Vango (10 page)

On the shores of Lake Constance, Germany, six years later, April 1934

In its gigantic hangar, the zeppelin was tied to the ground like a captive dragon. The mooring ropes squeaked. Spots of light lit up its flanks. It was almost midnight. Down on the ground, between the suitcases and mailbags, a radio was playing the music of Duke Ellington.

“Herr Doctor Eckener!”

These words were barked from outside.

The balloon swayed on its ropes. Its silvery bulk still gave off the salty smell of recent travels. It seemed to be dozing.

“Find him for me!”

Still barking orders, a man walked into the hangar. He was followed by three young soldiers in uniform, who froze when they saw the zeppelin.

The
Graf Zeppelin
was a balloon some two hundred and forty meters long and forty meters wide: in other words, it was as tall as a ten-story building, and it made anyone standing next to it look like a little worm. But the newcomer didn’t need this difference of scale to appear ridiculous.

“Dr. Eckener! Get me Dr. Eckener!”

Drowning in a uniform that was too big for him, the man who had just walked in was the
Kreisleiter
, the Nazi chief for the region of Friedrichshafen. Two embroidered oak leaves on his collar drew attention to his rank, which was handy for anyone who might otherwise have mistaken him for a pimply teenager dressed up by his mother in order to pay a visit to an elderly aunt.

“Find him for me!”

The soldiers stirred back into action, more intimidated by the splendor of the balloon than by their boss waving his arms about. They were virtually walking on tiptoes so as not to wake the monster.

The three soldiers were barely twenty years old.

They had all grown up in the region. And they had witnessed the evolution of these balloons, invented by Count von Zeppelin at the end of the previous century. They loved and respected this crazy adventure, born on the shores of their lake and kept alive by Commander Hugo Eckener following the count’s death.

They had watched out for the headlines about this most recent flying ship, the
Graf
, which traveled around the world and was a triumph in every town and city it landed in.

All three of them had visited the zeppelin on the ground, for its inauguration, when they were thirteen or fourteen, and their fingers had trembled as they touched the blue-and-gold-edged tableware made out of a porcelain so light it was almost transparent.

On pushing open the doors of the ten passenger cabins to reveal those luxurious bunks and windows that gave onto the sky, they had all dreamed of leading their fiancées in there by the hand one day.

Later on, in 1929, they had joined the hurrahs of the crowd when they saw the airship appear in the sunlight above the pine trees, on its return journey from a complete trip around the world in twenty days and a few hours.

Finally, scarcely out of shorts but already learning about weapons, they couldn’t help glancing up discreetly at the sky while standing to attention in their barracks at dawn, as the zeppelin passed overhead. Two hundred shiny pairs of eyes, under the weight of their helmets, had gazed upward at this childish dream.

And now here they were back again, embarrassed at turning up fully armed in the middle of the night while the airship was having a snooze.

The chief himself didn’t dare look the beast in the face. He was frantically searching for the source of such intolerable and decadent music that made people want to dance. When he had finally located the large wireless set, he rushed over and gave it a good kick. That was all it took to hush the musicians from the Cotton Club.

But a second kick turned the volume up and made the young soldiers, caught by the rhythm, sway their heads. Three or four kicks later, Duke Ellington’s piano began to weaken, but the chief’s boot was also in a bad way, and with the final assault, he crushed his big toe. The music stopped, to give way to his groanings.

After a few hobbled leaps in the Bavarian fashion, the diminutive chief gulped back his pain.

The music started up again. But it wasn’t coming from the radio, which was in pieces.

Somebody was whistling it.

The four men craned their necks at the same time.

Up high, suspended from the ropes of a pulley system on the back wing of the beast, was a man with a pot of paint fixed to his belt. He held a paintbrush in one hand and was meticulously painting the canvas of the zeppelin.

“Herr Doctor Hugo Eckener?”

The painter carried on working as he whistled his jazz tune.

“I wish to speak to Herr Doctor Hugo Eckener!”

“Yes?”

He turned his head.

