The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (45 page)

Was there ever a moment when Superman lingered a second too long in his timid Rent aspect and suffered a fatal hesitation? Did the Escapist ever forget to clasp his talisman and stumble on crippled legs into the fray? The Saboteur tries to remain calm, but the stuttering doormat with whom he must share his existence is a bundle of nerves and, like a fool, goes running out of the room.

He stands in the foyer outside the ballroom, leaning against a wall, his cheek pressed against the soft, cool flocked wallpaper. He lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, calms himself. There is no call for panic; he is the King of Infiltration, and he knows what to do. He stubs out the cigarette in the sand of a nearby ashtray, and takes hold of the cart once again. This time, when he enters the ballroom, he has the presence of mind to keep his head down, to avoid being recognized by the Escapist.

"Sorry, folks," he murmurs. He pushes the cart across to the far side of the stage, by the shivered timbers of the sunken ship. It has a squeaky wheel, and he feels certain that he must be attracting the attention of the musicians on the bandstand, of the magician and his big-nose girl. But when he looks back, they are absorbed in their own preparations. She is a pretty enough girl, he supposes, and her black mannish overcoat reminds him with a twinge of the queen of his own desire. When he reaches the ship, he stops, crouches behind the cart, and opens the compartment in which hot plates of food are stored by the room-service waiters on their way up to rooms.

Until now the ballroom has been too crowded with decorators, waiters, and hotel staff, coming and going as they prepared the room for the event, for him to find the opportunity to assemble the parts of his Exploding Trident. Now he works quickly, screwing the length of thin pipe that contains the black powder and cut-up nails into a second length of pipe that is empty. This will be the shaft. At the dummy end, he affixes tines of stiff red cellophane, copped from a costume-shop devil-suit pitchfork, with a piece of masking tape. It looks a little suspicious, he knows, but fortunately, verisimilitude is not something people generally expect from a sea god's trident. He unrolls the six-inch strip of fuse that protrudes through a hole drilled in the thing's business end. Then he stands up and, checking to see that he is not being observed, edges over toward one of the fishnets tacked to the wall, filled with its catch of fake crustaceans. No one sees; his rich lifelong powers of invisibility remain his truest ally. Gingerly, he slides the trident down through the heavy mesh of the fishnet until the fuse end bumps the carpet. When the time comes—when the Escapist has begun his legendary act—the Saboteur will contrive to pass by here again. He will rest half a lighted Camel against a strand of the net, so that the unlit end touches the fuse. Then he will hie himself out of harm's way and wait. And five minutes after that, the mongrels of Empire City will begin to know something of the terror their mongrel brothers and sisters are undergoing halfway around the world.

The Saboteur pushes the cart back toward the ballroom doors. At the last moment, as he is passing the magician, he cannot prevent himself from raising his head and looking his adversary in the eye. If there is a flicker of recognition there, it is extinguished in an instant as the doors to the ballroom fly open and, laughing and shouting and crying out in their loud barnyard voices, the first of the guests arrive.

6

What follows is the intended program for the performance given by the Amazing Cavalieri on the evening of April 12, 1941. A copy, printed by the performer himself using a "Printer's Devil" Genuine Junior Printing Press that he had dug out of the Empire Novelties stockroom just before the move from the Kramler Building, was handed out to every guest just prior to the show.

The Wanderings of a Handkerchief.

Magic Bananas.

A Miniature Conflagration.

Fly Away Home.

Please Don't Eat the Pets.

A Contagious Knot.

Adrift in the Stream of Time.

Ice and Fire.

Where Have I Been?

The Tail Has Lost Its Monkey.

