The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (80 page)

"You
can
be proud, Sammy. You have done great work. I have always been telling you this all along."

"What do you mean, all along, you've been gone since Pearl Harbor."

"In my mind."

"No wonder I didn't get the message."

Then, startling both of them, there was a flat, tentative knock. Someone was rapping on the frame of the open door to the corridor.

"Anyone here?" said an oboe voice, tentative and oddly familiar to Joe. "Hello?"

"Holy Amazing Midget Radio," Sammy said. "Look who it is."

"I heard I might find you boys up here," said Sheldon Anapol. He came into the room and shook hands with Sammy, then shambled over and stood in front of Joe. He had lost almost all of his hair, though none of his bulk, and his jaw, more mightily jowled than ever, was set in a defiant scowl. But his eyes, it seemed to Joe, were shining, full of tenderness and regret, as if he were seeing not Joe but the twelve years that had passed since their last encounter. "Mr. Kavalier."

"Mr. Anapol."

They shook hands, and then Joe felt himself being enveloped in the big man's fierce and sour embrace.

"You crazy son of a bitch," he said after he let Joe loose.

"Yes," Joe said.

"You look good, how are you?"

"I'm not bad."

"What was all that
narrishkeit
the other day, eh? You made me look very bad. I should be furious with you." He turned to Sammy. "I should be furious with him, don't you think?"

Sammy cleared his throat. "No comment," he said.

"How are you?" Joe asked him. "How is business?"

"A pointed question, as ever, from the mouths of you two. What can I tell you. Business is not good. In fact, it's very, very bad. As if television was not problem enough. Now we have hordes of Baptist lunatics down in Alabama, or some goddamned place, making big piles of comic books and setting them on fire because they are an offense to Jesus or the U.S. flag. Setting them on
fire
! Can you believe it? What did we fight the war for, if when it's over they're going to be burning books in the streets of Alabama? Then this Dr. Fredric Stick-Up-His-Ass Wertham, with that book of his. Now we have the Senate committee coming to town ... you heard about that?"

"I heard."

"They served me," Sammy said.

"You got subpoenaed?" Anapol stuck out his lip. "I didn't get subpoenaed."

"An oversight," Joe suggested.

"Why would they subpoena you, you're just an editor at that fifth-rate house, pardon me for saying so?"

"I don't know," Sammy admitted.

"Who knows, maybe they've got something on you." He took out his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead. "Jesus, what lunacy. I never should have let you two talk me out of the novelty business. Nobody ever made a big pile of whoopee cushions and lit them on fire, let me tell you." He went over to the lone chair. "Mind if I sit down?" He sat and let out a long sigh. It seemed to begin rather perfunctorily, for show, but by the end it carried a startling cargo of unhappiness. "Let me tell you something else," he said. "I'm afraid I didn't come up here just because I wanted to say hello to Kavalier. I thought I ought to—I thought you might want to know."

"Know what?" Sammy said.

"You remember we had that lawsuit?" Anapol said.

The next day—the twenty-first of April, 1954—the Court of Appeals of the State of New York would finally hand down a ruling in the matter of
National Periodical Publications, Inc.
v.
Empire Comics, Inc.
The suit had, in that time, made its way in and out of the courts, with settlements proposed and rejected, weaving a skein of reversals and legal maneuverings too complicated and tedious to tease out in these pages. National's case, in the business, was generally felt to be weak. Though both Superman and the Escapist shared skintight costumes, immense strength, and the odd impulse to conceal their true natures in the guise of far weaker and more fallible beings, the same qualities and features were shared by a host of other characters who had appeared in the comic books since 1958; or had been shared, at any rate, until those characters, one by one or in wholesale lots, had met their demise in the great superhero burn-off that followed the Second World War. Though it was true that National had also pursued Fawcett's Captain Marvel and Victor Fox's Wonder Man through the courts, a raft of other strong men who favored performing their feats, including flying, while wearing some form of undergarment—Amazing Man, Master Man, the Blue Beetle, the Black Condor, the Sub-Mariner—had been allowed to go about their business unmolested, without any apparent loss of income to National. Many would argue, in fact, that greater inroads into the hegemony of Superman in the marketplace had been made by his successors and imitators at National itself—Hourman, Wonder Woman, Dr. Fate, Starman, the Green Lantern—many of whom were but distortions or pale reflections of the original. What was more, as Sammy had always argued, the character of Superman itself represented the amalgamation of "a bunch of ideas those guys stole from somebody else," in particular from Philip Wylie, whose Hugo Dann was the bulletproof superhuman hero of his novel
Gladiator;
from Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose orphaned hero, young Lord Greystoke, grew up to become Tarzan, noble protector of a world of inferior beings; and from Lee Falk's newspaper comic strip
The Phantom,
whose eponymous hero had pioneered the fashion for colorful union suits among implacable foes of crime. In so many of his particulars, the Master of Elusion—a human showman, vulnerable, dependent on his team of assistants— bore very little resemblance to the Son of Krypton. Over the years, a number of judges, among them the great Learned Hand, had attempted, tongues not always quite firmly in cheek, to sort out these fine and crucial distinctions. A legal definition of the term "superhero" had even been arrived at.
[18]
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In the end, in its wisdom, the full panel of the Court of Appeals, overturning the ruling of the state Supreme Court, would side against the prevailing opinion in the comics trade and find in favor of the plaintiffs, sealing the Escapist's doom.

Like the news of the Treaty of Ghent to General Lambert at Biloxi, however, word of the court's ruling, when it came, already would have been overtaken by events.

"Today," Anapol said, "I killed the Escapist."

"What?"

"I killed him. Or let's say he's retired. I called Louis Nizer, I told him, Nizer, you win. As of today, the Escapist is officially retired. I give up. I'm settling. I'm signing his death warrant."

"Why?" Joe said.

"I've been losing money on the Escapist titles for a few years now. There was still some value in the property, you know, from various licensing arrangements, so I had to keep publishing him, just to keep the trademark viable. But his circulation figures have been in a nosedive for quite some time. Superheroes are dead, boys. Forget about it. None of our big hitters—
Scofflaw, Jaws of Horror, Hearts and Flowers, Bobby Sox
—none of them are superhero books."

Joe had gathered as much from Sammy. The age of the costumed superhero had long passed. The Angel, the Arrow, the Comet and the Fin, the Snowman and the Sandman and Hydroman, Captain Courageous, Captain Flag, Captain Freedom, Captain Midnight, