The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (71 page)

He had typed stories for comic books for the past seven years: costumed hero, romance, horror, adventure, true-crime, science fiction and fantasy stories, Westerns, sea yarns, and Bible stories, a couple of issues of
Classics Illustrated
,
^*
Sax Rohmer imitations, Walter Gibson imitations, H. Rider Haggard imitations, Rex Stout imitations, tales of both world wars, the Civil War, the Peloponnesian War, and the Napoleonic Wars; every genre but funny animals. Sammy drew the line at funny animals. The success in the trade of these dot-eyed, three-fingered imports from the world of animated cartoons, with their sawdusty gags and childish
antics, was one of the thousand little things to have broken Sammy Clay’s heart. He was a furious, even romantic, typist, prone to crescendos, diminuendos, dense and barbed arpeggios, capable of ninety words a minute when under deadline or pleased with the direction his story was taking, and over the years his brain had become an instrument so thoroughly tuned to the generation of highly conventional, severely formalistic, eight-to-twelve-page miniature epics that he could, without great effort, write, talk, smoke, listen to a ball game, and keep an eye on the clock all at the same time. He had reduced two typewriters to molten piles of slag iron and springs since his return to comics, and when he went to bed at night his mind remained robotically engaged in its labor while he slept, so that his dreams were often laid out in panels and interrupted by surrealistic advertising, and when he woke up in the morning he would find that he had generated enough material for a full issue of one of his magazines.

Now he moved his latest Remington to one side. Julie Glovsky saw a little brass key lying in the center of a square patch of blotter that was free of ash and dust. Sammy took the key and went to a large wooden cabinet, dragged up from a defunct photographical processing lab on a lower floor of the building.

“You have an Escapist costume?” Julie said.

“Yeah.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“From Tom Mayflower,” Sammy said.

He rummaged around inside the cabinet until he came up with an oblong blue box stamped
KING FAT HAND LAUNDRY
in crooked black letters. On the side, in grease pencil, someone had, for some reason, written the word
BACON
. Sammy gave the box a shake, and something rattled dryly within; he looked puzzled. He pulled the box open, and a small yellow card, about the size of a matchbook, fluttered out and corkscrewed to the floor. Sammy stooped over, picked it up, and read the legend printed on its face in brightly colored ink. When he looked up, his face was pinched, his jaw set, but Julie caught an unmistakable glint of amusement in his eyes. Sammy handed Julie the card. It featured a drawing of two ornate, old-fashioned skeleton keys, one on either side of the following brief text:

“It’s him,” Julie said. “Isn’t it? He was here. He took it.”

“How do you like that,” said Sammy. “I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

A
T LUNCHTIME
, the police showed up. They were taking the letter to the
Herald
seriously, and the detective in charge had a few questions for Sammy about Joe.

Sammy told the detective, a man named Lieber, that he had not seen Joe Kavalier since the evening of December 14, 1941, at Pier 11, when Joe sailed for basic training in Newport, Rhode Island, aboard a Providence-bound packet boat called the
Comet
. Joe had never answered any of their letters. Then, toward the end of the war, Sammy’s mother, as next of kin, had received a letter from the office of James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy. It said that Joe had been wounded or taken ill in the line of duty; the letter was vague about the nature of the injury and the theater of war. It said also that he had, for some time, been recuperating at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but that he was now being given a medical discharge and a commendation. In two days, he would be arriving at Newport News aboard the
Miskatonic
. Sammy had gone down to Virginia on a Greyhound bus to meet him and bring him home. But somehow or other, Joe had managed to escape.

“Escape?” Detective Lieber said. He was a young man, surprisingly young, a fair-haired Jew with pudgy hands, wearing a gray suit that looked expensive but not at all flashy.

“It was a talent he had,” Sammy said.

At the time, Joe’s vanishing had been a loss in some ways more genuine than that which death represents. He was not merely dead—and thus, in a sense, always locatable. No, they really had managed to
lose
him. He had gotten on the boat in Cuba; of this fact there was documentary evidence in the form of signatures and serial numbers on a medical transport record. But when the
Miskatonic
docked in Newport
News, Joe was no longer aboard. He had left a brief letter; though its contents were classified, one of the navy investigators had assured Sammy that it was not a suicide note. When Sammy returned from Virginia, after an interminable gray trip back up U.S. 1, he found their house in Midwood aflutter with bunting. Rosa had prepared a cake and a banner that welcomed Joe home. Ethel had bought a new dress and had her hair done, allowing the hairdresser to rinse out the gray. The three of them—Rosa, Ethel, and Tommy—were sitting in the living room, under the crepe-paper swags, crying. In the months that followed, they had generated all manner of wild and violent theories to explain what had happened to Joe, and pursued every lead and rumor. Because he had not been taken from them, they could not seem to let him go. Over the years, however, the intensity of Sammy’s anger and of his shock over Joe’s behavior had, inevitably, dwindled. The thought of his lost cousin was a sore one still; but it had, after all, been nearly nine years. “He was trained in Europe as an escape artist,” he told Detective Lieber. “That’s where we got the whole idea for the Escapist.”

“I used to read it,” Detective Lieber said. He coughed politely and looked around at the pages of art and framed covers of various Pharaoh titles that ornamented Sammy’s office. On the wall behind Sammy hung the vastly blown-up image of a single frame, from a story that Rosa had done for
Frontier Comics
, the only superhero story that Rosa ever drew. It showed the Lone Wolf and Cubby, in tight coveralls of fringed buckskin and lupine headdresses, their arms around each other’s shoulders. The blazing spokes of an Arizona sunrise reached out from behind them. Lone Wolf was saying, “WELL, PARDNER, IT LOOKS LIKE IT’S GOING TO BE A BEAUTIFUL DAY!” Rosa had done the enlargement herself and gotten it framed for Sammy’s last birthday. You could see the lithography dots—they were as big as shirt buttons—and somehow the scale of the image gave it a surreal importance.
^*

“I’m afraid I’m not as familiar with what you do here,” Detective Lieber said, eyeing the big Lone Wolf with a look of faint puzzlement.

