A Master Plan for Rescue (25 page)

The two men asked Jakob what he thought might happen if somebody went to the authorities and told them his true name, suggested they look into how he had turned up in New York with no visa.

When Jakob demanded to know what they wanted, they asked if he remembered the saboteurs who had landed on Amagansett beach last summer, if he had ever wondered what happened to the submarine that brought them here.

I assumed it went back to Germany, he’d told them.

That is what everybody assumes, they’d said. But it only got as far as Montauk when its engine gave out and it had to surface. That was shortly before dawn, the same time two of our colleagues on Civil Defense patrol were scanning the coastline with binoculars.

These colleagues had a boat, some guns, and the element of surprise, and before the sun broke over the water, they had captured the German captain and his first mate, and were towing the stranded submarine toward a private boat basin in Montauk.

I bet you are wondering what we did with the German captain and his first mate, one of the two men asked Jakob.

No, he told them, I am not.

But they had told him anyway.

They tied the men’s wrists and ankles together, and then they drove them to a deserted garage near the Montauk pier and locked them in the backseat of a running car.

We
gassed
them
, the taller of the two men kept saying. Isn’t that perfect?

When the men had stopped laughing about what they had done to the Germans, they told Jakob they wanted him to fix the submarine.

Jakob said he did not have the tools for such a job. They suggested the tools were likely much the same as those used to repair subway cars, and that Jakob would have no difficulty getting his hands on those. Then they reminded him of his reputation for being able to fix anything.

Two days later, they brought Jakob the pigeons and the code-o-graph, and the first piece of the submarine’s engine in the green toolbox.

We are going to communicate using a child’s toy? Jakob had asked them.

If your neighbors are curious about what you’re doing, you can tell them you are playing a child’s game.

It had taken a couple of weeks before Jakob had worked up the nerve to ask one of the men—the shorter one—what they were planning to use the submarine for.

Children, the man had said. Refugees from a camp in Marseilles. Our people worked with the Vichy government for months to get approval for one hundred visas. One hundred visas for Jewish children. Then the Allies invaded North Africa and those approvals vanished like a wisp of smoke.

And you can fit one hundred children in this submarine of yours? Jakob had asked him.

The man shook his head. No, but we can fit twenty-three.

But what you did to the captain and the first mate?

Germans are not the only ones who know how to pilot a boat, the man had told him.

“Why do you say it doesn’t matter now?” I asked.

Jakob looked over the bits and pieces of machinery on the table.

“They cannot save them, the twenty-three.”

“Why not?”

“The submarine must leave for Marseilles tonight.”

He explained it to me the way the shorter man had told it to him. Aid workers in Marseilles had chosen twenty-three refugees who would be taken to the harbor in Marseilles in a supply truck, then slipped aboard the submarine under cover of night. Twenty-three children whose names the workers had seen on the list of those from the camp who were scheduled to be put on trains for Germany.

The submarine would leave Marseilles and cross the Atlantic until it reached a spot twelve miles off the coast of Long Island at exactly the same time a New York–bound cargo ship would arrive at the same location and develop ten minutes’ worth of engine trouble. Once the cargo ship had resolved its engine difficulties—and picked up some undocumented cargo—it would resume its journey into a secure loading dock in New York Harbor, where it would be met by fifteen American families, eager to retrieve their newly acquired personal possessions.

“But the submarine cannot leave tonight.” Jakob nodded at the thing that looked like a small engine on the table. “Because I cannot fix this final piece.”

“But I thought you could fix anything?”

“Perhaps I am too tired. But all day I have sat here and tried to picture how this should work inside my head, and all I have been able to see is Rebecca’s face flushed with cold at the Christmas Market, how she looked the day we met, her hair soaking and dark, the two of us standing ankle-deep in broken glass and pretending it is ice.”

“You just need to sleep,” I told him. “You’ll fix it tomorrow.”

“Yes, but even if I do, it is too late.”

I leapt out of the chair and paced Jakob’s small apartment, asking him the questions he’d already asked the two men from Hallesches. Why couldn’t the submarine bring the refugees back to the boat basin in Montauk? Because the coastline was too heavily guarded now, and it would be dangerous enough getting a German submarine out with its two pilots. Why couldn’t they arrange another cargo ship to break down twelve miles out? Because it had taken weeks to find a captain willing to take the risk this time.

