AbrakaPOW

by Isaiah Campbell

  “We have done quite well, actually,” Josef yelled. He motioned to Herbert that it was time to go.

  “Right, so you wouldn’t be interested in the empty ranch house we were going to take you to that has an unlocked wine cabinet and a fully stocked refrigerator?”

  Josef turned and stepped out into the area where they stood. The girl and the boy took a step away from him. “Wine and food?” he asked. “Who knows me this well?”

  The girl gulped. “Felix. He sent us to you.”

  Josef smiled. “He is a good man. Komm, Herbert, lasst uns essen und trinken Wein.”

  Herbert followed him to stand before the children. “How do we know we can trust you? This could be a trap.”

  The girl elbowed the boy. “Give them to them.”

  The boy opened a paper bag he had been carrying and pulled out two very large, aluminum-wrapped tubes. He handed one to each of them.

  “What is this?” Herbert asked.

  “Those are burritos, only the best cuisine that Texas has to offer,” the girl said. “And they’re my mamaw’s burritos, so they’re the best of the best. And that’s how you know you can trust me, ’cause I don’t go giving her burritos to just anybody.”

  Josef eyed the bundle in his hands with trepidation. “What is a ‘burrito’?”

  “The best thing the Mexicans ever gave us,” the girl said. “It’s rice and beans and cheese—and when my mamaw makes them, sausage—wrapped up in a tortilla.”

  “Sausage?” Josef asked. He opened the foil and sniffed. “Lobe den Herrn, it smells like good sausage.” He took a bite.

  “Hey, now,” the girl said and smacked his hand, then briefly made the face one might make if they were having a heart attack. “Um, sorry, but you don’t go eating that out here. You wait till you’re in the cushy house so you can really enjoy it. Mamaw’s burritos deserve your full attention.”

  Josef was quick to agree, and although Herbert had some reservations, he finally also accepted the plan. The boy instructed them on how to find the house and which window would be unlocked for them, the girl made them promise they wouldn’t take another burrito bite until they were safely inside shelter, and the men hurried away.

  When they arrived at the large white house with a brown roof and finely pruned trees outside the front porch, they found the unlocked window and climbed in to find it exactly as promised and then some. The carpet was plush, the couches overstuffed, and there was gin and rum in the kitchen. Herbert also found a nice box of Cubans on a table next to a fancy wooden chair.

  Josef, meanwhile, perused the refrigerator and called out to his partner a list of the many fine dishes he intended to make for them that evening.

  “After we eat this burro,” Herbert said.

  “And while we enjoy the finer things,” Josef said with a smile. He came and sat on the sofa. “My friend, I told you we would thrive.”

  They unwrapped the burritos and began to eat. Herbert consumed his and washed it down with a glass of red wine. Josef took his time, savoring every bite. It was thus that he noticed, in the midst of one mouthful, a crunchy, chalky substance. He peeked beneath the tortilla and found a small white wedge. His first instinct was that it was garlic, so he chewed it. It most definitely was not garlic.

  If Josef had been trained in the area of pharmacology rather than the culinary arts, he might have recognized the pill in the burrito as being a bit of Barbital, a sleeping pill taken by many people, particularly mothers whose husbands were in the war, leaving them to take care of their stubborn sons alone.

  Josef went to ask his companion if he knew what the substance was, but Herbert was already snoring on the sofa. Josef began to feel a most certain sense of dread, but it wasn’t for very long. Soon he, too, slipped into a deep sleep.

  They would not awaken until Mr. and Mrs. Heyer, the owners of the ranch house who were at that exact moment sound asleep upstairs, came downstairs the next morning. Or, to be more precise, they wouldn’t awaken until the police, whom the Heyers would frantically call, arrived.

  Still, Josef would have been happy to know that theirs was the deepest sleep of any of the escapees.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  San Angelo at midnight was really no place for two eleven-year-olds.

  Although, to be fair to the fine people of San Angelo, there is no appropriate place for eleven-year-olds at midnight that is not called “bed.”

