His ears still ringing with artillery shells, screaming rockets, and the clattering ack-ack of Gene Krupa from the Crosley in a corner of the studio, Joe Kavalier laid down his brush and closed his eyes. He had been drawing, painting, smoking cigarettes, and nothing else for much of the past seven days. He clapped a hand to the back of his neck and engaged the bones that supported his battle-blown head in a few slow rotations. The vertebrae clicked and creaked. The joints of his hand throbbed, and the ghost of a brush notched his index finger. Each time he took a breath, he could feel a hard little billiard of nicotine and phlegm rattling around in his lungs. It was six o'clock on a Monday morning in October 1940. He had just won the Second World War, and he was feeling pretty good about it.
He slid off of his stool and went to look down on the autumn morning through the windows of the Kramler Building. Steam purled from the orifices of the street. A crew of a half-dozen workers in tan canvas coveralls, with peaked white caps perched atop their heads, used a water hose and long disheveled brooms to sluice a grimy tide down the gutters toward the storm drains at the corner of Broadway. Joe threw open the rattling sash of the window and poked his head out. It looked like it was going to be a fine day. The sky in the east was a bright Superman blue. There was a dank Octoberish smell of rain in the air with a faint acrid tang from a vinegar works along the East Biver, seven blocks away. To Joe, at that moment, it was the smell of victory. New York never looks more beautiful than to a young man who has just pulled off something he knows is going to knock them dead.
Over the course of the last week, in the guise of the Escapist, Master of Elusion, Joe had flown to Europe (in a midnight-blue autogyro),stormed the towered Schloss of the nefarious Steel Gauntlet, freed Plum Blossom from its deep dungeon, defeated the Gauntlet in protracted two-fisted combat, been captured by the Gauntlet's henchmen and dragged off to Berlin, where he was strapped to a bizarre multiple guillotine that would have sliced him like a hard-boiled egg while the Fuhrer himself smugly looked on. Naturally, patiently, indomitably, he had worked his way loose of his riveted steel bonds and hurled himself at the throat of the dictator. At this point-with twenty pages to go until the Charles Atlas ad on the inside back cover-an entire Wehrmacht division had come between the Escapist's fingers and that gravely desired larynx. Over the course of the next eighteen pages, in panels that crowded, jostled, piled one on top of the other, and threatened to burst the margins of the page, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Escapist had duked it out. With the Steel Gauntlet out of the picture, it was a fair fight. On the very last page, in a transcendent moment in the history of wishful figments, the Escapist had captured Adolf Hitler and dragged him before a world tribunal. Head finally bowed in defeat and shame, Hitler was sentenced to die for his crimes against humanity. The war was over; a universal era of peace was declared, the imprisoned and persecuted peoples of Europe-among them, implicitly and passionately, the Kavalier family of Prague -were free.
Joe leaned forward, the heels of his hands pressed against the windowsill and the lowermost edge of the sash digging into his back, and breathed in a cool vinegar whiff of the morning. He felt contented and hopeful and, in spite of having slept no more than four hours at a stretch in the last week, not in the least tired. He looked up and down the street. He was struck by a sudden sense of connectedness to it, of knowing where it led to. The map of the island-which looked to him like a man whose head was the Bronx, raising an arm in greeting-was vivid in his mind, flayed like an anatomical model to reveal its circulatory system of streets and avenues, of train, trolley, and bus routes.
When Marty Gold finished inking the pages that Joe had just completed, they would be strapped to the back of a motorcycle by the kid from Iroquois Color and carried along Broadway, down past Madison Square and Union Square and Wanamaker's, to the Iroquois plant on Lafayette Street. There, one of four kindly, middle-aged women, two of whom were named Florence, would guess with surprising violence and aplomb at the proper coloration for the mashed noses, the burning Dorniers, the Steel Gauntlet's diesel-driven suit of armor, and all the other things that Joe had drawn and Marty had inked. The big Heidelberg cameras with rotating three-color lenses would photograph the colored pages, and the negatives, one cyan, one magenta, one yellow, would be screened by the squinting old Italian engraver, Mr. Petto, with his corny green celluloid visor. The resulting color halftones would be shipped uptown once more, along the ramifying arterials, to the huge loft building at West Forty-seventh and Eleventh, where men in square hats of folded newsprint labored at the great steam presses to publish the news of Joe's rapturous hatred of the German Reich, so that it could be borne once more into the streets of New York, this time in the form of folded and stapled comic books, lashed with twine into a thousand little bundles that would be hauled by the vans of Seaboard News to the newsstands and candy stores of the city, to the outermost edges of its boroughs and beyond, where they would be hung up like laundry or marriage banns from wire display racks.
It was not that Joe felt at home in New York. That was something he never would have allowed himself to feel. But he was very grateful to his headquarters in exile. New York City had led him, after all, to his calling, to this great, mad new American art form. She had laid at his feet the printing presses and lithography cameras and delivery vans that allowed him to fight, if not a genuine war, then a tolerable substitute. And she paid him handsomely for doing so: he already had seven thousand dollars-his family's ransom-in the bank.
Then the music program ended, and the newsreader for WEAF came on the radio to report the announcement, that morning, by the government of unoccupied France, that it had promulgated a series of statutes, modeled after the German Nuremberg Laws, that would enable it to "superintend," in the newsreader's odd formula, its population of Jews. This followed earlier reports, the newsreader reminded his listeners, that some French Jews-communists, mostly-were being transported to labor camps in Germany.
Joe fell back into the Empire offices, banging the crown of his head against the window frame. He went over to the radio, rubbing at the knot that began to swell on his head, and turned up the volume. But that was apparently all there was to say about the Jews of France. The rest of the war news concerned itself with air raids on Tobruk and on Kiel in Germany, and with the continued harassment by German U-boats of Allied and neutral shipping to Britain. Another three ships had been lost, among them an American tanker carrying a load of oil pressed from the seeds of Kansas sunflowers.
Joe was deflated. The surge of triumph he felt when he finished a story was always fleeting, and seemed to grow briefer with every job. This time it had lasted about a minute and a half before turning to shame and frustration. The Escapist was an impossible champion, ludicrous and above all imaginary, fighting a war that could never be won. His cheeks burned with embarrassment. He was wasting his time. "Idiot," he said, wiping at his eyes with the back of an arm.
Joe heard the groan of the Kramler's old elevator, the whistle and rattle of its cage door being rolled to one side. He saw that his shirtsleeve was stained not only by tears but with coffee and smudges of graphite. The cuff was frayed and inky. He became aware of the grit and the clammy residue of sleeplessness on his skin. He was not sure how long it had been since his last shower.
"Look at this." It was Shelly Anapol. He had on a pale-gray sharkskin suit that Joe didn't recognize, as giant and gleaming as the lens of a lighthouse. His face was sunburned bright red, and the skin of his ears was peeling. Pale phantom sunglasses framed his mournful eyes, which somehow, this autumn morning, looked incrementally less so than usual. "I'd say you're here early if I didn't know that you never left."
"I just finished Radio," Joe said glumly.
"So what's the matter?"
"It stinks."
"Don't tell me it stinks. I don't like to hear you talk like that."
"I know."
"You're too hard on yourself."
"Not really."
"Does it stink?"
"It is all baloney."
"Baloney is okay. Let me see." Anapol crossed the space that formerly had been occupied by the desks and file cabinets of the Empire Novelties shipping clerks, but which were now filled, to Anapol's oft-expressed surprise, with the drawing boards and worktables of Empire Comics, Inc.
The previous January, Amazing Midget Radio Comics had debuted with a sold-out print run of three hundred thousand. [2] On the cover of the issue now on the stand-destined to be the first of the Empire titles (there were currently three) to break the million mark in circulation- the words "Amazing" and "Midget," which had been shrinking each month until they were a vestigial ant-high smudge in the upper left-hand corner, had been dropped forever, and along with them the whole idea of promoting novelties through comics. In September, Anapol had found himself compelled by the implacable arguments of good sense to sell off the inventory and accounts of Empire Novelties, Inc., to Johnson-Smith Co., the country's largest dealer in cheap novelties. It was this epochal sale and its proceeds that had financed the two-week trip to Miami Beach from which Anapol had just returned, red-faced and shining like a dime. He had not taken a vacation, as he had informed everyone several times before his departure, in fourteen years.
"How was Florida?" Joe said.
Anapol shrugged. "I'll tell you what, they have a nice setup down there in Florida." He seemed reluctant to admit this, as if he had invested considerable effort over the years in running Florida down. "I like it there."
"What did you do?"
"Ate, mostly. I sat out on the veranda. I had my violin. One night I played pinochle with Walter Winchell."
"A good cardplayer?"
"You might think so, but I cleaned his clock for him."
"Huh."
"Yes, I was surprised, too."
Joe slid the stack of pages across to Anapol, and the publisher began to sort through them. He tended to take a greater interest in their content, and to show a slightly more discerning eye, than he had on his first exposure to comics. Anapol had never been a devotee of the funny papers, so it had taken him a while simply to learn how to read a comic book. Now he went through each one twice, first when it was in production and then again when it hit the stands, buying a copy on his way to his train and reading it all the way home to Riverdale.
" Germany?" he said, stopping at the first panel of the second page. "We're calling them Germans now? Did George okay that?"
"A lot of guys are also calling them Germans, sir," Joe said. "The Spy Smasher. The Human Torch. You are going to look like the idiot who does not."
"Oh, am I, now?" Anapol said, twisting up a corner of his mouth.
Joe nodded. In his first three appearances, the Escapist along with his eccentric company had toured a thinly fictionalized Europe, in which he wowed the Razi elites of Zothenia, Gothsylvania, Draconia, and other pseudonymous dark bastions of the Iron Chain, while secretly going about his real business of arranging jailbreaks for resistance leaders and captured British airmen, helping great scientists and thinkers out of the clutches of the evil dictator, Attila Haxoff, and freeing captives, missionaries, and prisoners of war. But Joe had soon seen that this was not going to be anywhere near enough-for the Allies or for him. On the cover of the fourth issue, readers were startled to see the Escapist lift an entire panzer over his head, upside down, and tumble a pile of Gothsylvanian soldiers from its hatch like a kid shaking pennies out of a pig.
Within the covers of Radio Comics #4, it was revealed that the League of the Golden Key, depicted for the first time in its "secret mountain sanctum at the roof of the world," had called, in this time of great urgency, for a rare convention of the scattered masters of the globe. There was a Chinese master, a Dutch master, a Polish master, a master in a fur hood who might perhaps have been a Lapp. The assembled masters seemed mostly to be elderly, even gnomelike men. All agreed that our guy, Tom Mayflower, though he was new at the game and still young, was fighting the hardest and accomplishing the most of any of them. It was therefore voted to declare him "an emergency CHAMPION OF FREEDOM." The power of Tom Mayflower's key was increased twentyfold. He found that he now could peel the skin from an airplane, lasso a submarine with a steel cable borrowed from a nearby bridge, or tie the obligatory superheroic love knot in a battery of antiaircraft guns. He also developed an improvement on the old Ching Ling Soo trick of catching bullets-the Escapist could catch artillery shells. It hurt, and he would be knocked flat, but he could do it, staggering to his feet afterward and saying something like "I'd like to see Gabby Hartnett do that!" From that point on, it had been total war. The Escapist and his gang fought on land, at sea, in the skies of Fortress Europa, and the punishment taken by the minions of the Iron Chain grew operatically intense. It soon become clear to Sammy, however, that if Joe's monthly allotment of pages was not increased-if he was not kept fighting, round the clock-his cousin might be overcome by the imprisoning futility of his rage. Around this time, fortunately, the first complete circulation figures for Radio Comics #2 had come in at well in excess of half a million. Sammy immediately made the natural proposal of adding a second title to the line; Anapol and Ashkenazy, after the briefest of conferences, authorized the addition of two, to be called Triumph Comics and The Monitor. Sammy and Joe went for a series of long strolls, in and out of the streets of Manhattan and Empire City, talking and dreaming and walking in circles in the prescribed manner of golem makers. When they returned from the last of these arcane strolls, they had brought forth the Monitor, Mr. Machine Gun, and Dr. E. Pluribus Hewnham, the Scientific American, filling out both books with characters drawn by the now regular Empire stable: Gold, the Glovskys, Pantaleone. Both titles had, as Sammy had once predicted, killed; and Joe had soon found himself responsible every month for more than two hundred pages of art and wholesale imaginary slaughter on a scale that, many years later, could still horrify the good Dr. Fredric Wertham when he set about to probe at the violent foundations of the comics.
"Jesus Christ," Anapol said, wincing. He had reached the point, toward the end of the story, in which the Escapist went to work on the massed panzer divisions and storm troopers of the Wehrmacht. "Ouch."
"Yes."
Anapol pointed with a thick finger. "Is that a bone sticking out of the guy's arm?"
"It is meant to suggest this."
"Can we show a bone sticking out of a human arm?"
Joe shrugged. "I could erase it."
"Don't erase it, just… Jesus."
Anapol looked, as he generally did when he inspected Joe's work, as if he was going to be sick. Sammy had reassured Joe, however, that it was not disgust at the violence portrayed but at the awareness, always for some reason painful to Anapol, of how big the latest Escapist donnybrook was going to go over with the remarkably bloodthirsty children of America.
It was Joe's battle scenes-the type of panel or sequence known in the trade as a slugfest-that first got his work noticed, both in the business and by the boggled young manhood of America. These scenes have been described as wild, frenetic, violent, extreme, even Breughelian. There is smoke, fire, and lightning. There are thick flocks of bombers, spiky flotillas of battleships, gardens of blooming shell bursts. Up in one corner, a bombed-out castle looms stark on a hill. Down in another corner, a grenade is exploding in a henhouse as chickens and eggs go flying. Messerschmitts dive, finned torpedoes plow up the surf. And somewhere in the middle of it all struggles the Escapist, lashed with naval chain to the business end of a prescient Axis rocket bomb.
"One of these days you're going to go too far," Anapol said, shaking his head. He put the stack of Bristol board back together and started toward his office. "Somebody is going to get hurt."
"Somebody is getting hurt already," Joe reminded him.
"Well, not around here." Anapol unlocked his door and went in. Joe followed uninvited. He wanted Anapol to understand the importance of the fight, to succumb to the propaganda that he and Sammy were unabashedly churning out. If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe's existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.
Anapol looked around at the meager furnishings of his office, the sagging shelves, the desk lamp with its cracked shade, as if he had never seen them before.
"This place is a dump," he said, nodding, as if agreeing with some inaudible critic, possibly, Joe thought, his wife. "I'm glad we're getting out of here."
"Did you hear about Vichy?" Joe said. "The laws they passed?"
Anapol set a paper bag down on his desk and opened it. He took out a net sack filled with oranges.
"No, I did not," he said. " Florida orange?"
"They are planning to restrict the Jews there."
"That's terrible," Anapol said, handing him an orange. Joe put it into the hip pocket of his trousers. "I still can't believe I'm going to be in the Empire Slate Building ." His eyes developed a faraway glaze. "Empire Comics, Empire State Building, you see the connection?"
"As also they have such laws as these in Czechoslovakia."
"I know. They're animals. You're right. Tell me, what do you hear from your family?"
"The usual," Joe said. Envelopes bearing the strange Dlouha Street address arrived at a rate of about two a month, his mother's scratchy, baroque hand tattooed over with swastikas and eagles. There was often nothing at all in these letters in the way of news; they had been emptied of information by the censor. Joe was obliged to type his replies, because although on the comics page he had one of the steadiest lines in the business, when he sat down to write his brother-most of his letters were addressed to Thomas-his hand shook too violently to hold a pen. His missives were terse, as if to forestall the incoherence of emotion. In each one, he begged Thomas not to despair, assured him that he had not forgotten his promise, and that he was doing everything he could to get them all to New York. "Not anything is different."
"Look," Anapol said. "I won't stop you from cutting their goddamned heads off if that's what you want to do, as long as it sells enough comic books. You know that."
"I know."
"It's just… it makes me nervous."
The entire phenomenon of comic books, as it had turned out, made Anapol a little nervous. For fifteen years he'd broken his back traveling to the remote, humorless hinterlands of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. He had slept little, flirted with bankruptcy, driven six hundred miles a day, eaten appalling food, developed an ulcer, neglected his daughters, and worked his ass off trying to get novelty dealers to laugh. Now, suddenly, having done nothing more than allow himself to be persuaded by someone he had hitherto considered a young maniac to put up seven thousand dollars he could just barely afford, he was rich. All of the tables and equations for calculating the nature of the world had been thrown into question. He had broken off his affair with Maura Zell, moved back in with his wife, attended High Holiday services for the first time in forty years.
"I'm worried about you, Kavalier," he went on. "I suppose it can only be healthy for you to get your killer instincts or what have you out of your system that way"-he gestured vaguely toward the studio room-"but I can't help thinking that in the long run it's only going to make you… make you…" He seemed to lose his train of thought. He had been rummaging inside the paper bag, taking out various other souvenirs of his trip. There was a conch shell with its lush pink lip. There was a grinning monkey head made out of two coconut halves. And there was a framed photograph of a house, the colors hand-tinted and garish. The house in the picture stood on a patch of vibrant emerald lawn. The sky behind it was lurid blue. It was a modernistic house, low and flat and pale gray, charming as a carton of eggs. Anapol stood the photograph on his desk, beside the pictures of his wife and daughters. The frame was sober, plain black enamel, as if to suggest that the picture it contained was a document of rare importance, a diploma or government license.
"What is that?" Joe said.
Anapol blinked, looking at the picture. "That is my house in Florida," he said, sounding tentative.
"I thought you went to a hotel."
Anapol nodded. He looked queasy and happy and doubtful all at the same time. "We did. The Delano."
"You bought a house there?"
"Apparently. It seems crazy to me now." He pointed to the picture. "That isn't even my house. There is no house. There's just a piece of muddy sand with string tied around it on little sticks. In the middle of Palm River, Florida. Only there is no Palm River, either."
"You went to Florida and bought a house."
"Why don't I like the way you keep repeating it? Why do I feel like you're accusing me of something? Are you saying I don't have a right to throw my money away on whatever I damn well feel like, Kavalier?"
"No, sir," Joe said. "I would not dream." He yawned, a deep, joint-tightening yawn that made his entire body shudder. He was exhausted, but the yawn that racked him was the product of his anger and not his fatigue. The only people winning the war that Joe had been fighting in the pages of Empire Comics since January were Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy. Between them, they had pocketed something in the neighborhood, according to Sammy's guess, of six hundred thousand dollars. "Excuse me."
"That's right," Anapol said. "Go home. Get some sleep. You look like hell."
"I have an appointment," Joe said stiffly. He put on his hat and slung his jacket over his shoulder. "Goodbye."
UNDER ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES, the trip downtown to the German consulate discouraged Joe; today he found it difficult even to get himself on to the subway. He felt obscurely furious with Sheldon Anapol. He took a comic book out of the hip pocket of his jacket and tried to read. He had become a constant and careful consumer of comic books. By stalking the Fourth Avenue bookstalls, he had managed to acquire a copy of nearly every one that had been published in the past few years, acquiring also, while he was at it, stacks of old Sunday New York Mirrors so that he could study Burne Hogarth's vehement, precise, and painterly work in Tarzan. The same masturbatory intensity of concentration that Joe had once brought to the study of magic and wireless sets he now focused on the fledgling, bastard, wide-open art form into whose raffish embrace he had fallen. He noticed how strong the influence of movies was on artists like Joe Shuster and Batman's Bob Kane, and began to experiment with a cinematic vocabulary: an extreme close-up, say, on the face of a terrified child or soldier, or a zoom shot, drawing ever closer, over the course of four panels, on the battlements and keep of a grim Zothenian redoubt. From Hogarth he learned to trouble over the emotional occasion, so to speak, of a panel, choosing carefully, among the infinitude of potential instants to arrest and depict, the one in which the characters' emotions were most extreme. And from reading the comic books that featured art by the great Louis Fine, like the one in his hands right now, Joe learned to view the comic book hero, in his formfitting costume, not as a pulp absurdity but as a celebration of the lyricism of the naked (albeit tinted) human form in motion. It was not all violence and retribution in the early stories of Kavalier & Clay; Joe's work also articulated the simple joy of unfettered movement, of the able body, in a way that captured the yearnings not only of his crippled cousin but of an entire generation of weaklings, stumblebums, and playground goats.
Today, however, he could not seem to focus on the copy of Wonder-world Comics that he had brought along. His thoughts veered between irritation with the giddiness, the indecency, of Anapol's sudden prosperity and dread of his appointment with the Adjutant for Minority Relocation at the German consulate on Whitehall Street. It was not the prosperity itself he resented, for that was a measure of his and Sammy's success, but rather the disproportionate share of it that was going to Anapol and Ashkenazy, when it was he and Sammy who had invented the Escapist and were doing all the work of bringing him to life. No, it was not even that. It was the impotence of the money, and of all the pent-up warlike fancies that had earned it, to do anything but elaborate the wardrobe and fatten the financial portfolios of the owners of Empire Comics that so frustrated and enraged him. And there was nothing guaranteed to emphasize his fundamental powerlessness more thoroughly than a morning spent with Adjutant Milde at the German consulate. There was no pursuit more disheartening than the immigration goose chase.
Whenever he found himself with an empty morning or a week between issues, Joe would put on a good suit, a sober tie, a neatly blocked hat, and set out as he had this morning, burdened by an ever swelling satchel of documents, to try to make headway in the case of the Kavaliers of Prague. He paid endless visits to the offices of HIAS, to the United Jewish Appeal for Refugees and Overseas Needs, to travel agents, to the New York office of the President's Action Committee, to the wonderfully polite Adjutant at the German consulate with whom he had an appointment for ten o'clock that morning. To a certain cross section of clerks in that city of rubber stamps, carbon paper, and spindles, he had become a familiar figure, a slender, tall twenty-year-old with nice manners and a rumpled suit, appearing in the middle of a stifling afternoon, looking painfully cheerful. He would doff his hat. The clerk or secretary-a woman, more often than not-pinned to a hard chair by a thousand cubic feet of smoky, rancid air that caught like batter in the blades of the ceiling fans, deafened by the thunder of file cabinets, dyspeptic, despairing, and bored, would look up and see that Joe's thick thatch of curls had been deformed by his headgear into a kind of glossy black hat, and smile.
"I come to be pesky once again," Joe would say, in his increasingly slang-deformed English, and then take from the breast pocket of his jacket a slim humidor filled with five fifteen-cent panatelas or, when the clerk was a woman, a folding paper fan patterned with pink flowers, or simply a pearly-cold bottle of Coca-Cola. And she would take the fan or the soda pop, and listen to his pleas, and want to help him very much. But there was little to be done. Every month, Joe's income increased, and every month, he managed to put more and more money away, only to find that there was nothing to spend it on. The bribes and bureaucratic lubrications of the first years of the protectorate were a thing of the past. At the same time, obtaining a United States visa, never an easy thing, had become nearly impossible. By last month, when his own permanent residency had been approved, he had accumulated and sent to the State Department seven affidavits from noted New York gland doctors and psychiatrists attesting to the fact that the three senior members of his family would be unique and valuable additions to the populace of his adopted country. With each passing month, however, the number of refugees making their way to America shrank, and the news from home grew darker and more fragmentary. There was word of relocations, resettlements; the Jews of Prague were all to be sent to Madagascar, to Terezin, to a vast autonomous reservation in Poland. And Joe found himself in receipt of three officially discouraging letters from the Undersecretary for Visas, and a polite suggestion that he make no further inquiries in this regard.
His sense of entrapment in the toils of bureaucracy, of being powerless to help or free his family, also found its way into the comics. For as the Escapist's powers were augmented, the restraints required to contain him, either by his enemies or (as happened more rarely now) by himself when he was performing, grew more elaborate, even baroque. There were gigantic razor-jawed bear traps, tanks filled with electric sharks. The Escapist was tied to immense gas rings into which his captors needed only to toss a stray cigar butt to incinerate him, strapped to four rumbling panzers pointed in the cardinal directions, chained to an iron cherry at the bottom of an immense steel tumbler into which a forty-ton frothing "milkshake" of fresh concrete was poured, hung from the spring-loaded firing pin of an immense cannon aimed at the capital of "Occupied Latvonia" so that if he freed himself, thousands of innocent citizens would die. The Escapist was laid, lashed and manacled, in the paths of threshing machines, pagan juggernauts, tidal waves, and swarms of giant prehistoric bees revived by the evil science of the Iron Chain. He was imprisoned in ice, in strangling vines, in cages of fire.
Now it seemed very warm in the subway car. The fan in the center of the ceiling was motionless. A bead of sweat splashed a panel in the story about the fire-spewing Flame, lean and balletic in the great Lou Fine style, that Joe had been pretending to read. He closed the comic book and stuck it back in his pocket. He began to feel that he could not breathe. He loosened his tie and walked down to the end of the car, where there was an open louver. A faint black ripple of breeze blew from the tunnel, but it was sour and unrefreshing. At the Union Square station, a seat became available and Joe took it. He sat back and closed his eyes. He could not seem to rid his mind of the phrase superintend its population of Jews. All of his greatest fears for his family's safety seemed to lie folded within the bland envelope of that first word. Over the past year, his family had had their bank accounts frozen. They had been forced out of the public parks of Prague, out of the sleeping and dining cars of the state railways, out of the public schools and universities. They could no longer even ride the streetcars. Lately the regulations had grown more complex. Perhaps in an effort to expose the telltale badge of a yarmulke, Jews were now forbidden to wear caps. They were not allowed to carry knapsacks. They were not permitted to eat onions or garlic; also banned was the eating of apples, cheese, or carp.
