A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  He looked back at me.

  “I only told them the plan was mine.”

  “Why?”

  “I did not think the men from Hallesches would have appreciated the perfection.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They will try this plan of yours, if two problems can be solved.”

  The first problem was clothing. The refugees would have left their homes in a hurry when the Germans invaded, and not taken many clothes. They also would have spent a long time in hiding, and when you are a child, you continue to grow, even when you are running from the Germans, so nothing they had taken would still fit.

  “They will not look like American children when they land, and that will make them not so unnoticeable.”

  The second problem was where to take the refugees once they had landed. If the families would draw too much attention on the beach at Coney Island, they needed someplace else to meet. Someplace private, yet public enough so that fifteen families coming and going wouldn’t attract too much notice.

  “And if we solve these . . .” I began.

  “If you solve them.”

  A batch of papers blew off the shelf, spinning like a cyclone across the roof and disappearing over the edge. I felt as if I’d gone with them out into the empty air.

  “A master plan for rescue dreamed up by a boy,” he repeated. “It cannot happen any other way.”

  I nodded, pulling the flying cap closer about my head.

  In all the time since, I have not once wondered why I didn’t stand on that roof and argue with Jakob, beg him to help me with these problems, which were so much for a boy. I understood in the way that he did how the plan was meant to work. Believed in it the way that he did. For neither of us were strangers to all the leaps of logic and imagination in which grief can make you believe.

  Jakob gathered the dead bird into his hands and got to his feet.

  “You cannot take too long,” he told me. “They will not let the submarine leave for Marseilles until every part of the plan is in place. And they believe it is soon that the twenty-three will be put on the train for Germany.”

  I stood and nodded at the bird cupped in his hands, the empty cigar box that had once contained the strips of paper. “And that?”

  “You have not read the papers?” he said. “You do not know what Hitler is planning for France?”

  I shook my head.

  The coming darkness cast a slate-colored light on Jakob’s face. He looked weary, as if he’d been up here all night.

  “He intends to occupy the entire country.” He raised the limp bird closer to his face, as if he were trying to breathe life into it. “If that happens, there will not be a Jew left alive in France.”

  • • •

  I turned my back on Jakob and the dead bird, walked across the roof. My head was full of the problems I had to solve, and my hand was on the freezing edge of the door before I realized what I was hearing.

  Wheezing.

  The sound an asthmatic might make on a cold, snow-threatening day like this one.

  It’s only the wind in your ears, I told myself.

  I lifted one of the flaps of the flying cap and leaned forward. After a moment, I heard it again. Whoever it was, he was close, standing right on the other side of the roof door, with only its width between us.

  I made some noise with my shoes on the gravel, and the wheezing was replaced by the sound of footsteps hurrying down the stairs into the building.

  I turned toward Jakob—thinking I would say something to him, tell him what I’d heard—but he was still standing under the darkening sky with the lifeless bird spilling between his fingers. I turned back and pulled the door open.

  I chased after the wheeze, listening for it beneath the usual noises of the building—the shouting and door-slamming—as if it were the tenement’s own faulty breathing. I followed it to the fourth floor, the third. When I lost it on the second, I picked up speed, racing down the rest of the stairs and out through the door.

  I stood at the top of the metal staircase and squinted up and down Ludlow Street, looking for somebody running—heading toward Stanton, or maybe Houston. But all I saw was the usual blur of fur-hatted men, and packs of kids, and women tugging on grocery carts.

  And the sound of the wheeze had vanished, as if it had never been there, as if it had only been the wind in my ear.

  • • •

  As the subway took me back uptown, I invented elaborate theories about who might belong to that asthmatic wheeze. An FBI G-man who had discovered Jakob had been on the St. Louis. Somebody who had seen me following people and had decided to follow me. A Nazi who wanted to send Jakob back to Germany.

