A Master Plan for Rescue by Janis Cooke Newman Page A

luminous clock reflecting green off my glasses. I began to believe, too, that maybe he’d stopped coming, deciding it was too dangerous, deciding not to come back until I’d given up waiting for him.
    And then, one night, I saw him going up the steps to our building.
    It was a hot, humid night. A night with low thunder that rumbled over Long Island, making me believe I was hearing the war. A night full of heat lightning that flashed in the narrow band of sky over my head. A night too agitating for sleep. Twice already, I’d turned off the alarm before it rang. Even whatever it was that made that scrabbling sound at the back of the alley was feeling it. Earlier a garbage can lid had come clanging to the ground back there, and now it was being scraped from one side of the alley to the other.
    A bus lumbered down the street, the top of its headlights painted black. It passed in front of me, blocking my view, then continued on toward Broadway. I looked back at the steps. A shadowy figure was hurrying up them. He was nothing more than darkness brought together into something denser. But I knew it was my father. Those gathered shadows were too familiar.
    I darted out of the alley and across the street.
    He wasn’t wearing an overcoat. He was dressed in black pants and a black jacket, despite the hot night. I followed him through the front door. I meant to be silent, but I was in too much of a hurry, and the door banged shut after me.
    He spun around.
    Not my father.
    Uncle Glenn. Looking surprised, and possibly like he’d been caught at something.
    My uncle put a finger to his lips as if we were in on some secret together and gestured for me to follow him back outside. We sat side by side on the steps, the concrete still warm under my legs from the heat of the day.
    I began to explain what I was doing out in the middle of the night, saying something about how I couldn’t sleep, and it wouldn’t be until much later that I’d realize he hadn’t asked for any explanation. I was still holding onto the luminous-face clock, and I told him I’d wanted to keep track of the time.
    “You can imagine your mother,” Uncle Glenn said, “if she woke and found you missing.”
    I didn’t want to imagine that, so I asked him why he wasn’t wearing his white Civil Defense helmet or armband.
    “I’m on a different kind of Civil Defense patrol.”
    I took in his black pants and jacket. “Are you spying on the neighborhood?”
    Uncle Glenn put his finger to his lips again.
    I lowered my voice. “Do you think somebody on Dyckman Street could be a Nazi?”
    “That might be saying too much.”
    But that didn’t mean the neighborhood wasn’t full of Nazi sympathizers, he continued. People who could be talking to the wrong person about what they were doing at the Navy Yard, people who might be telling the wrong person something they shouldn’t about what was being loaded onto the ships in New York Harbor.
    I could hear the wheeze of my uncle’s asthma humming beneath his breath. The humid air of New York summer was not good for his lungs.
    “And you’re going to catch them?” I said.
    “If they’re out there.”
    “How will you know if you find one?”
    Uncle Glenn might have had Civil Defense training and a certificate from Fiorello La Guardia, but he did not have my father’s ability to read people.
    “How will I know if I find a Nazi sympathizer?” Uncle Glenn said.
    Heat lightning flashed in the eastern sky and there was the rumble of thunder. Uncle Glenn looked into the darkness of the street.
    “I grew up with one.”

Seven

    GLENN
    My father had a Cauet hand. An aluminum replacement for the appendage he’d lost fighting for the Kaiser in what they called the Great War. The Cauet hand had been made in France, and my father loved the symmetry of this. That he had lost the original fighting the French, then had tricked—at least in his mind tricked—his enemy into making him a substitute.
    The Cauet hand was shiny