Joe reached into his pocket and took out the orange that Anapol had given him. It was big and smooth and perfectly spherical, and oranger than anything Joe had ever seen. No doubt it would have seemed a prodigy in Prague, monstrous and illicit. He held it to his nose and inhaled, trying to find some kind of cheer or comfort in the bright volatile oils of its skin. But instead, he felt only panic. His breath was shallow and labored. The sour tunnel smell pouring in through the open louver seemed to drive away everything else. All at once, the shark of dread that never deserted its patrol of Joe's innards rose to the surface. You cannot save them, said a voice very close to his ear. He turned around. There was no one.
He found himself looking at the back page of the newspaper, a Times, that was being read by the man in the seat beside him, and his eye alighted on the shipping column. The Rotterdam , he saw, was due in port at eight a.m.-twenty minutes from now.
Joe had often entertained fantasies of the day he would go to greet his family as they disembarked from the Rotterdam or the Nieuw Amsterdam. He knew that the Holland America docks were across the river, in Hoboken. You had to ride the ferry to get there. When the train pulled into the Eighth Street station, Joe got off.
He walked along Eighth Street, over to Christopher, then to the river, threading his way like a pickpocket through the crowds just off the ferryboats from New Jersey: taut-jawed men in stiff hats and suits and obsidian shoes, newspapers pinned under their arms; brusque, brick-lipped, hard-heeled women in floral dresses. They stampeded down the ramps and onto Christopher and then scattered like raindrops blown across a window. Jostled, excusing himself, offering his apologies as he stumbled against them, half overwhelmed by the acrid miasma of cigar smoke and violent coughing they brought with them from the other shore, Joe nearly gave up and turned back.
But then he arrived at the huge, peeling shed that served the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad ferries on the Manhattan side. It was a grand old barn whose high central gable was improbably endowed with the lilting pediment of a Chinese pagoda. The people disembarking here from New Jersey retained a faint air of wind and adventure, hats askew, neckties disarranged. The smell of the Hudson River that filled the building stirred memories of the Moldau. The ferryboats themselves amused Joe. They were wide craft, low-slung, upcurving at either end like dented hats, trailing pompous billows of black smoke from their solemn funnels. The pair of big wheelhouses on either side of the boats sent Joe's imagination drifting down the bear-haunted Mississippi to New Orleans.
He stood on the foredeck, hat in hand, squinting into the haze as the terminus of the DL &W and the low red roofline of Hoboken drew nearer. He breathed in coal smoke and a whiff of salt, wide-awake and flush now with the optimism of transit. The color of the water shifted in bands that ran from verdigris to cold coffee. The river was as crowded as the city itself: garbage scows piled high, swarming with gulls; tankers pumped full of petroleum, kerosene, or linseed oil; anonymous black cargo ships and, in the distance, at once thrilling and terrible, the magnificent steamship of the Holland America Line on the arm of its proud tugboat escort, lofty, remote. Behind Joe lay the jumble, at once regular and random, of Manhattan, strung like the roadbed of a bridge between the high suspending piers of midtown and Wall Street.
At a certain point about halfway through the crossing, he was taunted by a hopeful apparition. The mad spires of Ellis Island and the graceful tower of the New Jersey Central terminus came into conjunction, merging to form a kind of crooked red crown. It was, for a moment, as if Prague herself were floating there, right off the docks of Jersey City, in a shimmer of autumn haze, not even two miles away.
He knew that the chances of his family's suddenly appearing, unheralded and intact, at the top of the Rotterdam 's gangway were nil. But as he walked along River Street in Hoboken, past raw bars and cheap sailors' hotels, to the Eighth Street pier, with all of the other people come to greet their arriving beloveds, he found he could not prevent a tiny flame from kindling in his chest. When he reached the pier, there seemed to be hundreds of men, women, and children shouting and embracing and milling around. There was a bright line of taxis, and there were black limousines. Porters rumbled around with their hand trucks, yelling out "Porter!" with opera-bouffe gusto. The elegant black-and-white ship, all 24,170 tons of it, loomed like a mountain in a dinner jacket.
Joe watched as several families reunited. Few of them seemed to have been separated by a mere whim to travel. They came from the countries of the war. He heard people speaking German, French, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, even Czech. Two men whose relation Joe could not quite figure out, but whom he finally decided must be brothers, went past him, arms around each other's necks, one man saying to the other in Czech, with joyful solicitude, "First thing we do is get you filthy stinking drunk, you poor bastard!" From time to time, Joe's attention would be diverted by the spectacle of a couple kissing or by some vaguely governmental-looking men shaking hands, but for the most part he watched the families. It was an incredibly cheering sight; he wondered that he had never thought of coming over to meet the Rotterdam before. He felt left out, and deeply envious of them, but what he felt most was the radiant ache of happiness that attended their reunions. It was like a noseful of wine that he could not drink; yet it intoxicated him.
As he watched the people emerging from under the striped awning of the gangway, he was surprised to see Dr. Emil Kavalier. His father appeared in the parting between two old women, squinting nearsightedly through the mica-chip lenses of his eyeglasses, head tilted ever so slightly backward, scanning the faces, looking for one in particular, it was Joe's, yes, he started this way, his face broke into a smile. He was enveloped in a large blond woman and her timber-wolf coat. It was not his father at all. The smile, if not the woman, was all wrong. The man saw Joe staring at him, and as he and his paramour moved past, he tipped his hat and nodded in a way that was once again eerily identical to the manner of Joe's dad. The forlorn trill of a purser's whistle sent a shiver down Joe's spine.
On his return to the city, although he was late for his meeting, he walked from Christopher Street to the Battery. He was snuffling, and his ears burned with cold, but the sunshine felt warm. He had shaken off his attack of panic from the train, the despair that had been brought on by the report from Vichy and his resentment of Anapol's prosperity. He bought a banana from a fruit stand, and then another several blocks farther down. He had always been passionately fond of bananas; they were the sole indulgence of his own sudden affluence. By the time he arrived at the German consulate on Whitehall Street, he was ten minutes late, but he thought it would be all right. It was only a matter of paperwork, and no doubt the secretary would be able to handle the problem herself. Joe might not even need to see the Adjutant.
The thought was appealing. The Adjutant, Herr Milde, was a polite and genial man who seemed to make a point of-indeed, he seemed to enjoy-wasting Joe's time. While he would never make promises or predictions, and never seemed to be in possession of information that had any but the most remote pertinence to the situation of the Kavalier family, he steadfastly, even pedantically refused to rule out the possibility that Joe's family might any day be granted their exit visas and permitted to leave. "Such things are always possible," he would affirm, though he never gave any examples. Milde's cruelty made it impossible for Joe finally to do that which his head counseled and his heart opposed: give up hope of his family's ever getting out until Hitler was defeated.
"It's quite all right," Fraulein Tulpe said when Joe walked into Milde's office. It was in the farthest corner of the consulate, which occupied a middle story of a drab neoclassical office block near the Bowling Green, at the back, between the agricultural desk and the men's lavatory. Milde's secretary was a sullen young woman with tortoise-shell glasses and straw-colored hair. She, too, was unfailingly polite with Joe in a way that, in her case, seemed intended to convey gentle distaste. "He isn't back from breakfast yet."
Joe nodded and sat down beside the watercooler. It sent a derisive belch of comment wobbling up into its reservoir.
"A late breakfast," he said, a little uncertainly. Her gaze seemed to fixate on him more than usual. He gazed down at his wrinkled trousers, the semipermanent bend in his necktie, the ink blotches on his cuffs. His hair felt lank and clammy. No doubt he smelled. For a moment he was acutely sorry that he had not stopped at Palooka Studios to shower on his way downtown, instead of wasting an hour on a foolish cruise to Hoboken. Then he thought, the hell with her. Let her smell my high Jewish smell.
"It is a farewell breakfast," she said, returning to her typewriter.
"Who is leaving?"
At that moment Herr Milde returned. He was a broad, athletic-looking man with a heroic chin and a receding hairline. He had stern, handsome features marred only when his upper lip lifted to reveal a set of big yellow equine teeth.
"I am," he said. "Among others. Sorry to keep you waiting, Herr Kavalier."
"You are returning to Germany?" Joe said.
"I have been transferred to Holland," he said. "I sail Thursday on the Rotterdam ."
They went into his office. Milde showed Joe to one of two steellegged chairs and offered a cigarette, which Joe declined. He lit one of his own instead. It was a petty gesture, but it gave Joe satisfaction. If Milde remarked it, he did not let on. He folded his hands on his desk blotter and hunched over them, leaning forward a little bit, as if eager to help Joe in any way. It was part of his policy of cruelty.
"I trust you are well?" he said.
Joe nodded.
"And your family?"
"As well as can be expected."
"I am gratified to hear it."
They sat there a moment. Joe waited for the latest bit of mummery and stage business from the Adjutant. Whatever it was, he could bear it today. He had witnessed, on the pier in Hoboken, as people something like his own had found themselves rejoined on the other side of the world. The trick could still be done. He had seen it with his own eyes.
"Now, if you please," Milde said, a little curtly. "I have a busy schedule and I am getting off to a late start."
"By all means," Joe said.
"What did you wish to speak to me about?"
Joe was thrown into confusion. "What did I wish?" he said. "You telephoned me."
Now it was Herr Milde's turn to look confused. "Did I?"
"Fraulein Tulpe did. She said you had found some problem in the paperwork for my brother. Thomas Masaryk Kavalier." He inserted the middle name as a patriotic gesture.
"Ah, yes," Milde nodded, frowning. It was clear he had no idea what Joe was talking about. He reached for the ranked dossiers waiting in a wire rack on his desk and found Joe's. He paged through it for a few minutes with an air of great diligence, flipping back and forth amid the crinkly sheets of onionskin it contained. He shook his head and clucked his tongue. "I'm sorry," he said, lifting the file to replace it in the rack. "I can't seem to find any reference to- Hello."
A piece of pale yellow paper that looked as if it might have been torn from a teletype machine fell out. Milde picked it up. He appeared to make his way very slowly through its contents, forehead furrowed, as if they presented an argument that was difficult to follow.
"Well, well," he said. "This is regrettable. I don't- It appears that your father has died."
Joe laughed. For the briefest instant, he thought that Milde was making a joke. But Milde had never made a joke before in Joe's hearing, and Joe saw that he was not kidding now. His throat tightened. He felt his eyes burning. If he had been alone, he would have broken down, but he was not alone, and he would rather have died himself than allow Milde to see him cry. He looked down at his lap, clamping down on his emotions and setting his jaw.
"I just had a letter…" he said weakly, his tongue thick amid his teeth. "My mother said nothing…"
"When was the letter posted?"
"Nearly a month ago."
"Your father has been dead for only three weeks. It says here that the cause was pneumonia. Here."
Milde passed the ragged sheet of soft yellow paper across the desk to Joe. It had been torn from a much longer list of the dead. The name kavalier emil dr was one of nineteen, beginning with Eisenberg and running alphabetically through to Kogan, each of them followed by a terse notation of age and date and cause of death. It appeared to be a partial list of the Jews who had died in Prague or environs during the months of August and September. Joe's father's name had been circled in pencil.
"Why…?" Joe could not seem to sort out the knot of questions interfering with his thoughts. "Why was I not informed?" he managed finally.
"I have no idea how that piece of paper, which I have never seen before, even found its way into your dossier," Milde said. "It's perfectly mysterious. Bureaucracy is a mysterious force." He seemed to realize that humorous remarks might not be appropriate at this time. He coughed. "It is regrettable, as I said."
"It may be an error," Joe said. It must be, he thought, for I saw him only this afternoon, in Hoboken! "A case of mistaken identity."
"Such things are always possible," Milde said. He stood up and extended a condolent hand. "I shall write a memorandum to my successor about your father's case. I will see that inquiries are made."
"You are most kind," Joe said, rising slowly from his chair. He felt a flush of gratitude to Herr Milde. Inquiries would be made. He had at least managed to obtain that much for his family. Someone now would take an interest, if only to this extent, in their case. "Goodbye, Herr Milde."
"Goodbye, Herr Kavalier."
Afterward, Joe found he had no memory of how he got out of Milde's office, along the warren of corridors, down the elevator, into the lobby. He wandered up Broadway for a block before it occurred to him to wonder where he was going. He went into a saloon and telephoned the office. Sammy was in. He started in about Joe's pages in grandiloquent terms, but when he perceived the silence on Joe's end, he ran out of steam and asked, "What?"
"I come from the consulate," Joe said. The telephone was old-fashioned, with a speaking tube and a cylindrical earpiece. There had been one like it in the kitchen of the house off the Graben. "They had some bad news for me." Joe told him how, quite by accident, he had learned that his father was dead.
"Could there be a mistake?"
"No," Joe said. He was thinking more clearly now. He was a little shaky, but it seemed to him that his thoughts were clear. His gratitude toward Adjutant Milde had turned once again to anger. "I'm sure it is not a mistake."
"Where are you?" Sammy said.
"Where am I?" Joe looked around and realized for the first time that he was in a saloon on Broadway, down at the toe of the city. "Where am I." It was not a question the second time he said it. "I'm on my way to Canada."
"No," he heard Sammy say, as he hung the receiver back on its hook. He went over to the bar. "I wonder if you can help me?" he said to the bartender.
The bartender was an elderly man with a shining pate and big rheumy blue eyes. He had been trying to explain to one of his customers, when Joe interrupted him, how to work the abacus he used to figure tabs. The customer looked glad of the interruption.
" Montreal, Canada," the bartender repeated, when Joe told him where he wanted to go. "I believe you want to leave from Grand Central Station."
The customer agreed with this. He said Joe wanted to take the Adirondack.
"What do you want to go there for?" he said. "If you don't mind my being so nosy?"
"I'm going to enlist in the R.A.F.," Joe said.
"Are you?"
"Yes. Yes, I'm tired of waiting."
"Attaboy," said the customer.
"They speak French up there," the bartender said. "Watch out."
Joe did not stop at home to pack a bag. He did not want to risk running into someone who would try to talk him out of his plan. Anyway, there was nothing he needed that he could not buy in a drugstore or find in a bus-station vending machine; his passport and visa he carried with him at all times. The Royal Air Force would dress and shoe and feed him.
He distracted himself for a while on the train by worrying about his interview with the recruiters. Would his resident-alien status in the United States be an impediment to his enlisting in the R.A.F.? Would they find some unknown flaw in his body? He had heard of guys being rejected for having flat feet and bad eyesight. If the air force didn't take him, he would join the Royal Navy. If he was not deemed fit for the navy, then he would take his chances in the infantry.
By Croton-on-Hudson, however, his spirits began to flag. He tried to cheer himself with thoughts of dropping bombs on Kiel or Tobruk, but his fantasies struck him as uncomfortably reminiscent of his slugfests in the pages of Radio, Triumph, and The Monitor. In the end, neither fretting nor bravado could distract him any longer from the thought that he was fatherless.
He and his father had in their jocular, gingerly fashion loved each other, but now that his father was dead, Joe felt only regret. It was not just the usual regret over things left unsaid, thanks unexpressed and apologies withheld. Joe did not yet regret the lost future opportunities for expatiation on favorite shared subjects, such as film directors (they revered Buster Keaton) or breeds of dogs. Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.
Emil Kavalier, like many doctors, had always been a terrible patient. He refused to acknowledge that he could fall prey to an illness, and had never taken a sick day in his life. When laid low by a grippe, he would suck mentholated pastilles, consume copious amounts of chicken broth, and go about his business. Joe could not even imagine him sick. How had he died? In a hospital? At home? Joe pictured him lying in a heavy scrolled bed in the middle of a jumbled apartment like the ones he had seen in the building where the Golem had been hidden.
What would become of his mother, grandfather, and brother? Their names might have appeared already on some other list of deaths that no one had bothered to report to him. Was pneumonia contagious? No, he felt fairly certain it was not. But it could be brought on by ill health and misery. If his father had been vulnerable to something like that, what kind of shape must Thomas be in? He imagined that the little food or medicine they possessed went to Thomas before it went to anyone else. Perhaps his father had sacrificed his health for the sake of Thomas's. Had his entire family died? How would he ever find out?
By the time the Adirondack pulled into Albany that afternoon, Joe's adventure into the unknown of war had come to seem one unknown too many for him to bear. He had convinced himself that it was far more likely that both his mother and Thomas were still alive. And if this was so, then they required rescue no less than they had before. He could not abandon them further by running off and trying, like the Escapist, single-handedly to end the war. It was imperative for him to remain focused on the possible. At least-it was a cruel thought, but he could not prevent himself from thinking it-there would now be one visa fewer to try to wrest from the Reich.
He got down from the train at Union Station in Albany and stood on the platform, getting in the way of people who were boarding. A man with round rimless spectacles brushed past, and Joe remembered the man on the Rotterdam 's gangway whom he had mistaken for his father. In retrospect, it seemed like an omen.
The conductor urged Joe to make up his mind; he was holding up the train. Joe wavered. All his doubts were counterbalanced by a powerful urge to kill German soldiers.
Joe let the train go without him, then suffered sharp stabs of regret and self-reproach. He stood outside by the taxi stand. He could get in a cab and order the driver to take him to Troy. If he missed the train at Troy, then he could have the driver take him straight on to Montreal. He had plenty of money in his wallet.
Five hours later, Joe was back in New York City. He had suffered through seven changes of mind on the way down the Hudson. He had spent the entire trip back in the train's club car, and he was much the worse for drink. He stumbled out in the evening. A cold front seemed to have moved in. The air burned his nostrils, and his eyes felt raw. He wandered up Fifth Avenue and then went into a Longchamps and ordered himself whiskey and soda. Then he went once again to the phone.
It took Sammy half an hour to get there; by that time, Joe was drunk enough, if not yet quite filthy stinking. Sammy walked into Long-champs' boisterous bar, pulled Joe off his stool, and caught him in his arms. Joe tried, but this time he could not stop himself. His weeping sounded to his own ears like sad, hoarse laughter. None of the people in the bar knew what to make of him. Sammy guided him to a booth at the back of the barroom and handed Joe his handkerchief. After Joe had swallowed the rest of his sobs, he told Sammy the little he knew.
"Could there be some mistake?" Sammy said.
"Such things are always possible," Joe said bitterly.
"Oh, Jesus," Sammy said. He had ordered two bottles of Ruppert's and was staring down at the neck of his. He was not a drinker and had not taken even a sip. "I hate to tell my mother this."
"Your poor mother," Joe said. "And my poor mother." The thought of his mother a widow started him crying all over again. Sammy came around from the other side of the table and slid into the booth alongside him. Then they just sat there for a while. Joe thought back to that morning, when he had stuck his head out into the day and felt as powerful as the Escapist, surging with the mystic Tibetan energies of his rage.
"Useless," he said.
"What is?"
"I am."
"Joe, don't say that."
"I'm worthless," Joe said. He felt that he must leave the bar. He did not want to sit around drinking and crying anymore. He wanted to do something. He would find something that could be done. He grabbed Sammy by the sleeve and shoulder of his peacoat and gave him a push, nearly knocking him out of the booth.
"Out," he said. "Let's go."
"Where are we going?" Sammy said, rising to his feet.
"I don't know," Joe said. "Work. I'm going to work."
"But you just-all right," Sammy said, looking into Joe's face. "Maybe that isn't a bad idea." They left Longchamps and went down into the cool, foul gloom of the subway.
On the southbound platform, a few feet from the cousins, stood a dark, glowering gentleman-reading the cut of his topcoat, or some indefinable emission radiating from his chin or eyes or haircut, Joe felt certain that he was German. This man was giving them the fish-eye. Even Sammy had to agree afterward that the man had been giving them the fish-eye. He was a German right out of a panel by Joe Kavalier, massive, handsome in a prognathous, lupine way, wearing a beautiful suit. As the wait for the train dragged on, Joe decided that he did not like what he considered to be the superior manner in which the theoretically German man was looking at him. He considered a number of possible styles, in German and in English, of expressing his feelings about the man and his fish-eye. Finally opting for a more universal statement, he spat, as if casually, onto the platform between him and the man. Public spitting was common enough at the time in that city of smokers, and the gesture might have remained safely ambiguous if Joe's missile had not overshot its mark. Spittle frosted the tip of the man's shoe.
Sammy said, "Did you just spit at that man?"
"What?" said Joe. He was a little surprised himself. "Eh, yes."
"He didn't mean it, mister," Sammy told the man. "He's just a little upset right now."
"Then he makes the apology," the man suggested not unreasonably.
His accent was thick and unquestionably German. He waited for his apology with the air of one accustomed to receiving apologies when he asked for them. He took a step closer to Joe. He was younger than Joe had thought at first, and even more imposing. He looked as if he could more than handle himself in a fight.
"Oh, my God," Sammy said in an undertone. "Joe, I think that man is Max Schmeling."
There were other people waiting for the train, and they had taken an interest. They started to argue about whether the man whose shoes Joe had spat on was or was not Schmeling, the Black Bull of the Uhlan, former heavyweight champion of the world.
"I'm sorry," Joe mumbled, sort of meaning it.
"What was that?" said the man, cupping a hand to his ear.
"Go to hell," Joe said, this time with greater sincerity.
"Shit-head," the man said, taking care with his English. With pugilistic quickness, he crowded Joe against an iron pillar, crooked an arm around Joe's neck, and gave him a swift punch in the stomach. Joe's breath deserted his body in a single hard gust and he pitched forward, striking his chin on the concrete platform. His eyeballs seemed to clang in their sockets. He felt as if someone had opened an umbrella inside his rib cage. He waited, flopped on his belly, unblinking as a fish, to see if he would ever again be able to draw a breath. Then he let out a long, low moan, a little at a time, testing the muscles of his diaphragm. "Wow," he said finally. Sammy knelt beside him and helped him to one knee. Joe gulped up big lopsided gouts of air. The German man turned to the other people on the platform, one arm raised in challenge or, perhaps, it seemed to Joe, in appeal. Everyone had seen Joe spit on his shoe, hadn't they? Then the big man turned and stalked off, way down to the far end of the platform. The train came, and the people all got on it, and that was the end of that. When they got back to Palooka Studios, Sammy, at Joe's request, said nothing about Joe's father. But he did tell everyone that Joe had gotten his ass kicked by Max Schmeling. Joe received their ironic congratulations. He was informed that he was lucky Schmeling had pulled his punch.
"Next time I see that guy," Joe said, to his surprise, "I am going to hit him back."
Joe never did encounter Max Schmeling, or his doppelganger, again. In any case, there is good reason to believe that Schmeling was not in New York at all but in Poland, having been drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the front as punishment for his defeat by Joe Louis in 1938.
There could not have been more than a couple of thousand German citizens in New York at that time, but in the following two weeks, wherever Joe went in the city, he managed to run across at least one. He seemed to have acquired, as Sammy remarked, a superpower of his own: he had become a magnet for Germans. He found them in elevators, on buses, in Gimbel's and at Longchamps restaurants. At first he would just watch them, or eavesdrop, sizing them up as good Germans or evil ones with sweeping certainty even if they were just talking about the rain or the taste of their tea, but it wasn't long before he began to approach them and attempt to engage them in conversation that was menacingly bland and suggestive. Often enough, his advances were met with a certain amount of resistance.
"Woher kommen Sie?" he asked a man he met buying a pound of steak at the butcher on Eighth Avenue, around the corner from Palooka Studios. "Schwabenland?"
The man nodded warily. " Stuttgart," he said.
"How is everything back there?" He could feel the note of intimidation creeping into his voice, of menacing innuendo. "Is everybody all right?"
The man shrugged, blushing, and made a mute appeal to the butcher with a raised eyebrow.
"Is there a problem?" the butcher asked Joe. Joe said that indeed there was not. But when he walked out of the butcher shop with his lamb chops, he felt strangely pleased with himself for having discomfited the man. He supposed that he ought to be ashamed of this feeling. He believed that on some level he was. But he could not seem to keep himself from remembering with pleasure the furtive look and the flushed cheeks when he had addressed the man in his own language.
The following day, a Saturday-this was about a week after Joe had learned of his father's death-Sammy took him to see a Brooklyn Dodgers football game. The idea was to get Joe out into the air and cheer him up a little. Sammy was partial to football, and seemed to have a particular fondness for the Dodgers' star back, Ace Parker. Joe had seen English rugby played in Prague, and once he decided there was no great difference between it and American football, he gave up trying to pay attention to the game and just sat smoking and drinking beer in the sharp raw breeze. Ebbets Field had a faintly ramshackle air that reminded him of a drawing in a comic strip-Popeye or Toonerville Trolley. Pigeons wheeled in the dark spaces of the grandstands. There was a smell of hair oil and beer and a fainter one of whiskey. The men in the crowd passed flasks and muttered comically violent sentiments.
After a while, Joe realized two things. The first was that he was quite drunk. The second was that, two rows behind him and up a little to his left, there sat a pair of German men. They were drinking beer from big paper cups, grinning, fair, stolid-looking men, brothers perhaps. They kept up an excited commentary and, on the whole, seemed to be enjoying the game, though they did not seem to understand it any better than Joe. They cheered whenever a fumble was recovered, regardless of who recovered it.
"Just ignore them," Sammy warned him, chary of his cousin's aggressive good luck in turning up Germans.
"They are looking at me," Joe said, fairly certain that this was so.
"They are not."
"They are looking over here."
"Joe."
