It's Superman! A Novel (12 page)

“
Mrs
.,” she says.

“Thank you, Mrs. Tibbell.”

As she unscrews the deep cap from her thermos, he has to turn away his head slightly and squint his eyes. Perfume has that effect on Officer Jaeger, causes his eyes to sting and water. Soon, if Nurse Tibbell sticks around, he’ll be sneezing his head off. But she doesn’t. She fills the cap with hot coffee, watches him take an appreciative gulp, and says, “Why don’t you just hold on to the thermos? You need it more than I do.” She gives him a motherly pat on his wrist and pads away on her rubber-soled shoes, past the room where a new patient called Sidney Marsden is getting dressed in the dark. She doesn’t notice that his door is closed.

It’s locked, too.

Marsden finishes tying his shoelaces, then goes back to the closet and removes his overnight bag. It requires a key and he uses it. The bag contains a full set of men’s clothes: underwear, trousers, shirt, and shoes, everything purchased only yesterday, the sizes estimated from newspaper photographs. Jeez, they forgot socks! Well, too bad. He rummages past the clothing, feels around and finds a small bundle, the newspaper wrapping spotted with gun oil. He takes it out and sets it down on a chair.

It’s half past twelve by the radium glow of the bedside clock.

He was told “not before one.”

Damn, though, he’s been twiddling his thumbs for going on ten hours already!

But if he rushes and does this thing too soon, he’ll get outside and there won’t be a car waiting. Exhaling a long sigh of disgust, he sits down on the side of the bed.

By ten of one, Rosemary Tibbell is beginning to feel anxious. Even though she has been ducking into different rooms and utility closets up and down the ninth floor, hiding briefly, emerging, then hiding again, she has, she knows, been noticed by some of the other nurses working the shift. She caught three of them whispering together and looking queerly at her. Even worse, a freckle-faced Irish nurse has gone over and started flirting with the baby-faced copper—who hasn’t, so far as Rosemary can see, taken even a
sip
of coffee in the last twenty minutes.

This better happen soon, she thinks.

She pats the slit pocket in her uniform skirt and feels the short loaded syringe there.

More than fifty blocks to the north, Lex Luthor’s mother, “Mrs. Wesley Dunn,” a widow, puts the last two pills from her candy dish into her mouth, below her tongue, and despite being logy by then, and nauseous, she rinses them down with the end of her bourbon. Vaguely, so vaguely, she hears the bells at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine ring the hour. One o’clock.

At the same moment downtown, on West Twenty-third Street, not far from the Hotel Chelsea, an explosion rips through a nineteenth-century brownstone residence that was converted five years ago into a workingman’s brothel. Windows blow out, followed by flames.

From the steps of the nearby YMCA, Herman Stickowski, called Stick, watches the fire with a satisfied grin on his face.

Under the wheel of a Packard 8 parked just across the street, Dick Sandglass watches Herman Stickowski for a few moments longer, then jumps from his car and runs toward the burning brownstone. It is two minutes past one.

At three minutes past, on the ninth floor of Roosevelt Hospital, Officer Ben Jaeger slumps to one side, lets out a fluttering breath, and immediately begins dreaming.

At five minutes past the hour, Rosemary Tibbell, having consulted a piece of notebook paper scribbled with instructions, flips several toggles on a little wall dingus that looks much like a fuse box. Immediately, up and down the ninth floor, paired blue and red bulbs start flashing an emergency sequence. She watches all of the other nurses respond: they drop everything and rush in a pack toward swinging doors at the opposite end of the hall.

At six minutes past one, Mrs. Tibbell enters Willi Berg’s room.

Stopping suddenly, she draws a sharp breath, then leans over Willi, who is fast asleep but whose legs are kicking under the covers. Carefully she pushes back the left sleeve of his pajama top and pulls out the plunger from her syringe.

She feels something cold touch her neck.

“Put it down, sweetheart.”

Maybe she would have and maybe she wouldn’t have, but Sidney Marsden, impatient beyond any further endurance, simply chops her across the windpipe with the edge of his hand, then punches down hard on the back of her neck. If he didn’t think Mrs. Tibbell was a real nurse, thus a good egg and deserving of continued life, he surely would have struck her with blows guaranteed to kill.

She crumples, he catches her and eases her down to the floor.

