The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (40 page)

The only bright prospect for the day was that he and Joe had also been invited to come down to the radio studio to meet the cast of
The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist,
in run-throughs for the debut next Monday afternoon. Hitherto, Burns, Baggot DeWinter, the advertising agency, had not involved Sammy or Joe or any of the Empire people in the production, though Sammy had heard that several of the first few episodes were being adapted directly from the comic books. Once, Sammy had met the show's writers by chance, as they were coming out of Sardi's. They knew him from the unflattering drawing that had run in the
Saturday Evening Post,
and stopped him to say hello and shed the gentle luster of their scorn upon him. They all seemed to Sammy like college-boy types, with pipes and bow ties. Only one would admit to ever having read a comic book, and probably all of them considered the form beneath contempt. One had written previously for
Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons,
another for
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.

But there was to be a party on Monday after the first broadcast, to which Sammy and Joe were invited; and on this balmy Friday, they went over to Radio City to get a look, if that was the right way to put it, at the vocal embodiments of their characters.

"Shabbes dinner," Joe said, as they passed the Time-Life Building. Joe claimed to have once seen Ernest Hemingway coming out of it, and Sammy looked for the writer as they went by.

"I saw him, I tell you."

"Sure you did. Yes, Shabbes dinner. At my mother's. Bad food. House like an oven. You don't want to miss that."

"I have a date with Rosa," Joe said. "I think we're supposed to eat with her father at the house."

"You do that almost every night! Come on, Joe, don't make me go alone. I'll go mad, mad, I tell you."

"Rosa is right," Joe said.

"As usual, but this time about what?"

"You need a girl."

It was cool and dark in the lobby of the RCA Building. The soft knocking of shoe heels on stone floors and the somber, reassuring pomposity of the Sert and Brangwyn murals allowed Sammy to experience what he dimly recognized as tranquility for the first time all day. A chubby young fellow was waiting for them at the guard's desk, nibbling on a manicured finger. He introduced himself as Larry Sneed, assistant to the producer George Chandler, and showed them how to sign in and pin passes to their jackets.

"Mr. Chandler's really glad you could make it over," Sneed said over his shoulder.

"It was nice of him to invite us."

"Well, he's become quite a fan of your work."

"He reads it?"

"Oh, he studies it like the Bible."

They got out of the elevator, went down a stairwell and across a hall into another stairwell, this one gray cinder-block and iron stairs, then into a dingy white corridor, past the closed door of a studio with the on air light illuminated, left, and into another studio. It was cool and smoky and dim. At one end of the big yellow room, three casually dressed groups of actors, holding scripts, were loitering around a trio of microphones. In the middle of the room, two men sat at a small table, listening. Pages of script lay everywhere, scattered on the ground and blown into drifts in the corners. There was a gunshot. Sammy was the only one in the room who jumped. He looked wildly around. Three men stood off to the left in the midst of an assortment of kitchen utensils, lumber, and scrap metal. One of them was holding a gun. They were all sweating profusely in spite of the air-conditioning.

"Ooh, got me!" cried Larry Sneed. He clutched his silk-fronted pot-belly and spun around. "Ha ha ha." He pretended to laugh. The actor who was delivering his line stopped talking, and everyone turned to look. They seemed to welcome the distraction, Sammy thought, except for the director, who scowled. "Hi, folks, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Mr. Chandler, here's a couple of bright young fellows like me who want to meet our marvelous cast. Mr. Sam Clay and Mr. Joe Kavalier."

"Hello, boys," said one of the two men at the center table, rising from his chair. He was about the same age as Sammy's father would have been, but tall and refined, with a trim Vandyke and extra-big black glasses that made him look, Sammy thought, like a man of science. He shook their hands. "This is Mr. Cobb, our director." Cobb nodded. Like Chandler, he was wearing a suit and tie. "And this ragged bunch is our cast. Forgive their appearance, but they've been rehearsing all week." Chandler pointed to the actors around the microphones, anointing each one from a distance with a momentary dab of his finger as he gave the name and role. "That's Miss Verna Kaye, our Plum Blossom; Pat Moran, our Big Al; and Howard Fine as the evil Kommandant X. Over there may I present Miss Helen Portola, our Poison Rose; Ewell Conrad as Omar; Eddie Fontaine as Pedro; and our announcer, Mr. Bill Parris."

