A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  When he was close, within an arm’s reach, the footsteps stopped. I heard him breathing, the air going into and out of his lungs. He was so close, I smelled him, a scent that was acrid and oily. The smell of evil. I held my breath, as much so he wouldn’t hear me, as so I wouldn’t take in any more.

  The door opened. The heavy factory shoes landed on the steps. Then the door slammed shut behind him.

  I waited until I heard the Nazi’s footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs before I put my hand on the door. The instant I heard him get to the end of the hallway, I ran after him.

  I followed the Nazi back through the dim building, keeping one floor above him. When he stopped on the third floor, I waited on the fourth, trying not to be noticed by the people going into and out of their apartments, the people who had no idea they were living with a Nazi. I listened for the sound of a key going into a lock, a bolt turning, a door swinging open. I stood at the top of the stairs as long as I could make myself, then rushed down just in time to see the door to apartment 3D swinging shut.

  Again, I could have stopped here. I had everything I needed to put in the message to my father.

  But instead I crept down the hallway, pressed my ear against the Nazi’s door, a door that was thick with brown paint, as if it had been painted a thousand times.

  I do not know what I expected to hear through those layers of paint. I do know I did not expect to hear what I did. Voices. Familiar ones.

  The Nazi was listening to Superman.

  I wanted to pound my fist against the thick paint of the door, make the Nazi turn off his radio, make him vow never to listen to Superman—or any other radio serial—again. And who knows? Perhaps I would have done just that if I hadn’t heard another voice—softer, like an undertone beneath the voices of Superman.

  It was the Nazi’s voice.

  The Nazi is using Superman to cover up some conversation he’s having with another Nazi, I thought. He’s using Superman to help Hitler win the war.

  And that was when I finally went to write the message to my father.

  • • •

  The message I sent said

  OKUNU YL G RGQY GO 4 20 19 SEBSTP LONUUO GPO 16B

  which meant

  THERE IS A NAZI AT 1 6 5 LUDLOW STREET APT 3D.

  I put it in our mailbox that night, and the next morning it was gone, replaced by a new message that read

  GNU ITE LENU

  which meant

  ARE YOU SURE.

  I sat on my bed and tallied the evidence—the lies in the Nazi’s undertone, the pigeons, the German on the roof, the soft voice under Superman. I also counted the black in the creases of the Nazi’s hands, the creases that made them the opposite of my father’s, though I supposed not everyone would.

  I took out a piece of composition paper and began to put the word

  YES

  into code.

  Then I stopped. What if my father went to 165 Ludlow Street and took a photograph of the man in apartment 3D, and he turned out only to be a person with a secret? If that happened, I could find a hundred, a thousand, an entire train full of Nazis, and my father wouldn’t trust me enough to turn up at any of their apartments with his Speed Graphic.

  I set aside the piece of composition paper I’d just taken out. Then I put this new message from my father—the one asking me if I was sure—with the others under my shirt, and went back to Ludlow Street.

  For a while, I leaned against the glass of Moroshevsky’s Kosher Meats across from the Nazi’s tenement, staring up at the windows I was pretty sure were his, trying to tell if he was home. But the Nazi kept his blackout shades pulled all the way down, even in the daytime, and after half an hour, a man in a bloody apron came out of the butcher shop and told me to find someplace else to lounge around.

  I took that as a sign to go inside the Nazi’s building.

  I checked the Nazi’s mailbox to see if he had any mail or secret messages. It was empty. Taped to its door was a piece of paper with the name Armstrong written on it. I didn’t believe this was the Nazi’s real name. I was positive he’d stolen it from the radio, taken it from Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy, thinking he could hide behind it the way he was hiding behind Superman.

  I tested the edge of the tape with my fingernail. When it came up, I peeled the name off the door, rolling it into a little ball, and shoved it into my pocket.

