Child of the Journey (31 page)

Like the matter of Miriam.

Ironically, everywhere except in Germany she was a Jew. How would the South Americans react to her?

Cross that bridge later, he thought, imagining a Fascist conflagration with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Degrelle in Europe; Hirohito in Japan; Chiang Kai-shek with his Blueshirts in China; the German-American Bund Party in the United States; the recently disenfranchised Integralistas in Brazil. And the Argentineans.

Together they would burn the world clean of the Communist threat and the decadence of democracy. Leading the troops, he would be the swordtip of a revolution, its fiery wedge!

The stewards exited, and he allowed himself a congratulatory smile.

"You look pleased with yourself, Herr Oberst," Colonel Perón said, re-entering. "The Führer will be ready to see you," Perón glanced at his watch, "in fifteen minutes. The meeting will be brief. He is most weary."

"Be so kind as to give me an indication of the subject of this meeting," Erich said, forcing himself to keep his smile.

Clasping his hands behind his back, Perón looked thoughtful. "At my instigation, the Führer has arranged to give you and your dogs an opportunity to prove your worth. I am told you consider them the equal of any good German soldier."

Erich's smile broadened. "How is it we are to prove ourselves?"

"As part of a two-part operation." Perón sat down and lit a cigarette. "In brief, I wish to view a particular naval operation in the South Atlantic. You are to accompany me."

"And that operation is?"

"A military secret, even from you, Herr Oberst. Outside of the highest officials, only the captain of the
Altmark
, whom you shall meet in due time, knows those details. I can tell you that I will be with you as far as Lüderitz, a port on the west coast of Africa."

"I see," Erich said, but he felt a mounting confusion. He struggled to maintain his professional reserve.

"I told you that this is to be a two-part operation," Perón said. "The first, the one I am to view, is top secret."

"And the second?"

"You and your men and dogs, together with a contingent of SS and free laborers, will proceed to Madagascar. Yours will be the advance party for troops that will secure the island for the Reich."

Madagascar! Erich thought. A stroke of genius! The Italians had invaded and defeated Ethiopia, and now Germany would have Madagascar. With the Italian hot-heads in control of the southern entrance to the Red Sea, Hitler had to make a similar move. Whoever held the island controlled the Indian Ocean. That meant control of oil.

The top secret operation Perón was to observe, Erich figured, must be an invasion, to help galvanize Perón's belief in the German cause by demonstrating how, with Germany's help, he could acquire not just his country but his continent!

"What is the timetable for the primary invasion?" Erich asked.

"If the invasion comes, it will come in good time."

"If?"
Erich's excitement halted. "There are no immediate plans?"

Perón shook his head.

"Then why am I being sent to Madagascar?"

"As you're no doubt aware, Poland has become increasingly aggressive. Should the Poles be foolish enough to spill German blood, your Führer intends, as he says, to crush them like roaches. He knows, however, that the problems he will have to contend with after peace is restored will be staggering. Over three million Jews in Poland alone!" Perón paused, as if to allow the information to take hold. "The Führer is convinced that a foothold in Madagascar will give him a solution to the Jewish question. He wishes to transport all Jews there to form a country of their own."

"I'm being sent to some
remote
African island where I am to wait out the war with the
remote
possibility that
perhaps
Germany will use the objective?" Erich felt his temper rising.

"Calm down, Herr Oberst." Perón's eyes flashed a warning. "Let me attempt to explain. As you know, your Führer is determined that he must rid himself of the Jews. You may not, however, be aware that your government has been trying to work with the Zionists to arrange for secret convoys to Palestine. Those talks have broken down. The British have cancelled all immigration approvals to Palestine and pressured Greece and Turkey not to accept Jews. They have sealed off the coast of Palestine with a flotilla of destroyers and intensive air reconnaissance. An alternative must be found."

The words peppered Erich's mind like shotgun pellets. Absurd!

"Hauptmann Eichmann favors resettling the Jews in a farming area near the Polish town of Nisko," Perón went on, "but Madagascar is not out of the question. If not Poland, then the island. The Poles apparently think the same thing, because two years ago they sent researchers there to see if Jews could be relocated in the island's Ankaizina region."

A nightmare. It could not be happening. Not to him.

"The idea's not new," Perón said. "Napoleon had such a plan, and Bonnet, the French Foreign Minister, recently made a similar suggestion. Here, Eichmann is the one who thought the thing through-- in concert, naturally, with your Führer."

"Will we make war on Madagascar?" Erich asked wearily.

Goebbels joined them. "The Führer hopes to persuade France to cede us the island. After the indigenous population has been moved to the mainland, the Sicherheitspolizei will orchestrate the Jewish resettlement in non-German ships."

"Another camp," Erich muttered.

"A homeland," Perón said.

Erich looked up, amazed at the conviction in Perón's voice.

"You will have six months to get this program on its feet," Perón said. "Do that, and the Führer will scrap plans for resettlement in Poland and institute resettlement to Madagascar. You will insure that the Jews
work.
Once the colony is established, production and trade will be managed by German-run organizations. There will ultimately be purely German and purely Jewish businesses. The merchant bank plus the issue and transfer bank will be German. The trading bank and production organization will be Jewish."

"I'm to stay in
Madagascar,
while Germany glorifies herself in Europe," Erich said in disbelief.

"The Führer will let Miriam accompany you, assuming you both approve. Leni Riefenstahl--I believe you know her--will film all this for the Reich. She would like to include a sense of domesticity. I believe she is also planning to do a documentary on the Bushmen, and at least one other African film, so you will see a lot of her, as you will Otto Hempel."

"Hempel! Going too?"

