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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon


Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from the author �Wonder Boys’. �The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’ is a heart-wrenching story of escape, love and comic-book heroes set in Prague, New York and the Arctic.One night in 1939, Josef Kavalier shuffles into his cousin Sam Clay's cramped New York bedroom, his nerve-racking escape from Prague finally achieved. Little does he realise that this is the beginning of an extraordinary friendship and even more fruitful business partnership. Together, they create a comic strip called �The Escapist’, its superhero a Nazi-busting saviour who liberates the oppressed around the world. �The Escapist’ makes their fortune, but Joe can think of only one thing: how can he effect a real-life escape, and free his family from the tyranny of Hitler?Michael Chabon’s exceptional novel is a thrilling tight-rope walk between high comedy and bitter tragedy, and confirms his position as one of the most inventive and daring of contemporary American writers. In Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, he has created two unforgettable characters bound together by love, family and cartoons.












MICHAEL CHABON

The AMAZING ADVENTURES of KAVALIER & CLAY


A NOVEL









DEDICATION (#ulink_f717a344-e5be-543b-9310-b6f886b3b795)


To my father




EPIGRAPH (#ulink_cd564c71-9a11-56dc-be75-4e27e8d34ce8)


We have this history of impossible solutions

for insoluble problems.

—WILL EISNER, in conversation

Wonderful escape!

—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, “Wakefield”




CONTENTS


Cover (#u7c145ca2-1b85-51ff-beba-10d0183ba9cd)

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART I THE ESCAPE ARTIST

1

2

3

4

PART II A COUPLE OF BOY GENIUSES

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

PART III THE FUNNY-BOOK WAR

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

PART IV THE GOLDEN AGE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

PART V RADIOMAN

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

PART VI THE LEAGUE OF THE GOLDEN KEY

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)



PART I (#ulink_552e49b8-8347-5d65-af2e-3e8334b42fde)




1 (#ulink_09493cf9-903d-5e96-852d-807270b17935)


IN LATER YEARS, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal. “You weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini’s first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called �Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.” The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist’s birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.

Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition—one of a thousand—of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion—one of them, at any rate—was for those two-bit argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.

The long run of Kavalier & Clay—and the true history of the Escapist’s birth—began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy’s mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like a question mark against the door frame, a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his face. This, Mrs. Klayman said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward the wall, was Josef Kavalier, her brother Emil’s son, who had arrived in New York tonight on a Greyhound bus, all the way from San Francisco.

“What’s the matter with him?” Sammy said. He slid over until his shoulders touched cold plaster. He was careful to take both of the pillows with him. “Is he sick?”

“What do you think?” said his mother, slapping now at the vacated expanse of bedsheet, as if to scatter any offending particles of himself that Sammy might have left behind. She had just come home from her last night on a two-week graveyard rotation at Bellevue, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse. The stale breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform gave off a faint whiff of the lavender water in which she bathed her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings. “He can barely stand on his own two feet.”

Sammy peered over his mother, trying to get a better look at poor Josef Kavalier in his baggy tweed suit. He had known, dimly, that he had Czech cousins. But his mother had not said a word about any of them coming to visit, let alone to share Sammy’s bed. He wasn’t sure just how San Francisco fitted into the story.

“There you are,” his mother said, standing up straight again, apparently satisfied at having driven Sammy onto the easternmost five inches of the mattress. She turned to Josef Kavalier. “Come here. I want to tell you something.” She grabbed hold of his ears as if taking a jug by the handles, and crushed each of his cheeks in turn with her lips. “You made it. All right? You’re here.”

“All right,” said her nephew. He did not sound convinced.

She handed him a washcloth and went out. As soon as she left, Sammy reclaimed a few precious inches of mattress while his cousin stood there, rubbing at his mauled cheeks. After a moment, Mrs. Klayman switched off the light in the kitchen, and they were left in darkness. Sammy heard his cousin take a deep breath and slowly let it out. The stack of newsprint rattled and then hit the floor with a heavy thud of defeat. His jacket buttons clicked against the back of a chair; his trousers rustled as he stepped out of them; he let fall one shoe, then the other. His wristwatch chimed against the water glass on the nightstand. Then he and a gust of chilly air got in under the covers, bearing with them an odor of cigarette, armpit, damp wool, and something sweet and somehow nostalgic that Sammy presently identified as the smell, on his cousin’s breath, of prunes from the leftover ingot of his mother’s “special” meatloaf—prunes were only a small part of what made it so very special—which he had seen her wrap like a parcel in a sheet of wax paper and set on a plate in the Frigidaire. So she had known that her nephew would be arriving tonight, had even been expecting him for supper, and had said nothing about it to Sammy.

Josef Kavalier settled back against the mattress, cleared his throat once, tucked his arms under his head, and then, as if he had been unplugged, stopped moving. He neither tossed nor fidgeted nor even so much as flexed a toe. The Big Ben on the nightstand ticked loudly. Josef’s breathing thickened and slowed. Sammy was just wondering if anyone could possibly fall asleep with such abandon when his cousin spoke.

“As soon as I can fetch some money, I will find a lodging, and leave the bed,” he said. His accent was vaguely German, furrowed with an odd Scots pleat.

“That would be nice,” Sammy said. “You speak good English.”

“Thank you.”

“Where’d you learn it?”

“I prefer not to say.”

“It’s a secret?”

“It is a personal matter.”

“Can you tell me what you were doing in California?” said Sammy. “Or is that confidential information too?”

“I was crossing over from Japan.”

“Japan!” Sammy was sick with envy. He had never gone farther on his soda-straw legs than Buffalo, never undertaken any crossing more treacherous than that of the flatulent poison-green ribbon that separated Brooklyn from Manhattan Island. In that narrow bed, in that bedroom hardly wider than the bed itself, at the back of an apartment in a solidly lower-middle-class building on Ocean Avenue, with his grandmother’s snoring shaking the walls like a passing trolley, Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men. In his desk drawer lay—and had lain for some time—the first eleven pages of a massive autobiographical novel to be entitled either (in the Perelmanian mode) Through Abe Glass, Darkly or (in the Dreiserian) American Disillusionment (a subject of which he was still by and large ignorant). He had devoted an embarrassing number of hours of mute concentration—brow furrowed, breath held—to the development of his brain’s latent powers of telepathy and mind control. And he had thrilled to that Iliad of medical heroics, The Microbe Hunters, ten times at least. But like most natives of Brooklyn, Sammy considered himself a realist, and in general his escape plans centered around the attainment of fabulous sums of money.

From the age of six, he had sold seeds, candy bars, houseplants, cleaning fluids, metal polish, magazine subscriptions, unbreakable combs, and shoelaces door-to-door. In a Zharkov’s laboratory on the kitchen table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers, tandem bottle openers, and heatless clothes irons. In more recent years, Sammy’s commercial attention had been arrested by the field of professional illustration. The great commercial illustrators and cartoonists—Rockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniff—were at their zenith, and there was a general impression abroad that, at the drawing board, a man could not only make a good living but alter the very texture and tone of the national mood. In Sammy’s closet were stacked dozens of pads of coarse newsprint, filled with horses, Indians, football heroes, sentient apes, Fokkers, nymphs, moon rockets, buckaroos, Saracens, tropic jungles, grizzlies, studies of the folds in women’s clothing, the dents in men’s hats, the lights in human irises, clouds in the western sky. His grasp of perspective was tenuous, his knowledge of human anatomy dubious, his line often sketchy—but he was an enterprising thief. He clipped favorite pages and panels out of newspapers and comic books and pasted them into a fat notebook: a thousand different exemplary poses and styles. He had made extensive use of his bible of clippings in concocting a counterfeit Terry and the Pirates strip called South China Sea, drawn in faithful imitation of the great Caniff. He had knocked off Raymond in something he called Pimpernel of the Planets and Chester Gould in a lockjawed G-man strip called Knuckle Duster Doyle. He had tried swiping from Hogarth and Lee Falk, from George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Elzie Segar. He kept his sample strips in a fat cardboard portfolio under his bed, waiting for an opportunity, for his main chance, to present itself.

“Japan!” he said again, reeling at the exotic Caniffian perfume that hung over the name. “What were you doing there?”

“Mostly I was suffering from the intestinal complaint,” Josef Kavalier said. “And I suffer still. Particular in the night.”

Sammy pondered this information for a moment, then moved a little nearer to the wall.

“Tell me, Samuel,” Josef Kavalier said. “How many examples must I have in my portfolio?”

“Not Samuel. Sammy. No, call me Sam.”

“Sam.”

“What portfolio is that?”

“My portfolio of drawings. To show your employer. Sadly, I am obligated to leave behind all of my work in Prague, but I can very quickly do much more that will be frightfully good.”

“To show my boss?” Sammy said, sensing in his own confusion the persistent trace of his mother’s handiwork. “What are you talking about?”

“Your mother suggested that you might to help me get a job in the company where you work. I am an artist, like you.”

“An artist.” Again Sammy envied his cousin. This was a statement he himself would never have been able to utter without lowering his fraudulent gaze to his shoe tops. “My mother told you I was an artist?”

“A commercial artist, yes. For the Empire Novelties Incorporated Company.”

For an instant Sammy cupped the tiny flame this secondhand compliment lit within him. Then he blew it out.

“She was talking through her hat,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“She was full of it.”

“Full of …?”

“I’m an inventory clerk. Sometimes they let me do pasteup for an ad. Or when they add a new item to the line, I get to do the illustration. For that, they pay me two dollars per.”

“Ah.” Josef Kavalier let out another long breath. He still had not moved a muscle. Sammy couldn’t decide if this apparent utter motionlessness was the product of unbearable tension or a marvelous calm. “She wrote a letter to my father,” Josef tried. “I remember she said you create designs of superb new inventions and devices.”

“Guess what?”

“She talked into her hat.”

Sammy sighed, as if to suggest that this was unfortunately the case; a regretful sigh, long-suffering—and false. No doubt his mother, writing to her brother in Prague, had believed that she was making an accurate report; it was Sammy who had been talking through his hat for the last year, embroidering, not only for her benefit but to anyone who would listen, the menial nature of his position at Empire Novelties. Sammy was briefly embarrassed, not so much at being caught out and having to confess his lowly status to his cousin, as at this evidence of a flaw in the omniveillant maternal loupe. Then he wondered if his mother, far from being hoodwinked by his boasting, had not in fact been counting on his having grossly exaggerated the degree of his influence over Sheldon Anapol, the owner of Empire Novelties. If he were to keep up the pretense to which he had devoted so much wind and invention, then he was all but obliged to come home from work tomorrow night clutching a job for Josef Kavalier in his grubby little stock clerk’s fingers.

“I’ll try,” he said, and it was then that he felt the first spark, the tickling finger of possibility along his spine. For another long while, neither of them spoke. This time, Sammy could feel that Josef was still awake, could almost hear the capillary trickle of doubt seeping in, weighing the kid down. Sammy felt sorry for him. “Can I ask you a question?” he said.

“Ask me what?”

“What was with all the newspapers?”

“They are your New York newspapers. I bought them at the Capitol Greyhound Terminal.”

“How many?”

For the first time, he noticed, Josef Kavalier twitched. “Eleven.”

Sammy quickly calculated on his fingers: there were eight metropolitan dailies. Ten if you counted the Eagle and the Home News. “I’m missing one.”

“Missing …?”

“Times, Herald-Tribune”—he touched two fingertips—“World-Telegram, Journal-American, Sun.” He switched hands. “News, Post. Uh, Wall Street Journal. And the Brooklyn Eagle. And the Home News in the Bronx.” He dropped his hands to the mattress. “What’s eleven?”

“The Woman’s Daily Wearing.”

“Women’s Wear Daily?”

“I didn’t know it was like that. For the garments.” He laughed at himself, a series of brief, throat-clearing rasps. “I was looking for something about Prague.”

“Did you find anything? They must have had something in the Times.”

“Something. A little. Nothing about the Jews.”

“The Jews,” said Sammy, beginning to understand. It wasn’t the latest diplomatic maneuverings in London and Berlin, or the most recent bit of brutal posturing by Adolf Hitler, that Josef was hoping to get news of. He was looking for an item detailing the condition of the Kavalier family. “You know Jewish? Yiddish. You know it?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. We got four Jewish newspapers in New York. They’d probably have something.”

“What about German newspapers?”

“I don’t know, but I’d imagine so. We certainly have a lot of Germans. They’ve been marching and having rallies all over town.”

“I see.”

“You’re worried about your family?”

There was no reply.

“They couldn’t get out?”

“No. Not yet.” Sammy felt Josef give his head a sharp shake, as if to end the discussion. “I find I have smoked all my cigarettes,” he went on, in a neutral, phrase-book tone. “Perhaps you could—”

“You know, I smoked my last one before bed,” said Sammy. “Hey, how’d you know I smoke? Do I smell?”

“Sammy,” his mother called, “sleep.”

Sammy sniffed himself. “Huh. I wonder if Ethel can smell it. She doesn’t like it. I want to smoke, I’ve got to go out the window, there, onto the fire escape.”

“No smoking in bed,” Josef said. “The more reason then for me to leave it.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Sammy said. “I’m dying to have a place of my own.”

They lay there for a few minutes, longing for cigarettes and for all the things that this longing, in its perfect frustration, seemed to condense and embody.

“Your ash holder,” Josef said finally. “Ashtray.”

“On the fire escape. It’s a plant.”

“It might be filled with the … spacek? … kippe? … the stubbles?”

“The butts, you mean?”

“The butts.”

“Yeah, I guess. Don’t tell me you’d smoke—”

Without warning, in a kind of kinetic discharge of activity that seemed to be both the counterpart and the product of the state of perfect indolence that had immediately preceded it, Josef rolled over and out of the bed. Sammy’s eyes had by now adjusted to the darkness of his room, which was always, at any rate, incomplete. A selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough’s three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom across the river, which came slanting in through a parting in the curtains. In this faint glow that was, to Sammy, the sickly steady light of insomnia itself, he could see his cousin going methodically through the pockets of the clothes he had earlier hung so carefully from the back of the chair.

“The lamp?” Josef whispered.

Sammy shook his head. “The mother,” he said.

Josef came back to the bed and sat down. “Then we must to work in the darkness.”

He held between the first fingers of his left hand a pleated leaf of cigarette paper. Sammy understood. He sat up on one arm, and with the other tugged the curtains apart, slowly so as not to produce the telltale creak. Then, gritting his teeth, he raised the sash of the window beside his bed, letting in a chilly hum of traffic and a murmuring blast of cold October midnight. Sammy’s “ashtray” was an oblong terra-cotta pot, vaguely Mexican, filled with a sterile compound of potting soil and soot and the semipetrified skeleton, appropriately enough, of a cineraria that had gone unsold during Sammy’s houseplant days and thus predated his smoking habit, still a fairly recent acquisition, by about three years. A dozen stubbed-out ends of Old Golds squirmed around the base of the withered plant, and Sammy distastefully plucked a handful of them—they were slightly damp—as if gathering night crawlers, then handed them in to his cousin, who traded him for a box of matches that evocatively encouraged him to EAT AT JOE’S CRAB ON FISHERMAN’S WHARF, in which only one match remained.

Quickly, but not without a certain showiness, Josef split open seven butts, one-handed, and tipped the resultant mass of pulpy threads into the wrinkled scrap of Zig Zag. After half a minute’s work, he had manufactured them a smoke.

“Come,” he said. He walked on his knees across the bed to the window, where Sammy joined him, and they wriggled through the sash and thrust their heads and upper bodies out of the building. He handed the cigarette to Sammy and, in the precious flare of the match, as Sammy nervously sheltered it from the wind, he saw that Josef had prestidigitated a perfect cylinder, as thick and straight and nearly as smooth as if rolled by machine. Sammy took a long drag of True Virginia Flavor and then passed the magic cigarette back to its crafter, and they smoked it in silence, until only a hot quarter inch remained. Then they climbed back inside, lowered the sash and the blinds, and lay back, bedmates, reeking of smoke.

“You know,” Sammy said, “we’re, uh, we’ve all been really worried … about Hitler … and the way he’s treating the Jews and … and all that. When they, when you were … invaded.… My mom was … we all …” He shook his own head, not sure what he was trying to say. “Here.” He sat up a little, and tugged one of the pillows out from under the back of his head.

Josef Kavalier lifted his own head from the mattress and stuffed the pillow beneath it. “Thank you,” he said, then lay still once more.

Presently, his breathing grew steady and slowed to a congested rattle, leaving Sammy to ponder alone, as he did every night, the usual caterpillar schemes. But in his imaginings, Sammy found that, for the first time in years, he was able to avail himself of the help of a confederate.




2 (#ulink_1f1d68d9-0894-5e30-a57e-0a2a293a327a)


IT WAS A CATERPILLAR SCHEME—a dream of fabulous escape—that had ultimately carried Josef Kavalier across Asia and the Pacific to his cousin’s narrow bed on Ocean Avenue.

As soon as the German army occupied Prague, talk began, in certain quarters, of sending the city’s famous Golem, Rabbi Loew’s miraculous automaton, into the safety of exile. The coming of the Nazis was attended by rumors of confiscation, expropriation, and plunder, in particular of Jewish artifacts and sacred objects. The great fear of its secret keepers was that the Golem would be packed up and shipped off to ornament some institut or private collection in Berlin or Munich. Already a pair of soft-spoken, keen-eyed young Germans carrying notebooks had spent the better part of two days nosing around the Old-New Synagogue, in whose eaves legend had secreted the long-slumbering champion of the ghetto. The two young Germans had claimed to be merely interested scholars without official ties to the Reichsprotektorat, but this was disbelieved. Rumor had it that certain high-ranking party members in Berlin were avid students of theosophy and the so-called occult. It seemed only a matter of time before the Golem was discovered, in its giant pine casket, in its dreamless sleep, and seized.

There was, in the circle of its keepers, a certain amount of resistance to the idea of sending the Golem abroad, even for its own protection. Some argued that since it had originally been formed of the mud of the River Moldau, it might suffer physical degradation if removed from its native climate. Those of a historical bent—who, like historians everywhere, prided themselves on a levelheaded sense of perspective—reasoned that the Golem had already survived many centuries of invasion, calamity, war, and pogrom without being exposed or dislodged, and they counseled against rash reaction to another momentary downturn in the fortunes of Bohemia’s Jews. There were even a few in the circle who, when pressed, admitted that they did not want to send the Golem away because in their hearts they had not surrendered the childish hope that the great enemy of Jew-haters and blood libelers might one day, in a moment of dire need, be revived to fight again. In the end, however, the vote went in favor of removing the Golem to a safe place, preferably in a neutral nation that was out of the way and not entirely devoid of Jews.

It was at this point that a member of the secret circle who had ties to Prague’s stage-magic milieu put forward the name of Bernard Kornblum as a man who might be relied upon to effect the Golem’s escape.

Bernard Kornblum was an Ausbrecher, a performing illusionist who specialized in tricks with straitjackets and handcuffs—the sort of act made famous by Harry Houdini. He had recently retired from the stage (he was seventy, at least) to settle in Prague, his adopted home, and await the inescapable. But he came originally, his proponent said, from Vilna, the holy city of Jewish Europe, a place known, in spite of its reputation for hardheadedness, to harbor men who took a cordial and sympathetic view of golems. Also, Lithuania was officially neutral, and any ambitions Hitler might have had in its direction had reportedly been forsworn by Germany, in a secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Thus Kornblum was duly summoned, fetched from his inveterate seat at a poker table in the card room of the Hofzinser Club to the secret location where the circle met—at Faleder Monuments, in a shed behind the headstone showroom. The nature of the job was explained to Kornblum: the Golem must be spirited from its hiding place, suitably prepared for transit, and then conveyed out of the country, without attracting notice, to sympathetic contacts in Vilna. Necessary official documents—bills of lading, customs certificates—would be provided by influential members of the circle, or by their highly placed friends.

Bernard Kornblum agreed at once to take on the circle’s commission. Although like many magicians a professional unbeliever who reverenced only Nature, the Great Illusionist, Kornblum was at the same time a dutiful Jew. More important, he was bored and unhappy in retirement and had in fact been considering a perhaps ill-advised return to the stage when the summons had come. Though he lived in relative penury, he refused the generous fee the circle offered him, setting only two conditions: that he would divulge nothing of his plans to anyone, and accept no unsolicited help or advice. Across the entire trick he would draw a curtain, as it were, lifting the veil only when the feat had been pulled off.

This proviso struck the circle as not only charming, in a certain way, but sensible as well. The less any of them knew about the particulars, the more easily they would be able, in the event of exposure, to disavow knowledge of the Golem’s escape.

Kornblum left Faleder Monuments, which was not far from his own lodgings on Maisel Street, and started home, his mind already beginning to bend and crimp the armature of a sturdy and elegant plan. For a brief period in Warsaw in the 1890s, Kornblum had been forced into a life of crime, as a second-story man, and the prospect of prizing the Golem out of its current home, unsuspected, awoke wicked old memories of gaslight and stolen gems. But when he stepped into the vestibule of his building, all of his plans changed. The gardienne poked her head out and told him that a young man was waiting to see him in his room. A good-looking boy, she said, well spoken and nicely dressed. Ordinarily, of course, she would have made the visitor wait on the stair, but she thought she had recognized him as a former student of Herr Professor.

Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance. Kornblum knew at once that his unexpected visitor must be Josef Kavalier, and his heart sank. He had heard months ago that the boy was withdrawing from art school and emigrating to America; something must have gone wrong.

Josef stood when his old teacher came in, clutching his hat to his chest. He was wearing a new-looking suit of fragrant Scottish tweed. Kornblum could see from the flush in his cheeks and the excess of care he took to avoid knocking his head against the low sloping ceiling that the boy was quite drunk. And he was hardly a boy anymore; he must be nearly nineteen.

“What is it, son?” said Kornblum. “Why are you here?”

“I’m not here,” Josef replied. He was a pale, freckled boy, black-haired, with a nose at once large and squashed-looking, and wide-set blue eyes half a candle too animated by sarcasm to pass for dreamy. “I’m on a train for Ostend.” With an outsize gesture, Josef pretended to consult his watch. Kornblum decided that he was not pretending at all. “I’m passing Frankfurt right about now, you see.”

“I see.”

“Yes. My family’s entire fortune has been spent. Everyone who must be bribed has been bribed. Our bank accounts have been emptied. My father’s insurance policy has been sold. My mother’s jewelry, her silver. The pictures. Most of the good furniture. Medical equipment. Stocks. Bonds. All to ensure that I, the lucky one, can be sitting on this train, you see? In the smoking car.” He blew a puff of imaginary smoke. “Hurtling through Germany on my way to the good old U.S.A.” He finished in twanging American. To Kornblum’s ear, his accent sounded quite good.

“My boy—”

“With all of my papers in order, you betcha.”

Kornblum sighed. “Your exit visa?” he guessed. He had heard stories of many such last-minute denials in recent weeks.

“They said I was missing a stamp. One stamp. I told them this couldn’t be possible. Everything was in order. I had a checklist, prepared for me by the Underassistant Secretary for Exit Visas himself. I showed this checklist to them.”

“But?”

“They said the requirements were changed this morning. They had a directive, a telegram from Eichmann himself. I was put off the train at Eger. Ten kilometers from the border.”

“Ah.” Kornblum eased himself down onto the bed—he suffered from hemorrhoids—and patted the coverlet beside him. Josef sat down. He buried his face in his hands. He let out a shuddering breath, his shoulders grew taut, cords stood out on the back of his neck. He was struggling with the desire to cry.

“Look,” the old magician said, hoping to forestall tears, “look now. I am quite certain you will be able to correct the predicament.” The words of consolation came out more stiffly than Kornblum would have liked, but he was starting to feel a little apprehensive. It was well past midnight, and the boy had an air of desperation, of impending explosion, that could not fail to move Kornblum, but also made him nervous. Five years earlier, he had been involved in a misadventure with this reckless and unlucky boy, to his undiminished regret.

“Come,” Kornblum said. He gave the boy a clumsy little pat on the shoulder. “Your parents are sure to be worrying. I’ll walk you home.”

This did it; with a sharp intake of breath, like a man leaping in terror from a burning deck into a frozen sea, Josef began to cry.

“I already left them once,” he said, shaking his head. “I just can’t do it to them again.”

All morning, in the train carrying him west toward Ostend and America, Josef had been tormented by the bitter memory of his farewell. He had neither wept, nor tolerated especially well, the weeping of his mother and grandfather, who had sung the role of Vitek in the 1926 premiere of Janáček’s Věc Makropulos at Brno and tended, as is not uncommon among tenors, to wear his heart on his sleeve. But Josef, like many boys of nineteen, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the imagined toughness of that organ. His habit of youthful stoicism kept him cool in the lachrymose embrace of his grandfather that morning at the Bahnhof. He had also felt disgracefully glad to be going. He was not happy to be leaving Prague so much as he was thrilled to be headed for America, for the home of his father’s sister and an American cousin named Sam, in unimaginable Brooklyn, with its nightspots and tough guys and Warner Bros. verve. The same buoyant Cagneyesque callousness that kept him from marking the pain of leaving his entire family, and the only home he knew, also allowed him to tell himself that it would be only a matter of time before they all joined him in New York. Besides, the situation in Prague was undoubtedly as bad now as it was ever going to get. And so, at the station, Josef had kept his head erect and his cheeks dry and puffed on a cigarette, resolutely affecting greater notice of the other travelers on the train platform, the steam-shrouded locomotives, the German soldiers in their elegant coats, than of the members of his own family. He kissed his grandfather’s scratchy cheek, withstood his mother’s long embrace, shook hands with his father and with his younger brother, Thomas, who handed Josef an envelope. Josef stuck it in a coat pocket with a studied absentmindedness, ignoring the trembling of Thomas’s lower lip as the envelope vanished. Then, as Josef was climbing into the train, his father had taken hold of his son’s coattails and pulled him back down to the platform. He reached around from behind Josef to accost him with a sloppy hug. The shock of his father’s tear-damp mustache against Josef’s cheek was mortifying. Josef had pulled away.

“See you in the funny papers,” he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope of salvation.

As soon as the train pulled away from the platform, however, and Josef had settled back in the second-class compartment seat, he felt, like a blow to the stomach, how beastly his conduct had been. He seemed at once to swell, to pulse and burn with shame, as if his entire body were in rebellion against his behavior, as if shame could induce the same catastrophic reaction in him as a bee’s sting. This very seat had cost, with the addition of departure imposts and the recent “transfer excise,” precisely what Josef’s mother had been able to raise from the pawning of an emerald brooch, her husband’s gift to her on their tenth anniversary. Shortly before that triste anniversary, Frau Dr. Kavalier had miscarried in her fourth month of pregnancy, and abruptly the image of this unborn sibling—it would have been a sister—arose in Josef’s mind, a curl of glinting vapor, and fixed him with a reproachful emerald gaze. When the emigration officers came on at Eger to take him off the train—his name was one of several on their list—they found him between two cars, snot-nosed, bawling into the crook of his elbow.

The shame of Josef’s departure, however, was nothing compared to the unbearable ignominy of his return. On the journey back to Prague, crowded now into a third-class car of an airless local, with a group of strapping, loud Sudeten farm families headed to the capital for some kind of religious rally, he spent the first hour relishing a sense of just punishment for his hard-heartedness, his ingratitude, for having abandoned his family at all. But as the train passed through Kladno, the inevitable homecoming began to loom. Far from offering him the opportunity to make up for his unpardonable behavior, it seemed to him, his surprise return would be an occasion only to bring his family further sorrow. For the six months since the start of occupation, the focus of the Kavaliers’ efforts, of their collective existence, had been the work of sending Josef to America. This effort had, in fact, come to represent a necessary counterbalance to the daily trial of mere coping, a hopeful inoculation against its wasting effects. Once the Kavaliers had determined that Josef, having been born during a brief family sojourn in the Ukraine in 1920, was, by a quirk of politics, eligible to emigrate to the United States, the elaborate and costly process of getting him there had restored a measure of order and meaning to their lives. How it would crush them to see him turn up on their doorstep not eleven hours after he had left! No, he thought, he could not possibly disappoint them by coming home. When the train at last crawled back into the Prague station early that evening, Josef remained in his seat, unable to move, until a passing conductor suggested, not unkindly, that the young gentleman had better get off.

Josef wandered into the station bar, swallowed a liter and a half of beer, and promptly fell asleep in a booth at the back. After an indefinite period, a waiter came over to shake him, and Josef woke up, drunk. He wrestled his valise out into the streets of the city that he had, only that morning, seriously imagined he might never see again. He drifted along Jerusalem Street, into the Josefov, and somehow, almost inevitably, his steps led him to Maisel Street, to the flat of his old teacher. He could not dash the hopes of his family by letting them see his face again; not, at any rate, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. If Bernard Kornblum could not assist him in escaping, at least he would be able to help him to hide.

Kornblum handed Josef a cigarette and lit it for him. Then he went over to his armchair, settled carefully into it, and lit another for himself. Neither Josef Kavalier nor the Golem’s keepers were the first to have approached Kornblum in the desperate expectation that his expertise with jail cells, straitjackets, and iron chests might somehow be extended to unlocking the borders of sovereign nations. Until this night, he had turned all such inquiries aside as not merely impractical, or beyond his expertise, but extreme and premature. Now, however, sitting in his chair, watching his former student shuffle helplessly through the flimsy scraps of triplicate paper, train tickets, and stamped immigration cards in his travel wallet, Kornblum’s keen ears detected the sound, unmistakable to him, of the tumblers of a great iron lock clicking into place. The Emigration Office, under the directorship of Adolf Eichmann, had passed from mere cynical extortion to outright theft, taking applicants for everything they had in return for nothing at all. Britain and America had all but closed their doors—it was only through the persistence of an American aunt and the geographic fluke of his birth in the Soviet Union that Josef had been able to obtain a U.S. entry visa. Meanwhile, here in Prague, not even a useless old lump of river mud was safe from the predatory snout of the invader.

“I can get you to Vilna, in Lithuania,” Kornblum said at last. “From there you will have to find your own way. Memel is in German hands now, but perhaps you can find passage from Priekule.”

“Lithuania?”

“I am afraid so.”

After a moment the boy nodded, and shrugged, and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray marked with the kreuzer-and-spade symbol of the Hofzinser Club.

“�Forget about what you are escaping from,’” he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum’s. “�Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.’”




