A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  I held my breath, listening for the scraping of another boat. Listening for the hard shoes on the steps that led from the boardwalk to the beach. Waves broke on the sand, wind blew the cables of the Parachute Jump against its steel scaffolding. The footsteps shifted from side to side, then moved away, heading down the boardwalk.

  When I returned with the last of the coats, the deaf refugee had landed. She and Rose stood apart from the others, surrounded by darkness yet catching the moonlight, as if they were magnets for it—Rose’s camel-colored coat and the deaf refugee’s dress.

  The pale light caught their hands as well, fluttering in the black night. But this was not like watching Rose and the boy in the playground. The deaf refugee nodded at only some of the words Rose made in the air. The rest made her shake her head, sent her own hands flying in interruption, smaller birds driving away bigger ones from a nest. It was as if Rose and the deaf refugee had sent away for code-o-graphs but had each received different versions, versions where a few of the letter codes were off, rendering every message half-understood.

  What we didn’t know was that American Sign Language wasn’t universal. The deaf refugee had learned a French version, and it was a kind of miracle that she and Rose found any common words in the language their hands made in the moonlight. Or perhaps it was no miracle, perhaps it was only the luck that had attached itself to this master plan for rescue dreamed up by a boy.

  And so far, it was lucky. The five rounded black shapes of the inflatable boats sat at the water’s edge, reflecting white in the places they were wet. And on the beach, twenty-three refugees—fourteen boys and nine girls—stood shivering in damp coats, cold and wet, but alive.

  I counted them—this time putting my hands on them. Touching the damp wool front of each poor box coat, my fingers pressing firmly enough to feel the resistance of breastbone, the solidity of a person who for weeks had been living inside my head. The last one I counted was the deaf refugee. She’d just finished buttoning up her coat when my hand fell on the front of it. She raised her head and studied my face, as if my touch was somehow part of the secret language she and Rose shared. Then she smiled. There was the black gap of a missing tooth on the left side of her mouth.

  “Let’s go to Paradise,” I said.

  We walked away from the inflatable boats, our footsteps silent in the sand.

  We came up onto the boardwalk between the curved tracks of the Tornado and the Wonder Wheel, white and round like a moon fallen to the earth. The amusements were dark and shuttered because of the war and winter, but still there were people walking along the boardwalk, looking out to sea. None of them paid us any attention. Not the old couple bundled like sausages against the cold. Not the soldier and his girl, kissing against the side of Stauch’s Dance Hall. Not the man with the Civil Defense armband just like Uncle Glenn’s, squinting out at the shoreline as if maybe he saw something reflecting white out there. We were only kids—twenty-three of us with coats wetter and sandier than the others—fooling around at Coney Island.

  We wove our way through the rides and shuttered arcades and came out onto Surf Avenue, crossing the street near the entrance to Luna Park, passing beneath the giant pinwheels, which—had it not been for the Dim-Out—would have been lit up with a thousand tiny lights, would have been spinning and dazzling the refugees. We were a block from the subway and we might as well have been invisible. None of the factory workers hurrying past us with their hair tied up in turbans and their metal lunch pails in their hands glanced at us. We were only kids—twenty-three of us paler than normal from a week under the ocean—walking past the Sodamat and Bushman Baths and Bernstein’s Penny Arcade.

  Inside the grimy light of the Stillwell Avenue station, Albie and I handed each of the refugees a nickel for the turnstile. Those nickels that had been spent as offerings for saints—Joseph and Mary and Francis of Assisi. Then we all went up to the platform and got onto a Manhattan-bound train, sitting together in the last car.

  In the better light of the subway car, I wished Albie and I had stolen some hats. Some of the refugees looked as if they’d cut their own hair. Chopped-looking bangs fell unevenly across their foreheads and stuck out above their ears. I glanced around the subway car to see if any of the factory workers or soldiers or women sitting with bags of groceries on their laps were looking at us. But this was wartime, when people had other things on their minds—sons and lovers who were off where somebody was shooting at them.

