When the alarm clock went off at six-thirty that Friday, Sammy awoke to find that Sky City, a chromium cocktail tray stocked with moderne bottles, shakers, and swizzle sticks, was under massive attack. In the skies around the floating hometown of D'Artagnan Jones, the strapping blond hero of Sammy's Pimpernel of the Planets comic strip, flapped five bat-winged demons, horns carefully whorled like whelks, muscles feathered in with a fine brush. A giant, stubbly spider with the eyes of a woman dangled on a hairy thread from the gleaming underside of Sky City. Other demons with goat legs and baboon faces, brandishing sabers, clambered down ladders and swung in on ropes from the deck of a fantastic caravel with a painstakingly rendered rigging of aerials and vanes. In command of these sinister forces, hunched over the drawing table, wearing only black kneesocks clocked with red lozenges, and swaddled in a baggy pair of off-white Czechoslovakian underpants, sat Josef Kavalier, scratching away with one of Sammy's best pens.
Sammy slid down to the foot of his bed to peer over his cousin's shoulder. "What the hell are you doing to my page?" he said.
The captain of the demonic invasion force, absorbed in his deployment and tipped dangerously back on the tall stool, was caught by surprise. He jumped, and the stool tipped, but he caught hold of the table's edge and neatly righted himself, then reached out just in time to catch the bottle of ink before it, too, could tip over. He was quick.
"I am sorry," Josef said. "I was very careful to don't harm your drawings. See." He lifted an overlaid sheet from the ambitious, Prince Valiant-style full-page panel Sammy had been working on, and the five noisome bat-demons disappeared. "I used separate papers for everything." He peeled away the baboon-faced demon raiders and lifted the paper spider by the end of her thread. With a few quick motions of his long-fingered hands, the hellish siege of Sky City was lifted.
"Holy cow!" said Sammy. He clapped his cousin on his freckled shoulder. "Christ, look at this! Let me see those things." He took the kidney-shaped sheet that Josef Kavalier had filled with slavering coal-eyed horned demons and cut to overlay Sammy's own drawing. The proportions of the muscular demons were perfect, their poses animated and plausible, the inkwork mannered but strong-lined. The style was far more sophisticated than Sammy's, which, while confident and plain and occasionally bold, was never anything more than cartooning. "You really can draw."
"I was two years studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. In Prague."
"The Academy of Fine Arts." Sammy's boss, Sheldon Anapol, was impressed by men with fancy educations. The ravishing, impossible scheme that had been tormenting Sammy's imagination for months seemed all at once to have a shot at getting off the ground. "Okay, you can draw monsters. What about cars? Buildings?" he asked, faking an employerly monotone, trying to conceal his excitement.
"Of course."
"Your anatomy seems not bad at all."
"It's a fascination for me."
"Can you draw the sound of a fart?"
"Sorry?"
"At Empire they put out a whole bunch of items that make farting sounds. A fart, you know what that means?" Sammy clapped the cupped palm of one hand to the opposite armpit and pumped his arm, squirting out a battery of curt, wet blasts. His cousin, eyes wide, got the idea. "Naturally, we can't say it outright in the ads. We have to say something like 'The Whoopee Hat Liner emits a sound more easily imagined than described.' So you really have to get it across in the drawing."
"I see," said Josef. He seemed to take up the challenge. "I would draw a breathing of wind." He scratched five quick horizontal lines on a scrap of paper. "Then I would put such small things, so." He sprinkled his staff with stars and curlicues and broken musical notation.
"Nice," said Sammy. "Josef, I tell you what. I'm going to try to do better than just get you a job drawing the Gravmonica Friction-Powered Mouth Organ, all right? I'm going to get us into the big money."
"The big money," Josef said, looking suddenly hungry and gaunt. "That would be good of you, Sammy. I need some of the very big money. Yes, all right."
Sammy was startled by the avidity in his cousin's face. Then he realized what the money was wanted for, which made him feel a little afraid. It was hard enough being a disappointment to himself and Ethel without having to worry about four starving Jews in Czechoslovakia. But he managed to discount the tremor of doubt and reached out his hand. "All right," he said. "Shake, Josef."
Josef put forth his hand, then pulled back. He put on what he must have thought was an American accent, a weird kind of British cowboy twang, and screwed his features into a would-be James Cagney wise-guy squint. "Call me Joe," he said.
"Joe Kavalier."
"Sam Klayman."
They started to shake again, then Sammy withdrew his own hand.
"Actually," he said, feeling himself blush, "my professional name is Clay."
"Clay?"
"Yeah. I, uh, I just think it sounds more professional."
Joe nodded. "Sam Clay," he said.
"Joe Kavalier."
They shook hands.
"Boys!" called Mrs. Klayman from the kitchen. "Breakfast."
"Just don't say anything about any of this to my mother," Sammy said. "And don't tell her I'm changing my name."
They went out to the laminate table in the kitchen and sat down in two of the padded chrome chairs. Bubbie, who had never met any of her Czech progeny, was sitting beside Joe, ignoring him completely. She had encountered, for better or worse, so many human beings since 1846 that she seemed to have lost the inclination, perhaps even the ability, to acknowledge faces or events that dated from any time after the Great War, when she had performed the incomparable feat of leaving Lemberg, the city of her birth, at the age of seventy, to come to America with the youngest of her eleven children. Sammy had never felt himself to be anything more, in Bubble's eyes, than a kind of vaguely beloved shadow from which the familiar features of dozens of earlier children and grandchildren, some of them dead sixty years, peered out. She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams, her arms streaked and pocked like relief maps of vast planets, her massive calves stuffed like forcemeat into lung-colored support hose. She was quixotically vain about her appearance and spent an hour each morning making up her face.
"Eat," Ethel snapped, depositing in front of Joe a stack of black rectangles and a pool of yellow mucilage that she felt obliged to identify for him as toast and eggs. He popped a forkful into his mouth and chewed it with a circumspect expression behind which Sammy thought he detected a hint of genuine disgust.
Sammy performed the rapid series of operations-which combined elements of the folding of wet laundry, the shoveling of damp ashes, and the swallowing of a secret map on the point of capture by enemy troops-that passed, in his mother's kitchen, for eating. Then he stood up, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and pulled on his good wool blazer. "Come on, Joe, we gotta go." He leaned down to embed a kiss in Bubble's suede cheek.
Joe dropped his spoon and, in the course of retrieving it, bumped his head on the table, hard. Bubbie cried out, and a minor commotion of silverware and chair-scraping ensued. Then Joe stood up, too, and delicately wiped his lips with his paper napkin. He smoothed it out when he finished and laid it on his empty plate.
"Delicious," he said. "Thank you."
"Here," Ethel said, taking a neat tweed suit, on a hanger, from the back of a kitchen chair. "I pressed your suit and took the spots off your shirt."
"Thank you, Aunt."
Ethel put her arm around Joe's hips and gave him a proud squeeze. "This one knows how to draw a lizard, that I can tell you."
Sammy flushed. This was a reference to the peculiar difficulties Sammy had run into, the month before, with the Live Chameleon item ("Wear it on your lapel to amaze and impress!") that Empire had recently added to their line. An apparently congenital lack of skill with reptiles was compounded by the fact that he had no idea what kind of reptile twenty-five cents sent to Empire Novelty would buy, since there were, in fact, no Live Chameleons in stock, and would not be until Shelly Anapol saw how many orders, if any, came in. Sammy had spent two nights poring over encyclopedias and library books, drawing hundreds of lizards, thin and fat, Old World and New, horned and hooded, and had ended up with something that looked a little like a flattened, bald squirrel. It was his sole failure since taking on the draftsmanship chores at Empire, but his mother, naturally, seemed to regard it as a signal one.
"He won't have to draw any lizards, or cheap cameras, or any of that other dreck they sell," said Sammy, and then added, forgetting the warning he had given Joe, "not if Anapol goes in for my plan."
"What plan?" His mother narrowed her eyes.
"Comic books," yelled Sammy, right to her face.
"Comic books!" She rolled her eyes.
" 'Comic books'?" said Joe. "What are these?"
"Trash," said Ethel.
"What do you know about it?" Sammy said, taking hold of Joe's arm. It was almost seven o'clock. Anapol docked your pay if you came in after eight. "There's good money in comic books. I know a kid, Jerry Glovsky-" He pulled Joe toward the hallway that led to the foyer and the front door, knowing exactly what his mother was going to say next.
"Jerry Glovsky," she said. "A fine example. He's retarded. His parents are first cousins."
"Don't listen to her, Joe. I know what I'm talking about"
"He doesn't want to waste his time on any idiotic comic books."
"'It's not your business,'" Sammy hissed, "what he does. Is it?"
This, as Sammy had known it would, shut her right up. The question of something being one's business or not held a central position in the ethics of Ethel Klayman, whose major tenet was the supreme importance of minding one's own. Gossips, busybodies, and kibitzers were the fiends of her personal demonology. She was universally at odds with the neighbors, and suspicious, to the point of paranoia, of all visiting doctors, salesmen, municipal employees, synagogue committeemen, and tradespeople.
She turned now and looked at her nephew. "You want to draw comic books?" she asked him.
Joe stood there, head down, a shoulder against the door frame. While Sammy and Ethel argued, he had been affecting to study in polite embarrassment the low-pile, mustard-brown carpeting, but now he looked up, and it was Sammy's turn to feel embarrassed. His cousin looked him up and down, with an expression that was both appraising and admonitory.
"Yes, Aunt," he said. "I do. Only I have one question. What is a comic book?"
Sammy reached into his portfolio, pulled out a creased, well-thumbed copy of the latest issue of Action Comics, and handed it to his cousin.
In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant. It aspired to the dimensions of a slick magazine and to the thickness of a pulp, offering sixty-four pages of gaudy bulk (including the cover) for its ideal price of one thin dime. While the quality of its interior illustrations was generally execrable at best, its covers pretended to some of the skill and design of the slick, and to the brio of the pulp magazine. The comic book cover, in those early days, was a poster advertising a dream-movie, with a running time of two seconds, that flickered to life in the mind and unreeled in splendor just before one opened to the stapled packet of coarse paper inside and the lights came up. The covers were often hand-painted, rather than merely inked and colored, by men with solid reputations in the business, journeyman illustrators who could pull off accurate lab girls in chains and languid, detailed jungle jaguars and muscularly correct male bodies whose feet seemed really to carry their weight. Held in the hand, hefted, those early numbers of Wonder and Detective, with their chromatic crew of pirates, Hindu poisoners, and snap-brim avengers, their abundant typography at once stylish and crude, seem even today to promise adventure of a light but thoroughly nourishing variety. All too often, however, the scene depicted on the label bore no relation to the thin soup of material contained within. Inside the covers-whence today there wafts an inevitable flea-market smell of rot and nostalgia-the comic book of 1939 was, artistically and morphologically, in a far more primitive state. As with all mongrel art forms and pidgin languages, there was, in the beginning, a necessary, highly fertile period of genetic and grammatical confusion. Men who had been reading newspaper comic strips and pulp magazines for most of their lives, many of them young and inexperienced with the pencil, the ink brush, and the cruel time constraints of piecework, struggled to see beyond the strict spatial requirements of the newspaper strip, on the one hand, and the sheer overheated wordiness of the pulp on the other.
From the beginning, there was a tendency among educators, psychologists, and the general public to view the comic book as merely a debased offspring of the newspaper comic strip, then in the full flower of its since-faded glory, read by presidents and Pullman porters, a proud American cousin, in indigenous vitality and grace, of baseball and jazz. Some of the opprobrium and sense of embarrassment that would forever after attach itself to the comic book form was due to the way it at first inevitably suffered, even at its best, by comparison with the mannered splendor of Burne Hogarth, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and the other kings of funny-page draftsmanship, with the finely tuned humor and adultish irony of Li'l Abner, Krazy Kat, Abbie 'n' Slats, with the steady, metrical storytelling of Gould and Gray and Gasoline Alley, or with the dizzying, never surpassed interplay of verbal and visual narrative in the work of Milton Caniff.
At first, and until very recently in 1939, comic books had in fact been nothing more than reprint digests of the more popular strips, uprooted from their newspaper homes and forced, not without violence and scissoring, between a pair of cheap glossy covers. The strips' measured, three-to-four-panel pacing, with Friday cliffhangers and Monday recapitulations, suffered in the more spacious confines of the "funny book,"and what felt stately, thrilling, or hilarious when doled out in spoonfuls on a daily basis seemed a jerky, repetitive, static, and unnecessarily protracted business in the pages of, say, More Fun (1937), the first comic book that Sammy Klayman ever bought. Partly for this reason, but also to avoid paying the established syndicates for the reprint rights, the early publishers of comic books began to experiment with original content, hiring artists or packagers of artists to create their own characters and strips. These artists, if experienced, were not generally successful or talented; if they had talent, they lacked experience. Those in the latter category were mostly immigrants or immigrants' children, or country boys right off the bus. They had dreams but, given their last names and lack of connections, no real chance of succeeding in the lofty world of Saturday Evening Post covers and ads for Mazda lightbulbs. Many of them, it must be said, could not even draw a realistic picture of the admittedly complicated bodily appendage with which they hoped to make their livings.
The drop-off in quality that followed the original-content revolution was immediate and precipitous. Lines grew tentative, poses awkward, compositions static, backgrounds nonexistent. Feet, notoriously difficult to draw in realistic depth, all but disappeared from the panels, and noses were reduced to the simplest variations on the twenty-second letter of the alphabet. Horses resembled barrel-chested, spindly dogs, and automobiles were carefully effaced with speed lines to disguise the fact that they lacked doors, were never drawn to scale, and all looked the same. Pretty women, as a requisite arrow in every boy cartoonist's quiver, fared somewhat better, but the men tended to stand around in wrinkleless suits that looked stamped from stovepipe tin and in hats that appeared to weigh more than the automobiles, ill at ease, big-chinned, punching one another in their check-mark noses. Circus strong men, giant Hindu manservants, and breechclouted jungle lords invariably sported fanciful musculature, eyeceps and octoceps and beltoids, and abdomens like fifteen racked pool balls. Knees and elbows bent at painful, double-jointed angles. The color was murky at best, and at worst there was hardly any color at all. Sometimes everything was just two tones of red, or two of blue. But most of all, comic books suffered not from insufficient artwork-for there was considerable vitality here, too, and a collective Depression-born urge toward self-improvement, and even the occasional talented hard-luck competent pencilman-but from a bad case of the carbon copies. Everything was a version, sometimes hardly altered at all, of a newspaper strip or a pulp-radio hero. Radio's Green Hornet spawned various colors of wasp, beetle, and bee; the Shadow was himself shadowed by a legion of suit-wearing, felt-hatted, lama-trained vigilantes; every villainess was a thinly disguised Dragon Lady. Consequently, the comic book, almost immediately upon its invention, or soon thereafter, began to languish, lacking purpose or distinction. There was nothing here one could not find done better, or cheaper, somewhere else (and on the radio one could have it for free).
Then, in June 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the power of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation. The artist, Joe Shuster, while technically just barely apt, seemed to understand from the first that the big rectangular page of the comic book offered possibilities for pacing and composition that were mostly unavailable in the newspapers; he joined three panels vertically into one to display the full parabolic zest of one of Superman's patented skyscraper-hops (the Man of Steel could not, at this point in his career, properly fly), and he chose his angles and arranged his figures with a certain cinematic flair. The writer, Jerome Siegel, had forged, through the smelting intensity of his fanatical love and compendious knowledge of the pulps and their antecedents, a magical alloy of several previous characters and archetypes from Samson to Doc Savage, one with its own unique properties of tensility, hardness, and luster. Though he had been conceived originally as a newspaper hero, Superman was born in the pages of a comic book, where he thrived, and after this miraculous parturition, the form finally began to emerge from its transitional funk, and to articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreams: to express the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves. Comic books were Rid Stuff, pure and true, and they arrived at precisely the moment when the kids of America began, after ten years of terrible hardship, to find their pockets burdened with the occasional superfluous dime.
"That's a comic book," said Sammy.
"Big money you say," Joe said, looking more doubtful than he had all morning.
"Fifty dollars a week. Maybe more."
"Fifty dollars!" said Ethel, her usual tone of disbelief modified, it seemed to Sammy, by a wrinkle of uncertainty, as if the very patent outrageousness of the claim might be a guarantee of its veracity.
"Forty at least."
Ethel folded her arms and stood there, chewing on her lower lip. Then she nodded. "I have to find you a better tie," she said to Joe. She turned and went back into the apartment.
"Hey, Sam Clay," Joe whispered, producing the neat little bundle, wrapped in a paper napkin, in which he had secreted his uneaten breakfast. He held it up with a little smile. "Where I can throw this?"
The offices of the Empire Novelty Company, Inc., were on the fourth floor of the Kramler Building, in a hard-luck stretch of Twenty-fifth Street near Madison Square. A fourteen-story office block faced with stone the color of a stained shirt collar, its windows bearded with soot, ornamented with a smattering of moderne zigzags, the Kramler stood out as a lone gesture of commercial hopefulness in a block filled with low brick "taxpayers" (minimal structures generating just enough in rent to pay property taxes on the land they occupied), boarded-up woolens showrooms, and the moldering headquarters of benevolent societies that ministered to dwindling and scattered populations of immigrants from countries no longer on the map. It had been dedicated in late 1929, then repossessed by the lien-holding bank when the developer leaped from the window of his office on the fourteenth floor. In the ten years since, it had managed to attract a small but varied number of tenants, among them a publisher of sexy pulp magazines; a distributor of hairpieces, false beards, male corsets, and elevator shoes; and the East Coast booking agents for a third-rate midwestern circus; all of them attracted, as Shelly Anapol had been, by the cut-rate rents and a collegial atmosphere of rascality.
Despite the air of failure and disrepute that permeated the neighborhood, Sheldon P. Anapol-whose brother-in-law Jack Ashkenazy owned Racy Publications, Inc., on the Kramler's seventh floor-was a talented businessman, likable and cruel. He had gone to work for Hyman Lazar, the founder of Empire Novelty, in 1914, at the age of twenty, as a penniless traveling salesman, and fifteen years later had saved enough to buy the company out from under Lazar when the latter ran afoul of his creditors. The combination of a hard-won cynicism, low overhead, an unstintingly shoddy product line, and the American boy's unassuageable hunger for midget radios, X-ray spectacles, and joy buzzers had enabled Anapol not only to survive the Depression but to keep his two daughters in private school and to support or, as he liked to put it, invoking unconscious imagery of battleships and Cunard liners, to "float" his immense and expensive wife.
As with all great salesmen, Anapol's past comprehended tragedy and disappointment. He was an orphan of pogrom and typhus, raised by unfeeling relations. His physical bulk, inherited from generations of slab-jawed, lumbering Anapols, had for much of his early life rendered him the butt of jokes and the object of women's scorn. As a young man, he had played the violin well enough to hope for a musical career, until a hasty marriage and the subsequent upkeep on his two dreadnought daughters, Belle and Candace, forced him into a life of commercial traveling. All of this left him hardened, battered, rumpled, and addicted to the making of money, but not, somehow, embittered. He had always been welcome, during his days on the road, in the lonely shops of the dealers in jokes and novelties, men who were often in their third or fourth line of work and almost universally broken, after years of guessing and disaster, of the ability to know what was amusing and what was not. The unambiguously comical sight of Anapol, with his vast, unbuttoned suits and mismatched socks, his sad violinist's eyes, modeling a blond horsehair wig or demonstrating a dentifrice that turned the teeth of victims black, had been the keystone of many a big sale in WilkesBarre or Pittsfield.
