The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (22 page)

"So it's to be comic books, now, is it?" he said to Anapol as they shook hands. "The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward." He took his pipe from his hip pocket.

"Sammy Klayman and his cousin Joe Kavalier," Anapol said. He put a hand on Sammy's shoulder. "Sammy, here, is pretty much responsible for this whole thing. Aren't you, Sammy?"

Sammy had the shakes. His teeth were chattering. He wanted to pick up something heavy and spray Anapol's brains across his blotter. He wanted to run weeping from the room. He just stood there, staring at Anapol until the big man looked away.

"You boys sure you want to work for me?" said Deasey. Before they could answer, he gave a nasty little chuckle and shook his head. He held a match to the bowl of his pipe and took six small sips of cherry smoke. "Well, let's have a look."

"Sit down, George, please," said Anapol, his normal saturnine hauteur giving way, as usual, in the proximity of a gentile with a diploma to arrant toadyism. "I think the boys here did a very nice job." Deasey sat down and dragged the pile of pages toward his right side. Ashkenazy pressed in close behind to peer over Deasey's shoulder. As Deasey lifted the protective sheet of tracing paper on the cover art, Sammy glanced over at Joe. His cousin was sitting stiffly in his chair, hands in his lap, watching the editor's face. Deasey's air of ruined integrity and confidence in his own judgments had made an impression on Joe.

"Who did this cover?" Deasey looked at the signature, then over the tops of his round glasses at Joe. "Kavalier, is that you?"

Joe got to his feet, literally holding his hat in his hand, and extended the other to Deasey.

"Josef Kavalier," Joe said. "How do you do."

"I'm fine, Mr. Kavalier." They shook. "And you're hired."

"Thank you," Joe said. He sat back down and smiled. He was just happy to get the job. He had no idea what Sammy was going through, the humiliation he was undergoing. All of his boasting to his mother! His strutting around Julie and the others! How in God's name would he ever be able to face Frank Pantaleone again?

Deasey set the cover art to his left, reached for the first page, and started to read. When he finished, he put it under Joe's cover and took the next page. He didn't look up again until the entire pile was on his left side and he had read through to the end.

"You put this together, son?" He smiled at Sammy. "You know, don't you, that this is pure trash. Superman is pure trash, too, of course. Batman, the Blue Beetle. The whole menagerie."

"You're right," said Sammy through his teeth. "Trash sells."

"By God, it does," said Deasey. "I can testify to that personally."

"Is it
all
trash, George?" said Ashkenazy. "I like that guy that comes out of the radio." He turned to Sammy. "How'd you come up with that?"

"Trash I don't mind," said Anapol. "Is it the same kind of trash as Superman, that's what I want to know."

"Might I confer with you gentlemen in private?" said Deasey.

"Excuse us, boys," Anapol said.

Sammy and Joe went and sat in the chairs outside Anapol's office.

Sammy tried to listen through the glass. Deasey could be heard murmuring gravely but indecipherably. Sometimes Anapol interrupted him with a question. After a few minutes, Ashkenazy came out, winked at Sammy and Joe, and left the Empire offices. When he came back a few minutes later, he was carrying a thin rattling sheaf of paper. It looked like a legal contract. Sammy's left leg started to twitch. Ashkenazy stopped in front of the door to Anapol's office and gestured grandly for them to enter.

"Gentlemen?" he said.

Sammy and Joe followed him in.

"We want to buy the Escapist," said Anapol. "We'll pay you a hundred and fifty dollars for the rights."

Joe looked at Sammy, eyebrows raised. Big money.

"What else?" said Sammy, though he had been hoping for a hundred at most.

"The other characters, the backups, we'll pay eighty-five dollars for the lot of them," Anapol continued. Seeing Sammy's face fall a little, he added, "It would have been twenty dollars apiece, but Jack felt that Mr. Radio was worth a little extra."

"That's just for the rights, kid," said Ashkenazy. "We'll also take you both on, Sammy for seventy-five dollars a week and Joe at six dollars a page. George wants you for an assistant, Sam. Says he sees real potential in you."

"You certainly know your trash," Deasey said.

"Plus we'll pay Joe, here, twenty dollars for every cover he does. And for all your pals and associates, five dollars a page."