  I went up to the third floor and listened at the Nazi’s door. All I could hear was the air moving around inside my own ear. If I owned the kind of gun the Green Hornet did, I thought, the kind that could blow the locks off doors, I could break into the Nazi’s apartment and find out what he was up to. Find out if he had any of the incendiary devices pictured on Uncle Glenn’s Civil Defense pamphlets.

  A couple of men with bushy beards and velvet yarmulkes that were much fancier than the one Moon Shapiro wore came out of 3B, arguing about the Yankees. I didn’t want to look suspicious, so pulled myself away from the Nazi’s door and headed for the roof.

  No one was up there. Only the Nazi’s pigeons, fluttering around inside their coop.

  I walked toward them, the gravel crunching under my shoes. It was a clear, bright day, the sky over my head open and blue. One of those rare fall days when wind blows so hard, the air in New York is as fresh as the air on the top of a mountain. As I approached the coop, the birds inside began to make that sound like a room full of babies, perhaps believing I was going to feed them. They flapped their wings and shrugged their shoulders as if putting on coats.

  I turned from the pigeons and studied the knocked-together shelves where the Nazi kept bags of feed, certain the proof I needed was here among the rolls of chicken wire and glass jars filled with nails. I rummaged through the half-empty bags, rolls of knotted twine, and broken pliers until I found a Garcia y Vega cigar box.

  I slid the cigar box out of the shelf and opened it. A few long, thin strips of paper flew across the roof.

  I ducked down behind the shelves out of the wind, sat on the tar paper with my back against one of the wooden coop legs. I opened the box again. It was filled with those narrow strips of paper, all of them blank. I dug my fingers through them, and at the bottom of the box found two small metal canisters with tiny clips. The perfect size to fit around a pigeon’s sticklike leg.

  I searched through the box again, that feeling of birds’ wings fluttering against the inside of my chest. All I needed was one message with words on it. Just one. My fingers brushed something at the bottom of the box. Something familiar.

  I lifted it through the tangled pieces of paper. But I didn’t need to see it to know what it was. My fingers spent all day reading its circle of raised letters like a kind of Braille, deciphering them in the darkness of my pocket the way I had my father’s film.

  I opened my hand in the clear light of that rare fall day. I was holding a Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph.

  Which could not be possible.

  Because why would a Nazi use a Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph for his secret messages? Why would he use something anyone with ten cents and the lids from two jars of Ovaltine could get from the radio?

  Perhaps because nobody would believe it.

  A waterfall of birdseed rained through the chicken wire into my lap. I looked closer at the Nazi’s code-o-graph. There was a photograph in the little window. I pushed my glasses onto the top of my head and brought the device closer to my face.

  It was of a woman. She had dark eyes and dark hair, and she wasn’t smiling, though she didn’t look sad or angry. She only looked as if she believed being photographed was something you should take seriously. She reminded me of my mother. It wasn’t so much a physical resemblance, it was more the way the woman in the Nazi’s code-o-graph was looking at the camera. Or perhaps the way she was looking at the person holding the camera.

  It was how the lig
ht reflected back from her eyes, what it seemed her mouth was about to do next. It recalled my mother’s expression when she would add up those numbers for my father, sliding the tip of that No. 2 pencil into and out of the gap between her teeth.

  I’d always had a hunch that adding up those numbers only took a part of my mother’s attention. And now, on the Nazi’s roof, I had the feeling that the rest of it had been on my father, and that she had only agreed to add up those numbers so that he would watch her.

  It was this, the way the woman in the photograph was looking at the person holding the camera, how her expression so recalled my mother’s, that made me believe the Nazi had stolen the photograph of the woman, the way he’d stolen Jack Armstrong’s name and the voices from Superman.

  I closed my fingers around the Nazi’s code-o-graph and put it in my pocket. Then I got to my feet and slid the Garcia y Vega box back onto the shelf.

  The pigeons were eyeing me from the sides of their heads.

  Nazi pigeons.

