect. You see how silly it all sounds.”
Crestfallen, the writer muttered that he guessed he did.
Simpson started to slink away, then stopped and turned. “Still, if there really was a murderer, who’d be your pick?”
“I wouldn’t rule out Beelzebub.”
“A monkey? Ridiculous!”
“Edgar Allen didn’t think so.”
Adjusting for time change—the airship would gain five hours before it reached New York—it was four o’clock before Smoot finally found what he was looking for. Found two of them, in fact. It took forty-five minutes of skull-sweat and nervous sweat to do what needed done afterwards, but he finished in time to clean up and dress for dinner.
Dinner that second evening was a morose affair.
Professor Heisenberger was in pain and couldn’t use his left hand. A steward had to cut up his squab for him.
Prunella Barrington-Smythe seemed an even greater casualty of the Great Monkey Raid. She downed two large gins for dinner and spent the rest of the meal clinging to her husband.
Zimmerman, still affronted at having his medical skills questioned, huffed and puffed at his food, and Simpson sulked at having his pet theory scorned.
Conversation above the level of pass the salt amounted to less than a dozen spoken words.
Well, things would get even gloomier tomorrow. For somebody at least.
Tomorrow would be when the murderer struck.
That didn’t mean he didn’t keep vigil during the midnight hours.
Weight being the great enemy of airships, Smoot couldn’t just lock Heisenberger in his cabin. The cabins, such as they were, were really just stretched fabric walls with a thin curtain hanging from a balsa wood doorway arch for privacy.
He split the watch with Tooley, giving out that he was worried about the professor’s wounds. The excuse wouldn’t fool the assassin, but their watchful eyes would at least deter the killer.
Snagging a brief four hours of sleep, Smoot once again rose before dawn and made his rounds. He double-checked the new padlock on the monkey cage door, not that the flimsy wire cage was much sturdier than Heisenberger’s cabin. As far as Smoot was concerned iron bars did a prison make, but according to Arthur the London Zoo shipped a lot of animals by air up to and including baby pachyderms and it had its own idée fixe on shipping rates and paying for deadweight. Never pay to push an iron cage around in the sky when a tin one would. Never pay for a tin cage when wire mesh was so much lighter.
Nothing more Smoot could do about the cages, so he poked around a few more potential trouble spots including the great diesel engine pods, then joined the passengers in time for breakfast.
He didn’t join them alone, however. He’d dug a companion out from his valise, now holstered under his arm. The little .32 Hammerless Pocket Browning wasn’t his usual faithful companion in the field, but bullets and ballonets don’t mix and .45s have a nasty habit of tearing holes the size of soup plates in things, rubber bags full of helium included. The little pencil eraser nibs the Hammerless spat out wouldn’t be quite so catastrophic.
Breakfast was as dismal as dinner the night before. If one of the passengers was a killer anticipating making their play in the next eight hours, Smoot couldn’t see it in any of their faces.
After breakfast, they all trouped dejectedly into the sky lounge.
The place had been repaired as best it could. Some of the balsa wood trim still lay splintered and the azure Lord Thompson-style throw rug had been moved off-center to cover the carpet spot where Professor Heisenberger had bled all over the floor.
The bar was noticeably short of shot glasses, but regular drinking glasses brought up from the crew’s mess would serve in a pinch. They had Mrs. Barrington-Smythe’s approval as they held more gin.
She sat curled up on wicker divan, making it her mission to empty enough bottles of Boodles to make the gin maker Cock Russell’s stock evaluations rise.
Her husband sat at a nearby table, him playing Solitaire/Patience and Simpson kibitzing over the shoulder for a change.
Heisenberger sat wincingly in the far corner while his verbal sparring partner Zimmerman sat in the corner opposite, scratching out yet another missive on a yellow radiogram pad. He ended it with a real zinger from the way he eureka-flourished it over his head, growling a Dutch phrase that must translate as something like “this will fix their wagon.” He stomped off to give it to the radio crew to send.
It must have been a lengthy cable because it took Zimmerman a long time to come back, but come back he did, smug and very self-satisfied.
