A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  Only I could stop him. Only I could keep what Jakob and I had told the barrel-chested man from turning worthless. Only I could keep what Jakob and I had done from turning worthless.

  I pulled my father’s gun out of my pocket and aimed it at my uncle.

  “You do not want to do this, Jack,” Jakob said.

  But I did want to do it.

  And for so many reasons. To save the refugees. For making Jakob and me tell a story we both knew would not end well for him. For the messages that were now scratching at the skin of my chest like I’d shoved a nest of spiders inside my shirt. And also, for the part of me where reason had not yet reached, the part that kept looking at the door that said Knock or die and expecting my father to step out.

  The barrel-chested man did not move. I don’t think he believed me capable of shooting at anybody.

  Uncle Glenn, on the other hand, began wheezing. It sounded louder and more rasping than it had behind the roof door. Louder than I had heard—or imagined—it these past weeks.

  He waved his hands in front of himself—perhaps asking me not to shoot him—but he couldn’t force any sound past his frantic gasping for breath.

  In the seconds before I pulled the trigger, I wondered if my uncle carried his code-o-graph in his pocket, if he wrote the messages that were supposed to be from my father on Aunt May’s ruffled place mats.

  The gun went off with a loud bang.

  My shoulder jolted from the kickback, and my ears rang as if there was a bell clanging inside my head.

  Uncle Glenn fell to his knees. Harry Jupiter’s desk chair with Jakob in it toppled over.

  The barrel-chested man lunged for me, and I ran.

  I went through the front office, spilling out into the blackness of 43rd Street, my ears too deafened by the noise of the gun to know if the barrel-chested man was behind me. I headed toward Eighth Avenue, remembering I had a gun in my hand only when I caught one of the Hell’s Kitchen kids staring at it. I shoved it into my pocket and fled down the war-darkened street, pieces of the torn and discarded messages—still warm from my body—flying out behind me like snow.

  I ran all the way to the 42nd Street subway station, stood at the edge of the platform looking down at the garbage trapped between the tracks—cigarette butts and the wrapper from a Mounds candy bar that would have smelled exactly like the skin at Rose LoPinto’s throat—until an uptown A rumbled deep in the tunnel, blowing warm, mouse-scented air into my face, ruffling my hair.

  I forced myself to keep my eyes on the narrow space between the tracks and the third rail as the train came screaming into the station. Calculated the type of speed it would take to roll out of the way, the amount of space it would require to fit between track and rail. I made myself stand on that platform as train after train slid into the station, keeping my eyes fixed on that impossibly narrow space until I was positive I would never again convince myself that anyone would be able to survive a tumble into it.

  Then I went back up to look for Albie and Rose and the refugees.

  • • •

  I found Albie in the drifting smoke under the Camel cigarette sign.

  “Where’s Rose?”

  “She waited awhile, but it got late.”

  “And the refugees?”

  “We found the families.”

  “Where?”

  “At Paradise.” The edges of Albie’s smile disappeared into the earflaps of his wool hat.

  “When?” I said. “How?”

  Because it was too cold to wander Times Square, Albie and Rose had taken the refugees to the Loews movie theater on 44th Street, sneaking them in through the side exit. They’d sat in the front row, away from everyone else, while Albie translated the dialogue into Yiddish.

  “It was Pride of the Yankees with Babe Ruth and Gary Cooper, but I still don’t think they have any idea how baseball works.”

  When the movie was over, they came back and stood under the Camel cigarette sign and waited for me. After half an hour, Rose suggested they go to Paradise and see if I was all right.

  “Rose suggested that?”

  But when they arrived, Paradise was dark and empty.

  “No police cars?” I asked him. “No ambulances?”

  Albie was explaining to the refugees that they would go back to Times Square—talking in Yiddish—when a man stepped out of the shadows and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “He asked me if we’d been to Coney Island lately.”

  The man told Albie that earlier that evening, as he and his wife were about to enter Paradise Photo, three men had come hurrying out. Something didn’t seem right, so the man sent his wife to wait in a bar on Ninth Avenue while he kept watch. When the other families arrived, he sent them to wait on Ninth Avenue, too.

  When Albie told the man that yes, as a matter of fact, they had just come from Coney Island, the man ran around the corner. In less than a minute, he was back with the families, fifteen men and women dressed in dark clothes to blend with the night.

  “They stood on the sidewalk in two bunches. Refugees on one side, families on the other. And nobody knew who belonged to who.”

  Then the man who’d tapped Albie on the shoulder said a name into the dark, only a first name, because that was all they had, and one of the refugees, a tall boy, one of the few in a coat that was too small for him, crossed over to the side with the families.

  “That’s how they found each other, the families saying the name of a refugee into the night, a name they had learned by heart, and then waiting for the right one to walk into their arms.”

  Except for the deaf refugee. The deaf refugee’s mother spoke her name with her hands, spelling it out in that secret code.

  “Did anybody see you?” I said.

  “It’s Hell’s Kitchen. The only people around are stumblebums and drunks. They probably believe they dreamed the whole thing.”

