Don't You Know There's a War On? Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Gail Hochman, of Brooklyn

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Two

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Part Three

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  About the Author

  Books by Avi

  Credits

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  MONDAY, MARCH 22, 1943

  German Tanks and Guns Battle

  Eighth Army Units in North Africa.

  U.S. Forces Suffer a Sharp Setback.

  German Radio Claims That U-boats

  Sank 204,000 Tons of Shipping in a

  Convoy Battle.

  1943 Draft to Call 12,000 Men Daily

  As President Warns Nation It

  Faces Reverses in War.

  Meatless Days in Restaurants.

  1

  I WAS LATE that Monday morning because my shoelace broke just as I was leaving for school. Meant I had to use some string. Now, you might think string would be easy to find, but it wasn’t. String was something you gave away for the war effort. Besides, my sister had already left for school and my mother was at her job at the Navy Yard. Those days me and my family lived in Brooklyn. During the war. When I was eleven.

  Like I was saying, I was supposed to be going to school. Class Five-B, Public School Number Eight. P.S. 8, we called it. The school’s real name was The Robert Fulton School, but I never heard no kid call it that.

  Anyway, by the time I finally got going down Hicks Street, I was so late no kids were there. Just grown-ups wearing big coats and dark hats. Me? I was dressed in my regular school outfit: bomber jacket, brown corduroy pants, plaid flannel shirt, and a snap-on glossy red necktie that almost reached my middle. Hanging round my neck was what we called a dog tag. Sort of this tin disk with your name and address stamped on it. All us kids had to wear them. You know, in case the enemy attacked like at Pearl Harbor and people wanted to know who your body was.

  The name on my tag was Howard Bellington Crispers. But the thing was, the only person who ever used my full name was my mom. And see, she only did when she was mad at me. So mostly people called me Howie. Which worried me, because it wasn’t on my tag. I mean, how were they going to identify me if my name wasn’t right? By my looks?

  Back then I wasn’t very tall. But my ears were big, plus I had the same old blue eyes and carrot-colored hair. Though Mom was always making me brush that hair down, it never stood flat. And no matter how much I was in front of the bathroom mirror pressing my ears back, they didn’t stay flat neither. These days, being sixteen, I’m taller, but to tell the truth, the hair and the ears, they haven’t changed much.

  The other thing, that morning it felt like it was going to rain. Which meant my shoes—with the string lace—might get wet. Not so jazzy because, like everybody, we had ration coupons for only three pairs of shoes a year. For the whole family. The point being, you did what you had to do because in those days, no matter what happened, you could always say, “Hey, don’t you know there’s a war on?” See, it explained anything.

  So anyway, there I was, going down Hicks Street carrying my pop’s beat-up wooden lunch box. Inside was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white Tip Top bread wrapped in paper, plus a graham-cracker snack and this dinky bottle of Borden’s chocolate milk. My left hand was holding a canvas satchel with my schoolbooks.

  This Hicks Street was narrow, squeezed tight by three-story brownstone houses with stoops. The neighborhood also had some old wooden houses, plus apartment buildings. My family lived in one of them apartments, a narrow third-floor walk-up with four small rooms. That included the kitchen complete with a few of your regular Brooklyn cockroaches. Didn’t bother me. Everyone had ’em.

  Them days, go along Brooklyn streets and you’d see tons of little flags with big blue stars in front windows. The flags were saying your family had someone in the war. Some windows had more than one star. There were gold stars too. Gold meant your someone had been killed.

  There was this blue star in our window because my pop was in the merchant marine. He sailed in the convoys going ’cross the North Atlantic bringing war supplies to our troops and allies. That meant we never knew where he was. When he wrote—wasn’t often—his letters were censored. Which was because, like people said, “Loose lips sink ships.” And let me tell you something—it was true too. Tons of ships were torpedoed by German subs. Wolf packs, they called them. And sailors—gobs of ’em—drowned. So I worried about Pop. A lot.

  Oh, sure, I’d see him for a few days every couple of months. But it was always a surprise when he came. He’d be dirty, red eyed, needing a shave, and you wouldn’t believe how tired. Most of his leave he just slept, except when he got up to eat apples. He loved apples. Ate ’em like they’d just been invented. Core and all, only spitting out the pips.

  When his time was up, he’d sail off. We didn’t know where. I don’t think Pop knew. Anyway, we weren’t supposed to ask.

  Still, I was better off than my best friend, Duane Coleman, who we called Denny. This Denny, he never saw his pop ’cause his father—a tailor—was an Eighth Army GI. That’s General Infantry. The Eighth was fighting Rommel, the Nazi general, in North Africa. No saying when Mr. Coleman would be home. If he came home. All us kids were scared of getting one of them telegrams from the government that began, “REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT . . .”

  Now, I was small, but Denny was smaller. I mean, the guy was waiting for his growth spurt like Dodger fans waited for a pennant. You know, “Wait till next year!”