The minutes ticked by towards lunch. Smoot readied himself as best he could. Lunch would mark only two hours until their approach into New York and Lakehurst Field.
If it was to be abduction, it’d happen right about the time the airship moored. If a straight-up assassination was on the menu, the killer could make a move any minute now.
Smoot positioned himself so he could watch all players involved and still keep an eye on the stairwell leading up from the crew deck. The Great Monkey Escape still rankled him. Some joker once said history didn’t repeat but it rhymed; Smoot wished history would stick to blank verse instead.
The ticking of his watch, the flip of Barrington-Smythe’s cards, the tinkle of Prunella’s gin glass. They all blended with the distant drone of the engine pods as the miles crept by.
Smoot kept glancing down the stairwell. He should have been looking up at the ceiling.
Weight being an airship’s great enemy, the solid-looking inlaid wood ceiling was neither solid nor a ceiling at all. It was a false ceiling comprised of lightweight foamed-cardboard squares fitted to a hidden suspended tin grid. The bottom of the squares, like most of the décor, was balsa wood laminate. The squares had all the structural integrity of tissue paper. A fallen sparrow could crash through it and several dozen panicked tropical birds did exactly that.
The monkeys had gotten loose again and had chased the birds across the gondola ceiling this time instead of through the crew area.
Again, the sky lounge was filled with a flock of fluttering frenzied fowl, again the screeching of simian fiends from hell.
Prunella screamed and her husband leapt up from the table to her defense, or tried to. Unfortunately, he tangled himself up in Simpson, who’d been looming over his shoulder. Both men went down in a heap of thrashing arms and legs.
A rum-numbed Heisenberger reared back in surprise, tipping his chief over backwards and crashing to the azure carpeted floor. He put up his good arm to shield his face.
Zimmerman—Smoot lost track of the fat, seated slug as just then the macaw that had savaged Prunella the day before decided Smoot would make a friendlier perch. The Deseretan was buffeted by a ballet of wings, claws, and beak. Through the swirling feathers Smoot thought he saw the following:
—the capuchin Beelzebub once again leap into Zimmerman’s waiting lap
—Zimmerman slip his hand into his waistcoat pocket and affix a thin shiny bracelet around one of Beelzebub’s wrists
—the fat Dutchman flick a finger in the direction of Professor Heisenberg.
Smoot shoved the macaw aside but by then the monk had pushed off with all fours from Zimmerman’s blubbery chest and sailed through the air, lauding with a predatory howl on top the Jewish professor.
This time the maniacal monk wasn’t fooling around. Its sharp-nailed fingers swept in slashing arcs in a welter of gore and blood.
Smoot crossed the room in an instant. He swatted the monkey away and bent down. It looked bad. The monkey had savaged the base of the professor’s neck where it met his shoulder. Blood everywhere. Grabbing his handkerchief, he knelt down and applied direct pressure to try to staunch the bleeding.
By this time, crew members boiled up the staircase. Tooley was one of them and he came running with his kit.
“Ugh,” he grimaced. “This is bad, real bad. If I didn’t know better, I swear this was knife work.”
“I can’t tell if the jugular got nicked.”
“Lift up. Let me check.” Tooley whistled. “No, but a whisker more to the left and it’d be goodbye, professor. Here, let me take over.”
Smoot gladly let him. Stepping back a bit, he rummaged through Tooley’s kit and came up with a vial and a syringe.
“Wh-what are you going to do with that?” the patient weakly asked.
“Send you to slumberland, chum. Tooley’s going to have to do some fancy stitchwork and he can’t do it if you’re thrashing about.”
“I’d rather have the rum,” Heisenberger mumbled.
Smoot untwisted the thin metal band that sealed the vial. He filled the syringe with a measured dose. It was probably the same barbiturate Zimmerman had offered the day before, but Smoot could trust the provenance of this vial and the correct dosage as well. He jabbed the professor in the arm and Heisenberger’s eyes rolled to the back of his head. He started to slur “I don’t feel too good” but didn’t finish.
Birds still squawked and monkeys still threw loose objects.
Tooley motioned to a couple crew mates. “Carry him to his bunk. I’ll work on him there, out of the battle zone.”
