The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (65 page)

These were not the first headquarters of the company—those had been a suite of seven large rooms in the McGraw-Hill Building, all green lacquer and ivory Bakelite, with everything from the washroom fixtures to the team of buxom receptionists trimmed in chrome, and all of it paid for with the money Jack Ashkenazy had pocketed in 1943 when Sheldon Anapol had bought him out. Ashkenazy had next invested millions in a Canadian real estate venture predicated on his odd belief that, after the war, Canada and the United States would merge into one country. When, to his astonishment, this failed to pan out, he had gone back to the source of all his still-considerable wealth: the costumed hero. He had rented the gleaming offices on West Forty-second, hired away some of Empire's best writers and artists, and charged them with making a star out of a character of his own creation, the eponymous Pharaoh, a reincarnated Egyptian ruler, naturally, who sported an elaborate Tutankhamen headdress, metal armbands, and a loincloth made apparently of stiff cement, and went around thus, discreetly half-naked, foiling evil with the mystic power of his Scepter of Ra. The writers and artists had come up with a raft of even more unlikely heroes and heroines—Earthman (with his superhuman control over rocks and dirt), the Snowy Owl (with his "supersonic hoot"), and the Rolling Rose (with her shiny red skates)—to fill the pages of Pharaoh Comics' nine inaugural titles. Unfortunately, Jack Ashkenazy had bet heavily on the costumed superhero just as readers' interest in that genre was beginning to flag. The defeat of those actual world-devouring supervillains, Hitler and Tojo, along with their minions, had turned out to be as debilitating to the long-underwear hero trade as the war itself had been an abundant source of energy and plots; it proved to be hard for the cashiered captains and supersoldiers, on their return from tying Krupp artillery into half-hitches and swatting Zeros like midges over the Coral Sea, to muster the old pre-1941 fervor for busting up rings of car thieves, rescuing orphans, and exposing crooked fight promoters. At the same time, a new villain, the lawless bastard child of relativity and Satan, had appeared to cast its roiling fiery pall over even the mightiest of heroes, who could no longer be entirely assured that there would always be a world for them to save. The tastes of returning GIs, who had become hooked on the regular shipments of comic books provided them along with candy bars and cigarettes, turned to darker, more "adult-oriented" fare: true-crime comics had their vogue, followed by romances, horror tales, Westerns, science fiction; anything, in short, but masked men. Millions of unsold copies of
Pharaoh Comics
#1 and its eight companion titles came back from the distributors; after a year, none of the remaining six titles was making a profit. Ashkenazy, sensing catastrophe, had moved downtown, fired the expensive talent, and retrenched, overhauling his line through a program of cost-cutting and slavish imitation, transforming it into a modest success very like Racy Publications, the fourth-rate pulp-magazine house, home of retreads, copycats, and cheap imitations at which he had begun his career as a publisher in the lean Depression years before two foolish young men laid the Escapist in his lap. But his pride had never quite recovered from the blow, and it was generally felt that Pharaoh's failure, along with the Canadian debacle, had started him down the road to his decline and eventual death two years ago.

Sammy crossed the broad grimy expanse of the workroom to his office. Julie hesitated at the door before following him in. The prohibition against entering Sam Clay's office, except in the case of family emergency, was absolute and closely observed. He would admit no one if he was working, and he was always working. His bursts of fevered composition, during which he might knock out an entire year's worth of
Brass Knuckle
or
Weird Date
in a single night, were celebrated not only in the Pharaoh offices but throughout the small, collegial world of the New York comic book business. He unplugged his intercom, took the telephone off the hook, sometimes stuffed his ears with cotton, paraffin, gobbets of foam rubber.

He had typed stories for comic books for the past seven years: costumed hero, romance, horror, adventure, true-crime, science fiction and fantasy stories, Westerns, sea yarns, and Bible stories, a couple of issues of
Classics Illustrated*
Sax Rohmer imitations, Walter Gibson imitations, H. Rider Haggard imitations, Rex Stout imitations, tales of both world wars, the Civil War, the Peloponnesian War, and the Napoleonic Wars; every genre but funny animals. Sammy drew the line at funny animals. The success in the trade of these dot-eyed, three-fingered imports from the world of animated cartoons, with their sawdusty gags and childish
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antics, was one of the thousand little things to have broken Sammy Clay's heart. He was a furious, even romantic, typist, prone to crescendos, diminuendos, dense and barbed arpeggios, capable of ninety words a minute when under deadline or pleased with the direction his story was taking, and over the years his brain had become an instrument so thoroughly tuned to the generation of highly conventional, severely formalistic, eight-to-twelve-page miniature epics that he could, without great effort, write, talk, smoke, listen to a ball game, and keep an eye on the clock all at the same time. He had reduced two typewriters to molten piles of slag iron and springs since his return to comics, and when he went to bed at night his mind remained robotically engaged in its labor while he slept, so that his dreams were often laid out in panels and interrupted by surrealistic advertising, and when he woke up in the morning he would find that he had generated enough material for a full issue of one of his magazines.

Now he moved his latest Remington to one side. Julie Glovsky saw a little brass key lying in the center of a square patch of blotter that was free of ash and dust. Sammy took the key and went to a large wooden cabinet, dragged up from a defunct photographical processing lab on a lower floor of the building.

"You have an Escapist costume?" Julie said.

"Yeah."

"Where'd you get it?"

"From Tom Mayflower," Sammy said.