The man suspended fifteen meters above the ground was indeed Hugo Eckener, sixty-six years old, director of the Zeppelin Company, and one of the century’s greatest explorers.

“Heil Hitler!” declared the short army chief, clicking his heels.

Commander Eckener did not respond to the salute. The soldiers could scarcely believe their eyes. What was this man, who was worshipped by all of Germany, this stout old lion with his white mane of hair, doing up there disguised as a decorator?

“Didn’t you hear me, Herr Doctor?”

“It seems you don’t like music, Herr
Kreisleiter.
”

“That’s not music!” retorted the chief, who took a certain pleasure in crunching beneath his feet a piece of the defunct radio.

“You’ll forgive me for not coming down. I’ve got this little job to be getting on with.”

“Don’t you have a maintenance person for that?”

Hugo Eckener, who was squeezed into his harness, smiled.

“The thing is . . . it’s rather dangerous work. Some people have died for this kind of thing. Would you mind passing me the new brush, which is just by your feet?”

The short army chief hesitated for a moment. It was an embarrassing situation. He wasn’t there to serve as an apprentice. But eventually he picked up the paintbrush and clumsily sent it flying through the air toward Eckener.

“Missed!” declared the painter.

Three times the chief failed to reach his target, until on the fourth attempt Eckener deftly slackened his ropes and managed to grab hold of the brush.

“You’re making progress, Herr
Kreisleiter
,” Commander Eckener said approvingly. He smiled.

The army chief realized he had just made himself look ridiculous in front of his soldiers.

“As I was saying,” Eckener went on, “it’s dangerous work. Which is why I’d rather do it myself, calmly, in the evening, listening to music.”

“That’s not music!”

“I used to share your opinion, but there’s a young American who’s been working here for a few days, Harold G. Dick. He’s befriended my son Knut. And I’m beginning to change my mind about this kind of music.”

“Only weaklings change their minds.”

Hugo Eckener burst out laughing. He liked idiots. Or at least, idiots had kept him amused for a long time now.

“It’s thanks to us changing our minds that we’ve been able to conquer the sky, you know, Herr
Kreisleiter.
Here’s a little piece of advice from a wise man: you’ll never go very high unless you can change your mind.”

“I’ll go higher than you, Herr Doctor,” countered the chief.

“Yes, you’ll go very high indeed . . . in your tree . . . but I was talking about the sky.”

The three soldiers held their breath. The maggot was squirming in his boots.

“Do you take me for a monkey, Doctor Eckener?”

Commander Eckener stopped painting, put the paintbrush in his left hand, and raised his right.

“I swear on the memory of my master, the good Count von Zeppelin, that I wasn’t thinking of a monkey.”

And he wasn’t lying. Eckener had too much respect for monkeys.

The short army chief tried to regain his composure. He didn’t know what to say anymore. He turned to his soldiers and tried to remember what had brought him here in the first place. All of a sudden it came back to him, and he turned around to face Eckener, reinvigorated.

“Doctor Eckener, you are under arrest.”

“Oh?”

His response was offhand, as if someone had just remarked on a stray hair from his short white mane.

“You have flown over Paris without authorization.”

“Paris!” sighed Eckener. “Who can resist Paris? Yes, I flew over Paris.”

“A certain person in Berlin is not happy. A certain person has indicated this to me. A certain person has asked me to arrest you.”

“A certain person is too kind to think of me, but a certain person can’t stop the clouds from passing over Notre Dame in Paris. A certain person in Berlin should know this, shouldn’t he?”

His brush stopped moving.

“I had a friend to see in Paris. Unfortunately, I just missed him.”

“Doctor Eckener, I am ordering you to come down!”

“Another time I would be delighted to join you over a nice bottle of wine, but I’ve got this little job to finish. I trust that in Berlin, a certain person will forgive my deadline — that is, if a certain person has any brain under his hat.”

Eckener was taking risks. And he knew it. The certain person in question had a small mustache the size of a postage stamp, and his name was Adolf Hitler.

The commander’s paintbrush was applying alumina paint to cover over a final line that was still black.