Smoot let Tooley carry the old man off. Battle zone it was. The capuchins were making monkeys of their would-be captors.
Arthur came pounding up the circular stairs. From the trickle of blood on the side of his head and his slightly-concussed look, somebody must have coshed him with a sap.
Arthur wasn’t fooling around anymore, either. No more seat cushions for him. He held in his hands a homemade capture rod formed out of a broom stick, a couple eyebolt screws, and a length of venetian blind cord tied as a slipknot-loop at the far end of the stick.
Using it like the trained zookeeper he was, he quickly looped monkey after monkey, snagging them around the neck, arm, leg, or even tail, whatever he could grab. Only the king devil monkey himself—Beelzebub revved up to a berserker’s pitch—managed to evade the loop.
The screeching fiend hopped onto the bar counter and into the bar sink.
“Got you now!” Aruthur roared, charging.
Smoot could have sworn the monk dropped an ice cube down the drain. At any rate, he saw a glint of light and an object fall.
Arthur looped the little beastie’s throat and started to haul Beelzebub in.
The monkey suddenly screamed and spasmed. Then it flopped limp, open eyes staring at nothing.
“Look, Mr. Smoot!” Arthur wailed. “H-he’s dead!”
“It’s foaming at the mouth!” shouted Simpson, who’d finally managed to get untangled with his fellow passenger. “Rabies!”
“No, not rabies.” Smooth said. Dilated pupils, rigid muscles, clenched jaw. And the foaming. Smoot had seen this all too often before. “Strychnine poisoning.”
“In a monk?” the mystery writer asked.
But Smoot’s mind was already working ahead. A pity it was seconds too slow.
There came a scream from Heisenberger’s cabin. The old man himself. A scream and a violent gasping, groan for breath. Agonal breathing, a clinical doctor might call it.
The death rattle of a doomed man.
Smoot flung aside the flimsy curtain to the professor’s cabin. From the tangled bedclothes, the old man had suddenly gone into convulsions. The lifeless body was bent backwards almost in a tetanic arch. Rigid muscles, dilated pupils, again a frothing of the mouth. The same as Beelzebub.
Heisenberger’s glassy eyes stared unblinkingly at the balsa wood ceiling. Smoot palmed them close.
“Strychnine,” he said.
The other passengers had clustered behind him. All the living passengers but one. Smoot turned to them. “Back to the lounge. Now!” he ordered with a voice that came from the grave.
The passengers sat in a circle. It wasn’t so much a gathering of suspects as it was that there was no place else onboard to sit.
Some uncaught birds still roosted on chairback and stair railings. Let them, Smoot thought. Smoot had eyes only for the animal resting comfortably in the center wicker seat.
Dr. Hans Zimmerman sat grinning as if in a catbird’s seat, plump hands interlaced over his ample belly. The triumphant smirk on his face was sickening.
“Come now, Mr. Smoot,” he oozed. “Why the fuss and bother? What’s one old Jew, more or less?”
“One old jew,” a macaw mimicked.
A growl escaped Smoot’s mouth.
“You’ll have to forgive Mr. Smoot. He thinks I killed a man.” Zimmerman shrugged. “How, I cannot say. I was seated here the whole time.”
“Blowgun dart! I bet it was a blowgun dart!” Simpson blurted. Prunella shushed him with a look.
Smoot flicked an eye at the mystery writer. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t a dart. The murder weapon was a monkey.”
The fat Dutchman roared with laughter. “You’re crazy!”
“Am I? Let’s get a couple points straight. First, there isn’t any ‘Hans Zimmerman’ from the Dutch side of the border any more than there’s a medical conference in New York. You’re Dr. Carl Zimmerman, a county quack from the German side of the Dutch border.”
Zimmerman hooted in scorn.
In response, Smoot’s slender .32 automatic and his credentials appeared in his bloodstained hands. “Second, I don’t work for Deseret Pacific. I’m Beehive Five, counter-intelligence.”
The doctor blanched. Beehive Five carried the same freighted respect around the world as London’s Special Branch or Washington’s Federal Bureau of Intelligence.