  Around DeKalb Avenue, I heard a sound like a waterfall and looked down. The refugees’ coats were raining sand, small steady streams of it falling onto the floor of the train. And still not one person on the subway paid attention to us. New York City was full of kids with bad haircuts, kids who’d been playing at the beach, kids roaming the city on their own. We were only more of them. Only kids—twenty-three of us who were supposed to have been on an entirely different kind of train.

  • • •

  We came aboveground at Times Square, stood in the artificial smoke drifting down from the soldier’s cigarette on the Camel billboard. The neon was dark, the top half of every headlight blacked out, yet the streets were crowded with soldiers and girls and people dressed up in good clothes, all rushing to the shows that went on behind their unlit signs.

  We headed west into Hell’s Kitchen, where there were always a hundred kids on the street, most of whom were usually wearing somebody else’s coat. Rose walked behind me, her moonlit presence shining on my back. Albie was beside me, the top of his wool cap at the edge of my vision.

  When we were a block from Paradise, I told him my father would be there.

  “Your father?” he said. “Why would he be there?”

  “I left him a message.”

  Albie stopped walking.

  “Where?”

  There was something in his voice that made me not want to say any more. I tried to keep us moving down 43rd Street, but now that Albie had stopped, I had to as well.

  “Where did you leave the message?” he repeated.

  “In our mailbox.”

  “And somebody took it?”

  “He did,” I said. “My father.”

  Rose came to stand beside me.

  “Tell me what the message said.” Albie sounded as if he was holding his breath.

  I looked at the twenty-three refugees standing in a quiet line down 43rd Street.

  “It said, ‘Come to Paradise Photo at nine.’”

  Albie exhaled, then he and Rose stared at each other, neither of them saying a word.

  “But it was in code,” I told them. “They’re always in code.” I took out my Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph and waved it around in the dark. “And anyway, why are you asking me these questions?”

  Albie pulled off his wool hat and held it in his hands, as if what he had to tell me couldn’t be told wearing a hat.

  “Because,” he said, “your father is dead.”

  I have wondered how it was that Albie could destroy the world I’d so carefully built with only five words. Destroy it as instantly and irrevocably as our bombs—in less than three years—would destroy those Japanese cities. Herr Brackman had once told Pietr that if people don’t want to know the truth, you can put it on the front page and they will find a way not to see it. But perhaps there is something different about hearing the truth. Or perhaps it has more to do with who is doing the telling.

  Whatever the explanation, the moment I heard those five words, the world in which my father had rolled out of the way of the uptown A in the nick of time, the world in which he would come back when the war ended needing his white shirts and his hats smelling of Wildroot Cream-Oil, collapsed in on itself. It seemed as if my eyes had gone entirely bad, as if I had turned blind. I was surrounded by darkness, and entirely alone.

  Cold water—freezing water—rushed into my lungs, filling them up, choking off my breath, stopping me f
rom grabbing any new air. I stood on the corner of 43rd Street with my mouth open and gasping and the world gone dark, drowning on dry land.

  Fingers, warm from the pocket of a shining coat, slipped around mine.

  I drew a breath. The downward-casting streetlights of 43rd Street blossomed back into my vision.

  Albie was studying the sidewalk as if he was looking for those five words, perhaps to take them back.

  “I always thought you believed me,” I said.

  He glanced up. “I thought it was like Mordy.”

  “Your brother?”

  “He was shot down the first month.”

  Details clicked into place, and I realized I should have guessed it. The old-fashioned schoolbag. The map with more colored tacks than anyone could fly. The pocketknife. The flying cap.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.”

  Albie shrugged.

  The deaf refugee tugged on Rose’s sleeve, probably wanting to know why we had stopped. Why we were all standing on 43rd Street.

  “We can’t go to Paradise,” Albie said. “We don’t know who’s waiting there.”