“There we go. Leave me now. This is an important job.”

The
Kreisleiter
took a few steps backward.

His eyes were wide as saucers.

He had just realized what the important job the commander kept referring to was all about. For most of the conversation, under his very eyes, Hugo Eckener had been applying a layer of silver paint to cover up the gigantic swastika on the wing of the zeppelin. Not a trace of it remained.

The maggot was speechless. The soldiers had retreated with him. Since Hitler and his Nazi Party had come to power the previous year, the swastika was obligatory on the left side of all airplanes and airships.

Eckener had always fought against this symbol, which represented everything he found repellent. Six months earlier, for the Chicago World’s Fair, he had performed a tour of the city in a clockwise direction so that America wouldn’t see, on the left side of the zeppelin, that tattoo of shame.

Yes, making a swastika disappear was a small but rather dangerous job in Germany in the spring of 1934. None of Eckener’s workers could have done it without ending up with the rope around his neck.

He put his paintbrush back in its pot.

“There we go. It looks better like that. It’s more handsome.”

The maggot took a pistol out of his belt.

“Come down! You’re finished.”

Eckener burst out laughing. An endearing laugh that suited him. It spread to his forehead, his temples, and his eyes. At the end of the day, even in these troubled times, the idiots still made him laugh.

The maggot fired into the air in the direction of the ceiling.

Eckener stopped abruptly. His face had changed beyond all recognition. Now he looked like the god of storms carved on public water fountains. He was a terrifying sight to behold.

“Never do that again.”

He had spoken very softly. The thing was, Eckener tolerated idiotic behavior only in very small doses. But for some time now, all around him, the dose had become excessive, mad, monstrous. There were enough people behaving like idiots to fill whole stadiums or the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Even his closest friends were starting to show some of the symptoms.

“Never do that again on my premises,” Eckener repeated.

How could this man, fastened by a few ropes to the tail of the zeppelin, his nose shiny with paint, speak with such authority to a representative of the Nazi Party?

“Now, kindly leave!”

The short army chief raised his chin.

“Doctor Eckener, I shall call for reinforcements,” he threatened.

For the time being, the reinforcements weren’t much to be frightened of. The three soldiers looked exceedingly pale, their jaws had dropped, and the youngest of them was scratching his knee with his submachine gun.

“And what will you tell your reinforcements?”

“I will tell them that you have profaned the swastika.”

Eckener frowned.

“You mean that we have profaned it?”

“What?”

“You will say that we have profaned it together?”

“Together?”

“Will these three young men be able to deny that you provided me with a new paintbrush?”

Hugo Eckener watched his visitor stiffen. He continued: “Have you forgotten how, three times, you insisted on passing it to me yourself? Aren’t you the one who provided me with the weapon for this crime? You have a short memory. Didn’t you watch me doing my work for a good twenty minutes without intervening? Answer me, Herr
Kreisleiter
! Answer me!”

His fearsome voice rang out in the hangar.

The
Kreisleiter
of Friedrichshafen felt sick. He had a sudden desire to chew the oak leaves on his collar. At first he was speechless, then he blurted out a pulp of words, to the effect of: “I’ll get you in the end.”

He roared a few curt orders to his men and declared, “Heil Hitler” two or three times while raising his right arm in every direction. He even saluted an old railway clock that had ended up there, before taking off his cap and tripping over the radio he himself had kicked into that position. Then off he clopped, clicking his heels like an ass on a bridge. His soldiers followed him.

Eckener watched them go.

He felt a moment of pity for those boys who would be used as a doormat for this buffoon, and then as a stepping-stone for someone infinitely more threatening.

Silence was restored.

Slowly, Hugo Eckener let out the rope in order to lower himself to the ground. He put down his paint pot and turned to face his handiwork.

It was all so silly. He knew the battle was already lost, and that soon he would have to paint an identical swastika back in the same place. He knew he was endangering his business and his balloon — in other words his entire life — as well as putting the men who worked at his side in danger. But he couldn’t do otherwise.