The Madagaskar Plan (33 page)

“Impossible.”

“Sturmbannführer! I told you the Jews were on the loose. Surrender yourself and we can all get out safely.” Pinzel was no more than four or five cabins away.

“Thirty seconds from now you’ll be chewing a BK,” said Tünscher. “Then it really will be over for Madeleine.”

“If I leave, I’ll never know where she is.”

“We’ll find another way.” Tünscher’s face was lit from the porthole: a pale-blue oval, his eyes agitated, sincere.

Another cabin door banged.

Burton clutched the records to his chest. Could Alice have gotten it wrong? Could Cranley and his housekeeper have made sure she overheard a lie? Concocted a plan to send him to Madagaskar, as far as possible from wherever Madeleine really was? Burton let the files spill to the floor and reached for his Beretta. Tünscher was holding a grenade. He blew on it as if it were a lucky die, pulled the pin—and bowled it through the door.

*   *   *

Ever since he was a boy Globocnik had wanted to do this; it was like whisking the cloth out from underneath a table set for dinner. That was one of the Führer’s tricks at the Berghof—though only he was permitted to do it. Globus grabbed the
Gustloff
’s wheel and spun it round completely, spun it till it locked and the horizon began to shift. The tremor of the engines shook the floor.

He positioned a soldier by the door and guided Gretta and Romy up the spiral staircase; they needed no encouragement. He left another guard on the top step.

“You see,” he told the girls when they were on the viewing platform, “big enough for a helicopter.” Romy was shaking, her cheeks teary with mascara. Perhaps he didn’t want to fuck her after all.

Smoke billowed from the rear of the ship. Across the water, the base was coming to full alert. Globus heard alarms ringing and saw crews sprinting toward their Walküres. The Jews continued to scale the sides of the ship, but they were irrelevant now. Let them and their records burn. The first helicopter lifted into the sky.

He inhaled deeply, the tang of the Ostafrikanischer Ozean blowing across the bay, and experienced a rare sense of satisfaction. All his life his father had been a source of humiliation to him. Even his name, Globocnik, had an embarrassing Slavic sound; Globus had considered changing his. But at that moment he wished they were standing side by side so he could show the old man the world he commanded. Globus reached to the heavens and fired three flares in rapid succession. The whole bay was bathed in a bloodred light.

The
Gustloff
strained at her anchor, drifting toward the chain of sea mines that surrounded the hull.

*   *   *

A barrage of BK44 fire. Burton dived to the ground, Tünscher with him, and they crawled to the nearest cabin door, hunkering for cover as bullets flashed off the walls. There was a violent jolt, and the ship lurched beneath them again.

Tünscher counted down the rounds to silence. “Reloading,” he said, getting to his feet.

They both sprinted through the swampy darkness, lit by gobs of fire from the grenade. At the far end of the corridor was the stairwell for the rear of the ship, if they could reach it—

The thunderclap was so loud Burton felt it as a physical pressure; his ears popped with a deafening whine.

The blast tore through the corridor, chased by a gust of invisible fire. Burton was whipped off his feet, his chin cracking the floorboards as he landed. He had the vertiginous sensation of the corridor shifting and rolling. Darkness pressed against his eyes, deeper than the gloom of the ship, a velvety warmth flooding through him …

Next moment: high-pitched squeaking, scurrying. Tiny claws pressed against his eyelids.

Burton sat up—a giddy rush—and tore the rat from his face. There were hundreds swarming around him and Tünscher, fleeing a tongue of water. He stood; within seconds his boots were submerged.

“We can’t sink,” coughed Tünscher. A layer of smoke rolled along the ceiling. “The bay’s not deep enough.”

“What did Patrick teach us? You can drown in an inch of water, even in the desert.”

The corridor was at an angle, the sound of buckling steel echoed along its length. They splashed toward the stairwell, the water bubbling around their shins like a foul-smelling spring. Soon it was at their knees, then their thighs. Burton reached the door and tried to push it open—it didn’t budge.

Tünscher shoved him out of the way. “You can’t do it one-handed.” He heaved against the metal, heaved again, his mouth contorting with the effort. When it refused to give he knelt, water up to his chest, and examined the lock.

