The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (25 page)

“Sammy, is this a trick?” he whispered. “Or are we serious?”

Sammy thought it over. The elevator chimed. The operator threw open the door.

“You tell me,” Sammy said.

H
IS EARS STILL RINGING
with artillery shells, screaming rockets, and the clattering
ack-ack
of Gene Krupa from the Crosley in a corner of the studio, Joe Kavalier laid down his brush and closed his eyes. He had been drawing, painting, smoking cigarettes, and nothing else for much of the past seven days. He clapped a hand to the back of his neck and engaged the bones that supported his battle-blown head in a few slow rotations. The vertebrae clicked and creaked. The joints of his hand throbbed, and the ghost of a brush notched his index finger. Each time he took a breath, he could feel a hard little billiard of nicotine and phlegm rattling around in his lungs. It was six o’clock on a Monday morning in October 1940. He had just won the Second World War, and he was feeling pretty good about it.

He slid off of his stool and went to look down on the autumn morning through the windows of the Kramler Building. Steam purled from the orifices of the street. A crew of a half-dozen workers in tan canvas coveralls, with peaked white caps perched atop their heads, used a water hose and long disheveled brooms to sluice a grimy tide down the gutters toward the storm drains at the corner of Broadway. Joe threw open the rattling sash of the window and poked his head out. It looked like it was going to be a fine day. The sky in the east was a bright Superman blue. There was a dank Octoberish smell of rain in the air with a faint acrid tang from a vinegar works along the East River, seven blocks away. To Joe, at that moment, it was the smell of victory. New York never looks more beautiful than to a young man who has just pulled off something he knows is going to knock them dead.

Over the course of the last week, in the guise of the Escapist, Master of Elusion, Joe had flown to Europe (in a midnight-blue autogyro),
stormed the towered
Schloss
of the nefarious Steel Gauntlet, freed Plum Blossom from its deep dungeon, defeated the Gauntlet in protracted two-fisted combat, been captured by the Gauntlet’s henchmen and dragged off to Berlin, where he was strapped to a bizarre multiple guillotine that would have sliced him like a hard-boiled egg while the Führer himself smugly looked on. Naturally, patiently, indomitably, he had worked his way loose of his riveted steel bonds and hurled himself at the throat of the dictator. At this point—with twenty pages to go until the Charles Atlas ad on the inside back cover—an entire Wehrmacht division had come between the Escapist’s fingers and that gravely desired larynx. Over the course of the next eighteen pages, in panels that crowded, jostled, piled one on top of the other, and threatened to burst the margins of the page, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Escapist had duked it out. With the Steel Gauntlet out of the picture, it was a fair fight. On the very last page, in a transcendent moment in the history of wishful figments, the Escapist had captured Adolf Hitler and dragged him before a world tribunal. Head finally bowed in defeat and shame, Hitler was sentenced to die for his crimes against humanity. The war was over; a universal era of peace was declared, the imprisoned and persecuted peoples of Europe—among them, implicitly and passionately, the Kavalier family of Prague—were free.

Joe leaned forward, the heels of his hands pressed against the windowsill and the lowermost edge of the sash digging into his back, and breathed in a cool vinegar whiff of the morning. He felt contented and hopeful and, in spite of having slept no more than four hours at a stretch in the last week, not in the least tired. He looked up and down the street. He was struck by a sudden sense of connectedness to it, of knowing where it led to. The map of the island—which looked to him like a man whose head was the Bronx, raising an arm in greeting—was vivid in his mind, flayed like an anatomical model to reveal its circulatory system of streets and avenues, of train, trolley, and bus routes.

When Marty Gold finished inking the pages that Joe had just completed, they would be strapped to the back of a motorcycle by the kid from Iroquois Color and carried along Broadway, down past Madison Square and Union Square and Wanamaker’s, to the Iroquois plant on Lafayette Street. There, one of four kindly, middle-aged women, two of
whom were named Florence, would guess with surprising violence and aplomb at the proper coloration for the mashed noses, the burning Dorniers, the Steel Gauntlet’s diesel-driven suit of armor, and all the other things that Joe had drawn and Marty had inked. The big Heidelberg cameras with rotating three-color lenses would photograph the colored pages, and the negatives, one cyan, one magenta, one yellow, would be screened by the squinting old Italian engraver, Mr. Petto, with his corny green celluloid visor. The resulting color halftones would be shipped uptown once more, along the ramifying arterials, to the huge loft building at West Forty-seventh and Eleventh, where men in square hats of folded newsprint labored at the great steam presses to publish the news of Joe’s rapturous hatred of the German Reich, so that it could be borne once more into the streets of New York, this time in the form of folded and stapled comic books, lashed with twine into a thousand little bundles that would be hauled by the vans of Seaboard News to the newsstands and candy stores of the city, to the outermost edges of its boroughs and beyond, where they would be hung up like laundry or marriage banns from wire display racks.

It was not that Joe felt at home in New York. That was something he never would have allowed himself to feel. But he was very grateful to his headquarters in exile. New York City had led him, after all, to his calling, to this great, mad new American art form. She had laid at his feet the printing presses and lithography cameras and delivery vans that allowed him to fight, if not a genuine war, then a tolerable substitute. And she paid him handsomely for doing so: he already had seven thousand dollars—his family’s ransom—in the bank.

