It's Superman! A Novel (25 page)

Mind, your own business, Paulie. Where’s he live?

Some dump hotel, Forty-nine and Ninth.

Where’s he get his money?

Money? He jumps every turnstile. Hides from the landlord.

How does he eat?

With his fingers.

Paulie . . .

He gets a roll and a cuppa every morning at six over at the Salvation Army.

Thank you, Paulie.

You want we should kill him?

Kill
him? Of course not, Stick. I
love
this guy.

Lex didn’t
really,
but he
was
mesmerized by him. And tantalized by certain possibilities that were becoming ever clearer in his mind.

Same as Lex, Caesar Colluzo was self-invented; he just hadn’t pulled it off with anything near to Lex’s high degree of polish. Born in Florence, he’d tell people; family impoverished by the Great War, he’d say; attended the Free University of Rome, he’d boast, where he received his first degrees, in theoretical physics, civil engineering, radiochemistry.

He attended the first international Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1927, Caesar would say, where he delivered a paper on quantum theory; Einstein applauded, Bohr applauded, everyone applauded. Immigrated to the United States in ’28, he’d say, and took several more advanced degrees. He worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he’d say, where he personally confirmed the existence of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen. Then he spent a year, he’d say, working as a reliability engineer at the Picatinny arsenal in New Jersey. No, wait. First he worked at the arsenal,
then
he worked for the NIST. No, first he worked for NIST, then at the Westinghouse lab on the Televox automaton, and
then
he went to Picatinny. And then . . .

Caesar Colluzo’s biography was a complete fabrication. It had taken Lex scarcely a week to dope out the real stuff.

He was born in Florence, all right—Florence, Pennsylvania. And yes, his parents
were
both Italians. A bricklayer and a seamstress. But the family name wasn’t Colluzo, it was DiLappa. Caesar’s birth name was Jacopo. He’d been in jail twice, each time for petty theft. And it was during his time in jail, apparently, while hiding from bullies in a surprisingly well-stocked library, that he first developed an interest in physics and chemistry, radio technology, and engineering in practically all of its branches (he wasn’t particularly interested in building
buildings).
And where had his interest in robots come from? From
Metropolis,
of course. The German picture by Fritz Lang. Caesar Colluzo had fallen in love with the movie’s female robot, the one who led the revolt of the masses.

Less than two weeks after the conference at NYU, Lex telephoned Caesar Colluzo, introduced himself, and invited him for drinks at the Waldorf.

Colluzo said, “That is very kind of you, I accept.” Then, following a long pause, he inquired, “What exactly is an
alderman
?”

“Someone,” said Lex, “who can make all of your dreams come true.”

They met on a rainy weekday afternoon. Lex deliberately arrived early and sat at the bar with his briefcase on the floor leaning against his right leg. As he waited for Colluzo to appear he sipped a whiskey and watched in the back bar mirror as the fat English movie director Alfred Hitchcock entertained a table full of reporters. Hitchcock was waving an ice cream cone, his wife and small daughter sitting there with him at the table with tight smiles on their faces. With orotund delivery he was singing the praises of American ice cream, which he wouldn’t trade for a steak-and-kidney pie, he said, or a broiled silversmith with carrots and dumplings, or even Kentish chicken pudding. It sounded rehearsed to Lex. Hitchcock was doing publicity for his new picture. The review that Lex had read in the
Times
made it sound good—but he just hadn’t gotten around to seeing it. He hadn’t gotten around to a lot of things.

All he seemed to have time for lately was city and criminal business, and at night he was too exhausted to do anything but go to bed and lie awake for hours, wondering why he had chosen to do what he’d done with his life.

When he was younger he’d operated by instinct, knowing before the age of fifteen that he needed to, was
fated
to, become a public figure as well as one of the most secretive men on the planet. But for the past year he’d wondered constantly just
why
he was doing it all. Why did he still work harder than anyone else in city government, the mayor included? Why take such pains with his wardrobe, with his persona? Why keep gobbling up, consolidating,
reinvigorating
the traditional New York rackets? Why keep launching new ones? Just because he could? It was an awful lot of work, and he no longer needed the money.

