The Madagaskar Plan (2 page)

“We don’t want it too heavy.” He looked her in the eye. “Not in your condition.”

Madeleine felt the press of her bladder. She forced a laugh. “What condition?”

Jared let the case drop and crossed the room until he was looming over her. She wanted to take a step back—but refused.

He reached for her pajama top. She’d bought three new pairs recently, all a size too big, with Empire lines to hide her waist. He teased the ends, then began to undo the buttons. His movements might have been seductive if not for the rawness of his eyes. His smooth, manicured hands encircled her stomach, only a thin barrier of skin separating his splayed fingers from her baby.

Madeleine couldn’t help herself: she retreated.

In response he leaned forward as if to kiss her ear and whispered something. It was so soft, Madeleine could hardly catch it.

It sounded like
I know
.

*   *   *

From somewhere the bitter tang of cigarettes. Madeleine took another step back and found herself against the door. The fingers ensnaring her belly pressed harder, till the pressure rose into her rib cage. The baby kicked.

“Jared, please, you’re hurting me.”

He spoke again: this time a declaration. His face was like cold wax, the nonchalance of the previous weeks gone. “I know about you and your lover—”

A rushing in her ears, simultaneously high-pitched and deafening, a low rumble. She needed to sit down.

“—the farm. The little life you were planning together. I’ve known since the spring.”

Madeleine shook her head.

“Everything I gave you,” he continued, “and this is how you repay me.”

For a long time she’d known this moment would come and had rehearsed her response. She wanted to rebuke him for the way he had shrunk her world even as it expanded to ball-gown dinners and hotel suites in the capitals of Europe. The way he told her not to eat as though she were a navvy, or his disapproval if she smiled too graciously at a doorman.
Everyone should know their place, Madeleine.
How she had spent years playing the part of a wife—gladly at first, sincerely—without believing his role as a husband. Madeleine felt no urge to justify, she just wanted to explain. Burton wasn’t the cause of their estrangement; he simply offered her the life she wanted. But now, seeing Jared’s eyes ringed with tears, the remorse welled in her.

“It was never like that.” More than once, the guilt had made her spurn Burton. She reached for her husband, grazing the dark fabric of his jacket. “I’m sorry, Jared. I…”

He snatched his hand away, showed his back. His shoulders gave a slight judder. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Madeleine thought she heard someone behind the door, listening in on them; that hint of cigarettes again.

“I shall give you a choice,” said her husband. “You can either leave tonight or”—he swallowed, his throat clicking as if the next words were rancid—“or I’ll forgive you everything. We can continue as before. A termination would be best, but if that’s too much I’m prepared to raise the child as my own. No one need ever know.”

Madeleine found herself dumb.

“Well?”

“Jared, I … I…”

“Choose.” When she didn’t reply, he repeated himself; this time she heard something creep into his tone. Contempt, brutality.

She stepped forward and reached for the case. “I need to get dressed.”

“You’d really choose him over all this?” He motioned to the room. Madeleine followed his hand, held open like an emperor’s: the Spink & Edgar bed, linen from Peter Reed, wardrobes choked with this season’s fashions, drawers that hid the diamond rings and pearls she’d never cared for. She thought of the drafty, bare rooms of the farmhouse and how comfortable she was there.

“I’m sorry, Jared. I love him.”

“Did you ever love me?”

“I can’t remember anymore.”

He removed the case from her grip, set it down. “There’s one other thing. Before you make your decision—”

“It’s too late for that.”

From his jacket he produced an envelope and placed it in her hands. “I told you I rushed home. I’ve been expecting this for weeks, and couldn’t wait to share it.”

The seal had been broken. There was a cover letter and a dozen typed pages of names.

“I don’t understand,” said Madeleine.

It was a communiqué from the Admiralty about a British warship in the Gulf of Kamerun. HMS
Ibis
. Sunk, presumed torpedoed by the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. The
Ibis:
it meant nothing to her, and yet there was a stirring in Madeleine’s gut that wasn’t the baby. Thirty men had been pulled alive from the water. All other hands were lost.