  “What about the families?” Rose asked.

  “Without them,” Albie nodded at the refugees, “the families haven’t done anything wrong.”

  I pulled my hand out of Rose’s warm one and took a few steps in the direction of the corner, as if the solution was up ahead on Ninth Avenue. The movement rustled my father’s messages against my chest.

  Except they couldn’t be my father’s messages.

  “What about Jakob?” I said, turning back. “He’s there.”

  Albie, Rose, and I stood quiet on the cold street.

  I slipped my hand into the weighted pocket where I kept my father’s gun.

  “You go back to Times Square,” I said to them. “Meet me later under the Camel sign.”

  “You’re sure?” Albie said.

  I nodded, but I was wishing I had his flying cap.

  He said something in Yiddish to the refugees and turned them back up 43rd Street. I stood on the sidewalk watching them go. Rose was at the end of the line, her coat the one shining thing in the whole of Hell’s Kitchen.

  • • •

  I watched Rose’s coat wink out like a dying star, then turned and ran down 43rd Street, barreling around the corner onto Ninth Avenue, telling myself it wasn’t as late as it felt, that the boats had come ashore early, that the subway had traveled faster, that Albie hadn’t taken as much time telling me my father was dead.

  Paradise Photo sat quiet, the window of brides dark and the door open a crack. I hurried through the dark front office, past Harry Jupiter’s desk with its bottle of rye whiskey and tumbling piles of negatives, past the girlie calendar perpetually opened to May 1936.

  A dim light was on in the photo studio, shining a narrow strip on the floor beneath the thick curtains. I ought to have hesitated, taken the time to look first, considered everything I should have seen coming, but instead I pushed my way through the dusty curtains, blinding myself as I went from dark to light.

  When my eyes adjusted, I saw Jakob sitting on Harry Jupiter’s desk chair. Somebody had placed it in front of the backdrop of the Roman Coliseum, and he looked as if he was waiting for the lions to come roaring out of the archways behind his head.

  Next to him—dressed in his black spying clothes—was Uncle Glenn.

  I suppose that someplace inside—someplace I could keep myself from looking at—I’d known it all along. Known the he had been the one who belonged to the wheeze.

  Known, too—I realized as I stood with the curtains at my back and my heart hammering—that he had been the one sending me the messages.

  “Why?” My voice bounced off the backdrops of Mount Rushmore and Niagara Falls, like I was trying for an echo. “Why did you pretend to be him?”

  My uncle took a step toward me, then seemed to think better of it.

  “At first I thought you would know it was me.”

  “And when you saw that I didn’t?”

  “I thought it would be more kind to let you keep believing.”

  A picture came into my head of all the nights I’d sat pressing my hands against those pieces of paper, certain I could feel my father’s magnetism on them, feel the electric tingle. All the weeks I’d walked around with those messages tucked inside my shirt, all the times I’d pressed them against the skin of my chest, thinking how they had only recently been touched by my father, thinking how now they were touching me.

  I lunged for my uncle. To do what? Beat my hands against him? Make him pay for all those nights and weeks? Probably.

  But before I could get halfway across the room, a man I hadn’t seen stepped out of the shadows. He was big and barrel-chested, and had the kind of thin-lipped mouth that looked as if it had long ago decided smiling wasn’t worth the time.

  “Where are the refugees?” he said to me.

  “He will know by now there are no refugees,” Jakob interrupted.

  It was the first thing he’d said since I’d entered the room. He pushed himself to the front of Harry Jupiter’s chair, and though he was talking to the barrel-chested man, he was looking at me.

  “He will know by now that there never were any refugees.”

  “I’ll bet they’re right outside,” Uncle Glenn said.

  He strode across the room past me and disappeared through the curtains.

  Jakob, the barrel-chested man, and I stood in the photo studio, listening to Uncle Glenn’s footsteps echo past Harry Jupiter’s desk. I kept my gaze on Jakob’s face, trying to read what he wanted me to do. I could feel the barrel-chested man’s eyes moving over us.