Still, I wouldn’t let it rest, couldn’t let it rest. I felt responsible for those twenty-three refugees. For surely if Jakob had not spent the night telling me his story under that floating subway car, that final piece of the submarine would be in possession of the two men from Hallesches and on its way to Montauk this very minute.

But there was something else.

Something else that drove me to the green metal box to pull out tool after tool and place it in front of Jakob, as if I could by sheer wanting, produce the one required to bring together all the bits and pieces of machinery on the table. Drove me to keep talking, keep pacing the small apartment. I believe that deep down, I was certain that everything depended on this. Not only the lives of the twenty-three refugees. But also something important about my father. And Rebecca, too. Although I couldn’t have explained to you what. Certainly not then. I can barely explain it now.

At some point, I began to tell Jakob how it would work, how
we
would rescue the refugees. Because of course he
would
fix that final piece. There had never been anything he couldn’t fix—except that one thing—and this would be his chance to make up for that.

The words tumbled from my mouth as if I were the battered Philco sitting in the corner—a radio Jakob must have bought broken and fixed. And as I talked, I saw the whole thing inside my head. Saw it perfectly clear.

The saboteurs’ submarine with the twenty-three refugees safe inside, moving along the dark coastline, its periscope skimming the black surface of the water, searching for a single bit of light. Less than a mile off the coast of Coney Island, the submarine breaks through the waves, silent except for the sound of seawater running down its smooth sides. With a gasp, the top opens and one by one the refugees step out into the starry night. They toss inflatable boats—exactly like the ones the saboteurs used to land at Amagansett—into the dark water, boats big enough to hold four or five of them. And then they begin to paddle, heading toward shore, following that single light shining at the top of the Parachute Jump.

I cannot say how this plan—so clear and fully realized—turned up inside my head. It might have been because there were so many stories already living there, and I had only just seen the light at the top of the Parachute Jump that morning. Or perhaps my father put it there. Perhaps he sent it to me as a message. If you had asked me then, that is what I would have told you.

Jakob listened as I described the rescue I’d seen inside my head, and then he said, “And one of the men from the submarine will go with them, yes?”

“No,” I told him. “That would be noticeable. But kids, kids are always fooling around on the beach at Coney Island.”

“So nobody waiting on the beach either?”

“I will be there,” I told him. “I will wait.”

“But these refugees, they speak only French or German. Perhaps a little Yiddish if we are lucky.”

I looked down at Albie’s flying cap. “I can bring someone who speaks Yiddish,” I told him.

“But still,” Jakob said, “children on the beach at night. That would be noticeable.”

“It’s November,” I reminded him. “It’s dark by six.”

Jakob shook his head. “Children alone in rubber boats being met by other children.”

“It will look like any other day at Coney Island.”

“It is too dangerous.”

“Better than the train to Germany,” I told him.

“Maybe.”

I stopped pacing and stood before him. “Send the men a message.”

“I am sure they have already thought of another plan.”

“Tell them about this one.”

“I am afraid they are too likely to say yes.”

I reached into my pocket and set Jakob’s code-o-graph on the table with the pieces of machinery.

“We cannot leave them there,” I told him.

He stared down at Rebecca’s face in the little window. The face with the expression that reminded me of my mother before my father and I went down into the 42nd Street subway.

Jakob picked up the code-o-graph and slipped it into his pocket, then he pushed his chair closer to the table.

“Come back tomorrow,” he told me. “I will tell you what they say.”

•   •   •

When I got home,
my mother was filling the apartment with the smell of meat and spices. The piece of lace had disappeared from the top of her head, and when I sat down at the red table and spooned up some of the stew, there was less of the undertone of trying. But I was so tired that beyond that, I couldn’t have told you much more about what my mother’s meal tasted like if it had meant the end of Hitler.

When I finished, my mother asked me if I wanted to talk about any of it, and I said not if I don’t have to.

“You don’t have to,” she told me, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “Only please, no more men with badges in my kitchen.”

She half-smiled then, which was half more than I’d seen in a while.

After that she got up and left the kitchen. But before she did, she let her hand rest on my head for a moment.

I got up as well, went to my room and spread my father’s messages over the cowboys and Indians riding across my bedspread. I knew he was waiting for me to answer the last message, the one that said

ARE YOU SURE.