Joe kept glancing back over his shoulder, forcing himself into their consciousness, their experience of the game-practically into their laps. Presently, even in their drunken state, they became aware of his attention. A certain amount of scowling and leering ensued. One of the brothers-they had to be brothers-had a crooked nose and a scarred ear indicating that he was not unfamiliar with the use of his fists. At last, toward the end of the third quarter, Joe overheard what he was quite certain was an anti-Semitic remark pass from the man who looked like a boxer to his brother or chum. It sounded to Joe as if the man had said, "Jew bastard." Joe stood up. He clambered over the back of his seat. The row behind him was full, and in the course of clearing it, he elbowed one of his neighbors in the ear. He tumbled into the Germans' row, nearly losing his balance. The Germans laughed, and the arm of a seat jabbed Joe in the side sharply, but he scrambled to his feet and, without a word, knocked the boxer's hat off his head. It fell into a clotted puddle of spilled beer and a rubble of peanuts at the other man's feet. The man with the cauliflower ear looked very surprised, and then astonished when Joe grabbed hold of his shirt collar. Joe yanked so hard that three buttons popped loose and shot off in all directions with audible whizzing sounds. But the man had a long reach, and he managed to get a hand around the back of Joe's neck. He pulled Joe to him and, at the same time, with the other hand connected his fist to the side of Joe's skull. While Joe was thus held, bent over the seat with his nose smashed against the man's left knee, the brother pummeled Joe's back over and over as if he were driving nails into a plank with two hammers. Before Sammy and some of the men sitting in the seats around them could pull the two Germans off, they had closed Joe's right eye for him, chipped a tooth, bruised his rib cage, and ruined a new suit. Then an usher came and threw Joe and Sammy out of Ebbets Field. They went quietly, Joe holding a paper cup of ice to the tender orbit of his eye. The pain was keen. There was an odor of urinals along the ramp leading down to the gates of the ballpark, a masculine smell, bitter and bracing.
"What are you doing?" Sammy asked him. "Are you crazy?"
"I'm sorry," Joe said. "I thought he said something."
"Why are you smiling, god damn it?"
"I don't know."
That night, when he and Sammy went to dinner at Ethel Klayman's, he bent down to pick up the napkin he had dropped, and when he sat up again, there was a bright exclamation mark of blood on his cheek.
"You need sutures," said his aunt in her most inarguable tone.
Joe protested. He had given out to his friends that he was afraid of needles and doctors, but the truth was that he felt edified by the wound to his head. It was not that he felt he deserved the pain so much as that it suited him. No matter how well he cleaned the cut, how tightly he compressed it, how thick the bandage he applied, within an hour or so, the first telltale freckle of red would have reappeared. It was like the memory of home, a tribute to his father's stoical denial of illness, injury, or pain.
"It's going to be fine," he said.
His aunt took hold of his elbow with her five-pronged iron grapple and sat him down on the lid of the toilet in the bathroom. She had Sammy fetch a bottle of slivovitz that had been left behind by a friend of her late husband in 1935 and not touched since. Then she crooked his head under her left arm and sewed him up. The thread was dark blue, exactly the color of the Escapist's uniform.
"Don't go looking for trouble," she begged him as she worked the long thin needle into his skin. "You'll be getting plenty of trouble soon enough."
After that, Joe went looking for trouble. For no good reason, he started going up, every day, to Yorkville, where there were numerous German beer halls, German restaurants, German social clubs, and German-Americans. Most of the time, he merely skulked around for a while and returned home from these forays without incident, but sometimes one thing led to another. The ethnic neighborhoods of New York have always been alert to the incursions of intemperate strangers. He got himself punched in the stomach yet again, on East Ninetieth Street, waiting for a bus, by a man who did not take kindly to the sneer that Joe armed himself with whenever he ventured uptown. Hanging around a candy store one afternoon, Joe attracted the attention of some little neighborhood boys, one of whom, for reasons having nothing to do with politics or racial theories, shot him in the back of the head with a big wet oyster of a spitball. These boys were all regular readers of the Escapist, and admirers of Joe Kavalier's work. If they had known who it was, they would probably have felt very sorry for peashooting him. But they just didn't like the way Joe looked. They had observed, with the ruthless acuity of boys, that there was something funny about Joe Kavalier, about his rumpled suit, his air of banked and smoldering testiness, the curly strands standing up from his imperfectly slicked-back hair like an exploded clockworks. He looked like a patsy for pranksters and practical jokers. He looked like a man who was looking for trouble.
It must be said at this point that a very large number of German New Yorkers were vehemently opposed to Hitler and the Nazis. They wrote outraged letters to the editors of the major dailies, condemning Allied and American inaction after the Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenland. They joined anti-fascist leagues, brawled with brown-shirts-Joe was far from the only young man who went out into the streets of New York that autumn spoiling for a fight-and vigorously supported the president and his policies when they took action against Hitler and his war. Nevertheless, there was a fair number of New York Germans who took open pride in the accomplishments, civil, cultural, sporting, and military, of the Third Reich. Among these was a smaller group that was regularly active in various patriotic, nationalistic, generally racist, and sometimes violent organizations sympathetic to the aims of the homeland. Joe frequently returned from Yorkville with anti-Jewish newspapers and tracts that he read through from front to back, stomach tight with fury, then stuffed into one of three peach crates that he used for a filing cabinet. (The other two held his letters from home and his comic books.)
One day, as he was haunting the streets of Yorkville, Joe noticed a sign painted in the window of a second-floor office: ARYAN-AMERICAN LEAGUE
Standing there, staring up at the window, Joe underwent a dark fantasy of running up to that office and bursting into that warren of snakes, feet flying right up at you out of the panel as jagged splinters of the door shot in all directions. He saw himself wading into a roiling tangle of brown-shirts, fists and boots and elbows, and finding, in that violent surf of men, triumph, or if not that then atonement, retribution, or deliverance. He watched the window for nearly half an hour, trying to catch a glimpse of an actual party member. No one entered the building or walked in front of the second-floor window. Joe soon gave up and went home.
Inevitably, he went back to Yorkville. There was a konditorei called Haussman's across the street from the headquarters of the AAL, and from a table by the window Joe had a good view of the door to the building's lobby and of the window. He ordered a slice of the house's excellent Sacher torte and a cup of coffee that was unusually drinkable for New York, and waited. Another slice and two cups later there was still no sign of any Aryan-American at work. He paid his tab and crossed the street. The building's directory, as he had already observed, listed an optometrist, an accountant, a publisher, and the AAL, but none of these concerns appeared to have any patients, clients, or employees. The building-it was called the Kuhn Building-was a graveyard. When he climbed the stairs to the second floor, the door to the AAL offices was locked. Gray daylight through the frosted glass of the door suggested that there were no lamps turned on inside. Joe tried the knob. Then he got down on one knee to examine the lock. It was a Chubb, old and solid, but if he'd had his tools, it would have presented no problem. Unfortunately, his picks and wrench were in a drawer beside his bed down at Palooka Studios. He felt around in his pockets and found a mechanical pencil whose metal pocket clip, attached to the shaft with a two-pronged collar, would serve well enough, suitably deformed, as a tension wrench. But there was still the matter of a pick. He went back downstairs and walked around the block until he found a child's bicycle chained to a window grate on East Eighty-eighth Street. It looked like a new bike, sugary red, its chrome parts bright as mirrors and its tires glossy and stubbled. He waited for a moment to make sure that no one was coming. Then he grasped the shiny handlebars and, with savage jabs of the heel of his shoe at the bike's front wheel, managed to spring loose a spoke. He wiggled it free of the wheel rim and then ran back to the corner of Eighty-seventh and York. Using an iron railing as a crimping form and the sidewalk itself as a rough file, he was able to fashion a serviceable pick from the thin strong wire of the spoke.
When he got back up to the offices of the Aryan-American League, he knocked on the scarred oak frame of the door. There was no reply. He hitched up his trousers, knelt down, put his forehead to the door, and set to work. The crude tools, lack of practice, and pulsation of his own excitement in his arteries and joints made the work more difficult than it ought to have been. He took off his jacket. He rolled up his sleeves. He tipped his hat into his hands and set it on the floor beside him. Finally he opened his collar and yanked his tie to one side. He cursed and sweated and listened so avidly for the sound of the door opening downstairs that he could not hear the lock through his fingers. It took him nearly an hour to get inside.
When he did, he found not the elaborate laboratory or manufactory of fascism he had been expecting but a wooden desk, a chair, a lamp, a typewriter, and a tall oak filing cabinet. The Venetian blinds were dusty and crooked, and missing slats. The wooden floor was bare and spotted with cigarette burns. The telephone, when Joe lifted the receiver, was dead. On one wall was a framed color lithograph of the Fuhrer in a romantic mood, chin held at a poetic angle, an alpine breeze stirring his dark forelock. Against another wall stood a shelf piled high with various publications, in English and in German, whose titles alluded to the aims and predictions of National Socialism and the pan-German dream.
Joe went over and stood behind the desk. He pulled out the chair and sat down. The blotter was lost amid a blizzard of notes and memoranda, some typed, some scrawled in a minute and angular hand.
hypnosis used on FT can prove it
FT and haschisshin old man of mountain further study
FT master swordsman
There were bus transfers, candy wrappers, a ticket stub from the Polo Grounds. There was a copy of a book called Thuggee. There were numerous newspaper clippings and articles that had been torn from Photoplay and Modern Screen. All of the magazine articles, Joe noticed, seemed to be concerned with the film star Franchot Tone. And larded throughout the layers of rubbish and cryptic notations were dozens of comic books: Superman, Marvel Mystery, Flash, Whiz, Shield-Wizard- as well as, Joe could hardly fail to notice, the latest issues of Radio, Triumph, and The Monitor. In spots, the drifts of paper grew positively mountainous. Paper clips, tacks, and pen nibs were scattered everywhere, like conventional features on a map. A jagged palisade of pencils bristled from an empty Savarin coffee can. Joe reached out and, with two quick sweeps of his arms, sent everything tumbling. The thumbtacks made a pattering sound as they hit the floor.
Joe went through the drawers. In one he found a statement from New York Telephone promising, reliably as it had turned out, to disconnect service if the AAL account continued unpaid; a typed manuscript; and, inexplicably, the menu from the recent wedding reception, at the Hotel Trevi, of Bruce and Marilyn Horowitz. Joe yanked out the drawer and tipped it over. The manuscript split into halves that sprawled like a dropped deck of cards. Joe picked up a page and read it. It appeared to be science fiction. Someone named Rex Mundy was taking aim with his ray pistol at the suppurating hide of a hideous Zid. Someone named Krystal DeHaven was dangling upside down from a chain above the yawning maw of a hungry tork.
He crumpled the page and resumed his raid on the desk drawers. One contained a framed photograph of Franchot Tone, in the lower left corner of which, tucked into the gap between the glass and the inner edge of the picture frame, was a panel that Joe recognized at once as having been cut from the pages of Radio Comics #1. It was a close-up shot of old Max Mayflower as a young man, rich and devil-may-care. His expression was dreamy, his cheeks were dimpled, and in the word balloon he was saying, "Oh, what do I care? The important thing is having fun." Joe noticed that the angle of Max's head, a certain wryness in his expression, and his chiseled nose were very similar, indeed identical, to those of Franchot Tone in the publicity photo. It was a resemblance that no one had ever noticed or remarked on before. Tone was not an actor whose work or face were especially familiar to Joe, but now, as he studied the slender, melancholy long face in the glossy photograph-it was signed To Carl with all the best wishes of Franchot Tone-he wondered if he could have unconsciously modeled the character on Tone.
In the last, bottom-right drawer, at the back, there was a small, leather-bound diary. On its flyleaf was an inscription dated Christmas 1939. To Carl, someplace to put his brilliant thoughts in order, with love, Ruth. For its first fifty pages or so the diary carried on a tiny and furious handwritten argument, the burden of which-insofar as Joe could make it out-seemed to be that Franchot Tone was a member of a secret league of assassins, funded by the company run by Tone's father, American Carborundum, who were bent on eliminating Adolf Hitler. The revelation stopped mid-sentence, and the remaining pages of the diary were taken up by several hundred variations on the words "Carl Ebling," signed in an encyclopedia of styles from florid to scratchy, over and over again. Joe opened the diary to its center, gripped each half, and tore it down the spine into two pieces.
When he had finished with the desk, Joe went over to the bookcase. Coolly, methodically, he sent the stacks of books and pamphlets fluttering to the floor. He was afraid that if he allowed himself to feel anything, it would be neither rage nor satisfaction but merely pity for the mad, dusty nullity of Carl Ebling's one-man league. So he proceeded without feeling anything, hands numb, emotions pinched like a nerve. He lifted the picture of Hitler from its hook, and it hit with a tinkle. Proceeding next to the file cabinet, he drew out the top drawer, A-D, upended it, and shook its contents loose, like the Escapist emptying soldiers from the turret of a tank. He yanked out E-J, and was about to send its contents spilling down atop the mound of A-D when he noticed the legend typed on the index tab of one of the very first files in the drawer: "Empire Comics, Inc."
The rather swollen folder contained all ten issues of Radio Comics that had so far appeared; affixed by a paper clip to the first issue were some twenty-five sheets of onionskin, densely typed. It was a report, in the form of a memorandum to All League Members, from Carl Ebling, President of the New York Chapter, AAL. The subject of the memorandum was, of all things, the superpowered escape artist known as the Escapist. Joe sat down in the chair, lit a cigarette, and started to read. In the opening paragraph of Carl Ebling's memorandum, the costumed hero, his publisher, and his creators, the "Jew cartoonists" Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, were all identified as threats to the reputations, dignity, and ambitions of German nationalism in America. Carl Ebling had read an article in the Saturday Evening Post <emphasis><strong>[3]</strong></emphasis> detailing the success and burgeoning circulation of Empire's comic book line, and he expounded briefly on the negative effects such crass anti-German propaganda would have on the minds of those in whose hands rested the future of the Saxon peoples-America's children. Next he drew his readers' hypothetical attention to the remarkable resemblance between the character of Max Mayflower, the original Misterioso, and the secret Allied agent Franchot Tone. After this, however, the sense of critical purpose seemed to abandon the author. In the paragraphs that followed, and for the remainder of the memorandum, Ebling contented himself-there was no better way of putting it-with summarizing and describing the adventures of the Escapist, from the first issue detailing his origins through the most recent issue to hit the newsstands. Ebling's summaries were, on the whole, careful and accurate. But the striking thing was the way, as he went along, month by month adding another entry to his dossier on Empire, Ebling's tone of dismissive scorn and outrage moderated and then vanished altogether. By the fourth issue, he had stopped larding his descriptions with terms like "outrageous" and "offensive"; meanwhile, the entries grew longer and more detailed, breaking down at times into panel-by-panel recitations of the action in the books. The final summary, of the most recent issue, was four pages long and so devoid of judgmental language as to be completely neutral. In the last sentence, Ebling seemed to realize how far he had strayed from his original project, and appended with unpunctuated haste that implied a certain shamefaced recovery of purpose, "Of course all this is the usual Jewish warmongering propiganda [sic]!' But it was plain to Joe that there was no real purpose being served by the Ebling memorandum except the exegesis, the precisely annotated recording, of ten months of pure enjoyment. Carl Ebling was, in spite of himself, a fan.
Joe had received letters from readers over the past months, boys and girls-mostly boys-scattered all over the United States from Las Cruces to LaCrosse, but these were usually limited to rather simple expressions of appreciation and requests for signed pinups of the Escapist, enough that Joe had evolved a standard pinup pose, which at first he drew each time by hand but had recently had photostatted, complete with his signature, to save time. Reading the Ebling memorandum marked the first time that Joe became aware of the possibility of an adult readership for his work, and the degree of Ebling's passion, his scholarly enthusiasm replete with footnotes, thematic analyses, and lists of dramatis personae, however reluctant and shamed, touched him strangely. He was aware-he could not deny it-of a desire to meet Ebling. He looked around at the havoc he had created in the poor, sad offices of the Aryan-American League and felt a momentary pang of remorse.
Then, abruptly, it was his turn to feel ashamed, not only for having extended, however momentarily, the consideration of his sympathy to a Nazi, but for having produced work that appealed to such a man. Joe Kavalier was not the only early creator of comic books to perceive the mirror-image fascism inherent in his anti-fascist superman-Will Eisner, another Jew cartoonist, quite deliberately dressed his Allied-hero Blackhawks in uniforms modeled on the elegant death's-head garb of the Waffen SS. But Joe was perhaps the first to feel the shame of glorifying, in the name of democracy and freedom, the vengeful brutality of a very strong man. For months he had been assuring himself, and listening to Sammy's assurances, that they were hastening, by their make-believe hammering at Haxoff or Hynkel or Hassler or Hitler, the intervention of the United States into the war in Europe. Now it occurred to Joe to wonder if all they had been doing, all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination.
He never knew afterward whether he failed to hear the sounds of Carl Ebling entering the building, climbing the stairs, and fingering the violated knob of the door because he was so lost in thought, or because Ebling walked with a light tread, or if the man had sensed an intruder and hoped to catch him unaware. In any case, it was not until the hinges squealed that Joe looked up to find an older, pastier version of Franchot Tone, the weak chin weaker, the recessive hairline farther along in its flight. He was zipped into a ratty gray parka, standing in the doorway of the Aryan-American League. He was holding a fat black sap in his hand.
"Who the hell are you?" The accent was not the elegant Tone drawl but something more or less local. "How did you get in here?"
"The name is Mayflower," Joe said. "Tom Mayflower."
"Who? Mayflower? That's-" His gaze lighted on the fat Empire file. His mouth opened, then shut again.
Joe closed the file and rose slowly to his feet. Keeping his eyes on Ebling's hands, he began to circle sideways around the desk.
"I was just leaving," Joe said.
Ebling nodded and narrowed his eyes. He looked frail, consumptive perhaps, a man in his late thirties or forties, his skin pale and freckled. He blinked and swallowed repeatedly. Joe took advantage of what he perceived to be an irresolute nature and made a dash for the door. Ebling caught him on the back of the head with the blackjack. Joe's skull rang like a coppery bell, and his knees buckled, and Ebling hit him again. Joe caught hold of the doorway, then turned, and another blow caught his chin. The pain swept away the last of the shame and remorse that had been muddling his thinking, and he was aware of a fast freshet of anger in his heart. He lunged at Ebling and caught hold of the arm that swung the sap, yanking it so hard that there was a pop of the joint. Ebling cried out, and Joe swung him by his arm and threw him up against the wall. Ebling's head struck the corner of the shelf on which the Nazi literature had been piled, and he dropped like an empty pair of trousers to the floor.
In the aftermath of his first victory, Joe hoped-he never forgot this wild, evil hope-that the man was dead. He stood breathing and swallowing, ears ringing, over Ebling and wished the twisted soul from his body. But no, there was the breath, lifting and lowering the fragile frame of the American Nazi. The sight of this involuntary, rabbitlike motion stanched the flow of Joe's anger. He went back to the desk and gathered up his jacket, cigarettes, and matches. He was about to leave when he saw the Empire Comics file, with a corner of the Ebling memorandum poking out of the top. He opened the folder, tugged the memorandum free of its clip, and flipped it over. On the back of the last page, using his mechanical pencil, he drew a quick sketch of the Escapist in the standard pose he had developed for pinups: the Master of Escape smiling, arms outstretched, the sundered halves of a pair of handcuffs braceleting his wrists.
To my pal Carl Ebling, he wrote across the bottom in big cheerful American cursive script. Lots of luck, The Escapist.
Shortly after three on the afternoon of Friday, October 25, 1940 (according to both his journal and the statement that he made to police), James Haworth Love, majority shareholder and chairman of the board of Oneonta Mills, was sitting with Alfred E. Smith, president-for-life of the Empire State Building Corporation, in the latter's souvenir-cluttered office on the thirty-second floor of the world's tallest building, when the building manager entered "ashen-faced and looking," as the industrialist put it in his private account of the day's events, "quite as if he were going to be ill." After a careful sideways glance at Love, the building manager, Chapin L. Brown, informed his boss that they had themselves a tricky situation down on twenty-five.
Alfred Emanuel Smith-trounced by Herbert Hoover in his 1928 bid for the White House-had been a political crony and business associate of Love's ever since his days as governor of New York. Love was in Smith's office that afternoon, in fact, to enlist Smith as the front man for a syndicate hoping to revive Gustav Lindenthal's old dream of a Hudson River Bridge, eight hundred feet tall and two hundred feet wide, at Fifty-seventh Street, its eastern approaches to be constructed on a large parcel of West Side real estate that had recently come into Love's possession. Smith and Love were by no means confidants-James Love made do without confidants, as far as Smith could tell-but the textile magnate was a man of almost legendary reticence, even secretiveness, well known for keeping his own counsel. With a confidential nod toward his guest, meant to signal his implicit trust in Mr. Love's discretion and good judgment, Smith said he supposed that Brown had better just go ahead and spill it. Brown nodded in turn to Mr. Love, clamped his hands onto his hips as if to steady himself, and let out a brief sigh which seemed intended to express both incredulity and pique.
"We may have a bomb in the building," he said.
At three o'clock, he went on, a man who claimed to represent a group of American Nazis-Brown pronounced it "nazzies"-had telephoned to say, in a handkerchief-muffled false baritone, that he had hidden, somewhere in the offices of the tenants on the twenty-fifth floor, a powerful explosive device. The bomb was set to detonate, the caller had claimed, at three-thirty, killing everyone in its vicinity, and possibly doing harm to the fabric of the celebrated building itself.
In his police statement, Mr. Love reported that His Honor took the news as gravely as it was delivered, though, as he noted in his journal, no amount of anxiety could have induced a pallor in that rubicund face.
"Have you called M'Naughton?" Smith said. His gravelly voice was soft and his demeanor calm, but there was a strangled quality, as of anger suppressed, in his tone, and his brown eyes, which tended to have the slightly sorrowful cast common among convivial men, bulged from his jowly old-baby's face. Captain M'Naughton was the chief of the building's private fire battalion. Brown nodded. "Harley?" This was the captain of the building's private police force. Brown nodded again.
"They're evacuating the floor," he said. "M'Naughton's boys are in there now, looking for the goddamned thing."
"Call Harley and say I'm coming down," Smith said. He was already on his feet and headed around his desk for the door. Smith was a native of the Lower East Side, a tough boy from the old Fourth Ward, and his feelings for the building of which he was, in the eyes of New York and the nation, the human symbol were intensely proprietary. He took one last backward glance at his office when they went out, as if just in case, Love thought, he would never see it again. It was crammed like an old attic with trophies and mementos of his career, which had taken him nearly to Washington but in the end had led him to reign over this (normally) far more harmonious kingdom in the sky. Smith sighed. Today marked the start of the final weekend in the grand two-year adventure of the New York World's Fair, whose official headquarters were in the Empire State Building, and a lavish banquet was on the schedule for tonight in the dining room of the Empire State Club, down on the twenty-first floor. Smith hated to see a lavish banquet spoiled for any reason. He shook his head regretfully. Then, settling his trademark brown derby on his head, he took his visitor's arm and led the way out to the elevator bank. Ten elevators served this floor, all locals running between twenty-five and forty-one.
"Twenty-five," Smith snapped to the operator as they got in. Bill Roy, Smith's bodyguard, came along to guard Smith's old Irish body. "Twenty-five," Smith repeated. He squinted at Mr. Brown. "The funny-book people?"
"Empire," said Mr. Brown. Then he added sourly, "Very funny."
At twenty-nine, the elevator slowed as if to stop, but the operator pressed a button, and the local, having received a kind of battlefield promotion to express, continued on its way down.
"What Empire?" Love wanted to know. "What funny books?"
"They call them comic books," said Mr. Brown. "The outfit's called Empire Comics. New tenants."
"Comic books." Love was a widower with no children of his own, but he had observed his nephews reading comic books a couple of summers back, up at Miskegunquit. At the time, he had taken note only of the charming scene: the two boys lying shirtless and barefoot, in a swinging hammock stretched between a pair of unblighted elms, in a dappled bend dexter of sunlight, their downy legs tangled together, the restless attention of each wholly absorbed in a crudely stapled smear of violent color labeled Superman. Love had followed the subsequent conquest by the strapping, tights-wearing hero of the newspapers, of cereal boxes, and lately of the Mutual Broadcasting System, and was not unknown to cast an eye toward Superman's funny-page adventures. "And what could Bundists possibly have against them?"
"Ever seen one of these funny books, Jim?" Smith said. "If I was a ten-year-old boy, I'd be amazed there was still any Nazis left over there in Germany, the way our friends here at Empire have been poundin' away at 'em."
The elevator doors opened onto the unnerving dreamlike spectacle of a hundred people moving in complete silence toward the stairs. Except for the occasional urgent, not especially polite, reminder from one of the dozens of building policemen swarming the elevator lobby that pushing and shoving was only going to get somebody a busted leg, the only sounds to be heard were the drumskin rumble of rubber boots and raincoats, the squeak and clatter of soles and heels, and the impatient tapping of umbrella tips on tile. As his party got off the elevator, James Love noticed that a big policeman, with a nod to Chapin Brown, stepped in behind them to block the doors. All of the elevators had been cordoned by blue-coated guards who stood rocking back on their heels, hands clasped behind their backs, a grim-faced, impenetrable line.
"Captain Harley thought we'd better get 'em out as a group and keep 'em all together," said Brown. "I tended to concur."
Al Smith nodded once. "No need to spook the whole building," he said. He glanced at his watch. "Not yet, at any rate."
Captain Harley now came hurrying over. He was a tall, broad Irishman with a scarred left eye socket, clenched like a fist around the white and blue bauble of the eye.
"You shouldn't be here, Governor," he said. He turned his angry eye on Love. "I gave orders to clear the floor. With all due respect, that means you, too, and your guest."
"Have you found the bomb, Harley, or haven't you?" said Smith.
Harley shook his head. "They're still in there poking around."
"And what are you going to do with all these people?" said Smith, watching as the last few stragglers, among them a stooped, sullen-looking, bespectacled young man who appeared to be swathed in four or five layers of clothing, were herded into the stairwell.
"We're taking them down to the station room-"
"Send all those good people on over to Nedick's. Buy them an orange drink on me. I don't want them milling around on the sidewalk blabber-mouthing." Smith lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper not entirely devoid, even under the circumstances, of congeniality. "In fact," he said. "No. I'll tell you what. Have one of your boys walk them all over to Keen's, all right, and tell Johnny, or whoever it is, to give everyone a drink and put it on Al Smith's tab."