  Uncle Glenn’s footsteps rushed back.

  “Where are they?” he said to me.

  “They are nowhere,” Jakob told him. “Because it was not children that got off those boats.”

  “Who was it then?”

  “It was men.”

  What was Jakob thinking? Men getting out of those inflatable boats would not save him from the barrel-chested man, who, though he had said very little, was clearly in charge and dangerous.

  “You’re lying,” Uncle Glenn said. “I heard it myself. Twenty-three children landing on a beach.”

  Jakob gave him a sick smile. “Do you actually think anyone would trust the lives of twenty-three refugees to a rescue plan dreamed up by a boy?”

  Uncle Glenn began to say something more, but the barrel-chested man raised his hand, and Uncle Glenn closed his mouth.

  The man began to walk toward me, taking his time. He stopped three feet away, as if he knew by instinct how my eyes worked.

  “Did men get out of those boats?”

  His voice was gentle, but his undertone told me he was turning it that way.

  They were children, refugees. What could they do to them?

  But they had no visas. And after my night under the floating subway car, I knew too well what could be done to them.

  “Was it men?” the barrel-chested man repeated.

  I looked around his bulk at Jakob.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How many?”

  I recalled the five inflatable boats reflecting white in the moonlight.

  “Five.”

  The man swiveled his head around. “Why would you involve this boy?”

  “He involved himself,” Jakob said. “I decided to make use of him.”

  “How?”

  “Someone had to show them where the subway was.”

  “But children?”

  “They are a good disguise. There are always children at Coney Island.”

  The barrel-chested man turned back to me.

  “Where did these five men go?”

  “Pennsylvania Station.”

  It was t
he first place I could think of that wasn’t Times Square.

  The man walked back across the room and stood above Jakob’s chair.

  “Who are these men? Why are they here?”

  Every trace of the gentleness had disappeared from his voice.

  Jakob shrugged. “They do not tell me such information.”

  “And you don’t ask?”

  “I no longer care for politics.”

  “And if they are here to work for the Germans, you don’t care about that?”

  “You think I should care because I am a Jew?”

  Jakob stared into the face of the barrel-chested man.

  “You think being a Jew means I should be on the side of this country? I was once on a boat of nine hundred Jews, nine hundred refugees who sailed up and down the coast of Florida hoping for a place to land. And do you know what we were to this country? A tourist attraction.”

  Jakob’s dark hair was hanging in his eyes. For some reason I remembered him telling me how Lena would cut it for him. I wondered who cut it for him now.

  The barrel-chested man shook his head. “You are making things worse for yourself.”

  Jakob gave an unhappy laugh. “After the worst has already happened?”

  Uncle Glenn pushed himself between Jakob and the man. “If there were no refugees, why did you come here?”

  Jakob nodded toward me. “I knew he would come. And I knew he would need to hear some kind of explanation. I did not know you gentlemen would be waiting for me.”

  “This is all an elaborate lie,” Uncle Glenn said.

  “If I were lying, I would tell you no one landed,” Jakob told him.

  “We need to look for those refugees.”

  “You cannot find what doesn’t exist.”

  “Twenty-three children,” Uncle Glenn said to the barrel-chested man. “They can’t be far. And they can’t be hard to find.”

  “I have given you myself,” Jakob said quietly. “Can that not be enough?”

  The pleading in Jakob’s voice was clear—even Uncle Glenn had to have heard what Jakob was asking of him. But Jakob hadn’t heard the story of Camp Siegfried and the swimming meet, he didn’t know about the Cauet hand and how hard it could strike in that soft place between neck and shoulder. He had never heard Uncle Glenn’s father speak to his pigeons in the soft German he never used with his son. Jakob couldn’t know that Uncle Glenn would not consider one sacrifice enough if he believed there were still twenty-three more opportunities to be a hero wandering in the night.