She looked up at Jared.

“The second sheet,” he said. “A list of the deceased.”

Madeleine turned to the page, scanned the names. It was at the bottom: Burton Cole.

Suddenly the whole world was sliding to one side, as if she were on the stricken ship herself. The papers tumbled from her hand, floating across Cranley’s shoes. She struggled to breathe, each lungful shallow yet needing all her effort.

“Everything went wrong in Kongo,” said her husband, the tiniest shard of delight audible in his words. “He had to flee—to Angola. And then a ship back home. Or so your lover thought.”

“Kongo.” She could barely speak. “How do you know about Kongo?”

“Who do you think sent him there? Planned his reunion with Hochburg?”

“You?”

“Cole was the perfect tool for the job, though kept unawares about the Colonial Office. He snared Hochburg in our trap of invading Rhodesia and, once he’d served his purpose, was left to die.”

She was shaking, almost doubled over, seeing the man who had been her husband for the first time. It was like that one occasion he had lashed out. A single blow to the stomach that put her on her knees; she couldn’t even remember what she’d done. Afterward Jared apologized for his lapse in control, swore it wouldn’t happen again as he filled the house with enough lilies to make her nauseous. She never told Burton about it.

“It should make your decision easier.” His tone was businesslike, the civil servant briefing his minister. “I presume you’ll be staying. I’m sure we can put this silly little affair behind us—”

She leapt at him, clawing his face. Her nails came away red.

Cranley shoved her back. Madeleine stumbled and fell; the baby bounced sickeningly inside her, like a stone.

Her husband stepped forward, treading on the lists of drowned sailors. His fingers bunched into a fist. She caught the glint of his wedding ring: it would break her front teeth.

“All the scorn I endured for you,” he said. “Jared Cranley, the man who could have had
any
woman he desired, yet married a Jewish domestic. Did it for love.” He reached for his handkerchief, let out a snort. “I’ve heard it said that I’m the most romantic man in London.”

With a sob, Madeleine stood up, grabbed the case, and opened the door. She’d find Alice, flee to the farm.

“This is Mr. Lyall,” said Cranley.

A man with a squashed nose and thick beard barred her way. He was dressed in a black suit that looked as if it had been slept in. The stench of cigarettes around him was enough to make her wince.

She tried to pass, but he blocked her path. Tried again, this time swinging the case at him. The clasp came loose, showering the room in clothes. Madeleine shoved past—then was on the floor, the small of her back stinging. She had no strength to stand up; she was crumbling inside with grief.

Lyall brandished a truncheon. He prodded it against her mouth.

“You always had a beautiful smile,” said Cranley. He looked at the garments strewn around the room. “Forget the case,” he said to Lyall. “I just want her gone.”

As Madeleine was yanked to her feet, she heard her pajamas rip. “What about Alice?” she asked.

“She’ll have everything she needs: a beautiful home, a doting father. I know Mrs. Anderson will make an excellent governess.”

“Promise?”

“You might be a Jewish whore, but Alice is still my daughter.” He dabbed the blood on his cheek with the handkerchief. “It would be better if there are no hysterics as you leave. I don’t want her upset.”

“And me?”

His tone brokered no reasoning, no pleading: “Better than you deserve.”

“Come on, Mrs. Cranley,” said Lyall, gripping her arm.

He dragged her into the hallway. At the bottom of the stairs, the front door was open to the fog outside. Waiting below, also in a black suit, was a pudgy man pacing back and forth. Over his arm was one of Madeleine’s fur coats; in his fist, a revolver.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

A memory shrieked in her mind: the time the Nazis came for her father in Vienna. The pounding on the door, the house swarming with uniforms and weapons. Her mother had asked the same question.
Just some forms to fill out,
soothed one of the brownshirts. Papa returned two days later, his tie missing, shirt filthy, unable to stop shaking.