“Forget it,” said Burton. “The rats had the best idea.” He waded away from the stairwell.

An electrical cable had been wrenched from the wall and was sparking violently. With each flash, Burton saw the silhouettes of three figures submerged to the waist.

“Governor Globus wants you alive,” said Pinzel, waving his gun. “I could say you drowned.”

Suddenly, Tünscher grabbed the scruff of Burton’s neck and propelled him toward the Nazis. Burton twisted to fight him off and saw the stairwell door. It was bulging outward, jets of foam tracing its outline. A rivet fired from the bulkhead, lethal as a bullet. It struck one of Pinzel’s men in the chest.

The door burst open.

Burton tumbled backward, wheeling in a surge of bubbles, his nose flooding. He felt weightless, as if he would fall forever—like he had in Germania.

Madeleine pushed him back onto the bed. The buttons of her dress were torn open, underwear discarded on the floor. She looked drunk. He remembered the colors of the hotel room vividly—the deep-burgundy furnishings—and, through the window, the virescent copper dome of the Great Hall looming above the city. He landed, bouncing on the mattress, the sensation protracted, as if it would never end. Madeleine mounted him, pinning his wrists down, her mouth so close he tasted the cherry, pistachio, and milk of ice cream on her breath.

“Make me one last promise,” she said. Earlier that afternoon they had pledged their futures to each other.

“Anything.”

“We’ll live together, grow old together, but we won’t marry.”

Marriage: an undesired country. He’d never imagined exchanging vows with Madeleine, yet her words brought back some of the old vulnerabilities. She had consented to Cranley—why not him?

“But—”

She pressed a finger against his lips, showed him the indent where her wedding band went; she always took it off when they were together. The skin was hard and shrunken.

“I never want to wear another ring.”

The current slackened. Burton staggered to his feet and fought his way through the foam. Tünscher was at the stairwell, his hand reaching for him. They ducked through the punctured door frame and Burton craned his neck: there was a square of fiery light at the top, water cascading on all sides.

Tünscher took the lead, mounting the stairs two at a time. “Right to the top,” he yelled. “We can get out that way.”

The ship continued to twist and strain around them—with the sound of metal being eviscerated—pitching the staircase to the left. Burton followed, using his one hand to steady himself. His boots slipped on the metal steps.

“Sturmbannführer!”

Pinzel was below, in the frothing water. He raised his BK44 as Burton pressed himself against the wall. Without slowing, Tünscher lobbed his final grenade over the side.

A spout of smoke and spray.

The stairwell continued to rotate. Burton felt like he was climbing through the inside of a tree trunk as it was felled. Soon they were half-clambering, half-crawling. A sign marked
A–C
told them they were on the deck where they had entered the ship.

“Two more,” said Tünscher, wheezing.

Burton could already feel gusts of fresh air when he stopped. A thought had taken hold of him: illogical, unlikely—but a possibility. How could he have not considered it before?

“I’m going back,” he shouted at Tünscher, sliding down the way they’d come.

“You got to be kidding me.”

Burton ignored him, returned to the deck below, through double doors and onto the promenade deck. It was clogged with smoke and a burning-autumn-leaves stench. Most of the filing cabinets had toppled over, like dominoes. He scrambled across them, chased by Tünscher’s calls. The door they had originally entered the ship from was bolted shut, fists pounding on it. Burton kept going till he reached the cabinets marked
COL
. He started righting them. “I need your help,” he said when Tünscher arrived.

“Look outside!”

The liner had broken away from its mooring and shifted in the bay. Through the cracked portholes, the SS base on the opposite shore was visible; a Walküre gunship was taking to the sky, and the bay was dotted with hovercrafts.

“You want your diamonds, help me.”

They righted the cabinet together. Burton yanked opened the drawers, scanned the wad of brown documents. Nothing. They lifted the next cabinet. Dead center in the second drawer was a line of clean paper. A nauseous energy surged in him; he plucked out the file.

Tünscher read over his shoulder: “‘Madeleine Rachel Cole.’”

“Born December 1915,” breathed Burton. He glanced at her photo: her eyes were widow blank, like his father’s after Mother vanished.

Tünscher pried the paper from his grip. “It says she’s in the Western Sector, Antzu. That’s fifty clicks from here. You could be there, back, and away in two days—
if
we get out now.”