Harley signaled to one of his men, and sent him after the evacuees.
"If you haven't found the thing in"- Smith checked his watch again-"ten minutes, I want you to clear out twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-six, and twenty-seven, too. Send them to… I don't know, Stouffer's or someplace like that. You got it?"
"Yes, Governor. Tell you the truth, I was only going to give it five minutes before I evacuated the other floors."
"I have faith in M'Naughton," Smith said. "Take ten."
"All right, now there's only one more problem, Your Honor," Captain Harley went on, working a meaty hand first over his lips, then across the whole lower half of his face, leaving a mottled flush. It was the frustrated gesture of a big man fighting a natural inclination to snap something in half. "I was working on it when I heard you come down."
"What is it?"
"There's one of 'em won't come out."
"Won't come out?"
"A Mr. Joe Kavalier. Foreign kid. Can't be more than twenty."
"Why won't this fellow come out?" said Al Smith. "What's the matter with him?"
"He says he has too much work to do."
Love snorted, then averted his face so as not to offend the policeman or his host with his amusement.
"Well, of all the- Carry him out, then," Smith said. "Whether he likes it or not."
"I'd love to, Your Honor. Unfortunately…" Harley hesitated, and mauled his jowls a little more with his big hand. "Mr. Kavalier has seen fit to handcuff his self to his drawing table. At the ankle, to be exact."
This time Mr. Love contrived to cover his laughter with a spasm of coughing.
"What?" Smith closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. "How the hell did he manage that? Where did he get the handcuffs?"
Here Harley flushed deeply, and muttered a barely audible reply.
"What's that?" Smith said.
"They're mine, Your Honor," said Harley. "And to tell you the truth, I'm not really sure how he got ahold of them."
Love's coughing fit had by now become quite genuine. He was a three-pack-a-day man, and his lungs were in terrible shape. To prevent public embarrassment, he generally laughed as little as possible.
"I see," Smith said. "Well, then, Captain, get a couple of your biggest boys and carry out the goddamn table, too."
"It's, uh, well, it's built in, Your Honor. Bolted to the wall."
"Then unbolt it! Just get the stupid S.O.B. out of there! His damn pencil sharpener is probably booby-trapped!"
Harley signaled to a couple of his stoutest men.
"Wait a minute," Smith said. He checked his watch. "God damn it." He pushed his derby toward the back of his head, making himself look at once younger and more truculent. "Leave me have a word with this pup. What is his name again?"
"It's Kavalier with a K, Your Honor, only I don't see the use or the sense in letting you-"
"In all my eleven years as president of this building, Captain Harley, I have never once sent you or your men in to lay a hand on one of the tenants. This isn't some flophouse on the Bowery." He started toward the door of Empire Comics. "I hope we can afford to devote a minute to reason before we give Mr. Kavalier with a K the bum's rush."
"Mind if I come with you?" Love said. He had recovered from his spasm of mirth, though his pocket handkerchief now contained the evidence of something evil and brown inside him.
"I can't let you do that, Jim," Smith said. "It would be irresponsible."
"You have a wife and children to lose, Al. All I have is my money."
Smith looked at his old friend. Before Chapin Brown had rushed in to interrupt them with word of the bomb threat, they had been discussing not the Hudson River Bridge, a scheme that with Love's subsequent, abrupt retirement from public life came, once again, to nothing, but rather the man's strongly held and oft-aired views on the war that Britain was losing in Europe. A loyal Willkie man, James Love was among a small number of powerful industrialists in the country who had been actively in favor of American entry into the war almost from its beginning. Though he was the son and grandson of millionaires, he had been troubled all his life, much like the president of the United States, by wayward liberal impulses that, however fitful-the Love mills were all open shops-made him a natural anti-fascist. Also figuring into his views, undoubtedly, was the memory, handed down from millionaire to millionaire in Love's family, of the colossal and enduring prosperity that war and government contracts had brought to Oneonta Woolens during the Civil War. All of this was known, or more or less understood, by Al Smith, and led him to conclude that the thought of risking death at the hands of American Nazis held a certain appeal to someone who had been trying to get into the war, one way or another, for almost two years now. Then, too, the man had lost his famously beautiful wife to cancer back in '56 or '37; since that time, vague rumors had reached Smith's ear of profligate conduct that might suggest the behavior of a man who had, in that tragedy, also lost his moorings, or at least his fear of death. What Smith did not know was that the one great and true friend of James Love's life, Gerhardt Frege, had been one of the first men to die-of internal injuries-at Dachau, shortly after the camp opened in 1953 [4] Smith did not suspect, and never would have imagined, that the animus James Love held against Nazis and their American sympathizers was, at bottom, a personal matter. But there was an eagerness in the man's eyes that both worried Smith and touched him.
"We give it five minutes," Smith said. "Then I have Harley drag the bastard out by his suspenders."
The waiting room of Empire Comics was a cold expanse of marble and leather moderne, a black tundra frosted over with glass and chrome. The effect was huge and intimidating and coldly splendid, rather like its designer, Mrs. Sheldon Anapol, though neither Love nor Smith had any way, of course, of drawing this parallel. There was a long hemicircular reception desk opposite the entry, faced with black marble and ribbed with Saturn's rings of glass, behind which three black-coated firemen, their faces concealed by heavy welder's masks, crouched, poking around carefully with broom handles. On the wall over the reception desk, there was a painting of a lithe masked giant in a dark blue union suit, his arms outspread in ecstatic embrace as he burst from a writhing nest of thick iron chains that entangled his loins, belly, and chest. On his chest, he wore the emblem of a stylized key.
Above his head arched foot-high letters proclaiming boldly the escapist! while at his feet a pair of firefighters crawled around on their hands and knees, searching the drawers and kneeholes of the reception desk for a bomb. The firemen, their visors glinting, looked up as Harley led Governor Smith and Mr. Love past.
"Find anything?" Smith said. One of the firemen, an elderly fellow whose helmet looked far too large for him, shook his head.
The comic book workshop, or whatever it was called, had none of the polish and gleam of the waiting room. The floor was concrete, painted light blue and littered with fag ends and crumpled carnations of drawing paper. The tables were a homely jumble of brand-new and semidecrepit, but there was full daylight on three sides, with spectacular if not quite breathtaking views of the hotel and newspaper towers of midtown, the green badge of Central Park, the battlements of New Jersey, and the dull metal glint of the East River, with a glimpse of the iron mantilla of the Queensboro Bridge. The windows were shut, and a pall of tobacco lay over the room. In a far corner, against a wall from which his built-in drawing table canted downward and out, hunched a pale young man, lean, rumpled, shirttails dangling, adding billowing yards of smoke to the pall. Al Smith signaled to Harley to leave them. "Five minutes," Harley said as he withdrew.
As soon as the police captain spoke, the young man whirled around on his stool. He squinted nearsightedly in the direction of Smith and Love as they approached, looking mildly annoyed. He was a good-looking Jewish kid, with large blue eyes, an aquiline nose, a strong chin.
"Young man," Smith said. "Mr. Kavalier, is it? I'm Al Smith. This is my friend Mr. Love."
"Joe," the young man said. His grip in Love's was firm and dry. Though he appeared to have been wearing his clothes rather too long, they were good enough clothes: a broadcloth shirt with a monogram stitched onto the breast pocket, a raw silk necktie, gray worsted trousers with a generous cuff. But he had the undernourished look of an immigrant, his deep-set eyes bruised and wary, the tips of his fingers stained yellow. The careful manicure of his nails had been ruined by ink. He looked ill rested, dog-tired, and-it was a surprising thought to Love, who was not a man especially sensitive to the feelings of others-sad. A less refined New Yorker probably would have asked him, Where's the funeral?
"Look here, young man," Smith said. "I've come to make a personal request. Now, I admire your dedication to your work here. But I'd like you just to do me a favor, a personal favor to me, you understand. Here it is. Come along now, and let me stand you to a drink. All right? We'll get this little problem cleared up, and then you'll be my guest at the club. Okay, kid? What do you say?"
If Joe Kavalier was impressed by this generous offer from one of the best-known, most beloved characters in contemporary American life, a man who once might have been president of the United States, he didn't show it. He merely looked amused, Love thought, and behind this amusement there were hints of irritation.
"I'd like to another time, maybe, thank you," he said, in an indeterminate Hapsburg accent. He reached for a stack of art board and took a fresh piece from the top. It appeared to the observant Love, who always took a ready interest in learning the secrets and methods of any kind of manufacturing or production, to have been preprinted with nine large square frames, in three tiers of three. "Only I have so much work."
"You're quite attached to your work, I can see that," Love said, catching the younger man's air of amused unconcern.
Joe Kavalier looked down at his feet, where a pair of metal cuffs linked his left ankle, in a gray sock with white and burgundy clocks, to one of the legs of his table. "I was not wanting to be interrupted, you know?" He tap-tap-tapped the end of his pencil against the piece of board. "So many little boxes to fill."
"Yes, all right, that's very admirable, son," Smith said, "but for gosh sakes, how much drawing will you be able to do when your arm is lying down on Thirty-third Street?"
The young man gazed around the studio, empty but for the smoke of his cigarette and a pair of grunting firemen, the buckles on their raincoats rattling as they clambered around the room.
"There isn't no bomb," he said.
"You think this thing's a hoax?" Love said.
Joe Kavalier nodded, then lowered his head to his work. He considered the page's first little box from one angle, then another. Then, rapidly, in a firm and certain manner and without stopping, he began to draw. In choosing the image he was now putting to paper, he didn't appear to be following the typewritten script lying stacked at his elbow. Perhaps he had committed it all to memory. Love craned his head to get a better look at what the kid was drawing. It seemed to be an airplane, one with the fierce-looking jambeaux of a Stuka. Yes, a Stuka in a streaking power dive. The detail was impressive. The plane had solidity and rivets. And yet there was something exaggerated in the backward sweep of the wings that suggested great speed and even a hint of falconish malevolence.
"Governor?" It was Harley. He sounded as if he was irritated with Al Smith now, too. "I got two men with a wrench ready and waiting."
"Just a moment," Love said, and then felt himself blush. It was Al Smith's decision, of course-it was Al Smith's building-but Love was impressed by the young man's good looks, his air of certainty with regard to the bomb's fraudulence; and he was fascinated, as always, by the sight of someone making something skillfully. He wasn't ready to leave either.
"You've got half a moment," Harley said, ducking out again. "With all due respect."
"Well, now, Joe," Smith said, checking his watch once again, looking and sounding more nervous than before. His tone grew patient and slightly condescending, and Love sensed that he was trying to be psychological. "If you won't evacuate, maybe you'll tell me why the Bund- would this be the Bund?"
"The Aryan-American League."
Smith looked at Love, who shook his head. "I don't believe I've ever heard of them," Smith said.
Joe Kavalier's mouth bunched up at one corner in a small, eloquent smirk, as if to suggest that this was hardly surprising.
"Why are these Aryans so upset with you people here? How did they come across these controversial drawings of yours? I wasn't aware that Nazis read comic books."
"All kinds of people are reading them," said Joe. "I get mail from all over the country. California. Illinois. From Canada, too."
"Really?" Love said. "How many of your comic books do you sell every month?"
"Jimmy-" Smith began, tapping the crystal of his wristwatch with a fat finger.
"We have three titles," the young man said. "Though now it's going to be five."
"And how many do you sell in a month?"
"Mr. Kavalier, this is fascinating stuff, but if you won't agree to come quietly I'm going to be obliged to-"
"Close to three million," Joe Kavalier said. "But they all get passed along at least once. They get traded for other ones, between the kids. So the number of people reading them, Sam-my partner, Sam Clay-says it's maybe two times how many we sell, or more."
"Das ist bemerkenswert," said Love.
For the first time, Joe Kavalier looked surprised. "Ja, no kidding."
"And that fellow out there in the lobby, with the key on his chest. That your star attraction?"
"The Escapist. He is the world-greatest escape artist, no chains to hold him, sending him to liberate the enprisoned peoples in the world. It's good stuff." He smiled for the first time, a smile that was self-mocking but not quite enough to conceal his evident professional pride. "He is made up by my partner and me."
"I take it your partner had sense enough to evacuate," Smith said, returning them to the ostensible purpose of this conversation.
"He is with an appointment. And there isn't any bomb."
At that moment, just as Joe Kavalier said "bomb," there was a burst of clamor-brrrang!-right over their heads. James Love jumped and let go of his cigarette.
"All clear," Smith said, mopping his forehead with a hankie. "Well, thank God for that."
"Good heavens." There was ash all down Love's jacket, and he brushed it away, blushing.
"All clear!" called a husky voice. A moment later, the elderly firefighter stuck his head into the workroom. "It was just an old clock, your honor," he told Smith, looking at once relieved and disappointed. "In the desk of a Mister… Clay. Taped to a couple of dowels painted red."
"I knew it," said Joe softly, starting in on the second little box.
"Dynamite isn't even red," the old fireman said, walking off. "Not really."
"The guy reads too much comic books," Joe said.
"Governor Smith!"
They turned, and three men came into the workroom. One of them, balding and vast in every part and extremity, had the air of a high official in some disreputable labor union; the other, tall and merely potbellied, had thinning rusty hair, a football hero gone to seed. Behind the two big fellows stood a tiny, quarrelsome-looking young man, dressed in an outsize gray pinstriped suit with padded shoulders that were almost comical in their breadth. The little one immediately came over to the drawing table where Joe Kavalier was working. He nodded to Love, sizing him up, and put a hand on Kavalier's shoulder.
"Mr. Anapol, isn't it?" Smith said, shaking the fat man's hand. "We've had a little excitement around here."
"We were at lunch!" Anapol cried, coming to shake Al Smith's hand. "We came running back as soon as we heard! Governor, I'm so sorry for all the trouble we caused you. I guess maybe"-here he shot a look at Kavalier & Clay-"these two young hotheads have been taking things a little too far in our magazines."
"Maybe so," Love said. "But they're brave young men, and I congratulate them."
Anapol looked taken aback.
"Mr. Anapol, may I present an old friend, Mr. James Love. Mr. Love is-"
"Oneonta Mills!" Anapol said. "Mr. James Love! What a pleasure. I regret that we're obliged to meet under such-"
"Nonsense," Love said. "We've been having a fine time." He ignored the scowl this statement produced on Al Smith's puss. "Mr. Anapol, this may be neither the time nor the place for this. But my firm has just brought all of our various accounts together under one umbrella and placed them with Burns, Baggot & DeWinter," Love went on. "Perhaps you've heard of them."
"Of course," Anapol said. "The Knackfalder Trousers Man. The dancing nuts."
"They're smart boys, and one of the smart things they've been talking about is taking a fresh look at our radio accounts. I'd like to have some of their fellows sit down with you and Mr. Kavalier, here, and Mister- Clay, is it?-and talk about finding a way for Oneonta Mills to sponsor this Escaper of yours."
"Sponsor?"
"On the radio, boss," said the little one, catching on quickly. He jutted his chin and deepened his voice and clutched an imaginary microphone. "Oneonta Mills, makers of Ko-Zee-Tos brand thermal socks and undergarments, presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist!" He looked at Love. "That the idea?"
"Something like that," Love said. "Yes, I like that."
"The idea," said Anapol. "A radio show." He pressed a hand to his belly as if he was not feeling well. "It makes me a little nervous. With all due respect, and I don't say I'm not interested, but…"
"Well, think it over, Mr. Anapol. I suppose there must be other characters available, but I have a feeling this is the one for me. Let's say I'll telephone Jack Burns and make arrangements to have you sit down and talk about it this week," Love said. "That is, if you gentlemen are free."
"I'm free," Anapol said, recovering himself. "My partner, Jack Ashkenazy, will also, I am sure, be free. And this is our editor in chief, Mr. George Deasey."
Love shook Deasey's hand, recoiling at the smell of cloves covering the whiskey on his breath.
"But these young fellows over here," Anapol continued, "well, they do good work, as you've seen, and they're very good boys, if maybe a little bit excitable. But they're, how should I put it, they're the hired hands on this farm."
Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier exchanged a look in which Love saw the smoldering coals of a grudge.
"Moo," Sam Clay said, with a shrug of his enormous false shoulders.
"I'm going to need a statement from you, Mr. Anapol," Captain Harley said. "And from you, Governor, and your guest. It won't take long."
"What do you say we do it down at the club," Al Smith said. "I could use a drink."
At that moment a messenger in blue livery walked in, carrying a special-delivery letter.
"Sheldon Anapol?" he said.
"Here," Anapol said, signing for it. "George, stay here and see that things get settled down."
Deasey nodded. Anapol tipped the messenger and exited behind Al Smith. Love signaled to Smith that he would follow, then turned back to the two young men. Sam Clay stood, his shoulder against his partner's, looking a little woozy, as if he had been sandbagged. Then he went over to a low shelf in a corner of the room. He quickly gathered a stack of magazines and brought them to Love, looking the older man right in the eye.
"Maybe you'd like to get to know the character a little better," he said. "Our character."
" 'Ours' as in…?"
" 'Ours' as in Joe and myself. The Escapist. Also the Monitor, the Four Freedoms, Mr. Machine Gun. All of Empire's leading sellers. Here. Joe, do you have- Yeah." He scrabbled around in the clutter under Joe Kavalier's table to find a sheet of stationery on whose elaborate letterhead a group of handsome, muscular men and boys lounged, relaxing on and about the letters, one wild-haired, hook-nosed boy perched atop the ampersand of the words "Kavalier & Clay." "I've always thought the Escapist would be perfect for radio."
"Well, I'm really not qualified to judge, Mr. Clay," Love said, not unkindly, taking the magazines and the sheet of paper. "To be perfectly honest, my only concern is whether or not he'll sell socks. But I will say"-and here his face took on an odd expression that Joe almost would have called a leer-"I do like what I've seen here today. Take care, boys."
He exited the workroom, troubled, but not unduly, by a pang of sympathy for Kavalier & Clay. Love saw how it was. These boys had come up with this Escapist character and then, in exchange for some token payment and the opportunity of seeing their names in print, signed away all the rights to Anapol and company. Now Anapol and company were prospering-enough to let a quarter of a floor in the Empire State Building, enough to exert an impressive mass-cultural influence over the vast American marketplace of children and know-nothings. And while, to judge from their attire, Messrs. Kavalier & Clay were sharing to some degree in the general prosperity, Sheldon Anapol had just made it apparent to both of them that the course of the river of money beside which they had pitched their camp had been diverted, and would henceforth flow no more around them. In bis life as a businessman, Love had seen plenty of boy geniuses left deserted amid the bleached bones and cacti of their dreams. These two would, no doubt, have other brilliant ideas, and furthermore, no one was ever born smart in business. Love's feeling of pity, while sincere-and inspired in part by Joe's dark good looks and the quickness of spirit of the two young men-lasted no longer than it took for the elevator to deposit him in the richly paneled lobby of the Empire State Club. He did not imagine for a moment that he had just set in motion the wheels not of another minor midtown ruination but, very nearly, his own.
Back in the workroom-once again alive with chitchat and gum-snap and some shivery Hampton on the radio-George Deasey stood in the doorway to his office. He knit his ginger eyebrows and pursed his lips, looking uncharacteristically moved.
"Gentlemen," he said to Joe and Sammy. "A word."
He went into his office and, as was his wont, lay down in the middle of the floor and began to pick his teeth. He had been trampled by a fly-maddened cavalry horse while covering one of the U.S. Marine Corps' numerous attempts to capture A. C. Sandino, and on chill afternoons like this one, his back tended to stiffen up on him. His toothpick was solid gold, a legacy from his father, a former associate justice of the New York State Court of Appeals. "Close the door," he told Sam Clay after the boys came in. "I don't want anyone to hear what I'm going to say."
"Why not?" Sammy said, obediently shutting the door as he followed Joe in.
"Because it would cause me considerable pain if anyone should form the mistaken impression that I actually give a tinker's damn about you, Mr. Clay."
"Fat chance of that," said Sammy. He flopped into one of the two straight-backed chairs that flanked Deasey's enormous desk. If he was stung by the insult, he gave no sign of it. He had toughened under the constant administration of tiny mallet blows from Deasey. During their first months working for him, on days when Deasey had ridden Sammy particularly hard, Joe had often listened in the dark, pretending to be asleep, as Sammy lay clenched tight in the bed beside him, barking into his pillow. Deasey mocked his grammar. In restaurants, he made fun of Sammy's poor table manners, unsophisticated palate, and amazement with such simple things as sculpted butter pats and cold potato soup. He offered Sammy a chance to write a Gray Goblin novel for Racy Police Stories, sixty thousand words at half a cent a word; Sammy, sleeping two hours a night for a month, wrote three books, which Joe had read and enjoyed, only to have Deasey dissect one after another, each time with terse, bitter criticism that was infallibly accurate. In the end, however, he had bought all three.
"First of all," Deasey said, "Mr. Clay, where is Strange Frigate?"
"Halfway done," Sammy said. This was a fourth Goblin novel that Racy Publications, now operating very much in the shadow of its younger sibling but still turning a profit for Jack Ashkenazy, had commissioned from Sam Clay. Like all seventy-two of its predecessors in the series, it would be published, of course, under the house name of Harvey Slayton. Actually, as far as Joe knew, Sammy had not even started it yet. The title was one of two hundred and forty-five that George Deasey had dreamed up during a two-day bender in Key West in 1936 and had been working his way through ever since. Strange Frigate was number seventy-three on the list. "I'll have it for you by Monday."
"You must."
"I shall."
"Mr. Kavalier." Deasey had a sneaky way of lolling his head around toward you, one hand half-covering his face as if he were about to drop off for a catnap-an impression made all the stronger if he was, as now, stretched out on the floor. Then, suddenly, his drooping eyelids would snap open, and you would find yourself on the point of a sharp inquisitorial gaze. "Please reassure me that my suspicions of your involvement in this afternoon's charade are unfounded."
Joe struggled to meet Deasey's sleepy Torquemada stare. Of course he knew that the bomb threat had been made by Carl Ebling, in direct retaliation for his attack on the headquarters of the AAL two weeks before. Clearly, Ebling had been casing the Empire offices, tracking the move from the Kramler Building, observing the comings and goings of the employees, preparing his big red comic book bomb. Such fixity of purpose ought to have been, in spite of the harmlessness of today's reprisal, cause for alarm. Joe really ought to have told the police about Carl Ebling right away, and had the man arrested and jailed. And the prospect of the man's imprisonment, by rights, ought to have given him satisfaction. But why, instead, did it feel like surrender? It seemed to Joe that Ebling could have just as easily reported him, for breaking and entering, destruction of property, even assault, but instead had pursued his solitary and furtive course, engaging Joe-all right, the man was under the false impression that his antagonist was Sam Clay, Joe was somehow going to have to set him straight about that-in a private battle, a concours a deux. And Joe had known, somehow, from the moment Anapol's secretary took the call, with an illusionist's instinct for hooey, that the threat was a sham, the bomb a fiction. Ebling wanted to frighten Joe, to threaten him into calling off the comic book war that he found so offensive to the dignity of the Third Reich and the person of Adolf Hitler, and yet, at the same time, he was unwilling actually to annihilate the source of a pleasure that in his lonely verbitterte life must be all too rare. If the bomb had been real, Joe thought, I would naturally turn him in. It did not occur to him that if the bomb had been real he would now, quite possibly, be dead; that the next blow in their battle, if it were struck not by the impersonal force of the law but by Joe himself, might well reify the conflict in Ebling's unbalanced mind; and least of all, that he had begun to lose himself in a labyrinth of fantastical revenge whose bone-littered center lay ten thousand miles and three years away.
"Completely," Joe said. "I don't even know the guy."
"What guy is that?"
"What I said. I don't know him."
"I can smell it," Deasey said dubiously. "But I just can't figure it out."
"Mr. Deasey," Sammy said. "What did you want us for?"
"Yes. I wanted- God help me, I wanted to warn you."
Like a wreck being winched from the sea bottom, Deasey lumbered to his feet. He had been drinking since before lunch and, as he got himself upright, nearly fell over again. He went over to the window. The desk, a scarred, tiger-oak behemoth with fifty-two pigeonholes and twenty-four drawers, had followed him from his old office in the Kramler, its drawers stocked with fresh ribbons, blue pencils, pints of rye, black twists of Virginia shag, clean sheets of foolscap, aspirin, Sen-Sen, and sal hepatica. Deasey kept both it and his office spotless, uncluttered, and free of dust. This was the first time in his entire career that he had ever had an office all to himself. This-these fifty square feet of new carpet, blank paper, and inky black ribbons-was the mark and clear summation of what he had attained. He sighed. He slipped two fingers between the slats of the Venetian blinds and let a wan slice of autumn light into the room.
"When they did the Gray Goblin on the DuMont network," he said. "You remember that, Mr. Clay?"
"Sure," Sammy said. "I used to listen sometimes."
"What about Crack Carter! Remember that one?"
"With the bullwhip?"
"Fighting evil amid the tumbleweeds. Sharpe of the Mounties?"
"Sure, absolutely. They all started in the pulps, is that it?"
"They have their common origin in a far more exclusive and decrepit locale than that," Deasey said.
Sammy and Joe looked at each other uncertainly. Deasey tapped his forehead with the tip of the toothpick.
"You were Sharpe of the Mounties?" Sammy asked.
Deasey nodded. "He started out in Racy Adventure."
"And Whiskey, the husky dog with whom he shares an almost uncanny bond?"
"That one ran for five years on NBC Blue," Deasey said. "I never made a dime." He turned from the window. "Now, boys, it's your turn in the barrel."