3 (#ulink_4e77a33d-c141-5737-9bf0-ad794949ccf6)


JOSEF KAVALIER’S determination to storm the exclusive Hofzinser Club had reached its height one day back in 1935, over breakfast, when he choked on a mouthful of omelette with apricot preserves. It was one of those rare mornings at the sprawling Kavalier flat, in a lacy secession-style building off the Graben, when everyone sat down to eat breakfast together. The Doctors Kavalier maintained exacting professional schedules and, like many busy parents, were inclined at once to neglect and indulge their children. Herr Dr. Emil Kavalier was the author of Grundsätzen der Endikronologie, a standard text, and the identifier of Kavalier’s acromegaly. Frau Dr. Anna Kavalier was a neurologist by training who had been analyzed by Alfred Adler and had since gone on to treat, on her paisley divan, the cream of cathected young Prague. That morning, when Josef suddenly hunched forward, gagging, eyes watering, scrabbling for his napkin, the father reached out from behind his Tageblatt and idly pounded Josef on the back. His mother, without looking up from the latest number of Monatsschrift für Neurologie und Psychiatrie, reminded Josef, for the ten thousandth time, not to bolt his food. Only little Thomas noticed, in the instant before Josef brought the napkin to his lips, the glint of something foreign in his brother’s mouth. He got up from the table and went around to Josef’s chair. He stared at his brother’s jaws as they slowly worked over the offending bit of omelette. Josef ignored him and tipped another forkful into his mouth.

“What is it?” Thomas said.

“What is what?” said Josef. He chewed with care, as if bothered by a sore tooth. “Go away.”

Presently Miss Horne, Thomas’s governess, looked up from her day-old copy of the Times of London and studied the situation of the brothers.

“Have you lost a filling, Josef?”

“He has something in his mouth,” said Thomas. “It’s shiny.”

“What do you have in your mouth, young man?” said the boys’ mother, marking her place with a butter knife.

Josef stuck two fingers between his right cheek and upper right gum and pulled out a flat strip of metal, notched at one end: a tiny fork, no longer than Thomas’s pinkie.

“What is that?” his mother asked him, looking as if she was going to be ill.

Josef shrugged. “A torque wrench,” he said.

“What else?” said his father to his mother, with the unsubtle sarcasm that was itself a kind of subtlety, ensuring that he never appeared caught out by the frequently surprising behavior of his children. “Of course it’s a torque wrench.”

“Herr Kornblum said I should get used to it,” Josef explained. “He said that when Houdini died, he was found to have worn away two sizable pockets in his cheeks.”

Herr Dr. Kavalier returned to his Tageblatt. “An admirable aspiration,” he said.

Josef had become interested in stage magic right around the time his hands had grown large enough to handle a deck of playing cards. Prague had a rich tradition of illusionists and sleight-of-hand artists, and it was not difficult for a boy with preoccupied and indulgent parents to find competent instruction. He had studied for a year with a Czech named Bozic who called himself Rango and specialized in card and coin manipulation, mentalism, and the picking of pockets. He could also cut a fly in half with a thrown three of diamonds. Soon Josef had learned the Rain of Silver, the Dissolving Kreutzer, the Count Erno pass, and rudiments of the Dead Grandfather, but when it was brought to the attention of Josef’s parents that Rango had once been jailed for replacing the jewelry and money of his audiences with paste and blank paper, the boy was duly removed from his tutelage.

The phantom aces and queens, showers of silver korunas, and purloined wristwatches that had been Rango’s stock in trade were fine for mere amusement. And for Josef, the long hours spent standing in front of the lavatory mirror, practicing the palmings, passes, slips, and sleights that made it possible to seem to hurl a coin into the right ear, through the brainpan, and out the left ear of a chum or relative, or to pop the knave of hearts into the handkerchief of a pretty girl, required a masturbatory intensity of concentration that became almost more pleasurable for him than the trick itself. But then a patient had referred his father to Bernard Kornblum, and everything changed. Under Kornblum’s tutelage, Josef began to learn the rigorous trade of the Ausbrecher from the lips of one of its masters. At the age of fourteen, he had decided to consecrate himself to a life of timely escape.

Kornblum was an “eastern” Jew, bone-thin, with a bushy red beard he tied up in a black silk net before every performance. “It distracts them,” he said, meaning his audiences, whom he viewed with the veteran performer’s admixture of wonder and disdain. Since he worked with a minimum of patter, finding other means of distracting spectators was always an important consideration. “If I could work without the pants on,” he said, “I would go naked.” His forehead was immense, his fingers long and dexterous but inelegant with knobby joints; his cheeks, even on May mornings, looked rubbed and peeling, as though chafed by polar winds. Kornblum was among the few eastern Jews whom Josef had ever encountered. There were Jewish refugees from Poland and Russia in his parents’ circle, but these were polished, “Europeanized” doctors and musicians from large cities who spoke French and German. Kornblum, whose German was awkward and Czech nonexistent, had been born in a shtetl outside of Vilna and had spent most of his life wandering the provinces of imperial Russia, playing the odeons, barns, and market squares of a thousand small towns and villages. He wore suits of an outdated, pigeon-breasted, Valentino cut. Because his diet consisted in large part of tinned fish—anchovies, smelts, sardines, tunny—his breath often carried a rank marine tang. Although a staunch atheist, he nonetheless kept kosher, avoided work on Saturday, and kept a steel engraving of the Temple Mount on the east wall of his room. Until recently, Josef, then fourteen, had given very little thought to the question of his own Jewishness. He believed—it was enshrined in the Czech constitution—that Jews were merely one of the numerous ethnic minorities making up the young nation of which Josef was proud to be a son. The coming of Kornblum, with his Baltic smell, his shopworn good manners, his Yiddish, made a strong impression on Josef.

Twice a week that spring and summer and well into the autumn, Josef went to Kornblum’s room on the top floor of a sagging house on Maisel Street, in the Josefov, to be chained to the radiator or tied hand and foot with long coils of thick hempen rope. Kornblum did not at first give him the slightest guidance on how to escape from these constraints.

“You will pay attention,” he said, on the afternoon of Josef’s first lesson, as he shackled Josef to a bentwood chair. “I assure you of this. Also you will get used to the feeling of the chain. The chain is your silk pajamas now. It is your mother’s loving arms.”

Apart from this chair, an iron bedstead, a wardrobe, and the picture of Jerusalem on the east wall, next to the lone window, the room was almost bare. The only beautiful object was a Chinese trunk carved from some kind of tropical wood, as red as raw liver, with thick brass hinges, and a pair of fanciful brass locks in the form of stylized peacocks. The locks opened by a system of tiny levers and springs concealed in the jade eyespots of each peacock’s seven tail feathers. The magician pushed the fourteen jade buttons in a certain order that seemed to change each time he went to open the chest.

For the first few sessions, Kornblum merely showed Josef different kinds of locks that he took out, one by one, from the chest; locks used to secure manacles, mailboxes, and ladies’ diaries; warded and pin-tumbler door locks; sturdy padlocks; and combination locks taken from strongboxes and safes. Wordlessly, he would take each of the locks apart, using a screwdriver, then reassemble them. Toward the end of the hour, still without freeing Josef, he talked about the rudiments of breath control. At last, in the final minutes of the lesson, he would unchain the boy, only to stuff him into a plain pine box. He would sit on the closed lid, drinking tea and glancing at his pocket watch, until the lesson was over.

“If you are a claustrophobe,” Kornblum explained, “we must detect this now, and not when you lie in chains at the bottom of the Moldau, strapped inside a postman’s bag, with all your family and neighbors waiting for you to swim out.”

At the start of the second month, he introduced the pick and the torque wrench, and set about applying these wonderful tools to each of the various sample locks he kept in the chest. His touch was deft and, though he was well past sixty, his hands steady. He would pick the locks, and then, for Josef’s further edification, take them apart and pick them again with the works exposed. The locks, whether new or antique, English, German, Chinese, or American, did not resist his tinkerings for more than a few seconds. He had, in addition, amassed a small library of thick, dusty volumes, many illegal or banned, some of them imprinted with the seal of the Bolsheviks’ dreaded Cheka, in which were listed, in infinite columns of minuscule type, the combination formulae, by lot number, for thousands of the combination locks manufactured in Europe since 1900.

For weeks, Josef pleaded with Kornblum to be allowed to handle a pick himself. Contrary to instructions, he had been working over the locks at home with a hat pin and a spoke from a bicycle wheel, with occasional success.

“Very well,” said Kornblum at last. Handing Josef his pick and a torque wrench, he led him to the door of his room, in which he had himself installed a fine new Rätsel seven-pin lock. Then he unknotted his necktie and used it to blindfold Josef. “To see inside the lock, you don’t use your eyes.”

Josef knelt down in darkness and felt for the brass-plated knob. The door was cold against his cheek. When at last Kornblum removed the blindfold and motioned for Josef to climb into the coffin, Josef had picked the Rätsel three times, the last in under ten minutes.

On the day before Josef caused a disturbance at the breakfast table, after months of nauseous breathing drills that made his head tingle and of practice that left the joints of his fingers aching, he had walked into Kornblum’s room and held out his wrists, as usual, to be cuffed and bound. Kornblum startled him with a rare smile. He handed Josef a small black leather pouch. Unrolling it, Josef found the tiny torque wrench and a set of steel picks, some no longer than the wrench, some twice as long with smooth wooden handles. None was thicker than a broom straw. Their tips had been cut and bent into all manner of cunning moons, diamonds, and tildes.

“I made these,” said Kornblum. “They will be reliable.”

“For me? You made these for me?”

“This is what we will now determine,” Kornblum said. He pointed to the bed, where he had laid out a pair of brand-new German handcuffs and his best American Yale locks. “Chain me to the chair.”

Kornblum allowed himself to be bound to the legs of his chair with a length of heavy chain; other chains secured the chair to the radiator, and the radiator to his neck. His hands were also cuffed—in front of his body, so that he could smoke. Without a word of advice or complaint from Kornblum, Josef got the handcuffs and all but one of the locks off in the first hour. But the last lock, a one-pound 1927 Yale Dreadnought, with sixteen pins and drivers, frustrated his efforts. Josef sweated and cursed under his breath, in Czech, so as not to offend his master. Kornblum lit another Sobranie.

“The pins have voices,” he reminded Josef at last. “The pick is a tiny telephone wire. The tips of your fingers have ears.”

Josef took a deep breath, slid the pick that was tipped with a small squiggle into the plug of the lock, and again applied the wrench. Quickly, he stroked the tip of the pick back and forth across the pins, feeling each one give in its turn, gauging the resistance of the drivers and springs. Each lock had its own point of equilibrium between torque and friction; if you turned too hard, the plug would jam; too softly, and the pins wouldn’t catch properly. With sixteen-pin columns, finding the point of equilibrium was entirely a matter of intuition and style. Josef closed his eyes. He heard the wire of the pick humming in his fingertips.

With a satisfying metallic gurgle, the lock sprang open. Kornblum nodded, stood up, stretched.

“You may keep the tools,” he said.

However slow the progress of the lessons with Herr Kornblum had seemed to Josef, it had come ten times slower for Thomas Kavalier. The endless tinkering with locks and knots that Thomas had covertly witnessed, night after night, in the faint lamplight of the bedroom the boys shared, was far less interesting to him than Josef’s interest in coin tricks and card magic had been.

Thomas Masaryk Kavalier was an animated gnome of a boy with a thick black thatch of hair. When he was a very young boy, the musical chromosome of his mother’s family had made itself plain in him. At three, he regaled dinner guests with long, stormy arias, sung in a complicated gibberish Italian. During a family holiday at Lugano, when he was eight, he was discovered to have picked up enough actual Italian from his perusal of favorite libretti to be able to converse with hotel waiters. Constantly called upon to perform in his brother’s productions, pose for his sketches, and vouch for his lies, he had developed a theatrical flair. In a ruled notebook, he had recently written the first lines of the libretto for an opera, Houdini, set in fabulous Chicago. He was hampered in this project by the fact that he had never seen an escape artist perform. In his imagination, Houdini’s deeds were far grander than anything even the former Mr. Erich Weiss himself could have conceived: leaps in suits of armor from flaming airplanes over Africa, and escapes from hollow balls launched into sharks’ dens by undersea cannons. The sudden entrance of Josef, at breakfast that morning, into territory once actually occupied by the great Houdini, marked a great day in Thomas’s childhood.

After their parents had left—the mother for her office on Narodny; the father to catch a train for Brno, where he had been called in to consult on the mayor’s giantess daughter—Thomas would not leave Josef alone about Houdini and his cheeks.

“Could he have fit a two-koruna piece?” he wanted to know. He lay on his bed, on his belly, watching as Josef returned the torque wrench to its special wallet.

“Yes, but it’s hard to imagine why he might have wanted to.”

“What about a box of matches?”

“I suppose so.”

“How would they have stayed dry?”

“Perhaps he could have wrapped them in oilcloth.”

Thomas probed his cheek with the tip of his tongue. He shuddered. “What other things does Herr Kornblum want you to put in there?”

“I’m learning to be an escape artist, not a valise,” Josef said irritably.

“Are you going to get to do a real escape now?”

“I’m closer today than I was yesterday.”

“And then you’ll be able to join the Hofzinser Club?”

“We’ll see.”

“What are the requirements?”

“You just have to be invited.”

“Do you have to have cheated death?”

Josef rolled his eyes, sorry he had ever told Thomas about the Hofzinser. It was a private men’s club, housed in a former inn on one of the Stare Mesto’s most crooked and crepuscular streets, which combined the functions of canteen, benevolent society, craft guild, and rehearsal hall for the performing magicians of Bohemia. Herr Kornblum took his supper there nearly every night. It was apparent to Josef that the club was not only the sole source of companionship and talk for his taciturn teacher but also a veritable Hall of Wonders, a living repository for the accumulated lore of centuries of sleight and illusion in a city that had produced some of history’s greatest charlatans, conjurors, and fakirs. Josef badly wanted to be invited to join. This desire had, in fact, become the secret focus of every spare thought (a role soon afterward to be usurped by the governess, Miss Dorothea Horne). Part of the reason he was so irritated by Thomas’s persistent questioning was that his little brother had guessed at the constant preeminence of the Hofzinser Club in Josef’s thoughts. Thomas’s own mind was filled with Byzantine, houris-and-candied-figs visions of men in cutaway coats and pasha pants walking around inside the beetle-browed, half-timbered hotel on Stupartskà with their upper torsos separated from their lower, summoning leopards and lyrebirds out of the air.

“I’m sure when the time comes, I will receive my invitation.”

“When you’re twenty-one?”

“Perhaps.”

“But if you did something to show them …”

This echoed the secret trend of Josef’s own thoughts. He swung himself around on his bed, leaned forward, and looked at Thomas. “Such as?”

“If you showed them how you can get out of chains, and open locks, and hold your breath, and untie ropes.…”

“All that’s easy stuff. A fellow can learn such tricks in prison.”

“Well, if you did something really grand, then … something to amaze them.”

“An escape.”

“We could throw you out of an airplane tied to a chair, with the parachute tied to another chair, falling through the air. Like this.” Thomas scrambled up from his bed and went over to his small desk, took out the blue notebook in which he was composing Houdini, and opened it to a back page, where he had sketched the scene. Here was Houdini in a dinner jacket, hurtling from a crooked airplane in company with a parachute, two chairs, a table, and a tea set, all trailing scrawls of velocity. The magician had a smile on his face as he poured tea for the parachute. He seemed to think he had all the time in the world.

“This is idiotic,” Josef said. “What do I know about parachutes? Who’s going to let me jump out of an airplane?”

Thomas blushed. “How childish of me,” he said.

“Never mind,” said Josef. He stood up. “Weren’t you playing with Papa’s old things just now, his medical-school things?”

“Right here,” Thomas said. He threw himself on the floor and rolled under the bed. A moment later, a small wooden crate emerged, covered in dust-furred spider silk, its lid hinged on crooked loops of wire.

Josef knelt and lifted the lid, revealing odd bits of apparatus and scientific supplies that had survived their father’s medical education. Adrift in a surf of ancient excelsior were a broken Erlenmeyer flask, a glass pear-shaped tube with a penny-head stopper, a pair of crucible tongs, the leather-clad box that contained the remains of a portable Zeiss microscope (long since rendered inoperable by Josef, who had once attempted to use it to get a better look at Pola Negri’s loins in a blurry bathing photo torn from a newspaper), and a few odd items.

“Thomas?”

“It’s nice under here. I’m not a claustrophobe. I could stay under here for weeks.”

“Wasn’t there …” Josef dug deep into the rustling pile of shavings. “Didn’t we used to have—”

“What?” Thomas slid out from under the bed.

Josef held up a long, glinting glass wand and brandished it as Kornblum himself might have done. “A thermometer,” he said.

“What for? Whose temperature are you going to take?”

“The river’s,” Josef said.

At four o’clock on the morning of Friday, September 27, 1935, the temperature of the water of the River Moldau, black as a church bell and ringing against the stone embankment at the north end of Kampa Island, stood at 22.2° on the Celsius scale. The night was moonless, and a fog lay over the river like an arras drawn across by a conjuror’s hand. A sharp wind rattled the seedpods in the bare limbs of the island’s acacias. The Kavalier brothers had come prepared for cold weather. Josef had dressed them in wool from head to toe, with two pairs of socks each. In the pack he wore on his back, he carried a piece of rope, a strand of chain, the thermometer, half a veal sausage, a padlock, and a change of clothes with two extra pairs of socks for himself. He also carried a portable oil brazier, borrowed from a school friend whose family went in for alpinism. Although he did not plan to spend much time in the water—no longer, he calculated, than a minute and twenty-seven seconds—he had been practicing in a bathtub filled with cold water, and he knew that, even in the steam-heated comfort of the bathroom at home, it took several minutes to rid oneself of the chill.

In all his life, Thomas Kavalier had never been up so early. He had never seen the streets of Prague so empty, the housefronts so sunken in gloom, like a row of lanterns with the wicks snuffed. The corners he knew, the shops, the carved lions on a balustrade he passed daily on his way to school, looked strange and momentous. Light spread in a feeble vapor from the streetlamps, and the corners were flooded in shadow. He kept imagining that he would turn around and see their father chasing after them in his dressing gown and slippers. Josef walked quickly, and Thomas had to hurry to keep up with him. Cold air burned his cheeks. They stopped several times, for reasons that were never clear to Thomas, to lurk in a doorway, or shelter behind the swelling fender of a parked Skoda. They passed the open side door of a bakery, and Thomas was briefly overwhelmed by whiteness: a tiled white wall, a pale man dressed all in white, a cloud of flour roiling over a shining white mountain of dough. To Thomas’s astonishment, there were all manner of people about at this hour, tradesmen, cabdrivers, two drunken men singing, even a woman crossing the Charles Bridge in a long black coat, smoking and muttering to herself. And policemen. They were obliged to sneak past two en route to Kampa. Thomas was a contentedly law-abiding child, with fond feelings toward policemen. He was also afraid of them. His notion of prisons and jails had been keenly influenced by reading Dumas, and he had not the slightest doubt that little boys would, without compunction, be interred in them.

He began to be sorry to have come along. He wished he had never come up with the idea of having Josef prove his mettle to the members of the Hofzinser Club. It was not that he doubted his brother’s ability. This never would have occurred to him. He was just afraid: of the night, the shadows, and the darkness, of policemen, his father’s temper, spiders, robbers, drunks, ladies in overcoats, and especially, this morning, of the river, darker than anything else in Prague.

Josef, for his part, was afraid only of being stopped. Not caught; there could be nothing illegal, he reasoned, about tying yourself up and then trying to swim out of a laundry bag. He didn’t imagine the police or his parents would look favorably on the idea—he supposed he might even be prosecuted for swimming in the river out of season—but he was not afraid of punishment. He just did not want anything to prevent him from practicing his escape. He was on a tight schedule. Yesterday he had mailed an invitation to the president of the Hofzinser Club:

The honored members of the Hofzinser Club

are cordially invited

to witness another astounding feat of autoliberation

by that prodigy of escapistry

CAVALIERI

at Charles Bridge

Sunday, 29 September 1935

at half past four in the morning.

He was pleased with the wording, but it left him only two more days to get ready. For the past two weeks, he had been picking locks with his hands immersed in a sinkful of cold water, and wriggling free of his ropes and loosing his chains in the bathtub. Tonight he would try the “feat of autoliberation” from the shore of Kampa. Then, two days later, if all went well, he would have Thomas push him over the railing of the Charles Bridge. He had absolutely no doubt that he would be able to pull off the trick. Holding his breath for a minute and a half posed no difficulty for him. Thanks to Kornblum’s training, he could go for nearly twice that time without drawing a breath. Twenty-two degrees Celsius was colder than the water in the pipes at home, but again, he was not planning to stay in it for long. A razor blade, for cutting the laundry sack, was safely concealed between layers of the sole of his left shoe, and Kornblum’s tension wrench and a miniature pick Josef had made from the wire bristle of a street sweeper’s push broom were housed so comfortably in his cheeks that he was barely conscious of their presence. Such considerations as the impact of his head on the water or on one of the stone piers of the bridge, his paralyzing stage fright in front of that eminent audience, or helplessly sinking did not intrude upon his idée fixe.

“I’m ready,” he said, handing the thermometer to his little brother. It was an icicle in Thomas’s hand. “Let’s get me into the bag.”

He picked up the laundry sack they had pilfered from their housekeeper’s closet, held it open, and stepped into the wide mouth of the bag as though into a pair of trousers. Then he took the length of chain Thomas offered him and wrapped it between and around his ankles several times before linking the ends with a heavy Rätsel he had bought from an ironmonger. Next he held out his wrists to Thomas, who, as he had been instructed, bound them together with the rope and tied it tightly in a hitch and a pair of square knots. Josef crouched, and Thomas cinched the sack over his head. “On Sunday we’ll have you put chains and locks on the cord,” Josef said, his voice muffled in a way that disturbed his brother.

“But then how will you get out?” The boy’s hands trembled. He pulled his woolen gloves back on.

“They’ll be just for effect. I’m not coming out that way.” The bag suddenly ballooned, and Thomas took a step backward. Inside the sack, Josef was bent forward, reaching out with both arms extended, seeking the ground. The bag toppled over. “Oh!”

“What happened?”

“I’m fine. Roll me into the water.”

Thomas looked at the misshapen bundle at his feet. It looked too small to contain his brother.

“No,” he said, to his surprise.

“Thomas, please. You’re my assistant.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not even in the invitation.”

“I’m sorry about that,” said Josef. “I forgot.” He waited. “Thomas, I sincerely and wholeheartedly apologize for my thoughtlessness.”

“All right.”

“Now roll me.”

“I’m afraid.” Thomas knelt down and started to uncinch the sack. He knew he was betraying his brother’s trust and the spirit of the mission, and it pained him to do so, but it couldn’t be helped. “You have to come out of there this minute.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Josef. “Thomas.” Lying on his back, peering out through the suddenly reopened mouth of the sack, Josef shook his head. “You’re being ridiculous. Come on, tie it back up. What about the Hofzinser Club, eh? Don’t you want me to take you to dinner there?”

“But …”

“But what?”

“The sack is too small.”

“What?”

“It’s so dark out … it’s too dark out, Josef.”

“Thomas, what are you talking about? Come on, Tommy Boy,” he added in English. This was the name Miss Horne called him. “Dinner at the Hofzinser Club. Belly dancers. Turkish delight. All alone, without Mother and Father.”

“Yes, but—”

“Do it.”

“Josef! Is your mouth bleeding?”

“God damn it, Thomas, tie up the goddamned sack!”

Thomas recoiled. Quickly, he bent and cinched the sack, and rolled his brother into the river. The splash startled him, and he burst into tears. A wide oval of ripples spread across the surface of the water. For a frantic instant, Thomas paced back and forth on the embankment, still hearing the explosion of water. The cuffs of his trousers were drenched and cold water seeped in around the tongues of his shoes. He had thrown his own brother into the river, drowned him like a litter of kittens.

The next thing Thomas knew, he was on the Charles Bridge, running past the bridge’s statues, headed for home, for the police station, for the jail cell into which he would now gladly have thrown himself. But as he was passing Saint Christopher, he thought he heard something. He darted to the bridge parapet and peered over. He could just make out the alpinist’s rucksack on the embankment, the faint glow of the brazier. The surface of the river was unbroken.

Thomas ran back to the stairway that led back down to the island. As he passed the round bollard at the stair head, the slap of hard marble against his palm seemed to exhort him to brave the black water. He scrambled down the stone stairs two at a time, tore across the empty square, slid down the embankment, and fell headlong into the Moldau.

“Josef!” he called, just before his mouth filled with water.

All this while Josef, blind, trussed, and stupid with cold, was madly holding his breath as, one by one, the elements of his trick went awry. When he had held out his hands to Thomas, he had crossed his wrists at the bony knobs, flattening their soft inner sides against each other after he was tied, but the rope seemed to have contracted in the water, consuming this half inch of wriggling room, and in a panic that he had never thought possible, he felt almost a full minute slip away before he could free his hands. This triumph calmed him somewhat. He fished the wrench and pick from his mouth and, holding them carefully, reached down through the darkness for the chain around his legs. Kornblum had warned him against the tight grip of the amateur picklock, but he was shocked when the tension wrench twisted like the stem of a top and spun out of his fingers. He wasted fifteen seconds groping after it and then required another twenty or thirty to slip the pick into the lock. His fingertips were deafened by the cold, and it was only by some random vibration in the wire that he managed to hit the pins, set the drivers, and twist the plug of the lock. This same numbness served him much better when, reaching for the razor in his shoe, he sliced open the tip of his right index finger. Though he could see nothing, he could taste a thread of blood in that dark humming stuff around him.

Three and a half minutes after he had tumbled into the river, kicking his feet in their heavy shoes and two pairs of socks, he burst to the surface. Only Kornblum’s breathing exercises and a miracle of habit had kept him from exhaling every last atom of oxygen in his lungs in the instant that he hit the water. Gasping now, he clambered up the embankment and crawled on his hands and knees toward the hissing brazier. The smell of coal oil was like the odor of hot bread, of warm summer pavement. He sucked up deep barrelfuls of air. The world seemed to pour in through his lungs: spidery trees, fog, the flickering lamps strung along the bridge, a light burning in Kepler’s old tower in the Klementinum. Abruptly, he was sick, and spat up something bitter and shameful and hot. He wiped his lips with the sleeve of his wet wool shirt, and felt a little better. Then he realized that his brother had disappeared. Shivering, he stood up, his clothes hanging heavy as chain mail, and saw Thomas in the shadow of the bridge, beneath the carved figure of Bruncvik, chopping clumsily at the water, paddling, gasping, drowning.

Josef went back in. The water was as cold as before, but he did not seem to feel it. As he swam, he felt something fingering him, plucking at his legs, trying to snatch him under. It was only the earth’s gravity, or the swift Moldau current, but at the time, Josef imagined that he was being pawed at by the same foul stuff he had spat onto the sand.

When Thomas saw Josef splashing toward him, he promptly burst into tears.

“Keep crying,” Josef said, reasoning that breathing was the essential thing and that weeping was in part a kind of respiration. “That’s good.”

Josef got an arm around his brother’s waist, then tried to drag them, Thomas and his ponderous self, back toward the Kampa embankment. As they splashed and wrestled in the middle of the river, they kept talking, though neither could remember later what the subject of the discussion had been. Whatever it was, it struck them both afterward as having been something calm and leisurely, like the murmurs between them that sometimes preceded sleep. At a certain point, Josef realized that his limbs felt warm now, even hot, and that he was drowning. His last conscious perception was of Bernard Kornblum cutting through the water toward them, his bushy beard tied up in a hair net.

Josef came to an hour later in his bed at home. It took two more days for Thomas to revive; for most of that time, no one, least of all his doctor parents, expected that he would. He was never quite the same afterward. He could not bear cold weather, and he suffered from a lifelong snuffle. Also, perhaps because of damage to his ears, he lost his taste for music; the libretto for Houdini was abandoned.

The magic lessons were broken off—at the request of Bernard Kornblum. Throughout the difficult weeks that followed the escapade, Kornblum was a model of correctness and concern, bringing toys and games for Thomas, interceding on Josef’s behalf with the Kavaliers, shouldering all the blame himself. The Doctors Kavalier believed their sons when they said that Kornblum had had nothing to do with the incident, and since he had saved the boys from drowning, they were more than willing to forgive. Josef was so penitent and chastened that they even would have been willing to allow his continued studies with the impoverished old magician, who could certainly not afford to lose a pupil. But Kornblum told them that his time with Josef had come to an end. He had never had so naturally gifted a student, but his own discipline—which was really an escape artist’s sole possession—had not been passed along. He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.

Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. “Never worry about what you are escaping from,” he said. “Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.”

Two weeks after Josef’s disaster, with Thomas recovered, Kornblum called at the flat off the Graben to escort the Kavalier brothers to dinner at the Hofzinser Club. It proved to be a quite ordinary place, with a cramped, dimly lit dining room that smelled of liver and onions. There was a small library filled with moldering volumes on deception and forgery. In the lounge, an electric fire cast a negligible glow over scattered armchairs covered in worn velour and a few potted palms and dusty rubber trees. An old waiter named Max made some ancient hard candies fall out of his handkerchief into Thomas’s lap. They tasted of burned coffee. The magicians, for their part, barely glanced up from their chessboards and silent hands of bridge. Where the knights and rooks were missing, they used spent rifle cartridges and stacks of prewar kreuzers; their playing cards were devastated by years of crimps, breaks, and palmings at the hands of bygone cardsharps. Since neither Kornblum nor Josef possessed any conversational skills, it fell upon Thomas to carry the burden of talk at the table, which he dutifully did until one of the members, an old necromancer dining alone at the next table, told him to shut up. At nine o’clock, as promised, Kornblum brought the boys home.




4 (#ulink_8f573485-cd97-595d-874c-b2768e2d2e0e)


THE PAIR of young German professors spelunking with their electric torches in the rafters of the Old-New Synagogue, or Altneuschul, had, as it happened, gone away disappointed; for the attic under the stair-stepped gables of the old Gothic synagogue was a cenotaph. Around the turn of the last century, Prague’s city fathers had determined to “sanitize” the ancient ghetto. During a moment when the fate of the Altneuschul had appeared uncertain, the members of the secret circle had arranged for their charge to be moved from its ancient berth, under a cairn of decommissioned prayer books in the synagogue’s attic, to a room in a nearby apartment block, newly constructed by a member of the circle who, in public life, was a successful speculator in real estate. After this burst of uncommon activity, however, the ghetto-bred inertia and disorganization of the circle reasserted itself. The move, supposed to have been only temporary, somehow was never undone, even after it became clear that the Altneuschul would be spared. A few years later, the old yeshiva in whose library a record of the transfer was stored fell under the wrecking ball, and the log containing the record was lost. As a result, the circle was able to provide Kornblum with only a partial address for the Golem, the actual number of the apartment in which it was concealed having been forgotten or come into dispute. The embarrassing fact was that none of the current members of the circle could remember having laid eyes on the Golem since early 1917.