“You’re not the only one to receive radiograms enroute, Doctor. Beehive Five discovered after we lifted off—not soon enough to prevent me wasting my time on the others, alas—your identity and mission. They sent me a rather revealing missive on one Carl Zimmerman, a country quack who got in on the ground floor of the Nazi party. A quack who writes papers not for international medical conferences but for the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party rag. Little gems like how the Jews are Darwin’s missing link between men and apes.”
The good doctor spat something unprintable in German.
“He’s quite the card, our doctor,” Smoot continued. “He does this party favor at all the Nazi parties. They drag in a Jewish prisoner from one of their camps and the doctor has his trained monkey savage the poor soul into bloody strips. A brown little organ grinder monkey.” Smoot jerked his chin at the dead body of Beelzebub, still lying on the bar counter.
“I thought I had it doped out how Zimmerman was going to do it. Have his monkey tear into Professor Heisenberger then offer to doctor him, slipping him a poisoned mickey in the process. We scotched that yesterday, though, didn’t we? You and that very hasty syringe you pulled.”
Zimmerman’s only response was to spit on the carpet.
“I goofed, though.” Smoot admitted. “I’m used to dealing with professionals on the other side. I forget amateurs don’t follow the rules. A professional would never try the same failed trick twice. And I thought I had you scotched anyway with the new padlock on the cage.” He glanced back at the zookeeper who was standing somewhat confused on the side of the room, a burlap bag of recaptured toucans in one hand. “Arthur, how’d the monkeys get out the second time?”
Arthur rubbed his battered noggin. “I came to and the back of the wire cage was all cut open with wire snips. No monk could do that.”
“But Dr. Zimmerman could. No wonder you took so long ‘sending’ that last cable. You were back in the cargo hold delivering an entirely different message, weren’t you?”
“That still doesn’t explain how he put the strychnine into the professor,” Simpson said.
“Knowing I wouldn’t let him inject anything into the professor, the doctor here had his monkey do it.”
“You’re crazy,” Zimmerman repeated.
“Am I? If I had a ship’s plumber uncork that bar sink and look in the gooseneck, what would we find?”
Zimmerman spat again, this time in the direction of the sink.
“Stumped me at first. Thought I saw you put a bracelet on the monk. But it wasn’t a bracelet, was it? It was a bagh nakh.”
“A Bach what?” Prunella demanded.
“A bagh nakh, darling,” her husband of all people supplied. He tapped his left palm. “Tiger claw. It’s a Sikh hand weapon from India. Sort of an upside brass knuckle you fit on your palm, only instead of knuckles on your palm it’s steel claws. Very nasty. You can’t read a Boys’ Own Adventure story without stumbling across at least a dozen of them.”
“But a monkey-sized one?” Simpson scoffed.
“Zimmerman fashioned it out of materials at hand. Probably the metal seal-band from that vial of sleepy juice yesterday. Whatever he used, it had a jagged point coated with enough strychnine to be lethal once directly in the bloodstream. If the monkey jabbed himself in the process as well…” he shrugged.
Zimmerman just smirked.
“But if you knew all this,” asked Simpson, “why didn’t you grab him earlier?”
The Beehive Five agent winced. “A couple reasons. First, I thought I could keep him from succeeding. But mostly, because Dr. Zimmerman here took out a little insurance policy, didn’t you, Doctor. Radio-controlled bombs planted aboard. As long he was free and clear and able to send out his hourly cables, no explosion. We grab him, no more airship. Just like what happened with the Boneta.”
“And you will continue to let me send my cables,” Zimmerman spat, “and you will let me walk off this airship free and clear in New York or my friends will press that button.”
The others looked to Smoot.
“Is this true?” Prunella demanded. “This Nazi pig is going to walk?”
“He has no choice, my dear,” Zimmerman smirked.
Smoot turned a half-inch towards Prunella. “Not exactly, Mrs. Barrington-Smythe. You see, I found his bombs this morning and disarmed them.”
Zimerman roared with fury at the news. He snatched up a glass ashtray and hurled it, knocking Smoot’s pistol out of his hand.
The pistol skittered across the floor.
The fat doctor launched himself onto his feet and chased after it.