  Still, Max and Shoji stood behind the grocery store, where they were plainly not meant to be, waiting for Gil to return from his mission. They had been waiting for twenty minutes.

  “Send a GI to round up guys at a bar,” Max said. “That was the dumbest idea ever.”

  “Dumber than sending kids to round up Nazis?” Shoji asked.

  “Close tie,” she said.

  He peeked around the corner to see if Gil was on his way back. “Can I ask you something?” he asked when he returned to her side.

  “Any time,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything for about a minute.

  “Including now,” she said, and he laughed.

  “Sorry, it’s a weird question, I think.”

  She playfully punched his shoulder. “At midnight there’s nothing but weird questions.”

  He rubbed the spot where she’d just walloped him. “Okay. Here’s the question.” He cleared his throat. “What am I to you?”

  She furrowed her brow. “What does that even mean?”

  “If someone was to ask you, ‘Who is Shoji?’, what would you tell them?”

  “I guess I’d tell them that you’re my friend.”

  He nodded. “Sure, right. But how would you distinguish me from the others? Like, would you say that I’m your funny friend, or your weird friend, or would you just say that I’m your Oriental cowboy friend?” He forced a smile.

  She could tell he was quite concerned about this, so she decided to give his question the level of consideration she would have appreciated had the tables been turned. “How many words are in the English language?” she finally asked.

  “I don’t know, a lot.”

  “Almost a million,” she said.

  “Okay, almost a million.”

  “With a million words to choose from, there’s not a single one that adequately describes what you are to me.”

  He thought about that and then grinned. “So I’m your indescribable?”

  “You’re my indescribable.”

  “I can live with that.”

  At that exact moment, Gil sauntered around the corner. “I’m back, kids.”

  Max sniffed his breath. “You didn’t drink anything?”

  “Never on the job,” he said.

  “Then why do you look so happy?” Shoji asked.

  Gil laughed. “I just had a fun time with the fine-looking flyboys and rallied them to join me, as specified, to meet three of my dearest friends.”

  “Pilots? Meeting us two and who else?” Shoji asked. Gil playfully swatted his head.

  “Now then, what about the Krauts?” Gil asked. “Any sign of them?”

  Max nervously tugged at her lip. “Not yet. They might have passed out in the desert trying to get here, they were so thirsty.” She sighed. “One of us really should have followed them.”

  “By that you mean me?” Shoji asked. She didn’t answer but turned her attention to Gil.

  “When they get here, you know how to do the trick?” she asked. “’Cause I don’t like trusting the sleight of hand to an amateur.”

  “I got it, Half-pint. No worries.”

  “You understand this would be like if you handed off the responsibility to play a concerto to me, right? It’s incredibly nerve-racking.”

  “You do realize how insulting it is to compare my ability to pull off a simple magic trick to your piano playing, right?”

  She patted his arm. “I do.”

  Thankfully for everyone involved, it was only a brief delay before Horst, Peter, and Heinz arrived. (And if you
are a very clever person and feel the need to point out that Heinz had already been captured, the prisoner you are remembering was Heinz Rehnen. This prisoner was Heinz Nicolai. Yes, there were two escaped prisoners named Heinz. It is an unfortunately common name that, if we were to retell this tale as a grand epic, we would probably change to increase believability. But, for the sake of accuracy, we must maintain that there were two Heinzs and bemoan the slight it places against the artistic value of this tome.)

  When Horst led his partners through the streets according to the map on the back of the Lucky Strike wrapper, he was fairly confident that he would be able to find the hotel without any problems. It was, then, quite discouraging when the location that was designated as the hotel was, in fact, a teeming bar.

  “Did you read the map correctly?” Peter asked.

  “Of course,” Horst snapped back. “It must have been drawn incorrectly.”

  They bickered for about a minute, trying to decide their next course of action. What they should have been doing instead, though, was moving away from the street. This was a fact they realized when one of the men in uniform at the bar noticed them.

  “Hey! It’s Gil’s buddies!” he yelled.