“Then why move it again?” Josef asked his old teacher, as they stood outside the art nouveau building, long since faded and smudged with thumbprints of soot, to which they had been referred. Josef gave a nervous tug at his false beard, which was making his chin itch. He was also wearing a mustache and a wig, all ginger in color and of good quality, and a pair of heavy round tortoiseshell spectacles. Consulting his image in Kornblum’s glass that morning, he had struck himself, in the Harris tweeds purchased for his trip to America, as looking quite convincingly Scottish. It was less clear to him why passing as a Scotsman in the streets of Prague was likely to divert people’s attention from his and Kornblum’s quest. As with many novices at the art of disguise, he could not have felt more conspicuous if he were naked or wearing a sandwich board printed with his name and intentions.

He looked up and down Nicholasgasse, his heart smacking against his ribs like a bumblebee at a window. In the ten minutes it had taken them to walk here from Kornblum’s room, Josef had passed his mother three times, or rather had passed three unknown women whose momentary resemblance to his mother had taken his breath away. He was reminded of the previous summer (following one of the episodes he imagined to have broken his young heart) when, every time he set out for school, for the German Lawn Tennis Club under Charles Bridge, for swimming at the Militär- und Civilschwimmschule, the constant possibility of encountering a certain Fraulein Felix had rendered every street corner and doorway a potential theater of shame and humiliation. Only now he was the betrayer of the hopes of another. He had no doubt that his mother, when he passed her, would be able to see right through the false whiskers. “If even they can’t find it, who could?”

“I am sure they could find it,” Kornblum said. He had trimmed his own beard, rinsing out the crackle of coppery red which, Josef had been shocked to discover, he had been using for years. He wore rimless glasses and a wide-brimmed black hat that shadowed his face, and he leaned realistically on a malacca cane. Kornblum had produced the disguises from the depths of his marvelous Chinese trunk, but said that they had come originally from the estate of Harry Houdini, who made frequent, expert use of disguise in his lifelong crusade to gull and expose false mediums. “I suppose the fear is that they will be soon be”—he flourished his handkerchief and then coughed into it—“obliged to try.”

Kornblum explained to the building superintendent, giving a pair of false names and brandishing credentials and bona fides whose source Josef was never able to determine, that they had been sent by the Jewish Council (a public organization unrelated to, though in some cases co-constituent with, the secret Golem circle) to survey the building, as part of a program to keep track of the movements of Jews into and within Prague. There was, in fact, such a program, undertaken semi-voluntarily and with the earnest dread that characterized all of the Jewish Council’s dealings with the Reichsprotektorat. The Jews of Bohemia, Moravia, and the Sudeten were being concentrated in the city, while Prague’s own Jews were being forced out of their old homes and into segregated neighborhoods, with two and three families often crowding into a single flat. The resulting turmoil made it difficult for the Jewish Council to supply the protectorate with the accurate information it constantly demanded; hence the need for a census. The superintendent of the building in which the Golem slept, which had been designated by the protectorate for habitation by Jews, found nothing to question in their story or documents, and let them in without hesitation.

Starting at the top and working their way down all five floors to the ground, Josef and Kornblum knocked on every door in the building and flashed their credentials, then carefully took down names and relationships. With so many people packed into each flat, and so many lately thrown out of work, it was the rare door that went unanswered in the middle of the day. In some of the flats, strict concords had been worked out among the disparate occupants, or else there was a happy mesh of temperament that maintained order, civility, and cleanliness. But for the most part, the families seemed not to have moved in together so much as to have collided, with an impact that hurled schoolbooks, magazines, hosiery, pipes, shoes, journals, candlesticks, knickknacks, mufflers, dressmaker’s dummies, crockery, and framed photographs in all directions, scattering them across rooms that had the provisional air of an auctioneer’s warehouse. In many apartments, there was a wild duplication and reduplication of furnishings: sofas ranked like church pews, enough jumbled dining chairs to stock a large café, a jungle growth of chandeliers dangling from ceilings, groves of torchères, clocks that sat side by side by side on a mantel, disputing the hour. Conflicts, in the nature of border wars, had inevitably broken out. Laundry was hung to demarcate lines of conflict and truce. Dueling wireless sets were tuned to different stations, the volumes turned up in hostile increments. In such circumstances, the scalding of a pan of milk, the frying of a kipper, the neglect of a fouled nappy, could possess incalculable strategic value. There were tales of families reduced to angry silence, communicating by means of hostile notes; three times, Kornblum’s simple request for the relationships among occupants resulted in bitter shouting over degrees of cousinage or testamentary disputes that in one case nearly led to a punch being thrown. Circumspect questioning of husbands, wives, great-uncles, and grandmothers brought forth no mention of a mysterious lodger, or of a door that was permanently shut.

When, after four hours of tedious and depressing make-believe, Mr. Krumm and Mr. Rosenblatt, representatives of the Census Committee of the Jewish Council of Prague, had knocked at every flat in the building, there were still three unaccounted for—all, as it turned out, on the fourth floor. But Josef thought he sensed futility—though he doubted his teacher ever would have admitted to it—in the old man’s stoop.

“Maybe,” Josef began, and then, after a brief struggle, let himself continue the thought, “maybe we ought to give up.”

He was exhausted by their charade, and as they came out onto the sidewalk again, crowded with a late-afternoon traffic of schoolchildren, clerks, and tradesmen, housekeepers carrying market bags and wrapped parcels of meat, all of them headed for home, he was aware that his fear of being discovered, unmasked, recognized by his disappointed parents, had been replaced by an acute longing to see them again. At any moment he expected—yearned—to hear his mother calling his name, to feel the moist brush stroke of his father’s mustache against his cheek. There was a residuum of summer in the watery blue sky, in the floral smell issuing from the bare throats of passing women. In the last day, posters had gone up advertising a new film starring Emil Jannings, the great German actor and friend of the Reich, for whom Josef felt a guilty admiration. Surely there was time to regroup, consider the situation in the bosom of his family, and prepare a less lunatic strategy. The idea that his previous plan of escape, by the conventional means of passports and visas and bribes, could somehow be revived and put into play started a seductive whispering in his heart.

“You may of course do so,” Kornblum said, resting on his cane with a fatigue that seemed less feigned than it had that morning. “I haven’t the liberty. Even if I do not send you, my prior obligation remains.”

“I was just thinking that perhaps I gave up on my other plan too soon.”

Kornblum nodded but said nothing, and the silence so counterbalanced the nod as to cancel it out.

“That isn’t the choice, is it?” Josef said after a moment. “Between your way and the other way. If I’m really going to go, I have to go your way, don’t I? Don’t I?”

Kornblum shrugged, but his eyes were not involved in the gesture. They were drawn at the corners, glittering with concern. “In my professional opinion,” he said.

Few things in the world carried more weight for Josef than that.

“Then there is no choice,” he said. “They spent everything they had.” He accepted the cigarette the old man offered. “What am I saying—�if I’m going’?” He spat a flake of tobacco at the ground. “I have to go.”

“What you have to do, my boy,” Kornblum said, “is to try to remember that you are already gone.”

They went to the Eldorado Café and sat, nursing butter and egg sandwiches, two glasses of Herbert water, and the better part of a pack of Letkas. Every fifteen minutes, Kornblum consulted his wristwatch, the intervals so regular and precise as to render the gesture superfluous. After two hours they paid their check, made a stop in the men’s room to empty their bladders and adjust their getups, then returned to Nicholasgasse 26. Very quickly they accounted for two of the three mystery flats, 40 and 41, discovering that the first, a tiny two-room, belonged to an elderly lady who had been taking a nap the last time the ersatz census takers came to call; and that the second, according to the same old woman, was rented to a family named Zweig or Zwang who had gone to a funeral in Zuerau or Zilina. The woman’s alphabetic confusion seemed to be part of a more global uncertainty—she came to the door in her nightgown and one sock, and addressed Kornblum for no obvious reason as Herr Kapitan—encompassing, among many other points of doubt, Apartment 42, the third unaccounted-for flat, about whose occupant or occupants she was unable to provide any information at all. Repeated knocking on the door to 42 over the next hour brought no one. The mystery deepened when they returned to the neighbors in 43, the last of the floor’s four flats. Earlier that afternoon, Kornblum and Josef had spoken to the head of this household: two families, the wives and fourteen children of brothers, brought together in four rooms. They were religious Jews. As before, the elder brother came to the door. He was a heavyset man in skullcap and fringes, with a great beard, black and bushy, that looked much more false to Josef than his own. The brother would consent to speak to them only through a four-inch gap, athwart a length of brass chain, as if admitting them might contaminate his home or expose the women and children to untoward influences. But his bulk could not prevent the escape of children’s shrieks and laughter, women’s voices, the smell of stewing carrots and of onions half-melting in a pan of fat.

“What do you want with that—?” the man said after Kornblum inquired about Apartment 42. He seemed to have second thoughts about the noun he was going to employ, and broke off. “I have nothing to do with that.”

“That?” Josef said, unable to contain himself, though Kornblum had enjoined him to play the role of silent partner. “That what?”

“I have nothing to say.” The man’s long face—he was a jewel cutter, with sad, exophthalmic blue eyes—seemed to ripple with disgust. “As far as I’m concerned, that apartment is empty. I pay no attention. I couldn’t tell you the first thing. If you’ll excuse me.”

He slammed the door. Josef and Kornblum looked at each other.

“It’s forty-two,” Josef said as they climbed into the rattling lift.

“We shall find out,” Kornblum said. “I wonder.”

On their way back to his room, they passed an ash can and into it Kornblum tossed the clipped packet of flimsy on which he and Josef had named and numbered the occupants of the building. Before they had gone a dozen steps, however, Kornblum stopped, turned, and went back. With a practiced gesture, he pushed up his sleeve and reached into the mouth of the rusting drum. His face took on a pinched, stoic blankness as he groped about in the unknown offal that filled the can. After a moment, he brought out the list, now stained with a nasty green blotch. The packet was at least two centimeters thick. With a jerk of his sinewy arms, Kornblum ripped it cleanly in half. He gathered the halves together and tore them into quarters, then tore the gathered quarters into eighths. His mien remained neutral, but with each division and reassembly the wad of paper grew thicker, the force required to tear it correspondingly increased, and Josef sensed a mounting anger in Kornblum as he ripped to smithereens the inventory, by name and age, of every Jew who lived at Nicholasgasse 26. Then, with a gelid showman’s smile, he rained the scraps of paper down into the wastebasket, like coins in the famous Shower of Gold illusion.

“Contemptible,” he said, but Josef was not sure, then or afterward, whom or what he was talking about—the ruse itself, the occupiers who made it plausible, the Jews who had submitted to it without question, or himself for having perpetrated it.

Well past midnight, after a dinner of hard cheese, tinned smelts, and pimientos, and an evening passed in triangulating the divergent news from the Rundesfunk, Radio Moscow, and the BBC, Kornblum and Josef returned to Nicholasgasse. The extravagant front doors, thick plate glass on an iron frame worked in the form of drooping lilies, were locked, but naturally this presented Kornblum with no difficulty. In just under a minute, they were inside and headed up the stairs to the fourth floor, their rubber-soled shoes silent on the worn carpeting. The sconce lights were on mechanical timers, and had long since turned off for the night. As they proceeded, a unanimous silence seeped from the walls of the stairwell and hallways, as stifling as a smell. Josef felt his way, hesitating, listening for the whisper of his teacher’s trousers, but Kornblum moved confidently in darkness. He didn’t stop until he reached the door of 42. He struck a light, then gripped the door handle and knelt, using the handle to steady himself. He passed the lighter to Josef. It was hot against the palm. It grew hotter still as Josef kept it burning so that Kornblum could get the string of his pick-wallet untied. When he had unrolled the little wallet, Kornblum looked up at Josef with a question in his eyes, a teacherly amalgam of doubt and encouragement. He tapped the picks with his fingertips. Josef nodded and let the light go out. Kornblum’s hand felt for Josef’s. Josef took it and helped the old man to his feet with an audible creaking of bones. Then he passed back the lighter and knelt down himself, to see if he still knew how to work over a door.

There was a pair of locks, one mounted on the latch and a second set higher up—a deadbolt. Josef selected a pick tipped with a bent parenthesis and, with a twitch of the torsion wrench, made short work of the lower lock, a cheap three-pin affair. But the deadbolt gave him trouble. He teased and tickled the pins, sought out their resonant frequencies as if the pick were an antenna connected to the trembling inductor of his hand. But there was no signal; his fingers had gone dead. He grew first impatient, then embarrassed, huffing and blowing through his teeth. When he let loose with a hissed Scheiss, Kornblum laid a heavy hand on his shoulder, then struck another light. Josef hung his head, slowly stood up, and handed Kornblum the pick. In the instant before the flame of the lighter was again extinguished, he was humbled by the lack of consolation in Kornblum’s expression. When he was sealed up in a coffin, in a container car on the platform in Vilna, he was going to have to do a better job.

Seconds after Josef handed over the pick, they were inside Apartment 42. Kornblum closed the door softly behind them and switched on the light. They just had time to remark on the unlikely decision someone had made to decorate the Golem’s quarters in a profusion of Louis XV chairs, tiger skins, and ormolu candelabra when a low, curt, irresistible voice said, “Hands up, gents.”

The speaker was a woman of about fifty, dressed in a green sateen housecoat and matching green mules. Two younger women stood behind her, wearing hard expressions and ornate kimonos, but the woman in green was the one holding the gun. After a moment, an elderly man emerged from the hallway at the women’s back, in stocking feet, his shirttails flapping around him, his broom-straw legs pale and knobby. His seamed, potato-nosed face was strangely familiar to Josef.

“Max,” Kornblum said, his face and voice betraying surprise for the first time since Josef had known him. It was then that Josef recognized, in the half-naked old man, the candy-producing magical waiter from his and Thomas’s lone night at the Hofzinser Club years before. A lineal descendant, as it later turned out, of the Golem’s maker, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and the man who had first brought Kornblum to the attention of the secret circle, old Max Loeb took in the scene before him, narrowing his eyes, trying to place this graybeard in a slouch hat with a commanding stage-trained voice.

“Kornblum?” he guessed finally, and his worried expression changed quickly to one of pity and amusement. He shook his head and signaled to the woman in green that she could put down her gun. “I can promise you this, Kornblum, you aren’t going to find it here,” he said, and then added, with a sour smile, “I’ve been poking around this apartment for years.”

Early the next morning, Josef and Kornblum met in the kitchen of Apartment 42. Here they were served coffee in scalloped Herend cups by Trudi, the youngest of the three prostitutes. She was an ample girl, plain and intelligent, studying to be a nurse. After relieving Josef of the burden of his innocence the previous night, in a procedure that required less time than it now took her to brew a pot of coffee, Trudi had pulled on her cherry-pink kimono and gone out to the parlor to study a text on phlebotomy, leaving Josef to the warmth of her goose-down counterpane, the lilac smell of her nape and cheek lingering on the cool pillow, the perfumed darkness of her bedroom, the shame of his contentment.

When Kornblum walked into the kitchen that morning, his eyes and Josef’s sought and avoided each other’s, and their conversation was monosyllabic; while Trudi was still in the kitchen, they barely drew a breath. It was not that Kornblum regretted having corrupted his young pupil. He had been frequenting prostitutes for decades and held liberal views on the utility and good sense of sexual commerce. Their berths had been more comfortable and far more fragrant than either would have found in Kornblum’s cramped room, with its single cot and its clanging pipes. Nevertheless, he was embarrassed, and from the guilty arc of Josef’s shoulders and the evasiveness of his gaze, Kornblum inferred that the young man felt the same.

The apartment’s kitchen was redolent of good coffee and eau de lilas. Wan October sunshine came through the curtain on the window and worked a needlepoint of shadow across the clean pine surface of the table. Trudi was an admirable girl, and the ancient, abused hinges of Kornblum’s battered frame seemed to have regained an elastic hum in the embrace of his own partner, Madame Willi—the wielder of the gun.

“Good morning,” Kornblum muttered.

Josef blushed deeply. He opened his mouth to speak, but a spasm of coughing seemed to seize him, and his reply was broken and scattered on the air. They had wasted a night on pleasure at a time when so much seemed to depend on haste and self-sacrifice.

Moral discomfort notwithstanding, it was from Trudi that Josef derived a valuable piece of information.

“She heard some kids talking,” he told Kornblum after the girl, leaning down to plant a brief, coffee-scented kiss on Josef’s cheek, had padded out of the kitchen and down the hall, to regain her disorderly bed. “There is a window in which no one ever sees a face.”

“The children,” Kornblum said, with a curt shake of his head. “Of course.” He looked disgusted with himself for having neglected this obvious source of surprising information. “On what floor is this mysterious window?”

“She didn’t know.”

“On which side of the building?”

“Again, she didn’t know. I thought we could find a child and ask it.”

Kornblum gave his head a shake. He took another puff on his Letka, tapped it, turned it over, studied the tiny airplane symbol that was printed on the paper. Abruptly, he stood up and started to go through the kitchen drawers, working his way around the cabinets until he came up with a pair of scissors. He carried the scissors into the gilded parlor, where he began opening and closing cabinets. With gentle, precise movements, he went through the drawers of an ornate sideboard in the dining room. At last, in a table in the front hall, he found a box of notepaper, heavy sheets of rag tinted a soft robin’s-egg blue. He returned to the kitchen with paper and scissors and sat down again.

“We tell the people we forgot something,” he said, folding a sheet of the stationery in half and cutting it, without hesitation, his hand steady and sure. With a half-dozen strokes, he had snipped the three-pointed outline of a paper boat, the sort that children fold from pieces of newspaper. “We say they have to put one of these in every window. To show they have been counted.”

“A boat,” Josef said. “A boat?”

“Not a boat,” Kornblum said. He put the scissors down, opened the cropped piece of paper at the center pleat, and held up a small blue Star of David.

Josef shivered at the sight of it, chilled by the plausibility of this imaginary directive. “They won’t do it,” he said, watching as Kornblum pressed the little star against the kitchen windowpane. “They won’t comply.”

“I would like to hope that you’re right, young man,” Kornblum said. “But we very much need you to be wrong.”

Within two hours, every household in the building had spangled its windows in blue. By means of this base stratagem, the room that contained the Golem of Prague was rediscovered. It was on the top floor of Nicholasgasse 26, at the back; its lone window overlooked the rear courtyard. A generation of children at play had, like sky-gazing shepherds in ancient fields, perfected a natural history of the windows that looked down like stars upon them; in its perpetual vacancy, this window, like a retrograde planetoid, had attracted attention and fired imaginations. It also turned out to be the only simple means of ingress for the old escape artist and his protégé. There was, or rather there had once been, a doorway, but it had been plastered and papered over, no doubt at the time of the Golem’s installment in the room. Since the roof was easily accessible via the main stair, Kornblum felt that it would attract less notice if they lowered themselves, under the cover of darkness, on ropes and came in through the window than if they tried to cut their way in through the door.

Once again they returned to the building after midnight—the third night of Josef’s shadow-existence in the city. This time they came dressed in somber suits and derby hats, carrying vaguely medical black bags, all supplied by a member of the secret circle who ran a mortuary. In this funereal garb, Josef lowered himself, hand under leather-gloved hand, down the rope to the ledge of the Golem’s window. He dropped much faster than he intended, nearly to the level of the window on the floor below, then managed to arrest his fall with a sudden jerk that seemed to wrench his shoulder from its socket. He looked up and, in the gloom, could just distinguish the outline of Kornblum’s head, the expression as unreadable as the fists clutching the other end of the rope. Josef let out a soft sigh between his clenched teeth and pulled himself back up to the Golem’s window.

It was latched, but Kornblum had provided him with a length of stout wire. Josef dangled, ankles snaked around the end of the rope, clinging to it with one hand while, with the other, he jabbed the wire up into the gap between the upper, outer sash and the lower, inner one. His cheek scraped against brick, his shoulder burned, but Josef’s only thought was a prayer that this time he should not fail. Finally, just as the pain in his shoulder joint was beginning to intrude on the purity of his desperation, Josef succeeded in popping the latch. He fingered the lower sash, eased it up, and swung himself into the room. He stood panting, working his shoulder in circles. A moment later, there was a creaking of rope or old bones, a soft gasp, and then Kornblum’s long narrow legs kicked in through the open window. The magician turned on his torch and scanned the room until he found a lightbulb socket, dangling on a looped cord from the ceiling. He bent to reach into his mortician’s bag, took out a lightbulb, and handed it to Josef, who went up on tiptoe to screw it in.

The casket in which the Golem of Prague had been laid was the simple pine box prescribed by Jewish law, but wide as a door and long enough to hold two adolescent boys head to toe. It rested across the backs of a pair of stout sawhorses in the center of an empty room. After more than thirty years, the floor of the Golem’s room looked new; free of dust, glossy, and smooth. The white paint on the walls was spotless and still carried a sting of fresh emulsion. Hitherto, Josef had been inclined to discount the weirdness in Kornblum’s plan of escape, but now, in the presence of this enormous coffin, in this timeless room, he felt an uneasy prickling creep across his neck and shoulders. Kornblum, too, approached the casket with visible diffidence, extending toward its rough pine lid a hand that hesitated a moment before touching. Cautiously he circled the casket, feeling out the nail heads, counting them, inspecting their condition and the condition of the hinges, and of the screws that held the hinges in place.

“All right,” he said softly, with a nod, clearly trying to hearten himself as much as Josef. “Let us continue with the remainder of the plan.”

The remainder of Kornblum’s plan, at whose midpoint they had now arrived, was this:

First, using the ropes, they would convey the casket out of the window, onto the roof, and thence, posing as undertakers, down the stairs and out of the building. At the funeral home, in a room that had been reserved for them, they would prepare the Golem for shipment by rail to Lithuania. They would begin by gaffing the casket, which involved drawing the nails from one side and replacing them with nails that had been trimmed short, leaving a nub just long enough to fix the gaffed side to the rest of the box. That way, when the time came, Josef would be able, without much difficulty, to kick his way out. Applying the sacred principle of misdirection, they would next equip the coffin with an “inspection panel,” making a cut across its lid about a third of the way from the end that held the head and equipping this upper third with a latch, so that it could, like the top half of a Dutch door, be opened separately from the lower. This would afford a good view of the dead Golem’s face and chest, but not of the portion of the coffin in which Josef would crouch. After that, they would label the casket, following all the complicated regulations and procedures and affixing the elaborate forms necessary for the transshipment of human remains. Forged death certificates and other required papers would have been left for them, properly concealed, in the mortuary’s workroom. After the coffin was prepared and documented, they would load it into a hearse and drive it to the train station. While riding in the back of the hearse, Josef was to climb into the coffin alongside the Golem, pulling shut the gaffed panel after him. At the station, Kornblum would check to see that the coffin appeared sealed and would consign it to the care of the porters, who would load it onto the train. When the coffin arrived in Lithuania, Josef, at his earliest opportunity, would kick aside the gaffed panel, roll free, and discover what fate awaited him on the Baltic shore.

Now that they were confronted with the actual materials of the trick, however—as was so often the case—Kornblum encountered two problems.

“It’s a giant,” Kornblum said, with a shake of his head, speaking in a tense whisper. With his miniature crowbar, he had pried loose the nails along one side of the coffin’s top and lifted the lid on its creaking, galvanized-tin hinges. He stood peering at the pitiable slab of lifeless and innocent clay. “And it’s naked.”

“It is very big.”

“We’ll never get it through the window. And if we do, we’ll never get it dressed.”

“Why do we have to dress it? It has those cloths, the Jewish scarves,” Josef said, pointing to the tallises in which the Golem had been wrapped. They were tattered and stained, and yet gave off no odor of corruption. The only smell Josef could detect arising from the swarthy flesh of the Golem was one too faint to name, acrid and green, that he was only later to identify as the sweet stench, on a summer afternoon in the dog days, of the Moldau. “Aren’t Jews supposed to be buried naked?”

“That is precisely the point,” Kornblum said. He explained that, according to a recent promulgation, it was illegal to transport even a dead Jew out of the country without direct authority of Reichsprotektor von Neurath. “We must practice the tricks of our trade.” He smiled thinly, nodding to the black mortician’s bags. “Rouge his cheeks and lips. Fit that dome of his with a convincing wig. Someone will look inside the coffin, and when he does, we want him to see a dead goyische giant.” He closed his eyes as if envisioning what he wanted the authorities to see, should they order the coffin to be opened. “Preferably in a very nice suit.”

“The most beautiful suits I ever saw,” said Josef, “belonged to a dead giant.”

Kornblum studied him, sensing an implication in the words that he was unable to catch.

“Alois Hora. He was over two meters tall.”

“From the Circus Zeletny?” Kornblum said. “�The Mountain’?”

“He wore suits made in England, on Savile Row. Enormous things.”

“Yes, yes, I remember,” Kornblum said, nodding. “I used to see him quite often at the Café Continental. Beautiful suits,” he agreed.

“I think—” Josef began. He hesitated. He said, “I know where I can find one.”

It was not at all uncommon in this era for a doctor who treated glandular cases to maintain a wardrobe of wonders, stocked with under-linens the size of horse blankets, homburgs no bigger than berry bowls, and all manner of varied prodigies of haberdashery and the shoemaker’s last. These items, which Josef’s father had acquired or been given over the years, were kept in a cabinet in his office at the hospital, with the laudable but self-defeating intention of preventing their becoming objects of morbid curiosity to his children. No visit to their father at his place of work was ever complete without the boys at least making an attempt to persuade Dr. Kavalier to let them see the belt, fat and coiling as an anaconda, of the giant Vaclav Sroubek, or the digitalis-blossom slippers of tiny Miss Petra Frantisek. But after the doctor had been dismissed from his position at the hospital, along with the rest of the Jews on the faculty, the wardrobe of wonders had come home and its contents, in sealed packing boxes, stuffed into a closet in his study. Josef was certain that he would find some of Alois Hora’s suits among them.

And so, after living for three days in Prague as a shadow, it was as a shadow that he finally went home. It was well past curfew, and the streets were deserted but for a few long, flag-fendered sedans with impenetrable black windows and, once, a lorry loaded with gray-coated boys carrying guns. Josef went slowly and carefully, inserting himself into doorways, ducking behind a parked car or bench when he heard the clank of gears, or when the fork of passing headlights jabbed at the housefronts, the awnings, the cobbles in the street. In his coat pocket, he carried the picks Kornblum had thought he would need for the job, but when Josef got to the service door of the building off the Graben he found that, as was not uncommonly the case, it had been left propped open with a tin can, probably by some housekeeper taking unauthorized leave, or by a vagabond husband.

Josef met no one in the back hall or on the stairs. There was no baby whimpering for a bottle, no faint air of Weber from a late-night radio, no elderly smoker intent on the nightly business of coughing up his lungs. Although the ceiling lights and wall sconces were lit, the collective slumber of the building seemed even more profound than that of Nicholasgasse 26. Josef found this stillness disturbing. He felt the same prickle on his nape, the creeping of his flesh, that he had felt on entering the Golem’s empty room.

As he slunk down the hall, he noticed that someone had discarded a pile of clothes on the carpet outside the door of his family’s home. For a preconscious instant, his heart leaped at the thought that, by some dreamlike means, one of the suits he sought had somehow been abandoned there. Then Josef saw that it was not a mere heap of clothing but one actually inhabited by a body—someone drunk, or passed out, or expired in the hallway. A girl, he thought, one of his mother’s patients. It was rare, but not unheard of, for an analysand, tossed by tides of transference and desublimation, to seek the safety of Dr. Kavalier’s doorstep or, by contrast, inflamed with the special hatred of countertransference, to leave herself there in some desperate condition, as a cruel prank, like a paper sack of dog turds set afire.

But the clothes belonged to Josef himself, and the body inside them was Thomas’s. The boy lay on his side, knees drawn to his chest, head pillowed on an arm that reached toward the door, fingers spread with an air of lingering intention, as if he had fallen asleep with a hand on the doorknob, then subsided to the floor. He had on a pair of trousers, charcoal corduroy, shiny at the knee, and a bulky cable sweater, with a large hole under the arm and a permanent Czechoslovakia-shaped ghost of bicycle grease on the yoke, which Josef knew his brother liked to put on whenever he was feeling ill or friendless. From the collar of the sweater protruded the piped lapels of a pajama top. The cuffs of the pajama bottoms poked out from the legs of the borrowed pants. Thomas’s right cheek was flattened against his outstretched arm, and his breath rattled, regular and clamorous, through his permanently rheumy nose. Josef smiled and started to kneel down beside Thomas to wake him, and tease him, and help him back to bed. Then he remembered that he was not permitted—could not permit himself—to make his presence known. He could not ask Thomas to lie to their parents, nor did he really trust him to do so in any sustained manner. He backed away, trying to think what could have happened and how best to proceed. How had Thomas gotten himself locked out? Was this who had left the service door propped open downstairs? What could have prompted him to risk being out so late when, as everyone knew, a girl in Vinorhady, not much older than Thomas, had just a few weeks before sneaked outside to look for her lost dog and been shot, in a gloomy alley, for violating curfew? There had been official expressions of regret from von Neurath over the incident, but no promise that such a thing would not happen again. If Josef could somehow manage to wake his brother undetected—say by throwing a five-haleru piece at his head from around the corner of the hallway—would Thomas ring to be let in? Or would he be too ashamed, and choose to continue to pass the night in the chilly, dark hall, on the floor? And how would he, Josef, possibly be able to get to the giant’s clothes with his brother lying asleep in the doorway or else with the whole household awakened and in an uproar over the boy’s waywardness?

These speculations were cut short when Josef stepped on something that crunched, at once soft and rigid, under his heel. His heart seized, and he looked down, dancing backward in disgust, to see not a burst mouse but the leather wallet of lock picks that had once been his reward from Bernard Kornblum. Thomas’s eyes fluttered, and he snuffled, and Josef waited, wincing, to see if his brother would sink back into sleep. Thomas sat up abruptly. With the back of his arm he wiped the spittle from his lips, blinked, and gave a short sigh.

“Oh, dear,” he said, looking sleepily unsurprised to find his Brooklyn-bound brother crouched beside him, three days after he was supposed to have departed, in the hallway of their building in the heart of Prague. Thomas opened his mouth to speak again, but Josef covered it with the flat of his hand and pressed a finger to his own lips. He shook his head and pointed at the door.

