It's Superman! A Novel (26 page)

But, he decided, there might also be
American
markets for light- and medium-grade explosives—corporations needed to stockpile that kind of thing in the face of labor strikes; strikers needed to do the same thing. It stood to reason. And there were the native fascist groups. And the communists too, of course, although they were notoriously bad credit risks. The Ku Klux Klan. Not to mention racketeers in other cities.

The problem was that Lex had no idea how to unload the stuff. So for several months he’d done nothing. (The Italian government offered to buy whatever Lex could sell them, but they proposed delivery to a submarine off the southern coast of New Jersey, and Lex balked at that.)

When Stick mentioned his idea—beautifully printed, carefully distributed catalogs with a dozen postal blinds and automatic forwarding addresses to handle the direct-mail business—Lex got it immediately. It was simple and it was beautiful and it would work. You could, said Stick, probably set up a system where a dummy telephone number would switch incoming calls to an untraceable other number. Lex thought
definitely
could, not
probably
, and right away put Caesar Colluzo to work developing such a system.

It was also Stick who suggested that there might be another market for these kinds of products scattered among ordinary citizens, and he proposed distributing the catalogs at gun shows and rodeos and stock-car races, at smokers and bachelor parties, bowling alleys and cabana clubs.

While Lex was fully prepared to recruit one of the chief copywriters at the largest advertising agency in New York (incriminating photographs, once again, would be involved), Stick proposed letting Ceil, who had done some editorial work as a young woman for a boosterism magazine in Putnam County, write all of the copy as well as lay everything out.

The first catalogs were mailed at the end of May.

Orders poured in almost immediately.

Lex considered his catalog business nothing short of an imaginative breakthrough in the annals of crime . . .

“Shall we continue with our story?” Lex says now, picking up the copy of
Northwest Passage
from Stick’s bedside table. He opens it to the bookmark and glances at the page number: 159. Then he flips to the last page: 709. “We’ll never make it to the end, Sticky,” he says, keeping his tone light, almost joking.

Stick looks surprised and suddenly begins to gasp for air. He fumbles with both hands, searching after the oxygen mask. When he finds it and holds it over his nose and mouth, his chest relaxes.

Lex turns and examines the green oxygen cylinder.

Removing the mask from his face, Stick says, “Yeah, I’d like it if you just read a little, sir.”

“Chapter . . . twenty-seven,” says Lex after deciphering the Roman numerals. “ ‘Rogers, it seemed to me, could go beyond the limits of human endurance; and then, without rest, buoyantly hurl himself against the fiercest opposition of Nature or man, or both. There was something elemental about—’ ”

“Boss, you can’t imagine what it’s like. It’s awful.”

“Knowing that you’re a dead man?” Lex shuts the book around his index finger.

“I’m worried all the time.”

“Ceil’s going to be okay,” says Lex. “Don’t worry about Ceil. I’ll see to it that she’s well taken care of.”

He has a cathouse in mind, a little place over in Chelsea. One of those that formerly belonged to Lucky Luciano. Like the whole string of them, it could use strong new management. Ceil has the starch, not to mention the heft, and the perfect madam’s bosom.

“I’m not just worried about Ceil, of course.”

“Of course not,” says Lex. He heaves himself to his feet and tosses the book on the table. Stands with his hands clasped in front of him. “There’s nothing afterward, you know.”

“What?”

“Once you die, that’s it.”

“Don’t
say
that. Oh, don’t say that, sir. Don’t say things like that.”

“I’d think it would be a comfort to you, Stick. Once you’re dead you’ll never know you ever existed. You’re nothing.”

Stick’s eyes dart uneasily. On his chest the oxygen mask quietly hisses. “What about God, sir? What about heaven?”

“Think about it, Stick. Why would God surround himself in heaven with billions of idiotic human beings when he can have anything he wants?” Lex glances at his watch.

Stick begins to wheeze, his eyes bulge, and he claps the mask back onto his face.

“Why would he
do
such a thing? It’s just not logical,” says Lex as he turns off the oxygen flow; lefty-loosey, righty-tighty.

Stick is thumping his hands on the mattress and turning blue.

But taking one last grab at life he flings away the mask, struggles for breath, for energy, juddering his lips and finally managing to say, “. . . op Sandglass came to see me.”

