A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  And a couple of times, I thought I spotted a very small man smoking a cigarette following me as I slipped into the subway at the corner of Broadway and Dyckman Street. But I could never trust my eyes, and he seemed very small for a man, so I figured I’d imagined him.

  It’s possible a call came when no one was in the apartment—or that my mother never picked up the phone—because every time it rang, she hurried away from it, as if that would prevent any bad news from finding her. And if a letter had been sent, it’s possible it was lost in the mail. It was wartime after all, and there was a lot of mail. It’s also possible that nobody at P.S. 52 wanted to talk to us about the reason I hadn’t returned to school. Nobody wanted to come to our apartment and knock on our door and ask if it was about what had happened in the 42nd Street subway station.

  • • •

  As the leaves turned and the weather grew colder, I searched all five boroughs of New York City for a Nazi to bring to my father. I broke in the Thom McAns walking the stone floors of Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central, ate countless pieces of Automat coconut custard pie, and used up every one of my mother’s nickels. One day I rode the subway all the way out to Coney Island and stood on the boardwalk in the salted wind staring at the gray sea, hoping to spot the periscope of a Nazi submarine. Another day I wandered Central Park in the slanted light of late autumn, crunching leaves the color of my mother’s clothes, eavesdropping on every park bench conversation.

  When I got discouraged, I pulled out the code-o-graph and looked at the photograph of myself in the little window.

  It began to get truly cold and I spent less time on the street and in the park, and more time on the subway and in the Automat and the train stations. I followed a man in an overcoat who was following another man, a man in a suit. I followed them out of the West Fourth Street subway station and around a corner, where the man in the overcoat punched the man in the suit, knocking him to the sidewalk, getting blood on the front of his jacket. The man in the suit did not seem surprised to have been hit by the man in the overcoat. He shook his head and wiped at the blood with a handkerchief. Another day, I followed a tall woman in a fur coat to a brownstone near Gramercy Park. While I was standing outside, debating whether to write down her address, she came back through the door, dressed as a man.

  I was always right about the people I followed not being what they presented themselves to be. But I was never right about them being a Nazi spy or saboteur. And some nights, even with the code-o-graph in my hand, even staring down at that photograph, I began to believe that the war would go on forever and I would never find a Nazi for my father.

  • • •

  At the end of October a transit cop cornered me on the platform below Pennsylvania Station, grabbing me by the shoulders, asking me for the address of this special school for kids with glasses, saying he would take me there himself, make sure I got there okay. It took a wrenching twist to get free of his hands, and once I did, I bolted under the turnstile and ran up the steps to 33rd Street, the pounding of his heavy shoes behind me.

  That night after dinner, after I knew Aunt May had left for her war job—an evening shift sewing uniforms at a converted factory down on 30th Street—I knocked on Uncle Glenn’s door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would tell me how to spot a Nazi.

  Uncle Glenn looked up and down the empty hallway. “Maybe we should talk about this inside.”

  My uncle had covered the ruffled place mats on Aunt May’s kitchen table with newspapers, all opened to stories about the war. Uncle Glenn followed the war news closely. I believed he bought nearly every newspaper sold in New York City, and read every one. He probably knew as much about the European theater as General Eisenhower.

  My uncle sat me down, then took the seat across from me.

  “What are you doing looking for Nazis?”

  “Same as you. For the war effort.”

  He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Why don’t you take up something a little more harmless?”

  “Just tell me.”

  He shook his head. I had the sense he was reading the story in front of him, a report about the bombing of Genoa.

  “You’re doing it.”

  “I’ve had Civil Defense training.”

  “Then tell me what they told you.”

  “It’s not just Civil Defense, I know how Nazis think.”

  “Then tell me that.”

  My uncle’s eyes were on the newspaper, full of photographs of the burning Italian city.

  “I can hear what people are really saying,” I told him.

  Uncle Glenn glanced up.

  “When they talk,” I continued, “I can hear what they really mean.”