"But Poison Rose is dead," said Joe.

"We haven't killed her on the radio yet," said Chandler. "And that big, handsome fellow over there is our Escapist, Mr. Tracy Bacon."

Sammy was too distracted just then to notice Mr. Tracy Bacon.

"Pedro?" he
said.

"The old Portuguese stagehand." Chandler nodded. "For comic relief. The sponsor felt we ought to lighten things up a little."

"Nize to mitts your ekwentinz," said Eddie Fontaine, with a tip of his imaginary Portuguese hat.

"And old Max Mayflower?" Sammy wanted to know. "And the man from the League of the Golden Key? You aren't having the League?"

"We tried it with the League, didn't we, Larry?"

"Yes, we did, Mr. Chandler."

"When you're debuting a series, it's better to get right down to business," said Cobb. "Skip the preliminaries."

"We take care of all that with the intro," Chandler explained. "Bill?"

"Armed with superb physical and mental training," Bill Parris began, "a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats—"

The whole cast chimed in for the tag.

"And coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!"

"This—is—the Escapist!"

Everyone laughed, except Joe, who clapped his hands. But for some reason, Sammy was irritated.

"And what about Tom Mayflower?" he persisted. "Who's going to be him?"

A cheerful, scratchy teenage voice rang out from the corner.

"I'm going to be Tom, Mr. Clay! And golly, I'm awful darn excited about it!"

That busted everybody up again. Tracy Bacon was looking right at Sammy, grinning, his cheeks flushed, mostly with pleasure, it seemed, at the astonished look on Sammy's face. Bacon was such a perfect Escapist that one would have thought he had been cast to play the role in a film, not on the air. He was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a dimple in his chin and glossy blond hair fitted to the top of his head like a polished brass plate. He wore an oxford shirt unbuttoned over a ribbed undershirt, blue jeans, and socks with no shoes. His muscles were not as large, perhaps, as the Escapist's, but they were distinctly visible. Clean-favored, thought Sammy, and imperially slim.

"Please, gentlemen, take a seat," said Chandler. "Larry, find them a place to sit down."

"That guy looks exactly like the Escapist," said Joe. "It gives me the creep."

"I know," said Sammy. "And he sounds just like Tom Mayflower."

They sat in the corner and watched the rehearsal. The script had been adapted—very freely—from Sammy's third Escapist story, which had introduced the character of Miss Plum Blossom's evil sister Poison Rose, a straight steal from Caniff's Dragon Lady whom Sammy, embarrassed by the blatancy of his theft, had killed off in
Radio
#4. In the Grand Opera House on the Bund in Shangpo, Rose had thrown herself between a bullet meant for Tom Mayflower and the pistol of a Razi agent with whom she had, until that moment, been allied. But the radio boys had revived her, and Sammy had to admit she certainly appeared to be well. Helen Portola was the only cast member not dressed casually, and in her bright green poplin dress she looked cool and refined and appetizing. When she growled her diabolical lines at the Escapist, whom she had rendered powerless with the stolen, legendary Eye of the Moon Opal, she looked at Tracy Bacon with accurate love in her eyes and made it sound like flirtation. Walter Winchell had already linked their names in his column.

