Read The Madagaskar Plan Online
Authors: Guy Saville
A vengeance more complete than death, more agonizing than torture or taking Madeleine as his own.
He stroked her face. She was peaceful, her cropped head giving her a vulnerable appearance while at the same time hardening the contours of her cheeks. He mapped the shape of her skull.
Burton leapt across her body and grabbed Hochburg. “You save her!” he roared.
The soldiers restrained him, forcing the boy to his knees.
Hochburg signaled that Burton was not to be harmed. He spoke in a low, beguiling voice: “It is time you learned the true meaning of what it is to suffer, as I have suffered these past twenty years.”
Burton crawled toward him. “Please, Walter. I beg you. You can save her.”
“You must share my daily torment. Know what it is to have the light inside you gutter.”
There was a click of heels as Kepplar joined them. He bustled past Hochburg, stood behind Burton, and with juvenile triumph clamped hold of his shoulders. Burton barely noticed; he was squeezing Madeleine’s hand, cooing that he’d save her, the same futile way Hochburg had once done.
“I feared the worst,” said Kepplar. “I thought you were down in the valley.”
Hochburg looked through the towers at the writhing water below. It had lost its destructive force and was now no more turbulent than a river during the rainy season. In the dawning light it was the color of coffee and seemed infested with crocodiles. No, not crocodiles: bodies. Thousands of them, the reservation flushed away, as Globocnik had threatened.
“I should never have trusted you with the dam,” he said to Kepplar. “Once more you fail me.”
“I tried to stop him,” replied his former deputy. “It was too late.”
“Where is Globus now?”
“Cuffed and under arrest. I left him at the dam.”
Hochburg sighed heavily, impressed again by the limitations of those beneath him. He adjusted the bandage around his eye. The need for his superweapon was more urgent than ever. “Did he have anything to say?”
“He was delirious. He wanted cognac to toast his mansion in Ostmark.”
“Ostmark! Globocnik is finished; he’ll be court-martialed for this. I’ll make sure he’s found guilty.”
More corpses flowed by, as if their source were an endless font of bodies.
“It’s time for us to leave, Derbus.”
Hochburg stooped and pried Madeleine’s hand from Burton’s. It was cold, as cold as Eleanor’s the last time he held it. “She’s beautiful,” he said, pressing her skin to his lips. “Too beautiful for this godforsaken place. Beauty that must die.”
He gave Burton a curt nod, snapped his fingers at Kepplar, and walked away.
* * *
“You’re just leaving him?” Kepplar experienced a rush of incredulity.
“Yes,” replied Hochburg. His voice was staid, certain, with no hint of jest.
There was a pitting in Kepplar’s stomach. He glanced at the soldiers, hoping they had been briefed before he arrived and that their expressions might convey what was happening. His hands were welded to Cole’s shoulders; he was glad he had the other man to keep him steady.
“But…” Kepplar could find no more words.
“Let him go,” said Hochburg impatiently. “We’ve a long journey ahead.” He made a spinning gesture with his finger to the pilot of his Walküre. The engine began to burn and whine.
Kepplar stared at the back of Cole’s head, where the medulla oblongata joined the neck, and thought how he wanted to strike him; you could kill a man with a single punch there. A dullness was creeping behind his eyes, a pressure building in his sinuses as if he’d gulped down a glass of ice water. He shunned cold drinks, despite the heat: Hochburg viewed them as a sign of weakness.
“I’ve barely slept since Roscherhafen. Haven’t eaten, haven’t shaved.” His voice yo-yoed.
“That is the price of your position,
Gruppen
führer. Why you are dressed in black.”
At last he was a Gruppenführer again. Kepplar felt cheated. “But all those men who died. On my patrol boat—and before that, in Kongo.” It took an effort to speak. “… And now you’re letting him go?”
“Yes,” repeated Hochburg.
“Why?”
“If I have to explain, you’ll never understand.”
“He deserves a pyre, like you promised last year.” He drummed his chest. “Like you were going to do with me. That was Cole’s sentence.”
Hochburg replied with a lilt of satisfaction: “His punishment must be more severe.”
“You promised.”
“There will be no burning.”