In the last decade, however, he had traveled no farther than Riverdale; and over the past year, following an intensification in his perennial "difficulties" with his wife, Anapol had rarely even left the Kramler Building. He had a bed and nightstand brought in from Macy's, and he slept in his office, behind an old crewelwork coverlet draped over a length of clothesline. Sammy had received his first raise the previous fall when he found an empty pushboy's clothes rack idling on Seventh Avenue one night and rolled it across town to serve as Anapol's clothes closet. Anapol, who had read widely in the literature of sales and was in fact eternally at work on a treatise-cum-autobiography he referred to sometimes as The Science of Opportunity and other times, more ruefully, as Sorrow in My Sample Case, not only preached initiative but rewarded it, an ethos on which Sammy now pinned all his hopes.
"So talk," said Anapol. He was wearing, as usual at this early hour, only socks, garters, and a pair of brightly patterned boxer shorts wide enough to qualify, Sammy thought, as a mural. He was bent over a tiny sink at the back of his office, shaving his face. He had been up, as every morning, since before dawn, settling on a move in one of the chess games he played by mail with men in Cincinnati, Fresno, and Zagreb; writing to other solitary lovers of Szymanowski whom he had organized into an international appreciation society; penning ill-concealed threats to particularly recalcitrant debtors in his creaky, vivid, half-grammatical prose in which there were hints of Jehovah and George Raft; and composing his daily letter to Maura Zell, his mistress, who was a chorine in the road company of Pearls of Broadway. He always waited until eight o'clock to begin his toilet, and seemed to set great store in the effect his half-naked imperial person had on his employees as they filed in for work. "What's this idea of yours?"
"Let me ask you this first, Mr. Anapol," Sammy said. He was standing, clutching his portfolio, on the threadbare oval of Chinese carpet that covered most of the wooden floor of Anapol's office, a large room set off from the desks of Mavis Magid, Anapol's secretary, and the five shipping, inventory, and account clerks by partitions of veneered presswood and glass. A hat rack, side chairs, and rolltop desk were all secondhand, scavenged in 1933 from the offices of a neighboring life-insurance company that went belly-up, and trucked on dollies down the hall to their present location. "What are they charging you over at National for the back cover of Action Comics this month?"
"No, let me ask you a question," Anapol said. He stepped back from the mirror and tried, as he did every morning, to induce a few long strands of hair to lie flat across the bald top of his head. He had said nothing so far about Sammy's portfolio, which Sammy had never before had the courage to show him. "Who is that kid sitting out there?"
Anapol did not turn around, and he hadn't taken his eyes from the tiny shaving mirror since Sammy had come into the room, but he couldsee Joe in the mirror. Joe and Sammy were sitting back to back, separated by the glass and wood partition that divided Anapol's office from the rest of his empire. Sammy craned around to get a look at his cousin. There was a pine drawing board on Joe's lap, a sketchpad, and some pencils. On the chair beside him lay a cheap pasteboard portfolio they had bought in a five-and-dime on Broadway. The idea was for Joe to fill it quickly with exciting sketches of muscular heroes while Sammy pitched his idea to Anapol and played for time. "You'll have to work fast," he had told Joe, and Joe had assured him that in ten minutes he would have assembled an entire pantheon of crime-fighters in tights. But then on the way in, as Sammy was talking up Mavis Magid, Joe had wasted precious minutes rummaging through the shipment of Amazing Midget Radios whose arrival yesterday morning from Japan had sent Anapol into a rage; the whole shipment was defective and, even by his relaxed standards, unsaleable.
"That's my cousin Joe," said Sammy, sneaking another glance over his shoulder. Joe was bent over his work, staring at his Fingers and craning his head slowly from left to right, as if some invisible force beam from his eyes were dragging the tip of the pencil across the page. He was sketching in the bulge of a mighty shoulder that was connected to a thick left arm. Other than this arm and a number of faint, cryptic guidelines, there was nothing on the page. "My mother's nephew."
"He's a foreigner? Where's he from?"
" Prague. How did you know?"
"The haircut."
Anapol stepped over to the pushboy's rack and took a pair of trousers from their hanger.
"He just got here last night," Sammy said.
"And he's looking for a job."
"Well, naturally-"
"I hope, Sammy, that you told him I have no jobs for anybody."
"Actually… I may have misled him a little on that score, boss."
Again Anapol nodded, as another of his unerring snap judgments was confirmed. Sammy's left leg started to twitch. It was the worst-lamed of the two and the first to weaken when he was nervous or about to be caught in a lie.
"And all this has something to do," Anapol said, "with how much they charge me over at National for the back cover of Action Comics."
"Or Detective."
Anapol frowned. He lifted his arms and then disappeared into a huge linen undershirt that did not exactly look freshly laundered. Sammy checked Joe's work. A massive frame had begun to emerge, a squarish head, a thick, almost tubular chest. While confidently rendered, the figure had something bulky about it. The legs were mighty and booted, but the boots were stout workman's boots, laced prosaically up the front. Sammy's leg began to shake a little harder now. Anapol's head reemerged from his undershirt. He tucked it over his furred walrus belly and down into his trousers. He was still frowning. He lifted his suspenders up over his shoulders and let them snap into place. Then, his eyes fixed on the back of Joe's head, he went over to his desk and flicked a switch.
"I need Murray," he said into the speaker. "It's a slow week," he added to Sammy. "That's the only reason I'm indulging you this way."
"I understand," said Sammy.
"Sit down."
Sammy sat and rested the portfolio against his legs, relieved to set it down. It was stuffed almost to bursting with his own sketches, concepts, prototypes, and finished pages.
Mavis Magid got Murray Edelman on the phone. The advertising manager for Empire Novelty told him, as Sammy had known he would because he voluntarily worked extra hours in Edelman's department every week, absorbing what he could of the old man's skewed and exclamatory slant on the advertising game, that National was charging almost seven times the going rate for the space on the back cover of its bestselling titles-the August issue of Action, the last for which there were figures, had sold close to a million and a half copies. There was, according to Murray, one reason and one reason alone for the skyrocketing sales of certain titles in the still relatively inchoate comic book market.
"Superman,"said Anapol when he hung up the phone, with the tone of someone ordering an unknown dish in an outlandish restaurant. He started to pace behind his desk, hands clasped behind his back.
"Think of how much product we could sell if we had our own Superman," Sammy heard himself saying. "We can call them Joy Buzzer Comics. Whoopie Cushion Comics. Think of how much you'll save on advertising. Think-"
"Enough," said Anapol. He stopped pacing and flicked the switch on his telephone console again. The cast of his face had altered, taking on a taut, faintly squeamish expression Sammy could recognize, after a year in his employ, as the repressed foreconsciousness of money. His voice was a hoarse whisper. "I need Jack," he said.
Mavis placed a call upstairs to the offices of Racy Publications, Inc., home of Racy Police Stories, Racy Western, and Racy Romance. Jack Ashkenazy was summoned to the phone. He confirmed what Murray Edelman had already said. Every pulp and magazine publisher in New York had taken notice of the explosive sales of National's Action Comics and its caped and booted star.
"Yeah?" Anapol said. "Yeah?Youare? Any luck?"
He took the receiver from his ear and stuffed it under his left armpit.
"They've been looking around for a Superman of their own upstairs," he told Sammy.
Sammy jumped out of his chair.
"We can get him one, boss," he said. "We can have him his very own Superman by Monday morning. But just between you and me," he added, trying to sound like his great hero, John Garfield, tough and suave at the same time, the street boy ready to wear fancy suits and go where the big money was, "I'd advise you to keep a little piece of this for yourself?'
Anapol laughed. "Oh, you would, would you?" he said. He shook his head. "I'll bear that in mind." He kept the receiver tucked under his arm and took a cigarette from the box on his desk. He lit it and inhaled, mulling things over, his big jaw tensed and bulging. Then he rescued the receiver and blew smoke into the mouthpiece.
"Maybe you'd better come down here, Jack," he said. He hung up again and nodded in Joe Kavalier's direction. "Is that your artist?"
"We both are," said Sammy. "Artists, I mean." He decided to match Anapol's dubiety with a burst of self-confidence he was rapidly inducing himself to feel. He went over to the partition and rapped, with a flourish, on the glass. Joe turned, startled, from his work. Sammy, not wanting to endanger his own display of confidence, didn't let himself look too closely at what Joe had done. At least the whole page seemed to have been filled in.
"May I-?" he said to Anapol, gesturing toward the door.
"Might as well get him in here."
Sammy signaled for Joe to come in, a ringmaster welcoming a famous aerialist into the spotlight. Joe stood up, gathering the portfolio and his stray pencils, then sidled into Anapol's office, sketchpad clutched to his chest, in his baggy tweed suit, with his hungry face and borrowed tie, his expression at once guarded and touchingly eager to please. He was looking at the owner of Empire Novelty as if all the big money Sammy had promised had been packed into the swollen carapace of Sheldon Anapol and would, at the slightest prick or tap, come pouring out in an uncontrollable green torrent.
"Hello, young man," said Anapol. "I'm told you can draw."
"Yes, sir!" Joe said, in a voice that sounded oddly strangled, startling them all.
"Give it here." Sammy reached for the pad and found, to his surprise, that he couldn't pry it loose. For an instant, he was afraid that his cousin had done something so abominable that he was afraid to show it. Then he caught a glimpse of the upper left corner of Joe's drawing, where a fat moon peered from behind a crooked tower, a crooked bat flapping across its face, and he saw that, on the contrary, his cousin simply couldn't let go.
"Joe," he said softly.
"I need a little more time with it," Joe said, handing the pad to Sammy.
Anapol came around from behind his desk, lodged the burning cigarette in a corner of his mouth, and took the pad from Sammy. "Look at that!" he said.
In the drawing it was midnight, in a cobblestone alley crosshatched with menacing shadows. There were evocative suggestions of tiled roofs, leaded windows, icy puddles on the ground. Out of the shadows and into the light of the bat-scarred moon strode a tall, brawny man. His frame was as sturdy and thick as his hobnailed boots. For costume he wore a tunic with deep creases, a heavy belt, and a big, shapeless stocking hat like something out of Rembrandt. The man's features, though regular and handsome, looked frozen, and his intrepid gaze was empty. There were four Hebrew characters etched into his forehead.
"Is that the Golem?" said Anapol. "My new Superman is the Golem?"
"I didn't-the conceit is new for me," Joe said, his English stiffening up on him. "I just drawed the first thing I could think of that resembled… To me, this Superman is… maybe… only an American Golem." He looked for support to Sammy. "Is that right?"
"Huh?" said Sammy, struggling to conceal his dismay. "Yeah, sure, but, Joe… the Golem is… well… Jewish."
Anapol rubbed his heavy chin, looking at the drawing. He pointed to the portfolio. "Let me see what else you got in there."
"He had to leave all his work back in Prague," Sammy put in quickly, as Joe untied the ribbon of the portfolio. "He just started throwing together some new stuff this morning."
"Well, he isn't fast," Anapol said when he saw that Joe's portfolio was empty. "He has talent, anyone can see that, but…" The look of doubtfulness returned to his face.
"Joe," cried Sammy. "Tell him where you studied!"
"The Academy of Fine Art, in Prague," said Joe.
Anapol stopped rubbing his chin. "The Academy of Fine Art?"
"What is that? Who are these guys? What's going on in here?" Jack Ashkenazy burst into the office without warning or a knock. He had all his hair, and was a much snappier dresser than his brother-in-law, favoring checked vests and two-tone shoes. Because he had prospered, in a Kramler Building kind of way, more easily than Anapol, he had not been forced to develop the older man's rumpled salesman's charm, but he shared Anapol's avidity for unburdening America's youth of the oppressive national mantle of tedium, ten cents at a time. He plucked the cigar from his mouth and yanked the sketchpad out of Anapol's hands.
"Beauteeful," he said. "The head is too big."
"The head is too big?" said Anapol. "That's all you can say?"
"The body's too heavy. Looks like he's made out of stone."
"He is made out of stone, you idiot, he's a golem."
"Clay, actually," said Joe. He coughed. "I can do something more lighter."
"He can do anything you want," said Sammy.
"Anything," Joe agreed. His eyes widened as an inspiration seemed to strike, and he turned to Sammy. "Maybe I ought to show them my fart."
"He's only ever read one comic book," Sammy said, ignoring this suggestion. "But I've read them all, boss. I've read every issue of Action. I've studied this stuff. I know how it's done. Look." He picked up his own portfolio and untied the strings. It was a cheap pasteboard number from Woolworth's, like Joe's, but battered, scraped, and carefully dented. You couldn't sit around in some art director's waiting room with a brand-new-looking portfolio. Everyone would know you were a tyro. Sammy had spent an entire afternoon last fall hitting his with a hammer, walking across it in a pair of his mother's heels, spilling coffee on it. Unfortunately, since purchasing it he had managed to land only two cartoons, one in a completely humor-free magazine called Laff and the other in Belle-Views, house organ of the psychiatric ward where his mother worked.
"I can do it all," he boasted, pulling out a fistful of sample pages and passing them around. What he meant, more precisely, was that he could steal it all.
"It isn't half bad," Anapol said.
"It ain't beauteeful, either," said Ashkenazy.
Sammy glared at Ashkenazy, not because Ashkenazy had insulted his work-no one was ever more aware of his own artistic limitations than Sam Clay-but because Sammy felt that he was standing on the border of something wonderful, a land where wild cataracts of money and the racing river of his own imagination would, at last, lift his makeshift little raft and carry it out to the boundless freedom of the open sea. Jack Ashkenazy, whose watery eyes could easily, Sammy imagined, be stabbed out with the letter opener on Anapol's desk, was threatening to get in his way. Anapol caught the look of visionary murder in Sammy's eyes and took a chance on it.
"What say we let these boys go home over the weekend and try to come up with a Superman for us." He fixed Sammy with a hard look. "Our own kind of a Superman, naturally."
"Of course."
"How long is a Superman story?"
"Probably twelve pages."
"I want a character and a twelve-page story by Monday."
"We're going to need a lot more than that," said Ashkenazy. "They got typically five or six characters in there. You know, a spy. A private eye. A shadowy avenger of the helpless. An evil Chinaman. These two can't come up with all that themselves and draw it. I got artists, Shelly. I got George Deasey."
"No!" said Sammy. George Deasey was the editor in chief of Racy Publications. He was a tyrannical, ill-tempered old newspaperman who filled the Kramler Building 's elevators with the exacerbated smell of rye. "It's mine. Ours, me and Joe. Boss, I can handle it."
"Absolutely, boss," said Joe.
Anapol grinned. "Get a load of this guy," he said. "You just get me a Superman," he went on, putting a placating hand on Sammy's shoulder. "Then we'll see about what you can handle or not. All right, Jack?"
Ashkenazy twisted his usually genial features into a grimace. "I have to tell you, Shelly. I got serious doubts. I'm going to have to say-"
"The radios," Joe said. "The little radios outside."
"Aw, forget the damn radios, Joe, will you?" Sammy said.
"What, the midgets?" Anapol said.
Joe nodded. "They are just wrong in the wires. All in the same way. One little wire is not, hmm. So." He kissed the tip of one index finger with the other. "Stuck together to the resistance."
"You mean to the resistor?"
"Okay."
"You know from radios?" Anapol narrowed his eyes doubtfully. "You're saying you could fix them?"
"Oh, assuredly, boss. It is simple to me."
"How much is it going to cost?"
"Not anything. Some few pence for the- I do not know the word." He angled his fingers into the form of a pistol. "Weichlote. You must to melt it."
"Solder? A soldering gun?"
"Okay. But perhaps I can to borrow that."
"Just a few pence, huh?"
"Maybe one penny for the radio, each radio."
"That's cutting it pretty close to my cost."
"But okay, I don't charge to do the work."
Sammy looked at his cousin, amazed and only a little put out at his having shanghaied the negotiation. He saw Anapol raise a meaningful eyebrow at his brother-in-law, promising or threatening something.
At last Jack Ashkenazy nodded. "There's just one thing," he said. He put a hand on Joe's arm, restraining him before he could sidle out of the office, with his blank-eyed Golem and his empty portfolio. "This is a comic book we're talking about, okay? Half bad is maybe better than beauteeful."
The first official meeting of their partnership was convened outside the Kramler Building, in a nimbus compounded of the boys' exhalations and of subterranean steam purling up from a grate in the pavement.
"This is good," Joe said.
"I know."
"He said yes," Joe reminded his cousin, who stood patting idly with one hand at the front of his overcoat and a panicked expression on his face, as though worried that he had left something important behind in Anapol's office.
"Yes, he did. He said yes."
"Sammy." Joe reached out and grabbed Sammy's wandering hand, arresting it in its search of his pockets and collar and tie. "This is good."
"Yes, this is good, god damn it. I just hope to God we can do it."
Joe let go of Sammy's hand, shocked by this expression of sudden doubt. He had been completely taken in by Sammy's bold application of the Science of Opportunity. The whole morning, the rattling ride through the flickering darkness under the East River, the updraft of Klaxons and rising office blocks that had carried them out of the subway station, the ten thousand men and women who immediately surrounded them, the ringing telephones and gum-snapping chitchat of the clerks and secretaries in Sheldon Anapol's office, the sly and harried bulk of Anapol himself, the talk of sales figures and competition and cashing in big, all this had conformed so closely to Joe's movie-derived notions of life in America that if an airplane were now to land on Twenty-fifth Street and disgorge a dozen bathing-suit-clad Fairies of Democracy come to award him the presidency of General Motors, a contract with Warner Bros., and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a swimming pool in the living room, he would have greeted this, too, with the same dreamlike unsurprise. It had not occurred to him until now to consider that his cousin's display of bold entrepreneurial confidence might have been entirely bluff, that it was 8°C and he had neither hat nor gloves, that his stomach was as empty as his billfold, and that he and Sammy were nothing more than a couple of callow young men in thrall to a rash and dubious promise.
"But I have belief in you," Joe said. "I trust you." "That's good to hear." "I mean it." "I wish I knew why."
"Because," said Joe. "I don't have any choice." "Oh ho."
"I need money," Joe said, and then tried adding, "god damn it." "Money." The word seemed to have a restorative effect on Sammy, snapping him out of his daze. "Bight. Okay. First of all, we need horses." "Horses?" "Arms. Guys." "Artists."
"How about we just call them 'guys' for right now?" "Do you know where we can find some?"