When Thomas cast his eyes in the direction of the door to their flat, he finally seemed to awaken. His mouth narrowed to a pout, as if he had something sour on his tongue. His thick black eyebrows piled up over his nose. He shook his head and again attempted to say something, and again Josef covered his mouth, less gently this time. Josef picked up his old pick-wallet, which he had not seen in months, perhaps years, and which he had supposed, when he gave the matter any thought at all, to be lost. The lock on the Kavaliers’ door was one that, in another era, Josef had successfully picked many times. He got them inside now with little difficulty, and stepped into the front hall, grateful for its familiar smell of pipe smoke and paper-whites, for the distant hum of the electric icebox. Then he stepped into the living room and saw that the sofa and piano had been draped in quilts. The fish tank stood empty of fish and drained of water. The box orange in its putti-crusted terra-cotta pot was gone. Crates stood piled in the center of the room.

“They moved?” he said, in the softest whisper he could manage.

“To Dlouha eleven,” Thomas said, in a normal tone. “This morning.”

“They moved,” Josef said, unable now to raise his voice, though there was no one to hear them, no one to alert or disturb.

“It’s a vile place. The Katzes are vile people.”

“The Katzes?” There were cousins of his mother, for whom she had never cared much, who went by this name. “Viktor and Renata?”

Thomas nodded. “And the Mucus Twins.” He gave a vast roll of his eyes. “And their vile parakeet. They taught it to say �Up your bum, Thomas.’” He sniffed, snickered when his brother did, and then, with another slow agglomeration of his eyebrows, began to discharge a series of coughing sobs, careful and choked, as if they were painful to let out. Josef took him into his arms, stiffly, and thought suddenly how long it had been since he had heard the sound of Thomas freely crying, a sound that had once been as common in the house as the teakettle whistle or the scratch of their father’s match. The weight of Thomas on his knee was unwieldy, his shape awkward and unembraceable; he seemed to have grown from a boy to a youth in just the last three days.

“There’s a beastly aunt,” Thomas said, “and a moronic brother-in-law due tomorrow from Frydlant. I wanted to come back here. Just for tonight. Only I couldn’t work the lock.”

“I understand,” Josef said, understanding only that, until now, until this moment, his heart had never been broken. “You were born in this flat.”

Thomas nodded.

“What a day that was,” Josef said, trying to cheer the boy. “I was never so disappointed in my life.”

Thomas smiled politely. “Almost the whole building moved,” he said, sliding off of Josef’s knee. “Only the Kravniks and the Policeks and the Zlatnys are allowed to stay.” He wiped at his cheek with a forearm.

“Don’t get snot on my sweater,” Josef said, knocking his brother’s arm to one side.

“You left it.”

“I might send for it.”

“Why aren’t you gone?” Thomas said. “What happened to your ship?”

“There have been difficulties. But I should be on my way tonight. You mustn’t tell Mother and Father that you saw me.”

“You aren’t going to see them?”

The question, the plaintive rasp in Thomas’s voice as he asked it, pained Josef. He shook his head. “I just had to dash back here to get something.”

“Dash back from where?”

Josef ignored the question. “Is everything still here?”

“Except for some clothes, and some kitchen things. And my tennis racket. And my butterflies. And your wireless.” This was a twenty-tube set, built into a kind of heavy valise of oiled pine, that Josef had constructed from parts, amateur radio having succeeded illusion and preceded modern art in the cycle of Josef’s passions, as Houdini and then Marconi had given way to Paul Klee and Josef’s enrollment at the Academy of Fine Arts. “Mother carried it on her lap in the tram. She said listening to it was like listening to your voice, and she would rather have your voice to remember you than your photograph, even.”

“And then she said that I never photograph well, anyway.”

“Yes, she did, as a matter of fact. The wagon is coming here tomorrow morning for the rest of our things. I’m going to ride with the driver. I’m going to hold the reins. What is it you need? What did you come back for?”

“Wait here,” Josef said. He had already revealed too much; Kornblum was going to be very displeased.

He went down the hall to their father’s study, checking to make sure that Thomas did not follow, and doing his best to ignore the piled crates, the open doors that ought at this hour to have been long shut, the rolled carpets, the forlorn knocking of his shoe heels along the bare wooden floors. In his father’s office, the desk and bookcases had been wrapped in quilted blankets and tied with leather straps, the pictures and curtains taken down. The boxes that contained the uncanny clothing of endocrine freaks had been dragged from the closet and stacked, conveniently, just by the door. Each bore a pasted-on label, carefully printed in his father’s strong, regular hand, that gave a precise accounting of the contents of the crate:

DRESSES (5)—MARTINKA

HAT (STRAW)—ROTHMAN

CHRISTENING GOWN—SROUBEK

For some reason, the sight of these labels touched Josef. The writing was as legible as if it had been typeset, each letter shod and gloved with serifs, the parentheses neatly crimped, the wavy hyphens like stylized bolts of lightning. The labels had been lettered lovingly; his father had always expressed that emotion best through troubling with details. In this fatherly taking of pains—in this stubbornness, persistence, orderliness, patience, and calm—Josef had always taken comfort. Here Dr. Kavalier seemed to have composed, on his crates of strange mementos, a series of messages in the very alphabet of imperturbability itself. The labels seemed evidence of all the qualities his father and family were going to require to survive the ordeal to which Josef was abandoning them. With his father in charge, the Kavaliers and the Katzes would doubtless manage to form one of those rare households in which decency and order prevailed. With patience and calm, persistence and stoicism, good handwriting and careful labeling, they would meet persecution, indignity, and hardship head-on.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which read

SWORD-CANE—DLUBECK

SHOE TREE—HORA

SUITS (3)—HORA

ASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)—HORA

Josef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.

“What’s that?” Thomas said, when Josef returned to the parlor with one of Hora’s extra-large garment bags slung over his shoulder. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Josef. “Look, Thomas, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

“I know.” Thomas sounded almost irritated. He sat down cross-legged on the floor. “I’m going to spend the night.”

“No, Thomas, I don’t think—”

“You don’t get to say,” Thomas said. “You aren’t here anymore, remember?”

The words echoed Kornblum’s sound advice, but somehow they chilled Josef. He could not shake the feeling—reportedly common among ghosts—that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said after a moment. “You oughtn’t to be out in the streets at night, anyway. It’s too dangerous.”

A hand on each of Thomas’s shoulders, Josef steered his brother back to the room they had shared for the last eleven years. With some blankets and a slipless pillow that he found in a trunk, he made up a bed on the floor. Then he dug around in some other crates until he found an old children’s alarm clock, a bear’s face eared with a pair of brass bells, which he wound and set for five-thirty.

“You have to be back there by six,” he said, “or they’ll miss you.”

Thomas nodded and climbed between the blankets of the makeshift bed. “I wish I could go with you,” he said.

“I know,” Josef said. He brushed the hair from Thomas’s forehead. “So do I. But you’ll be joining me soon enough.”

“Do you promise?”

“I will make sure of it,” Josef said. “I won’t rest until I’m meeting your ship in the harbor of New York City.”

“On that island they have,” Thomas said, his eyelids fluttering. “With the Statue of Liberation.”

“I promise,” Josef said.

“Swear.”

“I swear.”

“Swear by the River Styx.”

“I swear it,” Josef said, “by the River Styx.”

Then he leaned down and, to the surprise of both of them, kissed his brother on the lips. It was the first such kiss between them since the younger had been an infant and the elder a doting boy in knee pants.

“Goodbye, Josef,” said Thomas.

When Josef returned to Nicholasgasse, he found that Kornblum had, with typical resourcefulness, solved the problem of the Golem’s extrication. Into the thin panel of gypsum that had been used to fill the door frame at the time when the Golem was installed, Kornblum, employing some unspeakable implement of the mortuary trade, had cut a rectangle, at floor level, just large enough to accommodate the casket end-on. The obverse of the gypsum panel, out in the hall, was covered in the faded Jugendstil paper, a pattern of tall interlocking poppies, that decorated all the hallways of the building. Kornblum had been careful to cut through this thin outer hide on only three of his rectangle’s four sides, leaving at its top a hinge of intact wallpaper. Thus he had formed a serviceable trapdoor.

“What if someone notices?” Josef said after he had finished inspecting Kornblum’s work.

This gave rise to another of Kornblum’s impromptu and slightly cynical maxims. “People notice only what you tell them to notice,” he said. “And then only if you remind them.”

They dressed the Golem in the suit that had belonged to the giant Alois Hora. This was hard work, as the Golem was relatively inflexible. It was not as rigid as one might have imagined, given its nature and composition. Its cold clay flesh seemed to give slightly under the pressure of fingertips, and a narrow range of motion, perhaps the faintest memory of play, inhered in the elbow of the right arm, the arm it would have used, as the legend records, to touch the mezuzah on its maker’s doorway every evening when it returned from its labors, bringing its Scripture-kissed fingers to its lips. The Golem’s knees and ankles, however, were more or less petrified. Furthermore, its hands and feet were poorly proportioned, as is often the case with the work of amateur artists, and much too large for its body. The enormous feet got snagged in the trouser legs, so that getting the pants on was particularly difficult. Finally, Josef had to reach into the coffin and grasp the Golem around the waist, elevating its lower body several inches, before Kornblum could tug the trousers over the feet, up the legs, and around the Golem’s rather sizable buttocks. They had decided not to bother with underwear, but for the sake of anatomical verisimilitude—in a display of the thoroughness that had characterized his career on the stage—Kornblum tore one of the old tallises in two (kissing it first), gave a series of twists to one of the halves, and tucked the resulting artifact up between the Golem’s legs, into the crotch, where there was only a smooth void of clay.

“Maybe it was supposed to be a female,” Josef suggested as he watched Kornblum zip the Golem’s fly.

“Not even the Maharal could make a woman out of clay,” Kornblum said. “For that you need a rib.” He stood back, considering the Golem. He gave a tug on one lapel of the jacket and smoothed the billowing pleats of the trousers front. “This is a very nice suit.”

It was one of the last Alois Hora had taken delivery of before his death, when his body had been wasted by Marfan’s syndrome, and thus a perfect fit for the Golem, which was not so large as the Mountain in his prime. Of excellent English worsted, gray and tan, shot with a burgundy thread, it easily could have been subdivided into a suit for Josef and another for Kornblum, with enough left over, as the magician remarked, for a waistcoat apiece. The shirt was of fine white twill, with mother-of-pearl buttons, and the necktie of burgundy silk, with an embossed pattern of cabbage roses, slightly flamboyant, as Hora had liked his ties. There were no shoes—Josef had forgotten to search for a pair, and in any case none would have been large enough—but if the lower regions of the casket’s interior were ever inspected, the trick would fail anyway, shoes or no.

Once it was dressed, its cheeks rouged, its smooth head bewigged, its forehead and eyelids fitted with the tiny eyebrow and eyelash hairpieces employed by gentile morticians in the case of facial burning or certain depilatory diseases, the Golem looked, with its dull grayish complexion the color of boiled mutton, indisputably dead and passably human. There was only the faintest trace of the human handprint on its forehead, from which, centuries before, the name of God had been rubbed away. Now they only had to slide it through the trapdoor and follow it out of the room.

This proved easy enough; as Josef had remarked when he lifted it to get the trousers on, the Golem weighed far less than its bulk and nature would have suggested. To Josef, it felt as if they were struggling, down the hallway, down the stairs, and out the front door of Nicholasgasse 26, with a substantial pine box and a large suit of clothes, and little besides.

“�Mach’ bida lo nafsho,’” Kornblum said, quoting Midrash, when Josef remarked on the lightness of their load. “�His soul is a burden unto him.’ This is nothing, this.” He nodded toward the lid of the coffin. “Just an empty jar. If you were not in there, I would have been obliged to weight it down with sandbags.”

The trip out of the building and back to the mortuary in the borrowed Skoda hearse—Kornblum had learned to drive in 1908, he said, taught by Franz Hofzinser’s great pupil Hans Kreutzler—came off without incident or an encounter with the authorities. The only person who saw them carrying the coffin out of the building, an insomniac out-of-work engineer named Pilzen, was told that old Mr. Lazarus in 42 had finally died after a long illness. When Mrs. Pilzen came by the flat the next afternoon with a plate of egg cookies in hand, she found a wizened old gentleman and three charming if somewhat improper women in black kimonos, sitting on low stools, with torn ribbons pinned to their clothes and the mirrors covered, a set of conditions that proved bemusing to the clientele of Madame Willi’s establishment over the next seven days, some of whom were unnerved and some excited by the blasphemy of making love in a house of the dead.

Seventeen hours after he climbed into the coffin to lie with the empty vessel that once had been animate with the condensed hopes of Jewish Prague, Josef’s train approached the town of Oshmyany, on the border between Poland and Lithuania. The two national railway systems employed different gauges of track, and there was to be a sixty-minute delay as passengers and freight were shifted from the gleaming black Soviet-built express of Polish subjugation to the huffing, Czarist-era local of a tenuous Baltic liberty. The big Iosef Stalin–class locomotive eased all but silently into its berth and uttered a surprisingly sensitive, even rueful, sigh. Slowly, for the most part, as if unwilling to draw attention to themselves by an untoward display of eagerness or nerves, the passengers, a good many young men of an age with Josef Kavalier, dressed in the belted coats, knickers, and broad hats of Chasidim, stepped down onto the platform and moved in an orderly way toward the emigration and customs officers who waited, along with a representative of the local Gestapo bureau, in a room overheated by a roaring pot-bellied stove. The railway porters, a sad crew of spavined old men and weaklings, few of whom looked capable of carrying a hatbox, let alone the coffin of a giant, rolled back the doors of the car in which the Golem and its stowaway companion rode, and squinted doubtfully at the burden they were now expected to unload and carry twenty-five meters to a waiting Lithuanian boxcar.

Inside the coffin, Josef lay insensible. He had fainted with an excruciating, at times almost pleasurable, slowness over a period of some eight or ten hours, as the rocking of the train, the lack of oxygen, the deficit of sleep and surfeit of nervous upset he had accumulated over the past week, the diminished circulation of his blood, and a strange, soporific emanation from the Golem itself that seemed connected to its high-summer, rank-river smell, all conspired to overcome the severe pain in his hips and back, the cramping of his leg and arm muscles, the near-impossibility of urination, the tingling, at times almost jolting, numbness of his legs and feet, the growling of his stomach, and the dread, wonder, and uncertainty of the voyage on which he had embarked. When they took the coffin from the train, he did not waken, though his dream took on an urgent but inconclusive tinge of peril. He did not come to his senses until a beautiful jet of cold fir-green air singed his nostrils, lighting his slumber with an intensity matched only by the pale shaft of sunlight that penetrated his prison when the “inspection panel” was abruptly thrown open.

Once more it was Kornblum’s instruction that saved Josef from losing everything in the first instant. In the first dazzling panic that followed the opening of the panel, when Josef wanted to cry out in pain, rapture, and fear, the word “Oshmyany” seemed to lie cold and rational between his fingers, like a pick that was going, in the end, to free him. Kornblum, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the railroads of this part of Europe was in a few short years to receive a dreadful appendix, had coached him thoroughly, as they worked to gaff the coffin, on the stages and particulars of his journey. He felt the jostle of men’s arms, the sway of their hips as they carried the coffin, and this, together with the odor of northern forest and a susurrant snippet of Polish, resolved at the last possible instant into a consciousness of where he was and what must be happening to him. The porters themselves had opened the coffin as they carried it from the Polish train to the Lithuanian. He could hear, and vaguely understand, that they were marveling both at the deadness and giantness of their charge. Then Josef’s teeth came together with a sharp porcelain chiming as the coffin was dropped. Josef kept silent and prayed that the impact didn’t pop the gaffed nails and send him tumbling out. He hoped that he had been thrown thus into the new boxcar, but feared that it was only impact with the station floor that had filled his mouth with blood from his bitten tongue. The light shrank and winked out, and he exhaled, safe in the airless, eternal dark; then the light blazed again.

“What is this? Who is this?” said a German voice.

“A giant, Herr Lieutenant. A dead giant.”

“A dead Lithuanian giant.” Josef heard a rattle of paper. The German officer was leafing through the sheaf of forged documents that Kornblum had affixed to the outside of the coffin. “Named Kervelis Hailonidas. Died in Prague the night before last. Ugly bastard.”

“Giants are always ugly, Lieutenant,” said one of the porters in German. There was general agreement from the other porters, with some supporting cases offered into evidence.

“Great God,” said the German officer, “but it’s a crime to bury a suit like that in a dirty old hole in the ground. Here, you. Get a crowbar. Open that coffin.”

Kornblum had provided Josef with an empty Mosel bottle, into which he was, at rare intervals, to insert the tip of his penis and, sparingly, relieve his bladder. But there was no time to maneuver it into place as the porters began to kick and scrape at the seams of the giant coffin. The inseam of Josef’s trousers burned and then went instantly cold.

“There is no crowbar, Herr Lieutenant,” one of the porters said. “We will chop it open with an ax.”

Josef struggled against a wild panic that scratched like an animal at his rib cage.

“Ah, no,” the German officer said with a laugh. “Forget it. I’m tall, all right, but I’m not that tall.” After a moment, the darkness of the coffin was restored. “Carry on, men.”

There was a pause, and then, with a jerk, Josef and the Golem were lifted again.

“And he’s ugly, too,” said one of the men, in a voice just audible to Josef, “but he’s not that ugly.”

Some twenty-seven hours later, Josef staggered, dazed, blinking, limping, bent, asphyxiated, and smelling of stale urine, into the sun-tattered grayness of an autumn morning in Lithuania. He watched from behind a soot-blackened pillar of the Vilna station as the two dour-looking confederates of the secret circle claimed the curious, giant coffin from Prague. Then he hobbled around to the house of Kornblum’s brother-in-law, on Pylimo Street, where he was received kindly with food, a hot bath, and a narrow cot in the kitchen. It was while staying here, trying to arrange for passage to New York out of Priekule, that he first heard of a Dutch consul in Kovno who was madly issuing visas to Curaçao, in league with a Japanese official who would grant rights of transit via the Empire of Japan to any Jew bound for the Dutch colony. Two days later he was on the Trans-Siberian Express; a week later he reached Vladivostok, and thence sailed for Kobe. From Kobe he shipped to San Francisco, where he wired his aunt in Brooklyn for money for the bus to New York. It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelings of love, fear, and hopefulness that his brother’s escape inspired. It was the drawing of Harry Houdini, taking a calm cup of tea in the middle of the sky, that Thomas had made in his notebook during his abortive career as a librettist. Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him.



PART II (#ulink_6cdb5184-fc64-5f54-810f-59b6af4ce834)




1 (#ulink_1ddc3bf6-134b-5efc-a9c7-60c764feffe0)


WHEN THE ALARM CLOCK went off at six-thirty that Friday, Sammy awoke to find that Sky City, a chromium cocktail tray stocked with moderne bottles, shakers, and swizzle sticks, was under massive attack. In the skies around the floating hometown of D’Artagnan Jones, the strapping blond hero of Sammy’s Pimpernel of the Planets comic strip, flapped five bat-winged demons, horns carefully whorled like whelks, muscles feathered in with a fine brush. A giant, stubbly spider with the eyes of a woman dangled on a hairy thread from the gleaming underside of Sky City. Other demons with goat legs and baboon faces, brandishing sabers, clambered down ladders and swung in on ropes from the deck of a fantastic caravel with a painstakingly rendered rigging of aerials and vanes. In command of these sinister forces, hunched over the drawing table, wearing only black kneesocks clocked with red lozenges, and swaddled in a baggy pair of off-white Czechoslovakian underpants, sat Josef Kavalier, scratching away with one of Sammy’s best pens.

Sammy slid down to the foot of his bed to peer over his cousin’s shoulder. “What the hell are you doing to my page?” he said.

The captain of the demonic invasion force, absorbed in his deployment and tipped dangerously back on the tall stool, was caught by surprise. He jumped, and the stool tipped, but he caught hold of the table’s edge and neatly righted himself, then reached out just in time to catch the bottle of ink before it, too, could tip over. He was quick.

“I am sorry,” Josef said. “I was very careful to don’t harm your drawings. See.” He lifted an overlaid sheet from the ambitious, Prince Valiant–style full-page panel Sammy had been working on, and the five noisome bat-demons disappeared. “I used separate papers for everything.” He peeled away the baboon-faced demon raiders and lifted the paper spider by the end of her thread. With a few quick motions of his long-fingered hands, the hellish siege of Sky City was lifted.

“Holy cow!” said Sammy. He clapped his cousin on his freckled shoulder. “Christ, look at this! Let me see those things.” He took the kidney-shaped sheet that Josef Kavalier had filled with slavering coal-eyed horned demons and cut to overlay Sammy’s own drawing. The proportions of the muscular demons were perfect, their poses animated and plausible, the inkwork mannered but strong-lined. The style was far more sophisticated than Sammy’s, which, while confident and plain and occasionally bold, was never anything more than cartooning. “You really can draw.”

“I was two years studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. In Prague.”

“The Academy of Fine Arts.” Sammy’s boss, Sheldon Anapol, was impressed by men with fancy educations. The ravishing, impossible scheme that had been tormenting Sammy’s imagination for months seemed all at once to have a shot at getting off the ground. “Okay, you can draw monsters. What about cars? Buildings?” he asked, faking an employerly monotone, trying to conceal his excitement.

“Of course.”

“Your anatomy seems not bad at all.”

“It’s a fascination for me.”

“Can you draw the sound of a fart?”

“Sorry?”

“At Empire they put out a whole bunch of items that make farting sounds. A fart, you know what that means?” Sammy clapped the cupped palm of one hand to the opposite armpit and pumped his arm, squirting out a battery of curt, wet blasts. His cousin, eyes wide, got the idea. “Naturally, we can’t say it outright in the ads. We have to say something like �The Whoopee Hat Liner emits a sound more easily imagined than described.’ So you really have to get it across in the drawing.”

“I see,” said Josef. He seemed to take up the challenge. “I would draw a breathing of wind.” He scratched five quick horizontal lines on a scrap of paper. “Then I would put such small things, so.” He sprinkled his staff with stars and curlicues and broken musical notation.

“Nice,” said Sammy. “Josef, I tell you what. I’m going to try to do better than just get you a job drawing the Gravmonica Friction-Powered Mouth Organ, all right? I’m going to get us into the big money.”

“The big money,” Josef said, looking suddenly hungry and gaunt. “That would be good of you, Sammy. I need some of the very big money. Yes, all right.”

Sammy was startled by the avidity in his cousin’s face. Then he realized what the money was wanted for, which made him feel a little afraid. It was hard enough being a disappointment to himself and Ethel without having to worry about four starving Jews in Czechoslovakia. But he managed to discount the tremor of doubt and reached out his hand. “All right,” he said. “Shake, Josef.”

Josef put forth his hand, then pulled back. He put on what he must have thought was an American accent, a weird kind of British cowboy twang, and screwed his features into a would-be James Cagney wise-guy squint. “Call me Joe,” he said.

“Joe Kavalier.”

“Sam Klayman.”

They started to shake again, then Sammy withdrew his own hand.

“Actually,” he said, feeling himself blush, “my professional name is Clay.”

“Clay?”

“Yeah. I, uh, I just think it sounds more professional.”

Joe nodded. “Sam Clay,” he said.

“Joe Kavalier.”

They shook hands.

“Boys!” called Mrs. Klayman from the kitchen. “Breakfast.”

“Just don’t say anything about any of this to my mother,” Sammy said. “And don’t tell her I’m changing my name.”

They went out to the laminate table in the kitchen and sat down in two of the padded chrome chairs. Bubbie, who had never met any of her Czech progeny, was sitting beside Joe, ignoring him completely. She had encountered, for better or worse, so many human beings since 1846 that she seemed to have lost the inclination, perhaps even the ability, to acknowledge faces or events that dated from any time after the Great War, when she had performed the incomparable feat of leaving Lemberg, the city of her birth, at the age of seventy, to come to America with the youngest of her eleven children. Sammy had never felt himself to be anything more, in Bubbie’s eyes, than a kind of vaguely beloved shadow from which the familiar features of dozens of earlier children and grandchildren, some of them dead sixty years, peered out. She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams, her arms streaked and pocked like relief maps of vast planets, her massive calves stuffed like forcemeat into lung-colored support hose. She was quixotically vain about her appearance and spent an hour each morning making up her face.

“Eat,” Ethel snapped, depositing in front of Joe a stack of black rectangles and a pool of yellow mucilage that she felt obliged to identify for him as toast and eggs. He popped a forkful into his mouth and chewed it with a circumspect expression behind which Sammy thought he detected a hint of genuine disgust.

Sammy performed the rapid series of operations—which combined elements of the folding of wet laundry, the shoveling of damp ashes, and the swallowing of a secret map on the point of capture by enemy troops—that passed, in his mother’s kitchen, for eating. Then he stood up, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and pulled on his good wool blazer. “Come on, Joe, we gotta go.” He leaned down to embed a kiss in Bubbie’s suede cheek.

Joe dropped his spoon and, in the course of retrieving it, bumped his head on the table, hard. Bubbie cried out, and a minor commotion of silverware and chair-scraping ensued. Then Joe stood up, too, and delicately wiped his lips with his paper napkin. He smoothed it out when he finished and laid it on his empty plate.

“Delicious,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Here,” Ethel said, taking a neat tweed suit, on a hanger, from the back of a kitchen chair. “I pressed your suit and took the spots off your shirt.”

“Thank you, Aunt.”

Ethel put her arm around Joe’s hips and gave him a proud squeeze. “This one knows how to draw a lizard, that I can tell you.”

Sammy flushed. This was a reference to the peculiar difficulties Sammy had run into, the month before, with the Live Chameleon item (“Wear it on your lapel to amaze and impress!”) that Empire had recently added to their line. An apparently congenital lack of skill with reptiles was compounded by the fact that he had no idea what kind of reptile twenty-five cents sent to Empire Novelty would buy, since there were, in fact, no Live Chameleons in stock, and would not be until Shelly Anapol saw how many orders, if any, came in. Sammy had spent two nights poring over encyclopedias and library books, drawing hundreds of lizards, thin and fat, Old World and New, horned and hooded, and had ended up with something that looked a little like a flattened, bald squirrel. It was his sole failure since taking on the draftsmanship chores at Empire, but his mother, naturally, seemed to regard it as a signal one.

“He won’t have to draw any lizards, or cheap cameras, or any of that other dreck they sell,” said Sammy, and then added, forgetting the warning he had given Joe, “not if Anapol goes in for my plan.”

“What plan?” His mother narrowed her eyes.

“Comic books,” yelled Sammy, right to her face.

“Comic books!” She rolled her eyes.

“�Comic books’?” said Joe. “What are these?”

“Trash,” said Ethel.

“What do you know about it?” Sammy said, taking hold of Joe’s arm. It was almost seven o’clock. Anapol docked your pay if you came in after eight. “There’s good money in comic books. I know a kid, Jerry Glovsky—” He pulled Joe toward the hallway that led to the foyer and the front door, knowing exactly what his mother was going to say next.

“Jerry Glovsky,” she said. “A fine example. He’s retarded. His parents are first cousins.”

“Don’t listen to her, Joe. I know what I’m talking about.”

“He doesn’t want to waste his time on any idiotic comic books.”

“It’s not your business,” Sammy hissed, “what he does. Is it?”

This, as Sammy had known it would, shut her right up. The question of something being one’s business or not held a central position in the ethics of Ethel Klayman, whose major tenet was the supreme importance of minding one’s own. Gossips, busybodies, and kibitzers were the fiends of her personal demonology. She was universally at odds with the neighbors, and suspicious, to the point of paranoia, of all visiting doctors, salesmen, municipal employees, synagogue committeemen, and tradespeople.

She turned now and looked at her nephew. “You want to draw comic books?” she asked him.

Joe stood there, head down, a shoulder against the door frame. While Sammy and Ethel argued, he had been affecting to study in polite embarrassment the low-pile, mustard-brown carpeting, but now he looked up, and it was Sammy’s turn to feel embarrassed. His cousin looked him up and down, with an expression that was both appraising and admonitory.

“Yes, Aunt,” he said. “I do. Only I have one question. What is a comic book?”

Sammy reached into his portfolio, pulled out a creased, well-thumbed copy of the latest issue of Action Comics, and handed it to his cousin.

In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant. It aspired to the dimensions of a slick magazine and to the thickness of a pulp, offering sixty-four pages of gaudy bulk (including the cover) for its ideal price of one thin dime. While the quality of its interior illustrations was generally execrable at best, its covers pretended to some of the skill and design of the slick, and to the brio of the pulp magazine. The comic book cover, in those early days, was a poster advertising a dream-movie, with a running time of two seconds, that flickered to life in the mind and unreeled in splendor just before one opened to the stapled packet of coarse paper inside and the lights came up. The covers were often hand-painted, rather than merely inked and colored, by men with solid reputations in the business, journeyman illustrators who could pull off accurate lab girls in chains and languid, detailed jungle jaguars and muscularly correct male bodies whose feet seemed really to carry their weight. Held in the hand, hefted, those early numbers of Wonder and Detective, with their chromatic crew of pirates, Hindu poisoners, and snap-brim avengers, their abundant typography at once stylish and crude, seem even today to promise adventure of a light but thoroughly nourishing variety. All too often, however, the scene depicted on the label bore no relation to the thin soup of material contained within. Inside the covers—whence today there wafts an inevitable flea-market smell of rot and nostalgia—the comic book of 1939 was, artistically and morphologically, in a far more primitive state. As with all mongrel art forms and pidgin languages, there was, in the beginning, a necessary, highly fertile period of genetic and grammatical confusion. Men who had been reading newspaper comic strips and pulp magazines for most of their lives, many of them young and inexperienced with the pencil, the ink brush, and the cruel time constraints of piecework, struggled to see beyond the strict spatial requirements of the newspaper strip, on the one hand, and the sheer overheated wordiness of the pulp on the other.

From the beginning, there was a tendency among educators, psychologists, and the general public to view the comic book as merely a debased offspring of the newspaper comic strip, then in the full flower of its since-faded glory, read by presidents and Pullman porters, a proud American cousin, in indigenous vitality and grace, of baseball and jazz. Some of the opprobrium and sense of embarrassment that would forever after attach itself to the comic book form was due to the way it at first inevitably suffered, even at its best, by comparison with the mannered splendor of Burne Hogarth, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and the other kings of funny-page draftsmanship, with the finely tuned humor and adultish irony of Li’l Abner, Krazy Kat, Abbie ’n’ Slats, with the steady, metrical storytelling of Gould and Gray and Gasoline Alley, or with the dizzying, never surpassed interplay of verbal and visual narrative in the work of Milton Caniff.

