It's Superman! A Novel (24 page)

Willi saying, “There’s nobody around—do you see anybody? So would you please just pick up that boulder and throw it? Humor me.” Clark saying, “I don’t
feel
like picking up any boulders.”

And now off to their left a ball of oily black smoke—penetrated by a column of flame—foams high into the air. Somebody screams.

And Clark, who has been scuffling along next to Willi, suddenly isn’t there . . .

In the days that follow, he obviously enjoys, even relishes, thinking about what he did at that oil field—put on a burst of speed to roll a boomer who’d caught fire and then grabbed up a well cap, tossed it over the wellhead, and sprawled across it till the flames all quit.

Apropos of nothing, he says, “How much do you figure that cap weighed? More than a ton? It’s hard for me to gauge things like that.” Or he says, “Guess I’m fireproof, huh? My hair, too.” Or says, “We should’ve stuck around. I might’ve got some kind of reward.”

Clark is definitely different. And Willi is not sure that he likes the change.

Dear Father,

As bad luck would have it, we found ourselves yesterday in a miserable place called Panterville where a murder trial was about to start. A colored man was supposed to have killed a white man, his boss, over the boss’s wife. Or something like that, I’m not sure. I’ve seen race troubles since I’ve been gone, and back in Smallville too (remember what they did to Bill Hammer’s face that time?), but it is most awful in Texas. Colored people keep they eyes down here and a great number of them stutter.

Anyhow, when we showed up in Panterville a Negro was going on trial and it seemed like the whole town was gathered outside the district courthouse trying to get in.

There were five Texas Rangers on the front steps. One of them was a captain and
him
he had a shotgun. The others had sidearms. We heard the captain say that he and his men were there at the order of the governor and their instructions were to see that the trial took place in a legal manner, so everybody should go home. But nobody would. They just pushed closer. I wanted to get moving, but Willi wanted to stay so he could take pictures, which he did till some big farmer threatened to break his head. Then a shotgun went off twice inside the courthouse. A minute later they carried out two men
who’s
whose chests were bloody from pellet wounds. The crowd turned rowdy and people started to throw rocks and then a fat old preacher threw an open can of gasoline through a broken window and suddenly the whole building was on fire.

Everybody got out of there except the prisoner. For safekeeping he’d been locked inside the district attorney’s vault and now because of the fire nobody could get to it.

I ran inside and kept blowing hard to keep the flames away. I wasn’t afraid of being burned, I just didn’t want my clothes all ruined. But they got ruined anyway, by spark holes. I’m ashamed that I worried about such a thing at a time like that, but I did.

I had heard someone say the vault was on the third floor. It was and I found it and pulled off the door. But the prisoner was dead. I don’t know if the smoke got to him or what, but he was dead. His skin was red-hot in my arms. I carried him down the stairs and back outside.

Then a couple hundred people rushed at me and grabbed that poor colored man from my arms, they just snatched him away! You should have seen their faces. No, I wouldn’t have wanted you to. They were like a pack of
dogs
. They were like that, exactly. And they tied that dead man, whose name I never got, by a rope to the bumper of a Ford car and dragged him around the public square. Then they cut him off the bumper and pulled him to a tree and hanged him.

They tortured and hanged a dead man, Dad. It was the worst thing I have ever seen.

And do you remember how when I was a boy and whenever I stared at something too long it would start to smolder and even catch fire? Remember when I set those old magazines of Mom’s on fire? I did that again yesterday, but on purpose.

Every single automobile and truck that I could find, I looked at
real hard
till the gas tank blew up.

Those people in Panterville, they all just ran like hell, is what they did, excuse my language. But they ran like hell in all directions.

Willi must have seen something in my face because he dragged me away from there and back to the freight yards. And it’s a good thing he did too, because otherwise I would have burned down that whole town, Dad. I
wanted
to.