Lex turns the oxygen back on and Stick absorbs it,
gulps
it.

“Richard
Sandglass? From the Detective Bureau?”

Stick nods.

“Came to see you?”

Stick nods again.

“You two pals or something?” Leaning over the bed, Lex takes the mask from Stick’s hand. “You pals with a cop?”

“He pinched me twice as a fly dick. Both times when I was Jimmy Walker’s bootlegger. We’re not
pals
but he feels sorry for me, I guess. More than you can say for Paulie.”

“Forget Paulie.”

“He never comes to visit me!”

“I said forget Paulie. We’re talking about Richard Sandglass. Who
didn’t
come by here just to cheer you up. What’d he want?”

“First you got to promise you won’t turn off that oxygen tank again.”

“Fair enough.” Lex sits back down on his chair. “What did he want?”

“He said he was sorry to hear I wasn’t going to get better and told me that a deathbed confession has the weight of sworn testimony.”

Lex feels a sharp cramp in his abdomen and looks down at his hands lying flat on his thighs. Not a tremble. But his fingers have turned cold. “So far as a cop like Sandglass is concerned you’re a legger who went legit after Repeal. Why would he care about your deathbed confession?”

“He wanted me to tell him what I knew about you. What I did for you.”

“And you said . . . ?”

“ ‘Take a hike.’ What
else
would I say? But he says you’re nothing but a crook passing himself off as a politician. No offense, sir. I’m just repeating his words.”

“And when were you going to tell me about all this?”

Stick closes his eyes. “Leave me alone, sir. You don’t know what it’s like facing what I’m facing. Every second is precious. Don’t spoil it.”

Lex thinks about that, weighs it, and finally nods. Case made. He picks up the Kenneth Roberts novel, finds his place. “There was something elemental about him,” he reads, “something that made it possible for men who were dead with fatigue to gain renewed energy from him, just as a drooping wheat-field is stirred to life by the wall of wind that runs before a thunder storm.” Lex pauses, glances up, and meets Stick’s gaze. They both smile.

Lex resumes, “We’d no sooner made camp that night . . .”

5

From where she is sitting in the kitchen Ceil can see Lex Luthor step out of Herman’s room and gently close the door.

While he picks up the phone and makes a call, she puts water on for tea, then drapes a towel over Zulu’s cage. The parrot screeches in protest.

A few minutes later Lex walks into the kitchen.

“I bet Herman was glad to see you.”

“He was. These the blues?” he asks, picking up the proofs for the Fall Arsenal of Values. He flips through several pages. Headings read: “The Crown Prince,” “the Medley,” “the Salvo,” “the Hoopla.” All of the copy is illustrated by photographs of rifles and hand grenades, bomblets, cluster bomblets, stench and stink bombs (there’s a difference), infernal bombs, and gravity bombs, everything offered at sharply reduced prices. There are special offers on rifle dischargers, deep discounts for ordering large quantities. Lex finds a typo:
Combo,
in
Combo Pak,
is spelled
Comba.
When he points it out, Ceil puts a circle around it with a red grease pencil, scores out the “a,” draws a line, and carets in an “o.”

Then: “Ceil, I want to talk to you about an opportunity you might be interested in. But we’ll wait till after the funeral.”

“The funeral?”

“He’s gone, Ceil. That was Stick’s doctor I just called. He’ll call Mahoney’s.”

“Mahoney’s?”

“The funeral parlor.”

Lex promised Stick he would leave the oxygen tank alone and he did. He was a man of his word. He used a pillow.

It wasn’t as though he expected Stick to betray him to Richard Sandglass, but why take chances? And besides, Stick’s illness had dragged on. Lex did the man a favor.

Ceil reaches a hand to her forehead and leaves it there, pressing. “I should go see him.”

“If you absolutely need to,” says Lex, “but otherwise I wouldn’t.” As he is putting on his hat and coat he tells her, “By the way, you’ve done an excellent job on the catalog. Very excellent, indeed.”