  I flattened my hands on the chicken wire. It was sharp and cold. The gray birds behind it flapped their wings, sending stray feathers into the wind.

  I imagined myself doing what Uncle Glenn had done, imagined the feel of a feathery neck snapping in my hands.

  My hands seemed small on the chicken wire. And there were so many pigeons inside the coop.

  I took my hands off the wire, rubbed them on my pants to warm them.

  The latch on the door was a simple hook and eye, the kind of thing people use on a screen porch. I flipped it open, then I swung the door to the coop wide.

  The birds tilted their heads to look at the sky.

  I hit the side of the coop with the flat of my hand.

  “Go!” I shouted.

  Two pale gray birds flew out.

  “Go! Go!” I banged again on the side of the coop.

  Two more pigeons came swooping out.

  “Auf wiedersehen!” I shouted in the only German I knew besides Heil Hitler.

  As if to prove they were indeed Nazi pigeons, the rest of the birds came soaring out of the coop, the entire flock swirling above my head, two dozen or more gray birds following each other into the clear blue sky, leaving behind only a scattering of airy feathers that circled in the air before settling onto the black tar of the roof.

  I shut and latched the door behind them.

  As I ran down the stairs and out of the Nazi’s tenement, I was already thinking about how I would translate

  YES I AM SURE

  into

  IUL Y GX LENU.

  How I would do it the moment, the second, the instant I got home.

  But when the subway doors sighed open at Dyckman Street, I stayed in my seat.

  The strips of paper. The metal canisters. The code-o-graph. Were they enough? If I was wrong, I wouldn’t see my father until the war was over. And it seemed like the war was never going to be over.

  I rode the subway all afternoon, taking the train to the end of the line, then crossing the platform and taking it back, all the while adding up the evidence in my head, as if I had inherited my mother’s ability for calculation.

  Pigeons. German. Black creases.

  Paper. Canisters. Code-o-graph.

  Then I remembered Uncle Glenn dressed in black to spy on the neighbors. Dressed in black because if they were going to do anything suspicious, they were going to do it at night.

  By eleven o’clock, I was back in front of Moroshevsky’s Kosher Meats, my eyes on the front door of the Nazi’s tenement.

  Ten

  I’d planned to arrive in front of Moroshevsky’s sooner, intended to eat whatever cereal and meat combination Aunt May made us from Victory Meat Extenders, then slip out the second my mother’s breath reached the deepest part of her chest. But when my mother returned from five o’clock Mass that night, she went into the kitchen and began cooking.

  My mother had not cooked anything since July, not since the day the transit cop brought me home from the 42nd Street subway station. I lay on the linoleum in front of the Silvertone, waiting for her to go into her bedroom and stare at the ceiling until she fell asleep the way she had every night, while instead, she filled the apartment with the smell of meat browning. And when I sat up and pushed my glasses back onto my nose, I saw that she was standing in front of the stove with the piece of lace she wore to Mass still bobby-pinned to the top of her head, stirring something in a pot.

  My mother only cooked meals that could be made in one pot. A habit left over from her days cooking in her father’s warehouse on Tenth Avenue, when their stove had been a single kerosene burner. Back then, my mother had gotten all of her groceries from the market under the Ninth Avenue El—turnips, parsnips, potatoes, small bags of spices from the Italian and Jewish pushcart vendors. She’d simmer everything with bits of ground pork or chicken parts until it turned into a velvety stew. My mother improvised these combinations, and according to her, some of them were so horrible, even the Hell’s Kitchen dogs, legendary for eating anything—the dead, bloated bodies of cats, for example—wouldn’t touch the remains of her discarded pots. But occasionally the stars aligned and some of her stews were miraculous. But my mother was never able to repeat any of these starstruck dishes, claiming that writing down recipes gave her headaches.

  When the apartment was full of the smell of cooking—a smell unlike my Aunt May’s Victory Meat Extenders meals, which always smelled of grains, a smell I’d begun to associate with the fight against Fascism—my mother called me into the kitchen. I sat down and she placed a bowl of something meaty and brown in front of me.

