Many Words

Cannon made his way through the zep’s corridors to a large, wooden double door. It had less weight to it than Cannon expected: panels, then, and not solid wood, but the latter was a luxury zeppelin architects could rarely afford.

He stepped over the threshold. It was a moment before the fullness of the room struck him, bringing him to a dead stop. On Inconstant, he had a few shelves of books, a larger library than most zeps. Much more so than wooden doors, books were heavy. The Red Banner‘s architects hadn’t cared. This was a library.

It stretched one hundred feet fore and aft, at the aft end of the Red Banner‘s passenger spaces. A balcony level overlooked the reading area, a cluster of leather chairs and low wooden tables at the center of the main deck. Bookshelves lined the walls, each bearing hundreds of volumes. Plush red carpet covered the deck.

Cannon removed his hat. It seemed the right thing to do in such a hallowed place as this. It was a shame the Soviets would never let him come back after this job.

He approached a bored-looking stewardess who occupied a desk facing the door, paging through a book. “Er, dictionaries?” he said hopefully.

The stewardess lifted her eyes from the page with a titanic effort, jerked her thumb over her shoulder, and went back to her reading as quickly as possible.

So began several hours of arduous research. Cannon spoke no Russian, and he couldn’t very well ask for help: “Hello, I’m searching for plans to the zep so I can rob your most eminent passenger.” He suspected that would go over like a lead balloon.

The process went like this: use a Russian-English dictionary to read the card catalog, find a promising title, flip through it in search of diagrams. He tried a treatise in Soviet zep design, and found a chapter on the Red Banner. Going by its title, he surmised that, in the author’s view, he traveled in a shining example of the finest trends in luxury zeppelin design. Toward the end of the chapter was a facsimile of the zep’s deck plan, but it was too rough to make heads or tails of.

The citation for the diagram pointed him to his next target: the zep’s official history. If Cannon was reading his Cyrillic right, the author was one A. A. Alexandrov, which was the captain’s name. Cannon flipped quickly through the pages. Near the middle of the book, one page folded out to double width. On the front were engineering drawings—renditions of the Red Banner from the bow and the port side. She was a pure cylinder, capped at one end by a nose cone and the other by her empennage. An older design—modern zeps mad the more bulbous, rounded shape the Germans had pioneered after the war—but serviceable nevertheless, and possessed of a few advantages besides. For one, it was much cheaper to build and repair, and for another, the crew in the gondola had a clear view all the way aft to the tail, unobstructed by the downward swell in the hull found on more modern designs.

Bleary-eyed, Cannon reached for his pocket watch. He sat bolt upright on seeing that it read nine o’clock. Then he remembered, spinning the dial on its side until it read seven, then winding it for the day.

Iseabail still slept soundly on the couch. Cannon pulled a beige suit from the bag hanging in the closet and tiptoed into the washroom to dress. A few minutes later, he emerged, nudging Iseabail’s shoulder as he made for the door. “Get up. We have a lot to do today. Meet me in the lounge when you’re ready.”

It took her the better part of an hour, by which time the stewards had set up the lounge for breakfast. The fare was traditionally Russian: a heavy, buttery porridge the stewards called ‘kasha’, fried eggs, and cheese dumplings, alongside tea with more kick than Cannon’s preferred coffee.

He and Iseabail sat and ate, in no particular hurry. The stewards circled the room, bearing away dishes. They came and went by a small door far aft, just ahead of the red banner hanging from the wall.

“What I could really use is a map,” Cannon said, glancing at the nearby tables. No other passengers sat nearby, so, for the moment, he could drop the accent. He chose not to.

“There’s a library midships,” Iseabail suggested. “Ye can maybe find a deck plan there.”

“Maybe.” Cannon put his teacup down. “If I’m to be taking a jaunt through the crew spaces, I’d rather know where I’m going.”

Iseabail nodded. “D’ye know, you’re soundin’ more like an Englishman by the hour.”

Cannon smiled a thin-lipped smile.

Iseabail made a noise of disgust. “I hope ye can turn i’ off when we’re done. Wha’ am I to do?”

“Keep watch on the crew. Find out what you can about the captain, and how we might come by an invitation to his table,” Cannon replied.

“How am I supposed ta do tha’?”

“You’re a bright girl,” said Cannon, taking his hat and rising. “You’ll figure it out, I’m sure.” Iseabail rolled her eyes, and Cannon settled his hat in place. “I’ll meet you here when I’ve finished.”

Dinner passed pleasantly. Stewards served black bread, borscht, potatoes, and fish, whisking away dishes and refilling glasses with speed and efficiency entirely out of keeping with Cannon’s expectations. Later, the stewards deposited a tea tray in the Russian style on the table: a teapot full of boiling water, in which the tea steeped without respite; a samovar, to provide hot water with which to cut the concentrate in the teapot; and a sugar bowl, to cut the bitterness. The tables on the balcony got Lomonosov china.