Willi Berg flinches awake.

“Get dressed,” says Marsden, tossing him the overnight bag.

“Who the hell are you?”

“You want to get out of here?”

“Yeah, but who—?”

“Then get dressed.”

Taking the stairs, they leave the hospital together about a quarter past one and by twenty past are riding downtown in a Dodge touring sedan. By one-thirty they are crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.

National mourning. Further reports of arson.
Lex Luthor’s shocking new appearance.
Clark Kent, reporter. Willi becomes a chain-smoker.
His shocking new appearance.
●

1

The major story in newspapers published on Friday, August 16, 1935, is the plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska, that ended the lives of Will Rogers and Wiley Post. After Charles Lindbergh, Post was the country’s most touted aviation pioneer, and Rogers, of course, the universally beloved comedian, radio broadcaster, syndicated columnist, and movie personality, the Cherokee cowboy with a ready wink. He never met a man he didn’t like. The two friends were on a flight to Russia. It’s unbelievable. It’s horrible. It’s a national tragedy.

That same day readers also learn President Roosevelt has signed into law the Social Security Act, and Italy’s Primo Camera, who recently lost the world’s heavy-weight boxing match to American Negro Joe Louis, has had his passport canceled by Achille Starace, Secretary General of the Fascist Party. “Camera’s showing,” he says, “is a dishonor to Fascist sport.”

And in New York City news, for the fifth time in two weeks a house of ill-repute allegedly operated by associates of indicted racketeer Lucky Luciano was destroyed last night in a blaze that fire marshals are calling a clear case of arson. Three lives were lost, but, according to an officer from the Eighteenth Precinct, they were just prostitutes.

Two weeks after his brazen escape from a guarded room at Roosevelt Hospital, Ninth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, William Jacob Berg, twenty, the so-called Foto-Fugitive, still remains at large.

Meanwhile, (Miss) Catherine Barton, a woman of a certain age, was released yesterday from police custody. A cafeteria hostess from Woodside, Queens, who had originally given her name as Rosemary Tibbell, Miss Barton was discovered on the morning of August second lying bruised and unconscious in Mr. Berg’s hospital room. She was dressed in a nurse’s uniform rented from a costume store on West Forty-eighth Street. Although initially dubious of her claims to being romantically infatuated by the young murderer after seeing his photographs in the tabloid press, police finally charged the woman with simple trespass, allowed her to pay a small fine, and set her free.

In all the New York papers that day it is also reported that while Fred S. Gropper, vice-president of Amalgamated Gas & Electric, was being paid an annual salary of $60,000, AG&E President Howard H. Sloan had been charging the system’s many holding companies an aggregate of $150,000 per annum for their respective shares of Mr. Gropper’s services. Apparently, Mr. Sloan, whose whereabouts remain currently unknown, has been pocketing the $90,000-a-year difference.

Upon hearing of these revelations, Alderman Alexander Luthor, a personal friend of Sloan’s who benefited from the financier’s advice and monetary contributions during his recent election campaign, expressed shock and dismay but gently reminded members of the fourth estate that, in America at least, a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

During his press conference at City Hall, Alderman Luthor was asked by reporters to comment upon his startling new appearance. Running a hand over his recently shaved and polished skull, he laughed and said, “It kind of resembles the world, doesn’t it?”

Leaving the rostrum, the alderman was overheard to hum a few sprightly bars of “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.”

In the funnies today, Winnie Winkle finds a handbag full of jewelry, Dagwood runs smack into the postman, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are ambushed in a gulch, Pat Ryan kisses the Dragon Lady, and Daddy Warbucks is still being held prisoner in a lunatic asylum by a quack doctor in the employ of a rival tycoon.

“You know something, boss,” says Paulie Scaffa after he’s finished reading
Little Orphan Annie,
“you kind of
look
like Daddy Warbucks now. Especially since you both wear tuxedos.”

Whereupon Lex boxes Paulie’s ears. “Mind telling me why you’re sitting here reading the comics, is that what I pay you for?”

“Just give me something to do, boss, I’ll do it.”

“Find Willi Berg.”

“Boss, we’ve
looked.
He just
vanished.”

“But how? Who helped him?”

Paulie shakes his head.