Prunella stuck out a daintily-stockinged foot, tripping him. The fat German skittered across the floor as well.
Unfortunately, he skittered within inches of the pistol. He reached for it.
“Don’t,” a public-school voice ordered as the fat muzzle of a heavy Webley Army service revolver pressed hard against the doctor’s throbbing temple. Barrington-Smythe cocked back the Webley’s hammer.
Smoot circled warily to where he could kick his fallen pistol out of reach. He followed, stooping to pick it up.
“I’ll take it from here if you don’t mind,” he told the Englishman. “And I’d appreciate it if you lost the heater.”
Barrington-Smythe de-cocked the hammer and stepped away. He looked at the revolver in his hands and blushed guiltily. “I suppose having this is against airship line rules, isn’t it? I fished it out of our hold baggage this morning. Dash it all! I thought if those ruddy birds came back to pester my sweet Prudy, I’d pot myself a few jungle chickens.”
And shoot six holes in the ceiling while he was at it.
“I saw he had it on him this morning,” Simpson piped up. “That’s why I tripped him back then. Like I told Mr. Smoot earlier, I thought he was the killer.”
“What—?” the Englishman bleated.
Prunella fanned herself. “I feel like I’m missing several reels of this picture.”
Zimmerman growled from the floor. “Is it alright if I get back up?”
“Make him stay down there,” Prunella snipped. “I rather like the idea of him on the ground like the grubby little Nazi worm he is.”
“Grubby little worm,” a macaw seconded.
“So, what do we do with him now, Mr. Smoot?” Simpson asked.
“Nothing,” Zimmerman mumbled from the floor. “I was hoping to avoid embarrassing the Reich, but if you will check inside the left lining of my jacket?”
Smoot nodded. Barrington-Smythe snicked open a pen knife. He squatted down and cut open the jacket lining. A German passport plopped to the carpeted floor.
“Not just any German passport,” Zimmerman said, “but a diplomatic passport. I am an accredited diplomat travelling to my new posting at the German consulate in New York. As such, my person is inviolate, no matter what you think I may have done, up to and including murder.”
Smoot glanced through the passport.
“You can see it in his face,” Zimmerman crowed. “His ramshackle Mormon kingdom is already despised throughout the international community. Deseret can ill-afford to flout international laws.”
Smoot tossed the passport back to Zimmerman. Smirking with triumph, the fat German grunted to his feet and sat back in his center chair.
“Surely the Americans won’t stand for this,” Prunella said, a quiver in her voice.
“The most the Yanks can do,” her husband said dejectedly, “is declare him persona non grata and boot him back to Berlin.”
“To a hero’s welcome, I might add,” Zimmerman said, straightening his tie.
“Hardly,” Smoot said, his voice as cold as the look in his eye. “There’s one last little detail I didn’t mention. The man you killed wasn’t Professor Heisenberger. He was Jake Thacker, Beehive Five agent and my best friend. The real professor is safe and secure and even now enroute to Salt Lake City.”
Smoot stared at the Jew-killer. “You’re going back to Berlin alright—to face the tender mercies of the Fuehrer after failing your mission.”
“No!” the German breathed.
Before Smoot could even react, the doctor’s pudgy hand was fumbling at his mouth.
“Stop him!” Smoot yelled. “Don’t let him—”
But it was too late. Zimmerman bit down on the cyanide suicide capsule and was dead before he even slumped to the floor.
It caused a big stink when they docked at Lakehurst. Angry German officials and Yankee officials. A lot of talk about impounding the airship and holding its passengers and crew.
In the end, nothing much was done. The Improvement Era unloaded its New York cargo—the zoo animals mostly, a little battered and worse for wear—refueled and revictualed, and then continued on her lawful occasions, her streamlined nose pointed for Salt Lake and home.
Home.
A new and unexpected home for three passengers.
Both Barrington-Smythes and Arthur elected to remain aboard and continue on to Salt Lake City.
While they’d been delayed in Lakehurst, the United Kingdom government had fallen. The Tories were out and Mosley was in and the roundups had already started. Canada was lost as well. The Governor-General, with a gun not-so-figuratively pointed at the English monarch’s head, obeyed Mosely’s orders and dissolved the Canadian parliament. Canadian Mosleyites took over.