"Though of course I'll have to meet them first," said Deasey.

"That's not enough," said Sammy. "I told them the page rate would be eight dollars."

"Eight dollars!" said Ashkenazy. "I wouldn't pay eight dollars to John Steinback."

"We'll pay five," said Anapol gently. "And we want a new cover."

"You do," Sammy said. "I see."

"This hitting Hitler thing, Sammy, it makes us nervous."

"What? What is this?" Joe's attention had wandered a little during the financial discussions—he had heard one hundred and fifty dollars, six dollars a page, twenty per cover. Those numbers sounded very good to him. But now he thought he had just heard Sheldon Anapol declaring that he would not use the cover in which Hitler got his jaw broken. Nothing that Joe had painted had ever satisfied him more. The composition was natural and simple and modern; the two figures, the circular dais, the blue and white badge of the sky. The figures had weight and mass; the foreshortening of Hitler's outflying body was daring and a little off, but in a way that was somehow convincing. The draping of the clothes was right; the Escapist's uniform looked like a uniform, like jersey cloth bunched in places but tight-fitting, and not merely blue-colored flesh. But most of all, the pleasure that Joe derived from administering this brutal beating was intense and durable and strangely redemptive. At odd moments over the past few days, he had consoled himself with the thought that somehow a copy of this comic book might eventually make its way to Berlin and cross the desk of Hitler himself, that he would look at the painting into which Joe had channeled all his pent-up rage and rub his jaw, and check with his tongue for a missing tooth.

"We're not in a war with Germany," Ashkenazy said, shaking his finger at Sammy. "It's illegal to make fun of a king, or a president, or somebody like that, if you're not at war with them. We could get sued."

"May I suggest that you keep Germany in the story if you change the name and don't call them Germans. Or Nazis," said Deasey. "But you'll have to figure out a different kind of image for the cover. If not, I can give it to Pickering or Clemm or one of my other regular cover artists."

Sammy looked over at Joe, who stood looking down, nodding his head a little bit, as if he should have known all along that it would come to something like this. When he looked up again, however, his face was composed, his voice measured and calm.

"I like the cover," he said.

"Joe," said Sammy. "Just think about it a minute. We can figure something else out. Something just as good. I know it's important to you. It's important to me, too. I think it ought to be important to these gentlemen, too, and frankly I'm a little ashamed of them right now"—he shot Anapol a dirty look—"but just think about it a minute. That's all I'm saying."

"I do not need to do that, Sam. I will not agree to the other cover, no matter."

Sammy nodded, then turned back to Sheldon Anapol. He closed his eyes, very tight, as though about to jump into a swiftly moving ice-choked stream. His faith in himself had been shaken. He didn't know what was right, or whose welfare he ought to consider. Would it be helping Joe if they walked out over this? If they stayed and compromised, would it be hurting him? Would it be helping the Kavaliers in Prague? He opened his eyes and looked straight at Anapol.

"We can't do it," said Sammy, though it cost him great effort. "No, I'm sorry, that has to be the cover." He appealed to Deasey. "Mr. Deasey, that cover is dynamite and you know it."

"Who wants dynamite?" said Ashkenazy. "Dynamite blows up. A guy could lose a finger."

"We're not changing the cover, boss," Sammy said, and then, bringing to bear all his powers of dissimulated pluck and false bravado, he picked up one of the portfolios and began filling it with pieces of illustration board. He did not allow himself to think about what he was doing. "The Escapist fights evil." He tied the portfolio shut and handed it to Joe, still without looking at his cousin's face. He picked up another portfolio. "Hitler is evil."

"Calm down, young man," said Anapol. "Jack, maybe we can push the page rate for the others up to six,
nu?
Six dollars a page, Sammy. And eight for your cousin here. Come, Mr. Kavalier,
eight dollars a page!
Don't be foolish."

Sammy handed the second portfolio to Joe and started on the third.

"They aren't all
your
characters, don't forget," said George Deasey. "Maybe your friends would see things differently."

"Come on, Joe," said Sammy. "You heard what he said before. Every publisher in town wants in on this thing. We'll be all right."

They turned and walked out to the elevator.

