It's Superman! A Novel (35 page)

With half of his hair barbered and the other half not, Ben Jaeger is out the front door before the snooty broadcaster can finish observing a rhetorical pause.

“A major announcement is expected.”

5

Lex Luthor arrives at City Hail Park at seven minutes past the hour. When his limousine turns off Broadway and passes the old triangular post office he tells Paulie Scaffa, “Drive around. I shouldn’t be early.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

Carl Krusada sits up front with Paulie. Carl is wearing his cleric’s suit but not a Roman collar.

A number of reporters already congregated at the statue of Civic Virtue spot the big Lincoln and dash madly away from the monument’s dry basin and into the street. “Alderman! Alderman!” Before Lex can tell him to, Paulie speeds up. He turns off Park Row onto Frankfort Street, heading east and rolling parallel to the elevated railroad and the plaza entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Just for that,” says Lex, “I think I’ll show up late.”

Beside him but not touching, Mrs. O smiles.

“Paulie, why don’t you go on over to Water Street?”

At twelve minutes past one Lex climbs from the back of the car. He glances around, making certain no reporters have followed. Only a few blocks away is the bustling Fulton fish market, but over here the cobblestone street and broken sidewalks are deserted. Identical low brick buildings, former tanneries dating back to the early nineteenth century, face each other across Water Street. Lex uses a key to let himself into the most decrepit-looking one.

Inside is a long, freshly plastered room lighted by fluorescent tubing on the ceiling. Against the south wall stand more than a dozen robot prototypes, the original LR series, each partly disassembled. Against the north wall, stacked three deep, four high, and numbering over a hundred, are square and softly lustrous metal boxes. Except for the suitcase-style leather grips mounted on the lids, they resemble doorstep milk boxes, the kind provided to customers by local dairies. In a crate nearby are an equal number of small, flat radio transmitters in Bakelite housings. Positioned against the east wall and taking up nearly its full length is an electrostatic generator with crackling sparks jumping from electrode to electrode.

At a semicircular worktable centered in the room, Caesar Colluzo is bent over a circuit board no bigger than a playing card. He is applying solder. A twist of smoke rises and breaks when it touches his forehead. Scattered across the tabletop are various transistors, plug fuses, miniature vacuum tubes, a radio-frequency oscillator, pipes of different lengths, and a few small black cubes equipped with terminals and ground wires.

“Well?” says Lex. He strolls over to the wall of metal boxes, lifts the hinged lid on one, peeks inside, and shuts it again. “Any progress?”

Colluzo swivels around on his stool and—quite out of character—he smiles.

6

When Lois asked where was the closest place with a public telephone, Clark said there was a candy store just a block and a half away—then offered to walk her there. He didn’t want her to—you know. Walk
past
it. “Why should I?” said Lois. “Is it disguised as a Chinese laundry?”

“Just let me walk you.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“No, I insist.”

“So do I,” she said, and left.

He waited ten seconds then followed her down and out to St. Mark’s Place. Falling into step beside her, Clark couldn’t help but admire her profile. He liked her chin, he liked her throat, he liked the way that her eyebrows arched. She didn’t pluck them, did she? It didn’t look like it.

“Can I ask you something?”

She stops but looks in a hurry. “What?”

Seeking the courage to ask her out, Clark doesn’t find it. “I used to be a reporter for the
Smallville Herald-Progress,
that’s in Kansas, and I was wondering if you could help me get a job with
your
newspaper.”

She rolls her eyes (he likes those, too) and resumes walking.

“I’m serious!”

She stops again, this time to laugh.

“You don’t have to do that.”

Lois shuts her mouth, then opens it, then shuts it.

“You could’ve just said no, you can’t help me. But you didn’t have to laugh in my face.”

“Oh my,” she says.

“Yes,” he says right back. “Oh my.”

“I apologize. I’m sorry.”

Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t. He can’t tell. “Thank you,” says Clark. Then he points. “The candy store. Now you can make your phone call.” He turns around and starts back down the block.

“Kent.”

He hates it whenever somebody calls him by his last name.

“I practically just got hired myself,” says Lois. “I don’t have any clout.”

Two little boys Clark might have seen an hour ago from his window, one dressed as a pirate, the other as a cowboy, scoot around Lois into the candy store.

