by Guy Saville
Salois took his final sandwich and chewed in silent deliberation. Outside, the sunlight weakened, the glow of the stained-glass window fading to gray. The four men watched him.
“I won’t be threatened,” he said once he’d swallowed the last mouthful, “but I will do it. Not for you, for me.” He was completely still. “For what comes after. For hope.”
Rolland seemed relieved. “I’m glad you look at these things so realistically,” he replied. “You’ll leave for Mombasa tomorrow, to join the others. Then to Madagaskar before Führertag.”
Führertag: Hitler’s birthday, 20 April. Across the Reich, from the festooned avenues of Germania to the ice floes of the north and the deserts of Südwest Afrika, Germans everywhere celebrated. Simultaneously, as far as the state apparatus was concerned, its enemies plotted. Security was ratcheted up in the days before; military bases were put on high alert.
“Everything starts returning to normal on the twenty-first,” said Rolland, “which also happens to be Governor Globocnik’s birthday. His own festivities begin on the stroke of midnight: a lavish party to which regional bosses are invited, including the commander of Diego; intoxication compulsory. We strike an hour before dawn the same morning.”
“And after?”
“Considerable thought has gone into your escape, but we can discuss that later. First, time to introduce everyone properly. Colonel Turneiro you already know. And next to him—”
Salois was more interested in the man by the window. “What about you?”
“Ah, here we have the ringmaster,” said Rolland. “He’s coordinated between London and Lisbon—Washington, too.”
He left the window again, striding into the gloom, and offered a burned hand: “Jared Cranley, British intelligence.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Roscherhafen, DOA
17 April, 10:30
TÜNSCHER WAS LATE. Tünscher was always late.
They had agreed to meet at ten that morning, during the rainy hours when there were fewer people around. Burton didn’t bother arriving till half past and found himself at an empty table. Their meeting place was the Polar Café, festooned with sodden flags for Führertag; Hitler’s birthday celebrations would reach their climax in three days. Burton sat opposite an enclosure of concrete icebergs where penguins huddled together in the steaming rain. A banana-leaf roof thrummed above him. This was Roscherhafen’s Tiergarten, its zoo, designed by the Hagenbeck family and the largest in the world, as billboards proclaimed along every path: ninety hectares, a twelve-million-liter aquarium, more than ten thousand animals and seven hundred different species from across the globe.
Despite his torturous journey to Deutsch Ostafrika (DOA), Burton was calm and invigorated. It was as if Maddie had returned from the dead. The thought beat constantly in his mind, stoking him with hope, unveiling paths of light. He was closer to her than he had been in months and felt she must sense it, too. Burton imagined her cradling their child, the baby’s tiny, translucent fingers clutching at hers as she whispered that the three of them would be together shortly. He had dismissed Cranley’s claim to be the father. For all his posturing, it revealed his true nature: malicious, vindictive. For the moment, Burton didn’t want to consider what lay ahead. He had escaped Britain, chanced his way back into Nazi Africa; somehow he would get them out safely. The hated air of the tropics, muggy and dense in his lungs, teemed with possibilities. Everything he and Madeleine wished for could come true, even if they’d never see the farm again. During their trip to Germania, when they had decided to make a life together, they had discussed moving abroad. Quinces didn’t grow only in Suffolk.
Burton stilled his jigging leg and ordered a drink from a waitress wearing traditional Bavarian costume. There was no mango juice, so he chose a Reich Kola. Patrick had once told a tale about the Spanish Civil War and having to wait more than two days for Tünscher. When he finally showed, it was with a runaway whore and a bundle of stolen Miró canvases.
A family passed wearing lilac-and-blue KdF macs: father, mother, four blond kids, full of determined smiles despite their drenched socks and sandals. The youngest girl must have been the same age as Alice. She hung over the enclosure wall, gabbling something in a yokel accent. As if on cue, the penguins slid sullenly into the water; the girl clapped her hands in delight. Burton felt an unexpected reproach.