“I’m late for a meeting with Fatty Arbuckle,” says Lex, referring to Mayor La Guardia, a public friend he privately loathes. “We’ll talk more about this tonight. And bring Stick with you when you come back.”

“Sure, boss, and in the meantime, I’ll keep looking for the kid.”

“You do that.”

As soon as Lex has gone, Paulie raises the windows in his boss’s large, bright kitchen and lights a cigarette. Retaking his seat at the table, he continues to page through the
Daily News.
In
The Gumps
cartoon strip, Andy is griping to his wife, but there are too many words crowded into the talk balloons, so Paulie reads
Dick Tracy
instead. He knows he shouldn’t like
Dick Tracy,
but he does.

He likes how whenever somebody gets shot, you can see the bullet go in one side of the guy’s head and exit the other in a sinuous dotted line.

2

There is no paper published in Smallville, Kansas, on August 16. The
Herald-Progress,
eight broadsheet pages in a tombstone format, comes out just once a week. There will be a new edition next Tuesday. In the meantime, most town and farm residents still keep this past Tuesday’s edition on hand. They’ll wait until the next one is delivered before putting it in the outhouse or using it for peelings. That’s because Newel Timmins, at considerable expense, includes on the next-to-last page of his newspaper a complete seven-day program listing for all of the radio stations you can pick up in southeastern Osage County.

In Smallville, Newel Timmins is considered a cracker-jack businessman and a genuine public servant, although Jonathan Kent thinks he was a real boob to support Herbert Hoover in the last election. Otherwise he’s a decent enough fellow, for a Republican, and he certainly has been good to Clark. Even gives the boy his own byline if something he’s written—the story about the seven Amish families, for example, that just pulled up stakes and moved to Pennsylvania—runs in excess of two columns.

In the still-current number of the
Herald-Progress,
Clark’s name appears below “Ewing L. Herbert Celebrates 95th Birthday,” “History of Basketball to Be Topic at S’ville Study Club,” and “Farm Growth Since ’31 Is Epic of Toil.” In addition to reporting those long stories, he contributed several unsigned squibs, about a sawmill boiler explosion, the proposed teachers’ contract for School District No. 43, and the robbery at a farmer’s cooperative in Paola, over near the Missouri line, being attributed to members of the Jiggs Makley gang.

The final sentence reminds readers that Jiggs Makley died right here in Smallville, killed last May by a freakishly ricocheting bullet fired from his own gun.

Clark’s father scowls over that last item prior to taking up scissors and cutting it out of the paper. Most of his son’s other stories from the current edition, clipped out and neatly trimmed, are spread over the kitchen table, where there is also a jar of mucilage and a scrapbook. Mr. Kent keeps every story Clark writes, even those not amounting to more than public notices. Well, he can’t help it, he’s proud. And Clark, who claims to be embarrassed by the sheer thoroughness of his dad’s new hobby, is deeply touched by his diligence.

It is ten o’clock in the morning and Clark is slathering two thick slices of bread with mayonnaise, piling on ham. He carefully cuts the sandwich in half on a diagonal, wraps it in paper, and sticks it in a carry-all he bought at the mercantile store with his graduation money. In the carryall, which he can either sling over a shoulder or wear like a backpack, he keeps two notepads, a clutch of pencils bound with a rubber band, a cheap pencil sharpener, and a book he borrowed recently from the public library—the collected journalism of Richard Harding Davis. His interest in the science-fiction pulps has waned, may have even lapsed entirely. He no longer feels compelled to write that stuff, either.

“I’ll be back sometime this afternoon,” he says, buckling the flap on his carryall.

“Whenever’ll be fine.”

“I think I got all my chores done.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“But I can help you with that sump later, if you like.”

“Alger and I’ll take care of it.” As soon as he says that, Mr. Kent detects an ambient shift in the kitchen air, a chilling-down. He lays aside the mucilage brush and looks over a shoulder, meeting Clark’s gaze. “You can’t do everything, son. Well, maybe you can, but there’s no need to. Alger’s a good kid.”

“I’m not saying he’s not.”

“No, I don’t think you are. But don’t be jealous of him, either. Okay?”

For almost a month—ever since Mr. Kent learned that Alger Lee’s mother left suddenly for Detroit because her husband had been injured during a strike at the Ford plant—the boy has been helping around the farm three days a week. Sometimes four. Five, occasionally.