“It’s all arranged,” said Lyall. “Won’t take long to get there.”

Madeleine dug her feet into the carpet. Made her legs rigid.

Lyall forced her to the edge of the staircase. “My wife had a miscarriage once, silly old thing. Fell down some steps.”

She struggled a moment longer, then went limp, hugging her stomach. As Madeleine was led away, she twisted round for a final look at her husband.

Cranley was framed in the doorway of her room. He glanced at her for a second, then went back to examining the blood on his handkerchief. At his feet were the names of the dead.

PART I

BRITAIN

All that he held dear—hearth and family, belief and belonging—had been taken from him.

—ELEANOR COLE
Letter to her sister, 1930

CHAPTER ONE

Schädelplatz, Deutsch Kongo

26 January 1953, 06:30

PANZER CREWS CALLED it
Nashornstahl:
rhino steel. It was supposed to be impregnable. A girder of it had been welded across the entrance.

There was a crackling boom, like thunder heard from within a storm cloud, and the door exploded. Shards of metal and flame flew down the corridor. Before the smoke cleared, Belgian guerrillas poured through the barricade, kicking aside the mangled girder. Among the Europeans were black faces.

Oberstgruppenführer Walter Hochburg felt a shudder of incredulity. Then the fury swelled in him, his black eyes glittering.

No nigger, no breathing nigger, had ever set foot in the Schädelplatz, his secret headquarters. He raised his rifle above the sandbags—it was a BK44, the one Himmler had awarded him—and lashed the trigger. Waffen-SS troops fired alongside him.

More guerrillas surged into the passageway.

“Stand your ground,” roared Hochburg. His voice was a raw baritone.

To either side of him, men were retreating to the next redoubt. Hochburg followed with a slack stride, certain of his invincibility, his rifle searching out dark skin. He reached the second wall of sandbags and dipped behind them to reload.

“Oberstgruppenführer!”

Before him was his new deputy, Gruppenführer Zelman: flat-faced, blond, unblinking. The buttons on his uniform were as untarnished as virgin silver. He had emerged from a side passage.

“What news?” asked Hochburg.

Zelman huddled low. “A thousand guerrillas, maybe more, including artillery. The main entrance and southern walls have been breached. We can’t hold out much longer.”

“Where are my helicopters?”

“You must leave, Oberstgruppenführer. Immediately. Your bodyguards are waiting to escort you to Stanleystadt.” Stanleystadt: Kongo’s great northern city.

“And have the blacks in our sanctum? Never.” There shouldn’t be a single negroid within a thousand kilometers of the Schädelplatz. Hochburg slammed a fresh magazine into his BK44. “Get a rifle in your hand and fight. You, the auxiliary staff, kitchen porters, every last man.”

“I didn’t come to Africa to die, Oberstgruppenführer.”

“Then you have no right to be here.”

Not for the first time Hochburg regretted dismissing Kepplar, his former deputy. Whatever his failings, there was a man who would have relished defending the Schädelplatz. Zelman was a cousin of Reinhard Heydrich’s wife and had been assigned to him after the invasion of Rhodesia faltered.
To keep an eye on me,
Hochburg told him the day he arrived.

A grenade landed between them.

Zelman grabbed Hochburg and yanked him into the side passage. The blast turned the entrance into a cascade of bricks.

“I would have thrown it back,” said Hochburg as he got to his feet, swiping away the dust. When the attack woke him, he had put on his black dress uniform, the material straining against the brawn of his shoulders; now it was floured and torn.

Zelman led the way through the stone corridors of the Schädelplatz, till they turned into the main thoroughfare. Hochburg stopped abruptly.

He had been here fifteen minutes earlier, demanding the base at Kondolele get his gunships airborne. There should have been sentries by the door; instead, only the smell of the wind. He pushed his deputy to one side and stepped into the command center. The cloud-riddled dawn shone down on him, wands of orange and coral-pink light.