A Master Plan for Rescue (24 page)

I said the word again, and Moon made a sound like a bark. But his fist stayed exactly where it was.

Desperate, I grabbed hold of Moon’s arm with both of my hands and yanked his fist toward my face.

But Moon fought me. Each time I brought his fist close to my face it bounced away, as if there was a force field around my head, as if I was trying to push two magnets together.

Francis D’Amato came to watch, staring at us with his lazy eye. Bobby Devine came, too, exhaling the scent of Juicy Fruit into the wintery air. Also people I didn’t recognize, people who stopped to stand in the cold, people who couldn’t resist watching somebody beat himself up with Moon Shapiro’s big fist.

I kept shouting, “Hit me, you bastard,” and Moon kept grunting with the effort of keeping his fist away from my head. At last it occurred to me to try Moon’s weaker hand.

I let go of his right wrist and before he could figure out what I was doing, I grabbed the other one, folded his fingers into a fist, and drove it into my nose, knocking my glasses onto the ground.

It was like hitting myself in the face with a flesh-covered stone, an arm-shaped baseball bat. Bright pain exploded from my nose outward, and for a second I couldn’t see anything except black. Then I was sitting on the sidewalk, listening to a sound that was like pressing seashells hard against both of your ears. Something warm gushed over my mouth and chin. I wiped at it with the back of my hand, and it came away red.

I felt around the cold ground for my glasses, but all I could find was a crumpled-up pack of Lucky Strikes and an empty paper bag. The edgeless figure that was Moon was making a motion like wiping his hand on the front of his corduroy jacket. When he was finished, he turned and disappeared into the general blurriness of Academy Street.

“Here.” Declan Moriarity’s polio brace clicked next to my ear. “They were behind you.” My glasses fell into my lap.

By the time I’d dropped their weight on my nose, Declan—and anyone else who’d stopped to watch—had vanished up Academy Street. I pushed myself to my feet and wiped my sleeve under my nose. It didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore, but the skin around my mouth felt stiff, like it had frozen in the cold.

Being punched in the face had disoriented me. Once I stood, the sidewalk shifted under my feet, and the air felt thick and hard to breathe. At the corner of Vermilyea Street, the back of my neck itched with the feeling of being followed, and when I spun around, I saw the small man with the cigarette I believed I’d spotted those first weeks I stopped going to P.S. 52. The man I’d convinced myself wasn’t there, because he was much too small to be a man.

I waited on the corner for him to catch up with me, and when he got into my three-foot spot I realized I’d been right. He was too small to be a man, because he wasn’t a man. He was a boy. No older than I was.

His hair was almost black, and his skin was pale, and he had purplish half-moons under his eyes as if he stayed up nights worrying. He carried his books in an old-fashioned leather book bag covered with straps and buckles. But the most remarkable thing about him was the cigarette. It balanced on his lower lip as if glued there, sending a curl of smoke into his squinted brown eyes.

“Albie Battaglia,” he said, putting out a skinny arm. His voice was raspy, worn out before its time.

I shook his hand. The two of us—kids, one smoking a cigarette—shaking hands on Vermilyea Street as if we were men in suits.

I started to tell him my name, but he said he already knew it. Because of my father. But also because nobody at P.S. 52 had ever gotten away with missing forty-six days of school.

I told him I had someplace I had to be.

“Maybe you might want to wipe off your face first,” he suggested. “Unless you want to scare some lady on the subway.”

I felt the stiff skin under my nose and around my mouth.

“I live just over there.” He pointed to a brick apartment building ahead of us on Vermilyea.

Albie took me to his apartment, where a bald-headed man in a sleeveless undershirt was in the kitchen, stirring something in a big pot. I was so tired and disoriented that for a second I thought he was Otto from the flat in the Wasserstrasse. But then Albie called him
Pop
and shook a can that had a picture of a tree and a Star of David on it.

The two of them stood listening to the sound of one coin rattling.

“That’s all you could get for the Jewish Homeland?” Albie’s father asked.

“Everybody’s buying war bonds.” Albie shrugged. The cigarette was gone from his lower lip, though I had no memory of how or when he’d gotten rid of it.