Arthur muttered he didn’t fancy living in an entire country of Blakeleys. He jumped at the job Smoot arranged for him at Emigration Canyon Zoo. “A job in the Aviary and no more monks,” Arthur crowed.
The Barrington-Smythes were another matter.
They both had changed. The little fracas with Zimmerman, grappling with him over the pistol, had bucked them up immensely.
While much of their faults had been of their own making, much of had stemmed from having to passively, helplessly watch the England they loved slowly slip away, from having to flee the British Isles altogether. That surrender had undone them.
Having seen the Nazis thwarted first-hand—having help thwart them first-hand—it had done wonders for their souls.
She had softened, become more like the girl Barrington-Smythe must have fallen in love with, while he had sloughed off the worst excesses of his public-school persona. He was becoming the man he could be.
As the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia receded below the airship, Prunella sat, feet tucked under her as she attentively retied the gauze bandage wound around Arthur’s dented skull.
The sole toucan that had escaped recapture and had only emerged from hiding after lift-off cawed. The bird was the same gold-and-turquoise miscreant that had assailed Prunella that first attack. Now it rested contently on the back of the wicker divan Prunella occupied, clucking its meaty gray tongue and croaking “Give us a kiss!” as it patiently waited for Prunella to teach it even ruder things to say about Nazis.
Saucer and cup in hand, Smoot sat down next to Barrington-Smith.
“Sorry about your friend,” the Englishman said, perhaps for the fortieth time.
Smoot shrugged and stirred his Postum. “It’s never easy, but you learn to live with it in the Agency.” He took a sip. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
Barrington-Smythe shrugged. “Still a bit unsettled.” He laughed. “An understatement if ever there was one.” He fell silent for a while. “I know your Deseret wants to keep itself Mormon. It has some pretty high requirements for the Gentiles they let in. I’m not sure just being English and rich qualifies.”
Smoot sipped again. “Your help dealing with Zimmerman more than qualifies. Yours and Arthur’s.”
“A twenty-second hero.”
“Sometimes twenty-seconds is enough. You handed that officer’s pistol pretty handily. Sandhurst?”
“Reserve commission.”
“Deseret is always in need of professionally trained soldiers, if you’re truly worried about pulling your weight.” Another sip. “It’s not just that that’s worrying you, though, is it?”
Barrington-Smythe turned his head. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but Salt Lake City will never be London. Deseret will never be England.”
Smoot set down his cup. “No, it will never be England. But maybe it can serve as home until you get your England back.”
He made his goodbyes and left the homesick Englishman to his thoughts.
The Improvement Era was propelled by four huge Whitney & Pratt Goliath diesels housed on outrigger pylons arranged in X-pattern. Four were needed for lift-offs and landings and for bad weather and strong head winds. Right now, only the Number One and Number Three were in use.
The Number Two sat on the portside ventral pylon. The streamlined engine pod was large enough to not only hold the P&S Goliath, but serve as a mini-maintenance shop for inflight mechanics. Guide ropes made dangerous tasks like “wing-walking” the twenty-foot length of the outdoor pylon at three thousand feet above the ground easier, but still a bit perilous.
Smoot felt just a bit queasy until he’d completely crossed and opened the pod hatch and crawled inside the pod. He slumped with relief and wiped his brow. He was okay with heights like mountain peaks or tops of buildings, but three thousand feet of nothing below his feet was a bit much.
Bending slightly under the low pod roof, he shuffled back to where Professor Heisenberger had made a cozy little nest for himself. The good professor had a plaster cast on his leg, a souvenir of the Boneta attempt.
The real professor looked vaguely like the fallen Beehive Five agent. Jake Thacker had been a greasepaint-and-gray-dye version of the man. The real Isaac Heisenberger was more than straggly grey hair and deep lines in his face. He radiated a serene sense of antiquity that stretched back to the great void of Genesis as well as a fierce modernity exemplified by the mathematics swirling in his head that less than a handful of men the planet could appreciate, much less understand. Heisenberger was alive and vital and not quite worldly.