  Without any further warning, the three escapees were surrounded by over a dozen air force pilots.

  “Hey there, fellas,” one of the pilots said and slapped Heinz and Peter on the back.

  “Gil’s lookin’ all over for you,” another said to Horst.

  “Hey, somebody go get Gil,” one of them yelled to the group.

  “No need, gents,” Gil said and staggered through the circle to the escapees.

  Horst recognized Gil as one of the guards from Camp Barkeley. He stiffened his back and ducked his head.

  Gil came up and patted him on the chest. “I told these flyboys that if they saw some strangers in town, they were my sidekicks. Got me out of a fight in the bar,” he whispered into Horst’s ear. “So if you boys don’t mind playing along, we can get acquainted later.”

  Horst looked up at his face. Was this man too inebriated to recognize them? Or perhaps he didn’t pay attention during his rounds. Horst breathed a sigh and nodded.

  Gil went over and put his arms around Peter and Heinz. “Yeah, these old boys have gotten me out of a jam or two,” Gil yelled to the circle of pilots. “And they’re here to do it again, I’ll tell you.” He stepped away from the men and over to join the circle around them. “But they’re friendly. In fact, do any of you boys have a smoke I can bum?”

  The three men, nearly simultaneously, reached into their pockets to pull out the pack of Lucky Strikes they each had been given.

  But what emerged from their pockets were not Lucky Strikes.

  Instead each man held a tightly rolled piece of fabric. An armband, to be precise. It was an armband that none of those three men had ever worn, as they were not any of them members of the Schutzstaffel, the most notorious of Hitler’s henchmen. But it was an armband that they recognized, as did the pilots.

  It was distinguishable by the swastika, displayed prominently into the view of every man that surrounded them.

  The sight of the swastika sent every single person in that area running. It sent all the flyboys running to tackle these men they now knew were some type of Nazis. And it sent the escapees running for their lives.

  So it was that, when they turned down a corner in hopes they would not be ripped limb from limb by the drunken pilots that chased them, they were thrilled to see seven police officers, guns drawn, waiting for them.

  They raised their hands and surrendered immediately.

  And, in the shadows, the girl who had phoned the police from the payphone nearby had a secret smile. Apparently Gil was good at the old PICK POCKET AND SWITCH TRICK.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Major Larousse was waiting for Max when Gil dropped her off. It was past two in the morning, and yet he was wide-awake, mainly because it is required of officers to be the first informed on the status of a mission. Also because, at that hour, he felt the inclination that a father should be wide-awake when his daughter is out past midnight.

  She walked through the door and, for a moment, he hugged her as she had once hugged him when he’d walked through the door after his time in Africa. It was a hug they had not shared in a very long time. Yet, as quickly as it came, it died, and he peppered her with questions about the mission and how things went. Still, that hug gave her a glimmer of hope that, maybe, just maybe, the man who once would hide under the bridge in Central Park and hop out to scare her at the very moment she believed he was gone—maybe that man was still alive, somewhere deep inside the shell of Major Larousse. After completing the conversation, they both moved to their respective beds and collapsed into a slumber so deep, they were lucky the next day was Sunday.

  It was the tiny chill in the air that woke Max the next morning. She had been so swift in her trek to the land of dreams that she hadn’t noticed her window was open when she went to bed. She found it only mildly puzzling, since she didn’t remember opening the window, but assumed her mom had done it at some point during the day. Mrs. Larousse did have a habit of cleaning the whole house with bleach when she was particularly anxious. And given that Major Larousse had refused to reveal to her what exactly he and Max were going to be doing when they had left to do what they did, it would make sense that she’d had the nerves of a cat.

  She left her room and moved to the kitchen, where Major Larousse sat at the table enjoying some bacon, eggs, and pancakes. Mrs. Larousse set a plate of the delicacies out for Max.

  “Wow, you seem happy,” Max said.

  “He is,” her mother said and kissed the major’s forehead. “We got the call this morning that they caught five more prisoners. Three in San Angelo and two, believe it or not, sleeping in one of the ranch houses out west of here.”

