It's Superman! A Novel (34 page)

Lex tosses off his sheet and blanket. “Excellent.”

Twenty minutes later he is sitting at the kitchen table and reaching for a carton of Wheaties when Mrs. O’Shea comes in with the telephone. “Hadorn,” she says.

Brusquely, Lex takes the receiver. “Well?” He listens, nods, speaks softly, and hangs up. Passing back the phone, he says, “Done.”

“No chance they’ll suddenly change their—”

“It’s
done,”
says Lex. He throws back his head and laughs. “Call Paulie Scaffa and tell him to grab that other monkey and be over here in twenty minutes. Then call the papers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And say I’ll be happy to meet with reporters today at one o’clock . . . no, make it one-fifteen. In City Hall Park.”

“Why not at City Hall?”

“The park, Mrs. O. At the statue of Civic Virtue.” He picks up the Wheaties carton and fills his bowl. A square white packet drops out. He plucks it up and nearly tosses it aside. Instead he tears off a corner and shakes free a small green toy, a rocket ship exhibiting a star-ringed decal transfer that reads: “Solar Scouts.”

Behind Lex, Mrs. O laughs.

Lex is silent for a long time just looking at the toy. Then he gets up, no longer hungry. “I think you have some calls to make,” he tells Mrs. O’Shea. Carrying his coffee cup on its saucer, he walks down the hall and into his office, where he sits behind his desk, rolls a sheet of paper into the typewriter, and begins to draft remarks for his upcoming press conference.

Further self-doubt. Willi ponders the hazards and profits
of friendship. Ben Jaeger’s haircut. More about robots.
Civic Virtue. Clark Kent, reporter. Lex meets the press.
●

1

While Clark uses up the last of the spiced ham and sliced bread fixing three sandwiches, Willi has both elbows planted on the kitchen table and his face squeezed between his hands. “Tell me it ain’t so—please.”

“Wish I could,” says Lois.

As she has just finished explaining, the special investigation of Lex Luthor announced four weeks earlier by Fiorello La Guardia has spluttered into a metropolitan farce, generating titters on the street, skepticism in the press, and gag cartoons in
The New Yorker.

Each and every locale that the late (and lately much maligned) Richard Sandglass planned to identify as housing one or more of Lex Luthor’s felonious enterprises turned out to be completely and unimpeachably . . . legitimate. The alleged brothels in Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Turtle Bay, as well as in the outer boroughs, were just rental apartments, single-family dwellings, and licensed nursing homes. (The administrator of one of those hushed residences, a still-grieving widow named Ceil Stickowski, was
not
amused when the premises were invaded one morning by a squad of uniformed policemen.) In Hoboken the “counterfeit printing operation” was only a laundry and dry cleaner’s. No munitions were found stockpiled in a warehouse on Staten Island; instead, it was filled with Persian rugs. And there was no telephone call-tapping station on Blofeld Street in Queens, merely a permanent-waving establishment.

The originals of incorporation papers and real estate transfers—documents Sandglass presumably had photographed with a spy camera—turned up either missing or telling a very different story than the one the slain police lieutenant would have claimed they told.

And so on.

“How did Luthor
do
it?”

“I already told you. He got hold of the file that Dick put together.”

“But how did he manage to
undo
everything? So quickly?”

“He was ready for this,” says Lois. “Or at least prepared for it.”

“Wasn’t there a copy?” says Clark. He slides one plate down in front of Lois, another in front of Willi, “You said there were photographs—where are the negatives? Didn’t he keep the negatives?” He takes a bite from his own sandwich.

“If he did—”

“If?”

“Listen, farm boy, quit talking when I’m talking. And don’t talk with food in your mouth.” She glares. “If he
did
keep a copy, nobody’s found it.”

“Did they search his apartment?”

“Of
course.
Ben went through the whole place the same night Dick Sandglass was murdered.”

“Ben?
Ben
did?” That’s Willi: with a smirk. “This wouldn’t by some chance be the cop you’re dating?”

“How do you know who I’m dating?”

Willi folds his arms.
“Is
it?”

“That’s none of your business—but yes.”

Clark figures he’d better step in or else the conversation might quickly go awry. “But maybe he didn’t keep a copy at home. Maybe someplace else? What about a safe-deposit box?”