I’m not sorry I did what I did no matter
how
much money those cars and trucks cost. I was glad and I still am as I write this letter to you. I guess I have a temper and should be a monk or a hermit! I have a bad temper, Dad, I do, and that could be a real disaster some day. People could hate me. They probably will. And if they can find nails that won’t break, they might just crucify me.

loving

Your ^ son,

Clark

p.s. We have both had enough of this being on the bum and have decided to go to California to live and work. I will write again just as soon as we are settled, p.p.s. It
was
wrong, wasn’t it? Please don’t be too disappointed in me.

PART THREE

THE SAUCER-MAN FROM
TINSELTOWN

Jealousy. The martini maker. Caesar Colluzo.
Cell’s hero. Smokin’ Dynamite. Death of a henchman.
●

1

Despite Lex Luthor’s savvy and sensitive draft report on the Harlem race riot, and despite his many contributions to both the unification of the transit system and the preparation of a new city charter; despite the federal loans and work projects Lex facilitated due to his agile handling of Harold Ickes, the notoriously ill-tempered Secretary of the Interior; and despite the fact that Lex’s universal popularity has bolstered Fiorello La Guardia’s own flagging public approval—despite all of that, by the summer of 1937 the portly mayor of New York City has cooled significantly toward the affable young alderman.

He has snubbed Lex at City Hall, at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds; seen to it that Lex was not included in group pictures of dignitaries taken during groundbreaking ceremonies for the World’s Fair, the opening of the Lincoln Tunnel, and the dedication of the Triborough Bridge. He has left him out of strategy meetings, dropped him from steering committees. Arranged for him to be seated with cranks and boorish old coots at political banquets, no longer invites him to late-night games of Russian Bank at his family’s apartment in East Harlem, and most recently he interrupted a budget conference to upbraid Lex for what he called his “incessant, irritating, tuneless, retardate
humming.”

Does the mayor feel that Lex Luthor is becoming too popular? Is he piqued that Lex’s low-altitude piloting antics at the Montauk Air Show eclipsed his own cornet solo that very same day with the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall? Is La Guardia angered by Lex’s active lobbying efforts to be named either deputy mayor or city planning commissioner once the new charter is instituted? Or does he suspect that the alderman, observed on two occasions having drinks with Jeremiah Titus Mahoney, the Democratic candidate in the upcoming mayoral election, is hedging his bets, plotting disloyalty, possibly treachery?

Meanwhile, the handful of people in New York with some (but not full, not even close to full) knowledge of Lex Luthor’s illegitimate enterprises are wondering if the mayor—self-styled racket buster and smasher of slot machines—has tumbled somehow onto the humming alderman’s secret career. La Guardia is no dope. He’s a pain in the
tuchis,
a boil, a rat bastard, but no dope.

Lex, however, has no need to speculate: he knows
exactly
what’s going on. “La Guardia’s a prude, that’s
his
problem,” he tells Caesar Colluzo one evening in the first week of August. Lex started in again ranting about the mayor just as soon as he switched off his short-wave radio, and then pressed a button, sending the receiving-and-transmitting station revolving back to its concealed niche behind the living-room wall. One of Lex’s minor, but still lucrative, innovations in crime has been the establishment of a metropolitan wiretapping service, available to anyone willing and able to pay the price, and he just received his weekly update from a supervisor at the bootleg telephone exchange in Woodside, Queens. Along with a declaration of receipts, the woman—“Operative X12”—reported that yesterday afternoon at three-eleven
P.M.
Mayor La Guardia was heard telling Robert Moses over the telephone that Lex would no longer be consulted regarding building contracts for the upcoming World’s Fair. “He thinks I’m ostentatious for living in a place like this, and him still knocking around in that crummy little flat on the Upper East Side. He’s so morally superior I’d like to strangle him.”

Caesar Colluzo merely shrugs one shoulder.

“And it’s driving him crazy that I’m a trendsetter. Have you noticed how many men are wearing tuxedos in the daytime ever since I started to do it? Have you?”

“No,” says Colluzo, “I have not.”

“Well, just look around and you’ll see.”

As Lex paces and Colluzo reclines on a claret-colored sofa in the library of Lex’s new apartment in the Waldorf Towers, one of the phlegmatic Italian’s latest robots—the prototype LR-1—handily mixes a pitcher of martinis. Thirty-eight inches tall, aluminum, noiseless, and with ball bearings in lieu of feet, it scoops pimentoed olives from a bottle with a long-handled spoon and deposits one into each of two martini glasses. “Amazing,” says Lex. “I’ve seen grown men with less dexterity.”