And I knew I needed to let him know that Jakob wasn’t a Nazi, that he was something else. Something more. But I didn’t know how to put all of what Jakob was into a coded message.

It was a while before I remembered something my father had told me, a story from when he still lived in Ireland. He’d been seventeen, a year out of St. Brendan’s and working in a Dublin pub cleaning up after drunks. My father had boarded a Grafton Street tram and found himself sitting next to Michael Collins. At the time, Collins was the most wanted man in Ireland, but the British had never seen a photograph of him, so he went about the city as if he was its Lord Mayor.

“I knew it was him the second I sat down,” my father had told me. “Not by looking, but by the way he changed the air. Charged it in some way. It kept me from reading the man.”

The way my father described it, it was like he was reading himself. But a more heroic version of himself.

My father said he never forgot that tram ride. Said if Collins had turned and asked him to take up a gun and join the IRA, he wouldn’t have hesitated, would have followed him right off that tram.

It was Michael Collins’s death that made my father want to leave Ireland. The fact that after all the bounties the British had placed on his head, he’d been killed by another Irishman.

“It was like the country had lost a piece of itself,” my father had told me.

Now, in my room, I ripped a piece of paper from the composition book and wrote

KU YL SYHU XYVKGUS VTSSYRL

which meant

HE IS LIKE MICHAEL COLLINS.

Someone who wasn’t Irish, who wasn’t my father, might think I meant the person at 165 Ludlow was a spy, a traitor of some kind. But my father, who would have followed the man off a tram, who had left his own country because Michael Collins was no longer alive in it, he would understand what I was trying to say about Jakob.

I slipped downstairs and put the folded paper in the mailbox. Then for the first time in nearly two days, I slept.

The next morning, the message was gone.

I
went looking for Albie the next day, thinking I would find him in the sunless sliver of playground formed when the city built an addition onto P.S. 52 in the 1920s. This little alley was dank and cold, and smelled of cat spray. No teacher had been known to have set foot in it, which made it the perfect place for smoking.

But when I entered the rank darkness, flying cap in my hand, the only person there was Elliott Marshman, a pale fifth-grader who wore orthopedic shoes.

“Out sick,” Elliott said, pushing what were probably Albie’s old cigarette butts into a pile with the thick sole of his shoe. He glanced up at me. “Though I hear there’s a lot of truancy going around.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. Though when I turned to leave that sunless place, I put my hand over my own beating heart.

I wore Albie’s flying cap down to the Lower East Side, liking the way its weight on my head and the fur lining made me feel as if my thoughts were safe from the world. At Ludlow Street, I knocked on Jakob’s door for a long time, then I went to look for him on the roof.

As soon as I pushed open the door, I could tell the pigeons were agitated. They were flapping their wings against the chicken wire, darting back and forth inside the coop, turning themselves into gray blurs like the snow clouds piling up in the sky overhead. Perhaps it was Jakob agitating them, sitting on the roof with his back against a leg of their coop. Or maybe it was the pale gray thing in his hands.

My feet crunched across the gravel toward him. Something white blew by my face. Something too big to be snow. Another whipped past in a gust of wind, catching on my jacket. It was one of the narrow strips of paper Jakob used to write his messages, and it was covered with tiny writing.

Not in code. In what even I could see was French.

The wind picked up and a dozen—no, two, three dozen—strips of paper flew across the roof, swirling up from the knocked-together shelves near the pigeon coop. White papers covered in tiny black script. I walked through this paper blizzard toward Jakob, came close enough to know that the thing in his hands was a pigeon, its body seeming boneless, as if it had melted despite the cold.

“What happened to it?” I asked him.

“Exhaustion,” he told me. “I kept shooing it away, but it kept coming back.”

This close I could see that buckled onto the pigeon’s sticklike leg was a metal capsule.

I sat on the tar beside him.

“Did you fix the last piece?”

He lifted his eyes from the pigeon to me. “Did you doubt that I would?”

“And the men from Hallesches. You told them?”

Jakob looked into the sky, where the clouds were gathering.

“I was not going to.”

“But?”

“In the end I did.”

“Of course,” I said, “because it’s a good plan.”

Wind ruffled the feathers on the limp bird in Jakob’s lap.