  I stood in the artificial smoke drifting down from the Camel soldier, seeing the refugees fade into the night.

  “And Jakob?” Albie asked.

  “Tomorrow,” I told him.

  For tonight I didn’t want Albie to have any story that wasn’t the refugees walking into the arms of their families.

  Sixteen

  The next morning, I retrieved the flying cap that had belonged to Albie’s brother from the shoebox labeled Tax Receipts and replaced it with my father’s gun. Two artifacts of the dead exchanging places with each other.

  I arrived in the sunless alley before Albie had had time to light up his first cigarette, before Elliott Marshman or anybody had come to watch him smoke it. I returned the cap and gave him an account of everything that had happened the previous night at Paradise, everything except the detail of firing my father’s gun at Uncle Glenn.

  “It was your uncle writing the messages?” he said.

  I nodded.

  Albie stuck a cigarette to his lower lip.

  “I would have wanted to shoot him,” he told me.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “It’s always a long story,” he replied.

  For the whole of that day, Rose’s desk sat empty next to me.

  As soon as I was let out of P.S. 52, I went down to Jakob’s tenement and banged on his door. A woman coming out of another apartment told me that three men in suits had come and taken away most of Jakob’s things. That the super had just let them in.

  “Guess you can’t trust anybody,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure if she meant the super or Jakob.

  The pigeons, though, were still on the roof, softening the cold air with their cooing. I gave them water and more feed. When I looked inside the Garcia y Vega cigar box, I saw only the metal capsules rolling around. I suspected Jakob had started carrying his code-o-graph in his pocket the way I carried mine, and I wondered what the barr
el-chested man would make of it, if he’d let Jakob keep the picture of Rebecca.

  I did not see my uncle Glenn—not that I went looking for him. But I was sure that if I’d killed him, I would have heard about it.

  Rose didn’t return to P.S. 52 on Friday, and I began to be worried that something had happened to her on the way back from Times Square. I went to her building and rang the bell, hoping for her voice to come out of the little holes in the wall. When it didn’t, I walked into the street and looked up at her windows. The blue star was gone.

  On Saturday, I returned to Jakob’s tenement with the Radio Flyer and a hammer and knocked the legs off the pigeons’ coop. I tied the coop to the wagon with twine and paid a kid in Jakob’s building a quarter I’d taken from my mother’s wallet to help me carry the whole thing to the street.

  I could have taken the Radio Flyer and the pigeons onto the subway. I’d seen stranger things. An organ grinder and his monkey. Two men moving an icebox. Albie and me and a baby carriage full of poor box coats. But I didn’t. I wanted to walk. To pull the wagon loaded with Jakob’s pigeons all the way up Broadway from the Lower East Side to Dyckman Street—more than two hundred blocks.

  It was a freezing day, but at 23rd Street I took off my jacket and threw it on top of the coop. By 50th Street, my palms were so sweaty I kept losing my grip on the handle. When I stopped to wipe my hand across the front of my shirt, it left a red trail across my chest.

  As I passed Lou Brown’s Pool Parlor, Uncle Glenn came out carrying the leather case he used for his pool cue. In the frail winter sun, he looked pale and chubby. It was the first time I’d seen him up close since I’d shot at him, and I think that if I’d still had my father’s gun in my pocket—and if pulling the wagon hadn’t made my fingers so stiff I couldn’t bend them—I might have shot at him again.

  My uncle set his leather case on top of the coop and took the handle out of my blood-sticky hand. I would have stopped him, but I couldn’t lift my arm above my waist.

  Uncle Glenn pulled the wagon the rest of the way to our building, then talked Mr. Rubini from 2D into helping him carry the coop up to the roof. Two days later, when I got home from P.S. 52, it was standing on four new wooden legs.

  It was a week before my uncle and I spoke, an early December day with a chill that lets you know winter is setting in for good. Uncle Glenn had come to the roof with a bag of feed and as he turned to go, I stopped him with the question that had been keeping me up at night.

  “Jakob,” I said. “I didn’t shoot him, did I?”

  My uncle said that the bullet from my father’s gun had sailed across Harry Jupiter’s photo studio, neatly dividing the air between him and Jakob before piercing the backdrop of the Roman Coliseum, leaving a perfectly round hole above one of the painted archways.

  “Where is he now?” I asked.

  “In a jail in Washington,” Uncle Glenn said. “They plan to try him for treason.”

  The two of us stood and watched the pigeons scatter seed onto the black tar.

  “It would go better for him if you told what we both know.”

  “It was men,” I said. Because you cannot find what doesn’t exist.

  Rose did not come back to P.S. 52. And I began to believe I’d invented her. That she had been part of the world in which my father was alive, and now that it was gone, she’d vanished with it. I was afraid to ask anyone about her, afraid of what they’d say, We never knew such a girl. A girl who wore a microphone box called a RadioEar pinned close to her smooth olive-colored throat.

