The Madagaskar Plan (42 page)

“My name is Abner Weiss; I have spoken to the council before. Ben-Ze’ev sent me with news. It’s more than just the Ark. The Nazis are shutting down the factories and farms; they’re sending everyone to the reservations.”

Wischblatt made a shushing noise. “Only those who have joined this new ‘Pig Rebellion’ of yours. Yaudin, I insist you arrest these men. There are more important matters to discuss.”

The police chief’s brow was gnarled with indecision.

Another of the elders pointed at Salois. “How do we know he’s a Jew? This morning the Ark is destroyed; the same day a stranger arrives with promises of salvation if only we aid in his revolt. If it’s true about the reservations, he could have been sent by Globus. An agent provocateur.”

There was a murmur of assent.

“Can you prove who you are?” asked Yaudin.

“Do I have papers like you? No.”

“So how can we trust your story?”

Salois met Yaudin’s stare, then—one after the other—the eyes of every member of the council, lingering when he got to Wischblatt. He stepped into the center of the tables and loosened the cuffs of his caftan. It was patchy with salt stains and blood. He undid the buttons down his chest and tugged it over his head. The garment fell to the floor.

Salois raised his arms from his sides, palms upward, and slowly spun round, baring his torso for the whole room to see.

*   *   *

The coals in the oven hummed. The two bakers had stopped their work and were gawping at him, mouths loose with horror. Wischblatt stared for as long as he could, then, like the rest of the councilmen, hid his eyes.

“Do you want to see my legs?” asked Salois. His voice was funereal, savage. “The soles of my feet?” He went to unbuckle his belt.

“That’s enough,” said Yaudin. “You have my apologies, Major, the whole council’s. And our sorrow.”

“All I want is your help.”

The night of his execution, before casting himself into the Mozambique Channel, Salois had scrambled among the multitude of dead, reading forearms by moonlight, memorizing as many numbers as he was able to. The leaching of so many souls gave his mind a supernatural capacity. Later, as his body healed and fattened at the Inhambane monastery, he asked one of the Jesuits for a needle and a bowl of ink. He had spent days reciting every digit he could recall, tattooing his skin till every bare patch was indigo.

Abner picked up Salois’s caftan and handed it to him. He looked cut through.

Salois covered his body once more. Whenever it was exposed, wretchedness weighed on him as if he were to blame for the history his skin told. “What type of explosives?” he asked, fastening the buttons.

“Mostly dynamite. The British smuggle in supplies for us.”

“Where?”

“You mustn’t,” pleaded Wischblatt. “Do you think we like the Nazis? We hate them as much as you do.”

“No,” said Salois. “You want to cling to your perch here. You’d ignore your fellow men for a hut on Boriziny and an extra sack of rice.”

Wischblatt’s cheeks reddened. “We are wise to. With the Ark gone, we must be more cautious than ever.”

“With the Ark gone, nothing will save you from Globus. Except the United States.”

Salois despised the councilmen for their lack of courage, yet he understood how they wanted to preserve the fragility—the illusion—of the world they had created behind the walls of Antzu. A place where children could play without fear of being shot at and parents still died quietly in bed; where you could stroll with your spouse even if the air stank of open sewers. Perhaps that was why he was so resentful: they had families to protect.

“There’s a pig farm,” said Abner. “Nachtstadt. It’s thirty kilometers to the east. We bury supplies among the pens.”

“Will you help?” Salois stared into Abner’s eyes and saw too much emotion to make sense of. Frustration and guilt. Hope, excitement, relief.

Abner shook his head. “I can tell you how to get there, where to find the explosives. But I have to stay in Antzu.”

Salois tugged at the boy’s sleeves, revealing a roll call of tattoos. “You’re one of us.”

“From the first days of the Ha-Mered.”

“Then you have to join me.”

“Twenty-four hours ago, I would have followed you the whole way. Things have changed. I found my sister, after years apart; I have to care for my family.”

“Diego I can do alone if I must, but I need you to take me to the dynamite.”

Abner’s face was anguished. “I can send word to Ben-Ze’ev. He could bring you an army.”

“How long?”

“Two or three days.”

Salois brought the younger man close so the council wouldn’t hear, hoping to gain his confidence and coax him to arms. “There’s a train to take me into the heart of the base. No guards, no checks; the British set it up. I need to be on it
tonight
.”