On the whole, Sammy found it a depressing couple of hours. It was his first experience, though by no means his last, with having one of his creations appropriated and made to serve the purposes of another writer, and it upset him to such a degree that he was ashamed. It was all pretty much the same stuff—except for Pedro, of course—and yet somehow it was all totally different. It all seemed to have a lighter, more playful tone than in the comic books, no doubt in part because of the audible brilliance of Tracy Bacon's smile. The dialogue sounded a lot like the dialogue on
Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons.
This was logical, but somehow it, too, depressed Sammy. He had written dialogue as bad—although, at Deasey's suggestion, he had been studying the work of snappy dialogue writers like Irwin Shaw and Ben Hecht—but spoken aloud, it sounded worse. All the characters seemed to be slow on the uptake, vaguely retarded. Sammy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Joe got lost in the proceedings for a while, but then abruptly seemed to snap out of it. He leaned over.

"Isn't this great?" he said. He was whispering now, which meant that he was up to something. He looked at his watch. "Shit, five o'clock. I have to go, gate."

"You have to go, 'gate'?"

"Yes, 'gate.' It's like 'man.' 'What's happening, gate?' 'Don't be late, gate.' You never say 'gate'?"

"No, that's something I never say," Sammy said. "Only Negroes say that, Joe. Ethel's expecting us around six."

"Yes, okay. Six."

"That's in an hour."

"Okay."

"You're coming, aren't you?" said Sammy.

Mr. Cobb turned around in his chair and scowled at them again. They covered their mouths. Joe nodded his head toward the door. Sammy got up and followed him out into the hall. Joe closed the heavy studio door and leaned his shoulder against it.

"Joe, you said you'd come."

"I was very careful not to say that."

"Well, I don't have the transcript handy, but that was how it sounded."

"Sammy, please. Don't make me. I don't
want
to go. I want to go out with my girl. I want to have fun." He blushed. Having fun was still a difficult thing for Joe to admit he was able to do. "It isn't my fault that you don't have anyone—"

The studio door burst open, throwing Joe back against the wall.

"Sorry!" said Tracy Bacon. He gingerly pulled back the door to see what had become of Joe. "Holy Eye of the Moon Opal, are you all right?"

"Yes, thank you," said Joe, rubbing his forehead.

"I was in such a damn hurry to get out here I didn't bother to look where I was going! I was afraid you two might have left before I got a chance to talk to Mr. Clay."

"Yes, talk! You talk," Joe said, patting Bacon on the shoulder. "Unfortunately, I have to go. Mr. Bacon, it was nice meeting you, you are a perfect Escapist I think."

"Well, thank
you."

Joe drew himself up. "So," he said, pronouncing it in the German fashion. With Bacon interposed very carefully between them, he gave Sammy an awkward little wave and ducked around Bacon to make a dash for the end of the hall. Before reaching the stairwell, he stopped and turned back. He looked at Sammy right in the eyes, his expression grave and remorseful, as though he were on the verge of making a full confession of everything bad that he had ever done. Then he flashed his visitor's badge, Melvin Purvis-style, and was gone. And that, Sammy knew, was about as close as Joe Kavalier could get to an apology.

"So," said Bacon, "what's he so hot to trot about?"

"His girl," said Sammy. "Miss Rosa Luxemburg Saks."

"I see." Bacon had a little bit of a southern accent. "She a foreigner, too?"

"Yeah, she is," Sammy said. "She's from Greenwich Village."

"I've heard of it."

"It's a pretty backward place."

"Is it."

"The people are little more than savages."

"I hear they eat dogs there."

"Rosa can do amazing things with dog."

When this burst of somewhat labored bantering flagged, they were embarrassed. Sammy rubbed at the back of his neck. For some reason, he was a little afraid of Tracy Bacon. He decided that Bacon was playing with him, condescending to him. Big, radiant, confident fellows with string-bass voices always made him feel acutely how puny, dark, and Jewish he was, a goofy little curlicue of ink stamped on a sheet of splintery paper.

"You had something to ask me?" Sammy said coldly.

"Yes, I wanted—look here." He punched Sammy on the shoulder. Not painfully, but not gently, either. Not always knowing his own strength was eventually to become, thanks to Tracy Bacon, one of the Escapist's characteristic traits. "Ordinarily I wouldn't do something like this, but when I got a look at you and saw you weren't any older than I am, maybe even younger—how old are you?"