  Denny always had this serious look on his face. Maybe it was his wire-frame glasses, which not a lot of kids wore. Or his slicked-back black hair. Or the white shirt and the bow tie he was always wearing. Red suspenders too. Straps, we called them.

  Most mornings I walked to school knowing Denny would be waiting for me in front of Coleman Tailors and Cleaning, his family’s business. Going to school, we’d talk about war news, our dads, radio shows we heard.

  Big radio fans, most late afternoons we listened to Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy and to Captain Midnight. Because of those radio shows, me and Denny knew America was swarming with spies. The night before, Sunday, Suspense was all about this dog that had been trained to carry messages for a Nazi spy, but turned patriotic for some kid. Pure wham.

&nbs
p; Point is, a lot of them stories were real stuff. Instance, there were these Nazis that got dropped off at midnight by a U-boat right near Amagansett, Long Island—just miles from Brooklyn. Then they took the Long Island Railroad to the city to do sabotage. Except the FBI caught them. It was true too. You could look it up.

  So, see, if Denny and me could have found one spy, just one! Jiminy! It would have been the bestest thing in the whole world. Because, see, Denny and me, we had this secret pact that said we weren’t supposed to have no secrets from each other.

  Now, also, on the way to school, we always passed this newsstand. It was run by this old blind guy—Mr. Teophilo. Mr. Teophilo sat on a wooden orange crate behind a board set on bricks, which had all these city newspapers—morning and afternoon—spread out. Understand, we wouldn’t buy any papers. Just read the headlines. Sure, it was scary stuff, but we wanted to know.

  This Mr. Teophilo—don’t ask me how, ’cause like I said, he was old and blind—he always knew when we were passing by or standing in front of him. You’d come close and he’d turn in your direction with his eyes closed and his face not shaven so good, with this droopy white mustache. Plus this pure gold chain around his neck. Least Denny and me thought it was pure. Don’t ask me why we thought that—we just did.

  Anyway, we’d come close and Mr. Teophilo would call out, “Hey, Howie. Hey, Denny. Things are looking good.” Or, “Things are looking bad.”

  Or, like that morning, as I passed him, he said, “Hey, Howie, you’re late! And things aren’t going too well in North Africa neither.”

  Except that Monday I was worried about something else besides the war. See, I’d flunked my regular Monday math test so many times my mother said to me, “Howard Bellington Crispers, you get one more failing grade, you can forget about going to Saturday kid movies.”

  That was serious. The Saturday before, I’d seen Chapter Six of Junior G-Men of the Air at the Victory Movie Palace. It ended with this kid hero—Lionel Croft—flying his nifty biplane into a Nazi ambush behind the clouds. I had to know what happened.

  So there I was walking along, with Lionel Croft and the Monday math test chewing my mind, when suddenly I saw Dr. Lomister, the principal of my school, P.S. 8. And the point is—because this is the way this story really begins—Denny was always saying our principal—this Dr. Lomister—was a Nazi spy.

  2

  OKAY. Seeing Lomister on the street was like seeing King Kong walk by in his undershorts. Not only was the guy not in school, he was standing on a brownstone stoop pressing a doorbell button. The thing was, the way he kept turning around made me think he felt guilty about something.

  Lomister was this big galoot, a whole lot taller than the other P.S. 8 schoolteachers, who were all women. Dr. Lomister and the custodian were the only men in our school. Why Lomister was called Doctor, I didn’t know. Except it didn’t have nothing to do with sick. I mean, the guy should have been a drill sergeant, not a principal. He was that nuts for rules. All rules. Let me tell you, that guy knew rules like Brooklyn kids knew how many games the Dodgers were out of first place.

  Lomister had rules for everything. No tie, no belt—go sit in his office. Get caught running in the halls or shouting—go sit in his office. Don’t pledge allegiance to the flag right—go sit in his office. Write on the basement floor with chalk—go sit in his office. I don’t know. Maybe he just liked company. I mean, nobody wanted to be with him.

  See what I’m saying? He was a drill sergeant. Fact, Denny and I used to argue about how come Lomister wasn’t in the war.

  “Bet you anything he dyed his hair gray so he wouldn’t get drafted” was my idea.

  “A draft dodger?” Denny said. “Tell me another while that’s still warm!”

  Denny and me, we talked slang a ton. “Dressing up with words,” my mom called it.

  Anyway, I said to Denny, “Could be he’s the last son of a last son. They don’t have to go.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “and your grandma drives a tank. He could’ve volunteered. My old man’s fat, short, and bald, and he’s fighting in North Africa right now.”

  “Well, maybe Lomister’s got flat feet,” I tried. “Flat feet don’t march.”

  “Money from home, Jackson. He could’ve joined the navy.”

  “You’re sitting on a block of ice,” I shot back.

  “Hey,” Denny cried, “bet you two Wheaties box tops and six warm Mason Crows, I know what he is.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “He’s a spy.”