Joe's self-consciousness about his English, and a suspicion of patter inherited from his great teacher, kept his performance swift and wordless. Frequently he was told, usually by the mother or an aunt of the bar mitzvah boy, that the show had been very nice, but would it kill him to smile a little now and then? Tonight was no exception. If anything, it seemed to those scattered guests at the Saks reception who had caught his act before, he was even more guarded, more workmanlike in his approach than usual. His movements and his pacing were neither too hasty nor too slow, and there were no—as had sometimes happened in the past—dropped cards or spilled pitchers of water. But he took no apparent pleasure in the marvelous feats he performed. One would have thought it meant nothing to him that he could produce a bowlful of goldfish from a tin of sardines, or pass a bunch of bananas one at a time through the skull of a thirteen-year-old boy. Rosa supposed that he was troubled by something he had read in that latest letter from home, and wished, as she had wished many times, that he was more willing to share with her his fears, his doubts, and whatever bad news there was from Prague.

Longman Harkoo, though he tried, was one of those people incapable, due to some abnormality of vision or comprehension, of following the movements of a magic act, the way some people go to baseball games and never manage to see the ball in flight; a towering home run is just ten thousand people craning their necks. He soon gave up trying to pay attention to the things that were supposed to be amazing him, and found himself watching the boy's eyes behind the black silk mask. They continually scanned the room—that in itself was impressive enough, that he could manipulate the cards and other props of his act without looking at his hands—and they seemed, Harkoo noticed, to follow in particular the movements of one of the waiters.

Joe had recognized Ebling at once, though it took him a while, amid the distractions of greeting his hosts and Rosa's family and of pulling dimes and matchsticks out of the bar mitzvah boy's nose, to place him. The Aryan seemed to have lost weight since their last encounter. Then, too, the sheer surprise of seeing Ebling again had interfered with his ability to identify him. He had given no thought to the man, or to his own war on the Germans of New York, in many weeks. He no longer went looking for trouble; after the bomb scare last fall, Joe felt he had bested Carl Ebling in their duel. The man simply seemed to have abandoned the field. Joe had gone back up to Yorkville once, to leave a calling card or a nyah-nyah-nyah on the Aryan-American League. The sign was no longer in the window, and when Joe broke into the office for a second time, he found it empty. The desks and the files had been moved out, the portrait of Hitler taken down, leaving not even a discolored square on the wall. There was nothing left but an old potato chip lying like a moth in the middle of the scarred wooden floor. Carl Ebling had disappeared, leaving no forwarding address.

Now here he was, working as a waiter at the Hotel Pierre, and clearly—Joe knew this as surely as he knew that the goldfish in his bowl were only hunks of carrot that he had carved with an apple knife—up to no good. As Ebling hurried back and forth across the ballroom with a tray on his shoulder, he kept looking up at Joe, not at the silks and golden hoops in his hand but at
him,
right into his face, with an expression that struggled to remain blank and anonymous but which was tinged at the corners with a flush of bitter mischief.

As Joe was about to begin A Contagious Knot, in which, with a puff of breath, the knot that he had tied in a silk scarf appeared to transfer itself along the row of ordinary silk scarves held up by volunteers from the audience, one after another before their very eyes, Joe smelled smoke. For an instant he thought it must be the lingering odor of A Miniature Conflagration, but on further exposure he knew that it was unquestionably tobacco—and something more, something acrid like burning hair. Then he noticed a thin plume of smoke coming from the side of the bandstand, down to his left, by the sunken ship. At once he dropped the scarf with its devilish knot and walked, swiftly but without appearing to panic, toward the smoke that was scribbling the air. His first thought was that someone had dropped a cigarette; then he felt a tickle of suspicion, and the face of Ebling flashed through his mind. And then he saw it all; the cylinder of ash burned down almost to the printed tip of the cigarette, the singed carpet, the length of grayish fuse, the length of steel pipe crudely disguised with some gaudy red cellophane. He stopped, turned, and went back to his table, where the bowl from Please Don't Eat the Pets still sat, filled with bright swimming bits of carrot.

There was some murmuring from the tables as he picked up the bowl.

"Excuse me," he said, "we seem to have a little fire."

