A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  I knew it was him from across the street. The sound of his footfalls recognizable now. The way that even his shadowy self held its energy in check. When he reached the sidewalk, turned and began walking, I slipped up the steps and followed him.

  He led me to the Canal Street subway station, where even in the middle of the night there were people waiting for the train. People who worked the graveyard shift, like my father had done—men whose overall pant legs poked out from beneath their winter coats, women who’d wound turbans around their hair to keep it out of the machinery. Turbans that made them look as if they could grant you any wish.

  I hid near the turnstiles, peering around the corner at the Nazi, waiting for the train in the harsh light of the station. He wore heavy denim pants and his brown jacket, and around his neck he’d wrapped a brown scarf. He would have been easy to miss, standing so still on the platform.

  A Brooklyn-bound train came screeching into the station. The men in overalls and the women in turbans moved toward the open doors, none of them noticing the Nazi in their midst. These people appeared as if they’d only just woken up, which perhaps they had, with the remnants of dreams playing behind their eyes. Still, I don’t think they’d have noticed the Nazi if they’d been wide awake. He took up so little space, it was hard for me to keep focused on him.

  I waited until the Nazi got on the train, and then I dashed for the car behind his, ducking under the turnstile and sprinting for the door. It began to close when I was halfway across the platform. I leaped the last couple of feet, feeling the edges of the door move across the back of my sweater like it was brushing off leaves.

  “Nice timing, kid,” said a man over his copy of the Mirror.

  I nodded at him and went to sit at the end of the car.

  It took me until almost the next station before I spotted the Nazi through the scratched-up windows between my subway car and his. He was sitting in the middle of the car with his hands in his lap.

  The factory shoes, the heavy denim pants made me think the Nazi would get off at the stop for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was a good place for a Nazi to work. He could spend all day loosening bolts on battleships, then come home and talk about what was being loaded onto them on the shortwave radio while Superman played.

  I counted the stops as we moved through Manhattan, and then under the East River. When the train pulled into the station for the Navy Yard—the station that had been my father’s—everyone in the Nazi’s car stood. I tensed, ready to follow him out.

  But the Nazi stayed in his seat.

  The doors opened and the people in the Nazi’s car—the men in overalls, the women in turbans—filed out. Then a new batch streamed through the doors, people who had finished their shifts, people on their way home to Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst. I kept my eye on the Nazi, sitting with his hands in his lap, wondering if he’d spotted me, if he was waiting until the last second to bolt, to run for the open door.

  But the doors closed, and the Nazi was still sitting there.

  The train jolted, and we began traveling deeper into Brooklyn.

  Pacific Street.

  Union Street.

  Prospect Avenue.

  At each stop, the people who’d gotten on near the Navy Yard stood, yawned, and got off the train.

  By 45th Street, I was alone in my car, and the Nazi was alone in his, except for a skinny old man sitting across from him. The old man had fallen asleep two stops back, his head resting on a Buy War Bonds poster of a soldier about to throw a grenade. The old man had gotten on at the Navy Yard. A metal lunch pail sat in his lap and beneath his unbuttoned overcoat he was wearing overalls.

  We were deep in the tunnel between stations when the Nazi stood and began to walk across the car toward the old man. I leaned forward to get a better angle. What was the Nazi after? Something in the lunch pail? In the old man’s pockets? Then I noticed it, clipped to the front pocket of the old man’s overalls, hanging there on his skinny chest. I didn’t need the windows to be any clearer to make out what it was, didn’t need to be any closer to recognize it. My father had had one just like it.

  A Brooklyn Navy Yard war factory worker’s badge.

  It would have the old man’s name on it, but the Nazi had already stolen the name of Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy. It would also have the old man’s photograph, but anyone who would steal a woman’s picture to put in his code-o-graph could probably figure out a way around that, too.

  But you couldn’t turn up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard wearing the badge of somebody who also might show up there. You would have to do something to keep that from happening.

  The Nazi took another step toward the old man and raised his hand, his hand that had black in the creases, black from all the evil he’d done. He was reaching for the old man’s neck, a skinny neck left exposed by the way the old man’s head was resting on the Buy War Bonds poster.

  I got to my feet and pressed my palms against the scratched-up windows of the subway car door.

  The train rounded a curve, and the Nazi steadied himself.

  I thought about banging my fists on the scratched-up glass and stopping the Nazi from doing what I was certain he was going to do—wrap his black-creased hands around that skinny neck and squeeze it until the old man was dead. But then I thought—and I remember this clearly—that if I don’t bang my fists on the glass, and the Nazi does squeeze that skinny neck, if the Nazi takes that war factory badge, I could go home right now and leave my father a message that says

  YES IM SURE.

  And while I was hesitating, while I was feeling that scratched-up glass under my palms, the train slowed beneath my feet.

