It's Superman! A Novel (45 page)

Simultaneously the reconstituted robot’s articulated fingers close around Willi’s trachea and squeeze.

Clark drives his left fist through the robot, back to front. It comes out tangled with circuitry and spaghetti wires. He yanks it back inside, flexes open his fingers, and just—grabs. Anything he can find. And when he withdraws his hand, he pulls out still more insulated wire, more circuits, a spool of celluloid film, a tangle of paper tape punched with slots, and a small black socketed cube.

Willi is rubbing his throat, coughing and gasping.

Clark has had enough of this.

Plucking the gutted robot off the ground, he bends, crushes, twists, countertwists, and otherwise compacts it till it is roughly the size of a grapefruit. A small ellipsoidal plate mark dislodges itself and hits the bottom step with a bright
ting
!

Willi picks it up, and with Clark leaning over his shoulder they inspect it together. Stamped into the metal plate is a nine-numeral serial number, plus this information:

LEXBOT Sidekick S-40
LUTHOR Corp.
Assembled in the United States of America

Soda in turmoil. La Guardia gets testy.
Boastfulness and diffidence. “Deep Elem Blues!”
●

1

Dialing from her office at the club, Soda Wauters asked the operator to put her through to City Hall, New York City, only to be told to lie down and sleep it off, lady. And the operator strongly suggested that in the future Soda try speaking
civilly
over the telephone. What? She’d
been
civil.
What
? She’d said
what
? Called the operator
what?
She’d
never
—

But maybe Soda had, it was hard to remember. She was drunker than she’d been in a long while.

She considered calling one of the big dailies in New York but was afraid she would only get that same hateful operator again. Ditto for calling a cab. So she left the club around seven-thirty and waited on South Orange Avenue for a Public Service bus.

While she did, she got violently sick over the gutter.

Eventually she found herself in Newark’s Pennsylvania Railroad Station, following red arrows to the Hudson-Manhattan Tubes. Despite those she wandered around for half an hour, or maybe it just felt that long, till a transit cop nearly arrested her for public intoxication.

But rattling the bulky envelope in his not-unkind face, Soda told him she was on a
mission,
she had to catch the tubes because the man that she loved—the man she’d met and briefly but unconditionally loved,
a policeman of all things,
had entrusted her with special documents intended for hizzonner the mayor of New York City—
these.

“Sure, lady, sure,” he said. “Why don’t I help you walk over to Nedick’s and we’ll get you a cup of coffee?”

“I’m sure he’s dead!” she wailed.

“Who?” The cop looked sorry he had ever paid her any attention.

“The man I loved. He stopped coming around and now I’m sure he’s dead. And I have to get these papers and pictures to the mayor of New York City.
Don’t you get it?
That’s why he left them with me!”

When the transit cop took Soda firmly by an elbow she almost struggled. But something told her to be still and shut up, the right thing to do because at last he led her to the correct platform.

She paid her twenty-two cents, boarded a train, and promptly dozed off. She rode all the way into Manhattan and to the end of the line . . . then all the way back under the Hudson River, through Jersey City, across the Hackensack Meadows, to Kearny, where she woke up, and then to Newark again.

She changed trains and willed herself to stay awake.

Although Soda had never been to City Hall before (it never crossed her mind that the mayor might not be there on a Sunday evening—he
lived
there, didn’t he?), she knew it was downtown, not far from the Woolworth Building, so she meant to get off at the first stop in lower Manhattan: Cortlandt Street.

But somehow she missed it and got off at the
second
stop: Church Street. Good enough. She’d find the place. She
had
to. She was determined to deliver the envelope, and to deliver it tonight.

After Soda had taken it from her safe this afternoon she pored over just enough of its contents to get the gist.

There was a “ghost gang” operating in New York City, and her Richard (his last name was Sandglass, she discovered: “respectfully submitted, Richard Sandglass”) had rooted it out, gotten the goods on all of those dirty crooks like a G-man in a Warner Bros, picture. Why hadn’t he
said
he was a cop? Because she’d practically told him
don’t be one
? Or was she flattering herself?