"They have to pay us something," Sammy said. "After all. I mean, it may not be in the contract-"
"It isn't"
"But Anapol isn't a thief. He's an honorable person."
Deasey pressed his lips together tightly and hoisted the corners. It took Joe a moment to realize that he was smiling.
"It's my experience that honorable people live by the contracts they sign," Deasey said at last. "And not a tittle more."
Sammy looked at Joe. "He isn't cheering me up," he said. "Is he cheering you up?"
The question of a radio program, indeed the entire exchange that had taken place with the slim, silver-haired man wearing the eager expression, had largely escaped Joe. He was still far less proficient in English than he pretended to be, particularly when the subject ran to sports, politics, or business. He had no idea how socks or barrels figured into the discussion.
"That man wants to make a show on the radio about the Escapist," Joe said, slowly, feeling slow, thick-witted, and obscurely abused by inscrutable men.
"He seemed at least to be interested in having his flacks explore the possibility," Deasey said.
"And if they do, you are saying that they will not have to pay us for it."
"I'm saying that."
"But of course they must."
"Not a dime."
"I want a look at that contract," Sammy said.
"Look all you want," Deasey said. "Look it up and down. Hire a lawyer and have him nose around in it. All the rights-radio, movies, books, tin whistles, Cracker Jack prizes-they all belong to Anapol and Ashkenazy. One hundred percent."
"I thought you said you wanted to warn us." Sammy looked annoyed. "It seems to me the time for a warning would have been about a year ago, when we put our names to that piece-of-shit-excuse-my-language contract."
Deasey nodded. "Fair enough," he said. He went to a glass-fronted lawyer's bookcase, stocked with a copy of every pulp magazine in which one of his novels had appeared, each bound in fine morocco and stamped soberly in gold characters racy policeman or racy ace, with the issue number and date of publication and, beneath these, the uniform legend complete works of george deasey. [5] He stepped back and studied the books with, it seemed to Joe, a certain air of regret, though for what, exactly, Joe could not have said. "For what it's worth, here's the warning now. Or call it advice, if you like. You boys were powerless when you signed that contract last year. You aren't quite so powerless anymore. You've had a good run. You've come up with some good ideas that have sold well. You've begun to make a name for yourselves. Now, we could debate the merits of making a name for yourselves in a third-rate industry by cranking out nonsense for numbskulls, but what isn't in doubt is that there's money to be found in this game right now, and you two have shown a knack for dowsing it. Anapol knows it. He knows that, if you wanted to, you could probably walk over to Donenfeld or Arnold or Goodman and write yourself a much better deal to dream up nonsense over there. So that's my warning: stop handing this crap over to Anapol as if you owed it to him."
"Make him pay for it from now on. Make him give us a piece," Sammy said.
"You didn't hear it from me."
"But in the meantime-"
"You are screwed, gentlemen." He consulted his pocket watch. "Now get out. I have duds of my own to secrete about the premises before I-" He broke off and looked at Joe, then stared down at his watch as if trying to make up his mind about something. When he looked up again, his face had twisted in a false, almost sickeningly cheery, rictus. "The hell with it," he said. "I need a drink. Mr. Clay-"
"I know," Sammy said. "I have to finish Strange Frigate."
"No, Mr. Clay," Deasey said, awkwardly settling an arm over the shoulders of each of them and dragging them toward the door. "Tonight you are going to sail on it."
when Carl Ebling looked in the News the next morning, he was disappointed to find not the slightest mention of a bomb scare at the Empire State Building, of the Aryan-American League, or of a fiendish (if for the time being sham) bomber who called himself-deriving the moniker from a shrouded villain who made scattered appearances in the pages of Radio Comics throughout the prewar years-the Saboteur. The last would have been pretty unlikely, since Ebling had, in his nervous haste to squirrel the device in the desk of his imagined nemesis Sam Clay, forgotten to leave the note that he had prepared specially and signed with his nom de guerre. When he checked all the other Saturday papers, once again he found not a word to connect him to anything that had gone on in the city the previous day. The whole matter had been hushed up.
The party thrown for Salvador Dali that last Friday of the New York World's Fair got considerably more play. It rated twenty lines in Leonard Lyons's column, a mention in Ed Sullivan's, and an unsigned squib by E. J. Kahn in "Talk of the Town" the following week. It was also described in one of Auden's letters to Isherwood in L.A., and figured in the published memoirs of at least two mainstays of the Greenwich Village art scene.
The guests of honor, the satrap of Surrealism and his Russian wife, Gala, were in New York to close The Dream of Venus, an attraction, conceived and designed by Dali, that had been among the wonders of the Fair's Amusement Area. Their host, a wealthy New Yorker named Longman Harkoo, was the proprietor of Les Organes du Facteur, a Surrealist art gallery and bookshop on Bleecker Street, inspired by the dreaming postman of Hauterives. Harkoo, who had sold more of Dali's work than any other dealer in the world, and who was a sponsor of The Dream of Venus, had met George Deasey in school, at Collegiate, where the future Underminister of Agitprop for the Unconscious was two years ahead of the future Balzac of the Pulps; they had renewed their acquaintance in the late twenties, when Hearst had posted Deasey to Mexico City.
"Those Olmec heads," Deasey said in the cab on the way downtown. He had insisted on their taking a cab. "That was all he wanted to talk about. He tried to buy one. In fact, I once heard that he did buy it, and he's hidden it in the basement of his house."
"You used them in The Pyramid of Skulls," Sammy said. "Those big heads. There was a secret compartment in the left ear."
"It's bad enough you read them," Deasey said. Sammy had prepared for the composition of his first work as Harvey Slayton by immersing himself deeply in Deasey's oeuvre. "I find it incredibly sad, Clay, that you also remember the titles." Actually, he looked, Joe thought, quite flattered. He probably had never expected, at this point in a career that he so publicly accounted a failure, to encounter a genuine admirer of his work. He seemed to have discovered in himself a tenderness- unsuspected by no one more than he-for both of the cousins, but particularly for Sammy, who still viewed, as a springboard to literary renown, work that Deasey had long since concluded was only "a long, spiraling chute, greased with regular paychecks, to the Tartarus of pseudonymous hackdom." He had shown some of his old poems to Sammy, and the yellowed manuscript of a serious novel that he had never completed. Joe suspected that Deasey had intended these revelations to be warnings to Sammy, but his cousin had chosen to interpret them as proof that success in the pulpwoods was not incompatible with talent, and that he ought not to abandon his own novelistic dreams. "Where was I?"
" Mexico City," Joe said. "Heads."
"Thank you." Deasey took a pull from his flask. He drank an extremely cheap brand of rye called Brass Lamp. Sammy claimed that it was not rye at all but actual lamp oil, as Deasey was strongly nearsighted. "Yes, the mysterious Olmecs." Deasey returned the magic lamp to his breast pocket. "And Mr. Longman Harkoo."
Harkoo, Deasey said, was a Village eccentric of long standing, connected to the founders of one of the posh Fifth Avenue department stores. He was a widower-twice over-who lived in a queer house with a daughter from his first marriage. In addition to looking after the day-to-day affairs of his gallery, orchestrating his disputes with fellow members of the American Communist Party, and pulling off his celebrated fetes, he was also, in idle moments, writing a largely unpunctuated novel, already more than a thousand pages long, which described, in cellular detail, the process of his own birth. He had taken his unlikely name in the summer of 1924, while sharing a house at La Baule with Andre Breton, when a pale, hugely endowed figure calling himself the Long Man of Harkoo recurred five nights running in his dreams.
"Right here," Deasey called out to the driver, and the cab came to a stop in front of a row of indistinct modern apartment blocks. "Pay the fare, will you, Clay? I'm a little short."
Sammy scowled at Joe, who considered that his cousin really ought to have expected this. Deasey was a classic cadger of a certain type, at once offhand and peremptory. But Joe had discovered that Sammy was, in his own way, a classic tightwad. The entire concept of taxicabs seemed to strike Sammy as recherche and decadent, on a par with the eating of songbirds. Joe took a dollar from his wallet and passed it to the driver.
"Keep the change," he said.
The Harkoo house lay entirely hidden from the avenue, "like an emblem (heavy-handed at that) of suppressed nasty urges," as Auden put it in his letter to Isherwood, at the heart of a city block the whole of which subsequently passed into the hands of New York University, was razed, and now forms the site of the massive Levine School of Applied Meteorology. The solid rampart of row houses and apartment blocks that enclosed the Harkoo house and its grounds on all four sides could be breached only by way of a narrow ruelle that slipped unnoticed between two buildings and penetrated, through a tunnel of ailanthus trees, to the dark, leafy yard within.
The house, when they reached it, was a vest-pocket Oriental fantasy, a miniature Topkapi, hardly bigger than a firehouse, squeezed onto its tiny site. It curled like a sleeping cat around a central tower topped witha dome that resembled, among other items, a knob of garlic. Through skillful use of forced perspective and manipulation of scale, the house managed to look much bigger than it really was. Its luxurious coat of Virginia creeper, the gloom of its courtyard, and the artless jumble of its gables and spires gave the place an antique air, but it had in fact been completed in September 1930, around the time that Al Smith was laying the cornerstone for the Empire State Building. Like that structure, it was a kind of dream habitation, having, like the Long Man of Harkoo himself, originally appeared to Longman Harkoo in his sleep, giving him the excuse he had long sought to pull down the dull old Greek Revival house that had been the country home of his mother's family since the founding of Greenwich Village. That house had itself replaced a much earlier structure, dating to the first years of British dominion, in which-or so Harkoo claimed-a Dutch-Jewish forebear of his had entertained the devil during his 1682 tour of the colonies.
Joe noticed that Sammy was hanging back a little, looking up at the miniature tower, absently massaging the top of his left thigh, his face solemn and nervous in the light of the torches that flanked the door. In his gleaming pinstriped suit, he reminded Joe of their character the Monitor, armored for battle against perfidious foes. Suddenly Joe felt apprehensive, too. It had not quite sunk in until now, with all the talk of bombs and woolens and radio programs, that they had come downtown with Deasey to attend a party.
Neither of the cousins was much for parties. Though Sammy was mad for swing, he could not, of course, dance on his pipe-cleaner legs; his nerves killed his appetite, and at any rate, he was too self-conscious about his manners to eat anything; and he disliked the flavor of liquors and beer. Introduced into a cursed circle of jabber and jazz, he would drift helplessly behind a large plant. His brash and heedless gift of conversation, by means of which he had whipped up Amazing Midget Radio Comics and with it the whole idea of Empire, deserted him. Put him in front of a roomful of people at work and he would be impossible to shut up; work was not work for him. Parties were work. Women were work. At Palooka Studios, whenever there occurred the chance conjunction of girls and a bottle, Sammy simply vanished, like Mike Campbell's fortune, at first a little at a time, and then all at once.
Joe, on the other hand, had always been the boy for a party in Prague. He could do card tricks and hold his alcohol; he was an excellent dancer. In New York, however, all this seemed to have changed. He had too much work to do, and parties seemed a great waste of his time. The conversation came fast and slangy, and he had trouble following the gags and patter of the men and the sly double-talk of the ladies. He was vain enough to dislike it when something he said in all seriousness for some reason broke up a room. But the greatest obstacle he faced was that he did not feel that he ought-ever-to be enjoying himself socially. Even when he went to the movies, he did so in a purely professional capacity, studying them for ideas about light and imagery and pacing that he could borrow or adapt in his comic book work. Now he drew back alongside his cousin, looking up at the scowling torchlit face of the house, ready to run at the first signal from Sam.
"Mr. Deasey," Sammy said, "listen. I feel I've got to confess… I haven't even started Strange Frigate yet. Don't you think I better-"
"Yes," Joe said. "And I have the cover for The Monitor-"
"All you need is a drink, boys." Deasey looked greatly amused by their sudden qualms of conscience and courage. "That will make it go much easier when they pitch you both into the volcano. I presume you are virgins?" They scraped up the rough, clinker-brick front steps. Deasey turned, and all at once his face looked grave and admonitory. "Just don't let him hug you," he said.
The party had originally been planned for the pint-sized mansion's ballroom, but when that room was rendered uninhabitable by the noise from Salvador Dali's breathing apparatus, everyone crowded into the library instead. Like all the rooms in the house, the library was diminutive, built to a three-quarter scale that gave visitors a disquieting sense of giantism. Sammy and Joe squeezed in behind Deasey to find the room packed to the point of immobility with Transcendental Symbolists, Purists, and Vitalists, copywriters in suits the color of new Studebakers, socialist banjo players, writers for Mademoiselle, experts on Yuggogheny cannibal cults and bird-worshipers of the Indochinese Highlands, composers of twelve-tone requiems and of slogans for Eas-O-Cran, the Original New England Laxative. The gramophone-and (of course) the bar-had been carried up to the library as well, and over the heads of the crammed-together guests there veered the notes of an Armstrong trumpet solo. Beneath this bright glaze of jazz and a frothy layer of conversation there was a low, heavy rumbling from the distant air compressor. Along with the smells of perfume and cigarettes, the air in the room had a faint motor-oil smell of the wharves.
"Hello, George." Harkoo fought his way toward them, a round, broad, not at all long man, with thinning coppery hair cropped close. "I was hoping you would show."
"Hello, Siggy." Deasey stiffened and offered his hand in a way that struck Joe as defensive or even protective, and then, in the next instant, the man he called Siggy had put a wrestling hold on him, in which seemed to be mingled affection and a desire to snap bones.
"Mr. Clay, Mr. Kavalier," Deasey said, fighting free of the embrace like Houdini jerking and thrashing his way out of a wet straitjacket. "May I-present-Longman Harkoo, known to those who prefer not to indulge him as Mr. Siegfried Saks."
Joe had an uneasy feeling, as if the name meant something to him, but he could not quite get hold of the connection. He searched his memory for "Siegfried Saks," shuffling through the cards, trying to pop the ace that he knew was in there somewhere.
"Welcome!" The former Mr. Saks let go of his old friend and turned smiling to the cousins; they each took a step back, but he just offered them his hand, with a mischievous twinkle in his mild blue eyes that seemed to suggest he subjected to his demonic hugs only those who least liked to be touched. At a time when an honorable place in the taxonomy of male elegance was still reserved for the genus Fat Man, Harkoo was a classic instance of the Mystic Potentate species, managing to look at once commanding, stylish, and ultramundane in a vast purple-and-brown caftan, heavily embroidered, that hung down almost to the tops of his Mexican sandals. The little toe of his horny right foot, Joe saw, was adorned with a garnet ring. A venerable Kodak Brownie hung from an Indian-beaded strap around his neck.
"Sorry about all that racket downstairs," he said with a hint of weariness.
"Is it really him?" Sammy said. "Inside that thing?"
"It really is. I've tried to coax him out of it. I told him it was a marvelous idea in the, you know, the abstract, but in practice… But he's a terribly stubborn man. I've never known a genius who was not."
The doorman had pointed Dali out to them when they came in, standing in the ballroom, just off the front hall. He was wearing a deep-sea diving costume, complete with rubberized canvas coverall and globular brass helmet. A striking woman whom Deasey identified as Gala Dali stood loyally by her husband's side in the middle of the empty room, along with two or three other people too stubborn, too sycophantic, or perhaps simply too deaf to mind the intolerable coughing hum of the large gasoline-powered air pump, to which the Master was connected by a length of rubber hose. They were all yelling at the top of their lungs. "No one at the party," as Kahn wrote in The New Yorker, was ill-mannered enough to ask Dali what he intended by this get-up. Most took it to be either an allusion to the tenebrous benthos of the human unconscious or else to "The Dream of Venus," which as everyone knows featured a school of live girls dressed up as mermaids swimming around half-naked in a tank. In any case Dali would not, in all likelihood, have been able to hear the question through the diving helmet.
"But never mind," Harkoo continued cheerily, "we're all quite cozy in here. Welcome, welcome. Comic books, is it? Marvelous stuff. Love it. Regular reader. Positively a devotee."
Sammy beamed. Harkoo slipped the camera from around his neck and handed it to Joe. "I'd be very honored if you would take my picture," he said.
"Please? I'm sorry?"
"Take a picture of me. With the camera." He looked at Deasey. "Does he speak English?"
"He has his own brand. Mr. Kavalier is from Prague."
"Very good! Yes, you must! I have a marked deficit of Czech impressions."
Deasey nodded to Joe, who raised the camera's viewfinder to his left eye and framed Longman Harkoo's big, cracked-baby face. Harkoo settled his jowls and eyebrows into a sober, nearly blank expression, but his eyes gleamed with pleasure. Joe had never in his life made anyone so happy so easily.
"How do I focus it?" Joe asked him, lowering the camera.
"Oh, don't bother about that. Just look at me and push the little lever. Your mind will do the rest."
"My mind." Joe snapped a photo of his host, then handed the camera back to him. "The camera is…" He searched for the word in English. "Telepathic."
"All cameras are," his host said mildly. "I have been photographed now by seven thousand one hundred and… eighteen… people, all with this camera, and I assure you that no two portraits are alike." He handed the camera to Sammy, and his features, as if stamped from a machine, once more settled into the same corpulent happy mask. Sammy snapped the lever. "What possible other explanation can there be for this endless variation but interference by waves emanating from the photographer's own mind?"
Joe did not know how to reply to this, but he saw that a reply was expected, and as the intensity of his host's expectation increased, he realized somewhat belatedly what that reply must be.
"None," he said finally.
Longman Harkoo looked extremely pleased. He put one arm across Sammy's shoulders and the other across Joe's and, with a good deal of shoving and apologizing, managed to take them on a tour of their immediate neighbors, introducing them to painters and writers and various holders of cocktails, furnishing each, without even appearing to stop to organize his thoughts, with a miniature curriculum vitae that touched on the high points of their oeuvres, sex lives, or family connections.
"… her sister is married to a Roosevelt, don't ask me which one… you must have seen his Art and Agon… she's standing right under one of her ex-husband's paintings… he was publicly slapped by Siquieros…"
Most of the names were unfamiliar to Joe, but he did recognize Raymond Scott, a composer who had recently hit it big with a series of whimsical, cacophonous, breakneck pseudo-jazz pop tunes. Just the other day, when Joe stopped in at Hippodrome Radio, they had been playing his new record, Yesterthoughts and Stranger, over the store PA. Scott was feeding a steady diet of Louis Armstrong platters to the portable RCA while explaining what he had meant when he referred to Satchmo as the Einstein of the blues. As the notes fluttered out of the fabric-covered loudspeaker, he would point at them, as if to illustrate what he was saying, and even tried to snatch at one with his hands. He kept turning the volume up, the better to compete with the less important conversations taking place ail around him. Over there, under the saguaro cactus, was the girl painter Loren MacIver, whose luminous canvases Joe had admired at the Paul Matisse gallery. Tall, overly thin by Joe's lights, but with a New York kind of beauty-sharp, tense, stylish-she was chatting with a tall, striking Aryan beauty who was holding a tiny baby to her breast. "Miss Uta Hagen," Harkoo explained. "She's married to Jose Ferrer, he's around here someplace. They're doing Charley's Aunt."
The women offered their hands. MacIver's eyes were kohled, her lips painted a surprising shade of cocoa.
"These gentlemen make comic books," Harkoo told them. "The adventures of a fellow named the Escaper. Wears a union suit. Big muscles. Vapid expression."
"The Escapist," said Loren MacIver. Her face lit up. "Oh, I like him."
"You do?" said Sammy and Joe together.
"A man in a mask, who likes to be tied up with ropes?"
Miss Hagen laughed. "Sounds racy."
"It's quite surreal," Harkoo said.
"That's good, right?" Sammy said to Joe in a whisper. Joe nodded. "Just checking."
They made their way past several more curricula vitae holding cocktails, as well as a number of actual Surrealists, like raisins studded in a pudding. For the most part these seemed to be a remarkably serious, even sober bunch of fellows. They wore dark suits with waistcoats and solid neckties. Most of them seemed to be Americans-Peter Blume, Edwin Dickinson, a shy, courtly fellow named Joseph Cornell-who shared an air of steel-rimmed, Yankee probity that surrounded like a suburb their inner Pandemonium. Joe tried to keep all the names straight, but he was still not sure who Charley was or what was being done by Uta Hagen to his aunt.
At the far end of the library, a number of men had gathered into a tight, jostling ring around a very pretty, very young woman who was talking at what must have been the top of her lungs. Joe could not really understand what she was telling them, but it appeared to be a story that reflected poorly on her own judgment-she was blushing and grinning at the same time-and it unquestionably ended with the word "fuck." She tugged on the word, drawing it out to several times its usual length. She wound it all the way around her in two or three big loops and reveled in it as if it were a luxuriant shawl.
"Fuuuuuuuck."
The men around her burst out laughing, and she blushed even more deeply. She had on a loose, sleeveless kind of smock, and you could see the flush reaching all the way down past her shoulders to the tops of her arms. Then she looked up, and her eyes met Joe's.
"Saks," Joe said, producing the card at last. "Rosa Luxemburg Saks."
"Nah," Sammy said. "Is it?"
It was fascinating to see her face again after so long. Although Joe had never forgotten the girl whom he had surprised that morning in Jerry Glovsky's bedroom, he saw that, in his nocturnal reimaginings of the moment, he had badly misremembered her. He never would have recalled her forehead as so capacious and high, her chin as so delicately pointed. In fact, her face would have seemed overlong were it not counterbalanced by an extravagant flying buttress of a nose. Her rather small lips were set in a bright red hyphen that curved downward just enough at one corner to allow itself to be read as a smirk of amusement, from which she herself was not exempted, at the surrounding tableau of human vanity. And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.
The men around her had parted reluctantly as Harkoo, providing blocking for Joe and Sammy like a back for the latter's beloved Dodgers, shoehorned them into the circle.
"We've met," Rosa said. It was almost a question. She had a strong, deep, droll, masculine voice, turned up to a point that verged on speaker-rattling, as if she were daring everyone around her to listen and to judge. But then maybe, Joe thought, she was just very drunk. There was a glass of something amber in her hand. In any case, her voice went well, somehow, with her dramatic features and the wild mass of brown woolen loops, constrained here and there by a desperate bobby pin, that constituted her hairstyle. She gave his hand a squeeze that partook of the same bold intentions as her voice, a businessman's shake, dry and curt and forceful. And yet he noticed that she was, if anything, blushing more obviously than ever. The delicate skin over her clavicles was mottled.
"I don't believe so," said Joe. He coughed, partly to cover his discomfiture, partly to camouflage the suave rejoinder he had just been fed by the prompter crouching by the footlights of his desire, and partly because his throat had gone bone-dry. He felt a weird urge to lean down- she was a small woman, the top of whose head barely reached his collarbone-and kiss her on the mouth, in front of everyone, as he might have done in a dream, with that long optimistic descent across the distance between their lips enduring for minutes, hours, centuries. How surreal would that be? Instead, he reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes. "Someone like you I would absolutely remember," he said.
"Oh, good God," said one of the men beside her in disgust.
The young woman to whom he was lying produced a smile which- Joe couldn't tell-might have been either flattered or appalled. Her smile was a surprisingly broad and toothy achievement for a mouth that in contemplation had been compacted into such a tiny pout.
"Huh," said Sammy. He, at least, sounded impressed by Joe's suavity.
Longman Harkoo said, "That's our cue." He put his arm once more around Sammy's shoulder. "Let's get you a drink, shall we?"
"Oh, I don't- I'm not-" Sammy reached out to Joe as Harkoo led him away, as though worried that their host was about to drag him off to the promised volcano. Joe watched him go with a cold heart. Then he held the pack of Pall Malls out to Rosa. She tugged a cigarette free and put it to her lips. She took a long drag. Joe felt constrained to point out that the cigarette was not lit.
"Oh," she said. She snorted. "I'm such an idiot."
" Rosa," chided one of the men standing beside her, "you don't smoke!"
"I just took it up," Rosa said.
There was a muffled groan, then the cloud of men around her seemed to dissolve. She took no notice. She inclined toward Joe and peered up, curving her hand around his and the flame of the match. Her eyes shone, an indeterminate color between champagne and the green of a dollar. Joe felt feverish and a little dizzy, and the cool talcum smell of Shalimar she gave off was like a guardrail he could lean against. They had drawn very close together, and now, as he tried and failed to prevent himself from thinking of her lying naked and facedown on Jerry Glovsky's bed, her broad downy backside with its dark furrow, the alluvial hollow of her spine, she took a step backward and studied him.
"You're sure we haven't met."
"Fairly."
"Where are you from?"
" Prague."
"You're Czech. "
He nodded.
"A Jew?"
He nodded again.
"How long have you been here?"
"One year," he said, and then, the realization filling him with wonder and chagrin, "one year today."
"Did you come with your family?"
"Alone," he said. "I left them there." Unbidden, there flashed in his mind's eye the image of his father, or the ghost of his father, striding down the gangplank of the Rotterdam , arms outstretched. Tears stung his eyes, and a ghostly hand seemed to clutch at his throat. Joe coughed once and batted at the smoke from his cigarette, as if it were irritating him. "My father has recently died."
She shook her head, looking sorrowful and outraged and, he thought, entirely lovely. As his glibness had departed him, so a more earnest nature seemed to feel greater liberty to confess itself in her.
"I'm really sorry for you," she said. "My heart goes out to them."
"It's not so bad," Joe said. "It will be all right."
"You know we're getting into this war," she declared. She wasn't blushing now. The brass-voiced party girl of a moment before, telling a story on herself that ended in an oath, seemed to have vanished. "We have to, and we will. Roosevelt will arrange it. He's working toward it now. We won't let them win."
"No," Joe said, though Rosa's views were hardly typical of her countrymen, most of whom felt that the events in Europe were an embroilment to be avoided at any price. "I believe…" He found himself, to his mild surprise, unable to finish the sentence. She reached out and took his arm.