  The Nazi’s hand moved toward the old man’s neck, and then past it, falling onto his shoulder and giving it a shake. The old man jerked his head, suddenly awake. The Nazi pointed past his ear at the signs for 59th Street, moving past the windows as we pulled into the station.

  The train stopped. The skinny old man grabbed the handle of his lunch pail and stood, rubbing at his face. He gave the Nazi a small salute and walked off the train.

  The Nazi turned and went back to his seat.

  I sat back in mine.

  The doors closed and the train began moving. We made a hard left turn onto the tracks for the Sea Beach Line.

  The Nazi and I were going to Coney Island.

  • • •

  The Nazi and I rode the subway all the way to the end of the line. When the train stopped on the elevated platform, I followed him off, stepping into what seemed like another world, a world where everyone else had disappeared, and it was very cold, and very, very dark.

  We were near the ocean, and because of the threat of German U-boats floating beneath the black waves, no lights were left on at Coney Island. I moved through the blackness, listening for the sound of the Nazi’s factory shoes on the pavement, like following footsteps on the radio, my hands splayed in front of my face to keep myself from walking into anything. There was no one on the streets, no one driving on the road. There was only the Nazi’s footfalls and the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, like endless card-shuffling.

  I was surprised by how fast the Nazi could move in the dark, certain he’d come out here before. A gust of wind blew in from the ocean, full of salt that bit at my cheeks. It rattled something ahead, something that sounded like ice knocking together in hundreds of glasses, as if a horde of Nazis were ahead in the darkness sipping on cold drinks. I squinted into the black night and saw bits of light, glinting. As I came closer, they turned into a glittering wall of ice illuminated by the downward-casting bulb of a single lamp.

  Another salty gust of wind blew in, and the glittering wall shook, sounding once again like ice in the drinks of a hundred Nazis. I squinted. It was not ice, but a chain-link fence catching light in the cold, clear night.

  The Nazi continued toward the fence, not break
ing stride, as if he believed he had the power to walk straight through it. At the last second the fence slid back only enough for him to pass through, and the instant he did, it slammed shut behind him. He raised his arm in what at first I thought was the Nazi salute, but was only a wave. I looked back at the fence, and only then noticed the small building—no more than a box—near where the Nazi had entered. A man’s head was outlined in its dimly lit window.

  The Nazi disappeared into the darkness beyond the fence.

  But I knew these fences—some version of them were around every playground and schoolyard in New York City. Staying away from that small building and the man inside, I crept up to the fence, ran my hands along its icy diamonds. After a few feet, I found what I was looking for, the place where the sections of fence joined together, the narrow gap between the metal pipes.

  I squeezed an arm and a leg through, but got stuck on the reindeer sweater. I didn’t know how far ahead of me the Nazi was. Far, I thought. I slipped back through the fence and yanked off the sweater. Cold air blew through my T-shirt, but without the sweater, I fit easily through the fence. It wasn’t until I was through and running in the dark that it occurred to me that I could have held the reindeer sweater in my hand.

  I ran blindly into blackness. And then I wasn’t running anymore. I was on the ground, tripped up by something colder than the air, something that was hard beneath my hands. Train tracks, crisscrossing the pavement in every direction.

  I sat up and listened. The heavy footsteps of the Nazi were gone, but I heard buzzing, as if there were hives of bees somewhere out in the darkness. I got to my feet and ran toward the sound, feeling the tracks merge and split beneath the soles of my shoes.

  The buzzing led me to a hulking building. The sound was deafening, even through its walls, even with its big sliding doors pulled closed. There was no light anywhere. If the building had windows, they’d been painted over. I moved along its side, looking for a way in. Turning a corner, I saw a narrow rectangle of light hitting the pavement. One of the wide doors hadn’t been pulled all the way shut.

  I crept closer to it. Here the buzzing was joined by loud clanging—metal against metal—and a low electrical humming that made me jittery. This was a factory. A Nazi factory building things for Hitler right next to where the rest of New York came to ride the Cyclone and splash around in the ocean.

  I slipped through the opening in the door.

  In the air before me hung a floating subway car.

  Its metal wheels hovered above the floor at the height of my head, and shining out of the car’s undercarriage was a blindingly bright white light. A light so powerful it had carved a deep hole into the cement floor beneath the car in its own shape. There was a man—a Nazi—moving around inside that hole. He wore a hard hat and had goggles over his eyes, and he knew some trick that let him stand in that powerful white light and not be harmed.

  I pressed myself against the wall where the shadows were thickest and looked about the cavernous room. There were at least a dozen of these floating subway cars hovering in the air, all of them shooting out blinding white light, all of them with a Nazi who knew the trick of staying unharmed in it moving around beneath its undercarriage.

  I was in 1942, at the very end of the age when it was possible for me to enter a place like this and imagine I’d entered a world that belonged more in a comic book than at the southernmost tip of Brooklyn. But as I say, I was at the very end of that age, and as I stood with my back pressed against the wall of that room, I began to notice that the wheels of all those subway cars were resting on raised tracks, and that all that blinding white light was more probably shining up into their undercarriages rather than down from them. And not long after those two realizations slid into my brain, I remembered my father telling me about the Coney Island Yards, the true end of the line for broken subway cars.