Alice couldn’t come with him to Africa, and he had no desire to involve his aunt further, so he had walked the girl through the fog of Hampstead Heath to the glowing shadow of her house. He left her by the back wall, her coat lopsided where he had fastened the buttons with his stump. Through the mist came the roar of fire hoses, a woman’s voice calling, Alice! Alice!
“I’ll bring Mummy home,” he promised.
“Not to the farm. I don’t like the farm.”
“Is that why you told your father?”
Alice was vehement: “Mummy said I should never tell anyone. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
Three days later, he was booked on a Comet flight to Johannesburg. There were plainclothes policemen waiting at Heathrow, the same at Northolt airport and the Southampton docks. Each time he slipped away unnoticed. Finally, in desperation he strode up the first unwatched gangplank he found: a cargo ship for New Zealand. He hoped to pass another vessel en route and transfer to it. When there were none, he disembarked at Panama and caught a tramper back across the Atlantic to Cape Town, then another bound for Durban, and continued on overland through Mozambique.
Burton finished his Kola, ordered another. It was darker than the American equivalent, had a more syrupy, vanilla flavor. In the distance, distorted by the rain, he heard an oompah band. Screams from the roller coaster.
And then he saw him: strolling through the downpour, his straw-colored suit perfectly dry beneath a huge black umbrella. It seemed the years hadn’t touched Tünscher. He was leaner, his shoulders still too broad for the rest of him, golden hair cropped tight against his tan. The same grizzled, sardonic features. How was it Patrick used to describe them? That was it: “a frontier face.” By his side was a boy in Jungvolk uniform: black shorts and khaki shirt, his sleeve dark where the umbrella didn’t cover him. It had never occurred to Burton that Tünscher might have a family.
They made their way into the café. Tünscher shook out his umbrella, then thrust his hand forward. Burton seized it, both men trying to crush the other’s knuckles, and felt a wave of bravado at seeing his old comrade, as if Madagaskar would be no tougher than a raid on a Tuareg camp. Up close, one of Tünscher’s eyes was puffy and bruised; his pupils had an empty look.
“What happened?” asked Burton.
“I was bored. Got into a fistfight.”
“And is this your son?”
“Fuck, no! My sister’s boy. I borrow him for business meetings—adds an air of … innocence, in case someone’s watching. And I assume this is business.” He spoke with an impudent drawl that had earned him nightly beatings from the sous-officiers in those first days of the Legion. “Your telegram was intriguing.”
Tünscher beckoned the waitress over, glanced at her cleavage, and ordered cherry schnapps for himself, a Reich Kola for the youth.
“How did you know I was here?” he asked after the drinks arrived.
“Patrick.”
“I’ve not seen him in years.”
The two of them had fallen out in Spain and never spoken again; Burton had no idea why. “He kept tabs on you. Said you were back.”
“And how is the old Yankee bastard?”
“Didn’t you hear? It was broadcast across Africa.”
“I don’t listen to the radio. All that good news, the victories and everything, it depresses me.”
“Patrick’s dead.”
A pause. “When?”
“Last year, in Angola. We were on a job together.”
Tünscher fished in his pocket—underneath his jacket, he was wearing a woolen cardigan—and removed a cigarette packet. “I always hoped we’d square things
one day,” he said, lighting up. His expression remained inscrutable. “The dead are happier dead.”
“He had a daughter, in America.”
“I didn’t know that.” For the first time, Tünscher caught sight of Burton’s empty sleeve. “Your contribution to the Angolan front?”
“Fishing accident,” replied Burton. He hurried on: “What about you, Tünsch?”
“The body’s still in one piece, but the heart and head have suffered. I joined the SS.” He smiled—a line of crooked yellowing teeth—and watched Burton’s reaction before his smirk broadened to a laugh. “Relax, Major, I’m no blackshirt. I joined up for the fight. A Waffen brigade.”
“You were at Dunkirk?”
“The East; stayed after Barbarossa. I spent the last three years in the Urals and Siberia.”
“What’s it like out there?” asked Burton.