  I pushed these elaborate theories into every corner of my brain so there would be no room for the more logical one—that it had been Uncle Glenn hiding behind the roof door. Uncle Glenn, who didn’t believe I would come to him if I found a Nazi. Uncle Glenn, who might have been following me ever since I’d shown him how I could hear the undertone in voices.

  Still, if it had been Uncle Glenn behind that door, all he would have heard Jakob and me talking about was children and a submarine and the beach at Coney Island. He would know that Jakob wasn’t a Nazi. And he certainly wouldn’t have run away from me.

  Unless, said some part of my brain I hadn’t been able to fill with theories, Uncle Glenn wanted to be a hero so badly, he would turn in twenty-three Jews who weren’t supposed to be here. Twenty-four, if you counted Jakob.

  I yanked off the flying cap, as if trying to release the thought from my head. Not Uncle Glenn. Not the man who’d rescued me at my father’s wake, who’d pulled me from the depthless dark of the Keener’s mouth.

  It was somebody else. Somebody dangerous.

  Somebody I couldn’t tell Jakob about, because he might tell the men from Hallesches, and they would call off the plan. And I couldn’t let that happen. Not to either of us.

  • • •

  It was my mother who solved the problem of the clothes.

  She’d just come in from five o’clock Mass and was standing in the entryway of the living room, unbuttoning the blue overcoat she always wore once it got cold. Seeing her in it let me believe she was back to wearing normal clothes, that when she slipped the coat off, she’d be wearing a plaid skirt and a red sweater—a color that looked nice with her black hair falling loose around her shoulders. Watching her made me wish she’d stop unbuttoning the coat and put her hands in her pockets, and let me imagine something other than the dead-leaf thing I knew she was really wearing, because you could never tell what somebody had on underneath a coat.

  It was that quick, as though somebody else had put the idea into my head.

  I didn’t need twenty-three sets of clothes, I only needed twenty-three coats.

  And I knew where to get them. Knew from the winter almost no one had paid my father for their portraits, and we had picked out coats for ourselves from the poor box Father Barry kept behind the confessionals. Every Catholic church had a poor box, and the neighborhood around Dyckman Street, being so Irish, had a lot of Catholic churches.

  I figured out the solution to the second problem—where to take the twenty-three refugees—while I was changing into my pajamas. I’d just taken the code-o-graph out of my pocket and was looking at the picture of myself in the little window, that picture of my whole face without glasses, remembering the day I’d seen it for the first time, when it had still been a negative, the reverse of me. Suddenly, the words appeared inside my head like a photograph developing.

  Paradise Photo.

  Where people were always coming and going. Where there were always a hundred kids on the sidewalk. Where I knew exactly where Harry Jupiter hid the key.

  Where, once we were all inside—Albie and me, and the twenty-three refugees, and the families who have come to take
them, and Jakob, because of course he will be there—the door to the darkroom will open and a man wearing a belted overcoat and a hat pulled low on his forehead will come out and everyone will turn to look at him. But he will be looking only at me.

  “You did all this?” he will ask in an accent that still has enough Irish in it to push around the American, an accent I am beginning to forget.

  I will nod, and walk over to him, get so close he is no longer in focus. And then I will put my face into his chest, into the spot where his white shirt is showing between the lapels of his belted coat. The white shirt he still wears, though we don’t see each other anymore. And by now, it will have taken on the smell of the developing chemicals from all the pictures of Nazis he has taken. And I will smell, too, the Wildroot Cream-Oil he uses on his hair—spiky, like mine. And though he is wearing the hat pulled low, and his face is blurred, I will know it is him.

  • • •

  When I returned to Jakob’s apartment the next afternoon, I told him my idea about the poor box coats and about Paradise Photo. He sat and listened at the wooden table, which had been cleared of all the bits and pieces of machinery, turning the code-o-graph with the picture of Rebecca over in his hand, the way the boys eager to play skully turn their bottle caps over in their hands.