Sammy thought for a moment. "I believe I do," he said. "Come on." They set off in a direction that Joe decided was probably west. As they walked Sammy seemed to get lost quickly in his own reflections. Joe tried to imagine the train of his cousin's thoughts, but the particulars of the task at hand were not clear to him, and after a while he gave up and just kept pace. Sammy's gait was deliberate and crooked, and Joe found it a challenge to keep from getting ahead. There was a humming sound everywhere that he attributed first to the circulation of his own blood in his ears before he realized that it was the sound produced by Twenty-fifth Street itself, by a hundred sewing machines in a sweatshop overhead, exhaust grilles at the back of a warehouse, the trains rolling deep beneath the black surface of the street. Joe gave up trying to think like, trust, or believe in his cousin and just walked, head abuzz, toward the Hudson River, stunned by the novelty of exile.
"Who is he?" Sammy said at last, as they were crossing a broad street which a sign identified, improbably somehow, as Sixth Avenue. Sixth Avenue! The Hudson River!
"Who is he," Joe said.
"Who is he, and what does he do?"
"He flies."
Sammy shook his head. "Superman flies."
"So ours does not?"
"I just think I'd…"
"To be original."
"If we can. Try to do it without flying, at least. No flying, no strength of a hundred men, no bulletproof skin."
"Okay," Joe said. The humming seemed to recede a little. "And some others, they do what?"
"Well, Batman-"
"He flies, like a bat."
"No, he doesn't fly."
"But he is blind."
"No, he only dresses like a bat. He has no batlike qualities at all. He uses his fists."
"That sounds dull."
"Actually, it's spooky. You'd like it."
"Maybe another animal."
"Uh, well, yeah. Okay. A hawk. Hawkman."
"Hawk, yes, okay. But that one must fly."
"Yeah, you're right. Scratch the bird family. The, uh, the Fox. The Shark."
"A swimming one."
"Maybe a swimming one. Actually, no, I know a guy works in the Chesler shop, he said they're already doing a guy who swims. For Timely."
"A lion?"
"Lion. The Lion. Lionman."
"He could be strong. He roars very loud."
"He has a super roar."
"It strikes fear."
"It breaks dishes."
"The bad guys go deaf."
They laughed. Joe stopped laughing.
"I think we have to be serious," he said.
"You're right," said Sammy. "The Lion, I don't know. Lions are lazy. How about the Tiger. Tigerman. No, no. Tigers are killers. Shit. Let's see."
They began to go through the rolls of the animal kingdom, concentrating naturally on the predators: Catman, Wolfman, the Owl, the Panther, the Black Bear. They considered the primates: the Monkey, Gorillaman, the Gibbon, the Ape, the Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents.
"Be serious," Joe chided again.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Look, forget animals. Everybody's going to be thinking of animals. In two months, I'm telling you, by the time our guy hits the stands, there's going to be guys running around dressed like every damn animal in the zoo. Birds. Bugs. Underwater guys. And I'll bet you anything there's going to be five guys who are really strong, and invulnerable, and can fly."
"If he goes as fast as the light," Joe suggested.
"Yeah, I guess it's good to be fast."
"Or if he can make a thing burn up. If he can-listen! If he can, you know. Shoot the fire, with his eyes!"
"His eyeballs would melt."
"Then with his hands. Or, yes, he turns into a fire!"
"Timely's doing that already, too. They got the fire guy and the water guy"
"He turns into ice. He makes the ice everywhere."
"Crushed or cubes?"
"Not good?"
Sammy shook his head. "Ice," he said. "I don't see a lot of stories in ice."
"He turns into electricity?" Joe tried. "He turns into acid?"
"He turns into gravy. He turns into an enormous hat. Look, stop. Stop. Just stop."
They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, and that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment ofglobal vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime.
"This is not the question," he said. "If he's like a cat or a spider or a fucking wolverine, if he's huge, if he's tiny, if he can shoot flames or ice or death rays or Vat 69, if he turns into fire or water or stone or India rubber. He could be a Martian, he could be a ghost, he could be a god or a demon or a wizard or monster. Okay? It doesn't matter, because right now, see, at this very moment, we have a bandwagon rolling, I'm telling you. Every little skinny guy like me in New York who believes there's life on Alpha Centauri and got the shit kicked out of him in school and can smell a dollar is out there right this minute trying to jump onto it, walking around with a pencil in his shirt pocket, saying, 'He's like a falcon, no, he's like a tornado, no, he's like a goddamned wiener dog.' Okay?"
"Okay."
"And no matter what we come up with, and how we dress him, some other character with the same shtick, with the same style of boots and the same little doodad on his chest, is already out there, or is coming out tomorrow, or is going to be knocked off from our guy inside a week and a half."
Joe listened patiently, awaiting the point of this peroration, but Sammy seemed to have lost the thread. Joe followed his cousin's gaze along the sidewalk but saw only a pair of what looked to be British sailors lighting their cigarettes off a single shielded match.
"So…" Sammy said. "So…"
"So that is not the question," Joe prompted.
"That's what I'm saying."
"Continue."
They kept walking.
"How? is not the question. What? is not the question," Sammy said.
"The question is why."
"The question is why."
"Why," Joe repeated.
"Why is he doing it?"
"Doing what?"
"Dressing up like a monkey or an ice cube or a can of fucking corn."
"To fight the crime, isn't it?"
"Well, yes, to fight crime. To fight evil. But that's all any of these guys are doing. That's as far as they ever go. They just… you know, it's the right thing to do, so they do it. How interesting is that?"
"I see."
"Only Batman, you know… see, yeah, that's good. That's what makes Batman good, and not dull at all, even though he's just a guy who dresses up like a bat and beats people up."
"What is the reason for Batman? The why?"
"His parents were killed, see? In cold blood. Right in front of his eyes, when he was a kid. By a robber."
"It's revenge."
"That's interesting," Sammy said. "See?"
"And he was driven mad."
"Well…"
"And that's why he puts on the bat's clothes."
"Actually, they don't go so far as to say that," Sammy said. "But I guess it's there between the lines."
"So, we need to figure out what is the why."
" 'What is the why,' " Sammy agreed.
"Flattop."
Joe looked up and saw a young man standing in front of them. He was short-waisted and plump, and his face, except for a pair of big black spectacles, was swaddled and all but invisible in an elaborate confection of scarf and hat and earflaps.
"Julius," Sammy said. "This is Joe. Joe, this is a friend from the neighborhood, Julie Glovsky."
Joe held out his hand. Julie studied it a moment, then extended his own small hand. He had on a black woolen greatcoat, a fur-lined leather cap with mammoth earflaps, and too-short green corduroy trousers.
"This guy's brother is the one I told you about," Sammy told Joe. "Making good money in comics. What are you doing here?"
Somewhere deep within his wrappings, Julie Glovsky shrugged. "I need to see my brother."
"Isn't that remarkable, we need to see him, too."
"Yeah? Why's that?" Julie Glovsky shuddered. "Only tell me fast before my nuts fall off."
"Would that be from cold or, you know, atrophy?"
"Funny."
"I am funny."
"Unfortunately not in the sense of 'humorous.' "
"Funny," Sammy said.
"I am funny. What's your idea?"
"Why don't you come to work for me?"
"For you? Doing what? Selling shoestrings? We still got a box of them at my house. My mom uses them to sew up chickens."
"Not shoelaces. My boss, you know, Sheldon Anapol?"
"How would I know him?"
"Nevertheless, he is my boss. He's going into business with his brother-in-law, Jack Ashkenazy, who you also do not know, but who publishes Racy Science, Racy Combat, et cetera. They're going to do comic books, see, and they're looking for talent."
"What?" Julie poked his tortoise face out from the shadows of its woolen shell. "Do you think they might hire me?"
"They will if I tell them to," said Sammy. "Seeing as how I'm the art director in chief."
Joe looked at Sammy and raised an eyebrow. Sammy shrugged.
"Joe and I, here, we're putting together the first title right now. It's going to be all adventure heroes. All in costumes," he said, extemporizing now. "You know, like Superman. Batman. The Blue Beetle. That type of thing."
"Tights, like."
"That's it. Tights. Masks. Big muscles. It's going to be called Masked Man Comics," he continued. "Joe and I've got the lead feature all taken care of, but we need backup stuff. Think you could come up with something?"
"Shit, Flattop, yes. You bet."
"What about your brother?"
"Sure, he's always looking for more work. They got him doing Romeo Rabbit for thirty dollars a week."
"Okay, then, he's hired, too. You're both hired, on one condition."
"What's that?"
"We need a place to work," said Sammy.
"Come on then," said Julie. "I guess we can work at the Rathole." He leaned toward Sammy as they started off, lowering his voice. The tall skinny kid with the big nose had fallen a few steps behind them to light a cigarette. "Who the hell is that guy?"
"This?" Sammy said. He took hold of the kid's elbow and tugged him forward as though bringing him out onstage to take a deserved bow. He reached up to grab a handful of the kid's hair and gave it a tug, just kind of rocking his head from side to side while holding on to his hair, grinning at him. Had Joe been a young woman, Julie Glovsky might almost have been inclined to think that Sammy was sweet on her. "This is my partner."
Sammy was thirteen when his father, the Mighty Molecule, came home. The Wertz vaudeville circuit had folded that spring, a victim of Hollywood, the Depression, mismanagement, bad weather, shoddy talent, philistinism, and a number of other scourges and furies whose names Sammy's father would invoke, with incantatory rage, in the course of the long walks they took together that summer. At one time or another he assigned blame for his sudden joblessness, with no great coherence or logic, to bankers, unions, bosses, Clark Gable, Catholics, Protestants, theater owners, sister acts, poodle acts, monkey acts, Irish tenors, English Canadians, French Canadians, and Mr. Hugo Wertz himself.
"Hell with 'em," he would invariably finish, with a sweeping gesture that, in the dusk of a Brooklyn July, was limned by the luminous arc of his cigar. "The Molecule one day says 'fuck you' to the all of them."
The free and careless use of obscenity, like the cigars, the lyrical rage, the fondness for explosive gestures, the bad grammar, and the habit of referring to himself in the third person were wonderful to Sammy; until that summer of 1935, he had possessed few memories or distinct impressions of his father. And any of the above qualities (among several others his father possessed) would, Sammy thought, have given his mother reason enough to banish the Molecule from their home for a dozen years. It was only with the greatest reluctance and the direct intervention of Rabbi Baitz that she had agreed to let the man back in the house. And yet Sammy understood, from the moment of his father's reappearance, that only dire necessity could ever have induced the Genius of Physical Culture to return to his wife and child. For the last dozen years he had wandered, "free as a goddamn bird in the bush," among the mysterious northern towns of the Wertz circuit, from Augusta, Maine, to Vancouver, British Columbia. An almost pathological antsiness, combined with the air of wistful longing that filled the Molecule's simian face, petite and intelligent, when he spoke of his time on the road, made it clear to his son that as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he would be on his way again.
Professor Alphonse von Clay, the Mighty Molecule (born Alter Klayman in Drakop, a village in the countryside east of Minsk), had abandoned his wife and son soon after Sammy's birth, though every week thereafter he sent a money order in the amount of twenty-five dollars. Sammy came to know him only from the embittered narratives of Ethel Klayman and from the odd, mendacious clipping or newspaper photo the Molecule would send along, torn from the variety page of the Helena Tribune, or the Kenosha Gazelle, or the Calgary Bulletin, and stuffed, with a sprinkling of cigar ash, into an envelope embossed with the imprint of a drinking glass and the name of some demi-fleabag hotel. Sammy would let these accumulate in a blue velvet shoe bag that he placed under his pillow before he went to sleep each night. He dreamed often and intensely of the tiny, thick-muscled man with the gondolier mustachios who could lift a bank safe over his head and beat a draft horse in a tug-of-war. The plaudits and honors described by the clippings, and the names of the monarchs of Europe and the Near East who had supposedly bestowed them, changed over the years, but the essential false facts of the Mighty Molecule's biography remained the same: ten lonely years studying ancient Greek texts in the dusty libraries of the Old World; hours of painful exercises performed daily since the age of five, a dietary regimen consisting only of fresh legumes, seafoods, and fruits, all eaten raw; a lifetime devoted to the careful cultivation of pure, healthy, lamblike thoughts and to total abstention from insalubrious and immoral behaviors.
Over the years, Sammy managed to wring from his mother scant, priceless drops of factual information about his father. He knew that the Molecule, who derived his stage name from the circumstance of his standing, in calf-high gold lame buskins, just under five feet two inches tall, had been imprisoned by the Czar in 1911, in the same cell as a politically minded circus strong man from Odessa known as Freight Train Belz. Sammy knew that it was Belz, an anarcho-syndicalist, and not the ancient sages of Greece, who had schooled his father's body and taught him to abstain from alcohol, meat, and gambling, if not pussy and cigars. And he knew that it was in Kurtzburg's Saloon on the Lower East Side in 1919 that his mother had fallen in love with Alter Klayman, newly arrived in this country and working as an iceman and freelance mover of pianos.
Miss Kavalier was almost thirty when she married. She was four inches shorter than her diminutive husband, sinewy, grim-jawed, her eyes the pale gray of rainwater pooled in a dish left on the window ledge. She wore her black hair pulled into an unrelenting bun. It was impossible for Sammy to imagine his mother as she must have been that summer of 1919, an aging girl upended and borne aloft on a sudden erotic gust, transfixed by the vein-rippled arms of the jaunty homunculus who carried winking hundred-pound blocks of ice into the gloom of her cousin Lev Kurtzburg's saloon on Ludlow Street. Not that Ethel was unfeeling-on the contrary; she could be, in her way, a passionate woman subject to transports of maudlin nostalgia, easily outraged, sunk by bad news, hard luck, or doctor's bills into deep, black crevasses of despair.
"Take me with you," Sammy said to his father one evening after dinner, as they were strolling down Pitkin Avenue, on their way out to New Lots or Canarsie or wherever the Molecule's vagabond urges inclined him that night. Like a horse, Sammy had noticed, the Molecule almost never sat down. He cased any room he entered, pacing first up and down, then back and forth, checking behind the curtains, probing the corners with his gaze or the toe of a shoe, testing out the cushions in the chair or sofa with a measured bounce, then springing back onto his feet. If compelled to stand in one place for any reason, he would rock back and forth like someone who needed to urinate, worrying the dimes in his pocket. He never slept more than four hours a night, and even then, according to Sammy's mother, with inquietude, thrashing and gasping and crying out in his sleep. And he seemed incapable of staying in any one place for longer than an hour or two at a time. Though it enraged and humiliated him, the process of looking for work, crisscrossing lower Manhattan and Times Square, haunting the offices of booking agents and circuit managers, suited him well enough. On the days when he stayed in Brooklyn and hung around the apartment, he drove everyone else to distraction with his pacing and rocking and hourly trips to the store for cigars, pens, a Racing Form, half a roast chicken-anything. In the course of their post-prandial wanderings, father and son ranged far and sat little. They explored the eastern boroughs as far as Kew Gardens and East New York. They took the ferry from the Bush Terminal out to Staten Island, where they hiked out of St. George to Todt Hill, returning well after midnight. When, rarely, they hopped a trolley or caught a train, they would stand, even if the car was empty; on the Staten Island Ferry, the Molecule prowled the decks like a character out of Conrad, uneasily watching the horizon. From time to time in the course of a walk, they might pause in a cigar shop or at a drugstore, where the Molecule would order a celery tonic for himself and a glass of milk for the boy and, disdaining the chrome stool with its Naugahyde seat, would down his Cel-Ray standing up. And once, on Flatbush Avenue, they had gone into a movie theater where The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was playing, but they stayed only for the newsreel before heading back out to the street. The only directions the Molecule disliked to venture were to Coney Island, in whose most evil sideshows he had long ago suffered unspecified torments, and to Manhattan. He had his fill of it during the day, he said, and what was more, the presence on that island of the Palace Theatre, the pinnacle and holy shrine of Vaudeville, was viewed as a reproach by the touchy and grudge-cherishing Molecule, who never had, and never would, tread its storied boards.
"You can't leave me with her. It isn't healthy for a boy my age to be with a woman like that."
The Molecule stopped and turned to face his son. He was dressed, as always, in one of the three black suits that he owned, pressed and shiny with wear at the elbows. Though, like the others, it had been tailored to fit him, it nonetheless strained to encompass his physique. His back and shoulders were as broad as the grille of a truck, his arms as thick as the thighs of an ordinary man, and his thighs, when pressed together, rivaled his chest in girth. His waist looked oddly fragile, like the throat of an egg timer. He wore his hair cropped close and an anachronistic handlebar mustache. In his publicity photographs, where he often posed shirtless or in a skintight leotard, he appeared smooth as a polished ingot, but in street clothes he had an unwieldy, comical air and, with the dark hair poking out at his cuffs and collar, he looked like nothing so much as a pants-wearing ape, in a cartoon satirizing some all too human vanity.
"Listen to me, Sam." The Molecule seemed taken aback by his son's request, almost as though it dovetailed with his own thinking or, the thought crossed Sammy's mind, he had been caught on the verge of skipping town. "Nothing makes me happier than I take you with me," he continued, with the maddening vagueness his ill grammar permitted. He smoothed Sammy's hair back with a heavy palm. "But then again, Jesus, what a crazy fucking idea."
Sammy started to argue, but his father raised a hand. There was more to be said, and in the balance of his speech Sammy sensed or imagined a faint glimmer of hope. He knew that he had chosen a particularly auspicious night to make his plea. That afternoon, his parents had quarreled over dinner-literally. Ethel scorned the Molecule's dietary regimen, claiming not only that the eating of raw vegetables had none of the positive effects her husband attributed to it but also that, every chance the man got, he was sneaking off around the corner to dine in secret on steak and veal chops and french-fried potatoes. That afternoon, Sammy's father had returned to the apartment on Sackman Street (this was in the days before the move to Flatbush) from his afternoon of job hunting with a bag full of Italian squash. He dumped them out with a wink and a grin onto the kitchen table, like a haul of stolen goods. Sammy had never seen anything like these vegetables. They were cool and smooth and rubbed against one another with a rubbery squeak. You could see right where they had been cut from the vine. Their sliced-off stems, woody and hexagonal, implied a leafy green tangle that seemed to fill the kitchen along with their faint scent of dirt. The Molecule snapped one of the squashes in two and held its bright pale flesh up to Sammy's nose. Then he popped one in his mouth and crunched it, smiling and winking at Sammy as he chewed.
"Good for your legs," he had said, walking out of the kitchen to shower away the failures of the day.
Sammy's mother boiled the squash until it was a mass of gray strings.
When the Molecule saw what she had done, there were sharp and bitter words. Then the Molecule had grabbed brusquely for his son, like a man reaching for his hat, and dragged Sammy out of the house and into the heat of the evening. They had been walking since six. The sun had long since gone down, and the sky to the west was a hazy moire of purple and orange and pale gray-blue. They were walking along Avenue Z, dangerously close to the forbidden precincts of the Molecule's early sideshow disasters.
"I don't think you got the picture what's it like out there for me," he said as they walked along. "You think it's like a circus in the pictures. All the clowns and the dwarf and the fat lady sitting around a nice big fire eating goulash and singing songs with an accordion."
"I don't think that," Sammy said, though there was stunning accuracy in this assessment.