  “Like if they’re lying?”

  “Sometimes. Or if they mean something else.”

  My uncle shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

  “Maybe. But I can do it.”

  He sat back in his chair, studied me with his pale blue eyes. “Can you show me?”

  “I guess.”

  “Go get your jacket.”

  My uncle took me to Lou Brown’s Pool Parlor. I had never been up to this second-floor establishment—no kid had—but I’d imagined it dozens of times. A male sanctuary of thick carpets and velvet curtains filled with billiard tables that stood on curved mahogany legs. In truth, Lou Brown’s was a cavernous room with painted tin walls and a cracked linoleum floor, and the felt on the pool tables was ripped in places. The men playing moved through a layered haze of cigarette smoke like people caught in a fog.

  Uncle Glenn sat me on a wooden bar stool and bought me a metallic-tasting ginger ale. Then he asked me to tell him who in the room was the biggest liar.

  I squinted through the haze, tuning my ears to conversations punctuated by the hard clacking of billiard balls.

  A short man who was playing with his hat squashed onto his head was predicting the outcome of his shots before he made them. Seven into the corner pocket. Nine into the side. His undertone said that even he didn’t believe any of these were likely to happen.

  A fat man in suspenders who hadn’t stopped chalking the end of his cue since Uncle Glenn and I walked in was telling a story about a blond-haired waitress. I didn’t entirely understand the story, but there was so much unsatisfied longing in his voice, I knew whatever he was telling the men around him had never happened.

  And then there was the man I nearly missed, would have missed if the fat man in suspenders hadn’t finished his story about the waitress and turned to him. Later, thinking on it, I wondered if I almost missed the man because his gray suit had blended in with the haze of cigarette smoke, or if it was something else, something more intentional.

  The fat man turned, still chalking the end of his cue, and asked the man in the gray suit if he wanted to shoot some pool, and the man said, “No, but thanks anyway.”

  “Him.” I nodded my head toward the man in the gray suit, the man I’d nearly missed.

  Uncle Glenn looked over at the corner where the fat man had finally stopped chalking his cue. He was asking the man in the gray suit if he was sure about that, saying something about there still being plenty of night left.

  My uncle turned back to me. “What makes you say that?”

  “He really wants to play.”

  Uncle Glenn told me he’d been coming to Lou Brown’s for a year before he’d noticed the man in the gray suit, and even after he’d started noticing him, he was never entirely sure about it. Sometimes he’d think he was seeing him, but it would only be some of the cigarette smoke clinging together.

  He’d heard from someone—he couldn’t recall who—that the man’s name was Gary Adamson. But even the person who’d told him this wasn’t certain that was true, because whoever had told him hadn’t been certain of it himself. The important thing, though, was that the man in the gray suit w
as a pool hustler, probably the biggest one north of 125th Street.

  “And that means?” I said.

  “You can hear what people are really saying.”

  Uncle Glenn bought me another metallic-tasting ginger ale. Then he told me how to spot a Nazi. He said now that we were at war with them, they couldn’t fill up trains and sing songs about Jewish blood and march all over Long Island in their shiny boots. They had to be unnoticeable, easy to miss, like the man in the gray suit.

  “What you want to do is keep your eye out for somebody who’s trying not to be noticed.”

  “I’m already doing that,” I said.

  My uncle shook his head. “Not the person you can see who’s doing it. The person who is so good at it, it would take a year for you to notice he’s there.”

  I looked through the haze at the man whose name might be Gary Adamson. A gray suit moving through the cigarette smoke as if he was part of it.

  “One thing,” my uncle said.

  I turned back to him.

  “If you find this Nazi, you’ll let me know?”

  I nodded. Because who could tell if Uncle Glenn read voices.

  My uncle asked me if I wanted another of the metallic-tasting ginger ales, and when I said no, he took me home.

  The next day I found my Nazi.