As he went to pour the water onto the cigarette, he felt something large, heavy, and extremely hard smash into the small of his back. It felt a good deal like a human head. Joe went flying forward, and the goldfish bowl tumbled from his hands and shattered on the bandstand. Ebling climbed on top of Joe, clawing at his cheeks from behind, and as Joe tried to roll onto his back, he looked over and saw that the fuse was throwing a tiny shower of sparks. He gave up trying to roll and instead pushed upward on his hands and knees and proceeded to crawl, Ebling riding him, wild as an ape on the back of a pony, toward the pipe bomb. By now the people sitting closest to the bomb had taken note of the burning, and there was a general sense in the room that none of this was part of the show. A woman screamed, and then a lot of women were screaming, and Joe was lumbering forward with his rider ripping at his face and yanking on his ears. Ebling got his arms around Joe's throat and started to choke him. At that point, Joe ran out of bandstand. He lost his balance, and he and Ebling toppled over the side to the floor. Ebling rolled, tumbling against the outspread fishnet. It snapped loose from the wall, spilling a pile of rubber starfish and lobsters across him.

Ebling just had time to say "No." Then a sheet of heavy foil seemed to fall onto Joe's head, to wrap his face and throat and ears in crumpling steel. He was thrown backward, and something hot, a burning wire, was laid with a hiss across his forehead. There followed almost immediately an awful sound like a heavy club falling on a bag of tomatoes, and then an autumnal whiff of gunpowder.

"Oh, shit," Carl Ebling said, sitting up, blinking, licking his lips, blood on his forehead, blood in his hair, tiny red pawprints of blood all over his bright white jacket.

"What did you do?" Joe heard, or rather he felt, the words somewhere down in his throat. "Ebling, god damn it, what did you do?"

They were taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital. Joe's injuries were minor compared to Ebling's, and after he had been cleaned up, his facial wounds treated, and the laceration on his forehead butterflied shut, he was able to return, by popular demand, to the Grand Ballroom of the Pierre, where he was hailed and toasted and showered with money and praise.

As for Ebling, he was first charged only with unlawful possession of explosives; but this was later expanded to a charge of attempted murder. He was eventually indicted for a number of minor fires, synagogue vandalizings, phone-booth bombings, and even an attempted subway derailment the previous winter that had gotten a good deal of attention in the papers but, until the Saboteur confessed to it and to all of his other exploits, had gone unsolved.

Late that night, Rosa and her father helped Joe from the taxi to the curb and thence along the narrow lane up to the steps of the Harkoo house. His arms were draped across their shoulders and his feet seemed to glide two inches off the ground. He had not touched a drop all night, on orders from the emergency-room doctor at Mt. Sinai, but the morphine painkillers he had been given had finally taken their toll. Of that journey from the taxi to the curb, Joe was later to retain only the faint pleasant memory of Siggy Saks's kolnischwasser smell and of the coolness of Rosa's shoulder against his own abraded cheek. They dragged him up to the study and laid him out on the couch. Rosa unlaced his shoes, unbuttoned his trousers, helped him off with his shirt She kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his chest, his belly, pulled a blanket up to his chin, and then kissed his lips. Rosa's father brushed Joe's hair back from his bandaged brow with a soft motherly hand. Then there was darkness, and the sound of their voices draining out of the room. Joe felt sleep gathering around him, coiling like smoke or cotton wool about his limbs, and he fought against it for a few minutes with an agreeable sense of struggle, as a child in a swimming pool might attempt to stand buoyed atop a football. Just as he surrendered to his opiate exhaustion, however, the echo of the bomb burst began to chime again in his ears, and he sat up, his heart pounding. He switched on a table lamp and went over to the low settee on which Rosa had laid his blue tuxedo, and lifted the jacket. In a strange slow panic, as if his hands were wrapped in layers of gauze, he felt around the pockets. He took the jacket by the tails and dangled it upside down, and shook it and shook it again. Out tumbled wads of cash, stacks of business cards and
cartes de visite,
silver dollars and subway tokens, cigarettes, his pocketknife, torn corners of his program scrawled with the addresses and phone numbers of the people he had saved. He turned the jacket and each of its ten pockets inside out. He fell to his knees and shuffled over and over through the pile of cards and dollars and torn scraps of program. It was like the classic magician's nightmare in which the dreamer riffles, with mounting dread, through a deck at once ordinary and infinite, looking for a queen of hearts or a seven of diamonds that somehow never turns up.