Perhaps he did, though. Perhaps he needed far more of it than he already had. Not for any
personal
use—he had no real love of luxury—but to underwrite something vast and historical. Something complicated and irrevocable. Some . . . grand scheme. The undertaking of, the commitment to. But a grand scheme to achieve
what
? There was the rub. Lex had no real idea what his goal should be. He was no longer interested in becoming mayor or governor, or the greatest racketeer since Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. The early appeal was gone, had vanished.

Nothing seemed
compelling
enough.

Was he having a moral crisis? Or just fed up to the gills?

But his long night of the soul ended the morning he first laid eyes upon Caesar Colluzo . . .

And now here came the little scruffy Italian, seemingly unimpressed by the Waldorf bar and the tuxedoed alderman who stood up immediately to shake his hand. What would he like to drink? Nothing. Well, perhaps a glass of seltzer. “You mentioned on the telephone about making my dreams come true. I’m curious, sir, how you might presume that I even
have
dreams. Or what they might entail.” He really talked like that.

Smiling, Lex reached down and, while humming to himself (“How Deep Is the Ocean?”), picked up his briefcase. It weighed ten pounds and was filled with file folders and accordion folders stuffed with city ordinances and resolutions, revised budgetary figures, and correspondence that dealt with current labor negotiations, employee certifications, audits.

He undid the clasp, flicked through standing folders, then slid one out.

Colluzo’s eyes widened when he realized it contained photostatic copies of roughly one hundred of his robot schematics.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“No, I expect you don’t,” said Lex. He removed another file from his briefcase and passed that one to Colluzo as well. Then he took a sip from his drink. Straightened his cocktail napkin and carefully set down his glass.

Beside him Colluzo was staring with horror at the first of a dozen photographs inside the folder. Without looking at any of the others he snapped the folder closed.

“Just so you won’t be kept in suspense,” said Lex, “I’m very open-minded. Personally I don’t care what a man does on his own time. What
two
men do. Of course, most people in the world are not quite so open-minded. Policemen and judges, for example. And prison guards.”

“You are blackmailing me?”

“Engaging your services.” Lex took back the file folder.

“To do what?”

“Build me a few robots,” said Lex. “Isn’t that what you’ve always dreamed about doing?”

3

“I wouldn’t object to another one of those martinis,” Lex says now, and Caesar Colluzo glumly snatches up the remote-control device—it resembles a model-train transformer—and presses a tablet.

At the same moment Lex Luthor’s general factotum appears in the library: Mrs. O’Shea, a fiftyish Irish woman with a bubble of snowy white hair and a very slight brogue. She conveys a white telephone whose dial and disconnect buttons are made of 24-karat gold. Its cord snakes across the parquet floor, through the open doorway, and out into the hall. “It’s that Polish woman again,” she tells Lex. After putting the phone down on the table, she makes a tiny sneer at the LR-1, whose right arm lifts with a hydraulic hum to hover over the martini pitcher.

Mrs. O’Shea leaves the room.

Lex says, “Luthor,” then patiently listens. “Ceil? Calm down, it’s—
please,
Ceil, I want you to calm down. That’s better. All right? Now I’ll see what I can do, I’ll try to stop by. I’ll
try.”

He ends the connection by pressing and holding down one of the buttons. Then he releases it and dials 0. “I’ll need my car, Henry. Ten minutes?” After he’s pronged the receiver, Lex rubs a hand across his chin, his features composed into an unlikely expression, equal parts disgust and empathy.

When he strides toward the door, the LR-1, carrying a fresh martini, pivots and follows. Seeing it, Lex stops. So does the robot. Lex pinches the glass by its stem, raises and drains it. “I’ll be gone for a couple of hours,” he tells Caesar Colluzo. Then he sets his glass down on the flat surface of the robot’s head and walks out.

4

Ceil Stickowski thinks Lex Luthor is the greatest, kindest, smartest man on planet Earth, and if you are prepared to argue that with her, she is prepared to slug with you toe-to-toe.

Ever since Herman went to the doctor in April complaining about shortness of breath and was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the alderman has taken care of all of the medical bills, the drugstore prescriptions, even the sick-room rental equipment. And he never fails to visit Stick every other day, usually in the late afternoon. He’ll sit bedside and talk to Stick for a few minutes, then read to him for an hour. He’s a prince, that Mr. Luthor!