  Nine

  I found him on the BMT line coming back from Brighton. He was sitting near the end of the subway car, and if I hadn’t been looking for someone entirely unnoticeable, someone practiced at reining in his own energy to prevent it from disturbing the air around him, I would have missed him altogether.

  He was wearing heavy shoes with reinforced toes, the kind of shoes you wore if you worked in a factory—the kind of shoes my father had worn when he worked at the Navy Yard—and a brown jacket that zipped up the front. He was younger than my father, probably the same age as Uncle Glenn, though the shadows that circled his eyes made him seem older. His hair was black and straight and too long. It fell over his forehead and caught in his eyes when he blinked. But what I noticed most about him was his hands. Inside all the creases, in the places where my father’s hands were white, his were filled with black, as if all the evil he’d done—all the evil he was planning—had come to rest there.

  At the stop for Greenwood Cemetery, a woman in a fur jacket got on the train. She peered out the window, though there was nothing to see by then except the dark tunnel, then she turned and asked the Nazi if this train went to Union Square.

  I don’t believe the woman would have spoken to the Nazi—don’t think she would have even noticed him—if he and I had not been the only two people at this end of the subway car.

  The Nazi nodded and the woman in the fur jacket sat across from him. Then she asked him what he thought about Wendell Willkie’s harebrained scheme to fly around the globe while the world was at war. The Nazi replied that Mr. Willkie must have his reasons.

  It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was enough for me to hear his voice, which was unlike any I’d heard before.

  Most people’s undertones sound as if they are hiding one, maybe two things. But the Nazi’s sounded as if he was hiding everything. As if every word that came out of his mouth had to be inspected, checked for the correct size and shape before it could be sent out into the world, as if he believed he was talking to an audience rather than only one person.

  It reminded me of a radio announcer’s voice, the way he might tell you to be sure to tune in next week for another exciting episode of The Green Hornet, or make certain not to forget to fill up your car with Skelly Oil. But on the radio, talking like this—like you’d rehearsed every syllable—sounded natural. In the real world, it made everything that came out of the Nazi’s mouth sound like a lie.

  The woman in the fur jacket said a few more things to the Nazi about Wendell Willkie’s harebrained scheme, but the Nazi didn’t say anything back that a conversation could stick to, and eventually she drifted into staring at the advertisements above his head, and I’m certain forgot he was there.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking how after all these weeks of searching, I was now sitting one empty seat away from a Nazi. And I could not take my eyes off his hands, his hands that were the opposite of my father’s, the reverse of them, like a negative.

  When the Nazi got off the train, I followed him, up out of the subway and onto the corner of Essex Street and Delancey. This was the Lower East Side, a neighborhood five times more crowded than Hell’s Kitchen.

  For several panicked seconds I lost him in the confusion of so many people popping into and out of focus—scrawny dark-haired kids waving copies of The Forward, men in calf-length black coats hurrying past, their side curls trailing behind in the wind, women in thick stockings who dragged two-wheeled carts filled with groceries dangerously close to the toes of my tan Thom McAns. By the time I spotted the back of the Nazi’s brown jacket, it was already heading up Essex Street.

  I ran after him, pushed my way up a sidewalk that was crowded with people, as if the narrow-fronted tenements had overfilled, and then spewed their tenants out onto the streets, streets that smelled of pickles and horse manure and garbage. I was sure I would lose him in this crush of horse wagons and aproned vendors and soldiers, lose him in the sheer mass of people.

  I didn’t see that all the men in black coats, all the women with carts, all the scrawny kids, everyone—including the Nazi—had halted at the corner of Rivington Street for the traffic, until I was within a foot of the brown jacket. I skidded to a halt, the rubber soles of the Thom McAns squealing against the sidewalk.

  The Nazi turned and stared at me.

  His eyes were of no definite color. They shifted in the slanted light of this late October afternoon from blue to green to gray and back again, as if everything about them was a lie as well. I had the uncomfortable sense he was trying to look inside my head, that he might be trying to figure out how I worked.