  Max took a bite of her bacon. “Talk about lucky,” she said.

  Mrs. Larousse sat and drank from her cup of coffee. “Hey, maybe you won’t have to go live with Grandma Schauder after all.”

  “Drat,” the major said. “We were so close to having the house to ourselves.”

  They maintained the conversation for a few more minutes before Max jumped up. “Oh, I forgot to feed Houdini. Poor thing, he’s probably starving.”

  “I fed him last night, sweetie,” Mrs. Larousse said. “We actually got along quite well while you were gone. He can be quite the gentle ferret when he’s in the right mood.”

  “I’m gonna go get him and let him run around, then, since you two are such good friends,” Max said. “Besides, I missed his fuzzy little tail in my face while I was sleeping.”

  Max went to retrieve the ferret from her room, but the cage was, predictably, empty. She looked under her bed and dresser and every other nook or cranny that Houdini preferred to frequent, all to no avail. She crawled along the hallway, trying to see the world from his eye level in hopes of catching him napping. She didn’t have any luck.

  When she crawled past the kitchen, her mother came out after her. “What are you doing?”

  “Houdini got out.”

  Mrs. Larousse walked to Max’s room. “That’s impossible. I put him in the cage and even tied wire around the door to lock it.”

  “He’s Houdini, Mom” Max said. “He can get out of anything.”

  Mrs. Larousse came back from examining the cage. “That just doesn’t make sense, even for Houdini.”

  Max stood. “Oh, no. You left my window open. I’ll bet he got outside.” She ran out the front door before she could hear Mrs. Larousse say, “Your window was open?”

  Max looked around the yard, behind every bush and under every rock, but there was no sign of her little ferret friend. Then she heard Mrs. Morris next door, singing some hymn while she cleaned her kitchen. With a groan, Max went over to see if Houdini had returned to the scene of his earlier crime.

  “No, dear, trust me, if that wild animal had gotten back into my house, you’d know,�
� Mrs. Morris said.

  “He’s not wild,” Max said. “He’s a domesticated ferret.”

  “I know a wild animal when I see one,” Mrs. Morris said. “It’s a gift that comes with age.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Max said. “Thank you for your time.” She walked away from the back door.

  Mrs. Morris reached out and pulled her back to the door. “Dearie, did you go to church today?”

  Max blinked at her. “I’m sorry?”

  “My pastor said today is the day that lost things can become found things, and I’ve been wondering about you and your family. Do you go to church?”

  Max wiggled out of her hand. “Next Saturday is the start of Passover, so I imagine we’ll go then.”

  “What?” Mrs. Morris asked as though Max had just said they were planning a trip to Mars.

  “Yeah, we always go to temple for Passover. And my mom was telling me that there’s going to be a nice Seder meal at Temple Mizpah, so we’ll probably go to that.”

  “Yes, I know,” Mrs. Morris said. “The Ladies Auxiliary is putting on the Seder meal. But I didn’t know that your family is Jewish.”

  Max was very anxious to find her ferret. “My mom is, so I guess that makes me one, too,” she said. “Can I go now?”

  Mrs. Morris shook her head. “I don’t know if you know this, dearie, but the Messiah you people are waiting for has already come. I talk to him every Sunday.”

  “That’s wonderful, ma’am,” Max said. “I sleep in every Sunday, so it sounds like we both enjoy our weekends. But I really need to get back to Houdini.”

  Max turned and walked away. Mrs. Morris called after her, “I’ll be praying for you, young lady.”

  Max always found it odd that the phrase “I’ll be praying for you” never seemed to carry the reassurance it seemed, on the surface, it was intended to bear. Still, with or without Mrs. Morris’s prayers, her anxiety over the location of her ferret was beginning to overwhelm her.

  Then she saw that the storm cellar was open and, momentarily, felt a bit of a relief. If Houdini had ventured down there, maybe Felix had corralled him and was waiting for her to come and return the little creature to his rightful home.