Abner stepped away. “Do you have a sister?” he asked. “A mother?”

“No.”

“A wife?”

A clench of remorse, like an acid reflux. “Nobody.”

“If you did, perhaps you’d understand.”

Salois eased Abner to one side and addressed Yaudin: “Give me two of your wardens.”

“I don’t know,” replied Yaudin. “My men protect this city. None of them wants to be a hero.”

“Madagaskar doesn’t make heroes.” Salois faced the rabbi. “What about you?”

“I wield God’s wisdom, not his sword.”

Salois couldn’t hide his disgust. “Will none of you help?” His voice swelled. “Not one fellow Jew?” Silence. He flicked a look to the heavens and breathed a small, contemptuous sigh. “Then you deserve your fate.”

CHAPTER FORTY

16:00

HER HOUSE WAS empty.

Hochburg circled Madeleine’s room, thinking what a foul way this was to live. It was cramped and dusky; each breath speckled his throat with mildew. She had been here recently; there was an indent in the mattress, wet footprints on the floor. His boots dwarfed her feet.

“Go outside,” he told Kepplar. “Speak to the neighbors. See if anyone knows where she is.”

Once alone, Hochburg continued his search, moving with speed. He felt a slither of exhilaration, more expectant than when he’d tracked down Feuerstein. Half-tucked beneath the bed was a suitcase. He lifted the lid, rummaged through the few garments, and found a bottle of perfume. Hochburg squirted two bursts in front of his face and inhaled. The scent was musky and expensive; he didn’t like it. Judging from the fragrance and the clothing, Burton had given Madeleine a luxurious life. He opened her file and scrutinized it, hoping that some clue to her whereabouts might be hidden in its columns of facts and figures.

When Kepplar first handed it to him at Tana airport, he had been transfixed by the photograph. Madeleine’s hair was black, her nose and brow heavier, her expression dismal for Interpol’s lens—but there was something about the eyes, something about the inflection of her lips that struck him as belonging to Eleanor. So this was Burton’s wife. Whatever path had led her to Madagaskar, she and Burton had shared the one thing denied to Hochburg. His envy at the airport had been ferocious and silent. He stared at the photograph again.

Walter Hochburg wanted to possess this woman.

The sensation rose from deep within his loins, as profound and powerful as his ambitions for Africa. He wanted to press his body on top of hers, taste the hot, salty decay of her mouth; wherever people were concentrated in poverty, their teeth rotted. He wanted her servility, for Madeleine to wrap her arms willingly around his back and drag him into her, to cradle and yearn for him.

Eleanor had been his second lover. Since her death, he had known only one other woman, a secretary in his office at Muspel. It had been a brief, miscalculated liaison triggered by a passing similarity: sand in the wound of his loss. Every time they lay together, he screwed his eyes shut and imagined that she was Eleanor; every time, she failed. When their affair ended, he wanted to bury her in the dunes; instead he transferred her to Windhuk and swore not to repeat his mistake. In the decades since, he had forsaken pleasures of the flesh and had known no stirring—until now. To cuckold Burton would be a revenge more unexpected than anything he had conceived before. Hochburg remembered the anguish of having to watch Eleanor retire to bed with her husband.

“Herr Oberst!” Kepplar called from outside.

The SS nickname for Antzu was Moskitostadt: the air hummed as if electrified. Kepplar and the grooms periodically slapped and scratched themselves. Not a single insect landed on Hochburg; they never had.
You must have acid for blood
was Himmler’s peevish observation. The mist was beginning to thin.

“This Jewess saw her,” said Kepplar. He indicated a woman in the house opposite; she had fine skin gone blotchy and wore an old silk shawl.

The grooms were milling about, their BK44s slung over their shoulders. When they first marched into Antzu, Jews scurrying away from them till the streets were empty, their faces had shone. Now they looked bored, youths tricked into believing there would be action: the disappointment of the untested.

The woman curtsied and spoke in the haughty tone of someone yet to accept that her world was irrevocably changed. “The English has been gone for months. No one wanted her house because it was hexed—”

“I’ve no time for superstition,” replied Hochburg. “Where is she now?”

“What’s it worth? Some rupees? A sack of rice?”