"If I did to take you with me-and I am just saying now if-you will have to work very hard," the Molecule said. "They will only accept you if you can work."
"I can work," Sammy said, holding out an arm toward his father. "Look at that."
"Yeh," the Molecule said. He felt very carefully up and down the stout arms of his son, very much in the way Sammy had fingered the zucchini squash that afternoon. "You have arms that are not bad. But your legs are not so good."
"Well, jeez, I mean, I had polio, Pop, what do you want?"
"I know you had polio." The Molecule stopped again. He frowned, and in his face Sammy saw anger and regret and something else that looked almost like wishfulness. He stepped on his cigar end, and stretched, and shook himself a little, as if trying to shrug out of the constricting nets that his wife and son had thrown across his back. "What a fucking day I have. Holy shit."
"What?" Sammy said. "Hey, where are you going?"
"I need to think," his father said. "I need to think about what you are asking me."
"Okay," Sammy said. His father had started walking again, taking a right on Nostrand Avenue, striding along on his thick little legs with Sammy struggling to keep up, until he came to a peculiar building, Arabic in style, or maybe it was supposed to look Moroccan. It stood in the middle of the block, between a locksmith's stall and a weedy yard stacked with blank headstones. Two skinny towers, topped with pointy dollops of peeling plaster, reached into the Brooklyn sky at either corner of the roof. It was windowless, and its broad expanse was clad, with weary elaboration, in a mosaic of small square tiles, fly-abdomen blue and a soapy gray that once must have been white. Many of the tiles were missing, chipped, or picked or tumbled loose. The doorway was a wide, blue-tiled arch. In spite of its forlorn appearance and hokum Coney Island air of the Mysterious East, there was something captivating about it. It reminded Sammy of the city of domes and minarets that you could just get a glimpse of, faint and illusory, behind the writing on the front of a pack of Chesterfields. Alongside the arched doorway, in letters of white tile bordered in blue, was written brighton grand hammam.
"What's a ham-mam?" Sammy said as they went in. His nose was immediately assaulted by a pungent odor of pine, by the smell of scorched ironing, damp laundry, and something deeper underneath it all, a human smell, salty and foul.
"It's a shvitz," the Molecule said. "You know what a shvitz is?"
Sammy nodded.
"When it's time for thinking," said the Molecule, "I like to have a shvitz."
"Oh."
"I hate thinking."
"Yeah," said Sammy. "Me too."
They checked their clothes in the dressing room, in a tall black iron locker that creaked and fastened shut with the loud clang of a torture instrument. Then they went slapping down a long tiled corridor into the main steam room of the Brighton hammam. Their footsteps echoed as if they were inside a fairly large room. It was painfully hot, and Sammy felt that he couldn't fill his lungs with sufficient air. He wanted to run back out to the relative cool of the Brooklyn evening, but he crept along, feeling his way through the billowing garments of steam, a hand on his father's bare back. They climbed onto a low tiled bench and sat back, and Sammy felt each tile as a burning square against his skin. It was very hard to see, but from time to time a rogue current of air, or the vagaries of the invisible, wheezing, steam-producing machinery, would produce a break in the cover, and he could see that they were indeed inside a grand space, ribbed with porcelain groins, set with white and blue faience that was cracked in places, sweating and yellowed with age. As far as he could see, there were no other men or boys in the room with them, but he couldn't be sure, and he felt obscurely afraid of an unknown face or naked limb suddenly looming out of the murk.
They sat for a long time, saying nothing, and at some point Sammy realized, first, that his body was producing veritable torrents of sweat with an abandon it had never before in his life displayed, and, second, that all along he had been imagining his existence in vaudeville: carrying an armload of spangled costumes down a long dark corridor of the Royal Theatre in Racine, Wisconsin, past a practice room where a piano tinkled and out the back door to the waiting van on a Saturday in midsummer, the deep midwestern night rich with june bugs and gasoline and roses, the smell of the costumes fusty but animated by the sweat and makeup of the chorus girls who had just vacated them, envisioning and inhaling and hearing all this with the vividness of a dream, though he was, as far as he could tell, wide-awake.
Then his father said, "I know you had polio." Sammy was surprised; his father sounded extremely angry, as though ashamed that he had been sitting there all this time when he was supposed to be relaxing, working himself into a rage. "I was there. I finded you on the steps of the building. You were pass out."
"You were there? When I got polio?"
"I was there."
"I don't remember that."
"You were a baby."
"I was four."
"So, you were four. You don't remember."
"I would remember that."
"I was there. I carried you into the room we had."
"In Brownsville, this was." Sammy could not keep the skepticism out of his tone.
"I was there, god damn it."
As if blown by a gust of anger, the curtain of steam that hung between Sammy and his father parted suddenly, and he saw, for the first time really, the great brown spectacle of his naked father. None of the carefully posed studio photographs had prepared him for the sight. His father glistened, massive, savagely furred. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were like dents and wheel ruts in an expanse of packed brown earth. The root systems of an ancient tree seemed to furcate and furrow the surface of his thighs, and where his skin was not covered in dark hair, it was strangely rippled with wild webs of some kind of tissue just beneath the skin. His penis lay in the shadow of his thighs like a short length of thick twisted rope. Sammy stared at it, then realized he was staring. He looked away, and his heart jumped. There was a man there with them. He was sitting, a yellow towel across his lap, on the other side of the room. He was a dark-haired, swarthy young man with a single long eyebrow and a perfectly smooth chest. His eyes met Sammy's for a moment, then slid away, then back. It was as if a tunnel of clear air had opened between them. Sammy looked back at his father, his stomach awash in an acid of embarrassment, confusion, and arousal. Somehow the hirsute magnificence of him was too much. So he just looked down at the towel draped across his own two broomstick legs.
"You were so heavy to carry," his father said, "I thought you have to be dead. Only also you were so hot against the hand. The doctor came and we put ice on you and when you woke up you couldn't walk anymore. And then when you come back from the hospital I started taking you and I took you around, I carried you and I dragged you and I made you walk. Until your knees were scraped and bruised, I made you walk. Until you cried. First holding on to me, then on to the crutches, then not with crutches. All by yourself."
"Jeez," Sammy said. "I mean, huh. Mom never told me any of this."
"What a wonder."
"I honestly don't remember."
"God is merciful," the Molecule said dryly; he didn't believe in God, as his son well knew. "You hated every minute. You just as good hated me."
"But Mom lied."
"I am shocked."
"She always told me you left when I was just a little baby."
"I did. But I came back. I am there when you come sick. Then I stay and teach you to help you walk."
"And then you left again."
The Molecule appeared to choose to ignore this observation. "That's why I try to walk you around so much now," he said. "To make your legs strong."
This possible second motive for their walks-after his father's inherent restlessness-had occurred to Sammy before. He was flattered, and believed in his father, and in the potency of long walks.
"So you'll take me?" he said. "When you go?"
Still the Molecule hesitated. "What about your mother?"
"Are you kidding? She can't wait to get rid of me. She hates having me around as much as she hates having you."
At this the Molecule smiled. From all outward appearances, the renewed presence of her husband in her household was nothing but an annoyance to Ethel, or worse-a betrayal of principles. She criticized his habits, his clothing, his diet, his reading material, and his speech. Whenever he tried to escape the fetters of his awkward, obscene English and speak with his wife in the Yiddish in which both were fluent, she ignored him, pretended not to hear, or simply snapped, "You're in America. Talk American." Both in his presence and behind his back, she berated him for his coarseness, his long-winded stories of his vaudeville career and his childhood in the Pale of Settlement. She told him that he snored too loudly, laughed too loudly, simply lived too loudly, beyond the limit of tolerance of civilized beings. Her entire discourse with him appeared to consist solely of animadversion and invective. And yet the previous night, and every night since his return, she had invited him, in a voice that trembled with girlish shame, into her bed and allowed him to enjoy her. At forty-five, she was not very different than she had been at thirty, lean, ropy, and smooth, with skin the color of almond hulls and a neat soft tangle of ink-black hair between her legs, which he liked to grab hold of and pull until she cried out. She was a woman of appetite who had gone without the companionship of a man for a decade, and on his unexpected return she granted him access to even those parts and uses of her that in their early life she had been inclined to keep to herself. And when they were finished, she would lie beside him in the darkness of the tiny room she had partitioned from the kitchen by a beaded curtain, and stroke his great hairy chest, and repeat into his ear in a low whisper all the old endearments and professions of her beholdenness to him. At night, in the dark, she did not hate to have him around. It was this thought that had made him smile.
"Don't he so sure of it," he said.
"I don't care, Pop. I want to leave," said Sammy. "Damn it, I just want to get away."
"All right," said his father. "I promise that I will take you when I go."
The next morning, when Sammy woke up, his father had gone. He had found an engagement on the old Carlos circuit, in the Southwest, said his note, where he spent the rest of his career playing hot, dusty theaters from Kingman as far south as Monterrey. Though Sammy continued to receive cards and clippings, the Mighty Molecule never again passed within a thousand miles of New York City. One night, about a year before Joe Kavalier's arrival, a telegram had come with word that, at a fairground outside Galveston, under the rear wheels of a Deere tractor he was attempting to upend, Alter Klayman had been crushed, and with him Sammy's fondest hope, in the act of escaping from his life, of working with a partner.
The two uppermost floors of a certain ancient red row house in the West Twenties, in the ten years before it was pulled down along with all of its neighbors to make way for a gigantic, step-gabled apartment block called Patroon Town, were a notorious tomb for the hopes of cartoonists. Of all the many dozens of young John Helds and Tad Dorgans who had shown up, bearing fragrant, graduation-gift portfolios, mail-order diplomas from cartoonists' schools, and the proud badge of ink under a ragged thumbnail, to seek lodging under its rotted timbers, only one, a one-legged kid from New Haven named Alfred Caplin, had gone on to meet with the kind of success they had all believed they would find-and the father of the Shmoo had spent only two nights there before moving on to better lodgings across town.
The landlady, a Mrs. Waczukowski, was the widow of a gagman for the Hearst syndicate who had signed his strips "Wacky" and on his death had left her only the building, an unconcealed disdain for all cartoonists veteran or new, and her considerable share of their mutual drinking problem. Originally, there had been six separate bedrooms on the top two stories, but over the years these had been recombined into a kind of ad hoc duplex with three bedrooms, a large studio, a living room in which there was usually an extra cartoonist or two lodged on a pair of cast-off sofas, and what was referred to, generally without irony, as the kitchen: a former maid's room equipped with a hot plate, a pantry made from a steel supply cabinet stolen from Polyclinic Hospital, and a wooden shelf affixed with brackets to the ledge outside the window, on which, in the cool months, milk, eggs, and bacon could be kept.
Jerry Glovsky had moved in about six months earlier, and since then Sammy, in the company of his friend and neighbor Julie Glovsky, Jerry's younger brother, had visited the apartment several times. Though he was largely ignorant of the details of the apartment's past, Sammy had been sensitive to its thick-layered cigar-smoke allure of male fellowship, of years of hard work and sorrow in the service of absurd and glorious black-and-white visions. At the present time there were two other "permanent" occupants, Marty Gold and Davy O'Dowd, both of whom, like the elder Glovsky, shed sweat for Moe Shiflet, a.k.a. Moe Skinflint, a "packager" of original strips who sold his material, usually of poor quality, to the established syndicates and, more recently, to publishers of comic books. The place always seemed filled with ink-smirched young men, drinking, smoking, lying around with their naked big toes protruding from the tips of their socks. In the whole city of New York, there was no more logical hiring hall for the sort of laborers Sammy required to lay the cornerstone of the cheap and fantastic cathedral that would be his life's work.
There was nobody home-nobody conscious, at any rate. The three young men pounded on the door until Mrs. Waczukowsi, her hair tied up in pink paper knots and a robe pulled around her shoulders, at last dragged herself up from the first floor and told them to scram.
"Just another minute, madam," said Sammy, "and we shall trouble you no more."
"We have left some valuable antiquities in there," Julie said, in the same clench-jawed Mr. Peanut accent.
Sammy winked, and the two young men smiled at her with as many of their teeth as they could expose until finally she turned, consigning them all to hell with the eloquent back of her hand, and retreated down the stairs.
Sammy turned to Julie. "So where is Jerry?"
"Beats me."
"Shit, Julius, we've got to get in there. Where is everybody else?"
"Maybe they went with him."
"Don't you have a key?"
"Do I live here?"
"Maybe we could get in the window."
"Five stories up?"
"Damn it!" Sammy gave the door a feeble kick. "It's past noon and we haven't drawn a line! Christ." They would have to go back to the Kramler Building and ask to work at the rutted tables in the offices of Racy Publications, a course that would inevitably bring them within the baleful circumference of George Deasey's gaze.
Joe was kneeling by the door, running his fingers up and down the jamb, fingering the knob.
"What are you doing, Joe?"
"I could get us in, only I leave behind my tools."
"What tools?"
"I can pick the locks," he said. "I was trained to, to what, to get out of things. Boxes. Ropes. Chains." He stood up and pointed to his chest. "Ausbrecher. Outbreaker. No, what it is? 'Escape artist.' "
"You are a trained escape artist."
Joe nodded.
"You."
"Like Houdini."
"Meaning you can get out of things," Sammy said. "So you can get us in?"
"Normally. In, out, it's only the same thing in the other direction. But sadly, I leaved my tools in the Flat Bush." He pulled a small penknife from his pocket and began to probe the lock with its thin blade.
"Hold on," Julie said. "Wait a second, Houdini. Sammy. I don't think we ought to go breaking in-"
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Sammy said.
"You're right," Joe said. "We're in a hurry." He put the knife away and started back down the stairs. Sammy and Julie went after him.
In the street, Joe pulled himself up onto the newel that topped the right-hand baluster of the front steps, a chipped cement sphere onto which some long-vanished tenant had inked a cruel caricature of the querulous lunar face of the late Mr. Waczukowski. He pulled off his jacket and threw it to Sammy.
"Joe, what are you doing?"
Joe didn't answer. He perched for a moment atop the pop-eyed newel, his long feet side by side in their rubber-soled oxfords, and studied the retractable iron ladder of the fire escape. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and cupped a match. He let out a thoughtful cloud of smoke, then fit the cigarette between his teeth and rubbed his hands together. Then he sprang from the top of Mr. Waczukowski's head, reaching out. The lire escape rang against the impact of his palms, and the ladder sagged and with a rusted groan slid slowly downward, six woozy inches, a foot, a foot and a half, before jamming, leaving Joe to dangle five feet off the pavement. Joe chinned himself, trying to loosen it, and swung his legs back and forth; but it stayed latched.
"Come on, Joe," said Sammy. "That won't work."
"You'll break your neck," said Julie.
Joe let go of the ladder with his right hand, snatched a puff from his cigarette, then replaced it. Then he took hold of the ladder again and swung himself, throwing his entire body into it, with each swing describing an increasingly wider arc. The ladder rattled and chimed against the fire escape. Suddenly he folded himself in half, let go of the ladder completely, and allowed his momentum to jackknife him out, up and over, onto the bottom platform of the fire escape, where he landed on his feet. It was a completely gratuitous performance, done purely for effect or for the thrill of it; he easily could have pulled himself up the ladder hand over hand. He easily could have broken his neck. He paused for a moment on the landing, flicking ash from the end of his cigarette.
At that instant, the steady northerly wind that had been harrying the clouds over New York City all day succeeded at last in scattering them, sweeping clear over Chelsea a patch of wispy blue. A shaft of yellow sunlight slanted down, twisting with ribbons of vapor and smoke, a drizzling ribbon of honey, a seam of yellow quartz marbling the featureless gray granite of the afternoon. The windows of the old red row house pooled with light, then spilled over. Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce.
"Look at him," said Sammy. "Look what he can do."
Over the years, reminiscing for friends or journalists or, still later, the reverent editors of fan magazines, Sammy would devise and relate all manner of origin stories, fanciful and mundane and often conflicting, but it was out of a conjunction of desire, the buried memory of his father, and the chance illumination of a row-house window, that the Escapist was born. As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing-common enough among the inventors of heroes-to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.
At the same time, as he watched the reckless exercise of Joe's long, cavalier frame, the display of strength for its own sake and for the love of display, the stirring of passion was inevitably shadowed, or fed, or entwined by the memory of his father. We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place; but as Sammy watched Joe, he felt the heartbreak of that day in 1935 when the Mighty Molecule had gone away for good.
"Remarkable," Julie said dryly, in a voice that suggested there was something funny, and not in the sense of humorous, about the expression on his old friend's face. "Now if only he could draw."
"He can draw," said Sammy.
Joe ran clanking up the steps of the fire escape to the fourth-floor window, threw up the sash, and fell headfirst into the room. A moment later there was an impossibly musical Fay Wray scream from the apartment.
"Huh," Julie said. "The guy might do all right in the cartoon business."
A GIRL with wild brown ringlets, looking like she was going to cry, came barreling into the stairwell. She was wearing a man's herringbone overcoat. Joe stood in the middle of the apartment, his head hung at a comically sheepish angle, rubbing at the back of his neck. Sammy just had time to notice that the girl was carrying a pair of black engineer boots in one hand and a knot of black hose in the other before she brushed past Julie Glovsky, almost sending him over the banister, and went thumping bare-legged down the stairs. In her immediate wake, the three young men stood there looking at one another, stunned, like cynics in the wake of an irrefutable miracle.
"Who was that?" Sammy said, stroking his cheek where she had brushed against him with her perfume and her alpaca scarf. "I think she might have been beautiful."
"She was." Joe went to a battered horsehide chair and picked up a large satchel lying on it. "I think she forgot this." It was black leather, with heavy black straps and complicated clasps of black metal. "Her purse."
"That isn't a purse," said Julie, looking nervously around the living room, reckoning up the damage they had already done. He scowled at Sammy as if sensing another one of his friend's harebrained schemes already beginning to fall apart. "That's probably my brother's. You'd better put it down."
"Is Jerry transporting secret documents all of a sudden?" Sammy took the bag from Joe. "Suddenly he's Peter Lorre?" He undid the clasps and lifted the heavy flap.
"No!" said Joe. He lunged to snatch the bag, but Sammy yanked it away. "It's not nice," Joe chided him, trying to reach around and grab it. "We should respect her privacies."
"This couldn't be hers," said Sammy. And yet he found in the black courier's pouch a pricey-looking tortoiseshell compact, a much-folded pamphlet entitled "Why Modern Ceramics Is the People's Art," a lipstick (Helena Rubinstein's Andalucia), an enameled gold pillbox, and a wallet with two twenties and a ten. Several calling cards in her wallet gave her name, somewhat extravagantly, as Rosa Luxemburg Saks, and reported that she was employed in the art department at Life magazine.
"I don't think she was wearing any panties," said Sammy.
Julie was too moved by this revelation to speak.
"She wasn't," said Joe. They looked at him. "I came in through the window and she was sleeping there." He pointed to Jerry's bedroom. "In the bed. You heard her scream, yes? She put on her dress and her coat."
"You saw her," said Julie.
"Yes."
"She was naked."
"Quite naked."