“I told them because it would have been Rebecca’s idea of perfection.” He ran his hand over the gray feathers, putting them back in order. “A master plan for rescue dreamed up by a boy.”

He looked back at me.

“I only told them the plan was mine.”

“Why?”

“I did not think the men from Hallesches would have appreciated the perfection.”

“What did they say?”

“They will try this plan of yours, if two problems can be solved.”

The first problem was clothing. The refugees would have left their homes in a hurry when the Germans invaded, and not taken many clothes. They also would have spent a long time in hiding, and when you are a child, you continue to grow, even when you are running from the Germans, so nothing they had taken would still fit.

“They will not look like American children when they land, and that will make them not so unnoticeable.”

The second problem was where to take the refugees once they had landed. If the families would draw too much attention on the beach at Coney Island, they needed someplace else to meet. Someplace private, yet public enough so that fifteen families coming and going wouldn’t attract too much notice.

“And if we solve these . . .” I began.

“If
you
solve them.”

A batch of papers blew off the shelf, spinning like a cyclone across the roof and disappearing over the edge. I felt as if I’d gone with them out into the empty air.

“A master plan for rescue dreamed up by a boy,” he repeated. “It cannot happen any other way.”

I nodded, pulling the flying cap closer about my head.

In all the time since, I have not once wondered why I didn’t stand on that roof and argue with Jakob, beg him to help me with these problems, which were so much for a boy. I understood in the way that he did how the plan was meant to work. Believed in it the way that he did. For neither of us were strangers to all the leaps of logic and imagination in which grief can make you believe.

Jakob gathered the dead bird into his hands and got to his feet.

“You cannot take too long,” he told me. “They will not let the submarine leave for Marseilles until every part of the plan is in place. And they believe it is soon that the twenty-three will be put on the train for Germany.”

I stood and nodded at the bird cupped in his hands, the empty cigar box that had once contained the strips of paper. “And that?”

“You have not read the papers?” he said. “You do not know what Hitler is planning for France?”

I shook my head.

The coming darkness cast a slate-colored light on Jakob’s face. He looked weary, as if he’d been up here all night.

“He intends to occupy the entire country.” He raised the limp bird closer to his face, as if he were trying to breathe life into it. “If that happens, there will not be a Jew left alive in France.”

•   •   •

I turned my back
on Jakob and the dead bird, walked across the roof. My head was full of the problems I had to solve, and my hand was on the freezing edge of the door before I realized what I was hearing.

Wheezing.

The sound an asthmatic might make on a cold, snow-threatening day like this one.

It’s only the wind in your ears
, I told myself.

I lifted one of the flaps of the flying cap and leaned forward. After a moment, I heard it again. Whoever it was, he was close, standing right on the other side of the roof door, with only its width between us.

I made some noise with my shoes on the gravel, and the wheezing was replaced by the sound of footsteps hurrying down the stairs into the building.

I turned toward Jakob—thinking I would say something to him, tell him what I’d heard—but he was still standing under the darkening sky with the lifeless bird spilling between his fingers. I turned back and pulled the door open.

I chased after the wheeze, listening for it beneath the usual noises of the building—the shouting and door-slamming—as if it were the tenement’s own faulty breathing. I followed it to the fourth floor, the third. When I lost it on the second, I picked up speed, racing down the rest of the stairs and out through the door.

I stood at the top of the metal staircase and squinted up and down Ludlow Street, looking for somebody running—heading toward Stanton, or maybe Houston. But all I saw was the usual blur of fur-hatted men, and packs of kids, and women tugging on grocery carts.

And the sound of the wheeze had vanished, as if it had never been there, as if it had only been the wind in my ear.

•   •   •

As the subway
took me back uptown, I invented elaborate theories about who might belong to that asthmatic wheeze. An FBI G-man who had discovered Jakob had been on the
St. Louis
. Somebody who had seen me following people and had decided to follow me. A Nazi who wanted to send Jakob back to Germany.

I pushed these elaborate theories into every corner of my brain so there would be no room for the more logical one—that it had been Uncle Glenn hiding behind the roof door. Uncle Glenn, who didn’t believe I would come to him if I found a Nazi. Uncle Glenn, who might have been following me ever since I’d shown him how I could hear the undertone in voices.