“Vast. Too vast ever to control. Cold. Desolate.”
“I meant the war.”
Tünscher sunk into his cardigan and considered his reply. “Like a good-time girl when the navy’s in port,” he said at last.
“What?”
“Fucked in every way. The Soviets are beat but don’t know it; then there are the Eastern Jews…” He blew smoke. “I had to get out of there. Somewhere warm, civilized. So I thought I’d come home.” Like Burton, Tünscher had grown up in Africa.
“And now?”
“What is this, an interrogation?”
“Just catching up with an old friend.”
“I work for Section IX-c, the tourist department. The SS swallowed it up several years back. I take party chiefs to the Serengeti. Big-game hunting. They love going with old soldiers—gives them a heroic stirring.”
“And the rest of the time?”
“I guess that’s why you’re here,” said Tünscher. The boy next to him finished his Kola, sucking noisily through the straw. “The Section pays a pittance, but DOA is a good place to get rich.”
“Smuggling.”
“Booze, cigarettes mostly. Never girls, that’s not my racket.”
“You go to Madagaskar?”
“From time to time. Nosy Be is a good run.” Nosy Be: an islet off the northwest coast of Madagaskar that the SS used for leave when not returning to Europe. It was notorious for its bars and brothels. “They turn a blind eye to keep the garrison happy.”
Burton glanced around and produced a small box from his jacket. He slid it across the table. Tünscher removed it immediately, opening it in his lap: a tiny searchlight winked in his eyes.
“Five carats,” said Burton. Inside the box was a single diamond from the pouch he’d hidden on the farm. “I need your help, Tünsch.”
“That depends. Five carats doesn’t get you far in this part of the world.”
“I have more.”
It had stopped raining; the café was getting busier. Tünscher drained the last of his schnapps, made a “stand up” gesture to his nephew, then turned to Burton. “I know a better place to powwow.”
* * *
They walked at a brisk pace through the Tiergarten, passing the elephant house and the pink ranks of the flamingo lagoon. The last time Burton had been to a zoo was with Madeleine in Germania, when the ground was scattered with daffodils. By the big cat enclosure was a billboard that showed one of Lazinger’s fantasy portraits: Hitler in safari garb towering over a slain lion with Semitic features.
Whereas Kongo was a trove of mineral wealth, Deutsch Südwest Afrika functioned as the administrative center of the continent, and Muspel hid sand-lashed camps and military bases, DOA initially struggled to find a role beyond sisal production and fisheries. That it had once been a German colony, surrendered to the British after Versailles and not returned to the Reich until the Casablanca Conference, meant that Germania was keen to make it a glittering example of what National Socialism could achieve. It was the KdF that transformed it.
Kraft durch Freude (KdF: Strength Through Joy) was the Nazis’ leisure organization, one of its goals to make travel available to even the lowliest factory worker—as long as he joined the party. It offered subsidized package holidays and by 1937 had become the biggest tour operator in the world. There were hiking trips to the Alps, a huge beach resort on the Baltic, and, most popular of all, a fleet of twelve cruise liners that conveyed passengers in spartan luxury to the fjords of Norway, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. As the Reich expanded below the equator, ever more exotic possibilities were offered; it was one of the inalienable rights of conquest. Hitler approved: “Every worker will have his holiday … and everybody will be able to go on a sea cruise once or twice in his life.”
Robert Ley, founder of the KdF and later governor of DOA, first proposed developing the colony as a tourist destination. Its endless white beaches and German heritage made it an obvious choice. In five years from 1945, the capital, Roscherhafen (formerly Dar es Salaam), was transformed into a gleaming resort that accommodated half a million visitors a year from the cities and garrisons of German Africa. A new generation of cruise ships, big as aircraft carriers, brought a further three hundred thousand guests from the Fatherland itself.