“But for what it’s worth, my editor has this standing offer: If you scoop everybody else and bring him a story that makes the front page, he’ll hire you on the spot.”

“Yeah? That how you did it?”

She makes a face. “I graduated from journalism school. First in my class.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah—‘oh.’ ” She walks into the candy store just as the two boys in Halloween costumes walk out chewing on braided sticks of red licorice.

Clark is still waiting when she comes rushing back out and points beyond him, saying, “I need that cab!”

In a moment Clark has sped twenty yards up the street and is keeping pace with the Checker, thumping a hand on the roof. Just short of the corner of St. Mark’s and Third Avenue the cab finally stops. Clark pulls open the back door and waits for Lois to arrive at a trot.

“You have some legs, mister.”

He grins but wishes she’d start calling him Clark.

Climbing into the back of the cab, Lois says, “Tell Willi our friend the alderman is having a press conference right now.”

“That where you’re going?”

“City Hall Park,” she tells the hackie.

“Can I come with you?”

She closes the door and the Checker pulls away. At the corner it turns right and disappears.

By the candy store clock it’s one twenty-five when Clark plucks a pamphlet-style tourist map from the spinner rack and turns to the index, runs a finger down the list. City College, City Court, City Hall . . . City Hall Park. H5. The counter lady barks Hey! it’s not a public library. So he buys the map for a dime and several deckle-edge penny postcards. Then he plonks down another penny and helps himself to two sticks of red licorice.

7

Lex Luthor arrives back at City Hall Park at twenty minutes before two—Lois checks her watch when he steps from his limousine. A dozen of her colleagues do the same. It’s an odd salad of general assignment and wire reporters, political writers and police-beat veterans, even some chatter columnists. Winchell is present, and Runyon, Bugs Baer, Ed Sullivan. Thirty, forty newsmen altogether, including photographers. Lois is the only woman—“news hen,” is what the others all call her—but that’s no problem. She can hold her own. She’s disappointed Dorothy Kilgallen isn’t here. Lois still hasn’t met her and is dying to. Kilgallen, she heard, is in Europe, sent by Hearst to interview Hitler, an assignment Lois cannot imagine being up to herself. Yet.

Lex quickly makes his way toward the enormous marble statue of Civic Virtue, nodding this way and that but not smiling, not joshing or pointing or shaking hands the way that he usually does at public events. Nor does he pause to hum a snatch of a popular tune to get a cheap laugh and butter up the pen-and-pencil men. He goes and stands on the rim of the fountain basin with his arms folded across his chest, displaying confident balance. Behind him is the giant marble figure of a muscular sword-wielding young man, naked but for an inexplicable scrap of seaweed that covers his privates.

Lex withdraws a sheet of onion-skin paper from his tuxedo jacket.

“Gentlemen,” he begins, “. . . and Miss Lane,” he adds with a chilly smile, “thank you all for coming. For the past month, as you know, I’ve been the subject of something called a ‘special investigation.’ From the start I have proclaimed both my outrage and my innocence. This afternoon I have the great pleasure to inform you that Mr. Dodge’s
task force,
a task force assembled at the instruction of Mayor La Guardia, has completed its work and that I have been found completely innocent of any wrongdoing of any kind.

“I’m relieved, of course, but more than that I’m
sorrowful.”
He doesn’t look it. “Sorrowful that despite all of my efforts on behalf of the citizens of Greater New York I could have had my reputation impugned and my freedom imperiled by a series of wild accusations made against me by two members of our city’s otherwise superb police department. Officers corrupted by their association with known criminal elements.”

Lois opens her mouth.

Standing twenty yards away and half hidden behind a Dutch elm, Clark watches her close it again. He listens to her heart pound. Nothing to it, he’s discovered. You look, you focus, then you filter out everything else and hear what you need to hear. Or want to.

“One
of these officers,” says Lex, “the
instigator
of the attack against me, was murdered several weeks ago by his own cronies in the narcotics trade. I am speaking of course about Lieutenant Richard Sandglass. But we need concern ourselves no longer with
him.
Almighty God will handle Lieutenant Sandglass, if He hasn’t already, and save our courts the expense.”