At first, and until very recently in 1939, comic books had in fact been nothing more than reprint digests of the more popular strips, uprooted from their newspaper homes and forced, not without violence and scissoring, between a pair of cheap glossy covers. The strips’ measured, three-to-four-panel pacing, with Friday cliffhangers and Monday recapitulations, suffered in the more spacious confines of the “funny book,” and what felt stately, thrilling, or hilarious when doled out in spoonfuls on a daily basis seemed a jerky, repetitive, static, and unnecessarily protracted business in the pages of, say, More Fun (1937), the first comic book that Sammy Klayman ever bought. Partly for this reason, but also to avoid paying the established syndicates for the reprint rights, the early publishers of comic books began to experiment with original content, hiring artists or packagers of artists to create their own characters and strips. These artists, if experienced, were not generally successful or talented; if they had talent, they lacked experience. Those in the latter category were mostly immigrants or immigrants’ children, or country boys right off the bus. They had dreams but, given their last names and lack of connections, no real chance of succeeding in the lofty world of Saturday Evening Post covers and ads for Mazda lightbulbs. Many of them, it must be said, could not even draw a realistic picture of the admittedly complicated bodily appendage with which they hoped to make their livings.

The drop-off in quality that followed the original-content revolution was immediate and precipitous. Lines grew tentative, poses awkward, compositions static, backgrounds nonexistent. Feet, notoriously difficult to draw in realistic depth, all but disappeared from the panels, and noses were reduced to the simplest variations on the twenty-second letter of the alphabet. Horses resembled barrel-chested, spindly dogs, and automobiles were carefully effaced with speed lines to disguise the fact that they lacked doors, were never drawn to scale, and all looked the same. Pretty women, as a requisite arrow in every boy cartoonist’s quiver, fared somewhat better, but the men tended to stand around in wrinkleless suits that looked stamped from stovepipe tin and in hats that appeared to weigh more than the automobiles, ill at ease, big-chinned, punching one another in their check-mark noses. Circus strong men, giant Hindu manservants, and breechclouted jungle lords invariably sported fanciful musculature, eyeceps and octoceps and beltoids, and abdomens like fifteen racked pool balls. Knees and elbows bent at painful, double-jointed angles. The color was murky at best, and at worst there was hardly any color at all. Sometimes everything was just two tones of red, or two of blue. But most of all, comic books suffered not from insufficient artwork—for there was considerable vitality here, too, and a collective Depression-born urge toward self-improvement, and even the occasional talented hard-luck competent pencilman—but from a bad case of the carbon copies. Everything was a version, sometimes hardly altered at all, of a newspaper strip or a pulp-radio hero. Radio’s Green Hornet spawned various colors of wasp, beetle, and bee; the Shadow was himself shadowed by a legion of suit-wearing, felt-hatted, lama-trained vigilantes; every villainess was a thinly disguised Dragon Lady. Consequently, the comic book, almost immediately upon its invention, or soon thereafter, began to languish, lacking purpose or distinction. There was nothing here one could not find done better, or cheaper, somewhere else (and on the radio one could have it for free).

Then, in June 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the power of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation. The artist, Joe Shuster, while technically just barely apt, seemed to understand from the first that the big rectangular page of the comic book offered possibilities for pacing and composition that were mostly unavailable in the newspapers; he joined three panels vertically into one to display the full parabolic zest of one of Superman’s patented skyscraper-hops (the Man of Steel could not, at this point in his career, properly fly), and he chose his angles and arranged his figures with a certain cinematic flair. The writer, Jerome Siegel, had forged, through the smelting intensity of his fanatical love and compendious knowledge of the pulps and their antecedents, a magical alloy of several previous characters and archetypes from Samson to Doc Savage, one with its own unique properties of tensility, hardness, and luster. Though he had been conceived originally as a newspaper hero, Superman was born in the pages of a comic book, where he thrived, and after this miraculous parturition, the form finally began to emerge from its transitional funk, and to articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreams: to express the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves. Comic books were Kid Stuff, pure and true, and they arrived at precisely the moment when the kids of America began, after ten years of terrible hardship, to find their pockets burdened with the occasional superfluous dime.

“That’s a comic book,” said Sammy.

“Big money you say,” Joe said, looking more doubtful than he had all morning.

“Fifty dollars a week. Maybe more.”

“Fifty dollars!” said Ethel, her usual tone of disbelief modified, it seemed to Sammy, by a wrinkle of uncertainty, as if the very patent outrageousness of the claim might be a guarantee of its veracity.

“Forty at least.”

Ethel folded her arms and stood there, chewing on her lower lip. Then she nodded. “I have to find you a better tie,” she said to Joe. She turned and went back into the apartment.

“Hey, Sam Clay,” Joe whispered, producing the neat little bundle, wrapped in a paper napkin, in which he had secreted his uneaten breakfast. He held it up with a little smile. “Where I can throw this?”




2 (#ulink_b52bb7b9-6a95-5984-a9b2-dc03464eb184)


THE OFFICES of the Empire Novelty Company, Inc., were on the fourth floor of the Kramler Building, in a hard-luck stretch of Twenty-fifth Street near Madison Square. A fourteen-story office block faced with stone the color of a stained shirt collar, its windows bearded with soot, ornamented with a smattering of moderne zigzags, the Kramler stood out as a lone gesture of commercial hopefulness in a block filled with low brick “taxpayers” (minimal structures generating just enough in rent to pay property taxes on the land they occupied), boarded-up woolens showrooms, and the moldering headquarters of benevolent societies that ministered to dwindling and scattered populations of immigrants from countries no longer on the map. It had been dedicated in late 1929, then repossessed by the lien-holding bank when the developer leaped from the window of his office on the fourteenth floor. In the ten years since, it had managed to attract a small but varied number of tenants, among them a publisher of sexy pulp magazines; a distributor of hairpieces, false beards, male corsets, and elevator shoes; and the East Coast booking agents for a third-rate midwestern circus; all of them attracted, as Shelly Anapol had been, by the cut-rate rents and a collegial atmosphere of rascality.

Despite the air of failure and disrepute that permeated the neighborhood, Sheldon P. Anapol—whose brother-in-law Jack Ashkenazy owned Racy Publications, Inc., on the Kramler’s seventh floor—was a talented businessman, likable and cruel. He had gone to work for Hyman Lazar, the founder of Empire Novelty, in 1914, at the age of twenty, as a penniless traveling salesman, and fifteen years later had saved enough to buy the company out from under Lazar when the latter ran afoul of his creditors. The combination of a hard-won cynicism, low overhead, an unstintingly shoddy product line, and the American boy’s unassuageable hunger for midget radios, X-ray spectacles, and joy buzzers had enabled Anapol not only to survive the Depression but to keep his two daughters in private school and to support or, as he liked to put it, invoking unconscious imagery of battleships and Cunard liners, to “float” his immense and expensive wife.

As with all great salesmen, Anapol’s past comprehended tragedy and disappointment. He was an orphan of pogrom and typhus, raised by unfeeling relations. His physical bulk, inherited from generations of slab-jawed, lumbering Anapols, had for much of his early life rendered him the butt of jokes and the object of women’s scorn. As a young man, he had played the violin well enough to hope for a musical career, until a hasty marriage and the subsequent upkeep on his two dreadnought daughters, Belle and Candace, forced him into a life of commercial traveling. All of this left him hardened, battered, rumpled, and addicted to the making of money, but not, somehow, embittered. He had always been welcome, during his days on the road, in the lonely shops of the dealers in jokes and novelties, men who were often in their third or fourth line of work and almost universally broken, after years of guessing and disaster, of the ability to know what was amusing and what was not. The unambiguously comical sight of Anapol, with his vast, unbuttoned suits and mismatched socks, his sad violinist’s eyes, modeling a blond horsehair wig or demonstrating a dentifrice that turned the teeth of victims black, had been the keystone of many a big sale in Wilkes-Barre or Pittsfield.

In the last decade, however, he had traveled no farther than Riverdale; and over the past year, following an intensification in his perennial “difficulties” with his wife, Anapol had rarely even left the Kramler Building. He had a bed and nightstand brought in from Macy’s, and he slept in his office, behind an old crewelwork coverlet draped over a length of clothesline. Sammy had received his first raise the previous fall when he found an empty pushboy’s clothes rack idling on Seventh Avenue one night and rolled it across town to serve as Anapol’s clothes closet. Anapol, who had read widely in the literature of sales and was in fact eternally at work on a treatise-cum-autobiography he referred to sometimes as The Science of Opportunity and other times, more ruefully, as Sorrow in My Sample Case, not only preached initiative but rewarded it, an ethos on which Sammy now pinned all his hopes.

“So talk,” said Anapol. He was wearing, as usual at this early hour, only socks, garters, and a pair of brightly patterned boxer shorts wide enough to qualify, Sammy thought, as a mural. He was bent over a tiny sink at the back of his office, shaving his face. He had been up, as every morning, since before dawn, settling on a move in one of the chess games he played by mail with men in Cincinnati, Fresno, and Zagreb; writing to other solitary lovers of Szymanowski whom he had organized into an international appreciation society; penning ill-concealed threats to particularly recalcitrant debtors in his creaky, vivid, half-grammatical prose in which there were hints of Jehovah and George Raft; and composing his daily letter to Maura Zell, his mistress, who was a chorine in the road company of Pearls of Broadway. He always waited until eight o’clock to begin his toilet, and seemed to set great store in the effect his half-naked imperial person had on his employees as they filed in for work. “What’s this idea of yours?”

“Let me ask you this first, Mr. Anapol,” Sammy said. He was standing, clutching his portfolio, on the threadbare oval of Chinese carpet that covered most of the wooden floor of Anapol’s office, a large room set off from the desks of Mavis Magid, Anapol’s secretary, and the five shipping, inventory, and account clerks by partitions of veneered presswood and glass. A hat rack, side chairs, and rolltop desk were all secondhand, scavenged in 1933 from the offices of a neighboring life-insurance company that went belly-up, and trucked on dollies down the hall to their present location. “What are they charging you over at National for the back cover of Action Comics this month?”

“No, let me ask you a question,” Anapol said. He stepped back from the mirror and tried, as he did every morning, to induce a few long strands of hair to lie flat across the bald top of his head. He had said nothing so far about Sammy’s portfolio, which Sammy had never before had the courage to show him. “Who is that kid sitting out there?”

Anapol did not turn around, and he hadn’t taken his eyes from the tiny shaving mirror since Sammy had come into the room, but he could see Joe in the mirror. Joe and Sammy were sitting back to back, separated by the glass and wood partition that divided Anapol’s office from the rest of his empire. Sammy craned around to get a look at his cousin. There was a pine drawing board on Joe’s lap, a sketchpad, and some pencils. On the chair beside him lay a cheap pasteboard portfolio they had bought in a five-and-dime on Broadway. The idea was for Joe to fill it quickly with exciting sketches of muscular heroes while Sammy pitched his idea to Anapol and played for time. “You’ll have to work fast,” he had told Joe, and Joe had assured him that in ten minutes he would have assembled an entire pantheon of crime-fighters in tights. But then on the way in, as Sammy was talking up Mavis Magid, Joe had wasted precious minutes rummaging through the shipment of Amazing Midget Radios whose arrival yesterday morning from Japan had sent Anapol into a rage; the whole shipment was defective and, even by his relaxed standards, unsaleable.

“That’s my cousin Joe,” said Sammy, sneaking another glance over his shoulder. Joe was bent over his work, staring at his fingers and craning his head slowly from left to right, as if some invisible force beam from his eyes were dragging the tip of the pencil across the page. He was sketching in the bulge of a mighty shoulder that was connected to a thick left arm. Other than this arm and a number of faint, cryptic guidelines, there was nothing on the page. “My mother’s nephew.”

“He’s a foreigner? Where’s he from?”

“Prague. How did you know?”

“The haircut.”

Anapol stepped over to the pushboy’s rack and took a pair of trousers from their hanger.

“He just got here last night,” Sammy said.

“And he’s looking for a job.”

“Well, naturally—”

“I hope, Sammy, that you told him I have no jobs for anybody.”

“Actually … I may have misled him a little on that score, boss.”

Again Anapol nodded, as another of his unerring snap judgments was confirmed. Sammy’s left leg started to twitch. It was the worst-lamed of the two and the first to weaken when he was nervous or about to be caught in a lie.

“And all this has something to do,” Anapol said, “with how much they charge me over at National for the back cover of Action Comics.”

“Or Detective.”

Anapol frowned. He lifted his arms and then disappeared into a huge linen undershirt that did not exactly look freshly laundered. Sammy checked Joe’s work. A massive frame had begun to emerge, a squarish head, a thick, almost tubular chest. While confidently rendered, the figure had something bulky about it. The legs were mighty and booted, but the boots were stout workman’s boots, laced prosaically up the front. Sammy’s leg began to shake a little harder now. Anapol’s head reemerged from his undershirt. He tucked it over his furred walrus belly and down into his trousers. He was still frowning. He lifted his suspenders up over his shoulders and let them snap into place. Then, his eyes fixed on the back of Joe’s head, he went over to his desk and flicked a switch.

“I need Murray,” he said into the speaker. “It’s a slow week,” he added to Sammy. “That’s the only reason I’m indulging you this way.”

“I understand,” said Sammy.

“Sit down.”

Sammy sat and rested the portfolio against his legs, relieved to set it down. It was stuffed almost to bursting with his own sketches, concepts, prototypes, and finished pages.

Mavis Magid got Murray Edelman on the phone. The advertising manager for Empire Novelty told him, as Sammy had known he would because he voluntarily worked extra hours in Edelman’s department every week, absorbing what he could of the old man’s skewed and exclamatory slant on the advertising game, that National was charging almost seven times the going rate for the space on the back cover of its bestselling titles—the August issue of Action, the last for which there were figures, had sold close to a million and a half copies. There was, according to Murray, one reason and one reason alone for the skyrocketing sales of certain titles in the still relatively inchoate comic book market.

“Superman,” said Anapol when he hung up the phone, with the tone of someone ordering an unknown dish in an outlandish restaurant. He started to pace behind his desk, hands clasped behind his back.

“Think of how much product we could sell if we had our own Superman,” Sammy heard himself saying. “We can call them Joy Buzzer Comics. Whoopie Cushion Comics. Think of how much you’ll save on advertising. Think—”

“Enough,” said Anapol. He stopped pacing and flicked the switch on his telephone console again. The cast of his face had altered, taking on a taut, faintly squeamish expression Sammy could recognize, after a year in his employ, as the repressed foreconsciousness of money. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “I need Jack,” he said.

Mavis placed a call upstairs to the offices of Racy Publications, Inc., home of Racy Police Stories, Racy Western, and Racy Romance. Jack Ashkenazy was summoned to the phone. He confirmed what Murray Edelman had already said. Every pulp and magazine publisher in New York had taken notice of the explosive sales of National’s Action Comics and its caped and booted star.

“Yeah?” Anapol said. “Yeah? You are? Any luck?”

He took the receiver from his ear and stuffed it under his left armpit.

“They’ve been looking around for a Superman of their own upstairs,” he told Sammy.

Sammy jumped out of his chair.

“We can get him one, boss,” he said. “We can have him his very own Superman by Monday morning. But just between you and me,” he added, trying to sound like his great hero, John Garfield, tough and suave at the same time, the street boy ready to wear fancy suits and go where the big money was, “I’d advise you to keep a little piece of this for yourself.”

Anapol laughed. “Oh, you would, would you?” he said. He shook his head. “I’ll bear that in mind.” He kept the receiver tucked under his arm and took a cigarette from the box on his desk. He lit it and inhaled, mulling things over, his big jaw tensed and bulging. Then he rescued the receiver and blew smoke into the mouthpiece.

“Maybe you’d better come down here, Jack,” he said. He hung up again and nodded in Joe Kavalier’s direction. “Is that your artist?”

“We both are,” said Sammy. “Artists, I mean.” He decided to match Anapol’s dubiety with a burst of self-confidence he was rapidly inducing himself to feel. He went over to the partition and rapped, with a flourish, on the glass. Joe turned, startled, from his work. Sammy, not wanting to endanger his own display of confidence, didn’t let himself look too closely at what Joe had done. At least the whole page seemed to have been filled in.

“May I—?” he said to Anapol, gesturing toward the door.

“Might as well get him in here.”

Sammy signaled for Joe to come in, a ringmaster welcoming a famous aerialist into the spotlight. Joe stood up, gathering the portfolio and his stray pencils, then sidled into Anapol’s office, sketchpad clutched to his chest, in his baggy tweed suit, with his hungry face and borrowed tie, his expression at once guarded and touchingly eager to please. He was looking at the owner of Empire Novelty as if all the big money Sammy had promised had been packed into the swollen carapace of Sheldon Anapol and would, at the slightest prick or tap, come pouring out in an uncontrollable green torrent.

“Hello, young man,” said Anapol. “I’m told you can draw.”

“Yes, sir!” Joe said, in a voice that sounded oddly strangled, startling them all.

“Give it here.” Sammy reached for the pad and found, to his surprise, that he couldn’t pry it loose. For an instant, he was afraid that his cousin had done something so abominable that he was afraid to show it. Then he caught a glimpse of the upper left corner of Joe’s drawing, where a fat moon peered from behind a crooked tower, a crooked bat flapping across its face, and he saw that, on the contrary, his cousin simply couldn’t let go.

“Joe,” he said softly.

“I need a little more time with it,” Joe said, handing the pad to Sammy.

Anapol came around from behind his desk, lodged the burning cigarette in a corner of his mouth, and took the pad from Sammy. “Look at that!” he said.

In the drawing it was midnight, in a cobblestone alley crosshatched with menacing shadows. There were evocative suggestions of tiled roofs, leaded windows, icy puddles on the ground. Out of the shadows and into the light of the bat-scarred moon strode a tall, brawny man. His frame was as sturdy and thick as his hobnailed boots. For costume he wore a tunic with deep creases, a heavy belt, and a big, shapeless stocking hat like something out of Rembrandt. The man’s features, though regular and handsome, looked frozen, and his intrepid gaze was empty. There were four Hebrew characters etched into his forehead.

“Is that the Golem?” said Anapol. “My new Superman is the Golem?”

“I didn’t—the conceit is new for me,” Joe said, his English stiffening up on him. “I just drawed the first thing I could think of that resembled … To me, this Superman is … maybe … only an American Golem.” He looked for support to Sammy. “Is that right?”

“Huh?” said Sammy, struggling to conceal his dismay. “Yeah, sure, but, Joe … the Golem is … well … Jewish.”

Anapol rubbed his heavy chin, looking at the drawing. He pointed to the portfolio. “Let me see what else you got in there.”

“He had to leave all his work back in Prague,” Sammy put in quickly, as Joe untied the ribbon of the portfolio. “He just started throwing together some new stuff this morning.”

“Well, he isn’t fast,” Anapol said when he saw that Joe’s portfolio was empty. “He has talent, anyone can see that, but …” The look of doubtfulness returned to his face.

“Joe,” cried Sammy. “Tell him where you studied!”

“The Academy of Fine Art, in Prague,” said Joe.

Anapol stopped rubbing his chin. “The Academy of Fine Art?”

“What is that? Who are these guys? What’s going on in here?” Jack Ashkenazy burst into the office without warning or a knock. He had all his hair, and was a much snappier dresser than his brother-in-law, favoring checked vests and two-tone shoes. Because he had prospered, in a Kramler Building kind of way, more easily than Anapol, he had not been forced to develop the older man’s rumpled salesman’s charm, but he shared Anapol’s avidity for unburdening America’s youth of the oppressive national mantle of tedium, ten cents at a time. He plucked the cigar from his mouth and yanked the sketchpad out of Anapol’s hands.

“Beauteeful,” he said. “The head is too big.”

“The head is too big?” said Anapol. “That’s all you can say?”

“The body’s too heavy. Looks like he’s made out of stone.”

“He is made out of stone, you idiot, he’s a golem.”

“Clay, actually,” said Joe. He coughed. “I can do something more lighter.”

“He can do anything you want,” said Sammy.

“Anything,” Joe agreed. His eyes widened as an inspiration seemed to strike, and he turned to Sammy. “Maybe I ought to show them my fart.”

“He’s only ever read one comic book,” Sammy said, ignoring this suggestion. “But I’ve read them all, boss. I’ve read every issue of Action. I’ve studied this stuff. I know how it’s done. Look.” He picked up his own portfolio and untied the strings. It was a cheap pasteboard number from Woolworth’s, like Joe’s, but battered, scraped, and carefully dented. You couldn’t sit around in some art director’s waiting room with a brand-new-looking portfolio. Everyone would know you were a tyro. Sammy had spent an entire afternoon last fall hitting his with a hammer, walking across it in a pair of his mother’s heels, spilling coffee on it. Unfortunately, since purchasing it he had managed to land only two cartoons, one in a completely humor-free magazine called Laff and the other in Belle-Views, house organ of the psychiatric ward where his mother worked.

“I can do it all,” he boasted, pulling out a fistful of sample pages and passing them around. What he meant, more precisely, was that he could steal it all.

“It isn’t half bad,” Anapol said.

“It ain’t beauteeful, either,” said Ashkenazy.

Sammy glared at Ashkenazy, not because Ashkenazy had insulted his work—no one was ever more aware of his own artistic limitations than Sam Clay—but because Sammy felt that he was standing on the border of something wonderful, a land where wild cataracts of money and the racing river of his own imagination would, at last, lift his makeshift little raft and carry it out to the boundless freedom of the open sea. Jack Ashkenazy, whose watery eyes could easily, Sammy imagined, be stabbed out with the letter opener on Anapol’s desk, was threatening to get in his way. Anapol caught the look of visionary murder in Sammy’s eyes and took a chance on it.

“What say we let these boys go home over the weekend and try to come up with a Superman for us.” He fixed Sammy with a hard look. “Our own kind of a Superman, naturally.”

“Of course.”

“How long is a Superman story?”

“Probably twelve pages.”

“I want a character and a twelve-page story by Monday.”

“We’re going to need a lot more than that,” said Ashkenazy. “They got typically five or six characters in there. You know, a spy. A private eye. A shadowy avenger of the helpless. An evil Chinaman. These two can’t come up with all that themselves and draw it. I got artists, Shelly. I got George Deasey.”

“No!” said Sammy. George Deasey was the editor in chief of Racy Publications. He was a tyrannical, ill-tempered old newspaperman who filled the Kramler Building’s elevators with the exacerbated smell of rye. “It’s mine. Ours, me and Joe. Boss, I can handle it.”

“Absolutely, boss,” said Joe.

Anapol grinned. “Get a load of this guy,” he said. “You just get me a Superman,” he went on, putting a placating hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “Then we’ll see about what you can handle or not. All right, Jack?”

Ashkenazy twisted his usually genial features into a grimace. “I have to tell you, Shelly. I got serious doubts. I’m going to have to say—”

“The radios,” Joe said. “The little radios outside.”

“Aw, forget the damn radios, Joe, will you?” Sammy said.

“What, the midgets?” Anapol said.

Joe nodded. “They are just wrong in the wires. All in the same way. One little wire is not, hmm. So.” He kissed the tip of one index finger with the other. “Stuck together to the resistance.”

“You mean to the resistor?”

“Okay.”

“You know from radios?” Anapol narrowed his eyes doubtfully. “You’re saying you could fix them?”

“Oh, assuredly, boss. It is simple to me.”

“How much is it going to cost?”

“Not anything. Some few pence for the—I do not know the word.” He angled his fingers into the form of a pistol. “Weichlöte. You must to melt it.”

“Solder? A soldering gun?”

“Okay. But perhaps I can to borrow that.”

“Just a few pence, huh?”

“Maybe one penny for the radio, each radio.”

“That’s cutting it pretty close to my cost.”

“But okay, I don’t charge to do the work.”

Sammy looked at his cousin, amazed and only a little put out at his having shanghaied the negotiation. He saw Anapol raise a meaningful eyebrow at his brother-in-law, promising or threatening something.

At last Jack Ashkenazy nodded. “There’s just one thing,” he said. He put a hand on Joe’s arm, restraining him before he could sidle out of the office, with his blank-eyed Golem and his empty portfolio. “This is a comic book we’re talking about, okay? Half bad is maybe better than beauteeful.”




3 (#ulink_b389b30a-3e22-5586-adf9-82da84ce7133)


THE FIRST OFFICIAL MEETING of their partnership was convened outside the Kramler Building, in a nimbus compounded of the boys’ exhalations and of subterranean steam purling up from a grate in the pavement.

“This is good,” Joe said.

“I know.”

“He said yes,” Joe reminded his cousin, who stood patting idly with one hand at the front of his overcoat and a panicked expression on his face, as though worried that he had left something important behind in Anapol’s office.

“Yes, he did. He said yes.”

“Sammy.” Joe reached out and grabbed Sammy’s wandering hand, arresting it in its search of his pockets and collar and tie. “This is good.”

“Yes, this is good, god damn it. I just hope to God we can do it.”

Joe let go of Sammy’s hand, shocked by this expression of sudden doubt. He had been completely taken in by Sammy’s bold application of the Science of Opportunity. The whole morning, the rattling ride through the flickering darkness under the East River, the updraft of Klaxons and rising office blocks that had carried them out of the subway station, the ten thousand men and women who immediately surrounded them, the ringing telephones and gum-snapping chitchat of the clerks and secretaries in Sheldon Anapol’s office, the sly and harried bulk of Anapol himself, the talk of sales figures and competition and cashing in big, all this had conformed so closely to Joe’s movie-derived notions of life in America that if an airplane were now to land on Twenty-fifth Street and disgorge a dozen bathing-suit-clad Fairies of Democracy come to award him the presidency of General Motors, a contract with Warner Bros., and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a swimming pool in the living room, he would have greeted this, too, with the same dreamlike unsurprise. It had not occurred to him until now to consider that his cousin’s display of bold entrepreneurial confidence might have been entirely bluff, that it was 8°C and he had neither hat nor gloves, that his stomach was as empty as his billfold, and that he and Sammy were nothing more than a couple of callow young men in thrall to a rash and dubious promise.

“But I have belief in you,” Joe said. “I trust you.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“I mean it.”

“I wish I knew why.”

“Because,” said Joe. “I don’t have any choice.”

“Oh ho.”

“I need money,” Joe said, and then tried adding, “god damn it.”

“Money.” The word seemed to have a restorative effect on Sammy, snapping him out of his daze. “Right. Okay. First of all, we need horses.”

“Horses?”

“Arms. Guys.”

“Artists.”

“How about we just call them �guys’ for right now?”

“Do you know where we can find some?”

Sammy thought for a moment. “I believe I do,” he said. “Come on.”

They set off in a direction that Joe decided was probably west. As they walked Sammy seemed to get lost quickly in his own reflections. Joe tried to imagine the train of his cousin’s thoughts, but the particulars of the task at hand were not clear to him, and after a while he gave up and just kept pace. Sammy’s gait was deliberate and crooked, and Joe found it a challenge to keep from getting ahead. There was a humming sound everywhere that he attributed first to the circulation of his own blood in his ears before he realized that it was the sound produced by Twenty-fifth Street itself, by a hundred sewing machines in a sweatshop overhead, exhaust grilles at the back of a warehouse, the trains rolling deep beneath the black surface of the street. Joe gave up trying to think like, trust, or believe in his cousin and just walked, head abuzz, toward the Hudson River, stunned by the novelty of exile.

“Who is he?” Sammy said at last, as they were crossing a broad street which a sign identified, improbably somehow, as Sixth Avenue. Sixth Avenue! The Hudson River!

“Who is he,” Joe said.

“Who is he, and what does he do?”

“He flies.”

Sammy shook his head. “Superman flies.”

“So ours does not?”

“I just think I’d …”

“To be original.”

“If we can. Try to do it without flying, at least. No flying, no strength of a hundred men, no bulletproof skin.”

“Okay,” Joe said. The humming seemed to recede a little. “And some others, they do what?”

“Well, Batman—”

“He flies, like a bat.”

“No, he doesn’t fly.”

“But he is blind.”

“No, he only dresses like a bat. He has no batlike qualities at all. He uses his fists.”

“That sounds dull.”

“Actually, it’s spooky. You’d like it.”

“Maybe another animal.”

“Uh, well, yeah. Okay. A hawk. Hawkman.”

“Hawk, yes, okay. But that one must fly.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Scratch the bird family. The, uh, the Fox. The Shark.”

“A swimming one.”

“Maybe a swimming one. Actually, no, I know a guy works in the Chesler shop, he said they’re already doing a guy who swims. For Timely.”

“A lion?”

“Lion. The Lion. Lionman.”

“He could be strong. He roars very loud.”

“He has a super roar.”

“It strikes fear.”

“It breaks dishes.”

“The bad guys go deaf.”

They laughed. Joe stopped laughing.

“I think we have to be serious,” he said.

“You’re right,” said Sammy. “The Lion, I don’t know. Lions are lazy. How about the Tiger. Tigerman. No, no. Tigers are killers. Shit. Let’s see.”

They began to go through the rolls of the animal kingdom, concentrating naturally on the predators: Catman, Wolfman, the Owl, the Panther, the Black Bear. They considered the primates: the Monkey, Gorillaman, the Gibbon, the Ape, the Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents.

“Be serious,” Joe chided again.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Look, forget animals. Everybody’s going to be thinking of animals. In two months, I’m telling you, by the time our guy hits the stands, there’s going to be guys running around dressed like every damn animal in the zoo. Birds. Bugs. Underwater guys. And I’ll bet you anything there’s going to be five guys who are really strong, and invulnerable, and can fly.”

“If he goes as fast as the light,” Joe suggested.

“Yeah, I guess it’s good to be fast.”

“Or if he can make a thing burn up. If he can—listen! If he can, you know. Shoot the fire, with his eyes!”

“His eyeballs would melt.”

“Then with his hands. Or, yes, he turns into a fire!”

“Timely’s doing that already, too. They got the fire guy and the water guy.”

“He turns into ice. He makes the ice everywhere.”

“Crushed or cubes?”

“Not good?”

Sammy shook his head. “Ice,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of stories in ice.”

“He turns into electricity?” Joe tried. “He turns into acid?”

“He turns into gravy. He turns into an enormous hat. Look, stop. Stop. Just stop.”

They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, and that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment of global vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime.

“This is not the question,” he said. “If he’s like a cat or a spider or a fucking wolverine, if he’s huge, if he’s tiny, if he can shoot flames or ice or death rays or Vat 69, if he turns into fire or water or stone or India rubber. He could be a Martian, he could be a ghost, he could be a god or a demon or a wizard or monster. Okay? It doesn’t matter, because right now, see, at this very moment, we have a bandwagon rolling, I’m telling you. Every little skinny guy like me in New York who believes there’s life on Alpha Centauri and got the shit kicked out of him in school and can smell a dollar is out there right this minute trying to jump onto it, walking around with a pencil in his shirt pocket, saying, �He’s like a falcon, no, he’s like a tornado, no, he’s like a goddamned wiener dog.’ Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And no matter what we come up with, and how we dress him, some other character with the same shtick, with the same style of boots and the same little doodad on his chest, is already out there, or is coming out tomorrow, or is going to be knocked off from our guy inside a week and a half.”