Alexander Luthor, a name that kept appearing on page after page, meant nothing to Soda because she never read the papers. Why read a newspaper when you had a phonograph? Newspapers could only make you feel bad-sad, but songs could make you feel
good-
sad. No contest.

Now, after Soda has dragged herself up the stairs from Hudson Terminal and is standing on the pavement in front of two bridged skyscrapers on Court Street, she is struck with a pang of terror: it’s dark, it’s cold, the streets are empty. And turning dizzily in a circle, she can’t locate the Woolworth Building. She is lost in a canyon of tall buildings, her stomach is churning, her temples are throbbing, her cheeks are wet and chapped.

Soda’s instincts tell her to walk south; in fact, she heads due west, believing it’s south, and shortly finds herself on Greenwich Street. Stepping off the curb, her left ankle buckles and she goes down, whacking both kneecaps. The envelope sails from her grip, skims into the street. She gets up again—hosiery torn, knees bleeding, embedded with grit—and limps after it. Why is she doing this? Why did Richard come into her club? Why did she ever send him a drink? Why did he smile the way that he did?

She can’t do this.

She’s lost.

She’s fat and lonely and her heart is broken and she can’t do this, she’s lost.

Clutching the envelope horizontally, she folds it around her face like a mask and stands there.

Just stands there.

2

“Are you ever going to take these things off? I’m not a criminal, I’m a reporter!”

“There’s a difference?” says the cop who just leaned into the front of the radio car to grab a long-barrel flashlight, a notebook, and a fountain pen from the dashboard.

“Please. Can’t you take them off?”

Lois holds up her wrists fettered by handcuffs that are not just heavy but painfully tight, grooving her flesh. She cocks her head, looking miserable. “Come on, be a good guy.”

He slams the door and hikes away up the middle of Thirty-ninth Street, sidestepping debris and splashing through hose-water puddles.

Lois pounds her handcuffs against the steel grating that separates the front and back of the police car, then clashes them harder against the side window.

Of all the things she has to worry about (being handcuffed, being scooped, Ben’s condition, the way “Superman” stared at her and the way it made her feel), what primarily troubles Lois at the moment is this: she deliberately remained behind that locked security gate and let Willi Berg go back outside to inspect that robot-turned-cylinder.

She is appalled at herself, deeply ashamed.

Lois stayed behind the iron gate because she was scared.

Six or seven years ago, when she was still in high school, Lois went on a weekend camping trip with her father. (Her mother, as usual, didn’t accompany them; too many insects, too many
sounds
at night.) It was midsummer in the Adirondacks; they were hiking a rocky hillside, Lois in the lead. She felt strong, nimble, and full of health, and took a wholly conscious, unkind pleasure in the way that her father grunted and puffed and picked his way slowly along behind her.

As she found the last footholds to boost herself to the summit, she heard a clacking sound she ascribed to heat bugs. Planting the knee of one leg and swinging the other up and over the rim, she dragged herself onto the flat, sun-warmed surface of the granite rock only to discover, two feet away, a coiled rattlesnake. Its wedge-shaped head feinted and its tongue flicked. Lois froze in terror. Her mind shut down, went blank, so blank she never saw the snake slither away.

When her father arrived, she had already beaten her fists bloody against craggy rock. He had to grab her wrists to make her stop. Then it took Lois ten minutes to calm down enough to say what happened. He could understand her terror but not her anger. That just unleashed further anger. Didn’t he
see
? Couldn’t he get it? What was the
matter
with him? She was so scared that
she’d, done nothing
! “And just what do you think you were supposed to do?” he asked her. Go back! Run! Find a rock! No, no, no, he said.
No.
She’d done the right thing.
Nothing
was the right thing
to
do. Scared was good. Scared was smart. She could’ve fallen, she could’ve fallen
on him!
If she’d moved, the snake would have moved faster. Didn’t
she
get it? Scared was
good.
He put his arm around her shoulders, tried pulling her close but she flung herself away. “Scared is good,” he told her one last time, and let it drop.

Scared is
not
good! Lois thinks again now, sitting in the back of a squad car. Scared is just . . . scared.