  • • •

  As that winter turned into rainy spring, I believed I had lost everything. My father. Jakob. Rose. Even my uncle Glenn. I would have imagined this would make me feel lighter, hollowed out. Yet I sat beside Rose’s empty desk day after day and could barely lift my head. I dragged myself to the roof and stood before the fluttering coop feeling as if my body was made of cement. At night, I lay in front of the Silvertone like someone knocked out in a fight, trying to fill my head with pictures of horses’ hooves or the shining fender of the Green Hornet’s automobile. But all I saw was Jakob being led out of Paradise by the barrel-chested man.

  After a while, I couldn’t listen to the radio. I stayed in my room with the door shut. Lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, much like my mother, but without the cigarettes. When I couldn’t drive the picture of Jakob and the barrel-chested man out of my head, I began to tell Jakob’s story to myself, out loud, as if I was a kind of radio.

  Each night I began a little further back. From when I found him on the subway. From the day he boarded the St. Louis. From the day he met Rebecca on the streetcar. But always ending in the same place, the night he gave himself up for the twenty-three refugees.

  I told Jakob’s story to my walls, to my luminous-face alarm clock, to my cowboy and Indian bedspread. But all this relentless telling and retelling of Jakob’s story, all this talking into the emptiness of my room, made me no less heavy. Each time I told Jakob’s story out loud to no one, the weight of all those words seemed to fall onto me, burying me deeper, like poor box coats in sand.

  I began to believe that the only way to dig myself out from under the weight of the story was to tell it to someone else. Someone to whom it would matter.

  And there were only twenty-three of those people in the world.

  “Can you remember any of the names the families called out that night?” I said to Albie.

  He told me twelve names, and though I followed him all day, I couldn’t make him remember any more.

  But these were first names and not much to go on.

  I asked him if the families had said their own names.

  “They said as little as possible,” he told me. “I think that was the point.”

  Could he remember what they’d been wearing? Perhaps one of the fathers had been in a bus driver’s uniform? Maybe one was dressed like a waiter and had the name of the restaurant on his pocket.

  “They were wearing coats, just like the refugees.”

  Had they all headed for the subway? Had anyone gotten into a car with a license plate? Had he seen which direction they’d gone?

  “They just slipped away into the dark.”

  I questioned Albie every day, sure there was some detail he’d forgotten, some detail he’d remember if only I asked him enough times. I questioned him until I couldn’t anymore, because he was never alone. He was always either in the sunless alley surrounded by boys watching him smoke or walking toward Vermilyea Street in the company of three or four people I didn’t know, talking about subjects that had nothing to do with refugees.

  I believe I wore away any satisfaction Albie took from what we’d done that night with my ceaseless questions. I do know those questions ended the friendship between us. Knew it the morning I turned up early in the alley hoping to ask him if he thought any of the families had seemed to know Paradise, if any of them had acted familiar with the neighborhood. Only Elliott Marshman was there, using the sole of his orthopedic shoe to scrape Albie’s cigarette butts into a corner. Elliott had looked up when I entered, then quickly turned away. But before he did, I’d seen pity behind his pale lashes.

  I memorized the twelve names Albie had given me. Learned them by heart the way the families had. Then I roamed the streets of the city, repeating them to myself as I studied the faces of everybody who was near to my own age, looking for traces of the people who’d scraped ashore in those boats.

  Once on Essex Street I put my hand on the shoulder of a pale, dark-haired boy I believed I recognized and said all eight of the boys’ names Albie had told me. The boy stared back, then shoved me in the chest with both hands, knocking me to the sidewalk.

  “Go back to Hell’s Kitchen, Paddy,” he told me.

  • • •

  In late March, Uncle Glenn came to see me on the roof. It was one of the first warm days of
spring, one of the first that wasn’t raining, and I was flying the pigeons, a gray swarm circling in the blue sky. I’d been doing this more and more—flying Jakob’s birds—though not once did I consider writing a message and tying it to their legs.

  “They’re sending Jakob back to Germany.”

  “What about his trial?”

  “They don’t really have anything against him,” Uncle Glenn said. “Besides what he says against himself.”

  “And what you say.”

  Uncle Glenn stared at his shoes, pushed a few feathers around with the toes.

  “I’m no longer very sure what that is anymore.” He rubbed a hand over his thinning hair. “They’ve managed to convince the Germans he’s worth trading for a real spy. One of ours.”

  “And what do you think will happen to him when they find out he’s not?”

  “I don’t think he much cares.”

  I stared into the sky, watched Jakob’s birds spinning in the clear blue. Then I walked away from my uncle, across the roof to the coop.

  “I went to see him,” Uncle Glenn said to my back.

  I turned. “You?”

  I faced back to the coop, rested my hands on the chicken wire. It was sharp and cold, holding all the chill of winter.

  Uncle Glenn’s footsteps crunched up behind me.

  “He gave me this for you.”

  Uncle Glenn was holding a piece of paper with what looked like a coded message written on it.

  “Jakob has a code-o-graph?”

  “He said he wrote so many messages he memorized the code.”

  “How do I know you didn’t write it?”

  Uncle Glenn shrugged. “You don’t.”

  Wind fluttered the paper in my uncle’s hand like pigeons’ wings.