The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (46 page)

Early the next morning he returned, groggy and aching and half-mad with tinnitus, to the Pierre and made a thorough search of its ballroom. He inquired several times over the next week at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and contacted the lost-and-found office of the Hack Bureau.

Later, after the world had been torn in half, and the Amazing Cavalieri and his blue tuxedo were to be found only in the gilt-edged pages of deluxe photo albums on the coffee tables of the Upper West Side, Joe would sometimes find himself thinking about the pale-blue envelope from Prague. He would try to imagine its contents, wondering what news or sentiments or instructions it might have contained. It was at these times that he began to understand, after all those years of study and performance, of feats and wonders and surprises, the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

7

One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to this axiom. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World's Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia which is the usual hallmark of the aetataureate delusion. The rest of the world was busy feeding itself, country by country, to the furnace, but while the city's newspapers and newsreels at the Trans-Lux were filled with ill portents, defeats, atrocities, and alarms, the general mentality of the New Yorker was not one of siege, panic, or grim resignation to fate but rather the toe-wiggling, tea-sipping contentment of a woman curled on a sofa, reading in front of a fire with cold rain rattling against the windows. The economy was experiencing a renewal not only of sensation but of perceptible movement in its limbs, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six straight games, and the great big bands reached their suave and ecstatic acme in the hotel ballrooms and moth-lit summer pavilions of America. Given the usual urge of those who believe themselves to have lived through a golden age to expatiate upon the subject at great length afterward, it is ironic that the April night on which Sammy felt most aware of the luster of his existence—the moment when, for the first time in his life, he was fully conscious of his own happiness—was a night that he would never discuss with anyone at all.

It was one o'clock on a Wednesday morning, and Sammy stood alone atop the city of New York, gazing in the direction of the storm clouds, both literal and figurative, that were piling up away to the east. Before coming on to his shift at ten o'clock, he had showered in the rough stall Al Smith had arranged to have built for the spotters, down in their quarters on the eighty-first floor, and changed into the loose twill trousers and faded blue oxford shirt that he kept in his locker there and wore three nights a week throughout the war, taking them home after his Friday shift to wash them in time for Monday's. For appearances' sake, he put his shoes back on for the quick trip up to the observatory, but when he got there he always took them off again. It was his habit, his conceit, and his strange comfort to prowl the sky of Manhattan Island, on the lookout for enemy bombers and aerial saboteurs, in his stocking feet. As he made his regular rounds of the eighty-sixth floor, clipboard in hand, heavy army-issue binoculars on a cord around his neck, he whistled to himself, unaware that he was doing so, a tune at once tuneless and involved.

It promised to be a typically quiet shift; night flights of an authorized nature were rare even in good weather, and tonight, with warnings of thundershowers and electrical storms blowing in, there would be even fewer airplanes in the sky than usual. Affixed to Sammy's clipboard, as always, was a typed list provided by the Army Interceptor Command, in whose service he was a volunteer, of the seven aircraft that had been cleared for transit across New York metropolitan airspace that night. All but two were military, and by eleven-thirty Sammy had already spotted six of them, on schedule and in position, and made the required notation of their passages in his log. The seventh was not expected until around five-thirty, just before his shift ended and he went back down to the spotters' quarters to catch a few hours' sleep before his day at Empire Comics began.

He made another circuit through the long chrome expanse of the observation-deck restaurant, which initially had been built as the baggage and ticket counter for a planned worldwide dirigible service that had never materialized, and had then spent the last two years of Prohibition as a tearoom. The passage through the bar was the only real perturbation Sammy had ever experienced in his career as a plane spotter, for the temptation of the gleaming spigots, coffee urns, and orderly rows of glasses and cups had to be counterbalanced against the eventual subsequent need, should he indulge his thirst, to urinate. Sammy was certain that if a fatal black line of Junkers was ever to appear in the skies over Brooklyn, it would unquestionably be while he was in the bathroom taking a leak. He was just on the point of helping himself to a few inches of seltzer from the elaborate chrome tap under the still-illuminated neon Ruppert's sign when he heard a dark rumble. For a moment he thought it must have been the approaching thunder, but then, in his memory, he heard again the mechanical hiss that had underlaid it. He put down his glass and ran to the bank of windows on the other side of the room. The darkness of a Manhattan night, even at this late hour, was far from absolute, and the radiant carpet of streets reaching as far as Westchester, Long Island, and the wilds of New Jersey cast an upward illumination so bright that the stealthiest intruder flying without landing lights would have had a difficult time concealing itself from Sammy's gaze, even without binoculars. There was nothing in the sky, however, but the great cloud of light.

The rumble grew louder and somehow smoother; the hiss modulated to a soft hum; from the center of the building, there was a faint clacking of gears and cams: the elevators. It was not a sound he was accustomed to hearing at this hour, in this place. The fellow who generally relieved him at six, an American Legionnaire and retired oysterman named Bill McWilliams, always took the stairs up from the quarters on eighty-one. Sammy walked toward the elevator bank, wondering if he ought to pick up the telephone that connected him to the office of the Army Interceptor Command in the telephone-company building down on Cortlandt Street. In the pages of
Radio Comics,
the groundwork for an invasion of New York City could be laid in just a few panels, one of which would unquestionably depict the braining with a blackjack of a hapless plane spotter by the gloved fist of an Axis saboteur. Sammy could see the jagged star of impact, the sprung letters spelling out KR-RACK!, the word balloon in which the poor fool was shown saying, "Say, you can't come in—
ohhh!"