“Few people are,” Sammy said.

“I’m sure it must be interesting.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

Lieber shrugged. “Okay, so here’s what I don’t understand. Why would he
want
to ‘escape,’ as you put it? He just got out of the navy. He’s been in some godforsaken place or other. From the sound of it, he’s had it pretty tough. Why wouldn’t he
want
to come home?”

Sammy didn’t immediately reply. A possible answer had come to mind right away, but since it struck him as flippant, he held his tongue. Then he thought it over for a moment and saw that it might very well be the right answer to Detective Lieber’s question.

“He didn’t really have a home to come home to,” Sammy said. “I guess maybe that’s how it must have seemed to him.”

“His family in Europe?”

“All dead. Every one of them, his mother, his father, his grandfather. His kid brother’s boat was torpedoed. Just a little kid, a refugee.”

“Jesus.”

“It was not good.”

“And you’ve
never
heard from your cousin since? Not even—”

“Not a postcard. And I’ve made a lot of inquiries, Detective. I hired private detectives. The navy conducted a full investigation. Nothing.”

“Do you think—You must have considered the possibility that he might be dead?”

“He might be. My wife and I have discussed it over the years. But somehow I think—I just think that he isn’t.”

Lieber nodded and tucked his little notebook back into the hip pocket of his sharp gray suit.

“Thank you,” he said. He stood and shook Sammy’s hand. Sammy walked him out to the elevator.

“You look awfully young to be a detective,” Sammy said. “If you don’t mind my saying.”

“Yes, but I have the heart of a seventy-year-old man,” Lieber said.

“You’re Jewish, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I don’t mind.”

“I didn’t know they were making detectives out of Jews.”

“They just started,” Lieber said. “I’m kind of the prototype.”

The elevator thudded into place, and Sammy dragged the rattling cage to one side.

Sammy’s father-in-law stood there in a tweed suit. The jacket had epaulets, and there was enough tweed in it to clothe at least two grouse-hunting Scotsmen. Four or five years earlier, Longman Harkoo had delivered a series of lectures at the New School on the intimate relations between Catholicism and Surrealism, entitled “The Superego, the Ego, and the Holy Ghost.” They had been desultory, mumbling, and sparsely attended, but since that time Siggy had abandoned his former caftans and magister’s robes in favor of a more professorial attire. All of his enormous suits were made, badly, by the same Oxford tailor who ill-clothed the woolen flower of English academe.

“He’s afraid you’ll be angry with him,” Saks said. “We told him you wouldn’t be.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“Oh, much more than see him.” He smirked. “He’s—”

“You’ve
seen
Joe, and you never said anything to me or Rosa?”

“Joe? You mean Joe
Kavalier
?” Saks looked dumbfounded. He opened his mouth and then closed it again. “Hmm,” he said. Something seemed to be not quite adding up in his mind.

“This is my father-in-law, Mr. Harkoo,” Sammy told Lieber. “Mr. Harkoo, this is Detective Lieber. I don’t know if you’ve seen the
Herald
today, but there’s—”

“Who’s that behind you?” Lieber said, peering into the elevator, around the great dun bulk of Siggy Saks. The big man stepped deftly, and not without an air of happy anticipation, to one side, as though raising the curtain on a completed illusion. The bit of hocus-pocus produced an eleven-year-old boy named Thomas Edison Clay.

“I found him on the doorstep. Quite literally.”

“God damn it, Tommy,” Sammy said. “I walked you into the
building
. I saw you go into your
homeroom
. How did you get out?”

Tommy didn’t say anything. He just stood looking down at the eye patch in his hands.

“Another escape artist,” Detective Lieber said. “It must run in the family.”

A
GREAT FEAT OF ENGINEERING
is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction. Since its completion, the Empire State Building, a gigantic shard of the Hoosier State torn from the mild limestone bosom of the Midwest and upended, on the site of the old Waldorf-Astoria, in the midst of the heaviest traffic in the world, had been a magnet for dislocated souls hoping to ensure the finality of their impact, or to mock the bold productions of human vanity. Since its opening almost twenty-three years earlier, a dozen people had attempted to leap from its ledges or its pinnacle to the street below; about half had managed the trick. None, however, had ever before given such clear and considerate warning of his intentions. For the building’s private police and firefighting squadrons, working in concert with their municipal brethren, there had been ample time to post officers at all the street entrances and points of ingress, at the stairwell doors and elevator banks. The twenty-fifth floor, where the offices of Empire Comics were still to be found, swarmed with building cops in their big-shouldered brass and wool uniforms, with those old-fashioned peaked caps designed, legend had it, by the late Al Smith himself. Alerts had been issued to the building’s fifteen thousand tenants, warning them to be on the lookout for a lean, hawk-faced madman, perhaps dressed in a dark blue union suit, or perhaps in a moth-eaten blue tuxedo with extravagant tails. Firefighters in canvas coveralls ringed the building on three sides, from Thirty-third Street, around Fifth Avenue, to Thirty-fourth. They peered up through fine German binoculars, scanning the infinite planes of Indiana rock for any emerging hand or foot. They were ready, insofar as readiness was possible. Should the madman actually make it through a window and
out into the darkening stuff of the evening, their course of action was less clear. But they were hopeful.