One of the grooms shoved her. “Watch your tongue, Jew. You’re talking to an Oberstgruppenführer.”

Hochburg held out a restraining hand. “I can find you some rice.”

“We thought the English was dead. Then this morning, she turns up again. Her, an old woman, and a man. I never saw the other two before.”

Kepplar’s eyes sparkled. “It must be Cole.”

“Where are they now?”

“The old woman left, then hurried back not ten minutes ago, all afluster.” A mosquito landed at the base of her throat, and she picked it off. “The two of them went that way.”

“What’s in that direction?” Hochburg asked the grooms.

“The docks, Oberstgruppenführer, and the pit house.”

“Pit house?”

He looked apologetic. “The synagogue. But we shouldn’t go there. Governor Quorp warned us. It will cause problems.”

The other grooms laughed. “Don’t be such a louse.”

“You have been most cooperative, Fräulein,” said Hochburg, then addressed Kepplar: “Shoot her.”

The woman paled. “But Herr Oberstgruppenführer … I’m trying to help.”

“When will you people learn? So long as Jew sides against Jew, your extinction is guaranteed.”

The sparkle had vanished from Kepplar’s eye.

*   *   *

Madeleine followed blindly, darting down alleyways that twisted left, right, then right again, the next turn always half-cloaked in mist. The smell of bread was getting stronger, but she no longer cared. Nausea and elation pumped through her. She dodged beneath the scaffolding, knocked over a paint pot. The ground ran yellow.

“Where are we going?”

They were running toward the river.

Only moments before, she had been wrenched awake by someone shaking her. Disorientation distilled into alarm … Then she realized it was Jacoba and shrugged her off.

“Wake up! I’ve found you a way off the island, girl.”

At first Madeleine hadn’t understood. “There’s no way off…”

She glanced at the open door, expecting dusk or the impenetrable night, possibly the next day’s dawn. Mist chugged by as it had only minutes before. She had been dreaming, the clarity of the images already nebulous. Something to do with the twins and Burton and Jared, an expression of disbelief on his face as she took a dagger and—

The significance of what Jacoba had said sharpened in her mind.

She sat up. Her eyes felt arid.

“You’ve got to come quickly,” said Jacoba. “Before they arrest him.”

Madeleine grabbed the first item she found in the case, a white dress polka-dotted with mold, tied her boots, and headed for the door. Then she stopped. It was as if she heard the knife calling after her, a trill of revenge. She retrieved the blade and left the house.

They stopped on Nabi Daniel Strasse, outside the synagogue. To either side of its nondescript frontage were warehouses that stored crops from the local farms—cotton, sisal, tobacco—before they were shipped downriver. Madeleine had been inside a few times when she first arrived in Antzu but soon stopped visiting. God’s walls offered no comfort; they merely emphasized how alone she was. It had been the same during that early period in London. Years later, after Parliament passed the Evacuation Bill, she had watched with little emotion as Britain’s synagogues were demolished or converted into hostels for down-and-outs.

“You came here?” she asked Jacoba.

A pair of stooped old men were painting the building opposite. They glanced up from their brushes.

“To see my daughter. I had to beg to be let in.” She indicated a solitary Jupo guard by the entrance. “Then I heard them talking below. It’s fate.”

They hurried through the vestibule, the eyes of the dead staring down at them, and continued on to the balcony where women were allowed to worship. Below was a cluster of tables with the Judenrat gathered around them. She recognized the head of the council, Wischblatt, and also saw Abner, a skullcap on his fuzzy, blistered head; she’d never seen him wear one before. He was studying the toe of his boot in a way that reminded her of Cranley when she displeased him. The voice of the rabbi carried upstairs: “I wield God’s wisdom, not his sword.”

“Will none of you help?” came the reply.

The words were spoken by a man standing in the middle of the tables, dressed in a filthy burgundy caftan. There was something glowering about his presence, righteous.

“That’s the one,” said Jacoba, “Salois. He’s full of stupid talk. Dangerous talk. But a boat is on its way to rescue him.”

The two women went down the stairs, and Madeleine strode into the center of the tables. With the possibility of escape, there seemed hope for reaching Mandritsara. There was honey and fire in her veins. The council—the gray, bald men she used to see sashaying down Boriziny Strasse—scowled at her.