Burton took the sheet from him and hid it inside his tunic. They clambered over the remaining cabinets, headed toward the bow of the ship. The smoke was thinning. Burton’s head was full of gold, full of everything that Madeleine was: her kindness and vitality and occasional seriousness; how when she wore blue it lit up her eyes; her minxy shyness when the bedroom door closed. The sense of belonging she gave him. He stifled the urge to laugh and charged through the exit that led to the main deck.

On the horizon, the first shreds of dawn peeked between bulwarks of rain clouds. A helicopter, lights blinking, swooped over the bay. As it neared the Ark, its rotors beat the wind in Burton’s direction, choking him with the smell of bodies that hadn’t known soap in years. Acrid sweat and oily hair, clothes washed in muddy streams. An inhuman scent, feral and furious.

It was seventy feet to the edge of the ship. The deck in between was crowded with Jews in black waistcoats.

Burton retreated a step and bumped into Tünscher.

“They’re behind us, too,” he whispered.

The Jews glared at their uniforms. They crept closer till the nearest man was an arm’s length away. Burton kept his expression blank, made no eye contact.

A hand reached out for the collar of his jacket, tore off the skull-and-palm-tree lapel, and held it aloft for all to see before crumpling it. Then other hands were on him: grabbing, slapping, punching. Burton was dragged down into a scrum of fists and bare muddy feet.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

THERE WERE EIGHTY different types of lemurs on Madagaskar. Globus’s ambition was to make a trophy of every one.

Once he had been hunting the sifaka species through the desiccated forests of Steinbock. He’d glimpsed a flash of white fur, fired his rifle, heard the animal thud to the ground. His beaters—Malagasy who knew the terrain well—had searched for the body in vain. Then came cries of horror. Globus followed their voices and found his lemur. His shot had not killed it; the creature lay panting, mewling. And surrounding it was an army of ants, each the size of his thumb. They swarmed over the wounded animal till its fur teemed and vanished, then dragged it away to their nest.

Watching the two Sturmbannführers, Globus recalled that lemur. The soldier next to him aimed his BK44 below. Globus pushed the muzzle away. “Let’s see what happens.”

“Odilo!” shouted Gretta over the clatter of the approaching helicopter. “Do something!”

“Why? It serves them right.” The
Gustloff
continued to burn. “The Americans are going to crucify me for tonight. Which means more grief back home.”

“But you can’t let Jews kill them.”

She had a particular way of saying
Juden
—vicious and submissive—that excited him. He took his sister-in-law’s hand, kissed it, his lips lingering on her knuckles. “Especially for you then, Gretta.” Globus snatched the BK44 from the soldier and raked the deck below. The vermin scattered.

Gretta covered her ears. “Are they safe?”

Globus fired again till the magazine was empty.

The helicopter came in low to land. It was a troop carrier, the ferocity of its downdraft beating away the last of the Jews. Globus watched the Sturmbannführers struggle to their feet and make for the railings along the ship’s bow. He put one arm around Gretta, while the other reached for Romy, and escorted them onto the waiting aircraft. The soldiers who had been guarding the bridge joined them.

“What about Hauptsturmführer Pinzel?”

“The Jews will have him by now.” It was a pity, thought Globus, but for the Ark liaison officer to have gone missing might have its advantages; he’d also been the last one to see Hochburg.

Hochburg! What could this rotting hulk offer that he had visited twice? Who was Feuerstein? For someone of Hochburg’s rank to show such interest in a Jew was indecent. An unexpected idea seized Globus. Hochburg had always been one of Himmler’s favorites; perhaps he’d been sent by the Reichsführer to prod him into action and solve the current crisis. The calling card Hochburg had left in the cabinet was gutting the ship, something Globus had never dared risk. Perhaps Himmler was at last heeding what he’d protested ever since Heydrich signed the Ark away: whoever controls the records controls the population.

Perhaps, perhaps: he was too exhausted to think. All he knew was that the throne of Ostmark was less certain with each new Jewish outrage. He made sure the girls were fastened in—they were shaking with laughter and gratitude now—and took the copilot’s seat. The helicopter lifted into the air.