"What I'm saying is just, I don't know. I guess 'don't despair,'" she said. "I really, really do mean that, Joe."
At her words, the touch of her hand, her pronouncing of his short blank American name devoid of all freight and family associations, Joe was overcome with a flood of gratitude so powerful that it frightened him, because it seemed to reflect in its grandeur and force just how little hope he really had left. He pulled away.
"Thank you," he said stiffly.
She let her hand fall, dismayed at having offended him. "I'm sorry," she said again. She lifted an eyebrow, quizzical, bold, and on the verge, he thought, of recognizing him. Joe averted his eyes, his heart in his throat, thinking that if she were able to recollect him and the circumstances of their first meeting, his chances with her would be ruined. Her eyes got very big, and her throat, her cheeks, her ears were flooded with the bright heart's blood of humiliation. Joe could see her making an effort not to look away.
Just then a series of sharp metallic sounds cut the air, as if someone had thrust a spanner into the blades of a giant fan. The room fell silent, and everyone stood listening as the harsh chopping sounds ceased and were followed by an oscillating mechanical whine. A woman screamed, her musical horror carrying all the way up from the ballroom on the ground floor. Everyone turned to the door of the library.
"Help!" came a cry from downstairs, a man's hoarse voice. "He's drowning!"
Salvador Dali lay on his back in the middle of the ballroom floor, smacking ineffectually at the helmet of his diving suit with his gloved hands. His wife knelt beside him, working fiercely at a wingnut that kept the helmet bolted to the brass collar of the suit. A vein bulged in her forehead. A heavy lump of black onyx that she wore at the end of a thick gold chain kept clapping against the bell of the diving helmet.
"Il devient bleu," she observed in a calm panic. Two of the guests ran to Dali's side. One of them-it was the composer, Scott-brushed Senora Dali's hands away and took hold of the wings of the nut. Longman Harkoo barreled across the room, showing surprising alacrity for one of his girth. He began to slap at the whining air pump with the sole of his sandaled right foot.
"It's jammed! It's overloaded! Oh, what's the matter with this thing!"
"He's not getting any oxygen!" offered someone.
"Get that helmet off him!" another suggested.
"What the fuck do you think I'm trying to do!" shouted the composer.
"Stop shouting!" cried Harkoo. He pushed Scott out of the way now, grabbed the wingnut in his meaty fingers, and threw all of his bulk and momentum into a single great twist. The nut turned. He grinned. The nut turned again, and the grin faded. The nut turned, and turned, and turned again, never loosening; it had become fused to the bolt.
Joe stood in the doorway beside Rosa, watching, and as the nut turned helplessly in her father's fingers, she took hold of Joe's arm with both hands, without seeming to notice that she was doing so, and squeezed. The plea for his help implicit in the gesture thrilled and alarmed him. He reached into his pocket and took out the Victorinox knife that had been a gift from Thomas on his seventeenth birthday.
"What are you doing?" she said, letting go of him.
He didn't answer. He walked quickly across the room and knelt down beside Gala Dali, whose armpits smelled oddly of fennel seed. After ascertaining that Salvador Dali was indeed beginning to turn blue, Joe opened the screwdriver blade of the knife. He jammed it into the slot on the bolt head to hold the bolt steady. Then he worked the nut. Through the wire grid of the face plate, his eyes met Dali's, abulge with terror and asphyxia. A stream of muffled Spanish rattled against the far side of the inch-thick glass. As near as Joe could tell-his Spanish was poor-Dali was calling abjectly for the intercession of the Holy Mother of God. The bolt held. Joe bit down hard on his lip and twisted until his fingers felt that they would split at the tips. There was a snap, and the nut began to protest and grow warm. Then, slowly, it gave. Fourteen seconds later, with a loud Dom Perignon pop, Joe yanked the helmet off.
Dali gave great sobbing gasps as they helped him out of his suit. New York, though lucrative, was in many ways a dangerous place for him: in the spring of 1938, he had made all the papers by falling through a display window at Bonwit Teller. A glass of water was brought; he sat up and drained it. The left brachium of his famous mustache had wilted. He asked for a cigarette. Joe gave him one and held a match to it. Dali inhaled deeply, coughed, picked a flake of tobacco from his lip. Then he nodded to Joe.
"Jeune homme, vous avez sauve une vie de tres grand valeur," he said.
"Je le sais bien, maitre," said Joe.
He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was Longman Harkoo.
He was beaming, fairly rocking up and down in his sandals at the turn things had taken. The near death of a world-famous painter in a diving accident, in a Greenwich Village drawing room, contributed an unimpeachable Surrealist luster to the party.
"Hot stuff," he said.
Then the party seemed to close its fingers around Joe, treasuring him in its palm. He was a hero [6] People gathered around, tossing handfuls of hyperbolic adjectives and coarse expostulations at his head, holding their pale tin-pan faces up to his as if to catch a splash of his rattling-jackpot moment of glory. Sammy managed to swim or shoulder his way through the people slapping and grabbing at Joe, and gave him a hug. George Deasey brought him a drink that was bright and cold as metal in his mouth. Joe nodded slowly, without speaking, accepting their tributes and acclaim with the sullen, abstracted air of a victorious athlete, breathing deep. It was nothing to him: noise, smoke, jostling, a confusion of perfumes and hair oils, a throb of pain in his right hand. He looked around the room, rising on tiptoe to see over the waxy tops of men's heads, peering through the dense foliage of the plumes on women's hats, searching Rosa out. All his self-denial, his Escapist purity of intentions, were forgotten in the flush of triumph and a sense of calm very like that which pervaded him after he had taken a beating. It seemed to him that his fortunes, his life, the entire apparatus of his sense of self were concentrated only on the question of what Rosa Saks would think of him now.
"She fairly bounded across the room to him," as E. J. Kahn would afterward describe it-referring in his item to Rosa (whom he knew slightly) only as "a fetching Village art maiden"-and then, after managing to reach him, she seemed to grow suddenly shy.
"What did he say to you?" she wanted to know. "Dali."
" 'Thank you,' " said Joe.
"That's all?"
"He called me 'jeune homme.'"
"I thought I heard you speaking French," she said, hugging herself to still a tremor of unmistakable, almost maternal pride. Joe, seeing his exploit so richly rewarded by the flush in her cheeks and her unwavering regard, stood there scratching at the side of his nose with the thumb of his right hand, embarrassed by the ease of his success, like a fighter who mats his opponent nineteen seconds into the first round.
"I know who you are," she said, coloring again. "I mean, I… remember you now."
"I remember you, too," he said, hoping it did not sound salacious.
"How would you… I'd like you to see my paintings," she said. "If you want to, I mean. I have a-a studio upstairs."
Joe hesitated. From the time of his arrival in New York City, he had never permitted himself to speak to a woman for pleasure. It was not an easy thing to do in English, and anyway, he had not come here to flirt with girls. He didn't have time for it, and furthermore, he did not feel that he was entitled to such pleasures, or to the commitments that they would inevitably entail. He felt-it was not an articulated feeling, but it was powerful and, in its way, a comfort to him-that he could justify his own liberty only to the degree that he employed it to earn the freedom of the family he had left behind. His life in America was a conditional thing, provisional, unencumbered with personal connections beyond his friendship and partnership with Sammy Clay.
At this very moment, Joe's attention was diverted by the sound of someone, somewhere in the drawing room, talking in German. He turned and searched among the faces and the blare of conversation until he found the lips that were moving in time to the elegant Teutonic syllables he was hearing. They were fleshy, sensual lips, in a severe way, downturned at the corners in a somehow intelligent frown, a frown of keen judgment and bitter good sense. The frowner was a trim, fit man in a black turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, rather chinless but with a high forehead and a large, dignified German nose. His hair was fine and fair, and his bright black eyes held a puckish gleam that belied the grave frown. There was great enthusiasm in the eyes, pleasure in the subject of his discourse. He was talking, as far as Joe could tell, about the Negro dance team the Nicholas Brothers.
Joe felt the familiar exultation, the epinephrine flame that burned away doubt and confusion and left only a pure, clear, colorless vapor of rage. He took a deep breath and turned his back on the man. [7]
"I would love to see your work," he said.
The pitch of the staircase was steep and the treads narrow. There were three stories above the ground floor, and she took him all the way to the top. It got darker and spookier as they climbed. The walls on either side of the stairs were hung with hundreds of framed portraits of her father, carefully fit together like tiles to cover every inch of available space. In each of them, as far as Joe could tell from a hasty inspection, the subject wore the same goofy suppressing-a-fart expression, and if there was any significant difference among them, apart from the fact that some people were evidently more adept at telepathically focusing a lens than others, it was lost on Joe. As they made their way up through the increasing gloom, Joe seemed to steer only according to the light shed by the action of her palm against his wrist, by the low steady flow of voltage through the conducting medium of their sweat. He stumbled like a drunken man and laughed as she hurried him along. He was vaguely aware of the ache in his hand, but he ignored it. As they turned the landing to the top floor, a strand of her hair caught in the corner of his mouth, and for an instant he crunched it between his teeth.
She took him into a small room in the middle of the house, which curved queerly where it backed up against the central tower. In addition to her tiny, girlish white iron bed, a small dresser, and a nightstand, she had crowded in an easel, a photo enlarger, two bookcases, a drawing table, and a thousand and one other items piled atop one another, strewn about, and jammed together with remarkable industry and abandon.
"This is your studio?" Joe said.
A smaller blush this time, at the tips of her ears.
"Also my bedroom," she said. "But I wasn't going to ask you to come up to that."
There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it. Sometime around four o'clock that morning, for example, half-disentangled from the tulle of a dream, she had reached for the chewed stub of a Ticonderoga she kept by her bed for this purpose. When, just after dawn, she awoke, she found a scrap of loose-leaf paper in her left hand, scrawled with the cryptic legend "lampedusa." She had run to the unabridged on its lonely lectern in the library, where she learned this was the name of a small island in the Mediterranean Sea, between Malta and Tunisia. Then she had returned to her room, taken a big thumbtack with an enameled red head from an El Producto box she kept on her supremely "cluttered-up" desk, and tacked the scrap of paper to the eastern wall of her room, where it overlapped a photograph, torn from the pages of Life, of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy's handsome eldest son, tousled and wearing a Choate cardigan. The scrap joined a reproduction of a portrait of Arthur Rimbaud at seventeen, dreaming with chin in palm; the entire text of her only play, a Jarry-influenced one-act called Homunculus Uncle; plates, sliced from art books, of a detail from Bosch that depicted a woman being pursued by an animate celery, of Edvard Munch's Madonna, of several Picasso "blue" paintings, and of Klee's Cosmic Flora; Ignatius Donnelly's map of Atlantis, traced; a grotesquely vibrant full-color photo, also courtesy of Life, of four cheerful strips of bacon; a spavined dead locust, forelegs arrested in an attitude of pleading; as well as some three hundred other scraps of paper bearing the numinous vocabulary of her dreams, a puzzling lexicon that included "grampus," "ullage," "parbuckle," and some entirely fictitious words, such as "luben" and "salactor." Socks, blouses, skirts, tights, and twisted underpants lay strewn across teetering piles of books and phonograph albums, the floor was thick with paint-soaked rags and chromo-chaotic cardboard palettes, canvases stacked four deep stood against the walls. She had discovered the surrealistic potential of food, about which she had rather pioneeringly complicated emotions, and everywhere lay portraits of broccoli stalks, cabbage heads, tangerines, turnip greens, mushrooms, beets-big, colorful, drunken tableaux that reminded Joe of Robert Delaunay.
When they walked into the room, Rosa went over to the phonograph and switched it on. When the needle hit the groove, the scratches on the disk popped and crackled like a burning log. Then the air was filled with a festive wheeze of violins.
"Schubert," said Joe, rocking on his heels. "The Trout."
"The Trout's my favorite," Rosa said.
"Me too."
"Look out."
Something hit him in the face, something soft and alive. Joe brushed at his mouth and came away with a small black moth. It had electric-blue transverse bands on its belly. He shuddered.
Rosa said, "Moths."
"Moths more than one?"
She nodded and pointed to the bed.
Joe noticed now that there were a fair number of moths in the room, most of them small and brown and unremarkable, scattered on the blankets of the narrow bed, flecking the walls, sleeping in the folds of the curtains.
"It's an annoyance," she said. "They're all over the upstairs of the house. Nobody's really sure why. Sit down."
He found a moth-free spot on the bed and sat down.
"Apparently there were moths all through the last house, too," she said. She knelt down before him. "And in the one before that. That was the one where the murder happened. What's the matter with your finger?"
"It's sore. From when I was turning the screw."
"It looks dislocated."
His right index finger was curled a little to one side, in a queer parenthetical crook.
"Give me your hand. Come on, it's all right. I was almost a nurse once."
He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style. She turned his hand over and over, probed delicately with the tips of her own fingers at the joints and skin.
"Doesn't it hurt?"
"Actually," he said. The pain, now that he attended to it, was fairly sharp.
"I can fix it."
"You really are a nurse? I thought you worked at Life the magazine."
She shook her head.
"No, I'm really not a nurse," she said briskly, as if skipping over some incident or emotion she preferred to keep to herself. "It was just something I-pursued." She gave an explanatory sigh as if tired of her own tale. "I wanted to be a nurse in Spain. You know. In the war. I volunteered. I had a post in a hospital run by the A.C.P. in Madrid, but I… hey." She let his hand fall. "How did you know…"
"I saw your business card."
"My- Oh." He was rewarded with a full new flush. "Yes, it's such a bad habit," she went on, resuming her big stage voice though there was no crowd to overhear the performance, "leaving things in men's bedrooms."
Joe wasn't, in Sammy's phrase, buying any of that. He would have been willing to bet not only that having left her purse behind in Jerry Glovsky's room had mortified Rosa Luxemburg Saks but that her habits did not even encompass the regular visiting of men's bedrooms.
"This is going to hurt," she promised him.
"Badly?"
"Horribly, but only for a second."
"All right."
She looked at him, steadily, and licked her lips, and he had just noticed that the pale brown irises of her eyes were flecked with green and gold when abruptly she twisted his hand one way and his finger the other, and, crazing his arm to the elbow with instantaneous veins of lightning and fire, set the joint back into place.
"Wow."
"Hurt?"
He shook his head, but there were tears rolling down his cheeks.
"Anyway," she said. "I had a ticket from New York to Cartagena on the Bernardo. On March twenty-fifth, 1939. On the twenty-third, my stepmother died very suddenly. My father was devastated. I postponed sailing for a week. On the thirty-first, the Falangists took Madrid."
Joe remembered the Fall of Madrid. It had come two weeks after the fall, uncapitalized, disregarded, of Prague.
"You were disappointed?"
"Crushed." She cocked her head to one side, as if listening to the echo of the word she had just uttered. She gave her head a decisive shake. A curl slipped free of its pin and tumbled down the side of her face. She brushed it irritably to one side. "You want to know something? Honestly, I was relieved. What a coward, huh?"
"I don't think so."
"Oh, yes. I am. A big coward. That's why I just keep daring myself to do things I'm afraid of doing."
He had a notion. "Such things like?"
"Like bringing you up here to my room."
This was unquestionably the moment to kiss her. Now he was the coward. He leaned over and started to flip with his good hand through a stack of paintings by the bed. "Very good," he said after a moment. Her brushwork seemed hasty and impatient, but her portraits-the term "still life" did not suffice-of produce, canned foods, and the occasional trotter or lamb chop were at once whimsical, worshipful, and horrifying, and managed to suggest their subjects perfectly without wasting too much time on the details. Her line was very strong; she could draw as well as he, perhaps better. But she took no pains with her work. The paint was streaked, blotchy, studded with dirt and bristles; the edges of paintings often were left ragged and blank; where she couldn't get something quite right, she just blotted it out with furious, petulant strokes. "I can almost to smell them. What murder?"
"Huh?"
"You said there was a murder."
"Oh, yes. Caddie Horslip. She was a socialite or a debutante or-they hung my great-granduncle for it. Moses Espinoza. It was a huge sensation at the time, back in the eighteen-sixties, I think." She noticed that she was still holding his hand. She let it go. "There. Good as new. Have you got a cigarette?"
He lit one for her. She continued to kneel in front of him, and there was something about it that aroused him. It made him feel like a wounded soldier, making time in a field hospital with his pretty American nurse.
"He was a lepidopterist, Moses," she said.
"A-?"
"He studied moths."
"Oh."
"He knocked her out with ether and killed her with a pin. Or at least that's what my father says. He's probably lying. I made a dreambook about it."
"A pin," he said. "Ouch." He waggled his finger. "It's good, I think. You fixed it."
"Hey, how about that."
"Thank you, Rosa."
"You're welcome, Joe. Joe. You don't make a very convincing Joe."
"Not yet," he said. He flexed his hand, turned it over, studied it. "Am I going to be able to draw?"
"I don't know, can you draw now?"
"I'm not bad. What's a dreambook?"
She set the burning cigarette down on a phonograph record that lay on the floor beside her and went to her desk. "Would you like to see one?"
Joe bent over and picked up the cigarette, holding it upright between the very tips of his fingers as though it were a stick of burning dynamite. It had melted a small divot into the second movement of Mendelssohn's Octet.
"Here, this is one. I can't seem to find the Caddie Horslip."
"Really?" he said dryly. "What a surprise."
"Don't be smart, it's unattractive in a man."
He handed the cigarette to her and took from her a large, clothbound book, black with a red spine. It was an accounts ledger, swollen to twice its normal thickness, like a book left out in the rain, from all the things pasted into it. When he turned to the first page, he found the words "Airplane Dream #13" written in an odd, careful hand like a scattering of spindly twigs.
"Numbered," he said. "It's like a comic book."
"Well, there are just so many. I'd lose track."
"Airplane Dream #13" told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it-there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery-but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were images from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled Crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been thoroughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in drawings and diagrams, and an elaborate system of cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books. Joe started to read sitting down in her desk chair, but before long, without noticing, he had risen to his feet and started pacing around the room. He stepped on a moth without noticing.
"These must take hours," he said.
"Hours."
"How many have you done?"
She pointed to a painted chest at the foot of her bed. "A lot."
"It is beautiful. Exciting."
He sat down on the bed and finished reading, and then she asked him about what he did. Joe permitted himself, for the first time in a year, to consider himself, under the pressure of her interest in him andwhat he did, an artist. He described the hours he had put into his covers, lavishing detail on the flanges and fins of a death-wave generator, distorting and exaggerating his perspectives with mathematic precision, dressing up Sammy and Julie and the others and taking test photographs to get his poses right, painting luscious plumes of fire that, when printed, seemed to burn the slick ink and paper of the cover itself. He told her about his experiments with a film vocabulary, his sense of the emotional moment of a panel, and of the infinitely expandable and contractible interstice of time that lay between the panels of a comic book page. Sitting on Rosa's moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velazquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat.
At some point, he noticed that she was looking at him with a strange air of expectancy, or dread, and he stopped. "What is it?"
"Lampedusa," she said.
"What's that? Lampedusa?"
Her eyes widened as she waited, in expectancy or dread. She nodded.
"You mean the island?"
"Oh!" She threw her arms around his neck, and he fell backward on the bed. Moths scattered. The sateen coverlet brushed against his cheek like a moth's wing.
"Hey!" said Joe. Then she settled her mouth on his and left it there, lips parted, whispering an unintelligible dreambook sentence.
"Hello? Hey! Joe, you up here?"
Joe sat up. "Shit."
"Is that your brother?"
"My cousin Sam. My partner. In here, Sam," he said.
Sammy stuck his head in the door of the bedroom.
"Oh, hi," he said. "Jeez, I'm sorry. I was just-"
"She's a nurse," Joe said, feeling oddly culpable, as if he had somehow betrayed Sammy and must excuse his presence here. He held up his repaired hand. "She fixed it."
"That's great, uh, hi. Sam Clay."
"Rosa Saks."
"Listen, Joe, I was uh-I was just wondering if you were ready to leave this-excuse me, Miss, I know you live here and all-creepy place."
Joe could see that something had upset Sammy.
"What is it?"
"The kitchen…"
"The kitchen?"
"It's black."
Rosa laughed. "True," she said.
"I don't know. I just-I just want to get home, you know. Get to work on that thing. The uh, sorry. Forget about it. I'll see you."
He turned and started out. In Joe's absence, he had undergone a strange experience. He had wandered through the ballroom and a small conservatory behind it and into the mansion's kitchen, where the walls and floor were covered in gleaming black tile and the countertops coated with black enamel. There were a fair number of people crowded in there as well, and, hoping to find a place where he could be alone for just a moment and perhaps use the toilet, he had turned into a large butler's pantry. Here he had come upon the unlikely sight of two men, each wearing, with the overdetermination of a dream, a necktie and a mustache, embracing, their mustaches interlocked in a way that had reminded Sammy, for some reason, of the way his mother used to fit his comb into the bristles of the brush on top of his dresser when he was a kid.
Sammy had backed quickly out of the kitchen and come looking for Joe; he felt that he wanted to leave, right away. He knew about homosexuality, of course, as an idea, without ever having really connected it to human emotion; certainly never to any emotion of his own. It had never occurred to him that two men, even homosexual men, might kiss in that way. He had assumed, to the degree he had ever permitted himself to give it any thought it all, that the whole thing must be a matter of blow jobs in dark alleyways or the foul practices of love-starved British sailors. Rut those men with the neckties and mustaches-they had been kissing the way people kissed in the movies, with care and vigor and just a hint of showiness. One fellow had caressed the other's cheek.
Sammy rummaged through the riot of furs and overcoats draped on hooks in the front hall until he located his own. He settled his hat on his head and went out. He stopped and lingered on the top step. His thoughts were disordered and strange to him. He was appallingly jealous; it was like a heavy round stone had lodged in the center of his chest, but he could not have said for sure whether he was jealous of Joe or of Rosa Luxemburg Saks. At the same time, he was glad for his cousin. It was marvelous that in this big town he had managed to rediscover, a year later, the girl with the miraculous behind. Perhaps she would be able, as Sammy had not, to find a way to distract Joe at least a little from his evident project of getting his clock cleaned by every last German in the city of New York. He turned and looked back at the doorman, a raffish-looking fellow in a greasy gray jacket who leaned against the front door, smoking a cigarette. What had so rattled Sammy about the scene he had witnessed? What was he afraid of? Why was he running away?
"Forget something?" said the doorman.
Sammy shrugged. He turned and went back into the house. Not entirely sure of what he was doing, he forced himself to walk back through the ballroom that was, now that Dali had abandoned his diving costume, filled with happy and confident people who knew what they wanted and whom they loved, and into the black-tiled kitchen. A group of people were standing around the stove arguing about the proper way to make Turkish coffee, but the two men in the pantry had gone, leaving no trace of their presence. Had he imagined the whole thing? Was such a kiss really possible?
"Is he a fairy?" Rosa was, at that moment, asking Joe. They were still sitting on her bed, holding hands.
Joe was at first shocked by this suggestion, and then suddenly not. "Why would you say that?" he said.
She shrugged. "He has the feel," she said.
"Hmm," Joe said. "I don't know. He is-" He shrugged. "A good boy."
"Are you a good boy?"
"No," Joe said.
He leaned forward to kiss her again. They bumped teeth, and it made him weirdly aware of all the bones in his head. Her tongue was milkand salt, an oyster in his mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders, and he could feel her getting ready to push him away, and then after a moment she did.
"I'm worried about him," she said. "He looked a little lost. You should go after him."
"He will be fine."
"Joe," she said.
"Oh." She wanted him, he understood, to leave. They had taken it as far as she was prepared to go now. It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that. "Okay," he said. "Yes. I-I have work to do, too."
"Good," Rosa said. "Go work. Will you call me?"
"May I?"
"UNiversity 4-3212," she said. "Here." She got up and went over to her drawing table and scrawled the number on a sheet of paper, then tore it off and handed it to Joe. "Get whoever it is to absolutely promise to take a message because they're horribly unreliable around here about that kind of thing. Wait a minute." She wrote out another number. "This is my number at work. I work at Life, in the art department. And this is my number at the T.R.A. I'm there three afternoons a week and on Saturdays. I'll be there tomorrow."
"The tea array?"
"Transatlantic Rescue Agency. I'm a volunteer secretary there. It's a small operation on this end. Shoestring. Really it's just me and Mr. Hoffman. Oh, he is a wonderful man, Joe. He has a boat, he bought it himself, and he's working right now to get as many Jewish children out of Europe as the boat can fit."
"Children," Joe said.
"Yes. What are-is there-do you have children-in your family? Back in-"
"Where is it?" Joe said. "The T.A.R.?"
Rosa wrote out an address on Union Square.
"I would like to see you there tomorrow," Joe said. "Would that perhaps be possible?"
"we have one ship," said Hermann Hoffman. He was dimpled and plump, with a trim Vandyke, bags under his eyes that had an air of permanence, and a shiny black hairpiece almost aggressive in its patent falsity. His office at the Transatlantic Rescue Agency overlooked the iron-black trees and rusty foliage of Union Square. He had spent twenty times on his gray worsted suit what Joe, whose economy grew more draconian as his income increased, had spent on his own. With the precision of someone cutting a deck of cards, Hoffman drew three brown cigarettes from a pack that featured a gilt pharaoh and dealt one to Joe, one to Rosa, and one to himself. His nails were clipped and pearly, and his brand of cigarette, Thoth-Amon, imported from Egypt, was excellent. Joe could not imagine why such a man would wear a toupee that looked as if it had been ordered from the back cover of Radio Comics. "One ship, twenty-two thousand dollars, and half a million children." Hoffman smiled. It was, on his face, an expression of defeat.
Joe glanced at Rosa, who raised an eyebrow. She had warned him that Hoffman and his agency, struggling to achieve the impossible, operated on the perpetual brink of failure. In order to avoid having his heart broken, she said, her boss adopted the manner of an inveterate pessimist. She nodded, once, urging Joe to speak.