"I'll bet you couldn't draw it." Julie pulled off his sweater. It was the color of Wheatena, and underneath it he wore another, identical sweater. Julie was always complaining that he felt cold, even in warm weather; in the wintertime he went around swelled to twice his normal bulk. Over the years, his mother, based only on knowledge gleaned from the pages of the Yiddish newspapers, had diagnosed him with several acute and chronic illnesses. Every morning she obliged him to swallow a variety of pills and tablets, eat a raw onion, and take a teaspoon each of Castoria and vitamin tonic. Julie himself was a great perpetrator of nudes, and was widely admired in Sammy's neighborhood for his unclothed renditions of Fritzi Ritz, Blondie Bumstead, and Daisy Mae, which he sold for a dime, or, for a quarter, of Dale Arden, whose lovely pubic display he rendered in luxuriant strokes generally agreed to be precisely those with which Alex Raymond himself would have endowed her, if public morals and the exigencies of interplanetary travel had permitted it.
"Of course I could draw it," said Joe. "But I would not."
"I'll give you a dollar if you draw me a picture of Rosa Saks lying naked in bed," said Julie.
Joe took Rosa 's satchel from Sammy and sat down on the horsehide chair. He seemed to be balancing his material need against the desire he felt, as had Sammy, to hold on to a marvelous apparition and keep it for his own. At last he sighed and tossed the satchel to one side.
"Three dollars," he said.
Julie was not happy with this, but nonetheless he nodded. He pulled off another sweater. "Make it good," he said.
Joe knelt to grab a broken stub of Conte crayon lying on an overturned milk crate at his feet. He picked up an unopened overdue notice from the New York Public Library and pressed it flat against the milk crate. The long forefingers of his right hand, stained yellow at their tips, skated leisurely across the back of the envelope. His features grew animated, even comical: he squinted, pursed his lips and shifted them from side to side, grimaced. After a few minutes, and as abruptly as it had begun, his hand came to a stop, and his fingers kicked the crayon loose. He held up the envelope, wrinkling his forehead, as if considering the thing he had drawn and not simply the way he had drawn it. His expression grew soft and regretful. It was not too late, he seemed to be thinking, to tear up the envelope and keep the pretty vision all to himself. Then his face resumed its habitual mien, sleepy, unconcerned. He passed the envelope to Julie.
His short flight through the window had landed him on the floor of the bedroom, and Joe had chosen to draw Rosa Saks the way he'd first seen her, at eye level as he picked himself up from the floor, looking past a carved acorn that crowned the footboard of the bed. She was lying passed out on her belly, her sprawling right leg kicked free of the blankets and leaving exposed rather more than half of a big and fetching tuchis. Her right foot loomed large in the foreground, slender, toes curled. The lines of her bare and of her blanketed leg converged, at the ultimate vanishing point, in a coarse black bramble of shadow. In the distance of the picture, the hollows and long central valley of her back rose to a charcoal Niagara of hair that obscured all but the lower portion of her face, her lips parted, her jaw wide and perhaps a bit heavy. It was a four-by-nine-inch slice cut fresh from Joe's memory but, for allits immediacy, rendered in clean, unhurried lines, with a precision at once anatomical and emotional: you felt Joe's tenderness toward that curled little foot, that hollow back, that open, dreaming mouth drawing a last deep breath of unconsciousness. You wanted her to be able to go on sleeping, as long as you could watch.
"You didn't show her boobs!" said Julie.
"Not for three dollars," said Joe.
With grumbling and a great show of reluctance, Julie paid Joe off, then slid the envelope into the hip pocket of his overcoat, wedging it protectively into a copy of Planet Stories. When, fifty-three years later, he died, the drawing of Rosa Saks naked and asleep was found among his effects, in a Barracini's candy box, with a souvenir yarmulke from his eldest son's bar mitzvah and a Norman Thomas button, and was erroneously exhibited, in a retrospective at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, as the work of the young Julius Glovsky. As for Common Errors in Perspective Drawing, the overdue library book, recent inquiries have revealed that it was returned, under a citywide amnesty program, in 1971.
In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time. They took their shoes off, rolled up their shirtsleeves, and loosened their neckties. They moved ashtrays around, swept stacks of magazines to the floor, put a record on, and generally acted as if they owned the place. They were in the room where the boy-genius artists kept their drawing tables and taborets, a room variously referred to by its occupants over the years as the Bullpen, the Pit, the Rathole, and Palooka Studios, the latter a name often applied to the entire apartment, to the building, occasionally to the neighborhood, and even, on grim, hungover, hacking mornings with a view out the bathroom window of a sunrise the color of bourbon and ash, to the whole damn stinking world. At some time in the last century, it had been an elegant lady's bedroom. There were still curvy brass gas fixtures and egg-and-dart moldings, but most of the moss-green moire paper had been ripped down for drawing stock, leaving the walls covered only by a vast brown web of crazed glue. But in truth, Sammy and Joe scarcely took note of their surroundings. It was just the clearing in which they had come to pitch the tent of their imaginations. Sammy lay down on a spavined purple davenport; Joe, on the floor, was aware for a moment that he was lying on a sour-smelling oval braided rug, in an apartment recently vacated by a girl who had impressed him, in the few instants of their acquaintance, as the most beautiful he had ever seen in his life, in a building whose face he had scaled so that he could begin to produce comic books for a company that sold farting pillows, in Manhattan, New York, where he had come by way of Lithuania, Siberia, and Japan. Then a toilet flushed elsewhere in the apartment, and Sammy peeled his socks off with a happy sigh, and Joe's sense of the present strangeness of his life, of the yawning gap, the long, unretraceable path that separated him from his family, receded from his mind.
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat-was, literally, talked into life. Kavalier and Clay-whose golem was to be formed of black lines and the four-color dots of the lithographer-lay down, lit the first of five dozen cigarettes they were to consume that afternoon, and started to talk. Carefully, with a certain rueful humor inspired in part by self-consciousness at his broken grammar, Joe told the story of his interrupted studies with the Ausbrecher Bernard Kornblum, and described the role his old teacher had played in his departure from Prague. He told Sammy merely that he had been smuggled out in a shipment of unspecified artifacts that Sammy pictured aloud as big Hebrew grimoires locked with golden clasps. Joe did not disabuse him of this picture. He was embarrassed now that, when asked for a lithe aerial Superman, he had drawn a stolid golem in a Phrygian cap, and felt that the less said from now on about golems, the better. Sammy was keen on the details of autoliberation, and full of questions. Was it true that you had to be double-jointed, that Houdini was a prodigy of reversible elbow and knee sockets? No, and no. Was it true that Houdini could dislocate his shoulders at will? According to Kornblum, no. Was it more important in the trade to be strong or dexterous? It required more finesse than dexterity, more endurance than strength. Did you generally cut, pick, or rig a way out? All three and more-you pried, you wriggled, you hacked, you kicked. Joe remembered some of the things Kornblum had told him of his career in show business, the hard conditions, the endless travel, the camaraderie of performers, the painstaking and ongoing transmission among magicians and illusionists of accumulated lore.
"My father was in vaudeville," Sammy said. "Show business."
"I know. I have heard from my father one time. He was a strong man, yes? He was very strong."
"He was the World's Strongest Jew," Sammy said.
"He is now…"
"He is now dead."
"I am sorry."
"He was a bastard," Sammy said.
"Oh."
"Not literally. That's just an expression. He was a schmuck. He left when I was a little kid and never came back."
"Ah."
"He was all muscle. No heart. He was like Superman without the Clark Kent."
"Is that why you don't want our guy"-he had adopted Sammy's term-"to be strong?"
"No! I just don't want our guy to be the same as everybody else's, you know?"
"My mistake," said Joe. He sensed, however, that he was right. He could hear the admiration in Sammy's voice even as he pronounced the late Mr. Klayman a bastard.
"What's your father like?" Sammy said.
"He is a good man. He is a doctor. He is not the most strongest Jew in the world, sadly."
"That's what they need over there," Sammy said. "Or, look at you, you got out. Maybe what they need is like a super-Kornblum. Hey." He stood up and began to pound his right hand into the palm of his left. "Ooh. Ooh, ooh. Okay. Hold on a minute." Now he pressed the heels of his hands against his temples. You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus. Joe sat up. He ran his mind back over the last half hour of conversation and, as if he were picking up a transmission direct from Sammy's brain, saw in his own mind the outlines, the dark contours, the balletic contortions, of a costumed hero whose power would be that of impossible and perpetual escape. [1]
He was just envisioning or foretasting or, strangely, remembering this dashing character when Sammy opened his eyes. His face was twisted and flushed with excitement. He looked very much as if, to employ one of his own expressions, his bowels were in an uproar.
"Okay," he said, "listen to this." He started to pace between the drawing tables, looking down at his feet, declaiming in a sharp, barking tenor that Joe recognized from the announcers on American radio. "To, uh, to all those who, uh, toil in the bonds of slavery-"
"Bonds?"
"Yeah." Sammy's cheeks reddened, and he dropped the radio voice. "Chains, like. Just listen. It's comics, all right?"
"All right."
He resumed his pacing and radio-announcer tone and continued to compose his historic series of exclamations.
"To all those who toil in the bonds of slavery and, uh, the, the shackles of oppression, he offers the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom!" His delivery grew more assured now. "Armed with superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains! He is"-he paused and threw Joe a helpless, gleeful glance, on the point of vanishing completely into his story now-"the Escapist!"
" 'The Escapist.' " Joe tried it out. It sounded magnificent to his unschooled ear-someone trustworthy and useful and strong. "He is an escape artist in a costume. Who fights crime."
"He doesn't just fight it. He frees the world of it. He frees people, see? He comes in the darkest hour. He watches from the shadows. Guided only by the light from-the light from-"
"His Golden Key."
"That's great!"
"I see," Joe said. The costume would be dark, dark blue, midnight blue, simple, functional, ornamented only with a skeleton-key emblem on the chest. Joe went over to one of the drawing tables and climbed onto the stool. He picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper and started to sketch rapidly, closing his inner eyelid and projecting against it, so to speak, the image of a lithe, acrobatic man who had just leaped into his mind, a man in the act of alighting, a gymnast dismounting the rings, his right heel about to meet the ground, his left leg raised and flexed at the knee, his arms thrown high, hands outspread, trying to get at the physics of the way a man moved, the give-and-take of sinews and muscle groups, to forge, in a way that no comic book artist yet had, an anatomical basis for grace and style.
"Wow," Sammy said. "Wow, Joe. That's good. That's beautiful."
"He is here to free the world," said Joe.
"Exactly."
"Permit me to ask a question to you."
"Ask me anything. I got it all up here." Sammy tapped his head in a cocky manner that reminded Joe almost painfully of Thomas; in the next minute, when Sammy heard Joe's question, he looked crestfallen in exactly the same way.
"What is the why?" said Joe.
Sammy nodded slowly, then stopped.
"The why," he said. "Shit."
"You said-"
"I know, I know. I know what I said. All right." He picked up his coat and grabbed the last package of cigarettes. "Let's take a walk," he said.
The curtain itself is legendary: its dimensions, its weight, its darker-than-chocolate color, the Continental fineness of its stuff. It hangs in thick ripples like frosting poured from the proscenium arch of the most famous theater in the most celebrated block of the world's greatest city. Call it Empire City, home of the needle-tipped Excelsior Building, tallest ever built; home of the Statue of Liberation, on her island in the middle of Empire Bay, her sword raised in defiance to the tyrants of the world; and home also of the Empire Palace Theatre, whose fabled Black Curtain trembles now as, at stage right, the narrowest of fissures opens in the rich dark impasto of its velour. Through this narrow gap a boy peers out. His face, ordinarily a trusting blank surmounted by tousled yellow curls, is creased with worry. He is not measuring the numbers of the audience-the house is sold out, as it has been for every night of the current engagement. He is looking for someone or something that no one will discuss, that he has only inferred, for the unnamed person or thing whose advent or presence has been troubling the company all day.
Then a hand as massive and hard as an elk's horn, lashed by tough sinews to an arm like the limb of an oak, grabs the boy by the shoulder and drags him back into the wings.
"You know better, young man," says the giant, well over eight feet tall, to whom the massive hand belongs. He has the brow of an ape and the posture of a bear and the accent of a Viennese professor of medicine. He can rip open a steel drum like a can of tobacco, lift a train carriage by one corner, play the violin like Paganini, and calculate the velocity of asteroids and comets, one of which bears his name. His name is Alois Berg and the comet is called Berg's comet, but to the theatergoing public and to his friends he is usually just Big Al. "Come, there is a problem with the water tank."
Backstage, the instruments of torture and restraint stand in their proper places, looking both menacing and droll, ready for the stagehands to drag, wheel, or hoist them out onto the storied boards of the Palace. There is a regulation, asylum-issue, strap-strewn lunatic's bed; a large, slender milk can of riveted iron; a medieval Catherine wheel; and an incongruous chrome suit rack, from which dangle on prosaic wire hangers a fantastic array of straitjackets, ropes, chains, and thick leather straps. And there is the water tank, a great oblong box of glass, dolphin-sized, standing on one end: a drowned telephone booth. The glass is inch-thick, tempered, and tamperproof. The seals are neat and watertight. The timbers that frame the glass are sturdy and reliable. The boy knows all this because he built the tank himself. He wears, we see now, a leather apron filled with tools. There is a pencil stuck behind his ear and a chalk string in his pocket. If there is a problem with the tank, he can fix it. He must fix it: curtain is in less than five minutes.
"What's the matter with it?" The boy-really he is almost a man- makes his way toward the tank with aplomb, heedless of the crutch under his arm, untroubled by the left leg that has been lame since he was an infant.
"It seems to be inert, my boy. Immobilized." Big Al goes to the tank and gives it a friendly shove. The thousand-pound box tips, and the water inside shivers and sloshes. He could move the tank onstage unaided, but there are union rules, and greater showmanship in the five big stagehands that the feat requires. "In words of one syllable, stuck."
"Something's caught in this wheel here." The young man lowers himself down his crutch, hand under hand, lies on his back, and slides under a corner of the tank's heavy base. There is a rubber-tired wheel, mounted on a steel caster, at each corner. At one corner, something has lodged itself between tire and caster. The young man slips a screwdriver from his tool belt and starts to poke around.
"Al," comes his voice from under the tank. "What's the matter with him today?"
"Nothing, Tom," Big Al says. "He is merely tired. It's the last night of the engagement. And he is no longer as youthful as he once was."
They have been joined, silently, by a small, slender man in a turban. His face is ageless and brown, his eyes dark and sensitive. He has never joined any group, party, or discussion in any way other than silently. Stealth is in his nature. He is laconic and cautious and light on his feet. No one knows how old he is, or how many lives he lived before entering the employ of the Master of Escape. He can be a doctor, a pilot, a sailor, a chef. He is at home on every continent, conversant with the argot of policemen and thieves. There is no one better at bribing a prison guard before a jailbreak stunt to plant a key in a cell, or a reporter to inflate the number of minutes that the Master remained underwater during a bridge leap. He is called Omar, a name so patently corny that it, with the turban and the desert-brown skin, is widely believed by the public to be nothing more than atmosphere, a getup, part of the thrill-making shtick of Misterioso the Great. But if his origins and true name are doubtful, his dusky complexion is genuine. As for the turban, none outside the company know how vain he is about his receding hairline.
"Okay, then what's the matter with you," the young man persists. "You and Omar. You've been acting strange all day."
Omar and Big Al exchange looks. The revelation of secrets is more than anathema to them; it goes against their nature and training. They would be incapable of telling the boy, even if they wanted to.
"Imagination," Omar says finally, decisively.
"Too many pulp novels," says Big Al.
"Tell me this, then." The young man, Tom Mayflower, slides out from under the tank, clutching a black leather button lost from a coat front or a sleeve, embossed with a curious symbol, like three interlinked ovals. "What's the Iron Chain?"
Big Al looks toward Omar again, but his comrade has already disappeared, as silently as he came. Though he knows that Omar has gone to warn the Master, still Big Al curses him for leaving him alone to answer or not answer this question. He takes the button, to whose eyelet a bit of thread still clings, and tucks it into the pocket of his giant waistcoat.
"Two minutes," he says, suddenly as terse as their turbaned friend. "Have you fixed it?"
"It's perfect," Tom says, accepting the great antler hand that Big Al offers, scrambling to his unsteady feet. "Like everything I do."
Later, he will remember this flip reply and regret it with a flush of shame. For the tank is not perfect, not at all.
At five minutes past eight o'clock, Tom knocks. There is a star on the door, and under it, painted on a strip of card, the words "Mr. Misterioso." Tom's uncle, Max Mayflower, has never missed a curtain before. Indeed, his entire act is timed to the half second, tailored and endlessly readjusted to suit the abilities and, increasingly, the limitations of its star. His unheard-of tardiness has caused Big Al to fall silent, and Omar to utter a string of oaths in a barbarous tongue. But neither has the nerve to disturb the man they call Master. It is Miss Plum Blossom, the costumer, who has pushed Tom toward the door. Naturally, the ageless Chinese seamstress is widely believed to be secretly in love with Max Mayflower. Naturally, she is secretly in love with him. There are even rumors about these two and the somewhat misty parentage of Tom Mayflower, but though he loves Miss Blossom and his uncle dearly, Tom takes these rumors for the idle gossip they are. Miss Blossom would never dare disturb the Master in his dressing room before a show either, but she knows that Tom may penetrate certain of the man's mysteries and humors in a way that no one else can. Behind him, she gives another gentle push at the small of his back.
"It's Tom," the young man says, getting no answer. And then takes the unprecedented liberty of opening the dressing-room door unbidden.
His uncle sits at his dressing table. His body has grown fibrous and tough, like a stalk that hardens as it withers. His wiry legs are already clad in the skintight dark blue stuff of his costume, but his upper torso remains bare and freckled, lightly traced with the dull orange wisps that are the sole reminders of the ginger thatch that once covered him. His flaming orange mane has become gray stubble. His hands are wildly veined, his fingers knobbed like bamboo. And yet, until tonight, Tom has never seen a trace in him-not in body, voice, or heart-of the triumph of age. Now he sags, half naked, his bare head gleaming in the lighted mirror like a memento mori.
"How's the house?" he says. "Standing room only. Can't you hear them?" "Yes," his uncle says. "I hear them."
Something, some weary edge of self-pity in the old man's tone, irritates Tom.
"You shouldn't take it for granted," he says. "I'd give anything to hear them cheering that way for me."
The old man sits up and looks at Tom. He nods. He reaches for his dark blue jersey and pulls it over his head, then tugs on the soft blue acrobat's boots made for him in Paris by the famous circus costumer Claireaux.
"You're right, of course," he says, clapping the boy on the shoulder. "Thank you for reminding me."
Then he ties on his mask, a kind of kerchief with eyeholes, which knots at the back and covers the entire upper half of his skull.
"You never know," he says as he starts out of the dressing room. "You may get your chance some day."
"Not likely," Tom says, though this is his deepest desire, and though he knows the secrets, the mechanisms, procedures, and eventualities of the escape trade as well as any man alive save one. "Not with this leg of mine."