Joe listened patiently, awaiting the point of this peroration, but Sammy seemed to have lost the thread. Joe followed his cousin’s gaze along the sidewalk but saw only a pair of what looked to be British sailors lighting their cigarettes off a single shielded match.

“So …” Sammy said. “So …”

“So that is not the question,” Joe prompted.

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Continue.”

They kept walking.

“How? is not the question. What? is not the question,” Sammy said.

“The question is why.”

“The question is why.”

“Why,” Joe repeated.

“Why is he doing it?”

“Doing what?”

“Dressing up like a monkey or an ice cube or a can of fucking corn.”

“To fight the crime, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes, to fight crime. To fight evil. But that’s all any of these guys are doing. That’s as far as they ever go. They just … you know, it’s the right thing to do, so they do it. How interesting is that?”

“I see.”

“Only Batman, you know … see, yeah, that’s good. That’s what makes Batman good, and not dull at all, even though he’s just a guy who dresses up like a bat and beats people up.”

“What is the reason for Batman? The why?”

“His parents were killed, see? In cold blood. Right in front of his eyes, when he was a kid. By a robber.”

“It’s revenge.”

“That’s interesting,” Sammy said. “See?”

“And he was driven mad.”

“Well …”

“And that’s why he puts on the bat’s clothes.”

“Actually, they don’t go so far as to say that,” Sammy said. “But I guess it’s there between the lines.”

“So, we need to figure out what is the why.”

“�What is the why,’” Sammy agreed.

“Flattop.”

Joe looked up and saw a young man standing in front of them. He was short-waisted and plump, and his face, except for a pair of big black spectacles, was swaddled and all but invisible in an elaborate confection of scarf and hat and earflaps.

“Julius,” Sammy said. “This is Joe. Joe, this is a friend from the neighborhood, Julie Glovsky.”

Joe held out his hand. Julie studied it a moment, then extended his own small hand. He had on a black woolen greatcoat, a fur-lined leather cap with mammoth earflaps, and too-short green corduroy trousers.

“This guy’s brother is the one I told you about,” Sammy told Joe. “Making good money in comics. What are you doing here?”

Somewhere deep within his wrappings, Julie Glovsky shrugged. “I need to see my brother.”

“Isn’t that remarkable, we need to see him, too.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?” Julie Glovsky shuddered. “Only tell me fast before my nuts fall off.”

“Would that be from cold or, you know, atrophy?”

“Funny.”

“I am funny.”

“Unfortunately not in the sense of �humorous.’”

“Funny,” Sammy said.

“I am funny. What’s your idea?”

“Why don’t you come to work for me?”

“For you? Doing what? Selling shoestrings? We still got a box of them at my house. My mom uses them to sew up chickens.”

“Not shoelaces. My boss, you know, Sheldon Anapol?”

“How would I know him?”

“Nevertheless, he is my boss. He’s going into business with his brother-in-law, Jack Ashkenazy, who you also do not know, but who publishes Racy Science, Racy Combat, et cetera. They’re going to do comic books, see, and they’re looking for talent.”

“What?” Julie poked his tortoise face out from the shadows of its woolen shell. “Do you think they might hire me?”

“They will if I tell them to,” said Sammy. “Seeing as how I’m the art director in chief.”

Joe looked at Sammy and raised an eyebrow. Sammy shrugged.

“Joe and I, here, we’re putting together the first title right now. It’s going to be all adventure heroes. All in costumes,” he said, extemporizing now. “You know, like Superman. Batman. The Blue Beetle. That type of thing.”

“Tights, like.”

“That’s it. Tights. Masks. Big muscles. It’s going to be called Masked Man Comics,” he continued. “Joe and I’ve got the lead feature all taken care of, but we need backup stuff. Think you could come up with something?”

“Shit, Flattop, yes. You bet.”

“What about your brother?”

“Sure, he’s always looking for more work. They got him doing Romeo Rabbit for thirty dollars a week.”

“Okay, then, he’s hired, too. You’re both hired, on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“We need a place to work,” said Sammy.

“Come on then,” said Julie. “I guess we can work at the Rathole.” He leaned toward Sammy as they started off, lowering his voice. The tall skinny kid with the big nose had fallen a few steps behind them to light a cigarette. “Who the hell is that guy?”

“This?” Sammy said. He took hold of the kid’s elbow and tugged him forward as though bringing him out onstage to take a deserved bow. He reached up to grab a handful of the kid’s hair and gave it a tug, just kind of rocking his head from side to side while holding on to his hair, grinning at him. Had Joe been a young woman, Julie Glovsky might almost have been inclined to think that Sammy was sweet on her. “This is my partner.”




4 (#ulink_6d04bc46-9c55-5646-b577-6e5fe68ba864)


SAMMY WAS THIRTEEN when his father, the Mighty Molecule, came home. The Wertz vaudeville circuit had folded that spring, a victim of Hollywood, the Depression, mismanagement, bad weather, shoddy talent, philistinism, and a number of other scourges and furies whose names Sammy’s father would invoke, with incantatory rage, in the course of the long walks they took together that summer. At one time or another he assigned blame for his sudden joblessness, with no great coherence or logic, to bankers, unions, bosses, Clark Gable, Catholics, Protestants, theater owners, sister acts, poodle acts, monkey acts, Irish tenors, English Canadians, French Canadians, and Mr. Hugo Wertz himself.

“Hell with ’em,” he would invariably finish, with a sweeping gesture that, in the dusk of a Brooklyn July, was limned by the luminous arc of his cigar. “The Molecule one day says �fuck you’ to the all of them.”

The free and careless use of obscenity, like the cigars, the lyrical rage, the fondness for explosive gestures, the bad grammar, and the habit of referring to himself in the third person were wonderful to Sammy; until that summer of 1935, he had possessed few memories or distinct impressions of his father. And any of the above qualities (among several others his father possessed) would, Sammy thought, have given his mother reason enough to banish the Molecule from their home for a dozen years. It was only with the greatest reluctance and the direct intervention of Rabbi Baitz that she had agreed to let the man back in the house. And yet Sammy understood, from the moment of his father’s reappearance, that only dire necessity could ever have induced the Genius of Physical Culture to return to his wife and child. For the last dozen years he had wandered, “free as a goddamn bird in the bush,” among the mysterious northern towns of the Wertz circuit, from Augusta, Maine, to Vancouver, British Columbia. An almost pathological antsiness, combined with the air of wistful longing that filled the Molecule’s simian face, petite and intelligent, when he spoke of his time on the road, made it clear to his son that as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he would be on his way again.

Professor Alphonse von Clay, the Mighty Molecule (born Alter Klayman in Drakop, a village in the countryside east of Minsk), had abandoned his wife and son soon after Sammy’s birth, though every week thereafter he sent a money order in the amount of twenty-five dollars. Sammy came to know him only from the embittered narratives of Ethel Klayman and from the odd, mendacious clipping or newspaper photo the Molecule would send along, torn from the variety page of the Helena Tribune, or the Kenosha Gazette, or the Calgary Bulletin, and stuffed, with a sprinkling of cigar ash, into an envelope embossed with the imprint of a drinking glass and the name of some demi-fleabag hotel. Sammy would let these accumulate in a blue velvet shoe bag that he placed under his pillow before he went to sleep each night. He dreamed often and intensely of the tiny, thick-muscled man with the gondolier mustachios who could lift a bank safe over his head and beat a draft horse in a tug-of-war. The plaudits and honors described by the clippings, and the names of the monarchs of Europe and the Near East who had supposedly bestowed them, changed over the years, but the essential false facts of the Mighty Molecule’s biography remained the same: ten lonely years studying ancient Greek texts in the dusty libraries of the Old World; hours of painful exercises performed daily since the age of five, a dietary regimen consisting only of fresh legumes, seafoods, and fruits, all eaten raw; a lifetime devoted to the careful cultivation of pure, healthy, lamblike thoughts and to total abstention from insalubrious and immoral behaviors.

Over the years, Sammy managed to wring from his mother scant, priceless drops of factual information about his father. He knew that the Molecule, who derived his stage name from the circumstance of his standing, in calf-high gold lamé buskins, just under five feet two inches tall, had been imprisoned by the Czar in 1911, in the same cell as a politically minded circus strong man from Odessa known as Freight Train Belz. Sammy knew that it was Belz, an anarcho-syndicalist, and not the ancient sages of Greece, who had schooled his father’s body and taught him to abstain from alcohol, meat, and gambling, if not pussy and cigars. And he knew that it was in Kurtzburg’s Saloon on the Lower East Side in 1919 that his mother had fallen in love with Alter Klayman, newly arrived in this country and working as an iceman and freelance mover of pianos.

Miss Kavalier was almost thirty when she married. She was four inches shorter than her diminutive husband, sinewy, grim-jawed, her eyes the pale gray of rainwater pooled in a dish left on the window ledge. She wore her black hair pulled into an unrelenting bun. It was impossible for Sammy to imagine his mother as she must have been that summer of 1919, an aging girl upended and borne aloft on a sudden erotic gust, transfixed by the vein-rippled arms of the jaunty homunculus who carried winking hundred-pound blocks of ice into the gloom of her cousin Lev Kurtzburg’s saloon on Ludlow Street. Not that Ethel was unfeeling—on the contrary, she could be, in her way, a passionate woman subject to transports of maudlin nostalgia, easily outraged, sunk by bad news, hard luck, or doctor’s bills into deep, black crevasses of despair.

“Take me with you,” Sammy said to his father one evening after dinner, as they were strolling down Pitkin Avenue, on their way out to New Lots or Canarsie or wherever the Molecule’s vagabond urges inclined him that night. Like a horse, Sammy had noticed, the Molecule almost never sat down. He cased any room he entered, pacing first up and down, then back and forth, checking behind the curtains, probing the corners with his gaze or the toe of a shoe, testing out the cushions in the chair or sofa with a measured bounce, then springing back onto his feet. If compelled to stand in one place for any reason, he would rock back and forth like someone who needed to urinate, worrying the dimes in his pocket. He never slept more than four hours a night, and even then, according to Sammy’s mother, with inquietude, thrashing and gasping and crying out in his sleep. And he seemed incapable of staying in any one place for longer than an hour or two at a time. Though it enraged and humiliated him, the process of looking for work, crisscrossing lower Manhattan and Times Square, haunting the offices of booking agents and circuit managers, suited him well enough. On the days when he stayed in Brooklyn and hung around the apartment, he drove everyone else to distraction with his pacing and rocking and hourly trips to the store for cigars, pens, a Racing Form, half a roast chicken—anything. In the course of their post-prandial wanderings, father and son ranged far and sat little. They explored the eastern boroughs as far as Kew Gardens and East New York. They took the ferry from the Bush Terminal out to Staten Island, where they hiked out of St. George to Todt Hill, returning well after midnight. When, rarely, they hopped a trolley or caught a train, they would stand, even if the car was empty; on the Staten Island Ferry, the Molecule prowled the decks like a character out of Conrad, uneasily watching the horizon. From time to time in the course of a walk, they might pause in a cigar shop or at a drugstore, where the Molecule would order a celery tonic for himself and a glass of milk for the boy and, disdaining the chrome stool with its Naugahyde seat, would down his Cel-Ray standing up. And once, on Flatbush Avenue, they had gone into a movie theater where The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was playing, but they stayed only for the newsreel before heading back out to the street. The only directions the Molecule disliked to venture were to Coney Island, in whose most evil sideshows he had long ago suffered unspecified torments, and to Manhattan. He had his fill of it during the day, he said, and what was more, the presence on that island of the Palace Theatre, the pinnacle and holy shrine of Vaudeville, was viewed as a reproach by the touchy and grudge-cherishing Molecule, who never had, and never would, tread its storied boards.

“You can’t leave me with her. It isn’t healthy for a boy my age to be with a woman like that.”

The Molecule stopped and turned to face his son. He was dressed, as always, in one of the three black suits that he owned, pressed and shiny with wear at the elbows. Though, like the others, it had been tailored to fit him, it nonetheless strained to encompass his physique. His back and shoulders were as broad as the grille of a truck, his arms as thick as the thighs of an ordinary man, and his thighs, when pressed together, rivaled his chest in girth. His waist looked oddly fragile, like the throat of an egg timer. He wore his hair cropped close and an anachronistic handlebar mustache. In his publicity photographs, where he often posed shirtless or in a skintight leotard, he appeared smooth as a polished ingot, but in street clothes he had an unwieldy, comical air and, with the dark hair poking out at his cuffs and collar, he looked like nothing so much as a pants-wearing ape, in a cartoon satirizing some all too human vanity.

“Listen to me, Sam.” The Molecule seemed taken aback by his son’s request, almost as though it dovetailed with his own thinking or, the thought crossed Sammy’s mind, he had been caught on the verge of skipping town. “Nothing makes me happier than I take you with me,” he continued, with the maddening vagueness his ill grammar permitted. He smoothed Sammy’s hair back with a heavy palm. “But then again, Jesus, what a crazy fucking idea.”

Sammy started to argue, but his father raised a hand. There was more to be said, and in the balance of his speech Sammy sensed or imagined a faint glimmer of hope. He knew that he had chosen a particularly auspicious night to make his plea. That afternoon, his parents had quarreled over dinner—literally. Ethel scorned the Molecule’s dietary regimen, claiming not only that the eating of raw vegetables had none of the positive effects her husband attributed to it but also that, every chance the man got, he was sneaking off around the corner to dine in secret on steak and veal chops and french-fried potatoes. That afternoon, Sammy’s father had returned to the apartment on Sackman Street (this was in the days before the move to Flatbush) from his afternoon of job hunting with a bag full of Italian squash. He dumped them out with a wink and a grin onto the kitchen table, like a haul of stolen goods. Sammy had never seen anything like these vegetables. They were cool and smooth and rubbed against one another with a rubbery squeak. You could see right where they had been cut from the vine. Their sliced-off stems, woody and hexagonal, implied a leafy green tangle that seemed to fill the kitchen along with their faint scent of dirt. The Molecule snapped one of the squashes in two and held its bright pale flesh up to Sammy’s nose. Then he popped one in his mouth and crunched it, smiling and winking at Sammy as he chewed.

“Good for your legs,” he had said, walking out of the kitchen to shower away the failures of the day.

Sammy’s mother boiled the squash until it was a mass of gray strings.

When the Molecule saw what she had done, there were sharp and bitter words. Then the Molecule had grabbed brusquely for his son, like a man reaching for his hat, and dragged Sammy out of the house and into the heat of the evening. They had been walking since six. The sun had long since gone down, and the sky to the west was a hazy moiré of purple and orange and pale gray-blue. They were walking along Avenue Z, dangerously close to the forbidden precincts of the Molecule’s early sideshow disasters.

“I don’t think you got the picture what’s it like out there for me,” he said as they walked along. “You think it’s like a circus in the pictures. All the clowns and the dwarf and the fat lady sitting around a nice big fire eating goulash and singing songs with an accordion.”

“I don’t think that,” Sammy said, though there was stunning accuracy in this assessment.

“If I did to take you with me—and I am just saying now if—you will have to work very hard,” the Molecule said. “They will only accept you if you can work.”

“I can work,” Sammy said, holding out an arm toward his father. “Look at that.”

“Yeh,” the Molecule said. He felt very carefully up and down the stout arms of his son, very much in the way Sammy had fingered the zucchini squash that afternoon. “You have arms that are not bad. But your legs are not so good.”

“Well, jeez, I mean, I had polio, Pop, what do you want?”

“I know you had polio.” The Molecule stopped again. He frowned, and in his face Sammy saw anger and regret and something else that looked almost like wishfulness. He stepped on his cigar end, and stretched, and shook himself a little, as if trying to shrug out of the constricting nets that his wife and son had thrown across his back. “What a fucking day I have. Holy shit.”

“What?” Sammy said. “Hey, where are you going?”

“I need to think,” his father said. “I need to think about what you are asking me.”

“Okay,” Sammy said. His father had started walking again, taking a right on Nostrand Avenue, striding along on his thick little legs with Sammy struggling to keep up, until he came to a peculiar building, Arabic in style, or maybe it was supposed to look Moroccan. It stood in the middle of the block, between a locksmith’s stall and a weedy yard stacked with blank headstones. Two skinny towers, topped with pointy dollops of peeling plaster, reached into the Brooklyn sky at either corner of the roof. It was windowless, and its broad expanse was clad, with weary elaboration, in a mosaic of small square tiles, fly-abdomen blue and a soapy gray that once must have been white. Many of the tiles were missing, chipped, or picked or tumbled loose. The doorway was a wide, blue-tiled arch. In spite of its forlorn appearance and hokum Coney Island air of the Mysterious East, there was something captivating about it. It reminded Sammy of the city of domes and minarets that you could just get a glimpse of, faint and illusory, behind the writing on the front of a pack of Chesterfields. Alongside the arched doorway, in letters of white tile bordered in blue, was written BRIGHTON GRAND HAMMAM.

“What’s a ham-mam?” Sammy said as they went in. His nose was immediately assaulted by a pungent odor of pine, by the smell of scorched ironing, damp laundry, and something deeper underneath it all, a human smell, salty and foul.

“It’s a shvitz,” the Molecule said. “You know what a shvitz is?”

Sammy nodded.

“When it’s time for thinking,” said the Molecule, “I like to have a shvitz.”

“Oh.”

“I hate thinking.”

“Yeah,” said Sammy. “Me too.”

They checked their clothes in the dressing room, in a tall black iron locker that creaked and fastened shut with the loud clang of a torture instrument. Then they went slapping down a long tiled corridor into the main steam room of the Brighton hammam. Their footsteps echoed as if they were inside a fairly large room. It was painfully hot, and Sammy felt that he couldn’t fill his lungs with sufficient air. He wanted to run back out to the relative cool of the Brooklyn evening, but he crept along, feeling his way through the billowing garments of steam, a hand on his father’s bare back. They climbed onto a low tiled bench and sat back, and Sammy felt each tile as a burning square against his skin. It was very hard to see, but from time to time a rogue current of air, or the vagaries of the invisible, wheezing, steam-producing machinery, would produce a break in the cover, and he could see that they were indeed inside a grand space, ribbed with porcelain groins, set with white and blue faience that was cracked in places, sweating and yellowed with age. As far as he could see, there were no other men or boys in the room with them, but he couldn’t be sure, and he felt obscurely afraid of an unknown face or naked limb suddenly looming out of the murk.

They sat for a long time, saying nothing, and at some point Sammy realized, first, that his body was producing veritable torrents of sweat with an abandon it had never before in his life displayed, and, second, that all along he had been imagining his existence in vaudeville: carrying an armload of spangled costumes down a long dark corridor of the Royal Theatre in Racine, Wisconsin, past a practice room where a piano tinkled and out the back door to the waiting van on a Saturday in midsummer, the deep midwestern night rich with june bugs and gasoline and roses, the smell of the costumes fusty but animated by the sweat and makeup of the chorus girls who had just vacated them, envisioning and inhaling and hearing all this with the vividness of a dream, though he was, as far as he could tell, wide-awake.

Then his father said, “I know you had polio.” Sammy was surprised; his father sounded extremely angry, as though ashamed that he had been sitting there all this time when he was supposed to be relaxing, working himself into a rage. “I was there. I finded you on the steps of the building. You were pass out.”

“You were there? When I got polio?”

“I was there.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You were a baby.”

“I was four.”

“So, you were four. You don’t remember.”

“I would remember that.”

“I was there. I carried you into the room we had.”

“In Brownsville, this was.” Sammy could not keep the skepticism out of his tone.

“I was there, god damn it.”

As if blown by a gust of anger, the curtain of steam that hung between Sammy and his father parted suddenly, and he saw, for the first time really, the great brown spectacle of his naked father. None of the carefully posed studio photographs had prepared him for the sight. His father glistened, massive, savagely furred. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were like dents and wheel ruts in an expanse of packed brown earth. The root systems of an ancient tree seemed to furcate and furrow the surface of his thighs, and where his skin was not covered in dark hair, it was strangely rippled with wild webs of some kind of tissue just beneath the skin. His penis lay in the shadow of his thighs like a short length of thick twisted rope. Sammy stared at it, then realized he was staring. He looked away, and his heart jumped. There was a man there with them. He was sitting, a yellow towel across his lap, on the other side of the room. He was a dark-haired, swarthy young man with a single long eyebrow and a perfectly smooth chest. His eyes met Sammy’s for a moment, then slid away, then back. It was as if a tunnel of clear air had opened between them. Sammy looked back at his father, his stomach awash in an acid of embarrassment, confusion, and arousal. Somehow the hirsute magnificence of him was too much. So he just looked down at the towel draped across his own two broomstick legs.

“You were so heavy to carry,” his father said, “I thought you have to be dead. Only also you were so hot against the hand. The doctor came and we put ice on you and when you woke up you couldn’t walk anymore. And then when you come back from the hospital I started taking you and I took you around, I carried you and I dragged you and I made you walk. Until your knees were scraped and bruised, I made you walk. Until you cried. First holding on to me, then on to the crutches, then not with crutches. All by yourself.”

“Jeez,” Sammy said. “I mean, huh. Mom never told me any of this.”

“What a wonder.”

“I honestly don’t remember.”

“God is merciful,” the Molecule said dryly; he didn’t believe in God, as his son well knew. “You hated every minute. You just as good hated me.”

“But Mom lied.”

“I am shocked.”

“She always told me you left when I was just a little baby.”

“I did. But I came back. I am there when you come sick. Then I stay and teach you to help you walk.”

“And then you left again.”

The Molecule appeared to choose to ignore this observation. “That’s why I try to walk you around so much now,” he said. “To make your legs strong.”

This possible second motive for their walks—after his father’s inherent restlessness—had occurred to Sammy before. He was flattered, and believed in his father, and in the potency of long walks.

“So you’ll take me?” he said. “When you go?”

Still the Molecule hesitated. “What about your mother?”

“Are you kidding? She can’t wait to get rid of me. She hates having me around as much as she hates having you.”

At this the Molecule smiled. From all outward appearances, the renewed presence of her husband in her household was nothing but an annoyance to Ethel, or worse—a betrayal of principles. She criticized his habits, his clothing, his diet, his reading material, and his speech. Whenever he tried to escape the fetters of his awkward, obscene English and speak with his wife in the Yiddish in which both were fluent, she ignored him, pretended not to hear, or simply snapped, “You’re in America. Talk American.” Both in his presence and behind his back, she berated him for his coarseness, his long-winded stories of his vaudeville career and his childhood in the Pale of Settlement. She told him that he snored too loudly, laughed too loudly, simply lived too loudly, beyond the limit of tolerance of civilized beings. Her entire discourse with him appeared to consist solely of animadversion and invective. And yet the previous night, and every night since his return, she had invited him, in a voice that trembled with girlish shame, into her bed and allowed him to enjoy her. At forty-five, she was not very different than she had been at thirty, lean, ropy, and smooth, with skin the color of almond hulls and a neat soft tangle of ink-black hair between her legs, which he liked to grab hold of and pull until she cried out. She was a woman of appetite who had gone without the companionship of a man for a decade, and on his unexpected return she granted him access to even those parts and uses of her that in their early life she had been inclined to keep to herself. And when they were finished, she would lie beside him in the darkness of the tiny room she had partitioned from the kitchen by a beaded curtain, and stroke his great hairy chest, and repeat into his ear in a low whisper all the old endearments and professions of her beholdenness to him. At night, in the dark, she did not hate to have him around. It was this thought that had made him smile.

“Don’t be so sure of it,” he said.

“I don’t care, Pop. I want to leave,” said Sammy. “Damn it, I just want to get away.”

“All right,” said his father. “I promise that I will take you when I go.”

The next morning, when Sammy woke up, his father had gone. He had found an engagement on the old Carlos circuit, in the Southwest, said his note, where he spent the rest of his career playing hot, dusty theaters from Kingman as far south as Monterrey. Though Sammy continued to receive cards and clippings, the Mighty Molecule never again passed within a thousand miles of New York City. One night, about a year before Joe Kavalier’s arrival, a telegram had come with word that, at a fairground outside Galveston, under the rear wheels of a Deere tractor he was attempting to upend, Alter Klayman had been crushed, and with him Sammy’s fondest hope, in the act of escaping from his life, of working with a partner.




5 (#ulink_f2e5097d-8c70-5cdb-b913-500cf2d9a31a)


THE TWO UPPERMOST FLOORS of a certain ancient red row house in the West Twenties, in the ten years before it was pulled down along with all of its neighbors to make way for a gigantic, step-gabled apartment block called Patroon Town, were a notorious tomb for the hopes of cartoonists. Of all the many dozens of young John Helds and Tad Dorgans who had shown up, bearing fragrant, graduation-gift portfolios, mail-order diplomas from cartoonists’ schools, and the proud badge of ink under a ragged thumbnail, to seek lodging under its rotted timbers, only one, a one-legged kid from New Haven named Alfred Caplin, had gone on to meet with the kind of success they had all believed they would find—and the father of the Shmoo had spent only two nights there before moving on to better lodgings across town.

The landlady, a Mrs. Waczukowski, was the widow of a gagman for the Hearst syndicate who had signed his strips “Wacky” and on his death had left her only the building, an unconcealed disdain for all cartoonists veteran or new, and her considerable share of their mutual drinking problem. Originally, there had been six separate bedrooms on the top two stories, but over the years these had been recombined into a kind of ad hoc duplex with three bedrooms, a large studio, a living room in which there was usually an extra cartoonist or two lodged on a pair of cast-off sofas, and what was referred to, generally without irony, as the kitchen: a former maid’s room equipped with a hot plate, a pantry made from a steel supply cabinet stolen from Polyclinic Hospital, and a wooden shelf affixed with brackets to the ledge outside the window, on which, in the cool months, milk, eggs, and bacon could be kept.

Jerry Glovsky had moved in about six months earlier, and since then Sammy, in the company of his friend and neighbor Julie Glovsky, Jerry’s younger brother, had visited the apartment several times. Though he was largely ignorant of the details of the apartment’s past, Sammy had been sensitive to its thick-layered cigar-smoke allure of male fellowship, of years of hard work and sorrow in the service of absurd and glorious black-and-white visions. At the present time there were two other “permanent” occupants, Marty Gold and Davy O’Dowd, both of whom, like the elder Glovsky, shed sweat for Moe Shiflet, a.k.a. Moe Skinflint, a “packager” of original strips who sold his material, usually of poor quality, to the established syndicates and, more recently, to publishers of comic books. The place always seemed filled with ink-smirched young men, drinking, smoking, lying around with their naked big toes protruding from the tips of their socks. In the whole city of New York, there was no more logical hiring hall for the sort of laborers Sammy required to lay the cornerstone of the cheap and fantastic cathedral that would be his life’s work.

There was nobody home—nobody conscious, at any rate. The three young men pounded on the door until Mrs. Waczukowsi, her hair tied up in pink paper knots and a robe pulled around her shoulders, at last dragged herself up from the first floor and told them to scram.

“Just another minute, madam,” said Sammy, “and we shall trouble you no more.”

“We have left some valuable antiquities in there,” Julie said, in the same clench-jawed Mr. Peanut accent.

Sammy winked, and the two young men smiled at her with as many of their teeth as they could expose until finally she turned, consigning them all to hell with the eloquent back of her hand, and retreated down the stairs.

Sammy turned to Julie. “So where is Jerry?”

“Beats me.”

“Shit, Julius, we’ve got to get in there. Where is everybody else?”

“Maybe they went with him.”

“Don’t you have a key?”

“Do I live here?”

“Maybe we could get in the window.”

“Five stories up?”

“Damn it!” Sammy gave the door a feeble kick. “It’s past noon and we haven’t drawn a line! Christ.” They would have to go back to the Kramler Building and ask to work at the rutted tables in the offices of Racy Publications, a course that would inevitably bring them within the baleful circumference of George Deasey’s gaze.

Joe was kneeling by the door, running his fingers up and down the jamb, fingering the knob.

“What are you doing, Joe?”

“I could get us in, only I leave behind my tools.”

“What tools?”

“I can pick the locks,” he said. “I was trained to, to what, to get out of things. Boxes. Ropes. Chains.” He stood up and pointed to his chest. “Ausbrecher. Outbreaker. No, what it is? �Escape artist.’”

“You are a trained escape artist.”

Joe nodded.

“You.”

“Like Houdini.”

“Meaning you can get out of things,” Sammy said. “So you can get us in?”

“Normally. In, out, it’s only the same thing in the other direction. But sadly, I leaved my tools in the Flat Bush.” He pulled a small penknife from his pocket and began to probe the lock with its thin blade.

“Hold on,” Julie said. “Wait a second, Houdini. Sammy. I don’t think we ought to go breaking in—”

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Sammy said.

“You’re right,” Joe said. “We’re in a hurry.” He put the knife away and started back down the stairs. Sammy and Julie went after him.

In the street, Joe pulled himself up onto the newel that topped the right-hand baluster of the front steps, a chipped cement sphere onto which some long-vanished tenant had inked a cruel caricature of the querulous lunar face of the late Mr. Waczukowski. He pulled off his jacket and threw it to Sammy.

“Joe, what are you doing?”

Joe didn’t answer. He perched for a moment atop the pop-eyed newel, his long feet side by side in their rubber-soled oxfords, and studied the retractable iron ladder of the fire escape. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and cupped a match. He let out a thoughtful cloud of smoke, then fit the cigarette between his teeth and rubbed his hands together. Then he sprang from the top of Mr. Waczukowski’s head, reaching out. The fire escape rang against the impact of his palms, and the ladder sagged and with a rusted groan slid slowly downward, six woozy inches, a foot, a foot and a half, before jamming, leaving Joe to dangle five feet off the pavement. Joe chinned himself, trying to loosen it, and swung his legs back and forth; but it stayed latched.

“Come on, Joe,” said Sammy. “That won’t work.”

“You’ll break your neck,” said Julie.

Joe let go of the ladder with his right hand, snatched a puff from his cigarette, then replaced it. Then he took hold of the ladder again and swung himself, throwing his entire body into it, with each swing describing an increasingly wider arc. The ladder rattled and chimed against the fire escape. Suddenly he folded himself in half, let go of the ladder completely, and allowed his momentum to jackknife him out, up and over, onto the bottom platform of the fire escape, where he landed on his feet. It was a completely gratuitous performance, done purely for effect or for the thrill of it; he easily could have pulled himself up the ladder hand over hand. He easily could have broken his neck. He paused for a moment on the landing, flicking ash from the end of his cigarette.