  But in 1942, I was still young enough—and had lost enough—that the real world didn’t possess a fair chance of impressing itself on me. And once I understood where I was, I also understood what the Nazi was doing there. He had come to sabotage the New York subway system. And all I had to do was catch him at it.

  The islands of white light around the floating subway cars were the only light in the big room. The rest was in shadow. I pushed myself off the wall, heading toward the nearest raised-up car. One of these men in the hard hats and goggles was my Nazi; I would skirt the light and find him.

  My feet tangled in a snarl of wire and I fell to my knees. But with the buzzing and the clanging and that electrical hum I was coming to believe was the vibration of my own nerve endings, even I didn’t hear the fall. I got back up and moved closer to the white light.

  A hand clamped over my mouth.

  I knew this hand, recognized its scent—acrid and oily—from the roof on Ludlow Street. I could picture it as perfectly as if I was examining it beneath all that bright white light, black in the places where my father’s hand was white, black in the creases where the ghosts of my father’s photographs lived. But who could say what lived in the creases of the Nazi’s hand?

  I threw my body from side to side trying to get free; an arm wrapped itself around my chest like a snake. Then I was being dragged backward.

  I dug my heels into the floor, but the cement was smooth and the soles of my shoes slid as if I was being pulled over ice. I yanked at the arm locked across my chest, but it might as well have been made out of iron. The Nazi dragged me until there was no more floor under my feet, until I was falling into one of the deep holes under the floating subway cars, this one dark and unlit. This one empty except for me and the Nazi, his hand on my mouth, his arm across my chest, and the bulk of him pressed against my back.

  “I will take my hand away,” he said, in that voice that made everything sound like a lie. “If you do not yell.”

  I nodded beneath his oily-smelling hand. It was so loud in this room, there was no point in yelling.

  His hand left my mouth, and I backed away from him.

  It was dark under the subway car, and my eyes weren’t good in the dark. The Nazi was all shadows, like a person made out of smoke.

  “You,” he said, “from Rivington Street.”

  I shook my head, thinking if he believed I was only some kid who had wandered in, he might let me go.

  “Why are you following me?”

  In his undertone, working its way up between the lies, I heard fear, and that made me less afraid.

  “I know what you are,” I told him.

  I saw him startle in the darkness.

  “And what is that?”

  “A Nazi.”

  He unwound the scarf from around his neck and sighed.

  “One thing I am not is a Nazi,” he told me.

  I moved away, pressed my back against the cold cement wall.

  “Why should I believe you?” I said.

  “To begin, I am a Jew.”

  “Prove it.”

  From out of the darkness, I heard him laugh. Though if laughter had an undertone, his would be saying there was nothing here that was funny.

  The Nazi shook his head. “Never before have I been asked to prove that I was a Jew.”

  “I’m asking you to prove it.”

  “Why?”

  “I need you to.”

  “You have heard of the ship the St. Louis?” he said.

  “The ship of Jewish refugees?”

  From the still way his shadowy figure was standing, the Nazi must have been staring at me.

  “I was one of them.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said.

  “But it is true.”

  Over the years I have wondered why Jakob—for that was his name, at least all the name I ever learned—told me this. Why he told me any of what he said that night. For once he realized I knew nothing about him, he could have lifted me out fr
om under that subway car and gotten somebody, perhaps another transit cop, to take me home without ever telling me any of the information it was so dangerous for other people to know. My only guess is that he needed to tell the story. That he had kept it inside for too long, and that I—a twelve-year-old boy out in the middle of the night on a mission of his own imagination—seemed the safest place to put it.

  “Sit,” he told me. “Because if I am going to tell you how I got onto the St. Louis, how I got here, I am going to have to tell you about Rebecca.”

  Eleven

  JAKOB

  That she had a bad heart was the first thing Rebecca told me about herself. This was on a warm afternoon of thunderstorms, after the two of us had waited for the hour Jews were allowed on the Friedrichstrasse underground. You, I think, are too young to know this, but most love stories begin in the rain. There is something about sunshine that makes people believe they can stand better being alone.

  My clothes were soaked from waiting outside. Still I sat next to her and stared at her dark hair. Later, she said to me that she was making bets with herself on the number of stops we would make before I said something to her. But in the end, it was she who spoke first. That day, I thought it was because Rebecca had no patience. Later, I knew it was because she had no time.

  “What do you suppose they did with the Romani?” she said.

  “The Romani?”

  “The gypsies. Have you noticed the way they have all vanished?”

  I thought about how I had not seen the women who wore always three or four dirty skirts, one atop the other, begging for coins outside the cafe on Wassertorplatz the past few mornings.

  “Where do you think they have gone?” I asked her.