"Stranger things have happened," the old man says. Tom stands there, watching in admiration the way the old man's back straightens as he walks out, the way his shoulders settle and his gait becomes springy, yet calm and controlled. Then Tom remembers the button he found lodged in the wheel of the water tank, and runs after his uncle to tell him. By the time he reaches the wings, however, the orchestra has already struck up the Tannhauser overture, and Misterioso has strode, arms outspread, onto the stage.
Misterioso's act is continuous-from first bow till last, the performer does not leave the stage to change costume, not even after the drenching he receives during the Oriental Water Torture Trick. Entrances and exits imply flummery, substitutions, switcheroos. Like the tight costume that promises to betray any concealed tools, the constant presence of the performer is supposed to guarantee the purity and integrity of the act. Thus it causes considerable alarm in the company when-after theroar of applause that follows Misterioso's emergence, unchained, untied, unshackled, right side up, and still breathing, from the Oriental Water Torture tank-the performer staggers into the wings, hands pressed to a spreading stain, darker than water and sticky-looking, at his side. When, a moment later, the water tank is wheeled off by the five union stagehands, sharp-eyed Omar quickly discerns the drizzled trail of water it has left on the stage, which he traces back to a small- a perfect-hole in the glass of the front panel. A pale pink ribbon twists in the green water of the tank.
"Get off me," the old man says, staggering into his dressing room. He pushes free of Omar and Big Al. "Find him," he tells them, and they vanish into the theater. He turns to the stage manager. "Ring down the curtain. Tell the orchestra to play the waltz. Tom, come with me."
The young man follows his uncle into the dressing room and watches in astonishment and then horror as the old man strips away the damp jersey. His ribs are beaded with a lopsided star of blood. The wound beneath his left breast is small, but brimming like a cup.
"Take another one from the trunk," Max Mayflower says, and somehow the bullet hole gives even greater authority to his words than they would have ordinarily. "Put it on."
Immediately, Tom guesses the incredible demand that his uncle is about to place on him, and, in his fear and excitement and with The Blue Danube vamping endlessly in his ears, he does not attempt to argue or to apologize for not having fitted the tank he built with bulletproof glass, or even to ask his uncle who has shot him. He just gets dressed. He has tried on the costume before, of course, secretly. It takes him only a minute to do it now.
"You just have to do the coffin," his uncle tells him. "And then you're done."
"My leg," Tom says. "How am I supposed to?"
That is when his uncle hands him a small key, gold or gold-plated, old-fashioned and ornate. The key to a lady's diary or to a drawer in an important man's desk.
"Just keep it about you," Max Mayflower says. "You'll be all right."
Tom takes the key, but he doesn't feel anything right away. He just stands there, holding the key so tightly that it pulses against his palm, as he watches his beloved uncle bleed to death in the harsh light of the dressing room with the star on the door. The orchestra launches into their third assault on the waltz.
"The show must go on," his uncle says dryly, and so Tom goes, slipping the gold key into one of the thirty-nine pockets that Miss Blossom has concealed throughout the costume. It is not until he is actually stepping out onto the stage, to the frenzied derisive happy waltz-weary cheering of the audience, that he notices not only that he has left the crutch behind in the dressing room but that, for the first time in his life, he is walking without a limp.
Two Shriners in fezzes drape him with chains and help him into a heavy canvas mailbag. A lady from the suburbs cinches the neck of the mailbag and fixes the ends of the cord with a ham-sized padlock. Big Al lifts him as if lifting a swaddled babe and carries him tenderly to the coffin, which has been carefully inspected beforehand by the mayor of Empire City, its chief of police, and the head of its fire department, and pronounced tight as a drum. Now these same worthies, to the delight of the house, are given hammers and big twenty-penny nails. Gleefully, they seal Tom into the coffin. If anyone notices that Misterioso has, in the last ten minutes, put on twenty pounds and grown an inch, he or she keeps it to himself; what difference could it make, anyway, if it is not the same man? He will still have to contend with chains and nails and two solid inches of ash wood. And yet among the women in the audience, at least, there is an imperceptible shade of difference, a deepening or darkening, in the pitch of their admiration and fear. "Look at the shoulders on him," says one to another. "I never noticed."
Inside the thoroughly rigged coffin, which has been eased into an elaborate marble sarcophagus by means of a winch that was then used to lower the marble lid into place with a ringing tocsin of finality, Tom tries to banish images of bloody stars and bullet holes from his mind. He concentrates on the routine of the trick, the series of quick and patient stages that he knows so well; and, one by one, the necessary thoughts drive out the terrible ones. He frees himself of them. His mind, as he pries open the lid of the sarcophagus with the crowbar that has conveniently been taped to its underside, is peaceful and blank. When he steps into the spotlight, however, he is nearly upended by the applause, blown over, laved by it as by some great cleansing tide. All of his years of limping self-doubt are washed away. When he sees Omar signaling to him from the wings, his face even graver than usual, he is loath to surrender the moment.
"My curtain call!" he says as Omar leads him away. It is the second remark he will come to regret that day.
The man known professionally as Misterioso has long lived, in a detail borrowed without apologies from Gaston Leroux, in secret apartments under the Empire Palace Theatre. They are gloomy and sumptuous. There is a bedroom for everyone-Miss Blossom has her own chambers, naturally, on the opposite side of the apartment from the Master's-but when they are not traveling the world, the company prefers to hang around in the vast obligatory Organ Room, with its cathedral-like, eighty-pipe Helgenblatt, and it is here, twenty minutes after the bullet entered his rib cage and lodged near his heart, that Max Mayflower dies. Before doing so, however, he tells his ward, Tom Mayflower, the story of the golden key, in whose service-and not that of Thalia or Mammon-he and the others circled the globe a thousand times.
When he was a young man, he says, no older than Tom is now, he was a wastrel, a rounder, and a brat. A playboy, spoiled and fast. From his family's mansion on Nabob Avenue, he sallied night after night into the worst dives and fleshpots of Empire City. There were huge gambling losses, and then trouble with some very bad men. When they could not collect on their loans, these men instead kidnapped young Max and held him for a ransom so exorbitant that the revenue from it easily would have funded their secret intention, which was to gain control over all the crime and criminals in the United States of America. This would in turn enable them, they reasoned, to take over the country itself. The men abused Max violently and laughed at his pleas for mercy. The police and the federals searched for him everywhere but failed. Meanwhile, Max's father, the richest man in the state of which Empire City was the capital, weakened. He loved his profligate son. He wanted to have him back again. The day before the deadline for payment fell, he came to a decision. The next morning the Eagle newsboys hit the streets and exposed their veteran uvulas to the skies. "FAMILY TO PAY RANSOM!" they cried.
Now, imagine that somewhere, says Uncle Max, in one of the secret places of the world (Tom envisions a vague cross between a bodega and a mosque), a copy of the Empire City Eagle bearing this outrageous headline was crushed by an angry hand emerging from a well-tailored white linen sleeve. The owner of the hand and the linen suit would have been difficult to make out in the shadows. But his thoughts would be clear, his anger righteous, and from the lapel of his white suit there would have been dangling a little golden key.
Max, it turns out, was being held in an abandoned house on the outskirts of Empire City. Several times he tried to escape from his bonds, but could not loosen even one finger or toe. Twice a day he was unfettered enough to use the bathroom, and though several times he tried for the window, he could not manage even to get it unlatched. So after a few days he had sunk into the gray timeless hell of the prisoner. He dreamed without sleeping and slept with his eyes open. In one of his dreams, a shadowy man in a white linen suit came into his cell. Just walked right in through the door. He was pleasant and soothing and concerned. Locks, he said, pointing to the door of Max's cell, mean nothing to us. With a few seconds' work, he undid the ropes that bound Max to a chair and bid him to flee. He had a boat waiting, or a fast car, or an airplane- in his old age and with death so near, old Max Mayflower could no longer remember which. And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others. At that moment, one of Max's captors came into the room. He was waving a copy of the Eagle with the news of Max's father's capitulation, and until he saw the stranger in white he looked very happy indeed. Then he took out his gun and shot the stranger in the belly.
Max was enraged. Without reflecting, without a thought for his own safety, he rushed at the gangster and tried to wrestle away the gun. It rang like a bell in his bones, and the gangster fell to the floor. Max returned to the stranger and cradled his head in his lap. He asked him his name.
"I wish I could tell you," the stranger said. "But there are rules. Oh." He winced. "Look, I'm done for." He spoke in a peculiar accent, polished and British, with a strange western twang. "Take the key. Take it."
"Me? Take your key?"
"No, you don't seem likely, it's true. But I have no choice."
Max undid the pin from the man's lapel. From it dangled a little golden key, identical to the one that Max had given Tom a half hour before.
"Stop wasting your life," were the stranger's last words. "You have the key."
Max spent the next ten years in a fruitless search for the lock that the golden key would open. He consulted with the master locksmiths and ironmongers of the world. He buried himself in the lore of jailbreaks and fakirs, of sailor's knots and Arapaho bondage rituals. He scrutinized the works of Joseph Bramah, the greatest locksmith who ever lived. He sought out the advice of the rope-slipping spiritualists who pioneered the escape-artist trade and even studied, for a time, with Houdini himself. In the process, Max Mayflower became a master of self-liberation, but the search was a costly one. He ran through his father's fortune and, in the end, still had no idea how to use the gift that the stranger had given him. Still he pressed on, sustained without realizing it by the mystic powers of the key. At last, however, his poverty compelled him to seek work. He went into show business, breaking locks for money, and Misterioso was born.
It was while traveling through Canada in a two-bit sideshow that he had first met Professor Alois Berg. The professor lived, at the time, in a cage lined with offal, chained to the bars, in rags, gnawing on bones. He was pustulous and stank. He snarled at the paying public, children in particular, and on the side of his cage, in big red letters, was painted the come-on see the ogre! Like everyone else in the show, Max avoided the Ogre, despising him as the lowest of the freaks, until one fateful night when his insomnia was eased by an unexpected strain of Mendelssohn that came wafting across the soft Manitoba summer night. Max went in search of the source of the music and was led, to his astonishment, to the miserable iron wagon at the back of the fairgrounds. In the moonlight he read three short words: see the ogre! It was then that Max, who had never before in all this time considered the matter, realized that all men, no matter what their estate, were in possession of shining immortal souls. He determined then and there to purchase the Ogre's freedom from the owner of the sideshow, and did so with the sole valuable possession he retained.
"The key," Tom says. "The golden key."
Max Mayflower nods. "I struck the irons from his leg myself."
"Thank you," the Ogre says now, in the room under the stage of the Palace, his cheeks wet with tears.
"You've repaid your debt many times, old friend," Max Mayflower tells him, patting the great horny hand. Then he resumes his story. "As I pulled the iron cuff from his poor, inflamed ankle, a man stepped out of the shadows. Between the wagons," he says, his breath growing short now. "He was dressed in a white suit, and at first I thought it must be him. The same fellow. Even though I knew. That he was where. I'm about to go myself."
The man explained to Max that he had, at last and without meaning to, found the lock that could be opened by the little key of gold. He explained a number of things. He said that both he and the man who had saved Max from the kidnappers belonged to an ancient and secret society of men known as the League of the Golden Key. Such men roamed the world acting, always anonymously, to procure the freedom of others, whether physical or metaphysical, emotional or economic. In this work they were tirelessly checked by agents of the Iron Chain, whose goals were opposite and sinister. It was operatives of the Iron Chain who had kidnapped Max years before.
"And tonight," Tom says.
"Yes, my boy. And tonight it was them again. They have grown strong. Their old dream of ruling an entire nation has come to pass."
" Germany."
Max nods weakly and closes his eyes. The others gather close now, somber, heads bowed, to hear the rest of the tale.
The man, Max says, gave him a second golden key, and then, before returning to the shadows, charged him and the Ogre to carry on the work of liberation.
"And so we have done, have we not?" Max says.
Big Al nods, and, looking around at the sorrowing faces of the company, Tom realizes that each of them is here because he was liberated by Misterioso the Great. Omar was once the slave of a sultan in Africa; Miss Plum Blossom had toiled for years in the teeming dark sweatshops of Macao.
"What about me?" he says, almost to himself. But the old man opens his eyes.
"We found you in an orphanage in Central Europe. That was a cruel place. I only regret that at the time I could save so few of you." He coughs, and his spittle is flecked with blood. "I'm sorry," he says. "I meant to tell you all this. On your twenty-first birthday. But now. I charge you as I was charged. Don't waste your life. Don't allow your body's weakness to be a weakness of your spirit. Repay your debt of freedom. You have the key."
These are the Master's last words. Omar closes his eyes. Tom buries his face in his hands and weeps for a while, and when he looks up again he sees them all looking at him.
He calls Big Al, Omar, and Miss Blossom to gather around him, then raises the key high in the air and swears a sacred oath to devote himself to secretly fighting the evil forces of the Iron Chain, in Germany or wherever they raise their ugly heads, and to working for the liberation of all who toil in chains-as the Escapist. The sound of their raised voices carries up through the complicated antique ductwork of the grand old theater, rising and echoing through the pipes until it emerges through a grate in the sidewalk, where it can be heard clearly by a couple of young men who are walking past, their collars raised against the cold October night, dreaming their elaborate dream, wishing their wish, teasing their golem into life.
They had been walking for hours, in and out of the streetlights, through intermittent rainfall, heedless, smoking and talking until their throats were sore. At last they seemed to run out of things to say and turned wordlessly for home, carrying the idea between them, walking along the trembling hem of reality that separated New York City from Empire City. It was late; they were hungry and tired and had smoked their last cigarette.
"What?" Sammy said. "What are you thinking?"
"I wish he was real," said Joe, suddenly ashamed of himself. Here he was, free in a way that his family could only dream of, and what was he doing with his freedom? Walking around talking and making up a lot of nonsense about someone who could liberate no one and nothing but smudgy black marks on a piece of cheap paper. What was the point of it? Of what use was walking and talking and smoking cigarettes?
"I bet," Sammy said. He put his hand on Joe's shoulder. "Joe, I bet you do."
They were at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, in a boisterous cloud of light and people, and Sammy said to hold on a minute. Joe stood there, hands in his pockets, helplessly ordering his thoughts with shameful felicity into the rows and columns of little boxes with which he planned to round out the first adventure of the Escapist: Tom Mayflower donning his late master's midnight-blue mask and costume, his chest hastily emblazoned by the skilled needle of Miss Plum Blossom with a snappy gold-key emblem. Tom tracking the Nazi spy back to his lair. A full page of rousing fisticuffs, then, after bullet-dodging, head-knocking, and collapsing beams, an explosion: the nest of Iron Chain vipers wiped out. And the last panel: the company gathered at the grave of Misterioso, Tom leaning again on the crutch that will provide him with his disguise. And the ghostly face of the old man beaming down at them from the heavens.
"I got cigarettes." Sammy pulled several handfuls of cigarette packages from a brown paper bag. "I got gum." He held up several packs of Black Jack. "Do you like gum?"
Joe smiled. "I feel I must learn to."
"Yeah, you're in America now. We chew a lot of gum here."
"What are those?" Joe pointed to the newspaper he saw tucked under Sammy's arm.
Sammy looked serious.
"I just want to say something," he said. "And that is, we are going to kill with this. I mean, that's a good thing, kill. I can't explain how I know. It's just-it's like a feeling I've had all my life, but I don't know, when you showed up… I just knew…" He shrugged and looked away. "Never mind. All I'm trying to say is, we are going to sell a million copies of this thing and make a pile of money, and you are going to be able to take that pile of money and pay what you need to pay to get your mother and father and brother and grandfather out of there and over here, where they will be safe. I-that's a promise. I'm sure of it, Joe."
Joe felt his heart swell with the longing to believe his cousin. He wiped at his eyes with the scratchy sleeve of the tweed jacket his mother had bought for him at the English Shop on the Graben.
"All right," he said.
'And in that sense, see, he really will be real. The Escapist. He will be doing what we're saying he can do."
"All right" Joe said. "Ja ja, I believe you." It made him impatient to be consoled, as if words of comfort lent greater credence to his fears. "We will kill."
"That's what I'm saying."
"What are those papers?"
Sammy winked and handed over a copy each of the issues for Friday, October 27, 1939, of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold and of a Czech-language daily called New Yorske Listy.
"I thought maybe you'd find something in these," he said.
"Thank you," Joe said, moved, regretting the way he had snapped at Sam. "And, well, thank you for what you just said."
"That's nothing," said Sammy. "Wait till you hear my idea for the cover."
The actual current occupants of Palooka Studios, Jerry Glovsky, Marty Gold, and Davy O'Dowd, came home around ten, with half a roast chicken, a bottle of red wine, a bottle of seltzer, a carton of Pall Malls, and Frank Pantaleone. They walked in the front door boisterously quibbling, one of them imitating a muted trumpet; then they fell silent. They fell so quickly and completely silent, in fact, that one would have said they had been expecting intruders. Still, they were surprised to find, when they came upstairs, that Palooka Studios had been transformed, in a matter of hours, into the creative nerve center of Empire Comics. Jerry smacked Julie on the ear three times.
"What are you doing? Who said you could come in here? What is this shit?" He pushed Julie's head to one side and picked up the piece of board on which Julie had been penciling page two of the adventure he and Sammy had cooked up for Julie's own proud creation, a chilling tale of that Stalker of the Dark Places, that Foe of Evilness himself, "The Black Hat," said Jerry.
"I don't remember saying you could use my table. Or my ink." Marty Gold came over and snatched away the bottle of India ink into which Joe was about to dip his brush, then dragged his entire spattered taboret out of their reach, scattering a number of pens and pencils onto the rug, and completely discomposing himself. Marty was easily discomposed. He was dark, pudgy, sweated a lot, and was, Sammy had always thought, kind of a priss. But he could fake Caniff better than anyone, especially the way he handled blacks, throwing in slashes, patches, entire continents of black, far more freely than Sammy would ever have dared, and always signing his work with an extra-big letter 0 in Gold. "Or my brushes, for that matter."
He snatched at the brush in Joe's hand. A pea of ink fell onto the page Joe was inking, spoiling ten minutes' work on the fearsome devices arrayed backstage at the Empire Palace Theatre. Joe looked at Marty. He smiled. He drew the brush back out of Marty's reach, then presented it to him with a flourish. At the same time, he passed his other hand slowly across the hand that was holding the brush. The brush disappeared. Joe brandished his empty palms, looking surprised.
"How did you get in here?" Jerry said.
"Your girlfriend let us in," Sammy said. " Rosa."
" Rosa? Aw, she's not my girlfriend." It was stated not defensively but as a matter of fact. Jerry had been sixteen when Sammy first met him, and had already been dating three girls at a time. Such bounty was then still something of a novelty for him, and he had talked about them incessantly. Rosalyn, Dorothy, and Yetta: Sammy could still remember their names. The novelty had long since worn off; three was a dry spell now for Jerry. He was tall, with vulpine good looks, and wore his kinky, brilliantined hair combed into romantic swirls. He cultivated a reputation, without a great deal of encouragement from his friends, for having a fine sense of humor, to which he attributed, unconvincingly in Sammy's view, his incontestable success with women. He had a "big-foot" comedy drawing style swiped, in about equal portions, from Segar and McManus, and Sammy wasn't entirely sure how well he'd do with straight adventure.