At that instant, the steady northerly wind that had been harrying the clouds over New York City all day succeeded at last in scattering them, sweeping clear over Chelsea a patch of wispy blue. A shaft of yellow sunlight slanted down, twisting with ribbons of vapor and smoke, a drizzling ribbon of honey, a seam of yellow quartz marbling the featureless gray granite of the afternoon. The windows of the old red row house pooled with light, then spilled over. Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce.

“Look at him,” said Sammy. “Look what he can do.”

Over the years, reminiscing for friends or journalists or, still later, the reverent editors of fan magazines, Sammy would devise and relate all manner of origin stories, fanciful and mundane and often conflicting, but it was out of a conjunction of desire, the buried memory of his father, and the chance illumination of a row-house window, that the Escapist was born. As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing—common enough among the inventors of heroes—to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.

At the same time, as he watched the reckless exercise of Joe’s long, cavalier frame, the display of strength for its own sake and for the love of display, the stirring of passion was inevitably shadowed, or fed, or entwined by the memory of his father. We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place; but as Sammy watched Joe, he felt the heartbreak of that day in 1935 when the Mighty Molecule had gone away for good.

“Remarkable,” Julie said dryly, in a voice that suggested there was something funny, and not in the sense of humorous, about the expression on his old friend’s face. “Now if only he could draw.”

“He can draw,” said Sammy.

Joe ran clanking up the steps of the fire escape to the fourth-floor window, threw up the sash, and fell headfirst into the room. A moment later there was an impossibly musical Fay Wray scream from the apartment.

“Huh,” Julie said. “The guy might do all right in the cartoon business.”




6 (#ulink_833dfd0c-e952-5225-a563-82185137ceab)


A GIRL WITH WILD BROWN RINGLETS, looking like she was going to cry, came barreling into the stairwell. She was wearing a man’s herringbone overcoat. Joe stood in the middle of the apartment, his head hung at a comically sheepish angle, rubbing at the back of his neck. Sammy just had time to notice that the girl was carrying a pair of black engineer boots in one hand and a knot of black hose in the other before she brushed past Julie Glovsky, almost sending him over the banister, and went thumping bare-legged down the stairs. In her immediate wake, the three young men stood there looking at one another, stunned, like cynics in the wake of an irrefutable miracle.

“Who was that?” Sammy said, stroking his cheek where she had brushed against him with her perfume and her alpaca scarf. “I think she might have been beautiful.”

“She was.” Joe went to a battered horsehide chair and picked up a large satchel lying on it. “I think she forgot this.” It was black leather, with heavy black straps and complicated clasps of black metal. “Her purse.”

“That isn’t a purse,” said Julie, looking nervously around the living room, reckoning up the damage they had already done. He scowled at Sammy as if sensing another one of his friend’s harebrained schemes already beginning to fall apart. “That’s probably my brother’s. You’d better put it down.”

“Is Jerry transporting secret documents all of a sudden?” Sammy took the bag from Joe. “Suddenly he’s Peter Lorre?” He undid the clasps and lifted the heavy flap.

“No!” said Joe. He lunged to snatch the bag, but Sammy yanked it away. “It’s not nice,” Joe chided him, trying to reach around and grab it. “We should respect her privacies.”

“This couldn’t be hers,” said Sammy. And yet he found in the black courier’s pouch a pricey-looking tortoiseshell compact, a much-folded pamphlet entitled “Why Modern Ceramics Is the People’s Art,” a lipstick (Helena Rubinstein’s Andalucia), an enameled gold pillbox, and a wallet with two twenties and a ten. Several calling cards in her wallet gave her name, somewhat extravagantly, as Rosa Luxemburg Saks, and reported that she was employed in the art department at Life magazine.

“I don’t think she was wearing any panties,” said Sammy.

Julie was too moved by this revelation to speak.

“She wasn’t,” said Joe. They looked at him. “I came in through the window and she was sleeping there.” He pointed to Jerry’s bedroom. “In the bed. You heard her scream, yes? She put on her dress and her coat.”

“You saw her,” said Julie.

“Yes.”

“She was naked.”

“Quite naked.”

“I’ll bet you couldn’t draw it.” Julie pulled off his sweater. It was the color of Wheatena, and underneath it he wore another, identical sweater. Julie was always complaining that he felt cold, even in warm weather; in the wintertime he went around swelled to twice his normal bulk. Over the years, his mother, based only on knowledge gleaned from the pages of the Yiddish newspapers, had diagnosed him with several acute and chronic illnesses. Every morning she obliged him to swallow a variety of pills and tablets, eat a raw onion, and take a teaspoon each of Castoria and vitamin tonic. Julie himself was a great perpetrator of nudes, and was widely admired in Sammy’s neighborhood for his unclothed renditions of Fritzi Ritz, Blondie Bumstead, and Daisy Mae, which he sold for a dime, or, for a quarter, of Dale Arden, whose lovely pubic display he rendered in luxuriant strokes generally agreed to be precisely those with which Alex Raymond himself would have endowed her, if public morals and the exigencies of interplanetary travel had permitted it.

“Of course I could draw it,” said Joe. “But I would not.”

“I’ll give you a dollar if you draw me a picture of Rosa Saks lying naked in bed,” said Julie.

Joe took Rosa’s satchel from Sammy and sat down on the horsehide chair. He seemed to be balancing his material need against the desire he felt, as had Sammy, to hold on to a marvelous apparition and keep it for his own. At last he sighed and tossed the satchel to one side.

“Three dollars,” he said.

Julie was not happy with this, but nonetheless he nodded. He pulled off another sweater. “Make it good,” he said.

Joe knelt to grab a broken stub of Conte crayon lying on an overturned milk crate at his feet. He picked up an unopened overdue notice from the New York Public Library and pressed it flat against the milk crate. The long forefingers of his right hand, stained yellow at their tips, skated leisurely across the back of the envelope. His features grew animated, even comical: he squinted, pursed his lips and shifted them from side to side, grimaced. After a few minutes, and as abruptly as it had begun, his hand came to a stop, and his fingers kicked the crayon loose. He held up the envelope, wrinkling his forehead, as if considering the thing he had drawn and not simply the way he had drawn it. His expression grew soft and regretful. It was not too late, he seemed to be thinking, to tear up the envelope and keep the pretty vision all to himself. Then his face resumed its habitual mien, sleepy, unconcerned. He passed the envelope to Julie.

His short flight through the window had landed him on the floor of the bedroom, and Joe had chosen to draw Rosa Saks the way he’d first seen her, at eye level as he picked himself up from the floor, looking past a carved acorn that crowned the footboard of the bed. She was lying passed out on her belly, her sprawling right leg kicked free of the blankets and leaving exposed rather more than half of a big and fetching tuchis. Her right foot loomed large in the foreground, slender, toes curled. The lines of her bare and of her blanketed leg converged, at the ultimate vanishing point, in a coarse black bramble of shadow. In the distance of the picture, the hollows and long central valley of her back rose to a charcoal Niagara of hair that obscured all but the lower portion of her face, her lips parted, her jaw wide and perhaps a bit heavy. It was a four-by-nine-inch slice cut fresh from Joe’s memory but, for all its immediacy, rendered in clean, unhurried lines, with a precision at once anatomical and emotional: you felt Joe’s tenderness toward that curled little foot, that hollow back, that open, dreaming mouth drawing a last deep breath of unconsciousness. You wanted her to be able to go on sleeping, as long as you could watch.

“You didn’t show her boobs!” said Julie.

“Not for three dollars,” said Joe.

With grumbling and a great show of reluctance, Julie paid Joe off, then slid the envelope into the hip pocket of his overcoat, wedging it protectively into a copy of Planet Stories. When, fifty-three years later, he died, the drawing of Rosa Saks naked and asleep was found among his effects, in a Barracini’s candy box, with a souvenir yarmulke from his eldest son’s bar mitzvah and a Norman Thomas button, and was erroneously exhibited, in a retrospective at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, as the work of the young Julius Glovsky. As for Common Errors in Perspective Drawing, the overdue library book, recent inquiries have revealed that it was returned, under a citywide amnesty program, in 1971.




7 (#ulink_4dd27764-8724-53aa-8085-381af7afd27b)


IN THE IMMEMORIAL STYLE of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time. They took their shoes off, rolled up their shirtsleeves, and loosened their neckties. They moved ashtrays around, swept stacks of magazines to the floor, put a record on, and generally acted as if they owned the place. They were in the room where the boy-genius artists kept their drawing tables and taborets, a room variously referred to by its occupants over the years as the Bullpen, the Pit, the Rathole, and Palooka Studios, the latter a name often applied to the entire apartment, to the building, occasionally to the neighborhood, and even, on grim, hungover, hacking mornings with a view out the bathroom window of a sunrise the color of bourbon and ash, to the whole damn stinking world. At some time in the last century, it had been an elegant lady’s bedroom. There were still curvy brass gas fixtures and egg-and-dart moldings, but most of the moss-green moiré paper had been ripped down for drawing stock, leaving the walls covered only by a vast brown web of crazed glue. But in truth, Sammy and Joe scarcely took note of their surroundings. It was just the clearing in which they had come to pitch the tent of their imaginations. Sammy lay down on a spavined purple davenport; Joe, on the floor, was aware for a moment that he was lying on a sour-smelling oval braided rug, in an apartment recently vacated by a girl who had impressed him, in the few instants of their acquaintance, as the most beautiful he had ever seen in his life, in a building whose face he had scaled so that he could begin to produce comic books for a company that sold farting pillows, in Manhattan, New York, where he had come by way of Lithuania, Siberia, and Japan. Then a toilet flushed elsewhere in the apartment, and Sammy peeled his socks off with a happy sigh, and Joe’s sense of the present strangeness of his life, of the yawning gap, the long, unretraceable path that separated him from his family, receded from his mind.

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat—was, literally, talked into life. Kavalier and Clay—whose golem was to be formed of black lines and the four-color dots of the lithographer—lay down, lit the first of five dozen cigarettes they were to consume that afternoon, and started to talk. Carefully, with a certain rueful humor inspired in part by self-consciousness at his broken grammar, Joe told the story of his interrupted studies with the Ausbrecher Bernard Kornblum, and described the role his old teacher had played in his departure from Prague. He told Sammy merely that he had been smuggled out in a shipment of unspecified artifacts that Sammy pictured aloud as big Hebrew grimoires locked with golden clasps. Joe did not disabuse him of this picture. He was embarrassed now that, when asked for a lithe aerial Superman, he had drawn a stolid golem in a Phrygian cap, and felt that the less said from now on about golems, the better. Sammy was keen on the details of autoliberation, and full of questions. Was it true that you had to be double-jointed, that Houdini was a prodigy of reversible elbow and knee sockets? No, and no. Was it true that Houdini could dislocate his shoulders at will? According to Kornblum, no. Was it more important in the trade to be strong or dexterous? It required more finesse than dexterity, more endurance than strength. Did you generally cut, pick, or rig a way out? All three and more—you pried, you wriggled, you hacked, you kicked. Joe remembered some of the things Kornblum had told him of his career in show business, the hard conditions, the endless travel, the camaraderie of performers, the painstaking and ongoing transmission among magicians and illusionists of accumulated lore.

“My father was in vaudeville,” Sammy said. “Show business.”

“I know. I have heard from my father one time. He was a strong man, yes? He was very strong.”

“He was the World’s Strongest Jew,” Sammy said.

“He is now …”

“He is now dead.”

“I am sorry.”

“He was a bastard,” Sammy said.

“Oh.”

“Not literally. That’s just an expression. He was a schmuck. He left when I was a little kid and never came back.”

“Ah.”

“He was all muscle. No heart. He was like Superman without the Clark Kent.”

“Is that why you don’t want our guy”—he had adopted Sammy’s term—“to be strong?”

“No! I just don’t want our guy to be the same as everybody else’s, you know?”

“My mistake,” said Joe. He sensed, however, that he was right. He could hear the admiration in Sammy’s voice even as he pronounced the late Mr. Klayman a bastard.

“What’s your father like?” Sammy said.

“He is a good man. He is a doctor. He is not the most strongest Jew in the world, sadly.”

“That’s what they need over there,” Sammy said. “Or, look at you, you got out. Maybe what they need is like a super-Kornblum. Hey.” He stood up and began to pound his right hand into the palm of his left. “Ooh. Ooh, ooh. Okay. Hold on a minute.” Now he pressed the heels of his hands against his temples. You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus. Joe sat up. He ran his mind back over the last half hour of conversation and, as if he were picking up a transmission direct from Sammy’s brain, saw in his own mind the outlines, the dark contours, the balletic contortions, of a costumed hero whose power would be that of impossible and perpetual escape.


(#ulink_8d8072eb-0465-5a60-84e4-7e4ed930858f) He was just envisioning or foretasting or, strangely, remembering this dashing character when Sammy opened his eyes. His face was twisted and flushed with excitement. He looked very much as if, to employ one of his own expressions, his bowels were in an uproar.

“Okay,” he said, “listen to this.” He started to pace between the drawing tables, looking down at his feet, declaiming in a sharp, barking tenor that Joe recognized from the announcers on American radio. “To, uh, to all those who, uh, toil in the bonds of slavery—”

“Bonds?”

“Yeah.” Sammy’s cheeks reddened, and he dropped the radio voice. “Chains, like. Just listen. It’s comics, all right?”

“All right.”

He resumed his pacing and radio-announcer tone and continued to compose his historic series of exclamations.

“To all those who toil in the bonds of slavery and, uh, the, the shackles of oppression, he offers the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom!” His delivery grew more assured now. “Armed with superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains! He is”—he paused and threw Joe a helpless, gleeful glance, on the point of vanishing completely into his story now—“the Escapist!”

“�The Escapist.’” Joe tried it out. It sounded magnificent to his un-schooled ear—someone trustworthy and useful and strong. “He is an escape artist in a costume. Who fights crime.”

“He doesn’t just fight it. He frees the world of it. He frees people, see? He comes in the darkest hour. He watches from the shadows. Guided only by the light from—the light from—”

“His Golden Key.”

“That’s great!”

“I see,” Joe said. The costume would be dark, dark blue, midnight blue, simple, functional, ornamented only with a skeleton-key emblem on the chest. Joe went over to one of the drawing tables and climbed onto the stool. He picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper and started to sketch rapidly, closing his inner eyelid and projecting against it, so to speak, the image of a lithe, acrobatic man who had just leaped into his mind, a man in the act of alighting, a gymnast dismounting the rings, his right heel about to meet the ground, his left leg raised and flexed at the knee, his arms thrown high, hands outspread, trying to get at the physics of the way a man moved, the give-and-take of sinews and muscle groups, to forge, in a way that no comic book artist yet had, an anatomical basis for grace and style.

“Wow,” Sammy said. “Wow, Joe. That’s good. That’s beautiful.”

“He is here to free the world,” said Joe.

“Exactly.”

“Permit me to ask a question to you.”

“Ask me anything. I got it all up here.” Sammy tapped his head in a cocky manner that reminded Joe almost painfully of Thomas; in the next minute, when Sammy heard Joe’s question, he looked crestfallen in exactly the same way.

“What is the why?” said Joe.

Sammy nodded slowly, then stopped.

“The why,” he said. “Shit.”

“You said—”

“I know, I know. I know what I said. All right.” He picked up his coat and grabbed the last package of cigarettes. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

* (#ulink_c72e8dd0-f255-521e-a071-83f152e7165f) The still-fresh memory of Harry Houdini in the American mind thirteen years after his death—of his myth, his mysterious abilities, his physique, his feats, his dedicated hunting down and exposure of frauds and cheats—is a neglected source of the superhero idea in general; an argument in its favor, as it were.




8 (#ulink_721bccef-eb0b-5f0f-914c-75f78bfa3672)


THE CURTAIN ITSELF is legendary: its dimensions, its weight, its darker-than-chocolate color, the Continental fineness of its stuff. It hangs in thick ripples like frosting poured from the proscenium arch of the most famous theater in the most celebrated block of the world’s greatest city. Call it Empire City, home of the needle-tipped Excelsior Building, tallest ever built; home of the Statue of Liberation, on her island in the middle of Empire Bay, her sword raised in defiance to the tyrants of the world; and home also of the Empire Palace Theatre, whose fabled Black Curtain trembles now as, at stage right, the narrowest of fissures opens in the rich dark impasto of its velour. Through this narrow gap a boy peers out. His face, ordinarily a trusting blank surmounted by tousled yellow curls, is creased with worry. He is not measuring the numbers of the audience—the house is sold out, as it has been for every night of the current engagement. He is looking for someone or something that no one will discuss, that he has only inferred, for the unnamed person or thing whose advent or presence has been troubling the company all day.

Then a hand as massive and hard as an elk’s horn, lashed by tough sinews to an arm like the limb of an oak, grabs the boy by the shoulder and drags him back into the wings.

“You know better, young man,” says the giant, well over eight feet tall, to whom the massive hand belongs. He has the brow of an ape and the posture of a bear and the accent of a Viennese professor of medicine. He can rip open a steel drum like a can of tobacco, lift a train carriage by one corner, play the violin like Paganini, and calculate the velocity of asteroids and comets, one of which bears his name. His name is Alois Berg and the comet is called Berg’s comet, but to the theatergoing public and to his friends he is usually just Big Al. “Come, there is a problem with the water tank.”

Backstage, the instruments of torture and restraint stand in their proper places, looking both menacing and droll, ready for the stagehands to drag, wheel, or hoist them out onto the storied boards of the Palace. There is a regulation, asylum-issue, strap-strewn lunatic’s bed; a large, slender milk can of riveted iron; a medieval Catherine wheel; and an incongruous chrome suit rack, from which dangle on prosaic wire hangers a fantastic array of straitjackets, ropes, chains, and thick leather straps. And there is the water tank, a great oblong box of glass, dolphin-sized, standing on one end: a drowned telephone booth. The glass is inch-thick, tempered, and tamperproof. The seals are neat and watertight. The timbers that frame the glass are sturdy and reliable. The boy knows all this because he built the tank himself. He wears, we see now, a leather apron filled with tools. There is a pencil stuck behind his ear and a chalk string in his pocket. If there is a problem with the tank, he can fix it. He must fix it: curtain is in less than five minutes.

“What’s the matter with it?” The boy—really he is almost a man—makes his way toward the tank with aplomb, heedless of the crutch under his arm, untroubled by the left leg that has been lame since he was an infant.

“It seems to be inert, my boy. Immobilized.” Big Al goes to the tank and gives it a friendly shove. The thousand-pound box tips, and the water inside shivers and sloshes. He could move the tank onstage unaided, but there are union rules, and greater showmanship in the five big stagehands that the feat requires. “In words of one syllable, stuck.”

“Something’s caught in this wheel here.” The young man lowers himself down his crutch, hand under hand, lies on his back, and slides under a corner of the tank’s heavy base. There is a rubber-tired wheel, mounted on a steel caster, at each corner. At one corner, something has lodged itself between tire and caster. The young man slips a screwdriver from his tool belt and starts to poke around.

“Al,” comes his voice from under the tank. “What’s the matter with him today?”

“Nothing, Tom,” Big Al says. “He is merely tired. It’s the last night of the engagement. And he is no longer as youthful as he once was.”

They have been joined, silently, by a small, slender man in a turban. His face is ageless and brown, his eyes dark and sensitive. He has never joined any group, party, or discussion in any way other than silently. Stealth is in his nature. He is laconic and cautious and light on his feet. No one knows how old he is, or how many lives he lived before entering the employ of the Master of Escape. He can be a doctor, a pilot, a sailor, a chef. He is at home on every continent, conversant with the argot of policemen and thieves. There is no one better at bribing a prison guard before a jailbreak stunt to plant a key in a cell, or a reporter to inflate the number of minutes that the Master remained underwater during a bridge leap. He is called Omar, a name so patently corny that it, with the turban and the desert-brown skin, is widely believed by the public to be nothing more than atmosphere, a getup, part of the thrill-making shtick of Misterioso the Great. But if his origins and true name are doubtful, his dusky complexion is genuine. As for the turban, none outside the company know how vain he is about his receding hairline.

“Okay, then what’s the matter with you,” the young man persists. “You and Omar. You’ve been acting strange all day.”

Omar and Big Al exchange looks. The revelation of secrets is more than anathema to them; it goes against their nature and training. They would be incapable of telling the boy, even if they wanted to.

“Imagination,” Omar says finally, decisively.

“Too many pulp novels,” says Big Al.

“Tell me this, then.” The young man, Tom Mayflower, slides out from under the tank, clutching a black leather button lost from a coat front or a sleeve, embossed with a curious symbol, like three interlinked ovals. “What’s the Iron Chain?”

Big Al looks toward Omar again, but his comrade has already disappeared, as silently as he came. Though he knows that Omar has gone to warn the Master, still Big Al curses him for leaving him alone to answer or not answer this question. He takes the button, to whose eyelet a bit of thread still clings, and tucks it into the pocket of his giant waistcoat.

“Two minutes,” he says, suddenly as terse as their turbaned friend. “Have you fixed it?”

“It’s perfect,” Tom says, accepting the great antler hand that Big Al offers, scrambling to his unsteady feet. “Like everything I do.”

Later, he will remember this flip reply and regret it with a flush of shame. For the tank is not perfect, not at all.

At five minutes past eight o’clock, Tom knocks. There is a star on the door, and under it, painted on a strip of card, the words “Mr. Misterioso.” Tom’s uncle, Max Mayflower, has never missed a curtain before. Indeed, his entire act is timed to the half second, tailored and endlessly readjusted to suit the abilities and, increasingly, the limitations of its star. His unheard-of tardiness has caused Big Al to fall silent, and Omar to utter a string of oaths in a barbarous tongue. But neither has the nerve to disturb the man they call Master. It is Miss Plum Blossom, the costumer, who has pushed Tom toward the door. Naturally, the ageless Chinese seamstress is widely believed to be secretly in love with Max Mayflower. Naturally, she is secretly in love with him. There are even rumors about these two and the somewhat misty parentage of Tom Mayflower, but though he loves Miss Blossom and his uncle dearly, Tom takes these rumors for the idle gossip they are. Miss Blossom would never dare disturb the Master in his dressing room before a show either, but she knows that Tom may penetrate certain of the man’s mysteries and humors in a way that no one else can. Behind him, she gives another gentle push at the small of his back.

“It’s Tom,” the young man says, getting no answer. And then takes the unprecedented liberty of opening the dressing-room door unbidden.

His uncle sits at his dressing table. His body has grown fibrous and tough, like a stalk that hardens as it withers. His wiry legs are already clad in the skintight dark blue stuff of his costume, but his upper torso remains bare and freckled, lightly traced with the dull orange wisps that are the sole reminders of the ginger thatch that once covered him. His flaming orange mane has become gray stubble. His hands are wildly veined, his fingers knobbed like bamboo. And yet, until tonight, Tom has never seen a trace in him—not in body, voice, or heart—of the triumph of age. Now he sags, half naked, his bare head gleaming in the lighted mirror like a memento mori.

“How’s the house?” he says.

“Standing room only. Can’t you hear them?”

“Yes,” his uncle says. “I hear them.”

Something, some weary edge of self-pity in the old man’s tone, irritates Tom.

“You shouldn’t take it for granted,” he says. “I’d give anything to hear them cheering that way for me.”

The old man sits up and looks at Tom. He nods. He reaches for his dark blue jersey and pulls it over his head, then tugs on the soft blue acrobat’s boots made for him in Paris by the famous circus costumer Claireaux.

“You’re right, of course,” he says, clapping the boy on the shoulder. “Thank you for reminding me.”

Then he ties on his mask, a kind of kerchief with eyeholes, which knots at the back and covers the entire upper half of his skull.

“You never know,” he says as he starts out of the dressing room. “You may get your chance some day.”

“Not likely,” Tom says, though this is his deepest desire, and though he knows the secrets, the mechanisms, procedures, and eventualities of the escape trade as well as any man alive save one. “Not with this leg of mine.”

“Stranger things have happened,” the old man says. Tom stands there, watching in admiration the way the old man’s back straightens as he walks out, the way his shoulders settle and his gait becomes springy, yet calm and controlled. Then Tom remembers the button he found lodged in the wheel of the water tank, and runs after his uncle to tell him. By the time he reaches the wings, however, the orchestra has already struck up the Tannhäuser overture, and Misterioso has strode, arms outspread, onto the stage.

Misterioso’s act is continuous—from first bow till last, the performer does not leave the stage to change costume, not even after the drenching he receives during the Oriental Water Torture Trick. Entrances and exits imply flummery, substitutions, switcheroos. Like the tight costume that promises to betray any concealed tools, the constant presence of the performer is supposed to guarantee the purity and integrity of the act. Thus it causes considerable alarm in the company when—after the roar of applause that follows Misterioso’s emergence, unchained, untied, unshackled, right side up, and still breathing, from the Oriental Water Torture tank—the performer staggers into the wings, hands pressed to a spreading stain, darker than water and sticky-looking, at his side. When, a moment later, the water tank is wheeled off by the five union stagehands, sharp-eyed Omar quickly discerns the drizzled trail of water it has left on the stage, which he traces back to a small—a perfect—hole in the glass of the front panel. A pale pink ribbon twists in the green water of the tank.

“Get off me,” the old man says, staggering into his dressing room. He pushes free of Omar and Big Al. “Find him,” he tells them, and they vanish into the theater. He turns to the stage manager. “Ring down the curtain. Tell the orchestra to play the waltz. Tom, come with me.”

The young man follows his uncle into the dressing room and watches in astonishment and then horror as the old man strips away the damp jersey. His ribs are beaded with a lopsided star of blood. The wound beneath his left breast is small, but brimming like a cup.

“Take another one from the trunk,” Max Mayflower says, and somehow the bullet hole gives even greater authority to his words than they would have ordinarily. “Put it on.”

Immediately, Tom guesses the incredible demand that his uncle is about to place on him, and, in his fear and excitement and with The Blue Danube vamping endlessly in his ears, he does not attempt to argue or to apologize for not having fitted the tank he built with bulletproof glass, or even to ask his uncle who has shot him. He just gets dressed. He has tried on the costume before, of course, secretly. It takes him only a minute to do it now.

“You just have to do the coffin,” his uncle tells him. “And then you’re done.”

“My leg,” Tom says. “How am I supposed to?”

That is when his uncle hands him a small key, gold or gold-plated, old-fashioned and ornate. The key to a lady’s diary or to a drawer in an important man’s desk.

“Just keep it about you,” Max Mayflower says. “You’ll be all right.”

Tom takes the key, but he doesn’t feel anything right away. He just stands there, holding the key so tightly that it pulses against his palm, as he watches his beloved uncle bleed to death in the harsh light of the dressing room with the star on the door. The orchestra launches into their third assault on the waltz.

“The show must go on,” his uncle says dryly, and so Tom goes, slipping the gold key into one of the thirty-nine pockets that Miss Blossom has concealed throughout the costume. It is not until he is actually stepping out onto the stage, to the frenzied derisive happy waltz-weary cheering of the audience, that he notices not only that he has left the crutch behind in the dressing room but that, for the first time in his life, he is walking without a limp.

Two Shriners in fezzes drape him with chains and help him into a heavy canvas mailbag. A lady from the suburbs cinches the neck of the mailbag and fixes the ends of the cord with a ham-sized padlock. Big Al lifts him as if lifting a swaddled babe and carries him tenderly to the coffin, which has been carefully inspected beforehand by the mayor of Empire City, its chief of police, and the head of its fire department, and pronounced tight as a drum. Now these same worthies, to the delight of the house, are given hammers and big twenty-penny nails. Gleefully, they seal Tom into the coffin. If anyone notices that Misterioso has, in the last ten minutes, put on twenty pounds and grown an inch, he or she keeps it to himself; what difference could it make, anyway, if it is not the same man? He will still have to contend with chains and nails and two solid inches of ash wood. And yet among the women in the audience, at least, there is an imperceptible shade of difference, a deepening or darkening, in the pitch of their admiration and fear. “Look at the shoulders on him,” says one to another. “I never noticed.”

Inside the thoroughly rigged coffin, which has been eased into an elaborate marble sarcophagus by means of a winch that was then used to lower the marble lid into place with a ringing tocsin of finality, Tom tries to banish images of bloody stars and bullet holes from his mind. He concentrates on the routine of the trick, the series of quick and patient stages that he knows so well; and, one by one, the necessary thoughts drive out the terrible ones. He frees himself of them. His mind, as he pries open the lid of the sarcophagus with the crowbar that has conveniently been taped to its underside, is peaceful and blank. When he steps into the spotlight, however, he is nearly upended by the applause, blown over, laved by it as by some great cleansing tide. All of his years of limping self-doubt are washed away. When he sees Omar signaling to him from the wings, his face even graver than usual, he is loath to surrender the moment.

“My curtain call!” he says as Omar leads him away. It is the second remark he will come to regret that day.

The man known professionally as Misterioso has long lived, in a detail borrowed without apologies from Gaston Leroux, in secret apartments under the Empire Palace Theatre. They are gloomy and sumptuous. There is a bedroom for everyone—Miss Blossom has her own chambers, naturally, on the opposite side of the apartment from the Master’s—but when they are not traveling the world, the company prefers to hang around in the vast obligatory Organ Room, with its cathedral-like, eighty-pipe Helgenblatt, and it is here, twenty minutes after the bullet entered his rib cage and lodged near his heart, that Max Mayflower dies. Before doing so, however, he tells his ward, Tom Mayflower, the story of the golden key, in whose service—and not that of Thalia or Mammon—he and the others circled the globe a thousand times.

When he was a young man, he says, no older than Tom is now, he was a wastrel, a rounder, and a brat. A playboy, spoiled and fast. From his family’s mansion on Nabob Avenue, he sallied night after night into the worst dives and fleshpots of Empire City. There were huge gambling losses, and then trouble with some very bad men. When they could not collect on their loans, these men instead kidnapped young Max and held him for a ransom so exorbitant that the revenue from it easily would have funded their secret intention, which was to gain control over all the crime and criminals in the United States of America. This would in turn enable them, they reasoned, to take over the country itself. The men abused Max violently and laughed at his pleas for mercy. The police and the federals searched for him everywhere but failed. Meanwhile, Max’s father, the richest man in the state of which Empire City was the capital, weakened. He loved his profligate son. He wanted to have him back again. The day before the deadline for payment fell, he came to a decision. The next morning the Eagle newsboys hit the streets and exposed their veteran uvulas to the skies. “FAMILY TO PAY RANSOM!” they cried.