It was one of the express elevators from the lobby. Sammy checked his clipboard again. If anyone was expected—his supervisor, some other military type, some colonel of the Interceptor Command making an inspection—surely his night's orders would have noted it. But there was only, as he had known there would be, the same list of seven planes and flight plans, and a terse notation about the bad weather expected. Perhaps this was a surprise inspection. As Sammy looked down at his stocking feet, wiggling his nonregulation toes, his thoughts took another turn: maybe this visit was unannounced because something unforeseen had occurred. Perhaps someone was coming to tell Sammy that the country was at war with Germany, or even, somehow, that the war in Europe had ended, and it was time for him to go home.

There was a metallic shiver as the car drew up to the eighty-sixth floor, a rattle of cables. Sammy ran a damp hand through his hair. Locked in a bottom drawer of the guard station, he knew, there was a service .45, but Sammy had lost track of the key, and would not even have known, in any case, how to get the safety off. He raised his clipboard, ready to bring it down on the skull of the spy. The binoculars were heavier. He took them from his neck and prepared to swing them like a mace on their leather strap. The doors slid open.

"Is this Men's Sportswear?" said Tracy Bacon. He wore a tuxedo jacket, a white silk cravat stiff and glossy as meringue, and a mien that was grave but volatile, stretched thin over an underlying smirk, as if some kind of prank were under way. A brown paper shopping bag dangled from each hand. "Have you got anything in a gabardine?"

"Bacon, you can't—"

"I was just passing by," the actor said. "Thought I'd, you know, stop in."

"We're a thousand feet up!"

"Are we?"

"It's one o'clock in the morning."

"Is it?"

"This is a U.S. Army facility," Sammy went on, sounding self-important and knowing it, struggling to ascribe a reason to the giddy flush of guilt, so like exhilaration, that suffused him at the arrival of Tracy Bacon on the eighty-sixth floor. He was perilously happy to see his new friend. "Technically speaking. After hours, nobody's allowed in or out without clearance from Command."

"Yikes," said Bacon. The magnificent Otis machinery that enclosed him gave a sigh, as of impatience. Bacon took a step backward. "Then you absolutely do
not
want a Nazi spy like me hanging around. What was I
thinking?"
The elevator doors stuck out their black rubber tongues. Sammy watched the sundered halves of his own reflection reach toward each other in the brushed chrome panels of the doors.
"Auf wiedersehen."

Sammy thrust his hand through the doors. "Wait."

Bacon waited, looking at Sammy, one eyebrow raised in the challenging manner of an auctioneer about to bring his gavel down. His jacket was a charcoal silk cutaway, with piped lapels, and his broad chest was plated in the largest and whitest dickie Sammy had ever seen. In his formal attire, he seemed to beam down from a greater height than usual, certain as ever that in the end he would be, even a thousand feet up, at one in the morning, and contrary to military regulations, welcome. Even with the incongruous pair of shopping bags, or perhaps because of them, he looked impossibly comfortable in his monkey suit, shoulders pressed against the back wall of the elevator, legs crooked at the knee, the great right foot in its long black Lagonda of a shoe twisting ever so slightly on its toe tip. The elevator sighed again.

"Well," Sammy said, "seeing as how your father's a general..."

Sammy stepped aside, keeping a hand on the door that was struggling to close. Bacon hesitated a moment longer, as if daring Sammy to change his mind again. Then he pushed himself off the elevator wall and sauntered out. The doors closed. Sammy was in gross violation of the code.

"Only a brigadier," Bacon said. "You all right, Clay?"

"Fine, I'm fine, come in."

"That's the lowest, you know."

"What is?"

"Brigadier. It's the lowest grade of general they make."

"That must chafe."

"Eats him away. Wow." Bacon looked around the cool marble sweep of the observation floor's lobby, kept dim at night to cut down on reflection and permit better viewing through the great dark windows, and he squinted a little as he peered off into the glints and shadows of the bar on one hand and the long bank of windows on the other. "Wow!"

"Yeah, wow," Sammy said, suddenly feeling less exhilarated than awkward, even slightly afraid. What had he done? What was Bacon up to? What was the faintly acrid but not unpleasant smell that seemed to be emanating from the actor's direction? "So, uh. Welcome."

"This is great!" Bacon said. He strode toward the windows that looked out over the Hudson River, toward the black cliffs and neon billboards of New Jersey. There was something faintly lurching, Frankensteinian, in Bacon's gait, and Sammy followed him closely to make sure nothing got broken. Bacon pressed his face to the window, smashing his straight, slightly pointed nose flat against it with a vehemence that made Sammy's heart leap. The windows were made of thick tempered glass, but Tracy Bacon possessed that brand of glamorous stupidity—or so it would come to seem to Sammy—which acts as a charm against such technological safeguards. He would wriggle his way out onto a theater balcony that had been closed because it was on the verge of collapse, enter any stairway marked No Admittance, and, as Sammy would later learn, Bacon especially liked, when there was no one looking, to sneak from subway platforms down onto the tracks, penetrating some ways into the tunnels by the pale glow of his platinum cigarette lighter. It had been a terrible mistake letting him up here tonight. "I must say, I couldn't figure out why anybody in his right mind would want to sign himself up for this kind of work ... unpaid ... but now ... you have all this to yourself, every night?"

"Three nights a week. Are you drunk?"

"What kind of question is that?" Bacon said, without elaborating whether he found the question offensive or merely superfluous, or both. "I came up here my first day in New York City," he continued, his breath fogging up the glass. "It was a lot different in the daylight. Kids running around. All that blue sky and steam out there. Pigeons. Boats. Flags."