Colluzo nods. “Yes, and he can pick up a dime, as well.”

“That’s wonderful. But can he pick up a
showgirl
?”

The Italian doesn’t even smile. He is a slightly built, round-headed man in his early thirties with thinning black hair and the effete kind of mustache Continental royalty affect, the sort that reminds Lex Luthor of two sardines on a collision course. As always Caesar is dressed in a tatty black suit, a white shirt, and a black string tie. The shirt buttons are yellow and brittle, and the frayed cuffs spill from his coat sleeves, ending just shy of his big knuckles.

When the robot delivers a martini in a frosted glass, Lex says, “Thank you.” Then: “Can he hear me?”

“It
is a machine, Mr. Luthor. It does not need your gratitude, nor can it respond to politeness. It cannot decode the
sounds
you make.”

“The sounds I make,” says Lex in a musing voice. He sips his drink. “Delicious!”

“I took the recipe from a bartender’s guide I found in your kitchen.”

“How resourceful of you.” Finishing the martini, Lex smacks his lips. Then he clears his throat and changes his tone: “Fatty wants me to throw a public tantrum. But it’s not going to happen.”

Colluzo moves one shoulder again.

“I know when to turn the other cheek,” says Lex, “and when to strike.”

The robot glides over to the side of the chromium bar cabinet, and with a hard emphatic click turns itself off.

“But he’ll get his eventually. I’ll see
to
it.”

“Why do you keep talking to me about the mayor? Do I care? I don’t. I am an engineer.”

“You’re
my
engineer,” says Lex. He glares but can’t bring himself to grow angry at the little genius. Flinging himself down in a chair, he lifts his feet onto the hassock and crosses his ankles.
My
engineer.
My
robot.
My
grand and perfect plan . . .

2

The scruffy little man was a fascination from the moment Lex first noticed him seated in a tiered lecture room at New York University a year ago this coming November. Lex was there in his official capacity to attend a seminar entitled “Public Works and Civil Engineering,” and while the hall was crowded, so crowded that a number of attendees were perched on the steps or stood along the back wall, the chairs on either side of Caesar Colluzo remained unoccupied. Lex supposed it was because the little man (who
was
he?) was dressed like a ragamuffin, smelled of garlic, and seemed far more the knife-sharpening, organ-grinding, cart-pushing kind of Italian than he did the Enrico Fermi, Franco Rasetti sort. Lex was sitting two rows above and once his attention began to drift, as it always did during those sorts of things, he found himself staring down at Caesar with gathering absorption. He was astounded by the way Caesar’s right hand never stopped moving as he jotted down every droning word the panelists uttered in an elegant stenography.

But that wasn’t what caused Lex’s real fascination. That came about when he realized that while Caesar Colluzo was taking notes with his right hand, he was simultaneously sketching and labeling diagrams in a separate notebook with his left.

Robots.

Caesar Colluzo was filling page after page of a red-covered notebook with sketches, diagrams, even preliminary blueprints for the kind of square-headed, block-bodied, tubular-legged robots that proliferated on the covers of science-fiction magazines and clanked across the floors of subterranean laboratories in Saturday-morning chapter-plays.

Lex decided then and there to learn more about this strange-looking little Italian.

And so he charged Paulie and Stick with finding out whatever they could. The first thing they discovered was that Caesar Colluzo was neither a public official nor a city engineer, but instead was the most active, albeit unregistered, university student in the five boroughs of New York City. In any week from early in the morning till late in the evening he sat in on classes—undergraduate, graduate, doctorate, postdoctorate, and always classes in the pure or applied sciences—at NYU, as well as at Hunter, Fordham, Columbia, Brooklyn College, City College, Queens College, even the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Taking copious notes with his right hand while sketching, revising, finessing, and providing schematics for a veritable fleet of man-shaped robots with his left.

This guy’s a real cold shudder, boss, why you so interested in him
?