  Then she served herself and sat across from me.

  Most nights if she ate at all, my mother ate the meal Aunt May left us standing at the sink, holding the plate near her mouth, a cigarette caught between the fingers of her hand. The last time my mother had sat at the red table and had dinner with me there had been three of us.

  “How is it?” she said.

  The stew my mother made that night was one of her best, one of the ones where the planets and stars had lined up perfectly. She’d put steak in it—probably used up all our ration coupons—and after Aunt May’s meat loaf bulked up with mashed potatoes and hamburgers made of ground beef and corn flakes, it was like biting into a cow. The gravy was thick and brown and smoky, and the spices were sweet and savory at the same time. But for all that, I could barely choke down the miraculous stew.

  For beneath all its meaty, spicy richness, the stew had an undertone, and it was as complex as the combination of flavors swirling inside my mouth. It tasted too much of trying, of my mother having carefully placed each ingredient into the pot, which was something she had never done before, instead of tossing in herbs by the handful, throwing in spices with a kind of intuition. The stew tasted also of the brown clothes and the piece of lace on her head, of the fact that she’d just come from the front row of Good Shepherd, which made me think too much of how she’d looked at my father’s messages, as if his magnetism was nowhere on them. And spicing all of it was the taste of how long I’d waited for her to begin cooking again, how long I’d waited for her to come out of her room, and how now that she had, I only wanted her to go back into it and fall asleep.

  “It’s fine,” I told her.

  “Do you want more?”

  “No. No, thanks.”

  I pushed away from the table and went to my room, chose my spying clothes carefully. The black Mass pants to blend in with the dark and a heavy wool sweater with a reindeer knitted into the front that Aunt May had given me last Christmas, the warmest thing I owned. I put on a dark wool cap, pulling it to the frame of my glasses to hide as much of my pale forehead as possible.

  In case the Nazi caught me—something I didn’t want to think about—I left his code-o-graph and my father’s messages in my bedroom. Without the paper messages up against m
y skin, the T-shirt I’d put on under the reindeer sweater to keep it from itching felt almost too soft. Before leaving my room, I slipped my own code-o-graph with the picture my father had taken of me into my pocket.

  I wonder now at how sure I was that the Nazi would step out of that tenement door. How sure I was that he hadn’t already gone to bed behind those blackout shades, or already left for whatever terrible purpose he intended. I can only put it down to those weeks in front of the Silvertone’s big speakers, the weeks in which my life was made up of programs in which the Shadow or the Lone Ranger waited in a dark alley or behind a boulder for the saboteur or the cattle rustler to turn up—and he always did. This was what those weeks of living inside the radio world had taught me, and I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me the real world worked otherwise.

  It was especially dark on the Lower East Side. Half the streetlamps were dark, and whether they were broken or it was intentional, I didn’t know. No one left their blackout shades up, and no one had left on an outside light. It was as if the people who lived down here were more afraid of the Germans. The figures passing me on the sidewalk were nothing but footsteps and shadows.

  Moroshevsky’s doorway was a couple of steps below the sidewalk and I huddled there, out of the way of a chill wind that was full of ice and the smell of the East River. I imagined my father doing the same thing, waiting in a doorway for a Nazi to show his face, and I sent my mind across the dark streets to find him, as if he and I were radio waves on a channel that was always open. I felt a shiver, as though we’d connected, but it might have been the cold.

  I don’t know how long I stood in Moroshevsky’s doorway watching the Nazi’s tenement. Long enough for my fingers, curled inside the sleeves of the sweater because I’d forgotten gloves, to start aching from the cold. Long enough for my feet to turn numb through the thick soles of the Thom McAns. But not long enough to doubt that the tenement door would eventually open and a shadowy figure would step out, that I would hear those heavy factory shoes coming down the metal staircase.