“If he rented one, nobody’s found a receipt.”

“So
now
what?” Willi again: no longer smirking.

“Well,” says Lois, “there’s always ‘Superman.’ ” She takes a mincing bite of her sandwich.

“He’s real, Lois.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He
is.
You’ll see.”

“I can’t wait.”

But Clark is thinking that he sure can.
He
can wait. Gladly. Because no matter how strong he is or how fast or how far he can see, he is still a farm boy, as Lois rightly called him, a twenty-year-old wheat from Kansas who never figured out the mysteries of the slide rule, who can’t fathom electricity or the principles of music theory, much less radio transmission, and who is utterly mystified by the atom, the X-ray, and the salinity of the ocean. So just how is a guy like
him
supposed to take on and best somebody like Lex Luthor, a grown-up, a millionaire, a
genius
who evidently can snap his fingers and make whatever he wants or doesn’t want vanish into the air?

In Clark’s mouth his bite of sandwich tastes like mucilage.

“Do you have any mustard?” Lois lifts the top off her sandwich to frown at the spiced ham.

“Gee,” says Clark, “no.”

When she pushes her plate aside, rejecting lunch, Clark—on top of everything else he’s feeling, worrying about, even
suffering
at this particular moment—is all of a sudden ardently and utterly in love.

2

The special task force assembled to investigate Alderman Lex Luthor commandeered office space in the sub-basement of police headquarters on Centre Street. Ordinarily by seven
A.M.
the place was packed with uniformed and plainclothes cops, accountants, clerk-typists, and assistant D.A.s. But when Ben Jaeger arrived that Friday morning at quarter of eight he walked into an empty room. Several desks that had been crammed in there only last night were gone, both rolling blackboards had been wiped clean, the telephones were disconnected (he tried three of them), and even the electric percolator was cold.

On the desk he’d been using, Ben discovered an envelope with his name on it. He picked it up and for more than a minute stood holding it in both hands before he took a long breath and tore open the flap. He’d half expected reassignment orders—to a potsy beat in Totenville or Inwood. But it was simply a handwritten note telling him to report immediately upstairs, Room 411.

Twenty minutes later Ben was saying, “Yes, sir. I understand that, sir, but if you—”

He listened and nodded, said, “Yes, sir” again. And: “I know, sir, and I’m grateful. But, Mr. Mayor, if you could just—”

Once more he stopped, squinting against tears that sprang into his eyes, and listened. “Of course, sir. I can see how that’s probably . . . best. Thank you, sir.”

He unpinned his shield from the breast of his tunic and placed it on the desk, his fingers reluctant to withdraw. But finally they did. Ben nodded to the mayor of New York City, the commissioner of investigation, the commissioner of police, and the Manhattan district attorney. Nothing more was said. He opened the door and walked out. Downstairs in the locker room he changed back into civilian clothes. When he turned in his uniform and brogans, the property clerk told him he had to pay a dollar-ten for dry cleaning and twenty-five cents for new heels. Those were the rules. “You can take it out of my last paycheck,” said Ben. He left the building and walked from Centre Street over to Canal, and along Canal only as far as the first saloon.

3

Willi Berg stands on the roof of the tenement, smoking another cigarette and looking west down St. Mark’s Place. And there’s Clark, trotting after Lois Lane, catching up to her—the dog. And now they’re walking together, stopping. Lois walking again, Clark watching. Catching up with her again. His old girlfriend and his best pal. His
only
pal. Some pal. You’d think he might’ve
asked
Willi if it was okay before he started flossing with Lois.

That hick’s got some crust.

Not that Willi is still
interested
in Lois, that’s all done, that’s ancient history.

But
still.

He coughs, clears his throat, and reaches again for his packet of cigarettes. That’s not what he wants, though. What he wants is a life. His real life. His old life. His Willi the Great life.

And despite being a hick, Clark is the guy to get it for him, get it back, especially now that Dick Sandglass, dammit, is dead. Simple as that. For two years Willi has been using Clark for a bodyguard, his ace in the hole, and maybe that was crummy, maybe it was even chickenshit, but so? So what? It was self-preservation. Besides, he’d been good for Clark—got him out of the sticks, didn’t he? Showed him the big, wide world, or at least part of it. And hasn’t he encouraged Clark to practice every day, to inventory all of his crazy ripening talents and figure out what he could do with them? Lift that, toss that, boil this. See where I’m pointing? What’s on the other side? And don’t give me any baloney about eyestrain
—just tell me.
Willi had done, was still doing, a lot for Clark Kent. So what kind of thanks does he get? Big lug tries to steal his girlfriend!