Albie’s father noticed me standing in the doorway.

“Whoa, kid, you want to clean that up.” He reached across the sink and threw a sponge at my head.

I wiped it around the lower half of my face. It was warm and smelled like garlic and Palmolive.

Albie led me to his room, and the two of us sat on the bed, which was covered with a cowboy and Indian bedspread that was exactly like mine. He told me his parents worked at the Navy Yard in alternating shifts, and that it was his father’s dream to move them all to the Jewish Homeland in Palestine.

“My mother says it’s because my father is a convert,” Albie explained, “because all converts are crazy Zionists.”

Albie told me these things in a rush, as if he’d been waiting awhile to say them to me.

When he stopped for a breath, I pointed to his wall.

There was an enormous map of Europe taped there, and someone—Albie, I assumed—had stuck what looked like a hundred different-colored thumbtacks into it.

Albie stood and swept his sticklike arm across the map. “These are all the places my brother Mordy dropped bombs on the Nazis.”

I got up and pushed the glasses onto the top of my head, took a closer look. There were thick clusters of tacks around cities in Germany—Hamburg and Mannheim, Bremen and Kassell. There were also clusters of tacks in places outside of Germany—in Gdynia and Crete and Lorient.

“What about the different colors?”

“It’s a code. For when he bombed a place more than once.”

“And your brother did all these?”

“Let’s say he
might
have done all these. The army doesn’t let Mordy get too specific in his letters.”

Albie swooped his hand in the air above the tacks, like it was a bomber.

“I put in the tacks from newspaper stories. When Mordy comes home, we’ll pull out the ones that aren’t his.”

He went back, sat on the bed, opened the old-fashioned book bag. “He sent me this.”

I pushed the glasses back down. It was a leather flying cap. The kind Captain Midnight wore, with goggles and fur inside.

I went and sat next to him. Albie placed the flying cap into my hands. I buried my hands in the softness of the fur lining.

Again, I felt Jakob’s code-o-graph in my pocket, and I was about to tell Albie I had to go. But then I noticed something. Maybe it wasn’t real, maybe it was only a piece of Jakob’s story snagged on my consciousness. Still, in the light coming through the window, Albie’s lips had taken on a bluish color and instead of telling him I had to leave, I asked him why he smoked.

“I have a heart murmur.”

“And smoking is good for that?”

“Who knows? But nobody ever got punched in the head for not being able to run because he smoked too much.”

I looked at Albie, at the purplish half-moons under his eyes, his small size.

“Moon Shapiro has never beaten you up?”

“Moon Shapiro once asked me to show him how to blow a smoke ring.”

“You’re a genius,” I told him.

Albie lifted his bony shoulders. “
I
didn’t get away with forty-six days of truancy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well.”

I smoothed the lining of the flying cap.

“Try it on,” Albie told me.

I slipped the cap onto my head. It was soft and warm. Comforting.

“What were you doing all that time?” Albie asked me.

Sometimes I think I told him because he slept under the same cowboy and Indian bedspread that I did. Other times I think it was because I’d been awake all night listening to a man tell his story under a floating subway car. Mostly, though, I believe it was because I’d spent too much time keeping too much of a secret on my own. But maybe it was the cowboy and Indian bedspread after all.

Whatever the reason, after Albie Battaglia asked me the question, I sat on his familiar bedspread wearing the flying cap that had come straight out of the radio world, and said, “I was looking for Nazis.”

And then I told him why.

The words came tumbling out of my mouth in a rush—the way Jakob’s must have all night—and it was like riding the Parachute Jump. The way your body feels after you’ve climbed to the top and suddenly you’re falling through the bright salt-tinged blue of sky and sea, certain you are going to smash into a thousand pieces like glass on the boardwalk, and then your chute catches air, pulling you upward, and every single muscle lets go, every muscle you didn’t realize you’d been holding tight.

As I talked, Albie kept nodding his head, as if he was making room inside it for everything I was saying. And when I finished, he asked me if I’d found any Nazis.

“I thought I did,” I told him. “But I didn’t. That’s why I have to go.”