He rummaged around inside the cabinet until he came up with an oblong blue box stamped king fat hand laundry in crooked black letters. On the side, in grease pencil, someone had, for some reason, written the word bacon. Sammy gave the box a shake, and something rattled dryly within; he looked puzzled. He pulled the box open, and a small yellow card, about the size of a matchbook, fluttered out and corkscrewed to the floor. Sammy stooped over, picked it up, and read the legend printed on its face in brightly colored ink. When he looked up, his face was pinched, his jaw set, but Julie caught an unmistakable glint of amusement in his eyes. Sammy handed Julie the card. It featured a drawing of two ornate, old-fashioned skeleton keys, one on either side of the following brief text:

Welcome, faithful Foe of Tyranny, to the

LEAGUE OF THE GOLDEN KEY!!!

This card bestows on

(print name above)

all the rights and duties of a true-blue friend of Liberty and Humanity!

"It's him," Julie said. "Isn't it? He was here. He took it." "How do you like that," said Sammy. "I haven't seen one of those in years."

3

AT lunchtime, the police showed up. They were taking the letter to the
Herald
seriously, and the detective in charge had a few questions for Sammy about Joe.

Sammy told the detective, a man named Lieber, that he had not seen Joe Kavalier since the evening of December 14, 1941, at Pier 11, when Joe sailed for basic training in Newport, Rhode Island, aboard a Providence-bound packet boat called the
Comet.
Joe had never answered any of their letters. Then, toward the end of the war, Sammy's mother, as next of kin, had received a letter from the office of James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy. It said that Joe had been wounded or taken ill in the line of duty; the letter was vague about the nature of the injury and the theater of war. It said also that he had, for some time, been recuperating at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but that he was now being given a medical discharge and a commendation. In two days, he would be arriving at Newport News aboard the
Miskatonic.
Sammy had gone down to Virginia on a Greyhound bus to meet him and bring him home. But somehow or other, Joe had managed to escape.

"Escape?" Detective Lieber said. He was a young man, surprisingly young, a fair-haired Jew with pudgy hands, wearing a gray suit that looked expensive but not at all flashy.

"It was a talent he had," Sammy said.

At the time, Joe's vanishing had been a loss in some ways more genuine than that which death represents. He was not merely dead—and thus, in a sense, always locatable. No, they really had managed to
lose
him. He had gotten on the boat in Cuba; of this fact there was documentary evidence in the form of signatures and serial numbers on a medical transport record. But when the
Miskatonic
docked in Newport News, Joe was no longer aboard. He had left a brief letter; though its contents were classified, one of the navy investigators had assured Sammy that it was not a suicide note. When Sammy returned from Virginia, after an interminable gray trip back up U.S. 1, he found their house in Midwood aflutter with bunting. Rosa had prepared a cake and a banner that welcomed Joe home. Ethel had bought a new dress and had her hair done, allowing the hairdresser to rinse out the gray. The three of them—Rosa, Ethel, and Tommy—were sitting in the living room, under the crepe-paper swags, crying. In the months that followed, they had generated all manner of wild and violent theories to explain what had happened to Joe, and pursued every lead and rumor. Because he had not been taken from them, they could not seem to let him go. Over the years, however, the intensity of Sammy's anger and of his shock over Joe's behavior had, inevitably, dwindled. The thought of his lost cousin was a sore one still; but it had, after all, been nearly nine years. "He was trained in Europe as an escape artist," he told Detective Lieber. "That's where we got the whole idea for the Escapist."

"I used to read it," Detective Lieber said. He coughed politely and looked around at the pages of art and framed covers of various Pharaoh titles that ornamented Sammy's office. On the wall behind Sammy hung the vastly blown-up image of a single frame, from a story that Rosa had done for
Frontier Comics,
the only superhero story that Rosa ever drew. It showed the Lone Wolf and Cubby, in tight coveralls of fringed buckskin and lupine headdresses, their arms around each other's shoulders. The blazing spokes of an Arizona sunrise reached out from behind them. Lone Wolf was saying, "WELL, PARDNER, IT LOOKS LIRE IT'S GOING TO BE A BEAUTIFUL DAY!" Rosa had done the enlargement herself and gotten it framed for Sammy's last birthday. You could see the lithography dots—they were as big as shirt buttons—and somehow the scale of the image gave it a surreal importance.
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"I'm afraid I'm not as familiar with what you do here," Detective Lieber said, eyeing the big Lone Wolf with a look of faint puzzlement.

"Few people are," Sammy said.

"I'm sure it must be interesting."

"Don't be too sure."

Lieber shrugged. "Okay, so here's what I don't understand. Why would he
want
to 'escape,' as you put it? He just got out of the navy. He's been in some godforsaken place or other. From the sound of it, he's had it pretty tough. Why wouldn't he
want
to come home?"

Sammy didn't immediately reply. A possible answer had come to mind right away, but since it struck him as flippant, he held his tongue. Then he thought it over for a moment and saw that it might very well be the right answer to Detective Lieber's question.

"He didn't really have a home to come home to," Sammy said. "I guess maybe that's how it must have seemed to him."

"His family in Europe?"

"All dead. Every one of them, his mother, his father, his grandfather.

His kid brother's boat was torpedoed. Just a little kid, a refugee."

"Jesus."

"It was not good."

"And you've
never
heard from your cousin since? Not even—"

"Not a postcard. And I've made a lot of inquiries, Detective. I hired private detectives. The navy conducted a full investigation. Nothing."

"Do you think— You must have considered the possibility that he might be dead?"

"He might be. My wife and I have discussed it over the years. But somehow I think— I just think that he isn't."

Lieber nodded and tucked his little notebook back into the hip pocket of his sharp gray suit.

"Thank you," he said. He stood and shook Sammy's hand. Sammy walked him out to the elevator.

"You look awfully young to be a detective," Sammy said. "If you don't mind my saying."

"Yes, but I have the heart of a seventy-year-old man," Lieber said.

"You're Jewish, if you don't mind me asking?"

"I don't mind."

"I didn't know they were making detectives out of Jews."