As the number of vacationgoers increased, so did the need to occupy them. While safaris were the preserve of high-ranking officials, more immediate diversions had to be created for the masses. To the south of the city, KdF built its first “education and entertainment park”—a colossal site consisting of the zoo, the botanical garden, a military museum to commemorate Germany’s East African campaign during the Great War, and a sprawling amusement park that offered the thrills of Oktoberfest all year long beneath broiling African skies. The British, with their decaying seaside towns and holiday camps, could only look on in envy.
Tünscher guided them to the fairground. The air smelled of wet cobbles and engine grease. There were shrieks from the log flume and the ghost train, the tinkling grind of merry-go-round music. If the crowds were aware of the war raging in Kongo, it didn’t show in their smiles. Rising from the center of the park was the Roscherhafen Riesenrad, a monumental Ferris wheel; as with everything, it was the largest in the world, at over a hundred meters tall. Tünscher bought a string of tickets so they would have a cabin to themselves.
“I never feel comfortable in these things,” he said, stuffing a handkerchief into the light fitting as they began to move. “Microphone,” he explained. “Now we can talk.”
“What about the boy?” replied Burton.
Tünscher leaned toward his nephew and sang to the tune of the “Horst Wessel Lied,” the Nazi anthem:
When Der Führer says we is the master race
We quack quack quack in Der Führer’s face
When Goebbels says we own world and space
We quack quack quack in the doctor’s face
It was from a Donald Duck cartoon, a song that was banned everywhere in the German-speaking world. You could get five years in a concentration camp for letting it cross your lips. The boy offered a blank grin.
Tünscher gave his hair a playful tousle. “Stone deaf.”
“What about the Jungvolk uniform? I thought you had to pass a medical.”
“He failed. Bastards. I bought the clothes; he wears them when we go out together. You never saw a kid so happy.”
The car was rising. With all the Führertag bunting, the park below appeared like a scarlet crater. To the east it gave way to a strip of beach and drab blue waves: what Burton still thought of as the Indian Ocean. He was keen to start negotiating but felt cautious, remembering how loose his old friend’s tongue could be; his war record didn’t help.
“It takes four minutes and forty-one seconds to go round,” said Tünscher, unstrapping his watch. “You’d better be quick.”
“I need to get to Madagaskar. To find someone.”
“A Jew, I presume.”
“Who else?”
“There are several SS brigades on the island. Perhaps you want to save one of the Schutzstaffel from himself.”
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“A Jew.”
“They pay well?”
“Nothing.”
“You sure? There are stories of treasure troves on the island. Hoards of gold smuggled from Europe.”
“This is coming from my pocket.”
A humph. “What town?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sector?”
Burton shook his head.
“Getting you on the island should be simple enough—for the right price. But without a location, forget it.”
“There must be some way.”
“It might help if I knew who this person was.”
Burton would have preferred not to say, but the truths he’d withheld from Patrick remained livid inside him. He explained about Madeleine as quickly and with as little emotion as he could, then waited for Tünscher’s contempt. In Bel Abbès, if a fellow legionnaire received a perfumed letter or admitted to falling for one of the prostitutes at Madame Maxine’s, Tünscher was always the first to scorn.
Instead he stared out of the window and nodded gravely. The wind whistled and clanged around the wheel as they reached the highest point. “There may be a way to find out where she is, but I’ve never tried it. I’ll have to ask around.”
“I need to go tonight.”
Tünscher let out a blast of laughter; next to him, his nephew gave a silent, gormless grin.
“The baby was due in February,” said Burton. “I wasted weeks getting here. Anything could have happened—they could be sick, starving. Every single day matters.” The thought had punished him since he’d left Britain.
“At least wait till after Führertag.”
“And if she dies the night before? If I could have got there?”
Tünscher banged his sternum. “I should never drink schnapps, gives me indigestion. How many of those diamonds you got?”
“Keep the one I gave you,” replied Burton. “That’s your down payment. Help me find Maddie and the baby, get us all off the island, and there are four more.”
“How do I know they’re not fakes?”
“You don’t.”
“I’ll do it for ten.”
“Five. That’s my only offer. Unless you want to spin for it.”