I stood and handed back the flying cap. My head felt cold and bare.

I walked to the door of Albie’s bedroom.

“Hey,” he said.

I turned, and he tossed me the flying cap the way his father had tossed me the sponge.

“It’s cold out there,” he said.

•   •   •

I was halfway down
the dark hallway of Jakob’s tenement when I heard voices coming from inside his apartment. At first I thought they might be coming from the radio. But they were too ringing and bright to be radio voices. And they were speaking in German.

I pulled off Albie’s flying cap and pressed my ear to the door. I made out the sound of two men shouting, and beneath them, the quieter sound of Jakob’s voice. I had no practice with deciphering the undertone in foreign voices, but even through the layers of paint on Jakob’s door, there was something threatening in that loud German.

I heard more shouting, and then a flurry of footsteps heading for the door.

I ran for the stairs. Behind me, Jakob’s door clicked open.
Down
?
Up
? I ran up half a flight, then turned and slowly came down. Just somebody on my way out.

Two men in dark overcoats stepped onto the landing below me. One was tall, and one was short. And if I’d seen them on the subway, I might have followed them. Because now that they weren’t shouting, they were very good at not being noticed.

I lingered on the stairway until I heard the two men leave the building, then I ran back to Jakob’s apartment and once again pressed my ear to the door.

Nothing except silence. He hadn’t even turned the radio on, and for a terrible moment I imagined him lying inside there—dead—killed by the two men in one of the terrible ways still swirling around inside my head. Hung by the neck, drowned in a vat.

I began pounding on the door, shouting his name into its thick-painted surface.

A man came out of an apartment across the hallway.

“Hey, boychik,” he said, “what’s with the ruckus?”

Then there was nothing under my pounding fist, and Jakob was pulling me by the front of my jacket into his apartment.

He slammed the door shut behind me and put his hand over my mouth—the second time he’d done that in twenty-four hours.

“You are finished with the yelling, yes?” he said.

I nodded, and he dropped his hand.

“Who were those men? The ones who were shouting at you in German?”

“It is better if we do not talk about them.”

“Are they Nazis?”

“No,” he said. “They are Jews.”

“Why is it you say everyone I think is a Nazi is a Jew?”

Jakob sighed. “Maybe they are getting more difficult to tell apart.”

He turned and walked into the apartment, which was no more than two rooms. A smaller one that contained an unmade bed, and the slightly larger one we were standing in. Jakob moved to stand before an unpainted table covered with bits and pieces of machinery—grease-covered bolts and cogs, and something that might have been a small engine—as if he might be hiding it. Open on the floor was the green metal toolbox he’d brought back from the Coney Island Yards.

“Are you in danger?” I asked him.

He smiled, and though I had not known him long, I realized how rare that was.

“Ah,” he said, “the intrepid Nazi-hunter is here to protect the defenseless Jew.”

There are many ways a man could have said this to a boy. Ways that would have mocked him, even gently. But the way Jakob said it to me that late November afternoon was none of these. The way Jakob said it to me was meant to make it clear that no one, not in a long while, had asked him such a question, or cared to know the answer, was meant to tell me that perhaps it was the best thing I could have asked him.

He pulled out a chair and sat in it. Then he pushed another one out with his foot, using the toe of his heavy factory shoes.

“Come and sit.”

“Are you going to tell me about the men?”

Jakob rubbed his face. He looked tired, and I realized that he, too, had been awake all night.

“I do not suppose any of it matters now.”

I crossed the room and took the chair he’d pushed out for me.

He said the two men had come to see him a couple of months ago, knocked on his door in the middle of the day, saying they’d recognized him on Delancey Street, that they knew him from his shop in Hallesches. They told Jakob they remembered his shop very well, remembered how he had fixed things for everyone until the law that required Jews to register their businesses. Then they remembered how he had shut his shop and only fixed things for Nazis.

“They asked me if I felt any guilt over having repaired so many phonographs and motorbikes and automobiles for Nazis while refusing my own people. If I believed I owed them something to make amends,” he said.

“I only did what I had to do to keep myself and the people I loved alive, I told them.”