Then the music program ended, and the newsreader for WEAF came on the radio to report the announcement, that morning, by the government of unoccupied France, that it had promulgated a series of statutes, modeled after the German Nuremberg Laws, that would enable it to “superintend,” in the newsreader’s odd formula, its population of Jews. This followed earlier reports, the newsreader reminded his listeners, that some French Jews—communists, mostly—were being transported to labor camps in Germany.

Joe fell back into the Empire offices, banging the crown of his head against the window frame. He went over to the radio, rubbing at the
knot that began to swell on his head, and turned up the volume. But that was apparently all there was to say about the Jews of France. The rest of the war news concerned itself with air raids on Tobruk and on Kiel in Germany, and with the continued harassment by German U-boats of Allied and neutral shipping to Britain. Another three ships had been lost, among them an American tanker carrying a load of oil pressed from the seeds of Kansas sunflowers.

Joe was deflated. The surge of triumph he felt when he finished a story was always fleeting, and seemed to grow briefer with every job. This time it had lasted about a minute and a half before turning to shame and frustration. The Escapist was an impossible champion, ludicrous and above all
imaginary
, fighting a war that could never be won. His cheeks burned with embarrassment. He was wasting his time. “Idiot,” he said, wiping at his eyes with the back of an arm.

Joe heard the groan of the Kramler’s old elevator, the whistle and rattle of its cage door being rolled to one side. He saw that his shirtsleeve was stained not only by tears but with coffee and smudges of graphite. The cuff was frayed and inky. He became aware of the grit and the clammy residue of sleeplessness on his skin. He was not sure how long it had been since his last shower.

“Look at this.” It was Shelly Anapol. He had on a pale-gray sharkskin suit that Joe didn’t recognize, as giant and gleaming as the lens of a lighthouse. His face was sunburned bright red, and the skin of his ears was peeling. Pale phantom sunglasses framed his mournful eyes, which somehow, this autumn morning, looked incrementally less so than usual. “I’d say you’re here early if I didn’t know that you never left.”

“I just finished
Radio
,” Joe said glumly.

“So what’s the matter?”

“It stinks.”

“Don’t tell me it stinks. I don’t like to hear you talk like that.”

“I know.”

“You’re too hard on yourself.”

“Not really.”

“Does it stink?”

“It is all baloney.”

“Baloney is okay. Let me see.” Anapol crossed the space that formerly had been occupied by the desks and file cabinets of the Empire Novelties shipping clerks, but which were now filled, to Anapol’s oft-expressed surprise, with the drawing boards and worktables of Empire Comics, Inc.

The previous January,
Amazing Midget Radio Comics
had debuted with a sold-out print run of three hundred thousand.
*
On the cover of the issue now on the stand—destined to be the first of the Empire titles (there were currently three) to break the million mark in circulation—the words “Amazing” and “Midget,” which had been shrinking each month until they were a vestigial ant-high smudge in the upper left-hand corner, had been dropped forever, and along with them the whole idea of promoting novelties through comics. In September, Anapol had found himself compelled by the implacable arguments of good sense to sell off the inventory and accounts of Empire Novelties, Inc., to Johnson-Smith Co., the country’s largest dealer in cheap novelties. It was this epochal sale and its proceeds that had financed the two-week trip to Miami Beach from which Anapol had just returned, red-faced and shining like a dime. He had not taken a vacation, as he had informed everyone several times before his departure, in fourteen years.

“How was Florida?” Joe said.

Anapol shrugged. “I’ll tell you what, they have a nice setup down there in Florida.” He seemed reluctant to admit this, as if he had invested considerable effort over the years in running Florida down. “I like it there.”

“What did you do?”

“Ate, mostly. I sat out on the veranda. I had my violin. One night I played pinochle with Walter Winchell.”

“A good cardplayer?”

“You might think so, but I cleaned his clock for him.”

“Huh.”

“Yes, I was surprised, too.”

Joe slid the stack of pages across to Anapol, and the publisher began to sort through them. He tended to take a greater interest in their content, and to show a slightly more discerning eye, than he had on his first exposure to comics. Anapol had never been a devotee of the funny papers, so it had taken him a while simply to learn how to
read
a comic book. Now he went through each one twice, first when it was in production and then again when it hit the stands, buying a copy on his way to his train and reading it all the way home to Riverdale.

“Germany?”
he said, stopping at the first panel of the second page. “We’re calling them
Germans
now? Did George okay that?”

“A lot of guys are also calling them Germans, sir,” Joe said. “The Spy Smasher. The Human Torch. You are going to look like the idiot who does not.”

“Oh, am I, now?” Anapol said, twisting up a corner of his mouth.

Joe nodded. In his first three appearances, the Escapist along with his eccentric company had toured a thinly fictionalized Europe, in which he wowed the Razi elites of Zothenia, Gothsylvania, Draconia, and other pseudonymous dark bastions of the Iron Chain, while secretly going about his real business of arranging jailbreaks for resistance leaders and captured British airmen, helping great scientists and thinkers out of the clutches of the evil dictator, Attila Haxoff, and freeing captives, missionaries, and prisoners of war. But Joe had soon seen that this was not going to be anywhere near enough—for the Allies or for him. On the cover of the fourth issue, readers were startled to see the Escapist lift an entire panzer over his head, upside down, and tumble a pile of Gothsylvanian soldiers from its hatch like a kid shaking pennies out of a pig.