  “What do you think the men from Hallesches will say?” I said when I’d finished.

  “I think they will say I have come up with an excellent plan.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “You should begin collecting the coats. These men are not ones to waste time. They are like the Nazis in that way.”

  He told me to get fourteen boys’ coats and nine girls’ coats. “Your size, or perhaps a little smaller.”

  I nodded, and then I got up and headed toward the door. I was halfway out when he spoke to my back.

  “We will do this?” he said. “Rescue them?”

  I turned. He had folded his fingers over the code-o-graph and was gripping it tightly.

  “We will,” I said. But I had to put my hand in my pocket and touch the thin edges of my own code-o-graph to make my voice steady.

  • • •

  The next day, I found Albie in the sunless alley, surrounded by a half dozen sixth-grade boys who were watching him smoke as if he was a vaudeville act. I said I had something to tell him, and he dismissed the boys, saying that we had private business. They filed out, trailed by Elliott Marshman, who dragged the thick soles of his orthopedic shoes in case Albie decided to call him back.

  As I explained the plan—the submarine, the refugees, Coney Island—the lit end of Albie’s Lucky Strike bounced in the dim light like a winter firefly. I gave him only the parts of Jakob’s story he needed to know, and told him nothing about the wheeze I’d heard behind the roof door. Albie’s father—the convert—had insisted he learn Yiddish as well as Hebrew. We made plans to start collecting poor box coats later that afternoon.

  I was halfway home when I heard the wheeze again.

  Or thought I heard it. For the first time since my eyes had gone bad, I couldn’t be certain of something I was hearing. It was possible it had been the bus wheezing up Broadway, or heat escaping through the subway grates, or a hundred other things. Since that afternoon on Jakob’s roof, I’d been listening for the wheeze, and I’d started to hear it everywhere.

  I reeled around. But there was no one there.

  At least, no one I recognized, no one close to me. Because there was never no one on a New York City street in the middle of the day. And with my eyes, twenty people I might have recognized could have been standing just beyond my three-foot zone, and I wouldn’t have known it.

  A master plan for rescue dreamed up by a boy, I thought. Who had believed that was a good idea? A man who had tried to make a pigeon fly across the ocean to deliver a message to a dead girl?

  A chill wind blew up the street, turning me cold. Cold as those refugees would be if their submarine was sunk by a battleship, if their inflatable boats were capsized by a coast guard cutter. If somebody with a wheeze had them sent back to Germany.

  I felt the weight of those twenty-three lives settle on me. Lives that were depending on my plan. A plan that, perhaps, I’d dreamed up for my own reasons.

  I took off, ran all the way back to Dyckman Street, and down into the basement of our building.

  I tore through the shelves where everybody stored the things they couldn’t fit inside their apartments—glass ornaments and camping equipment and clothes that were wrong for the season we were in—until I found the shoebox my father had labeled Tax Receipts. There was so much duct tape wound around the top, I had to get a screwdriver from Mr. Puccini’s toolbox to cut through it.

  After I did, after I’d taken off the top, I was looking down at my father’s gun.

  He’d shown it to me more than a year ago. We’d been to see a Charlie Chan movie at the Alpine Theater—Murder Over New York—and on the way out, I’d asked him if he still had his gun from when he’d worked as bodyguard to the Duke’s illegal alcohol. I remember asking him if he’d ever shot anybody.

  “I shot over a couple of people’s heads a few times,” he’d told me. “That was about the extent of it.”

  I took my father’s gun out of the shoebox.

  There were five bullets rolling around in the bottom of the box, and I loaded them into the gun. My father had taught me how the afternoon we’d gone to see Murder Over New York. I can’t say why. Maybe he thought it was a skill I could use.

  I raised my arm and aimed the gun at the coal-burning furnace in the corner—the furnace that was breathing fire like a mechanical dragon, making a wheezing sound like a person with asthma. For a small gun, it felt heavy. No, not heavy, substantial. The feeling traveled up my wrist and into my body.