Well,
former.

But
still.

Even though he doesn’t want another cigarette he lights one anyway and wonders what the hell he is going to do for the rest of the day.

There are no magazines, no books in the apartment, and he’s finished with the morning dailies. The only thing on the radio till the late afternoon are soap operas for women, and it would take a lot more than boredom, it would take brainsickness, before Willi Berg would consider tuning in to
Pretty Kitty Kelly
or
The Road to Life.
Hold on, though. Not so fast. Thinking of women—but not, he hopes, soap operas—has just reminded him that Mrs. Palubiski said only yesterday that he ought to drop by sometime. They met on the roof, right over there. Mrs. Palubiski,
Christina,
was hanging sheets, Willi was doing calisthenics. Come visit, she said. She could offer him coffee or a ginger ale. Or if he preferred something stronger, she also had that. She owned a phonograph and half a dozen Bing Crosby sides. Ted Lewis stuff, too, and Benny Goodman. His version of “Moon Glow.” And she had “Stormy Weather” by that colored girl—Ethel Waters. He told her his name was Ace and prayed she wouldn’t ask him for his last name because he hadn’t made one up yet. She had not. Instead she’d asked him could he dance. No? She could teach him. Days were long, yes?
Too
long. And her husband, she let drop, never came home before six-thirty, quarter of seven.

Willi is thinking now, what the hell. He’s still miffed at Clark—pfui to you, pal, and to you too, Lois—but what the hell. Just . . . what the hell.

Till he got his life back he still had to live.

4

The barber shop is below sidewalk level on Broadway just above Canal. The barber is Italian, in his fifties, small and short—he wears lifts on his shoes. As he wields a comb and scissors now around Ben Jaeger’s head he keeps saying, “Hold still or I cut your ear.”

Ben is drunk, very drunk, sliding down and shifting around in the chair, rolling his head, snoozing off and then flinching awake.

“You don’t keep still, I cut your ear.”

“Sorry, paisan.” Ben sits up and squares his shoulders, looks straight ahead at a wall of framed and autographed celebrity photographs: Don Budge, Clyde Beatty, Eddie Arcaro, Joel McCrea.

On the radio Little Jack Little’s recording of “I’m in the Mood for Love” is playing. Dick Sandglass had no use for Little Jack Little—he’s one of those lightweights, like Rudy Vallee or Paul Whiteman. Ben remembers how Sandglass would tease him for being so crazy about Bing Crosby:
You got no taste, kid. One of these days, when I got a year or two, I’ll teach you how to listen.
And now Ben is remembering the names of some of the drummers that Sandglass admired (Jo Jones, Gene Krupa, Stan King), the ones he’d booshwash about while they were tailing Lex Luthor at three in the morning or taking sneaky photographs of brothels in Queens and Brooklyn, a warehouse out by New Dorp Beach, a print shop in Hoboken. Ben remembers how Sandglass would solo on the steering wheel with his index fingers, on the dashboard with a couple of pencils.

“You okay?”

“Sure, sure,” says Ben. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t
look
fine.”

The barber continues to work on the right side of Ben’s head, carefully snipping.

“I’m in the Mood for Love” finishes playing and is followed by a gong and then by an announcer who comes on to read the one o’clock news in a high-hat baritone. To end insurgency in the Holy Land, he says, British authorities today are burning the homes of Arab terrorists. The barber lowers the volume. Emperor Hirohito, says the announcer, has again declared that Japan will continue its war in China until victory is achieved. Local news and weather in a moment, says the announcer, but first this important word from Kreml Shampoo—it removes dandruff and checks falling hair because it’s made from an 80 percent olive oil base.

“That stuff’s no good,” says the barber.

“No?”

“Not so good, no.”

The announcer resumes his sonorous reading of the news: “Embattled alderman Alexander Luthor has . . .”

“Hold
still
!”

“Shhh!”

“—alled a news conference for one-fifteen this afternoon at City Hall Park.”