"If she's not your girlfriend," said Julie, "then why was she in your bed naked?"
"Shut up, Julie," Sammy said.
"You saw her in my bed naked?"
"Alas, no," said Sammy.
"I was just kidding," said Julie.
Joe said, "Do I smell chicken?"
"These are not bad," said Davy O'Dowd. He had close-cropped red hair and tiny green eyes, and was built like a jockey. He was from Hell's Kitchen, and had lost part of an ear in a fight when he was twelve; that was about all Sammy knew about him. The sight of the pink nubbin of his left ear always made Sammy a little sick, but Davy was proud of it. Lifting the sheet of tracing paper that covered each page, he stood perusing the five pages of "The Legend of the Golden Key" that Sammy and Joe had already completed. As he looked each page over, he passed it to Frank Pantaleone, who grunted. Davy said, "It's like a Superman-type thing."
"It's better than Superman." Sammy got down off his stool and went over to help them admire his work.
"Who inked this?" said Frank, tall, stooped, from Bensonhurst, sadjowled, and already, though not yet twenty-two, losing his hair. In spite of, or perhaps in concert with, his hangdog appearance, he was a gifted draftsman who had won a citywide art prize in his senior year at Music and Art and had taken classes at Pratt. There were good teachers at Pratt, professional painters and illustrators, serious craftsmen; Frank thought about art, and of himself as an artist, the way Joe did. From time to time he got a job as a set painter on Broadway; his father was a big man in the stagehands' union. He had worked up an adventure strip of his own, The Travels of Marco Polo, a Sunday-only panel on which he lavished rich, Fosterian detail, and King Features was said to be interested. "Was it you?" he asked Joe. "This is good work. You did the pencils, too, didn't you? Klayman couldn't do this."
"I laid it out," Sammy said. "Joe didn't even know what a comic book was until this morning." Sammy pretended to be insulted, but he was so proud of Joe that, at this word of praise from Frank Pantaleone, he felt a little giddy.
"Joe Kavalier," said Joe, offering Frank his hand.
"My cousin. He just got in from Japan."
"Yeah? Well what did he do with my brush? That's a one-dollar red sable Windsor and Newton," said Marty. "Milton Caniff gave me that brush."
"So you have always claimed," said Frank. He studied the remaining pages, chewing on his puffy lower lip, his eyes cold and lively with more than mere professional interest. You could see he was thinking that, given a chance, he could do better. Sammy couldn't believe his luck. Yesterday his dream of publishing comic books had been merely that: a dream even less credible than the usual run of his imaginings. Today he had a pair of costumed heroes and a staff that might soon include a talent like Frank Pantaleone. "This is really not bad at all, Klayman."
"The Black… Hat," Jerry said again. He shook his head. "What is he, crime-fighter by night, haberdasher by day?"
"He's a wealthy playboy," said Joe gravely.
"Go draw your bunny," Julie said. "I'm getting paid seven-fifty a page. Isn't that right, Sam?"
"Absolutely."
"Seven-fifty!" Marty said. With mock servility, he scooted the taboret back toward Sammy and Joe and replaced the bottle of ink at Joe's elbow. "Please, Joe-san, use my ink."
"Who's paying that kind of money?" Jerry wanted to know. "Not Donenfeld. He wouldn't hire you."
"Donenfeld is going to be begging me to work for him," said Sammy, uncertain who Donenfeld was. He went on to explain the marvelous opportunity that awaited them all if only they chose to seize it. "Now, let's see." Sammy adopted his most serious expression, licked the point of a pencil, and scratched some quick calculations on a scrap of paper. "Plus the Black Hat and the Escapist, I need-thirty-six, forty-eight-three more twelve-page stories. That'll make sixty pages, plus the inside covers, plus the way I understand it we have to have two pages of just plain words." So that their products might qualify as magazines, and therefore be mailed second-class, comic book publishers made sure to toss in the minimum two pages of pure text required by postal law-usually in the form of a featherweight short story, written in sawdust prose. "Sixty-four. But, okay, here's the thing. Every character has to wear a mask. That's the gimmick. This comic book is going to be called Masked Man. That means no Chinamen, no private eyes, no two-fisted old sea dogs."
"All masks," said Marty. "Good gimmick."
"Empire, huh?" said Frank. "Frankly-"
"Frankly-frankly-frankly-frankly-frankly," they all chimed in. Frank said "frankly" a lot. They liked to call his attention to it.
"-I'm a little surprised," he continued, unruffled. "I'm surprised Jack Ashkenazy is paying seven-fifty a page. Are you sure that's what he said?"
"Sure, I'm sure. Plus, oh, yeah, how could I forget. We're putting Adolf Hitler on the cover. That's the other gimmick. And Joe here," he said, nodding at his cousin but looking at Frank, "is going to draw that one all by himself."
"I?" said Joe. "You want me to draw Hitler on the cover of the magazine?"
"Getting punched in the jaw, Joe." Sammy threw a big, slow punch at Marty Gold, stopping an inch shy of his chin. "Wham!"
"Let me see this," said Jerry. He took a page from Frank and lifted the tracing-paper flap. "He looks just like Superman."
"He does not."
"Hitler. Your villain is going to be Adolf Hitler." Jerry looked at Sammy, eyebrows lifted high, his amazement not entirely respectful.
"Just on the cover."
"No way are they going to go for that."
"Not Jack Ashkenazy," Frank agreed.
"What's so bad about Hitler?" said Davy. "Just kidding."
"Maybe you ought to call it Racy Dictator," said Marty.
"They'll go for it! Get out of here," Sammy cried, kicking them out of their own studio. "Give me those." Sammy grabbed the pages away from Jerry, clutched them to his chest, and climbed back onto his stool. "Fine, listen, all of you, do me a favor, all right? You don't want to be in on this, good, then stay out of it. It's all the same to me." He made a disdainful survey of the Rathole: John Garfield, living high in a big silk suit, taking a look around the cold-water flat where his goody-goody boyhood friend has ended up. "You probably already have more work than you can handle."
Jerry turned to Marty. "He's employing sarcasm."
"I noticed that."
"I'm not sure I could take being bossed around by this wiseass. I've been having problems with this wiseass for years."
"I can see how you might."
"If Tokyo Joe, here, will ink me," said Frank Pantaleone, "I'm in." Joe nodded his assent. "Then I'm in. Fra- To tell you the truth, I've been having a few ideas in this direction, anyway."
"Will you lend one to me?" said Davy. Frank shrugged. "Then I'm in, too."
"All right, all right," said Jerry at last, waving his hands in surrender. "You already took over the whole damned Pit anyway." He started back down the stairs. "I'll make us some coffee." He turned back and pointed a finger at Joe. "But stay away from my food. That's my chicken."
"And they can't sleep here, either," said Marty Gold.
"And you have to tell us how's come if you're from Japan, you could be Sammy's cousin and look like such a Jew," Davy O'Dowd said.
"We're in Japan," Sammy said. "We're everywhere."
"Jujitsu," Joe reminded him.
"Good point," said Davy O'Dowd.
FOR two days, none of them slept. They drank Jerry's coffee until it was gone, then brought up cardboard trays of sour black stuff from the all-night Greek on Eighth Avenue, in blue-and-white paper cups. As promised, Jerry was cruel in his administration of the chicken, but another half was fetched, along with bags of sandwiches, hot dogs, apples, and doughnuts; they cleared the hospital-pantry of three cans of sardines, a can of spinach, a box of Wheaties, four bouillon cubes, and some old prunes. Joe's appetite was still stranded somewhere east of Robe, but Sammy bought a loaf of bread that Joe spread with butter and devoured over the course of the weekend. They went through four cartons of cigarettes. They blared the radio, when the stations signed off they played records, and in the quiet moments between they drove one another mad with their humming. Those who had girlfriends broke dates.
It became clear fairly quickly that Sammy, deprived of his bible of clipped panels and swiped poses, was the least talented artist in the group. Within twelve hours of commencing his career as a comic book artist, he retired. He told Joe to go ahead and lay out the rest of the artwork for the Escapist story by himself, guided, if he needed a guide, by some of the issues of Action and Detective and Wonder that littered the floor of the Pit. Joe picked up a copy of Detective and began to leaf through it.
"So the idea for me is to draw very badly like these fellows."
"These guys aren't trying to draw bad, Joe. Some of what they do is okay. There's a guy, Craig Flessel, he's really pretty good. Try to keep an open mind. Look at this." Sammy grabbed a copy of Action and opened it to a page where Joe Shuster showed Superman freeing Lois Lane from the grasp of some big-shouldered crooks-war profiteers, as Sammy recalled. The backgrounds were reduced to their essence, hieroglyphs signifying laboratory, log cabin, craggy mountaintop. The chins were jutting, the musculature conventionalized, Lois's eyes plumed slits. "It's simple. It's stripped down. If you sat there and filled every panel with all your little bats and puddles and stained-glass windows, and drew in every muscle and every little tooth and based it on Michelangelo and cut your own ear off over it, that would be bad. The main thing is, you use pictures to tell a good story."
"The stories are good?"
"Sometimes the stories are good. Our story is really fucking good, if I do say so myself."
"Fucking," Joe said, letting it out slowly like a satisfying drag.
"Fucking what?"
Joe shrugged. "I was just saying it."
Sammy's real talents, it developed, lay elsewhere than in the pencil or brush. This became clear to everyone after Davy O'Dowd returned to the Pit from a brief conference with Frank over ideas for Davy's character. Frank was already wrapped up in his own idea, or lack thereof, working at the kitchen table and, in spite of his promise to Davy, could not be bothered. Davy came in from the kitchen scratching his head.
"My guy flies," said Davy O'Dowd. "That I know."
Joe shot a look at Sammy, who clapped a hand to his forehead.
"Oy," he said.
"What?"
"He flies, huh?"
"Something wrong with that? Frank says this is all about wishful figments."
"Huh?"
"Wishful figments. You know, like it's all what some little kid wishes he could do. Like for you, hey, you don't want to have a gimpy leg no more. So, boom, you give your guy a magic key and he can walk."
"Huh." Sammy had not chosen to look at the process of character creation in quite so stark a manner. He wondered what other wishes he might have subsumed unknowingly into the character of lame Tom Mayflower.
"I always wished I could fly," Davy said. "I guess a lot of guys must have wished that."
"It's a common fantasy, yeah."
"It seems to me that makes it something you can't have too many of," Jerry Glovsky put in.
"All right, then, so he can fly." Sammy looked at Joe. "Joe?"
Joe glanced up briefly from his work. "Why."
"Why?"
Sammy nodded. "Why can he fly? Why does he want to? And how come he uses his power of flight to fight crime? Why doesn't he just become the world's best second-story man?"
Davy rolled his eyes. "What is this, comic book catechism? I don't know."
"Take one thing at a time. How does he do it?"
"I don't know."
"Stop saying you don't know."
"He has big wings."
"Think of something else. A rocket pack? Antigravity boots? An autogyro hat? Mythological powers of the winds? Interstellar dust? Blood transfusion from a bee? Hydrogen in his veins?"
"Slow down, slow down," Davy said. "Jesus, Sam."
"I'm good at this shit. Are you scared?"
"Just embarrassed for you."
"Take a number. Okay, it's a fluid. An antigravity fluid in his veins, he has this little machine he wears on his chest that pumps the stuff into him."
"He does."
"Yeah, he needs the stuff to stay alive, see? The flying part is just a, like an unexpected side benefit. He's a scientist. A doctor. He was working on some kind of, say, artificial blood. For the battlefield, you know. Synth-O-Blood, it's called. Maybe it's, shit, I don't know, maybe it's made out of ground-up iron meteorites from outer space. Because blood is iron-based. Whatever. But then some criminal types, no, some enemy spies, they break into his laboratory and try to steal it. When he won't let them, they shoot him and his girl and leave them for dead. It's too late for the girl, okay, how sad, but our guy manages to get himself hooked up to this pump thing just before he dies. I mean, he does die, medically speaking, but this stuff, this liquid meteorite, it brings him back from the very brink. And when he comes to-"
"He can fly!" Davy looked happily around the room.
"He can fly, and he goes after the spies that killed his girl, and now he can really do what he always wanted to, which was help the forces of democracy and peace. But he can never forget that he has a weakness, that without his Synth-O-Blood pump, he's a dead man. He can never stop being… being…" Sammy snapped his fingers, searching for a name.
"Almost Dead Flying Guy," suggested Jerry.
"Blood Man," said Julie.
"The Swift," Marty Gold said. "Fastest bird in the world."
"I draw really nice wings," said Davy O'Dowd. "Nice and feathery."
"Oh, all right, damn it," Sammy said. "They can just be there for show. We'll call him the Swift."
"I like it."
"He can never stop being the Swift," Sammy said. "Not for one goddamned minute of the day." He stopped and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. His throat was sore and his lips were dry and he felt as if he had been talking for a week. Jerry, Marty, and Davy all looked at one another, and then Jerry got down from his stool and went into his bedroom. When he came out, he was carrying an old Remington typewriter.
"When you're done with Davy's, do mine," he said.
Jerry did manage to slip out for an hour, late Saturday, to return Rosa Saks's purse to her, and then again on Sunday afternoon, for two hours, returning with the crooked mark on his neck of the teeth of a girl named Mae. As for Frank Pantaleone, he disappeared sometime around midnight on Friday and eventually turned up fully dressed in the empty bathtub, behind the shower curtain, drawing board against his knees. When he finished a page, he would bellow out, "Boy!" and Sammy would run it upstairs to Joe, who did not look up from the shining trail of his brush until just before two o'clock on Monday morning.
"Beauteeful," said Sammy. He had been finished with his scripts for several hours but had stayed awake, drinking coffee until his eyeballs quivered, so that Joe would have company while he finished the cover he had designed. This was the first word either had said for at least an hour. "Let's go see if there's anything left to eat."
Joe climbed down from his stool and carried the cover over to the foot-high pile of illustration board and tracing paper that would be the first issue of their comic book. He hitched up his trousers, worked his head around a few times on the creaky pivot of his neck, and followed Sammy over to the kitchen. Here they found and proceeded to devour a light supper consisting of the thrice-picked-over demi-carcass of a by now quite hoary chicken, nine soda crackers, one sardine, some milk, as well as a yellow doorstop of adamantine cheese they found wedged, under the milk bottle, between the slats of the shelf outside the window. Frank Pantaleone and Julie Glovsky had long since gone home to Brooklyn; Jerry, Davy, and Marty were asleep in their rooms. The cousins chewed their snack in silence. Joe stared out the window onto the blasted backyard, black with ice. His heavy-lidded eyes were ringed with deep shadows. He pressed his high forehead against the cold glass of the window.
"Where am I?" he said.
"In New York City," said Sammy.
" New York City." He thought it over. " New York City, U.S.A. " He closed his eyes. "That is not possible."
"You all right?" Sammy put his hand on Joe's shoulder. "Joe Kavalier."
"Sam Clay."
Sammy smiled. Once again, as when he had first enclosed the pair of newly minted American names in a neat inked rectangle of partnership on page 1 of the Escapist's debut, Sammy's belly suffused with an uncomfortable warmth, and he felt his cheeks color. It was not merely the blush of pride, nor of the unacknowledged delight he took in thus emblematizing his growing attachment to Joe; he was also moved by a grief, half affectionate, half ashamed, for the loss of Professor von Clay that he had never before allowed himself to feel. He gave Joe's shoulder a squeeze.
"We've done something great, Joe, do you realize that?"
"Big money," said Joe. His eyes opened.
"That's right," said Sammy. "Big money."
"Now I remember."
In addition to the Escapist and the Black Hat, their book now boasted the opening adventure, inked and lettered by Marty Gold, in the career of a third hero, Jerry Glovsky's Snowman, essentially the Green Hornet in a blue-and-white union suit, complete with a Korean houseboy, a gun that fired "freezing gas," and a roadster that Sammy's text described as "ice-blue like the Snowman's evil-detecting eyes." Jerry had managed to rein in his bigfoot style, letting it emerge usefully in the rendering of Fan, the bucktoothed but hard-fighting houseboy, and of the Snowman's slavering, claw-fingered, bemonocled adversary, the dreaded Obsidian Hand. They also had Davy O'Dowd's first installment of the Swill, with his lush, silky Alex Raymond wings, and Radio Wave, drawn by Frank Pantaleone and inked by Joe Kavalier with, Sammy was forced to admit, mixed results. This was Sammy's own fault. He had yielded, in the creation of Radio Wave, to Frank's experience and prowess with a pencil, not daring to offer him assistance in the development or plotting of the strip. This act of deference resulted in a dazzlingly drawn, tastefully costumed, sumptuously muscled, and beautifully inked hero with no meddling girlfriend, quarrelsome sidekick, ironic secret identity, bumbling police commissioner, Achilles' heel, corps of secret allies, or personal quest for revenge; only the hastily explained, well-rendered, and dubious ability to transmit himself through the air "on the invisible rails of the airwaves," and leap unexpectedly from the grille of a Philco into the hideout of a gang of jazz-loving jewel thieves. It was soon apparent to Sammy that once they were wise to him, all the crooks in Radio Wave's hometown need simply turn off their radios in order to thrive unmolested, but by the time he had a chance to look the thing over, Joe had already inked half of it.
Julie had done a nice job on his Hat story, illustrating one of Sammy's retooled, custom-fitted Shadow plots in a flat, slightly cartoony style not too different from that of Superman's Joe Shuster, only with better buildings and cars; and Sammy was satisfied with the Escapist adventure, though Joe's layouts were, to be honest, a little static and overly pretty, and then rushed and even scratchy-looking at the very end.
But the undisputed glory of the thing was the cover. It was not a drawing but a painting, executed in tempera on heavy stock, in a polished illustrator's style, at once idealized and highly realistic, that reminded Sammy of James Montgomery Flagg but which Joe had actually derived, he said, from a German illustrator named Kley. Unlike the great anti-Nazi covers to come, there was no hullabaloo of tanks or burning airplanes, no helmeted minions or screaming females. There were just the two principals, the Escapist and Hitler, on a neoclassical platform draped with Nazi flags against a blue sky. It had taken Joe only a few minutes to get the Escapist's pose right-legs spread, big right fist arcing across the page to deliver an immortal haymaker-and hours to paint in the highlights and shadows that made the image seem so real. The dark blue fabric of the Escapist's costume was creased with palpable pleats and wrinkles, and his hair-they had decided to do the kerchief as a mask that left the hair exposed-glinted like gold and at the same time looked messy and windblown. His musculature was lean and understated, believable, and the veins in his arm rippled with the strain of the blow. As for Hitler, he came flying at you backward, right-crossed clean out of the painting, head thrown back, forelock a-splash, arms flailing, jaw trailing a long red streamer of teeth. The violence of the image was startling, beautiful, strange. It stirred mysterious feelings in the viewer, of hatred gratified, of cringing fear transmuted into smashing retribution, which few artists working in America, in the fall of 1939, could have tapped so easily and effectively as Josef Kavalier.