“Alderman—just what
proof
do you have that Lieutenant Sandglass was involved in the narcotics racket? Or anything else illegal?” It’s Lois, her face unprofessionally red.

“Miss Lane, I’m not finished.”

“No, but we’re all supposed to quote you tomorrow and
that’ll
be the proof.”

“If I may continue . . .”

Her fellow reporters are glaring at her. Most of them. The others smirk or laugh outright.

“A just God, as I say, will take care of Lieutenant Sandglass. In the meantime, I take satisfaction in informing all of you that the lieutenant’s partner in mischief, in crime, in calumny—Benjamin Harold Jaeger—was dismissed from duty earlier today. I am fully confident that charges will be brought against Officer Jaeger at the proper time.”

That staggers Lois. But she quickly recovers. “Alderman, I’m asking you again, what
proof
—”

But already Lex has turned to his left and is addressing Walter Winchell, who just asked how you spelled Jaeger.

Consulting his typescript, Lex says, “J . . . A . . .”

“E-G-E-R!” booms a rapid voice from the back of the crowd. “My name is spelled J-A-E-G-E-R, and yours, you murdering son of a bitch, is spelled L-I-A-R!”

Along with everyone else, Clark turns and looks. Ben Jaeger’s bright yellow hair is shorter, much shorter, on one side of his head than it is on the other. And he’s drunk.
That,
thinks Clark, is Lois Lane’s
boyfriend
?

Although it seems likely Ben Jaeger—tromping through the crowd with his arms thrust out like Karloff’s Frankenstein—will hurl himself momentarily at Lex Luthor, Lex himself never budges. Nor do any of the press brigade try to impede or restrain him. They all merely step clear like it’s none of their business. No, Clark realizes, not
that
—like stepping clear
is
their business. Which Clark supposes is true.

It just isn’t true for him.

But before he can do anything—what, exactly, Clark has no idea—Lois Lane tosses away her pad and pencil, shouts Ben’s name, and lunges in front of him. She grabs his wrists. For a moment he struggles. It looks as though he’ll twist free and send her reeling. Then he just . . . quits.

With her right hand still clamped to his wrist and her left pressed gently now to the small of his back, she leads Ben away.

From a distance of fifty or sixty yards Clark hears her murmur, “It’s going to be all right, honey, it’s going to be okay.”

Honey.

For two or three seconds Clark’s heart doesn’t beat.

The reporters are laughing now because Lex Luthor has just said, “Walter, did you get that spelling?”

Clark steps away from the tree and walks over to where Lois dropped her pad and pencil and picks them up.

Lex has noticed Clark, is looking down at him with an amused expression.

Clark coolly stares back.

And Lex’s smile falters. He remembers his typed remarks and consults them. “I have”—he clears his throat—“just one more thing to say before I let all of you gentlemen go about your business.”

From the edge of his eyes he glances back over at Clark.

Clark is still staring at him.

“Now that this malicious
investigation
has been concluded and my good name restored . . . I am announcing today my resignation from the Board of Aldermen. Effective immediately.”

Lex waits for the hubbub to quiet down. While he does he looks back over to the spot where Clark was standing. But Clark is gone. He seeks him elsewhere in the press crowd, but no. He’s just—gone.

8

Shortly after the big clocks on the colonnaded municipal, state, and federal buildings grouped around Foley Square have marked two o’clock with perfect synchronicity, Clark finds Lois Lane sitting on the steps of the Supreme Court building with Ben Jaeger.

He followed her talcum scent and the jangly meter of her heart.

“I thought you might need this,” he says, holding out Lois’s notepad. If she doesn’t ask for it back, he intends to keep the pencil still in his pocket. It’s just an ordinary yellow Ticonderoga Number 2 pencil, it doesn’t say
Daily Planet
on it or anything, but still Clark thinks he’d like to keep it. Little memento. The day we met.

Lois is astonished to see him but more astonished—jolted—by the sight of her notepad. “How did you—? What are you
doing
here?”

Clark smiles and shrugs. Has he ever
been
so happy?

Ben, meanwhile, regards him with chilly suspicion. “Lois . . . ?” He cuffs the edges of his red eyes. After he blots away their shine, he narrows them.