The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (12 page)

"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.