"I understand," said Joe. "I knew, of course-"
"It's a very nice ship," Hoffman continued. "She was called the Lioness, but we've renamed her the Ark of Miriam. Not large, but extremely well maintained. We bought her from Cunard, which had her on the Haiphong-to-Shanghai run. That's a picture of her." He pointed to a tinted photograph on the wall behind Joe. A trim liner, its plimsollcolored bold red, steamed across a bottle-green sea under a heliotrope sky. It was a very large photograph, in a platinum frame. Hermann Hoffman regarded it lovingly. "She was originally built for the P &O Company in 1893. A good deal of our initial endowment went toward her purchase and refitting, which, due to our emphasis on hygiene and humane treatment, proved to be quite costly." Another hangdog smile. "Most of the remainder went into the bank accounts and mattresses of various German officers and functionaries. After we take out pay for the crew and documentation, I don't honestly know how much we'll be able to accomplish with the little we have left. We may not be able to underwrite passage for half the children we have already arranged to bring over. It's going to cost us more than a thousand dollars per child."
"I understand," Joe said. "If I may say, I-" Joe looked at Rosa again. She had, overnight, worked a thorough transformation on herself. Joe was amazed. It was as though she had set out to eradicate every trace of the moth girl. She had on a Black Watch kilt, dark hose, and a plain white blouse buttoned at the wrists and collar. Her lips were bare, and she had ironed her flyaway hair into two frizzy pleats parted down the middle. She had even put on a pair of glasses. Joe was taken aback by the change, but found the presence of the caterpillar girl reassuring. If he had walked into the outer office of the T.R.A. and found a wild-haired portraitist of vegetables, he might have been a little dubious about the agency's credentials. He was not sure which of the two poses, moth or caterpillar, was the less sincere, but either way, he was grateful to her now.
"Mr. Kavalier has money, Mr. Hoffman," Rosa said. "He can afford to underwrite his brother's passage himself?'
"I'm happy for you, Mr. Kavalier, but tell me. We have space on Miriam for three hundred and twenty-four. Our agents in Europe have already arranged for the transit of three hundred and twenty-four German, French, Czech, and Austrian children, with a waiting list that is considerably longer than that. Should one of them be left behind to make room for your brother?"
"No, sir."
"Is that what you propose we do?"
"No, sir." Joe shifted in his chair miserably. Couldn't he think of anything better to say to this man than No, sir, over and over again like a child being shown the error of his ways? His brother's fate might well be settled in this room. And it all depended on him. If he was, to Hoffman, in any way insufficiently… something, the Ark of Miriam would sail from Portsmouth without Thomas Kavalier. He stole another look at Rosa. It's all right, her face told him. Just tell him. Talk to him.
"I understand there may be room in the sick bay," Joe said.
Now Hoffman shot a look at Rosa. "Well, ye-es. In the best of circumstances, perhaps. But suppose there is an outbreak of measles, or some kind of accident?"
"He is a very small boy," Joe said. "For his age. He would not occupy very much space."
"They are all small, Mr. Kavalier," Hoffman said. "If I could safely pack in three hundred more of them, I would."
"Yes, but who would pay forthem?" Rosa burst out. She was getting impatient. She pointed her finger at Hoffman. Joe noticed a streak of aubergine paint on the palm of her hand. "You say that three hundred and twenty-four have been cleared for passage, but you know that right now we can't pay for more than two hundred and fifty."
Hoffman sat back in his chair and stared at her in what Joe hoped was only mock horror.
Rosa covered her mouth. "Sorry," she said. "I'll be quiet."
Hoffman turned to Joe. "Watch out when she points that finger at you, Mr. Kavalier."
"Yes, sir."
"She's right. We are short of funds around here. The right adverb, I believe, is 'chronically.'"
"This is what I was thinking," Joe said. "What if I paid for another child beside to my brother?"
Hoffman sat forward, chin in palm. "I'm listening," he said.
"It's possible that I most likely can arrange to pay the fare for two or perhaps three others."
"Indeed?" Hoffman said. "And just what is it you do, Mr. Kavalier? Some kind of artist, is that it?"
"Yes, sir," Joe said. "I work in comic books."
"He's very talented," Rosa said, though last night she had admitted to Joe that she had never looked between the covers of a comic book in her life. "And very well paid."
Hoffman smiled. He had been concerned for some time at the apparent lack in his young secretary's life of a suitable male companion.
"Comic books," he said. "That's all I hear about, Superman, Batman. My son, Maurice, is a regular reader." Hoffman reached for a picture frame on his desk and turned it around, revealing the face of a smaller version of himself, bags under the eyes and all. "He's having his bar mitzvah in a month."
"Congratulations," Joe said.
"Which comic book do you draw? Do you draw Superman?"
"No, but I know a guy, a young man, who does. I work at Empire Comics, sir. We do the Escapist. Also, maybe your son knows them, the Monitor, Mr. Machine Gun. I draw a lot of it. I make about two hundred dollars a week." He wondered if he ought to have brought along his pay stubs or some other kind of financial documentation. "I usually manage to save all of this but perhaps twenty-five."
"My goodness," Hoffman said. He looked over at Rosa, whose face also betrayed a fair amount of surprise. "We're in the wrong line of work, dear."
"It seems that way, boss," she said.
"The Escapist," Hoffman continued. "I think maybe I've seen that, but I'm not sure-"
"He is an escape artist. A performing magician."
"A performing magician?"
"That's correct."
"Do you know anything about magic?"
There was a whetted edge to the question. It was more than a friendly inquiry, though Joe could not imagine why.
"I have studied it," Joe said. "In Prague. I studied with Bernard Kornblum."
"Bernard Kornblum!" Hoffman said. "Kornblum!" His expression softened. "I saw him once."
"You saw Kornblum?" Joe turned to Rosa. "That's astonishing."
"I'm completely astonished," Rosa said. "Was it in Konigsberg, sir?"
"It was in Konigsberg."
"When you were a boy."
He nodded. "When I was a boy. I was quite an amateur magician myself at one time. Still dabble from time to time. Now let me see." He waggled his fingers, then wiped his hands on an invisible napkin. His cigarette was gone. "Voila." He rolled his heavy-lidded eyes to the ceiling and plucked the cigarette from thin air. "Et voila." The cigarette slipped from his fingers and fell onto his jacket, left a streak of ash on his lapel, then dropped to the floor. Hoffman cursed. He pushed his chair back, clapped a hand onto his head, and, with a grunt, bent over to pick up the cigarette. When he sat up again, the warp of his wig seemed to have come free of the weft. Coarse black hairs stood up all over his head, wavering like a pile of iron filings drawn toward a distant but powerful magnet. "I'm terribly out of practice, I'm afraid." He patted down his hairpiece. "Are you any good?"
Kornblum had disdained patter as unworthy of the true master, and now Joe rose, wordlessly, and took off his jacket. He shot his cuffs and casually presented his empty hands for Hermann Hoffman's inspection. He was aware that he was taking a certain risk. Close work had never been his forte. He hoped that his index finger was all right.
"How is your finger?" Rosa whispered.
"Fine," said Joe. "May I trouble you for your cigarette lighter?" he asked Hoffman. "I'll only need it for a moment."
"But of course," said Hoffman. He handed his gold lighter to Joe.
"And another cigarette, I'm afraid."
Hoffman complied, watching Joe carefully. Joe stepped back from the desk, fit the cigarette to his lips, lit it, and inhaled deeply. Then he held up the lighter between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and blew out a long blue jet of smoke. The lighter vanished. Joe took another deep drag and held it, and pinched his nose, and comically bugged out his eyes. The brown Thoth-Amon vanished. He opened his mouth and breathed out slowly. The smoke had vanished, too.
"Sorry," said Joe. "Clumsy of me."
"Very nice. Where is the lighter?"
"Here is the smoke."
Joe raised his left hand in a fist, drew it across his face, and then opened his hand like a flower. A teased knot of smoke floated out. Joe smiled. Then he picked up his jacket, hanging from the back of his chair, and took out his own cigarette case. He opened the case and revealed the Egyptian cigarette snug inside it, like a brown egg in a carton full of whites. It was still burning. He leaned forward and rolled the burning end in the ashtray on Hoffman's desk until it went out. As he straightened, he put the cigarette back into his mouth and snapped his fingers in front of the extinguished coal. The lighter reappeared. He scratched up a new flame and relit the cigarette. "Ah," he said, as if settling into a warm bath, exhaling.
Rosa applauded. "How did you do it?" she said.
"Maybe I'll tell you one day," Joe said.
"Oh, no, don't do that," Hoffman said. "I'll tell you what, Mr. Kavalier. If you will agree to underwrite, let us say two children, in addition to your brother, then we will start working on your brother's case, and do what we can to find room on Miriam for him."
"Thank you, sir." Joe turned to Rosa. Once again she looked all business. She nodded. He had done well. "That's very-"
"But first I have a favor to ask of you."
"What's that? Anything."
Hoffman nodded toward the picture of Maurice.
"If I were a wealthy man, Mr. Kavalier, I would finance this entire venture out of my own pocket. As it is, nearly every spare penny I have goes to the agency. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, or what it was like in Prague, but here in New York, bar mitzvahs are not cheap. In the circle my wife and I move in, they can be quite lavish. It's deplorable, but there it is. A photographer, caterers, the ballroom at the Hotel Trevi. It's costing me an arm and a leg."
Joe nodded slowly and glanced at Rosa. Was Hoffman really asking him to help pay for his son's reception?
"Do you have any idea," Hoffman said, "what it's going to cost me to hire a magician?" A cigarette appeared between the fingers of his right hand. It was, Joe noticed, still burning-it was the one he had dropped on the floor a few minutes before. Joe was certain he had seen Hoffman pick it up and snuff it in the ashtray. On further consideration, he was somewhat less certain. "I wonder if you might consider working something up?"
"I-I will be happy to."
"Excellent," Hoffman said.
They went out of his office. Rosa closed the door and grinned at him, her eyes wide. "How about that?"
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you very much, Rosa."
"I'm going to start a file for him right now." She went over to her desk, sat down, and took a printed form from a tray on the desk. "Tell me how to spell his name. Kavalier." "With a K."
"Kavalier with a R. Thomas. Is that with an h, or-?" "With an h. I want to see you," he said. "I want to take you to dinner." "I'd like that," she said without looking up. "Middle name?"
when he walked outside again, the sky was shining like a nickel and the air was filled with the smell of sugared nuts. He bought a bag, and it was hot in the hip pocket of his twelve-dollar suit. He walked across the street to the square. Thomas was coming to America! He had a date for dinner!
Crossing the park, he found himself puzzling over the secret of Hoffman's cigarette trick. Where had he concealed the holder from which he stole the burning cigarette? What kind of holder could keep a cigarette burning for so long? He was halfway across the square before he had the answer-the toupee.
Just as he passed the statue of George Washington, he noticed a small group of people up ahead, gathered around one of the long green benches to his right. Joe, supposing that someone on the park bench must be handing out slices of the latest grim confection from the battlefields and capitals of Europe, plucked a cashew from the bag, tossed it into the air, threw back his head and caught the nut, and kept on walking. As he passed the little knot of murmuring people, however, he saw that they all seemed to be looking not at the bench but at the tall slim maple rising up just behind it, in a lacy iron cage. Some of the people, he saw, were smiling. An older woman in a checked wool coat took a dancing little backward step away, hand pressed to her chest, laughing in embarrassment at her alarm. There must, Joe thought, be some kind of animal on the tree, a mouse or a monkey or a monitor lizard escaped from the Central Park Zoo. He went over to the bench and, when no one would make room for him, pushed up on the tips of his toes to see.
A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe remembered, was that he believed in magic. Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings. Not in the kitchen enchantments of Slavic grandmothers with their herbiaries and parings from the little toe of a blind virgin tied up in a goatskin bag. Not in astrology, theosophy, chiromancy, dowsing rods, seances, weeping statues, werewolves, wonders, or miracles. All these Kornblum had regarded as fakery far different-far more destructive-than the brand of illusion he practiced, whose success, after all, increased in direct proportion to his audiences' constant, keen awareness that, in spite of all the vigilance they could bring to bear, they were being deceived. What bewitched Bernard Kornblum, on the contrary, was the impersonal magic of life, when he read in a magazine about a fish that could disguise itself as any one of seven different varieties of sea bottom, or when he learned from a newsreel that scientists had discovered a dying star that emitted radiation on a wavelength whose value in megacycles approximated π. In the realm of human affairs, this type of enchantment was often, though not always, a sadder business-sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel. Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.
There was, on the slender bole of the youthful maple tree in its cage on the west side of Union Square, an enormous moth. It rested, papillating its wings with a certain languor like a lady fanning herself, iridescent green with a yellowish undershimmer, as big as that languid lady's silk clutch. Its wings lay spread flat and when, every so often, they pulsed, the woman in the checked coat would squeal, to the amusement of the others gathered around, and jump back.
"What is this moth?" Joe asked the man beside him.
"Guy here says it's called a luna." The man nodded toward a stout, bankerish-looking fellow in a tyrolean hat with a moth-green feather, standing nearer to the tree and the moth than any of them.
"That's right," the portly man said in an oddly wistful voice. "A luna moth. We used to see them from time to time when I was a kid. In Mount Morris Park." He reached out his pudgy hand, in its yellow pigskin glove, toward the beating blue heart of his childhood memory.
" Rosa," Joe said, under his breath. Then, like an ambiguous trope of hopefulness, the luna moth took wing with an audible rustle, tumbled upward into the open sky, and staggered off in the general direction of the Flatiron Building.
So much has been written and sung about the bright lights and ballrooms of Empire City-that dazzling town!-about her nightclubs and jazz joints, her avenues of neon and chrome, and her swank hotels, their rooftop tea gardens strung in the summertime with paper lanterns. On this steely autumn afternoon, however, our destination is a place a long way from the horns and the hoohah. Tonight we are going down, under the ground, to a room that lies far beneath the high heels and the jackhammers, lower than the rats and the legendary alligators, lower even than the bones of Algonquins and dire wolves-to Office 99, a small, neat cubicle, airless and white, at the end of a corridor in the third subbasement of the Empire City Public Library. Here, at a desk that lies deeper in the earth than even the subway tracks, sits young Miss Judy Dark, Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes. The nameplate on her desk so identifies her. She is a thin, pale thing, in a plain gray suit, and life is clearly passing her by. Twice a week a man with skin the color of boiled newspaper comes by her office to cart away the books that she has officially pronounced dead. Every ten minutes or so her walls are shaken by the thunder of the uptown local racing overhead.
On this particular autumn night, only the prospect of another solitary evening lies before her. She will fry her chop and read herself to sleep, no doubt with a tale of wizardry and romance. Then, in dreams that strike even her as trite, Miss Dark will go adventuring in chain mail and silk. Tomorrow morning she will wake up alone, and do it all again. Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!
Judy packs her satchel and turns out her light, not forgetting to take her umbrella from its hook. She is a kind of human umbrella, folded, with her strap snapped tight. She walks down the long corridor and accidentally steps into a huge puddle; whenever it rains, Subbasement 3 begins to leak. Her feet are soaked to the ankles. Shoes squeaking, she gets into the elevator. Like a diver, she rises slowly to the surface of the city. Turning up her collar, she heads for the front door of the library. Tonight, as every night, she is the last to leave.
There is a policeman by the front doors. He is there to help guard the book.
"Good night, Miss," the policeman says as he unlocks the heavy bronze door for her. He is a big-shouldered, knuckle-chinned fellow with a twinkle in his eye because her shoes are squeaking.
"Good night." Miss Dark is mortified by the sound of her feet.
"The name's O'Hara." He has thick, shining hair, glossy as a squirt of black paint.
"Judy Dark."
"Well, Miss Dark, I have just one question."
"Yes, Officer O'Hara?"
"What's it take to get a smile out of you?"
A dozen smart retorts spring to her lips but she says nothing. She tries fervently to fix a frown on her lips but to her dismay cannot prevent herself from smiling. O'Hara takes advantage of her confusion to keep her there talking for a moment longer.
"Did you have a chance to see the book in all the confusion today, Miss Dark? Would you like me to show it to you?"
"I saw it," she says.
"And what did you think?"
"It's lovely."
"Lovely," he tries. "Is it, now?"
She nods, not meeting his gaze, and steps out into the evening. It is raining, of course. The umbrella now does what its owner has never been able to manage, and Miss Dark goes home. She fries her veal chop and turns on the radio. She eats her dinner and wonders why she lied to the policeman. She has not, in fact, been to see the Book of Lo, though she is dying to see it. She meant to go on her lunch break, but the crowd around its case was too big. She wonders what the book is, if not lovely.
The Book of Lo was the sacred book of the ancient and mysterious Cimmerians. Last year-as was widely reported at the time-this legendary text, long since given up for lost, turned up in the back room of an old wine cellar downtown. It is the oldest book in the world, three hundred ancient pages, in a leather case encrusted with rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, devoted to the strange particulars of the worship of the great Cimmerian moth goddess, Lo. Today it went on display in the grand exhibition hail of the Public Library, behind bulletproof glass. Half the city, it seemed, came to get a look. Miss Dark, driven away by the pushing crowds, returned to Office 99 without having gotten so much as a glimpse of it and ate her lunch at her desk. Now, looking up from her empty plate, at the walls of her empty apartment, she feels a sharp inward bite of regret. She ought to have taken the policeman up on his offer. Maybe, she thinks, it isn't too late. She puts on her hat and coat and a pair of dry shoes and heads back out into the night. She will tell Officer O'Hara, when she gets there, that there is work she has forgotten to do.
But when she gets there, Officer O'Hara seems to have abandoned his post, and what's more, he has left the front door unlocked. Curious, and vaguely annoyed-suppose someone really should try to steal the Book of Lo?-she wanders into the exhibit hall. There, on the black marble expanse of the floor, men in black masks stand around the fallen body of Officer O'Hara. Miss Dark ducks behind a convenient arras. She thrills with horror as the men-an apelike trio in stevedore sweaters and newsdealer caps-use a diamond-tipped can opener to slice the lid from the glass case and so relieve Empire City of its book. Hastily they stuff the book into a sack. Now: what about O'Hara? One of the thieves knows for sure, he says, that the copper made him; he and O'Hara grew up on the same block, way back when. Maybe they had better just do the poor sap in.
This is too much for the Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes. She rushes into the echoing hall with a vague plan to frighten or at the very least distract the men from their evil work. Or perhaps she can lead them away by drawing their attention to herself. Taking advantage of the momentary confusion created by her appearance and her cry of "NOOOOOO!" she snatches up the sack with the sacred Book of Lo inside and runs out of the gallery. The thieves, having recovered their presence of mind, give chase now, guns drawn, curses streaming from their lips in mad torrents of printer's marks and random punctuation.
Miss Dark, terrified but not so that it prevents her from entertaining the ironic thought that for the first time in her life she knows what it feels like to have men chasing after her, heads for the safest place she knows: her neat, square hole underground. She cannot afford to wait for the elevator. Running headlong down the fire stairs she is struck by the odd feeling that the Book of Lo has come to pulsing life in her arms; but no, that's just the reverberation of her own pounding heart.
They catch her in the long corridor of Subbasement 3. She turns, a gun glints, then sprouts a bright white flower. But the shot, in that dark, cramped corridor, goes wild. It ricochets, knitting a wild web of velocity trails across the corridor before settling, finally, into the meat of a conduit in the ceiling. The pipe snaps in half, and out of it tumbles a live power line, like a snake falling from a tree onto a piglet. It lands in the very puddle that earlier ruined Miss Dark's shoes. Now many watts of power course through her slender frame, and through the circuitry of gems and gold wire on the leather case of the Book of Lo. A flash turns everything white but the black roentgen skeleton of Miss Judy Dark, and she utters a somewhat unladylike cry of "YE-OOOW!"
"Nice shot," says one of the thieves. They lift the book from her slack grip and make off with it to the surface world, leaving Miss Judy Dark for dead.
Which she very well may be. She flies, hair streaming, upward through a spiral column of smoke and light. The first thing we notice about her may not be, surprisingly, that she appears to be flying in the nude, the zones of her modesty artfully veiled by the coils of the astral helix. No, what we notice first is that she appears to have grown an immense pair of swallowtailed moth's wings. They are a pale greenish-white and have a translucent quality; they might even, like Wonder Woman's airplane, be visibly invisible, at once ghostly and solid. All around her, outside the column spiraling infinitely upward, reality dissolves into dream-landscapes and wild geometric prodigies. Chessboards dissolve, parabolas bend themselves into asterisks, whorls, and pinwheels. Mysterious hieroglyphs stream past like sparks from a roman candle. Miss Dark, her great phantom wings steadily flapping, takes it all strangely in stride-for, dead or alive, there is no question that Judy Dark, that human umbrella, has, at long last, opened to the sky.
Finally, in the immeasurable and timeless distance, she makes out something that has the appearance of solidity, a smudge of stony gray, wavering. As she draws nearer, she glimpses a flash of silver, a ghostly stand of cypress, the plinth and columns of a temple, rough-hewn, pyramidal, at once Druidic and Babylonian, and withal vaguely reminiscent of the great institution in whose bowels she has for so long dreamed away her days. It looms ever larger, and then the spiral finally unravels around her and gives out, depositing her, clothed now only in the clasp of her wings, on the temple's threshold. The great doors, cast from solid silver and ornamented with crescent moons, creak as they slowly open inward to admit her. With a final glance back toward the shattered chrysalis of her old life, she steps through the portal and into a high chamber. Here, in a weird radiance cast by the tails of a thousand writhing glowworms, sits on a barbarous throne a raven-haired giantess with immense green wings, sensuously furred antennae, and a sharp expression. She is, quite obviously, the Cimmerian moth goddess, Lo. We know it before she even opens her rowanberry mouth.
"You?" the goddess says, her feelers wilting in evident dismay. " You are the one the book has chosen? You are to be the next Mistress of the Night?"
Miss Dark-wreathed discreetly now in curling tufts of dry-ice smoke-concedes that it seems unlikely. Only now we notice, perhaps for the first time, that our Judy is no longer wearing her glasses. Her unpinned hair strays around her face with Linda Darnell abandon. And all at once the idea of her being a Mistress of the Night-whatever that may mean-is somehow less difficult to swallow.
"Know that before my homeland, great Cimmeria, was plunged into eternal darkness," the goddess explains, "it was ruled by women." Ah, she reminisces, her face wistful, her eyes brimming, and that was a paradise! All were happy in the Queendom of Cimmeria, peaceful, contented-the men in particular. Then one shrivel-hearted malcontent, Nanok, schooled himself in the ways of bloodshed and black magic, and set himself upon an obsidian throne. He sent his armies of demons into battle against the peace-loving Cimmerians; the outcome was foreordained. Men took over the world, Lo was banished to the nether kingdoms, and the Queendom of Cimmeria was plunged into its legendary perpetual night. "And since Cimmeria fell into eternal darkness," Lo says, "men have been making a hash of things. War, famine, slavery. Things got so bad after a while that I felt obliged to send help. A champion, out of the land of darkness, to fly in darkness but always to seek the light. A woman warrior with power enough to help right the world's many wrongs."
Unfortunately, the goddess continues, her power is not what it once was. She is able to underwrite, as it were, only one Mistress of the Night at a time. The previous incarnation having at last, after a thousand years, grown too old, the moth goddess has sent forth her sacred book to find a new girl worthy of donning the witchy green wings of the great luna moth.
"I confess I did have someone a little more… sturdy… in mind," Lo says. "But I suppose that you will have to do. Go now." She waves her ancient slender hand and draws the outline of a moon in the air between herself and Judy. "Return to the mortal realm, and haunt the night in which evil so often goes prowling. You now possess all the mystic power of ancient Cimmeria."
"If you say so," Judy says. "But, well…"
"Yes? What is it?"
"I really think I'll need some clothes."
The goddess, a serious old girl, cannot suppress the faint pale crescent of a smile. "You will find, Judy Dark, that you have only to imagine something to make it so."
"Gee whiz!"
"Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination."
"Yes. I mean, yes, mistress."
"Usually the girls come up with something involving boots. I don't know why." She shrugs, then outspreads the mighty span of her wings. "Now go, and remember, if ever you should need me, you have only to come to me in your dreams."
Worlds and aeons hence, in a dilapidated old tenement along the river, two of the thieves set to work with chisel and tongs on the gems in the ancient book's case. In a chair, in a corner, bound and gagged, Officer O'Hara sits slumped. It is still raining, there is a chill in the air, and the third thief is trying to start a fire in an old black potbellied stove.
"Here," says the first thief as he reaches to tear a sheaf of pages from the Book of Lo. "I'll bet this old thing'llburn real nice."
There is a silken rustle, like a billowing ball gown or an immense, soft pair of wings. They look up and see a giant shadow flit in through the window.
"It's a bat!" says a thief.
"It's a bird!" says another.
"It's a lady!" says the third, no fool, starting to run for the door.
The lady turns, eyes flashing. The garment she has imagined for herself is iridescent green, part Merry Widow, part Norman Bel Geddes, tricked out with fins and vanes and laced, with evident complexity, up the front. Her lower parts, in their tight green underpants, are barely covered by the merest suggestion of a skirt, her nine miles of leg are enmeshed in black fishnet, and the heels on her ankle boots are stingingly high. She wears a purple cowl, topped with a pair of lushly furred antennae, that covers her eyes and nose but leaves her black curls free to tumble around her bare shoulders. And from her back bloom, no longer ghostly but green as leaves, a pair of great swallowtailed moth's wings, each jeweled with a staring blind eye.
"That's right, little mouse," she cries to the man headed for the door. "Run!"