Hochburg stepped over to him and freed his hands from Cole’s shoulders; Kepplar hadn’t realized how tight his grip was. “This morning we fly to Muspel. I have a secret task for you there: you will help build me a wonder weapon. A weapon to deliver us the final victory against the British.”
“I don’t want to go to Muspel.”
Kepplar remembered the pure blue skies and furnace winds, his lips either perpetually cracked or congealed with petroleum jelly.
“To serve is to obey, Derbus. Given your failure at the dam, I’m being generous.”
“You blame me for Globocnik?”
“I’m making what I can of your limitations.”
His tone was paternal and mildly derisive. He would never speak to Globus in that manner, thought Kepplar, or to other thugs lower down the ranks. The pimply grooms in Antzu had been afforded a modicum of respect. Hochburg was contemptuous of these men, yet their shared easiness with killing made them equals of a sort, an approval denied Kepplar even though he was the one who had delivered Burton Cole.
The sheer irrelevance of his doggedness was clear. There was only one way to be worthy of a man who paved his home in skulls.
“Our work here is done,” said Hochburg, putting his arm around Kepplar’s shoulders to lead him away. Kepplar recalled those months in Roscherhafen when he’d longed for the Oberstgruppenführer’s touch. The rest of his life would be defined by his shortcomings unless he acted now.
Something broke in Kepplar, like the dam burst he’d just witnessed.
He shrugged off Hochburg’s arm, implacable with rage. If he didn’t understand the hold Cole had over his master, he understood how to destroy it. Kepplar unfastened his Walther P38 pistol: he would shoot Burton through the head, then put the woman out of her misery. Two shots to free himself of his humiliation in the Schädelplatz. Two shots to prove himself to Hochburg.
He flicked off the safety catch and felt a sense of release.
“Put it down!” he heard the Oberstgruppenführer say.
He remembered the first service weapon he received in Africa and his anticipation of thrusting it in a black face.
Kepplar didn’t feel the blast. The sound bounced around the towers, like the toll of a bell, distorted and unnatural, as if it would never end. A pfennig-sized hole appeared in the breast of his uniform. The material around it thickened, sopping wet and terrifyingly hot. It was too black to show the blood. The uncocked P38 slipped from his hand.
Hochburg lowered his smoking pistol and caught Kepplar. There was no remorse in his expression.
“I couldn’t let you kill him,” he said. “Not when I finally have him like this.”
The breath was withering in Kepplar; he went to reply—and found it impossible to inflate his lungs.
He grasped feebly at Hochburg. “But the paperwork…”
* * *
Burton watched Hochburg lay the one-eared officer on the floor, then order the guards to clear away his body. He handled the Browning.
“A fine weapon. I shall keep it, as a memento of this time.”
Madeleine stirred and called out for Burton. She kept having snatches of lucidity, separated by silence; the gap between them was getting longer. Her breathing was steady but flimsy. Burton tucked Hochburg’s tunic around her to keep her warm. He was convinced that he could still save her. Madeleine had survived too much for it to end here; she had earned her right to life. Then he heard Patrick, tapping out his pipe and whispering:
Hope is the last thing to go
.
“You don’t have to do this,” said Burton.
Hochburg drew himself up to his full height. “Man’s cry to the heavens since the beginning of time.”
“Double your revenge on me—but spare her.”
A sad, cruel shake of his head.
“I beg you.”
Hochburg stared through the pillars at the churning, reborn river. The thousands of bodies. He spoke pensively:
“After today, no amount of threats or diplomacy will assuage the United States. They will send their navy; the American Jewish Committee will be unmuzzled. War is coming, the likes of which we cannot imagine.” There was a miserable-looking Jew chained to his wrist. Hochburg raised him to his feet. “I know you’ll search for me, Burton; I’ll be waiting. Back in our homeland. In Africa.”
He retreated to the edge of the Totenburg, surrounded by soldiers, then paused on the threshold and removed one of the troops’ helmets. He tossed it at Burton.
“To dig with.” He indicated the black uniform covering Madeleine. “You’ll find everything else you need inside.”
Hochburg bent into the wind of the helicopter. Moments later his Walküre roared overhead, bearing south till the sound of it faded. Water trickled down the massive stone towers and dripped noisily into hidden culverts; from the valley came the rushing of the river.