Still, if it had been Uncle Glenn behind that door, all he would have heard Jakob and me talking about was children and a submarine and the beach at Coney Island. He would know that Jakob wasn’t a Nazi. And he certainly wouldn’t have run away from me.

Unless
, said some part of my brain I hadn’t been able to fill with theories,
Uncle Glenn wanted to be a hero so badly, he would turn in twenty-three Jews who weren’t supposed to be here. Twenty-four, if you counted Jakob
.

I yanked off the flying cap, as if trying to release the thought from my head. Not Uncle Glenn. Not the man who’d rescued me at my father’s wake, who’d pulled me from the depthless dark of the Keener’s mouth.

It was somebody else. Somebody dangerous.

Somebody I couldn’t tell Jakob about, because he might tell the men from Hallesches, and they would call off the plan. And I couldn’t let that happen. Not to either of us.

•   •   •

It was my mother
who solved the problem of the clothes.

She’d just come in from five o’clock Mass and was standing in the entryway of the living room, unbuttoning the blue overcoat she always wore once it got cold. Seeing her in it let me believe she was back to wearing normal clothes, that when she slipped the coat off, she’d be wearing a plaid skirt and a red sweater—a color that looked nice with her black hair falling loose around her shoulders. Watching her made me wish she’d stop unbuttoning the coat and put her hands in her pockets, and let me imagine something other than the dead-leaf thing I knew she was really wearing, because you could never tell what somebody had on underneath a coat.

It was that quick, as though somebody else had put the idea into my head.

I didn’t need twenty-three sets of clothes, I only needed twenty-three coats.

And I knew where to get them. Knew from the winter almost no one had paid my father for their portraits, and we had picked out coats for ourselves from the poor box Father Barry kept behind the confessionals. Every Catholic church had a poor box, and the neighborhood around Dyckman Street, being so Irish, had a lot of Catholic churches.

I figured out the solution to the second problem—where to take the twenty-three refugees—while I was changing into my pajamas. I’d just taken the code-o-graph out of my pocket and was looking at the picture of myself in the little window, that picture of my whole face without glasses, remembering the day I’d seen it for the first time, when it had still been a negative, the reverse of me. Suddenly, the words appeared inside my head like a photograph developing.

Paradise Photo
.

Where people were always coming and going. Where there were always a hundred kids on the sidewalk. Where I knew exactly where Harry Jupiter hid the key.

Where, once we were all inside—Albie and me, and the twenty-three refugees, and the families who have come to take them, and Jakob, because of course he will be there—the door to the darkroom will open and a man wearing a belted overcoat and a hat pulled low on his forehead will come out and everyone will turn to look at him. But he will be looking only at me.

“You did all this?” he will ask in an accent that still has enough Irish in it to push around the American, an accent I am beginning to forget.

I will nod, and walk over to him, get so close he is no longer in focus. And then I will put my face into his chest, into the spot where his white shirt is showing between the lapels of his belted coat. The white shirt he still wears, though we don’t see each other anymore. And by now, it will have taken on the smell of the developing chemicals from all the pictures of Nazis he has taken. And I will smell, too, the Wildroot Cream-Oil he uses on his hair—spiky, like mine. And though he is wearing the hat pulled low, and his face is blurred, I will know it is him.

•   •   •

When I returned to Jakob’s
apartment the next afternoon, I told him my idea about the poor box coats and about Paradise Photo. He sat and listened at the wooden table, which had been cleared of all the bits and pieces of machinery, turning the code-o-graph with the picture of Rebecca over in his hand, the way the boys eager to play skully turn their bottle caps over in their hands.

“What do you think the men from Hallesches will say?” I said when I’d finished.

“I think they will say I have come up with an excellent plan.”

“So what do we do now?”

“You should begin collecting the coats. These men are not ones to waste time. They are like the Nazis in that way.”

He told me to get fourteen boys’ coats and nine girls’ coats. “Your size, or perhaps a little smaller.”

I nodded, and then I got up and headed toward the door. I was halfway out when he spoke to my back.

“We will do this?” he said. “Rescue them?”

I turned. He had folded his fingers over the code-o-graph and was gripping it tightly.

“We will,” I said. But I had to put my hand in my pocket and touch the thin edges of my own code-o-graph to make my voice steady.

•   •   •