"Six and a half!" called Anapol. "Hey, what about my
radios?"

Joe looked back over his shoulder, then at Sammy, who had settled his snub features into an impassive mask. Sammy pushed the down button with a determined jab of his finger. Joe inclined his head toward his cousin.

"Sammy, is this a trick?" he whispered. "Or are we serious?" Sammy thought it over. The elevator chimed. The operator threw open the door.

"You tell me," Sammy said.

PART III

THE

FUNNY-BOOK WAR

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I just finished
Radio,"
Joe said glumly.

"So what's the matter?"

"It stinks."

"Don't tell me it stinks. I don't like to hear you talk like that."

"I know."

"You're too hard on yourself."

"Not really."

"Does it stink?"

"It is all baloney."

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

The previous January,
Amazing Midget Radio Comics
had debuted with a sold-out print run of three hundred thousand.
[2]
^[2]
On the cover of the issue now on the stand—destined to be the first of the Empire titles (there were currently three) to break the million mark in circulation— the words "Amazing" and "Midget," which had been shrinking each month until they were a vestigial ant-high smudge in the upper left-hand corner, had been dropped forever, and along with them the whole idea of promoting novelties through comics. In September, Anapol had found himself compelled by the implacable arguments of good sense to sell off the inventory and accounts of Empire Novelties, Inc., to Johnson-Smith Co., the country's largest dealer in cheap novelties. It was this epochal sale and its proceeds that had financed the two-week trip to Miami Beach from which Anapol had just returned, red-faced and shining like a dime. He had not taken a vacation, as he had informed everyone several times before his departure, in fourteen years.

"How was Florida?" Joe said.

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

"What did you do?"

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

"A good cardplayer?"

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

"Huh."

"Yes, I was surprised, too."

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

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

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

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

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

Within the covers of
Radio Comics
#4, it was revealed that the League of the Golden Key, depicted for the first time in its "secret mountain sanctum at the roof of the world," had called, in this time of great urgency, for a rare convention of the scattered masters of the globe. There was a Chinese master, a Dutch master, a Polish master, a master in a fur hood who might perhaps have been a Lapp. The assembled masters seemed mostly to be elderly, even gnomelike men. All agreed that our guy, Tom Mayflower, though he was new at the game and still young, was fighting the hardest and accomplishing the most of any of them. It was therefore voted to declare him "an emergency CHAMPION OF FREEDOM." The power of Tom Mayflower's key was increased twentyfold. He found that he now could peel the skin from an airplane, lasso a submarine with a steel cable borrowed from a nearby bridge, or tie the obligatory superheroic love knot in a battery of antiaircraft guns. He also developed an improvement on the old Ching Ling Soo trick of catching bullets—the Escapist could catch artillery shells. It hurt, and he would be knocked flat, but he could do it, staggering to his feet afterward and saying something like "I'd like to see Gabby Hartnett do
that!"
From that point on, it had been total war. The Escapist and his gang fought on land, at sea, in the skies of Fortress Europa, and the punishment taken by the minions of the Iron Chain grew operatically intense. It soon become clear to Sammy, however, that if Joe's monthly allotment of pages was not increased—if he was not kept fighting, round the clock—his cousin might be overcome by the imprisoning futility of his rage. Around this time, fortunately, the first complete circulation figures for
Radio Comics
#2 had come in at well in excess of half a million. Sammy immediately made the natural proposal of adding a second title to the line; Anapol and Ashkenazy, after the briefest of conferences, authorized the addition of two, to be called
Triumph Comics
and
The Monitor.
Sammy and Joe went for a series of long strolls, in and out of the streets of Manhattan and Empire City, talking and dreaming and walking in circles in the prescribed manner of golem makers. When they returned from the last of these arcane strolls, they had brought forth the Monitor, Mr. Machine Gun, and Dr. E. Pluribus Hewnham, the Scientific American, filling out both books with characters drawn by the now regular Empire stable: Gold, the Glovskys, Pantaleone. Both titles had, as Sammy had once predicted, killed; and Joe had soon found himself responsible every month for more than two hundred pages of art and wholesale imaginary slaughter on a scale that, many years later, could still horrify the good Dr. Fredric Wertham when he set about to probe at the violent foundations of the comics.