Perón ignored the outburst. "The war with Poland, if it comes, is unlikely to last. France is too worried about Mussolini and Franco to risk a war with Germany. You will return here soon enough."

"What if the war drags on?"

"Then, Herr Oberst," Goebbels said, walking toward the door, "you wait--and enjoy the tropics."
 

Erich stood up and shoved his chair hard against the table. "So you have found a way to rid yourself of me and my dogs."

Goebbels did not turn around.

Breathing hard, Erich looked at Perón.
 

"This has nothing to do with Goebbels," Perón said, his smile not wavering, "though it is true that you do not exactly inspire his love. I myself have heard him say that your dogs stink like Jews."

L
ooking into Miriam's bedroom and watching her sleep, Erich decided he would never understand the female psyche. The last thing he had expected from her was enthusiasm about Madagascar. Anger, yes. Neutrality, perhaps. But open enthusiasm? Just when he had begun to accept Solomon as a permanent specter between them?

In the two weeks since the Reichschancellery, she had been almost excited--sorting, packing, asking questions about what she should or should not take in the single steamer trunk allotted her. Maybe they would have a real marriage someday after all, he thought. One that included lovemaking. Not just sex. Certainly not rape. Perhaps one day she would let go of the pain of her thighs digging into the rim of a metal bathtub--

He reached for the book Leni had sent him after the meeting at the Reichschancellery.
The Memoirs of Mauritius Augustus, Count de Benyowsky.
Her accompanying note explained that, after her current projects were finished, she wanted to do a feature-length about the Count. She and her crew would film Erich's trip as far as Lüderitz, divert to do her Bushman shoot, and rejoin him to continue filming the Jews after their base camp was in place. Then--the project dearest to her heart, the Benyowsky movie. The Count, she wrote, bore startling similarities to a good friend of hers, recently promoted to colonel.
 

In the autobiography, Benyowsky liberally mixed fiction with fact, but the lies were so outrageously inventive that Erich found them amusing. He felt drawn to the Hungarian, an eighteenth-century aristocratic adventurer captured by the Russians during the Seven Years' War.

Escaping from a Siberian penal camp, Benyowsky and his fellow exiles had stolen two ships and eventually ended up in northeastern Madagascar. There they had encountered malaria, native unrest brought on by the jealousy of European traders competing for economic rights to the huge island, and humidity that could wilt even the strongest of men. Undaunted, he had borrowed an idea from the Americans, and with supplies and moral support from Benjamin Franklin had founded a colony and written the island's first Constitution, guaranteeing equal rights for all. The result was peace between the tribes.

As drums beat and nearly naked women danced beneath an African moon, thirty thousand warriors laid down their
assegais
-- spears--and prostrated themselves at his feet. In gratitude, they proclaimed Benyowsky
Ampandzaka-bé,
Chief of Chiefs.

The memoirs had given Erich insights he could never have found in Goebbels' military documents. Madagascar began to fascinate him, especially after his five or six meetings with an island native named Bruqah, who was to be his guide and translator. The man was a fascinating dichotomy--knowledgeable, an excellent teacher, outwardly Westernized--yet in many ways that combination of mystic and pragmatist he had only seen before in Solomon.

Maybe Madagascar would give him a way to design for himself a place in history
and
to spit in the Führer's eye. What if he created a homeland for the Jews, not founded on ghetto or camp conditions, but on equal rights? A true homeland. He, Erich Alois Nobody, recipient of an empty double promotion and false promises.
That
would earn him Miriam's forgiveness...and maybe even God's.

Were it not for Otto Hempel going to Madagascar too--

He forced himself away from thoughts of that pig and indulged instead in a fantasy of dancing women and beating drums and thousands of grateful warriors laying down their dogwood spears to prostrate themselves at
his
feet--all the while chanting
Ampandzaka-bé.

Like his flirtation with Leni, this too was a pleasant and harmless fabrication, he told himself, staring at Miriam, who turned awkwardly in her sleep.

"Bruqah!" she cried out.

He tried to remember when he had mentioned that name to her. Not that there had been any reason to avoid doing so; she would be meeting the Malagasy herself soon enough.

Miriam was again breathing regularly, sleeping more easily. Their bedroom's French doors were open, and a lightly humid breeze carried with it the intermittent barking of the dogs reacting to the full moon. Tonight, he thought, the grand house encapsulated him. For once it was an extension of himself...its stone his cells, its heritage
his
heart, and not only Miriam ex-Rathenau's. Tonight he could believe that the events of that cabaret night when he had first seen her--the night he had met Rathenau, and Miriam had danced upon his boyish desire--had been no accident of fate, but rather destiny, preparing him to claim the important things that had been Rathenau's.

He was finally master of this castle.

Rising quietly, he slipped into his smoking jacket and went downstairs, intent on quieting the dogs. When he opened the front door, he discovered a messenger about to knock.

"Heil Hitler!" The messenger clicked his heels together and saluted.

Erich returned the greeting, though without enthusiasm. "Must you come in the middle of the night? Can nothing in this country wait until morning?"

He glanced past the young man and, surprised to see a bicycle instead of a motorcycle in the driveway, realized this was not one of the usual messengers from headquarters. They were all beginning to look alike, these young Nazis, he told himself cynically. So blond and fervid.

"My apologies, Herr Oberst. I was told to deliver this package immediately." The messenger swung his knapsack off his back and pulled out a receipt book, pen, and a small box wrapped in butcher paper.

Erich signed and dated the proffered page. The messenger noted the time after checking his watch, stepped back, and again saluted. It irritated Erich, having to comply.

The young man lowered his arm he looked at Erich expectantly.