In Ceil and Herman’s time of crisis, Lex Luthor, God bless him, has even found a way for Ceil to make an income of her own. He’s put her in charge of the mail-order catalogs. There have been two so far: the original Smokin’ Dynamite catalog and the Smokin’ Dynamite Summer Supplement. A third—the Smokin’ Dynamite Fall Arsenal of Values—is ready to be printed, and a fourth, the last, a clearance catalog, is in the works. Because Ceil does all of the production work (layouts, photostats, pasteups), then oversees the print runs at a clandestine typography shop in Hoboken, Lex now puts another sixty dollars cash into Stick’s pay envelope each Friday. She wishes he would give her the money she’s earned in a separate envelope, one with her own name on it, but wouldn’t dream of suggesting it.

When Mr. Luthor arrives at half past seven this evening, Ceil greets him pleasurably, taking both of his hands in hers and drawing him inside.

The Stickowskis rent a two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a brownstone in Turtle Bay, the rooms dark and sparsely, inexpensively furnished. Hung on the walls are framed pictures of scenic wonders—the Matterhorn, Arizona canyons, natural bridges. The only extravagances are a Stromburg-Carlson radio-phonograph in the living room and an African parrot named Zulu that Ceil keeps in a rattan cage out in the kitchen.

“I shouldn’t have called, Mr. Luthor. I hope you’ll forgive me but he seems so listless today and I guess I just—”

“It’s fine, Ceil. I’m glad you called. Is he awake?”

“Last I checked.”

Lex nods but makes no movement toward the bedroom. “I was wondering,” he says, “about those proofs.”

“Oh! They’re all corrected. You can look at them before you leave, if you want.”

“Why don’t I do that?”

Ceil walks a step behind him as far as the bedroom. He goes in and leaves the door open. She remains outside. Lex starts to sit down in a chair but changes his mind and comes back and shuts the door.

As he does he gives Ceil a sympathetic smile.

In Stick’s room Lex always feels conflicted and uncomfortable. He is sorry that Stick is dying, he truly is (the man was a most efficient triggerman), but wishes he’d just go ahead and
do
it, croak already. Let’s get this show on the road.

Braced against three pillows in a hospital bed that rents for a dollar a day, Stick is pressing an oxygen mask to his face. It makes him look like a fatally ill bomber pilot.

On the nightstand, along with the medicine bottles, spoons, and crumpled tissues, are a thick wooden crucifix, two stubby white unlit candles, and a pygmy-size bottle of chrism.

“Priest been to see you?”

Stick nods yes while letting his hand drop away from the mask. The mask plops onto his stomach. He looks so tired and wasted that Lex feels drained of vitality himself just being near him. “Had Extreme Unction and everything.”

“Excellent, Stick. Just terrific.” He leans forward and pats Stick on the wrist. “Come up with any new ideas lately?”

“Wish I had, sir. But I think the medicine must be interfering with the old imagination.”

“Well, don’t worry about it.”

Stick is pretty far gone in the head. Sometimes he’ll hear quarreling voices and see crazy things: blue lizards that scramble over the walls and red bats that cling upside down to the ceiling, fish squirting out of his pillowcase to flop around in his bed, fall off, and die on the floor. It’s the morphine.

But long before he started dosing with that stuff, Stick passed his days in bed dreaming up new criminal opportunities for Lex to pursue (restaurants, bakeries, trucking companies) and suggesting fresh variations on the old standbys of policy, extortion, and loan-sharking. Most of his ideas were pure cockamamie. One of them, however, was a real beaut.

Flipping idly through a pile of Sears-Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs one day, it dawned on him that mail-order might be the perfect way to move a warehouse inventory of small ordnance—hand grenades, rifle grenades, smoke bombs, gas bombs, time bombs, dumb bombs, and novelty bomblets disguised as pencils, spaldeens, and lumps of coal—that Lex had acquired along with a score of bordellos in the aftermath of Lucky Luciano’s imprisonment and Meyer Lansky’s relocation to southern California.

Lex hadn’t planned on becoming involved in the sale of incendiaries and small arms, but once he acquired that warehouse he got interested. With the U.S. Neutrality Act in effect, and an embargo on weapon sales to European and Asian belligerents, Lex decided to explore arms merchandising.