  I forced myself to hold his gaze, my eyes watering behind my glasses. A cold wind blew across Rivington Street.

  The people around us began to move. The Nazi turned away and hurried across the street.

  I followed him up Essex and across Stanton to Ludlow Street. At a brick tenement a quarter of the way up the block, he stopped and looked back down the street. I stepped behind a vendor’s pushcart and watched him from between the bolts of cloth. After a moment, the Nazi turned, then climbed a metal staircase to the front door.

  I could have stopped there, could have written down the address—165 Ludlow—and put it in a message to my father. But I wanted to know which apartment was his, which set of grimy-looking windows belonged to the man who had evil living in the creases of his hands.

  It was dark in the Nazi’s hallway, and smelled like decades of other people’s cooking—chicken soup and long-boiled cabbage—smelled also of the outhouse I spied through the half-open door at the end of the hallway. A woman bumped a grocery cart down the stairs, two girls came laughing past me as if I wasn’t there, a pack of screaming boys clattered down the steps, while a man in an undershirt leaned over the banister shouting at them in Yiddish. And over all of it, I heard the heavy factory shoes of the Nazi climbing the tenement steps.

  I kept thinking the Nazi would stop on one of the floors, but I followed his footsteps all the way to the final set of stairs—a narrow, wooden set that led to the roof. I crouched on the top one, pushing open the roof door an inch or two, enough to see the black tar of the Nazi’s roof and the gray sky. Cold air blew in, and with it the sound of traffic on Houston Street and somebody on the sidewalk shouting about whitefish, and also something closer and quieter. Something that sounded like the cooing of babies, as if the Nazi had an entire roomful of them trapped up here.

  I pushed the door open and squeezed through it. I still couldn’t see the Nazi, only someone’s laundry flapping around in the wind. Staying lo
w, I crept around the door frame—a six-foot-high box with a slanted back, just something so somebody could stand while walking up the stairs—bits of gravel sticking to my palms.

  The Nazi was standing not more than ten feet away from me. I could see the back of his brown jacket, his too-long black hair hanging over the collar. In front of him, propped up on wooden legs, was a coop filled with fluttering pigeons.

  It felt as if those pale gray wings were fluttering against the inside of my chest. My ears filled up with the sound of Uncle Glenn’s voice, telling me the story about his father and his pigeons. Telling me how he would take the birds out of their coop and let them walk across the aluminum surface of his Cauet hand, talk to them in the soft German Uncle Glenn never heard.

  Especially how he would talk to them in the soft German Uncle Glenn never heard, because beneath the humming of the traffic on Houston Street and the shouting about whitefish, I could hear the Nazi talking to his pigeons. Talking to them in German. Leaning his dark head toward the chicken wire at the front of their coop and speaking sentence after sentence in the language of the enemy. And all the lies that had been lurking in the Nazi’s undertone when he’d been talking to the woman in the fur jacket about Wendell Willkie’s harebrained scheme, all the lies that had been there when he’d been speaking English, had vanished.

  I stayed crouched behind the door frame with somebody’s laundry flapping behind me and watched the Nazi feed his pigeons, watched him take a burlap bag of seed from some wooden shelves he’d knocked together and dump it into the side of the coop, all the while talking to the pale gray birds in the enemy’s language, telling them the secrets he kept hidden when he spoke in English. When he was finished, the Nazi set the bag of seed back onto the shelf and stood looking up into the gray sky. Searching for what? A Messerschmidt? Rain?

  Then he turned and began to walk toward me.

  He was moving fast, and I didn’t have time to slip back inside. I ducked around the side of the door frame—that six-foot-high box with the slanted back, that small thing that was only enough for someone to stand up in while walking up the stairs. The Nazi’s heavy factory shoes came crunching across the gravel of the roof toward me, and all I could do was keep backing up in time with them, praying the Thom McAns wouldn’t make any sound as I slid them over the same gravel.