  I made a firing noise with my mouth. Then I lowered my arm and dropped my father’s gun into my jacket pocket. My pockets were stretched out from me forgetting my gloves and the gun fit inside perfectly.

  Looking back, I don’t believe I had any intention of firing the gun at anything more animate than that furnace. It is only that the reality of what Jakob and I were attempting had finally become clear to me, as if it had come and stood in my three-foot zone. And the weight of my father’s gun in my pocket made me feel safe.

  I went upstairs to our apartment then and got Albie’s flying cap—the cap I’d forgotten to bring back to him today. I folded it in half and tucked it into the shoebox labeled Tax Receipts. Then I wound several layers of Mr. Puccini’s duct tape around the top of the box and put it back on the shelf.

  I believed Albie had loaned the cap to me for luck, and now I wanted it someplace where nothing could get at it. If he asked me about it, I would make some excuse, tell him I forgot it.

  I didn’t plan to remember it until those inflatable boats landed at Coney Island.

  • • •

  When I met Albie on Vermilyea Street, I was pulling my old Radio Flyer wagon. I’d fitted the wooden slats into the sides, and then taped a sign to them that said ALUMINUM FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE. I’d also thrown in a couple of my mother’s old pots.

  Albie asked why the sign and the pots, and I told him part of the plan was making sure nobody knew we were collecting poor box coats.

  “Nobody like who?”

  “Just nobody,” I said.

  We were tossed out of the first church we went into—St. Jude’s—by a fat priest, after Albie strolled past the bowl of Holy Water as if it were a drinking fountain.

  “Don’t you know how to make the sign of the cross?” I asked him.

  “Why would I?”

  “Wasn’t your father Catholic at one time?”

  “Not since before I was born.”

  The two of us stood in the wind on the corner of Nagle Avenue, while I made Albie practice the sign of the cross until he could perfor
m it as haphazardly as anyone who’d been born to the faith. Then we headed over to Holy Trinity. As we were entering, Albie turned his face up to the weak November sun and asked me if he looked too Jewish to pull this off.

  I recalled what Jakob had told me about the Wandering Jew exhibit, the hooked noses and thick lips made out of rubber. To me, Albie only looked like himself—a smallish boy with pale skin and violet half-moons beneath his eyes.

  “You look fine,” I told him.

  We started out by asking for the coats. Hiding our own jackets in the bushes, claiming to be coatless. We told the priests we had a sister at home who also needed a coat. They told us to have our sister come in and ask for herself.

  After that first day, we realized it would take too long to collect twenty-three coats by asking. That’s when we began stealing them. We’d wait in the back until the priest disappeared into a confessional, then slip up the aisle to the poor box and rummage through it, tossing the stained shirts and moth-holed sweaters—all the clothes that smelled like other people’s closets—onto the floor, until we’d found every coat that was our size or smaller.

  Sometimes whoever was confessing only had a few sins, and the priest came out before we were finished. Then we grabbed whatever coats we’d found and ran, the echoey sound of our footsteps bouncing around the church, disturbing the old ladies on the kneelers, their rosaries dangling from their fingers.

  Because of my eyesight, because nothing was truly clear unless it was three feet away from me, I was always running into the unknown. This made everything feel hazardous. Still, I liked these flights from the dim churches into the clear November light, my arms full of coats, a cassocked priest nipping at my heels. I liked the companionable sound of Albie’s shoes keeping time with mine, the reassuring weight of my father’s gun in my pocket tugging on my shoulder.

  At some point, we remembered we’d have to take the twenty-three refugees on the subway, so we also began stealing nickels out of the wooden offering boxes from the side altars. The boxes where people paid for the candles set before the statues of saints—Joseph, Mary, Francis of Assisi. When Albie asked me if we were allowed to help ourselves to the money from these boxes, I told him they were only another kind of poor box.