Joe nodded and squeezed Sammy's hand in return. "You're right," he said. "Maybe we done something good."
Joe leaned against the wall of the kitchenette, then slid down until he hit the floor. Sammy sat down next to him and handed him the last saltine. Joe took it but, instead of eating it, began snapping off tiny pieces of cracker and tossing them out into the greater Pit. His nose in profile was a billowing sail; his hair descended in exhausted coils over his forehead. He seemed to be a million miles away, and Sammy imagined that he was wistfully recalling some part of his homeland, some marvel he had seen long ago, an advertising jingle for pomade, a dancing chicken in a gimcrack museum, his father's ear-whiskers, the lace hem of his mother's slip. All at once, like the paper flower inside one of Empire Novelty's Instant Miracle Garden capsules, the consciousness of everything his cousin had left behind bloomed in Sammy's heart, bleeding dye.
Then Joe said, half to himself, "Yes, I would like to see again that Rosa Saks."
Sammy laughed. Joe looked at him, too tired to inquire, and Sammy was too tired to explain. Another few minutes passed in silence. Sammy's chin dropped down onto his chest. After bobbing there for a moment, his head bounced up again and he snapped open his eyes.
"Was that the first woman you ever saw naked?"
"No," said Joe. "I drew models at the art school."
"Right."
"Have you seen?"
There was more implicit in this question, naturally, than the mere observation of a woman without her clothes. Sammy had long ago prepared a detailed account of the loss of his virginity, the moving tale of an encounter under the boardwalk with Roberta Blum on her last night in New York City, the eve of her departure for college, but he found he lacked the energy to recount it. So he just said, "No."
When Marty Gold wandered upstairs an hour later, in search of a desperate glass of milk to counteract the effects of the coffee he had drunk, he found the cousins asleep on the floor of the kitchenette, half in and half out of each other's arms. Sleepless, ulcerated, Marty was in a very ill mood, and it is to his lasting credit that, instead of throwing a fit at their having violated his prohibition on sleeping in the apartment, he threw an army blanket over Joe and Sammy, one that had returned with the Waczukowski son from Ypres, and warmed the five toes of Al Capp. Then he brought in the bottle of milk from the windowsill and carried it with him back to bed.
Monday dawned as the most beautiful morning in the history of New York City. The sky was as blue as the ribbon on a prize-winning lamb. Atop the Chrysler Building, the streamlined gargoyles gleamed like a horn section. Many of the island's 6,011 apple trees were heavy with fruit. There was an agrarian tinge of apples and horse dung in the air. Sammy whistled "Frenesi" all the way across town and into the lobby of the Kramler Building. As he whistled, he entertained a fantasy in which he featured, some scant years hence, as the owner of Clay Publications, Inc., putting out fifty titles a month, pulp to highbrow, with a staff of two hundred and three floors in Rockefeller Center. He bought Ethel and Bubbie a house out on Long Island, way out in the sticks, with a vegetable garden. He hired a nurse for Bubbie, someone to bathe her and sit with her and mash her pills up in a banana. Someone to give his mother a break. The nurse was a stocky, clean-cut fellow named Steve. He played football on Saturdays with his brothers and their friends. He wore a leather helmet and a sweatshirt that said army. On Saturdays, Sammy left his polished granite and chromium office and took the train out to visit them, feasting in his private dining car on turtle meat, the most abominated and unclean of all, which the Mighty Molecule had once sampled in Richmond and never to his dying day forgotten. Sammy hung his hat on the wall of the charming, sunny Long Island cottage, kissed his mother and grandmother, and invited Steve to play hearts and have a cigar. Yes, on this last beautiful morning of his life as Sammy Klayman, he was feeling dangerously optimistic.
"Did you bring me a Superman?" Anapol said without preamble when Sammy and Joe walked into his office.
"Wait till you see," said Sammy.
Anapol made room on his desk. They opened the portfolios one after another, and piled on the pages.
"How much did you do?" Anapol said, lifting an eyebrow.
"We did a whole book," said Sammy. "Boss, allow me to present to you"-he deepened his voice and flourished his hands in the direction of the pile-"the debut issue of Empire Comics' premier title, Masked-"
"Empire Comics."
"Yeah, I was thinking."
"Not Racy."
"Maybe it's better."
Anapol fingered his Gibraltar chin. "Empire Comics."
"And their premier title…" Sammy lifted the sheet of tracing paper on Joe's painting. "Masked Man Comics."
"I thought it was going to be called Joy Buzzer or Whoopee Cushion."
"Is that what you want to call it?"
"I want to sell novelties," said Anapol. "I want to move radios."
"Radio Comics, then."
"AmazingMidgetRadioComics" Joe said, clearly under the impression that it sounded very fine.
"I like it," Anapol said. He put on his glasses and leaned down to examine the cover. "He's a blond. All right. He's hitting someone. That's good. What's his name?"
"His name's the Escapist."
"The Escapist." He frowned. "He's hitting Hitler."
"How about that."
Anapol grunted. He picked up the first page, read the first two panels of the story, then scanned the rest. Quickly, he scanned the next two pages. Then he gave up.
"You know I have no patience with nonsense," said the Northeast's leading wholesaler of chattering windup mandibles. He put the pages aside. "I don't like it. I don't get it."
"What do you mean? How can you not get it? He's a superhuman escape artist. No cuffs can hold him. No lock is secure. Coming to the rescue of those who toil in the chains of tyranny and injustice. Houdini, but mixed with Robin Hood and a little bit of Albert Schweitzer."
"I can see you have a knack for this," said Anapol, "by the way. I'm not saying that's a good thing." His large, woebegone features drew tight, and he looked as if his breakfast were repeating on him. He smells money, thought Sammy. "On Friday, Jack talked to his distributor, Seaboard News. Turns out Seaboard's looking for a Superman, too. And we're not the first ones they've heard from." He hit the switch that buzzed his secretary. "I want Jack." He picked up the phone. "Everybody's trying to get in on this costumed-character thing. We've got to jump on it before the bubble goes pop."
"I already have seven guys lined up, boss," said Sammy. "Including Frank Pantaleone, who just sold a strip to Ring Features." This was nearly true. "And Joe here. You see what kind of work he can do. How about that cover?"
"Punching Adolf Hitler," Anapol said, inclining his head doubtfully. "I just don't know about that. Hello, Jack? Yeah. That's right. Okay." He hung up. "I don't see Superman getting mixed up in politics. Not that I personally would mind seeing somebody clean Hitler's clock."
"That's the point, boss," said Sammy. "Lots of people wouldn't mind. When they see this-"
Anapol waved the controversy away. "I don't know, I don't know. Sit down. Stop talking. Why can't you be a nice, quiet kid like your cousin here?"
"You asked me…"
"And now I'm asking you to stop. That's why a radio has a switch. Here." He pulled open a drawer in his desk and took out his humidor. "You did good. Have a cigar." Sammy and Joe each took one, and Anapol set fire to the twenty-cent lonsdales with the silver Zippo that had been presented to him as a token of gratitude by general subscription of the International Szymanowski Society. "Sit down." They sat down. "We'll see what George thinks."
Sammy leaned back, letting out one vainglorious swallowtail cloud of blue smoke. Then he sat forward. "George? George who? Not George Deasey?"
"No, George Jessel. What do you think, of course George Deasey. He's the editor, isn't he?"
"But I thought… you said-" Sammy's protest was interrupted by a fit of severe coughing. He stood up, leaned on Anapol's desk, and tried to fight down the spasm of his lungs. Joe patted him on the back. "Mr. Anapol-I thought I was going to be the editor."
"I never said that." Anapol sat down, the springs of his chair creaking like the hull of an imperiled ship. His sitting down was a bad sign; Anapol did business only on his feet. "I'm not going to do that. Jack's not going to do that. George Deasey has been in the business for thirty years. He's smart. Unlike you or I, he went to college. To Columbia College, Sammy. He knows writers, he knows artists, he meets deadlines, and he doesn't waste money. Jack trusts him."
It is easy to say, at this remove, that Sammy ought to have seen this coming. In fact, he was shocked. He had trusted Anapol, respected him. Anapol was the first successful man Sammy had ever known personally. He was as dedicated to his work, as tireless a wanderer, as imperious, as remote from his family as Sammy's father, and to be betrayed by him, too, came as a terrible blow. Day after day, Sammy had listened to Anapol's lectures about taking the initiative, and the Science of Opportunity, and as these jibed with his own notions of how the world functioned, Sammy had believed. He didn't think it would be possible to show more initiative, or seize an opportunity more scientifically, than he had in the last three days. Sammy wanted to argue, but once deprived of their central pillar of Enterprise Rewarded, the arguments in favor of making him editor, and not the unquestionably qualified and proven George Deasey, struck him, abruptly, as ludicrous. So he sat back down. His cigar had gone out.
A moment later, wearing a corn-colored jacket over green velour pants and an orange-and-green-plaid tie, Jack Ashkenazy came in, followed by George Deasey, who, as ever, appeared to be in a testy mood. He was, as Anapol had mentioned, a graduate of Columbia, class of 1912. Over the course of his career, George Debevoise Deasey had published symbolist poetry in the Seven Arts, covered Latin America and the Philippines as a correspondent for the American and the Los Angeles Examiner, and written over a hundred and fifty pulpwood novels under his and a dozen other names, including, before he was made editor in chief of all their titles, more than sixty adventures of Racy's biggest seller, the Shadow-like Gray Goblin, star of Racy Police Stories. Yet he took no pride or true satisfaction in these or any of his other experiences and achievements, because when he was nineteen, his brother Malcolm, whom he idolized, had married Oneida Shaw, the love of Deasey's life, and taken her down to a rubber farm in Brazil, where they both died of amoebic dysentery. The bitter memory of this tragic episode, while long since corrupted by time and crumbled to an ashy gray powder in his breast, had outwardly hardened into a well-known if not exactly beloved set of mannerisms and behaviors, among them heavy drinking, prodigious work habits, an all-encompassing cynicism, and an editorial style based firmly on ruthless adherence to deadlines and on the surprise administration, irregular and devastating as the impact of meteors from space, of the scabrous and literate tongue-lashings with which he regularly flensed his quavering staff. A tall, corpulent man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a drooping ginger mustache, he still dressed in the stiff-collared shirts and high-button waistcoats of his generation of literary men. He professed to despise the pulps and never lost an opportunity to ridicule himself for earning his living by them, but all the same he took the work seriously, and his novels, each of them composed in two or three weeks, were written with verve and an erudite touch.
"So it's to be comic books, now, is it?" he said to Anapol as they shook hands. "The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward." He took his pipe from his hip pocket.
"Sammy Klayman and his cousin Joe Kavalier," Anapol said. He put a hand on Sammy's shoulder. "Sammy, here, is pretty much responsible for this whole thing. Aren't you, Sammy?"
Sammy had the shakes. His teeth were chattering. He wanted to pick up something heavy and spray Anapol's brains across his blotter. He wanted to run weeping from the room. He just stood there, staring at Anapol until the big man looked away.
"You boys sure you want to work for me?" said Deasey. Before they could answer, he gave a nasty little chuckle and shook his head. He held a match to the bowl of his pipe and took six small sips of cherry smoke. "Well, let's have a look."
"Sit down, George, please," said Anapol, his normal saturnine hauteur giving way, as usual, in the proximity of a gentile with a diploma to arrant toadyism. "I think the boys here did a very nice job." Deasey sat down and dragged the pile of pages toward his right side. Ashkenazy pressed in close behind to peer over Deasey's shoulder. As Deasey lifted the protective sheet of tracing paper on the cover art, Sammy glanced over at Joe. His cousin was sitting stiffly in his chair, hands in his lap, watching the editor's face. Deasey's air of ruined integrity and confidence in his own judgments had made an impression on Joe.
"Who did this cover?" Deasey looked at the signature, then over the tops of his round glasses at Joe. "Kavalier, is that you?"
Joe got to his feet, literally holding his hat in his hand, and extended the other to Deasey.
"Josef Kavalier," Joe said. "How do you do."
"I'm fine, Mr. Kavalier." They shook. "And you're hired."
"Thank you," Joe said. He sat back down and smiled. He was just happy to get the job. He had no idea what Sammy was going through, the humiliation he was undergoing. All of his boasting to his mother! His strutting around Julie and the others! How in God's name would he ever be able to face Frank Pantaleone again?
Deasey set the cover art to his left, reached for the first page, and started to read. When he finished, he put it under Joe's cover and took the next page. He didn't look up again until the entire pile was on his left side and he had read through to the end.
"You put this together, son?" He smiled at Sammy. "You know, don't you, that this is pure trash. Superman is pure trash, too, of course. Batman, the Blue Beetle. The whole menagerie."
"You're right," said Sammy through his teeth. "Trash sells."
"By God, it does," said Deasey. "I can testify to that personally."
"Is it all trash, George?" said Ashkenazy. "I like that guy that comes out of the radio." He turned to Sammy. "How'd you come up with that?"
"Trash I don't mind," said Anapol. "Is it the same kind of trash as Superman, that's what I want to know."
"Might I confer with you gentlemen in private?" said Deasey.
"Excuse us, boys," Anapol said.
Sammy and Joe went and sat in the chairs outside Anapol's office.
Sammy tried to listen through the glass. Deasey could be heard murmuring gravely but indecipherably. Sometimes Anapol interrupted him with a question. After a few minutes, Ashkenazy came out, winked at Sammy and Joe, and left the Empire offices. When he came back a few minutes later, he was carrying a thin rattling sheaf of paper. It looked like a legal contract. Sammy's left leg started to twitch. Ashkenazy stopped in front of the door to Anapol's office and gestured grandly for them to enter.
"Gentlemen?" he said.
Sammy and Joe followed him in.
"We want to buy the Escapist," said Anapol. "We'll pay you a hundred and fifty dollars for the rights."
Joe looked at Sammy, eyebrows raised. Big money.
"What else?" said Sammy, though he had been hoping for a hundred at most.
"The other characters, the backups, we'll pay eighty-five dollars for the lot of them," Anapol continued. Seeing Sammy's face fall a little, he added, "It would have been twenty dollars apiece, but Jack felt that Mr. Radio was worth a little extra."
"That's just for the rights, kid," said Ashkenazy. "We'll also take you both on, Sammy for seventy-five dollars a week and Joe at six dollars a page. George wants you for an assistant, Sam. Says he sees real potential in you."
"You certainly know your trash," Deasey said.
"Plus we'll pay Joe, here, twenty dollars for every cover he does. And for all your pals and associates, five dollars a page."
"Though of course I'll have to meet them first," said Deasey.
"That's not enough," said Sammy. "I told them the page rate would be eight dollars."
"Eight dollars!" said Ashkenazy. "I wouldn't pay eight dollars to John Steinback."
"We'll pay five," said Anapol gently. "And we want a new cover."
"You do," Sammy said. "I see."
"This hitting Hitler thing, Sammy, it makes us nervous."
"What? What is this?" Joe's attention had wandered a little during the financial discussions-he had heard one hundred and fifty dollars, six dollars a page, twenty per cover. Those numbers sounded very good to him. But now he thought he had just heard Sheldon Anapol declaring that he would not use the cover in which Hitler got his jaw broken. Nothing that Joe had painted had ever satisfied him more. The composition was natural and simple and modern; the two figures, the circular dais, the blue and white badge of the sky. The figures had weight and mass; the foreshortening of Hitler's outflying body was daring and a little off, but in a way that was somehow convincing. The draping of the clothes was right; the Escapist's uniform looked like a uniform, like jersey cloth bunched in places but tight-fitting, and not merely blue-colored flesh. But most of all, the pleasure that Joe derived from administering this brutal beating was intense and durable and strangely redemptive. At odd moments over the past few days, he had consoled himself with the thought that somehow a copy of this comic book might eventually make its way to Berlin and cross the desk of Hitler himself, that he would look at the painting into which Joe had channeled all his pent-up rage and rub his jaw, and check with his tongue for a missing tooth.
"We're not in a war with Germany," Ashkenazy said, shaking his finger at Sammy. "It's illegal to make fun of a king, or a president, or somebody like that, if you're not at war with them. We could get sued."
"May I suggest that you keep Germany in the story if you change the name and don't call them Germans. Or Nazis," said Deasey. "But you'll have to figure out a different kind of image for the cover. If not, I can give it to Pickering or Clemm or one of my other regular cover artists."
Sammy looked over at Joe, who stood looking down, nodding his head a little bit, as if he should have known all along that it would come to something like this. When he looked up again, however, his face was composed, his voice measured and calm.
"I like the cover," he said.
"Joe," said Sammy. "Just think about it a minute. We can figure something else out. Something just as good. I know it's important to you. It's important to me, too. I think it ought to be important to these gentlemen, too, and frankly I'm a little ashamed of them right now"-he shot Anapol a dirty look-"but just think about it a minute. That's all I'm saying."
"I do not need to do that, Sam. I will not agree to the other cover, no matter."
Sammy nodded, then turned back to Sheldon Anapol. He closed his eyes, very tight, as though about to jump into a swiftly moving ice-choked stream. His faith in himself had been shaken. He didn't know what was right, or whose welfare he ought to consider. Would it be helping Joe if they walked out over this? If they stayed and compromised, would it be hurting him? Would it be helping the Kavaliers in Prague? He opened his eyes and looked straight at Anapol.
"We can't do it," said Sammy, though it cost him great effort. "No, I'm sorry, that has to be the cover." He appealed to Deasey. "Mr. Deasey, that cover is dynamite and you know it."
"Who wants dynamite?" said Ashkenazy. "Dynamite blows up. A guy could lose a finger."
"We're not changing the cover, boss," Sammy said, and then, bringing to bear all his powers of dissimulated pluck and false bravado, he picked up one of the portfolios and began filling it with pieces of illustration board. He did not allow himself to think about what he was doing. "The Escapist fights evil." He tied the portfolio shut and handed it to Joe, still without looking at his cousin's face. He picked up another portfolio. "Hitler is evil."
"Calm down, young man," said Anapol. "Jack, maybe we can push the page rate for the others up to six, nu? Six dollars a page, Sammy. And eight for your cousin here. Come, Mr. Kavalier, eight dollars a page! Don't be foolish."
Sammy handed the second portfolio to Joe and started on the third.
"They aren't all your characters, don't forget," said George Deasey. "Maybe your friends would see things differently."
"Come on, Joe," said Sammy. "You heard what he said before. Every publisher in town wants in on this thing. We'll be all right."
They turned and walked out to the elevator.
"Six and a half!" called Anapol. "Hey, what about my radios?"
Joe looked back over his shoulder, then at Sammy, who had settled his snub features into an impassive mask. Sammy pushed the down button with a determined jab of his finger. Joe inclined his head towardhis cousin.
"Sammy, is this a trick?" he whispered. "Or are we serious?" Sammy thought it over. The elevator chimed. The operator threw open the door.
"You tell me," Sammy said.
<a l:href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> The still-fresh memory of Harry Houdini in the American mind thirteen years after his death-of his myth, his mysterious abilities, his physique, his feats, his dedicated hunting down and exposure of frauds and cheats – is a neglected source of the superhero idea in general; an argument in its favor, as it were.