Now, imagine that somewhere, says Uncle Max, in one of the secret places of the world (Tom envisions a vague cross between a bodega and a mosque), a copy of the Empire City Eagle bearing this outrageous headline was crushed by an angry hand emerging from a well-tailored white linen sleeve. The owner of the hand and the linen suit would have been difficult to make out in the shadows. But his thoughts would be clear, his anger righteous, and from the lapel of his white suit there would have been dangling a little golden key.

Max, it turns out, was being held in an abandoned house on the outskirts of Empire City. Several times he tried to escape from his bonds, but could not loosen even one finger or toe. Twice a day he was unfettered enough to use the bathroom, and though several times he tried for the window, he could not manage even to get it unlatched. So after a few days he had sunk into the gray timeless hell of the prisoner. He dreamed without sleeping and slept with his eyes open. In one of his dreams, a shadowy man in a white linen suit came into his cell. Just walked right in through the door. He was pleasant and soothing and concerned. Locks, he said, pointing to the door of Max’s cell, mean nothing to us. With a few seconds’ work, he undid the ropes that bound Max to a chair and bid him to flee. He had a boat waiting, or a fast car, or an airplane—in his old age and with death so near, old Max Mayflower could no longer remember which. And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others. At that moment, one of Max’s captors came into the room. He was waving a copy of the Eagle with the news of Max’s father’s capitulation, and until he saw the stranger in white he looked very happy indeed. Then he took out his gun and shot the stranger in the belly.

Max was enraged. Without reflecting, without a thought for his own safety, he rushed at the gangster and tried to wrestle away the gun. It rang like a bell in his bones, and the gangster fell to the floor. Max returned to the stranger and cradled his head in his lap. He asked him his name.

“I wish I could tell you,” the stranger said. “But there are rules. Oh.” He winced. “Look, I’m done for.” He spoke in a peculiar accent, polished and British, with a strange western twang. “Take the key. Take it.”

“Me? Take your key?”

“No, you don’t seem likely, it’s true. But I have no choice.”

Max undid the pin from the man’s lapel. From it dangled a little golden key, identical to the one that Max had given Tom a half hour before.

“Stop wasting your life,” were the stranger’s last words. “You have the key.”

Max spent the next ten years in a fruitless search for the lock that the golden key would open. He consulted with the master locksmiths and ironmongers of the world. He buried himself in the lore of jailbreaks and fakirs, of sailor’s knots and Arapaho bondage rituals. He scrutinized the works of Joseph Bramah, the greatest locksmith who ever lived. He sought out the advice of the rope-slipping spiritualists who pioneered the escape-artist trade and even studied, for a time, with Houdini himself. In the process, Max Mayflower became a master of self-liberation, but the search was a costly one. He ran through his father’s fortune and, in the end, still had no idea how to use the gift that the stranger had given him. Still he pressed on, sustained without realizing it by the mystic powers of the key. At last, however, his poverty compelled him to seek work. He went into show business, breaking locks for money, and Misterioso was born.

It was while traveling through Canada in a two-bit sideshow that he had first met Professor Alois Berg. The professor lived, at the time, in a cage lined with offal, chained to the bars, in rags, gnawing on bones. He was pustulous and stank. He snarled at the paying public, children in particular, and on the side of his cage, in big red letters, was painted the come-on SEE THE OGRE! Like everyone else in the show, Max avoided the Ogre, despising him as the lowest of the freaks, until one fateful night when his insomnia was eased by an unexpected strain of Mendelssohn that came wafting across the soft Manitoba summer night. Max went in search of the source of the music and was led, to his astonishment, to the miserable iron wagon at the back of the fairgrounds. In the moonlight he read three short words: SEE THE OGRE! It was then that Max, who had never before in all this time considered the matter, realized that all men, no matter what their estate, were in possession of shining immortal souls. He determined then and there to purchase the Ogre’s freedom from the owner of the sideshow, and did so with the sole valuable possession he retained.

“The key,” Tom says. “The golden key.”

Max Mayflower nods. “I struck the irons from his leg myself.”

“Thank you,” the Ogre says now, in the room under the stage of the Palace, his cheeks wet with tears.

“You’ve repaid your debt many times, old friend,” Max Mayflower tells him, patting the great horny hand. Then he resumes his story. “As I pulled the iron cuff from his poor, inflamed ankle, a man stepped out of the shadows. Between the wagons,” he says, his breath growing short now. “He was dressed in a white suit, and at first I thought it must be him. The same fellow. Even though I knew. That he was where. I’m about to go myself.”

The man explained to Max that he had, at last and without meaning to, found the lock that could be opened by the little key of gold. He explained a number of things. He said that both he and the man who had saved Max from the kidnappers belonged to an ancient and secret society of men known as the League of the Golden Key. Such men roamed the world acting, always anonymously, to procure the freedom of others, whether physical or metaphysical, emotional or economic. In this work they were tirelessly checked by agents of the Iron Chain, whose goals were opposite and sinister. It was operatives of the Iron Chain who had kidnapped Max years before.

“And tonight,” Tom says.

“Yes, my boy. And tonight it was them again. They have grown strong. Their old dream of ruling an entire nation has come to pass.”

“Germany.”

Max nods weakly and closes his eyes. The others gather close now, somber, heads bowed, to hear the rest of the tale.

The man, Max says, gave him a second golden key, and then, before returning to the shadows, charged him and the Ogre to carry on the work of liberation.

“And so we have done, have we not?” Max says.

Big Al nods, and, looking around at the sorrowing faces of the company, Tom realizes that each of them is here because he was liberated by Misterioso the Great. Omar was once the slave of a sultan in Africa; Miss Plum Blossom had toiled for years in the teeming dark sweatshops of Macao.

“What about me?” he says, almost to himself. But the old man opens his eyes.

“We found you in an orphanage in Central Europe. That was a cruel place. I only regret that at the time I could save so few of you.” He coughs, and his spittle is flecked with blood. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I meant to tell you all this. On your twenty-first birthday. But now. I charge you as I was charged. Don’t waste your life. Don’t allow your body’s weakness to be a weakness of your spirit. Repay your debt of freedom. You have the key.”

These are the Master’s last words. Omar closes his eyes. Tom buries his face in his hands and weeps for a while, and when he looks up again he sees them all looking at him.

He calls Big Al, Omar, and Miss Blossom to gather around him, then raises the key high in the air and swears a sacred oath to devote himself to secretly fighting the evil forces of the Iron Chain, in Germany or wherever they raise their ugly heads, and to working for the liberation of all who toil in chains—as the Escapist. The sound of their raised voices carries up through the complicated antique ductwork of the grand old theater, rising and echoing through the pipes until it emerges through a grate in the sidewalk, where it can be heard clearly by a couple of young men who are walking past, their collars raised against the cold October night, dreaming their elaborate dream, wishing their wish, teasing their golem into life.




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THEY HAD BEEN WALKING for hours, in and out of the streetlights, through intermittent rainfall, heedless, smoking and talking until their throats were sore. At last they seemed to run out of things to say and turned wordlessly for home, carrying the idea between them, walking along the trembling hem of reality that separated New York City from Empire City. It was late; they were hungry and tired and had smoked their last cigarette.

“What?” Sammy said. “What are you thinking?”

“I wish he was real,” said Joe, suddenly ashamed of himself. Here he was, free in a way that his family could only dream of, and what was he doing with his freedom? Walking around talking and making up a lot of nonsense about someone who could liberate no one and nothing but smudgy black marks on a piece of cheap paper. What was the point of it? Of what use was walking and talking and smoking cigarettes?

“I bet,” Sammy said. He put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Joe, I bet you do.”

They were at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, in a boisterous cloud of light and people, and Sammy said to hold on a minute. Joe stood there, hands in his pockets, helplessly ordering his thoughts with shameful felicity into the rows and columns of little boxes with which he planned to round out the first adventure of the Escapist: Tom Mayflower donning his late master’s midnight-blue mask and costume, his chest hastily emblazoned by the skilled needle of Miss Plum Blossom with a snappy gold-key emblem. Tom tracking the Nazi spy back to his lair. A full page of rousing fisticuffs, then, after bullet-dodging, head-knocking, and collapsing beams, an explosion: the nest of Iron Chain vipers wiped out. And the last panel: the company gathered at the grave of Misterioso, Tom leaning again on the crutch that will provide him with his disguise. And the ghostly face of the old man beaming down at them from the heavens.

“I got cigarettes.” Sammy pulled several handfuls of cigarette packages from a brown paper bag. “I got gum.” He held up several packs of Black Jack. “Do you like gum?”

Joe smiled. “I feel I must learn to.”

“Yeah, you’re in America now. We chew a lot of gum here.”

“What are those?” Joe pointed to the newspaper he saw tucked under Sammy’s arm.

Sammy looked serious.

“I just want to say something,” he said. “And that is, we are going to kill with this. I mean, that’s a good thing, kill. I can’t explain how I know. It’s just—it’s like a feeling I’ve had all my life, but I don’t know, when you showed up … I just knew.…” He shrugged and looked away. “Never mind. All I’m trying to say is, we are going to sell a million copies of this thing and make a pile of money, and you are going to be able to take that pile of money and pay what you need to pay to get your mother and father and brother and grandfather out of there and over here, where they will be safe. I—that’s a promise. I’m sure of it, Joe.”

Joe felt his heart swell with the longing to believe his cousin. He wiped at his eyes with the scratchy sleeve of the tweed jacket his mother had bought for him at the English Shop on the Graben.

“All right,” he said.

“And in that sense, see, he really will be real. The Escapist. He will be doing what we’re saying he can do.”

“All right,” Joe said. “Ja ja, I believe you.” It made him impatient to be consoled, as if words of comfort lent greater credence to his fears. “We will kill.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“What are those papers?”

Sammy winked and handed over a copy each of the issues for Friday, October 27, 1939, of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold and of a Czech-language daily called New Yorske Listy.

“I thought maybe you’d find something in these,” he said.

“Thank you,” Joe said, moved, regretting the way he had snapped at Sam. “And, well, thank you for what you just said.”

“That’s nothing,” said Sammy. “Wait till you hear my idea for the cover.”




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THE ACTUAL CURRENT OCCUPANTS of Palooka Studios, Jerry Glovsky, Marty Gold, and Davy O’Dowd, came home around ten, with half a roast chicken, a bottle of red wine, a bottle of seltzer, a carton of Pall Malls, and Frank Pantaleone. They walked in the front door boisterously quibbling, one of them imitating a muted trumpet; then they fell silent. They fell so quickly and completely silent, in fact, that one would have said they had been expecting intruders. Still, they were surprised to find, when they came upstairs, that Palooka Studios had been transformed, in a matter of hours, into the creative nerve center of Empire Comics. Jerry smacked Julie on the ear three times.

“What are you doing? Who said you could come in here? What is this shit?” He pushed Julie’s head to one side and picked up the piece of board on which Julie had been penciling page two of the adventure he and Sammy had cooked up for Julie’s own proud creation, a chilling tale of that Stalker of the Dark Places, that Foe of Evilness himself,

“The Black Hat,” said Jerry.

“I don’t remember saying you could use my table. Or my ink.” Marty Gold came over and snatched away the bottle of India ink into which Joe was about to dip his brush, then dragged his entire spattered taboret out of their reach, scattering a number of pens and pencils onto the rug, and completely discomposing himself. Marty was easily discomposed. He was dark, pudgy, sweated a lot, and was, Sammy had always thought, kind of a priss. But he could fake Caniff better than anyone, especially the way he handled blacks, throwing in slashes, patches, entire continents of black, far more freely than Sammy would ever have dared, and always signing his work with an extra-big letter O in Gold. “Or my brushes, for that matter.”

He snatched at the brush in Joe’s hand. A pea of ink fell onto the page Joe was inking, spoiling ten minutes’ work on the fearsome devices arrayed backstage at the Empire Palace Theatre. Joe looked at Marty. He smiled. He drew the brush back out of Marty’s reach, then presented it to him with a flourish. At the same time, he passed his other hand slowly across the hand that was holding the brush. The brush disappeared. Joe brandished his empty palms, looking surprised.

“How did you get in here?” Jerry said.

“Your girlfriend let us in,” Sammy said. “Rosa.”

“Rosa? Aw, she’s not my girlfriend.” It was stated not defensively but as a matter of fact. Jerry had been sixteen when Sammy first met him, and had already been dating three girls at a time. Such bounty was then still something of a novelty for him, and he had talked about them incessantly. Rosalyn, Dorothy, and Yetta: Sammy could still remember their names. The novelty had long since worn off; three was a dry spell now for Jerry. He was tall, with vulpine good looks, and wore his kinky, brilliantined hair combed into romantic swirls. He cultivated a reputation, without a great deal of encouragement from his friends, for having a fine sense of humor, to which he attributed, unconvincingly in Sammy’s view, his incontestable success with women. He had a “bigfoot” comedy drawing style swiped, in about equal portions, from Segar and McManus, and Sammy wasn’t entirely sure how well he’d do with straight adventure.

“If she’s not your girlfriend,” said Julie, “then why was she in your bed naked?”

“Shut up, Julie,” Sammy said.

“You saw her in my bed naked?”

“Alas, no,” said Sammy.

“I was just kidding,” said Julie.

Joe said, “Do I smell chicken?”

“These are not bad,” said Davy O’Dowd. He had close-cropped red hair and tiny green eyes, and was built like a jockey. He was from Hell’s Kitchen, and had lost part of an ear in a fight when he was twelve; that was about all Sammy knew about him. The sight of the pink nubbin of his left ear always made Sammy a little sick, but Davy was proud of it. Lifting the sheet of tracing paper that covered each page, he stood perusing the five pages of “The Legend of the Golden Key” that Sammy and Joe had already completed. As he looked each page over, he passed it to Frank Pantaleone, who grunted. Davy said, “It’s like a Superman-type thing.”

“It’s better than Superman.” Sammy got down off his stool and went over to help them admire his work.

“Who inked this?” said Frank, tall, stooped, from Bensonhurst, sad-jowled, and already, though not yet twenty-two, losing his hair. In spite of, or perhaps in concert with, his hangdog appearance, he was a gifted draftsman who had won a citywide art prize in his senior year at Music and Art and had taken classes at Pratt. There were good teachers at Pratt, professional painters and illustrators, serious craftsmen; Frank thought about art, and of himself as an artist, the way Joe did. From time to time he got a job as a set painter on Broadway; his father was a big man in the stagehands’ union. He had worked up an adventure strip of his own, The Travels of Marco Polo, a Sunday-only panel on which he lavished rich, Fosterian detail, and King Features was said to be interested. “Was it you?” he asked Joe. “This is good work. You did the pencils, too, didn’t you? Klayman couldn’t do this.”

“I laid it out,” Sammy said. “Joe didn’t even know what a comic book was until this morning.” Sammy pretended to be insulted, but he was so proud of Joe that, at this word of praise from Frank Pantaleone, he felt a little giddy.

“Joe Kavalier,” said Joe, offering Frank his hand.

“My cousin. He just got in from Japan.”

“Yeah? Well what did he do with my brush? That’s a one-dollar red sable Windsor and Newton,” said Marty. “Milton Caniff gave me that brush.”

“So you have always claimed,” said Frank. He studied the remaining pages, chewing on his puffy lower lip, his eyes cold and lively with more than mere professional interest. You could see he was thinking that, given a chance, he could do better. Sammy couldn’t believe his luck. Yesterday his dream of publishing comic books had been merely that: a dream even less credible than the usual run of his imaginings. Today he had a pair of costumed heroes and a staff that might soon include a talent like Frank Pantaleone. “This is really not bad at all, Klayman.”

“The Black … Hat,” Jerry said again. He shook his head. “What is he, crime-fighter by night, haberdasher by day?”

“He’s a wealthy playboy,” said Joe gravely.

“Go draw your bunny,” Julie said. “I’m getting paid seven-fifty a page. Isn’t that right, Sam?”

“Absolutely.”

“Seven-fifty!” Marty said. With mock servility, he scooted the taboret back toward Sammy and Joe and replaced the bottle of ink at Joe’s elbow. “Please, Joe-san, use my ink.”

“Who’s paying that kind of money?” Jerry wanted to know. “Not Donenfeld. He wouldn’t hire you.”

“Donenfeld is going to be begging me to work for him,” said Sammy, uncertain who Donenfeld was. He went on to explain the marvelous opportunity that awaited them all if only they chose to seize it. “Now, let’s see.” Sammy adopted his most serious expression, licked the point of a pencil, and scratched some quick calculations on a scrap of paper. “Plus the Black Hat and the Escapist, I need—thirty-six, forty-eight—three more twelve-page stories. That’ll make sixty pages, plus the inside covers, plus the way I understand it we have to have two pages of just plain words.” So that their products might qualify as magazines, and therefore be mailed second-class, comic book publishers made sure to toss in the minimum two pages of pure text required by postal law—usually in the form of a featherweight short story, written in sawdust prose. “Sixty-four. But, okay, here’s the thing. Every character has to wear a mask. That’s the gimmick. This comic book is going to be called Masked Man. That means no Chinamen, no private eyes, no two-fisted old sea dogs.”

“All masks,” said Marty. “Good gimmick.”

“Empire, huh?” said Frank. “Frankly—”

“Frankly—frankly—frankly—frankly—frankly,” they all chimed in. Frank said “frankly” a lot. They liked to call his attention to it.

“—I’m a little surprised,” he continued, unruffled. “I’m surprised Jack Ashkenazy is paying seven-fifty a page. Are you sure that’s what he said?”

“Sure, I’m sure. Plus, oh, yeah, how could I forget. We’re putting Adolf Hitler on the cover. That’s the other gimmick. And Joe here,” he said, nodding at his cousin but looking at Frank, “is going to draw that one all by himself.”

“I?” said Joe. “You want me to draw Hitler on the cover of the magazine?”

“Getting punched in the jaw, Joe.” Sammy threw a big, slow punch at Marty Gold, stopping an inch shy of his chin. “Wham!”

“Let me see this,” said Jerry. He took a page from Frank and lifted the tracing-paper flap. “He looks just like Superman.”

“He does not.”

“Hitler. Your villain is going to be Adolf Hitler.” Jerry looked at Sammy, eyebrows lifted high, his amazement not entirely respectful.

“Just on the cover.”

“No way are they going to go for that.”

“Not Jack Ashkenazy,” Frank agreed.

“What’s so bad about Hitler?” said Davy. “Just kidding.”

“Maybe you ought to call it Racy Dictator,” said Marty.

“They’ll go for it! Get out of here,” Sammy cried, kicking them out of their own studio. “Give me those.” Sammy grabbed the pages away from Jerry, clutched them to his chest, and climbed back onto his stool. “Fine, listen, all of you, do me a favor, all right? You don’t want to be in on this, good, then stay out of it. It’s all the same to me.” He made a disdainful survey of the Rathole: John Garfield, living high in a big silk suit, taking a look around the cold-water flat where his goody-goody boyhood friend has ended up. “You probably already have more work than you can handle.”

Jerry turned to Marty. “He’s employing sarcasm.”

“I noticed that.”

“I’m not sure I could take being bossed around by this wiseass. I’ve been having problems with this wiseass for years.”

“I can see how you might.”

“If Tokyo Joe, here, will ink me,” said Frank Pantaleone, “I’m in.” Joe nodded his assent. “Then I’m in. Fra—To tell you the truth, I’ve been having a few ideas in this direction, anyway.”

“Will you lend one to me?” said Davy. Frank shrugged. “Then I’m in, too.”

“All right, all right,” said Jerry at last, waving his hands in surrender. “You already took over the whole damned Pit anyway.” He started back down the stairs. “I’ll make us some coffee.” He turned back and pointed a finger at Joe. “But stay away from my food. That’s my chicken.”

“And they can’t sleep here, either,” said Marty Gold.

“And you have to tell us how’s come if you’re from Japan, you could be Sammy’s cousin and look like such a Jew,” Davy O’Dowd said.

“We’re in Japan,” Sammy said. “We’re everywhere.”

“Jujitsu,” Joe reminded him.

“Good point,” said Davy O’Dowd.




11 (#ulink_ea3c28d0-3392-51cd-b387-0fab39395c59)


FOR TWO DAYS, none of them slept. They drank Jerry’s coffee until it was gone, then brought up cardboard trays of sour black stuff from the all-night Greek on Eighth Avenue, in blue-and-white paper cups. As promised, Jerry was cruel in his administration of the chicken, but another half was fetched, along with bags of sandwiches, hot dogs, apples, and doughnuts; they cleared the hospital-pantry of three cans of sardines, a can of spinach, a box of Wheaties, four bouillon cubes, and some old prunes. Joe’s appetite was still stranded somewhere east of Kobe, but Sammy bought a loaf of bread that Joe spread with butter and devoured over the course of the weekend. They went through four cartons of cigarettes. They blared the radio, when the stations signed off they played records, and in the quiet moments between they drove one another mad with their humming. Those who had girlfriends broke dates.

It became clear fairly quickly that Sammy, deprived of his bible of clipped panels and swiped poses, was the least talented artist in the group. Within twelve hours of commencing his career as a comic book artist, he retired. He told Joe to go ahead and lay out the rest of the artwork for the Escapist story by himself, guided, if he needed a guide, by some of the issues of Action and Detective and Wonder that littered the floor of the Pit. Joe picked up a copy of Detective and began to leaf through it.

“So the idea for me is to draw very badly like these fellows.”

“These guys aren’t trying to draw bad, Joe. Some of what they do is okay. There’s a guy, Craig Flessel, he’s really pretty good. Try to keep an open mind. Look at this.” Sammy grabbed a copy of Action and opened it to a page where Joe Shuster showed Superman freeing Lois Lane from the grasp of some big-shouldered crooks—war profiteers, as Sammy recalled. The backgrounds were reduced to their essence, hieroglyphs signifying laboratory, log cabin, craggy mountaintop. The chins were jutting, the musculature conventionalized, Lois’s eyes plumed slits. “It’s simple. It’s stripped down. If you sat there and filled every panel with all your little bats and puddles and stained-glass windows, and drew in every muscle and every little tooth and based it on Michelangelo and cut your own ear off over it, that would be bad. The main thing is, you use pictures to tell a good story.”

“The stories are good?”

“Sometimes the stories are good. Our story is really fucking good, if I do say so myself.”

“Fucking,” Joe said, letting it out slowly like a satisfying drag.

“Fucking what?”

Joe shrugged. “I was just saying it.”

Sammy’s real talents, it developed, lay elsewhere than in the pencil or brush. This became clear to everyone after Davy O’Dowd returned to the Pit from a brief conference with Frank over ideas for Davy’s character. Frank was already wrapped up in his own idea, or lack thereof, working at the kitchen table and, in spite of his promise to Davy, could not be bothered. Davy came in from the kitchen scratching his head.

“My guy flies,” said Davy O’Dowd. “That I know.”

Joe shot a look at Sammy, who clapped a hand to his forehead.

“Oy,” he said.

“What?”

“He flies, huh?”

“Something wrong with that? Frank says this is all about wishful figments.”

“Huh?”

“Wishful figments. You know, like it’s all what some little kid wishes he could do. Like for you, hey, you don’t want to have a gimpy leg no more. So, boom, you give your guy a magic key and he can walk.”

“Huh.” Sammy had not chosen to look at the process of character creation in quite so stark a manner. He wondered what other wishes he might have subsumed unknowingly into the character of lame Tom Mayflower.

“I always wished I could fly,” Davy said. “I guess a lot of guys must have wished that.”

“It’s a common fantasy, yeah.”

“It seems to me that makes it something you can’t have too many of,” Jerry Glovsky put in.

“All right, then, so he can fly.” Sammy looked at Joe. “Joe?”

Joe glanced up briefly from his work. “Why.”

“Why?”

Sammy nodded. “Why can he fly? Why does he want to? And how come he uses his power of flight to fight crime? Why doesn’t he just become the world’s best second-story man?”

Davy rolled his eyes. “What is this, comic book catechism? I don’t know.”

“Take one thing at a time. How does he do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stop saying you don’t know.”

“He has big wings.”

“Think of something else. A rocket pack? Antigravity boots? An autogyro hat? Mythological powers of the winds? Interstellar dust? Blood transfusion from a bee? Hydrogen in his veins?”

“Slow down, slow down,” Davy said. “Jesus, Sam.”

“I’m good at this shit. Are you scared?”

“Just embarrassed for you.”

“Take a number. Okay, it’s a fluid. An antigravity fluid in his veins, he has this little machine he wears on his chest that pumps the stuff into him.”

“He does.”

“Yeah, he needs the stuff to stay alive, see? The flying part is just a, like an unexpected side benefit. He’s a scientist. A doctor. He was working on some kind of, say, artificial blood. For the battlefield, you know. Synth-O-Blood, it’s called. Maybe it’s, shit, I don’t know, maybe it’s made out of ground-up iron meteorites from outer space. Because blood is iron-based. Whatever. But then some criminal types, no, some enemy spies, they break into his laboratory and try to steal it. When he won’t let them, they shoot him and his girl and leave them for dead. It’s too late for the girl, okay, how sad, but our guy manages to get himself hooked up to this pump thing just before he dies. I mean, he does die, medically speaking, but this stuff, this liquid meteorite, it brings him back from the very brink. And when he comes to—”

“He can fly!” Davy looked happily around the room.

“He can fly, and he goes after the spies that killed his girl, and now he can really do what he always wanted to, which was help the forces of democracy and peace. But he can never forget that he has a weakness, that without his Synth-O-Blood pump, he’s a dead man. He can never stop being … being …” Sammy snapped his fingers, searching for a name.

“Almost Dead Flying Guy,” suggested Jerry.

“Blood Man,” said Julie.

“The Swift,” Marty Gold said. “Fastest bird in the world.”

“I draw really nice wings,” said Davy O’Dowd. “Nice and feathery.”

“Oh, all right, damn it,” Sammy said. “They can just be there for show. We’ll call him the Swift.”

“I like it.”

“He can never stop being the Swift,” Sammy said. “Not for one goddamned minute of the day.” He stopped and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. His throat was sore and his lips were dry and he felt as if he had been talking for a week. Jerry, Marty, and Davy all looked at one another, and then Jerry got down from his stool and went into his bedroom. When he came out, he was carrying an old Remington typewriter.

“When you’re done with Davy’s, do mine,” he said.

Jerry did manage to slip out for an hour, late Saturday, to return Rosa Saks’s purse to her, and then again on Sunday afternoon, for two hours, returning with the crooked mark on his neck of the teeth of a girl named Mae. As for Frank Pantaleone, he disappeared sometime around midnight on Friday and eventually turned up fully dressed in the empty bathtub, behind the shower curtain, drawing board against his knees. When he finished a page, he would bellow out, “Boy!” and Sammy would run it upstairs to Joe, who did not look up from the shining trail of his brush until just before two o’clock on Monday morning.

“Beauteeful,” said Sammy. He had been finished with his scripts for several hours but had stayed awake, drinking coffee until his eyeballs quivered, so that Joe would have company while he finished the cover he had designed. This was the first word either had said for at least an hour. “Let’s go see if there’s anything left to eat.”

Joe climbed down from his stool and carried the cover over to the foot-high pile of illustration board and tracing paper that would be the first issue of their comic book. He hitched up his trousers, worked his head around a few times on the creaky pivot of his neck, and followed Sammy over to the kitchen. Here they found and proceeded to devour a light supper consisting of the thrice-picked-over demi-carcass of a by now quite hoary chicken, nine soda crackers, one sardine, some milk, as well as a yellow doorstop of adamantine cheese they found wedged, under the milk bottle, between the slats of the shelf outside the window. Frank Pantaleone and Julie Glovsky had long since gone home to Brooklyn; Jerry, Davy, and Marty were asleep in their rooms. The cousins chewed their snack in silence. Joe stared out the window onto the blasted backyard, black with ice. His heavy-lidded eyes were ringed with deep shadows. He pressed his high forehead against the cold glass of the window.

“Where am I?” he said.

“In New York City,” said Sammy.

“New York City.” He thought it over. “New York City, U.S.A.” He closed his eyes. “That is not possible.”

“You all right?” Sammy put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Joe Kavalier.”

“Sam Clay.”

Sammy smiled. Once again, as when he had first enclosed the pair of newly minted American names in a neat inked rectangle of partnership on page 1 of the Escapist’s debut, Sammy’s belly suffused with an uncomfortable warmth, and he felt his cheeks color. It was not merely the blush of pride, nor of the unacknowledged delight he took in thus emblematizing his growing attachment to Joe; he was also moved by a grief, half affectionate, half ashamed, for the loss of Professor von Clay that he had never before allowed himself to feel. He gave Joe’s shoulder a squeeze.

“We’ve done something great, Joe, do you realize that?”

“Big money,” said Joe. His eyes opened.

“That’s right,” said Sammy. “Big money.”

“Now I remember.”

In addition to the Escapist and the Black Hat, their book now boasted the opening adventure, inked and lettered by Marty Gold, in the career of a third hero, Jerry Glovsky’s Snowman, essentially the Green Hornet in a blue-and-white union suit, complete with a Korean houseboy, a gun that fired “freezing gas,” and a roadster that Sammy’s text described as “ice-blue like the Snowman’s evil-detecting eyes.” Jerry had managed to rein in his bigfoot style, letting it emerge usefully in the rendering of Fan, the bucktoothed but hard-fighting houseboy, and of the Snowman’s slavering, claw-fingered, bemonocled adversary, the dreaded Obsidian Hand. They also had Davy O’Dowd’s first installment of the Swift, with his lush, silky Alex Raymond wings, and Radio Wave, drawn by Frank Pantaleone and inked by Joe Kavalier with, Sammy was forced to admit, mixed results. This was Sammy’s own fault. He had yielded, in the creation of Radio Wave, to Frank’s experience and prowess with a pencil, not daring to offer him assistance in the development or plotting of the strip. This act of deference resulted in a dazzlingly drawn, tastefully costumed, sumptuously muscled, and beautifully inked hero with no meddling girlfriend, quarrelsome sidekick, ironic secret identity, bumbling police commissioner, Achilles’ heel, corps of secret allies, or personal quest for revenge; only the hastily explained, well-rendered, and dubious ability to transmit himself through the air “on the invisible rails of the airwaves,” and leap unexpectedly from the grille of a Philco into the hideout of a gang of jazz-loving jewel thieves. It was soon apparent to Sammy that once they were wise to him, all the crooks in Radio Wave’s hometown need simply turn off their radios in order to thrive unmolested, but by the time he had a chance to look the thing over, Joe had already inked half of it.

Julie had done a nice job on his Hat story, illustrating one of Sammy’s retooled, custom-fitted Shadow plots in a flat, slightly cartoony style not too different from that of Superman’s Joe Shuster, only with better buildings and cars; and Sammy was satisfied with the Escapist adventure, though Joe’s layouts were, to be honest, a little static and overly pretty, and then rushed and even scratchy-looking at the very end.




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