And weak.

She stayed behind that iron safety gate because she was weak. Period.

And if there is one thing Lois Lane despises above everything else it is being, and being seen as, weak.

She turns to strike again at the side window with her handcuffs but sees a flying wedge of police- and fire-department officials flanking a short, rotund, furiously gesticulating man in a flapping overcoat and a black sombrero.

Lois palm-slaps the glass and the bracelets beat percussion.

Pausing in midgesture, midbellow (“And I want—”), Fiorello La Guardia glances irritably around.

Turning to one of the two police commissioners accompanying him, the mayor asks a quick question, nods at the reply. Then he says something else, and twenty seconds later Lois is sighing with relief as a key turns and her handcuffs snap open.

When the mayor says, “Good evening, Lois,” she feels an instant puerile gratitude that he called her by her first name. They’ve never spoken before, although she has attended half a dozen of his press conferences, even asked him a few questions, one of which (“Are you at all embarrassed to have sponsored Lex Luthor’s entrance into city politics?) he called “impudent.”

“Good evening, Mr. Mayor. And thank you.” She makes a big show of rubbing her chafed wrists. “At least
some
people know how to treat members of the press.”

“Don’t push it, Miss Lane,” he says, eyes snapping. “You were involved in a very damaging series of events here tonight, and for all we know you’re partly responsible.
Are
you?”

“Of course not!”

“What do you know about that infernal device? Are you
smiling
?”

“I’m sorry, Mayor. ‘Infernal device’?”

“That’s funny?”

“It was a robot.”

“So they tell me. What do you know about it?”

“It was in the luggage compartment of a car”—she ought to have said: a 1936 Nash-Lafayette 3-window coupe, now scrap metal, now
shrapnel
—“driven by the same person who shot Ben Jaeger.”

“And that’s all you know.”

“That’s it.”

Lois doesn’t deem it necessary to inform the mayor about the small obloid metal tag that Willi passed to her and that is concealed now inside the left cup of her white cotton Gamble’s brassiere. He can read about it like everybody else in tomorrow morning’s
Daily Planet.

“And what can you tell us about this—strongman?”

Commissioner Blanshard—or maybe it’s Valentine, she always gets those two men confused—leans forward and whispers into La Guardia’s left ear.

“I’ve just been reminded there’s a team of weightlifters in town from the Soviet Union. Did you happen to notice if this fellow spoke Russian?”

“Mayor La Guardia, he’s not just some run-of-the-mill muscleman, he can
fly
! Ask your cops. They had him surrounded and he just—”

“I’m having a difficult time believing all this.”

“Welcome to the club.”

Again one of the police commissioners speaks quietly into the mayor’s ear. La Guardia frowns. “Are you certain?”

The commissioner says that he is.

“Miss Lane”—apparently “Lois” was a one-time-only form of address—“you saw this flying man escape . . .”

“I don’t think he was
escaping.
I think he was just
leaving
.”

“The police ordered him to stay.”

Lois shrugs. “If it hadn’t been for him, Mayor, there wouldn’t be a single house standing on this block right now. But have it your way. Yes, I saw this flying man
escape
. . .”

“Taking another man along with him. A photographer.”

“Well, he had a camera, but I don’t know if—”

“Who was he, Miss Lane?”

“You know, Mr. Mayor, if I may change the subject for just a moment. Right as we speak there’s a wonderful man in the hospital with two bullets in his chest, a police officer that you
personally
scapegoated because you wanted to get all of that nasty Lex Luthor business out of the way before the election—”

“Miss Lane:
who was the photographer?
”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. And so do we.”

“Then why ask?”

“Put her back in the car,” says La Guardia.

Lois immediately stretches out her arms, presses her fists together: the martyr.

“That won’t be necessary,” he says. “But don’t tempt me.” He turns away, sloshing off (lord! he remembered galoshes) through water that still rushes down the street in torrents.

3

“Can I get you more toast? We doing all right with that bacon, sir?”

“Nothing more for me, Carl, thank you. But why don’t you try calling Paulie’s house again?”