The life was vanishing from Madeleine’s skin. She was awake again, blinking at him. Burton eased back Hochburg’s tunic and examined the wound. Her arms were still bound where Cranley had tied them. Her dress was soaked red. He found the bullet buried a fingernail’s depth beneath her skin and tried to think of it as nothing worse than a splinter. Like the splinters he’d removed from her on the farm: soaking a finger in hot water till it was plump, carefully easing out the sliver of wood with tweezers.
As if overhearing his thoughts, she shook her head. “My papa used to say that the worst place to go was on the operating table.”
“I’ve got to try—”
She shook her head again, and gazed at the roiling currents below. “The island will rise up now. It’s what Salois wanted … Abner too.”
“I don’t care.”
Silence except for the river. Then:
“Not in here, Burton.”
He had to look away, his eyes resting on the pillars. Only one of them bore names of the fallen, the others smooth; the names were in oversized letters, as though engraved by children. Not enough Germans had died during the first rebellion to fill the memorial.
“I want sky,” she breathed. “Sun and grass, not stone.”
He scooped her up, Hochburg’s tunic as tight around her as a shroud. She mewled as she was lifted, her body sagging in the middle. Burton brought her from the shadow of the Totenburg into the dawn. The sky was broken with dark clouds; there was a sprinkle of fading stars and a strip of light on the horizon.
“There,” she said.
Farther along the ridge stood several trees, their trunks sheltered by low palm fronds. He carried her to the spot; it reminded him of the copse where he’d hidden with Alice all those months ago in Hampstead. The ground smelled mushroomy and damp. After he laid her down, he broke off some fronds, arranging them under her as a mat, removed his jacket, and propped it behind her head. She murmured, “Thank you.” The first of the birds had started to call and sing; it was agonizing to hear. Burton raged, raged against the quickening of the light. Pink and yellow were seeping into the clouds.
“It’s a Battenberg sky,” he said. “Remember when you came up with that?” His voice broke. “How we used to watch them on the farm?”
Her eyes were closed; the rise and fall of her chest was becoming weaker.
Burton curled his fingers into hers and sat cross-legged, gradually sinking lower and lower to catch the wisps of her breath until his ear hovered over her heart. He was overpowered by the riot in his head, mute with the things he wanted to say. Everything seemed at once too portentous and too trivial.
He wanted to slide on top of Maddie and bind himself to her—but feared causing her more pain. He wanted to die. Most of all, he wanted to see her as an old lady: skin loosening around her neck, hair in a gray bun, her face wise, wrinkled, and beautiful, smiling at him.
A shaft of watery sunlight broke through the branches. Suddenly she lurched awake and grabbed his severed arm where the bone ended. Her voice was ferocious.
“Find him,” she said. “Kill him.”
* * *
Burton wasn’t aware of her final breath; it was too delicate. Not even enough to blow out a candle. All he knew was that there came a moment when he looked at Madeleine and everything they had together—everything they built and planned and dreamed of—was gone.
THE GREAT HALL of the Reich rose over Germania like a snow-covered mountain.
It had been inaugurated on 30 January 1950, twenty-five years after a convict in Landsberg prison sketched his first designs for it. The hall reached a quarter of a kilometer into the sky, was fronted with a colonnade of bloodred pillars, and could accommodate 180,000 people beneath its cupola. On top of the dome stood the Nazi eagle, its talons clutching the globe. Symbolism for the simplest of minds.
Burton and Madeleine sat outside a café on the Kurfürstendamm, the hall glimpsed through the trees, looming over every other building. It was visible from every part of the city. You couldn’t help but be awed by it: its sheer scale, the ambition of a mind that could conceive of such a structure. Even Madeleine was grudgingly impressed.
It was a mild, sunny afternoon. An accordion was playing close by; waiters in starched jackets flitted around them. On the table was a coffeepot and slices of poppy seed cake. Madeleine had an elaborate sundae of cherry and pistachio ice cream drizzled with chocolate sauce that she was scooping up with a long silver spoon. Like an anteater, Burton joked—which only made her laugh like a sea lion, till they both had to stop eating to control themselves. Burton felt slightly dehydrated, lazy, and relaxed. It should have been a perfect afternoon, and yet neither of them had steered the conversation to the subject of their future.
“Why did your husband bring you here?” asked Burton suddenly.