Charlie Brunner makes a purchase. Prehistoric life.
Recent news of Lois Lane. A strange visitor.
Alger in Kansas City. Skinny gets even.
●

1

The Smokin’ Dynamite Fall Arsenal of Values is printed on August 9, 1937, between bootleg runs of
How to Win Friends and Influence People
and
Gone with the Wind.
(That was Lex’s own brainstorm, producing cheap copies of best-selling books for the English-language markets in South and Central America. Booming business.) The catalogs are printed in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a counterfeit union bug as well as bogus state and federal licensing notices. They are then put into cartons, and the cartons trucked to a direct mailer in Newark who runs the catalogs through his machines, attaching labels. Reboxed, the catalogs are sent by train to Brownsville, Texas, then by truck to Mexico and mailed. Thus they reenter the country and disappear into the U.S. postal routes.

Before the end of August the orders start pouring in.

One of them comes from a first-time customer in Hollywood, California, named Charles V. Brunner.

Brunner is a thirty-five-year-old trumpeter with the Bob Crosby Orchestra, a very decent Dixieland-style swing band despite the bandleader’s complete lack of musical talent. But young Bob is good at fronting talent and he has name recognition, being kid brother to Bing.

Currently the band is playing an extended engagement at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. That’s where Brunner picked up the Smokin’ Dynamite catalog. It was lying around the dressing room in a messy pile of slicks and pulp magazines. The handsome painted cover caught his attention: in the style of James Montgomery Flagg at his most genially patriotic, it showed Uncle Sam on the porch of a log cabin accepting a parcel from his friendly mailman on the rural route; the Smokin’ Dynamite logo appeared on the upper left-hand corner of Uncle Sam’s parcel. Once Brunner realized what the catalog was offering, he found himself wholly absorbed in the array of products.

The revenge idea popped into his head practically full-blown the same instant he turned a page and came upon the double spread offering a wide selection of “infernal devices.”

A
time
bomb.
That’s
what he could do, he could blow her up with a time bomb.

For the past several weeks Brunner had been wondering just what the hell he was going to do about his wife’s infidelity. She didn’t know that he knew, that he’d
seen
them together. Charlie Brunner was biding his time but he had to do
something.
And it was the catalog that made him decide upon his course of action. He would kill her. Her and the boyfriend.

The model Brunner chose was called the Trinitro-Delux. Three sturdy red cardboard tubes, TNT filler, fuse, safety clips, copper wires, and a Bulova “silent-tick” alarm clock. All for under thirty bucks, postage included.

He paid with a money order.

The Trinitro-Delux is delivered in a sturdy carton wrapped with brown paper—and ironically, since it comes on a Saturday, Skinny carries it in from the mailbox. “You got something,” she says, tossing the parcel on the coffee table and giving Brunner a sickening jolt because he knows immediately what’s inside. But he needn’t have worried—it was banged around a lot worse than that in the mails. The materiel is well packed in excelsior. “What’d you get?”

“None of your damn business,” says Brunner, getting up from the couch and taking the parcel with him down the hall to the bathroom.

“Be like that. See if I care.” Skinny flips him off behind his back.

Almost since day one the Brunners’ marriage has been miserable and quarrelsome. A man should know better than to marry a woman with a shape like Skinny’s. Pour a physique like hers into a nurse’s uniform and watch out. Trouble, capital T. And Charlie Brunner has that, all right.

But at least he knows what’s going on. He even knows where they’ve been doing the dirty: in a cheap little bungalow on Vine Street. And when: every Tuesday afternoon. Brunner followed Skinny there twice, loitering around but unable to make himself go bang on the door. He didn’t want to be the ridiculous cuckold, the public fool, like one of those guys from the
Decameron
or the
Canterbury Tales.
He didn’t want to make a scene. He considers himself quite an alligator. With a reputation to protect.

After he quit the Goodman orchestra (Benny was a monster to work for!) and joined Bob Crosby’s outfit, he recorded a number of sides with the band for Decca, then traveled with the guys to Chicago, Boston, and finally New York City, playing four weeks at the Hotel New Yorker followed by six at the Hotel Lexington’s Silver Grill.

Since he was in town, Brunner went and lived with Skinny Simon again. Why not? It was better than sharing a hotel room with one of the guys in the band. So they’d had their big reunion, and that was fine, but then one thing led to another, same old story, and before you knew it, Brunner was marrying the broad down at City Hall and bringing her back out to California with him. Big mistake.