She extends her arm. Bright green light ripples from her outspread fingers and enmeshes the thief before he can reach the door. There is an unpleasant crackling sound, a snapping of twigs and pinecones, as an entire skeleton of human bones is compressed rapidly into a very small skin; then silence; then a tiny thin squeak.
"Holy cats!" the moth woman says.
"She turned Louie into a mouse!" cries the first thief. Now he is running, too.
"Freeze!" Green light leaps again, and with a crunching even more sickening than before the atoms and fibers of the thief's body are rearranged and simplified into cold blue crystals of ice. He stands gleaming like a man of diamond. The corners of his fedora glint. "Oops," the moth woman mumbles. "Goodness me!"
"What kind of a dolly are you?" the remaining thief demands. "What are you trying to do to us?"
"I just want to give you a hot time, big boy," she says, and at once the man bursts into flames of such intensity that they melt his erstwhile confederate to a shallow puddle on the floor. The mouse, its tail singed and smoking, dives for the safety of the nearest floorboard.
"Guess I still have a little bit to learn," muses the newly minted Mistress of the Night. She unties the policeman, who has begun, in all the excitement, to revive. He opens his eyes in time to see a scantily clad woman with enormous green wings jump into the sky. For a while to come he will tell himself, and half believe, that what he saw was the last apparition of a fading dream. It is not until he gets home, and goes to examine his battered handsome mug in the mirror, that he finds, on his cheek, the red butterfly imprint of her lips.
Deasey, as they had known he would, objected to the latest bit of degeneracy from Kavalier & Clay. "I can't allow this to happen to my country," he said. "Things are bad enough already."
Sammy and Joe were not caught unprepared. "She's not showing anything any kid can't see at Jones Beach " was the line that they had decided on. Sammy gave it.
Joe said, "Just like at Jones Beach " He had never been to Jones Beach.
The morning was gloomy, and as usual in cool weather, Deasey lay spread out on the floor like an old bearskin. Now he pulled himself carefully up to a sitting position, his considerable bulk shifting audibly on his arthritic joints.
"Let me have another look," he said.
Sammy handed him the sheet of Bristol board with the character design for Luna Moth, "the first sex object," in Jules Feiffer's memorable phrase, "created expressly for consumption by little boys." It was a pinup. A woman with the legs of Dolores Del Bio, black witchy hair, and breasts each the size of her head. Her face was long, her chin pointed, and her mouth a bright red hyphen, downturned at one corner in a saucy little smirk. The pair of furry antennae hung at playful angles, as if tasting the viewer's desire.
The golden toothpick waggled up and down. "Your usual wasted effort, Mr. Kavalier, my condolences."
"Thank you."
"That means you think it could be a hit," said Sammy.
"It's very difficult to fail at pornography," said Deasey. He gazed out beyond the river at the sere brown cliffs of New Jersey and allowed himself to recall a winter afternoon twelve years before, on a cool, sunny terrace overlooking Puerto Concepcion and the Sea of Cortez, when he had sat down at the keys of his portable Royal and begun work on a great and tragic novel, about the love between two brothers and a woman who died. Although the novel was long since abandoned, the typewriter was on his desk even now, page 232 of Death Wears a Black Sarong rolled around its platen. Surely, Deasey thought, that fonda, that terrace, that heartbreaking sky, that novel-they were all still there, waiting for him. He had only to make his way back.
"Mr. Deasey?" said Joe.
Deasey left off looking out at the expanse of sandstone sky and rusty palisade and went over to his desk. He picked up the phone.
"Fuck it," he said. "We'll leave it up to Anapol. I have a feeling they may be looking for a new kind of character, anyway."
"Why's that?" Sammy said.
Deasey looked at Sammy and then at Joe. There was something he wanted to tell them. "Why is what?"
"Why might Shelly and Jack be looking for a new kind of character?"
"I never said that. Let's call him. Get me Mr. Anapol," he said into the phone.
"What about Ashkenazy?" said Joe. "What will he say?"
Deasey said, "Do you seriously have any doubts?"
Be a u t e e f u l." Ashkenazy sighed. "Look at those… those…" "They're called knockers," said Anapol. "Look at them! Which one of you thought this up?" said Ashkenazy. He looked at Joe with one eye while he kept the other on Luna Moth. Affluence had brought with it an entire panoply of new suits, striped and checked and boldly herringboned, madly checkered three-piece numbers, each of them the color of a different variety of squash, from butternut to Italian green. The fabrics were rich woolens and cashmeres, the cuts jazzy and loose, so that he no longer looked like a racetrack tout, with his chewed cigar end and his thumbs in his waistcoat. Now he looked like a big-time gangster with a fix in on the third at Belmont. "I bet it was you, Kavalier."
Joe looked at Sammy. "We did it together," he said. "Sammy and I. Mostly Sammy. I just said something about a moth."
"Aw, now don't be modest, Joe," Sammy said, stepping over to pat Joe on the shoulder. "He pretty much slapped the whole thing together himself?'
The practice of magic, which Joe had resumed in front of the mirror in Jerry Glovsky's bedroom immediately after meeting with Hermann Hoffman, also seemed to have played a role in her parturition. It was true, however, that Sammy, for some time, had been digging around for a female superbeing. The addition of sex to the costumed-hero concept was a natural and, apart from a few minor efforts at other companies- the Sorceress of Zoom, the Woman in Red-yet to be attempted. Sammy had been toying with ideas for a cat-woman, a bird-woman, a mythological Amazon (all of them soon to be tried elsewhere), and a lady boxer named Kid Vixen when Joe had proposed his secret tribute to the girl from Greenwich Village. The idea of a moth-woman was also, in its way, a natural. National had another huge hit on its hands with Batman in Detective Comics, and the appeal of a nocturnal character, one who derived her power from the light of the moon, was evident.
"I don't know," said Shelly Anapol. "It makes me a little nervous." He took from his partner, and held with the tips of his fingers, the painting of Luna Moth, which Joe had invested with all the hopefulness and desire that Rosa, admittedly in person a somewhat less buxom creature, had stirred in him-he had worked most of the time with an erection. Anapol pushed aside a letter that lay open on his desk blotter and dropped the painting there, as if it were extremely hot or had been dipped in carbolic. "Those are very large breasts, boys."
"We know it, Mr. Anapol," said Sammy.
"But a moth, I don't know, it's not a popular insect. Why can't she be a butterfly? There must be some good names there. Red, uh, what? Red Dot… Bluewing… Pearly… I don't know."
"She can't be a butterfly!'' said Sammy. "She's the Mistress of the Night."
"That's another thing: we can't say 'mistress.' Already I'm getting fifty letters a week from priests and ministers. A rabbi from Schenectady. Luna Moth. Luna Moth." The look of incipient nausea had come into his eyes and slack jaw. They were going to make themselves a pile with this.
"George, you think this is a good idea?"
"Oh, it's drivel, Mr. Anapol," Deasey said brightly. "Extremely pure."
Anapol nodded. "You haven't been wrong yet," he said. He picked up the letter that he had pushed aside, scanned it quickly, then put it back down. "Jack?"
"They got nothing like it," Ashkenazy said.
Anapol turned to Sammy. "It's settled, then. Call Pantaleone, the Glovskys, whoever you need to fill in the rest of the book. What the hell, make 'em all dollies. Maybe we could call it All Doll. Huh? Huh? All Doll. That's new. Is that new?"
"I never heard of anything like it."
"Let them infringe on us for a change. Yeah, good, get the kids in here, George, and get them started on this. I want something by Monday."
"Here we go again," said Sammy. "There's just one thing, Mr. Anapol."
Ashkenazy and Anapol looked at him. You could see they knew what was coming. Sammy glanced at Deasey, remembering the speech the editor had made on Friday night, hoping to find some encouragement. Deasey was watching intently, his face expressionless but pale, his forehead beaded with perspiration.
"Uh-oh," Anapol said. "Here it comes."
"We want in on the Escapist radio program, that's first."
"That's first?"
"Second is, you agree that this character, Luna Moth, is half ours. Fifty percent to Empire Comics, fifty percent to Kavalier & Clay. We get half of the merchandising, half the radio program if there is one. Half of everything. Otherwise we take her, and our services, elsewhere."
Anapol half turned his head toward his partner. "You were right," he said.
"And we want raises, too," Sammy said, with another glance at Deasey, deciding, now that the subject seemed to be open for discussion, to press it as far as he could.
"Another two hundred dollars a week," Joe said. The Ark of Miriam was scheduled to sail in the early spring of next year. At that rate, if he put away an additional two hundred a week, he would be able to underwrite four, five, perhaps half a dozen passages more than he had promised.
"Two hundred dollars a week!" Anapol shouted.
Deasey chuckled and shook his head. He seemed genuinely tickled.
"And, uh, yeah, the same for Mr. Deasey, here, too," said Sammy. "He's going to have a lot more to do."
"You can't negotiate for me, Mr. Clay," Deasey said dryly. "I'm management."
"Oh."
"But I do thank you."
All at once Anapol looked very tired. What with phony bombs and millionaires and threatening letters from famous attorneys hand-delivered by messengers, he had not slept well since Friday. Last night he had tossed and turned for hours, while beside him Mrs. Anapol growled at him to lie still.
"Shark!" she had called him. "Shark, be still." She called him "shark" because she had read in Frank Buck's column that this animal literally could not stop moving or it would die. "What's the matter with you, my God, it's like trying to sleep with a cement mixer in the bed."
I almost got blown up! he wanted to tell her for the one hundredth time. He had decided to say nothing about the cheap-novelty bomb in the Empire offices, as he had said nothing about the threatening letters that had been trickling in steadily ever since Kavalier & Clay had declared unilateral war on the Axis.
"I'm going to lose my shirt," he had said instead.
"So you'll lose your shirt," his wife said.
"It's a goddamn very nice shirt I'm going to lose. Do you know how much money there is in radio? With the pins, the pencils, the cereal boxes. We're not just looking at novelties, you know. This is Escapist pajamas. Bath towels. Board games. Soft drinks."
"They won't take it away."
"They're going to try."
"So let them try. In the meantime, you get on the radio, and I have a chance to meet an important and cultivated man like James Love. I saw him in the newsreel once. He looks just like John Barrymore."
"He does look like John Barrymore."
"So what's the matter with you? Why can't you ever enjoy anything you get?"
Anapol shifted a little in bed and produced the latest entry in an encyclopedic display of groaning. As was the case every night since Empire had made the move to the Empire State Building, his knees ached, his back was sore, and there was a sharp crick in the side of his neck. His beautiful black-marble office was so spacious and high-ceilinged that it made him uncomfortable. He couldn't get used to having so much room. As a result, he had a tendency to sit hunched all day, balled up in his chair, as if to simulate the paradoxically comforting effects of more cramped and uncomfortable quarters. It gave him a pain.
"Sammy Klayman," she said finally.
"Sammy," he agreed.
"So then don't cut him out."
"I have to cut him out."
"And why is that."
"Because cutting him in would set what your brother calls 'a dangerous president.' "
"Because."
" 'Because.' Because those two signed a contract. A perfectly legal, standard industry contract. They signed all their rights to the character away, now and forever. They're just not entitled."
"So it would be against the law, you're saying," his wife said with her usual light ironic touch, "for you to give them a piece of the radio money."
A fly came into the room. Anapol, wearing green silk pajamas with black piping, got out of bed. He turned on the bedside light and pulled on his dressing jacket. He took a copy of Modern Screen with Dolores Del Rio's picture on the cover, rolled it up, and greased the fly against the window. He cleaned up the mess, took off his dressing jacket, climbed back into bed, and turned out the light.
"No," he said, "it would not be against the goddamn law."
"Good," Mrs. Anapol had said. "I don't want you breaking any laws. A jury hears that you're in the comic book business, they'll lock you away in Sing Sing just like that." Then she rolled over and settled in for the night. Anapol had groaned and flopped and drunk three glasses of Bromo-Seltzer, until at last he hit on the general outlines of a plan that eased the pangs of a modest but genuine conscience and allayed his anxieties about the mounting ire that Kavalier & Clay's war appeared to be drawing down on Empire Comics. He had not had time to run it past his brother-in-law, but he knew that Jack would go along.
"So," he said now. "You can have in on the radio show. Assuming there is a radio show. We'll give you credit, all right, something like, what, 'Oneonta Woolens, et cetera, presents The Adventures of the Escapist, based on the character by Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay appearing every month in the pages of et cetera.' Plus, for every episode that airs, let's say you two receive a payment. A royalty. Call it fifty dollars per show."
"Two hundred," Sammy said.
"One."
"One fifty."
"One. Come on, that's three hundred a week. You're looking at possibly fifteen grand a year to split between you."
Sammy looked at Joe, who nodded. "Okay."
"Smart boy. All right, as for Miss Moth here. Fifty percent is out of the question. You have no right to any part of her. You boys came up with her as employees of Empire Comics, on our payroll. She's ours. We have the law on our side here, I know, because I have spoken to my attorney, Sid Foehn of Harmattan, Foehn & Buran, about this very subject in the past. The way he explained it to me, it's just like they do at the Bell Laboratories. Any invention a guy comes up with there, no matter who thought it up or how long they worked on it, even if they did it all by themselves, it doesn't matter, as long as they were employed there, it belongs to the laboratory."
"Don't cheat us, Mr. Anapol," Joe put in abruptly. Everyone looked shocked. Joe had misjudged the force of the word "cheat" in English. He thought it merely meant to treat someone unfairly, without any necessary implication of evil intent.
"I would never cheat you boys," said Anapol, looking profoundly hurt. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. "Excuse me. Coming down with a cold. Let me finish, all right? Fifty percent is, like I say, we'd be crazy and foolish and stupid to go along with that, and you can't threaten me with taking this dolly to somebody else because, like I say, you made her up on my payroll and she's mine. Talk to a lawyer of your own if you want. But, look, let's avoid confrontation, why don't we? In recognition of the fine track record you two have so far, coming up with this stuff, and just to show you boys, you know, that we appreciate what you've done for us, we'd be willing to cut you in on this Moth deal to the tune of what-"
He looked at Ashkenazy, who shrugged elaborately.
"Four?" he croaked.
"Call it five," Anapol said. "Five percent."
"Five percent!" Sammy said, looking as though Anapol's meaty hand had slapped him.
"Five percent!" said Joe.
"To split between you."
"What!" Sammy leapt from his chair.
"Sammy." Joe had never seen his cousin so red in the face. He tried to remember if he had ever seen him lose his temper at all. "Sammy, five percent, even so, this could be talking about the hundreds of thousands of dollars." How many ships could be fitted out, for that, and filled with the lost children of the world? With enough money, it might not matter if the doors of all the world's nations were closed-a very rich man could afford to buy some island somewhere, empty and temperate, and build the damned children a country of their own. "Maybe the millions someday."
"But five percent, Joe. Five percent of something we created one hundred percent!"
"And owe to Jack and me one hundred percent," said Anapol. "You know, it wasn't so long ago a hundred dollars sounded like a lot of money to you boys, as I recall."
"Sure, sure," said Joe. "Okay, look, Mr. Anapol, I'm sorry for what I said about cheating. I think you are being very much square."
"Thank you," Anapol said.
"Sammy?"
Sammy sighed. "Okay. I'm in."
"Hold on a minute," Anapol said. "I'm not done. You get your radio royalty. And the credit I mentioned. And the raises. Hell, we'll raise George's pay, too, and happy to do it." Deasey tipped an imaginary hat to Anapol. "And cut you two in for five percent of the Moth character. There's just one condition."
"What is it?" Sammy asked warily.
"We can't have any more nonsense around here like we had on Friday. I've always thought you were taking this Nazi business too far, but we were making money and I didn't think I could really complain. But now we're putting a stop to it. Right, Jack?"
"Lay off the Nazis for a while, boys," Ashkenazy said. "Let Marty Goodman get the bomb threats." This was the publisher of Timely Periodicals, home of the Human Torch and the Submariner, both of whom were giving the Empire heroes a run for the money now in the antifascist sweepstakes. "All right?"
"What does this mean, 'lay off'?" Joe said. "You mean no fighting the Nazis at all?"
"Not a one."
Now it was Joe's turn to rise from his chair. "Mr. Anapol-"
"No, now listen, you two know I bear no goodwill toward Hitler, and I'm sure eventually we're going to have to deal with him, et cetera. But bomb threats? Crazy maniacs that live right here in New York writing me letters saying they're going to stave in my big fat Jewish head? That I don't need."
"Mr. Anapol-" Joe felt the ground falling away under his feet.
"We've got plenty of problems right here at home, and I don't mean spies and saboteurs. Gangsters, crooked cops. I don't know. Jack?"
"Rats," said Ashkenazy. "Bugs."
"Let the Escapist and the rest of'em take care of that sort of thing for a while."
"Boss-" Sammy said, seeing the blood drain from Joe's face.
"And what's more, I don't care what James Love feels personally, I know the Oneonta Woolens Company, the board of that company is a bunch of conservative, rock-rib Yankee gentlemen, and they are goddamned well not going to want to sponsor anything that's going to get them bombed, not to mention Mutual or NBC or whoever we end up taking this to."
"No one is going to get bombed!" Joe said.
"You were right once, young man," Anapol said. "That may be all the being right you get."
Sammy folded his thick arms across his broad chest, elbows out. "And so what if we don't agree to the condition?"
"Then you don't get any five percent of Luna Moth. You don't get the raise. You don't get a piece of the radio money."
"But we could still keep on doing our stuff. Joe and I could keep fighting those Nazis."
"Certainly," said Anapol. "I'm sure Marty Goodman would be more than happy to hire you two to lob grenades at Hermann Goring. But you'd be finished here."
"Boss," said Sammy, "don't do this."
Anapol shrugged. "Not up to me. It's up to you. You have an hour," he said. "I want to get this all squared away before we meet with the radio people, which we are doing over lunch today."
"I don't need an hour," Joe said. "The answer is no. Forget it. You are cowards, and you are weak, and no."
"Joe?" Sammy said, calming himself now, trying to take everything in. "You're sure?"
Joe nodded.
"That's it, then," said Sammy. He put his hand on the small of Joe's back, and they started out of the office.
"Mr. Kavalier," George Deasey said now, pulling himself up out of his chair. "Mr. Clay. A word. Excuse us, gentlemen?"
"Please, George," Anapol said, handing the editor the painting of Luna Moth. "Talk some sense into them."
Sammy and Joe followed Deasey out of Anapol's office and into the workroom.
"Gentlemen," Deasey said. "I apologize for this, but I feel another little speech coming on."
"There's no point," Sammy said.
"This one is aimed more at Mr. R., here, I think."
Joe lit a cigarette, blew out a long stream of smoke, looked away. He didn't want to hear it. He knew that he was being unreasonable. But for a year now, unreason-the steadfast and all-consuming persecution of a ridiculous, make-believe war against enemies he could not defeat, by a means that could never succeed-had offered the only possible salvation of his sanity. Let people be reasonable whose families were not held prisoner.
"There is only one sure means in life," Deasey said, "of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money."
Joe didn't say anything. Sammy laughed nervously. He was prepared to back Joe up, of course, but he wanted to make sure, insofar as you could ever be sure, that it was really the right thing to do. He was hungry to follow Deasey's advice-to follow any fatherly guidance that came his way-but at the same time, he hated the thought of conceding so decisively to the man's cynical view of everything.
"Because, Mr. K., when I look at the way you have our various costumed friends punching the lights out of Herr Hitler and his associates month after month, tying their artillery into pretzels and so forth, I sometimes get the feeling, well, that you may have, let's say, other ambitions for your work here."
"Of course I do," said Joe. "You know that."
"It makes me very sorry to hear," Deasey said. "This kind of work is a graveyard of every kind of ambition, Kavalier. Take my word for it. Whatever you may hope to accomplish, whether from the standpoint of art or out of… other considerations, you will fail. I have very little faith in the power of art, but I remember the flavor of that faith, if you will, from when I was your age; the taste of it on the back of my tongue. Out of respect for you and the graceful idiot I once was, I concede the point. But this." He nodded toward the drawing of Luna Moth, then expanded the gesture with a weary spiral of his hand to take in the offices of Empire Comics. "Powerless," he said. "Useless."
"I… I do not believe that," Joe said, feeling himself weaken as his own worst fears were given voice.
"Joe," Sammy said. "Think of what you could do with all the money they're talking about. Think of how many kids you could afford to bring over here. That's something real, Joe. Not just a comic book war. Not just getting a fat lip from some kraut in the IRT."
And that was the problem, Joe thought. Giving in to Anapol and Ashkenazy would mean admitting that everything he had done until now had been, in Deasey's phrase, powerless and useless. A waste of precious time. He wondered if it could possibly be simple vanity that made him want to refuse the offer. Then the image of Rosa came into his mind, sitting on her disordered bed, head cocked to one side, eyes wide, listening and nodding as he told her about his work. No, he thought. Regardless of what Deasey says, I believe in the power of my imagination. I believe-somehow, when saying this to the image of Rosa, it did not sound trite or overblown-in the power of my art.
"Yes, god damn it, I want the money," Joe said. "But I can't stop fighting now."
"Okay," Sammy said. He sighed and looked around the workroom with a slump in his shoulders and a valedictory expression on his face.
It was the end of the dream that had flickered into life a year ago, in the darkness of his bedroom in Brooklyn, with the scraping of a match and the sharing of a hand-rolled cigarette. "That's what we'll tell them, then." He started to walk back into Anapol's office.
Deasey reached out and took hold of his shoulder. "Just a minute, Clay," he said.
Sammy turned back. He had never seen the editor look so uncertain before.
"Oh, Jesus," Deasey said. "What am I doing?"
"What are you doing?" said Joe.
The editor reached into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and took out a folded sheet of paper. "This was in my in box this morning."
"What is it?" Sammy said. "Who's it from?"
"Just read it," Deasey said.
It was a photostatted copy of a letter from the firm of Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin & Krim.
Dear Messrs. Ashkenazy and Anapol:
This letter is being written to you on behalf of National Periodical Publications, Inc. ("National"). National is the exclusive owner of all copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights in and to the comic book magazines "Action Comics" and "Superman" and the character of "Superman" featured therein. National has recently learned of your magazine, "Radio Comics," featuring the fictional character "The Escapist." This character represents a blatant attempt to copy the protected work of our client, namely the various series that feature the adventures of the fictional character known as "Superman," which our client has been publishing since June of 1938. As such, your character constitutes a blatant infringement of our client's copyrights, trademarks, and common-law rights. We hereby demand that you immediately cease and desist from any further publication of your comic book magazine "Radio," and that all existing copies of these comic books be destroyed with a letter verifying destruction signed by an officer of your corporation.
If you fail to cease and desist from such publication, or fail to submit such a verification letter within five days of this letter, National Periodical Publications, Inc., shall forthwith pursue all of its legal and equitable remedies, including seeking to enjoin your further publication of "Radio Comics." This letter is written without waiver of any of our client's rights and remedies, at law and in equity, all of which are hereby expressly reserved.
"But he's nothing like Superman," Sammy said when he had finished. Deasey gave him a baleful look, and Sammy realized he was missing the point. He tried to work his way through to what the point might be. There was clearly something about this letter that Deasey felt would be helpful to them, though he was unwilling to go so far as to tell them what it was. "But that doesn't matter, does it?"
"They've already beaten Victor Fox and Centaur on this," Deasey said. "They're going after Fawcett, too."
"I heard about this thing," Joe said. "They made Will Eisner go in there, Sammy, and he had to tell them that Victor Fox told him, 'Make me a Superman.' "
"Yeah, well, that's what Shelly said to me, too, remember? He said- oh. Oh."
"It's very likely," Deasey said steadily and slowly, as if speaking to an idiot, "that you will be deposed as a witness. I imagine your testimony could be damaging."
Sammy slapped Deasey's arm with the letter.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, hey, thanks, Mr. Deasey."
"What are you going to say?" Joe asked Sammy, as his cousin stared at the door to Anapol's office.
Sammy drew himself up and ran a hand across the top of his head.
"I guess I'm going to go in there and offer to perjure myself," he said.
<a l:href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> In 1998, the New York branch of Sotheby's offered a rare copy of Amazing Midget Radio Comics #1 in Very Good condition. The minimum bid was fixed at ten thousand dollars. Its staples were shiny, its corners sharp, its pages white as piano keys. The cover had a long transverse crease, but after more than half a century-three generations removed now from that jittery year in that brutal yet innocent city-the joy and rage incarnate in the knockout Kavalier punch still startled. It sold, after lively bidding, for $42,200.
<a l:href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> "Fighting Fascism in His Underwear," issue of August 17, 1940.
<a l:href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a> Frege, a socialist, an alpine skier, and, like Love, a Rhodes scholar (they had met at Trinity College), was stripped of his title as German national downhill champion and sentenced to Dachau for "soliciting an act of depravity" in the Munich Bahnhof.
<a l:href="#_ftnref5">[5]</a> This legendary library of self-mortification was lost, and widely considered apocryphal, until 1993, when one of its volumes, Racy Attorney #23, turned up at an IKEA store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it was mutely serving as a dignified-looking stage property on a floor-model "Hjorp" wall unit. It is signed by the author and bears the probably spurious but fascinating inscription To my pal Dick Nixon.
<a l:href="#_ftnref6">[6]</a> Two weeks after Kahn's piece appeared in The New Yorker, giving some particulars of Josef Kavalier and of his family's plight, Kahn forwarded to Joe a check for twelve dollars, one for ten, and a letter from a Mrs. F. Bernhard of East Ninety-sixth Street, offering to feed him a home-cooked meal of schnitzel and knodelen. It is probable that Joe never took her up on the offer. Records indicate, however, that the checks were cashed.
<a l:href="#_ftnref7">[7]</a> It was probably just as well. The man was Max Ernst, not merely an artist whose work Joe admired but a committed anti-fascist, public enemy of the Nazis, and fellow exile.