The evening stretched on. In the morning, they would set their clocks back two hours, to account for their westward progress, so nobody was in any particular hurry to retire. Cannon and Iseabail whiled away a few hours chatting with Wailani, on everything from archeology to their imagined home in England. Iseabail waxed eloquent about their country cottage outside of York, while Cannon filled in details of their shared career, working from his exploits with the Long Nines and mixing in bits and pieces from recent news in the field.

Eventually, they made their excuses, returning to their cabin. Cannon prepared to curl up on the divan, but Iseabail would have none of it: “Ye dinnae fit, cap’n, an’ I do.”

Cannon protested, but Iseabail was nothing if not stubborn, and after a bit, he gave up. Soon, she snored away on the sofa, while Cannon covered his ears with a pillow. Some time later, he was asleep.

Cannon looked into the distance at the ostentatious red banner hanging at the forward end of the dining room, as though he were deep in remembrance. “When I was a mere boy,” he began, “before the war, I had occasion to take a German zeppelin to New York. The chill cut through the heaviest furs—we rode in the gondola, and with the zeppelin filled with hydrogen, we could hardly heat it. Regardless, the captain dined with all the passengers, every night, hosting us in his wardroom.”

Cannon paused in his bogus recollection as four stewards set up chairs and music stands in the center of the balcony. Others delivered instrument cases to them.

“How far we’ve come,” Cannon said. “Can we expect music, then?”

Wailani nodded. The instruments came out, and the four stewards became a serviceable string quartet. “As long as you don’t mind Russian composers.”

Cannon nodded over the opening strains of something Tchaikovsky. “Certainly not. Old masters, one and all.” A moment passed. “Mr. Wailani, I feel we’ve been simply terrible guests. Here we are, imposing upon your hospitality, and yet we’ve done all the talking. How was your time in Panama? Seal any deals, did you?”

Wailani leaned back, losing some of his jocularity. “I had hoped to. The Panamanians do not see the value of a canal.”

“Seems rather redundant what with zeppelins, doesn’t it?”

Wailani smiled. “With that attitude, you could be a Panamanian. What most fail to see is that the day of the airship will, eventually, come to a close. Then, a man with a canal from Atlantic to Pacific could grow wealthy indeed.”

“Seems rather speculative,” Cannon said diffidently. “What if it isn’t for a hundred years?”

To her credit, Iseabail managed a disinterested air, though Cannon could see her foot tapping excitedly.

“Perhaps,” Wailani shrugged. “Business is my business. It pays to be ahead of the curve.”

“Quite the opposite, in our line.”

Wailani laughed aloud. “Well put. Though— well, I am no expert, but is it not the case that Mr. Volkov was ahead of the curve?”

Cannon mulled it over, then smiled in what he hoped was a reserved British manner. “You may just be right.”

Somewhere in the middle of the stream of passengers, Cannon and Iseabail entered the room on the balcony level. In two rows, one on each side of the door, stewards in gleaming white uniforms stood to define a passage to the stairs leading down. Looking between them, Cannon spotted Volkov taking a seat at one of the aft balcony tables, next to a main whose shoulders sagged beneath the weight of his uniform’s epaulets. That and the medals pinned to his breast pegged him, in Cannon’s mind, as the captain. Cannon edged that way.

“Nilzya,” a steward told him, holding out his hand in the universal gesture for stop.

“I would like to dine with the captain,” Cannon pressed.

“Angliski ni govoryu,” the steward replied, not yielding an inch.

A familiar voice boomed from behind them. “He can’t help you.” John Wailani clapped Cannon on the shoulder. “Perhaps you will accept my table as a worthy substitute?” Cannon could do nothing but nod, and Wailani parted the wall of stewards with a wave of his hand. “The Smiths will dine with me,” he said.

The very same obstinate steward replied in accented English. “Yes, Mr. Wailani.”

“Thank you, Andrey Andreyevitch.”

They proceeded to the other aft table, where Wailani ushered them to the two chairs against the inner wall. Cannon pulled one out for Iseabail, and took the other for himself. Wailani sat across from them.

“Thanks for the invitation,” Iseabail said.

“Say nothing of it,” Wailani replied. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the captain’s table. “It appears you have been foiled, as far as meeting Mr. Volkov goes.”

“I’m afraid so,” Cannon replied, heaving a dramatic sigh. “I suppose some things are the same the whole world round.”

Wailani raised his substantial eyebrows.

“Few captains deign to receive the riff-raff. It isn’t like the old days.”

“Go on.”