  “Tell it to the marines,” I said.

  After all, like we both knew, at regular Thursday morning school assemblies, Lomister was always giving these boring speeches that “this war is to protect our country. Because our country is run by rules, not men.” And that we had to follow the rules for “our boys over there.” You know, bunch of patriotic flak.

  Thing is, the guy was always making a fuss about how early he got to school—before anyone, for cripe’s sake. I mean, one of his favorite sayings was “You have to start early to bring our boys home early.”

  Not even my kid sister, Gloria, who drooled over school so much she got there twenty minutes before I did, arrived before Lomister.

  But see, there was Lomister, not in school. He was on this stoop. Breaking his own rule about being early! And the way he was acting made me remember what Denny said: Lomister was a spy.

  So I ducked behind a car to see what was going on.

  3

  THE FRONT DOOR to the brownstone opened. Whoever opened it stayed in a shadow. That was so suspicious it made me crack my knuckles, which I did whenever I was nervous, though my mother said I’d grow up deformed.

  Anyway, next thing, Lomister took off his hat and went inside, shutting the door behind him. Just like the movies.

  Now, Lomister went up the front steps—the stoop—that led up to the second floor, where the main door was. But see, next to the stoop was another set of smaller steps that went down a little ways to the lowest floor of the house. And next to those steps was a fenced-in place with a steel door that opened to a chute, which was used for delivering coal to the house furnace. Get the picture?

  That morning the basement steel door was propped open a couple of inches. Probably because the coal man was coming. The minute I seen that, I knew I could open it more and get into the house and snoop around. And hey, if Lomister was a spy and I could prove it, then Denny and me could tell the FBI. We’d be big-shot heroes with our pictures a front-page extra on the Brooklyn Eagle.

  But there was a whole other idea which went through my head faster than the lightning that turned Billy Batson into Captain Marvel. It was this: If I got to school late, I wouldn’t be able to take the math test. If I didn’t take the math test, my teacher, Miss Gossim, couldn’t fail me. If I didn’t fail the test, my mom couldn’t make me miss Chapter Seven of Junior G-Men of the Air.

  What’s more, as I was standing there trying to make up my mind, it started spitting rain.

  All of which should explain how come I ran across the street, climbed over the low railing, and lifted that steel door.

  I was going inside.

  4

  OKAY. This chute I told you about was a long U-shaped metal slide, shiny because of all the coal that had slid down. It went from the inside lip of the steel door right on down into the house basement.

  So what did I do? I sat on the door frame, legs dangling into the slide, lunch box and satchel under one arm, holding the steel door wide open with my free hand. Then I hitched forward and let go of the door.

  Trouble was, the steel door dropped a lot faster than me, so I got me a bingo-whacko on the old bean. I’m telling you, sliding down the chute into the basement, I was seeing tons of stars. And all of them were in my head.

  Next second I was sitting woozy at the bottom. But light was coming from somewhere, so I could see some stuff. I was in the basement all right. It was long, low, and hot, with stale, dusty air thick as butterscotch pud
ding. Place smelled rotten too. From garbage, I figured. At the far end were steps leading up, and a weak lightbulb glowing up top.

  Next to where I came down was this big, bulky furnace with fat pipes that ran out from its top section. Looked like a giant robot octopus with silver arms. Nearby was a shovel for tossing coal into the firebox. The coal pile was real low. That figured.

  Anyway, I was sitting there when the furnace turned on with a roar. Flames licked around the edges of the fire door, throwing out more light. Now I could see stacked cardboard boxes and a workbench with tools. There was an old tennis racquet too, plus a couple of baseball bats. Also some old trunks and suitcases sitting right next to—get this—a couple of filing cabinets.

  Now, them file cabinets wowed me. See, from radio shows, movies, and comic books, I knew that private eyes, superheroes, and secret agents always found what they called criminal-eating evidence in file cabinets. So there I was, surer than ever I was in a spy nest.

  Soon as I got my head back straight, I stood up from the chute and headed for that flight of steps.

  Grabbing the shaky banister, I went up. When I reached the top, I put my ear to the door. Didn’t hear nothing. I tried the door handle. Wouldn’t budge. Hey, more proof that whoever lived in the house had something to hide, right? Over our place we never shut doors. “You want to be private,” we’d say, “go join the army.”

  Anyway, the door being shut, I went back down to the basement and tried to think what to do—other than leave. That’s when I noticed another door, half the size of an ordinary door. It was set into a wall maybe three feet off the ground. No regular door handle, either, just a latch. Right below were these garbage cans.

  I shoved the cans to one side and tried the door. It was stuck, so I used two hands to yank. Pop! It opened! Set into a shaft was a large, tall box with ropes attached to its top. Two more ropes dangled in front of it. A broken dinner plate was lying on the bottom.

  What I’d found was a dumbwaiter.