“Obidiah,” he said in greeting.
“Isaac.”
The professor shifted his weight. “I’m sorry about Jacob.”
“I hope you are worth it.”
The old man said nothing.
“Just what makes you worth the life of my friend?”
The old man smiled sadly. “Of myself, nothing. Of my mathematics, in that there is worth.”
Smoot shifted his position. He could never sit tailor-fashion for very long. “But what are your mathematics for?”
Heisenberger’s eyes looked out upon a horizon Smoot couldn’t see.
“The whole world is falling into darkness, Obidiah. Germany and Japan and Italy and Russia and now England.”
Smoot nodded. And Norway with its Quisling and France with its Darlan and Franco’s Spain. Henry Wallace’s United States, Huey Long’s Confederacy. The whole world was falling under the bootheel of one strongman or another. Hitler or Stalin or an odious little worm like Mosley.
What was it Lord Grey had said about the last war? The lights were going out all over Europe; we would not see them lit again in our lifetimes?
Now the lights of the entire world were being extinguished one by one. Only Deseret and maybe Texas were left as beacons of light and freedom, and the two small republics were not enough to stand against the rest of the world.
“There are only two kinds of politics, Obidiah. Two types of Governments. Two types of men. Those who wish to rule over others and those who wish only to rule themselves. Do you believe that?”
“With all my heart and soul,” Smoot whispered.
The old man said nothing for a long moment. “My mathematics are the key to a new type of destructive bomb.”
“The Einstein type?”
Science fiction magazines were rife with lurid tales of atomic bombs and atomic warfare, right up there with spaceships and ray guns and green men from Mars who loved to abduct Earth women. That was fiction.
In real life, Smoot had seen—surreptitiously photographed on occasion—intelligence reports on various world powers gearing up to invent atomic weapons.
“Those are fission bombs. Fearsome, yes,” Heisenberger admitted, “but mine are fusion. They are to fission as what fission is to a child’s cap pistol. The type of bomb I have in my head burns with the same power that heats the sun. In the split-second of detonation, it is a sun, a miniature sun. The very atmosphere of the entire planet might ignite upon detonation. Fearsome does not begin to describe it.”
“And you are giving this to Deseret?”
The old man shook his head. “I am begging Deseret to take it. Only with this power can the last remaining country of light and liberty stand against the forces arrayed against it.”
“‘Where none shall hurt or make afraid,'” Smoot quoted. “Only now we’ll have the power to ‘make afraid.'”
“There is no other way.”
The old man patted Smoot on the hand.
“But for the sacrifice of your friend, those who would gladly ‘make afraid’ and revel in it would have me, have my bomb.” His chin jerked up. “Yes, it was worth it.”
Maybe. Maybe this miniature sun could rekindle the light of the world. Evil held within itself the seeds of its own destruction. With this power Deseret might hold out until internal contradictions caused the dictatorships to collapse upon themselves.
Once again Smoot saw Jake’s face as he’d filled the syringe. Once again he heard Jake’s last words: I’d rather have the rum.
Smoot would rather have a world where nations weren’t racing to build such bombs, but wanting doesn’t make things so.
This new world. It wasn’t the world Smoot wanted.
But maybe it could serve until he helped make the world he did.
— & —
With nearly a hundred professional publications to his credit, Lee Allred‘s science fiction has appeared in the pages of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and dozens of other magazines and anthologies. He’s also scripted comic books for Marvel, DC, IDW, and Image Comics, including such fan favorite titles as Fantastic Four, Batman Black and White, Batman ’66, Bug! The Adventures of Forager, and Dick Tracy: Dead or Alive. Lee has written extensively on LDS themes and for LDS venues, He has been a finalist numerous times for the Association of Mormon Letters annual award and is a multiple prize winner/finalist for the Mormon Lit Blitz fiction contest. “Murder Takes a Zeppelin” is set in the same alternate history fictional universe as his Sidewise Award finalist novella “For the Strength of the Hills” and takes place shortly after events in “Subject to Kings” (States of Deseret). You can learn more about Lee and his fiction at leeallred.com, his Substack Type Like the Wind, or by following him on X/Twitter at @lee_allred.
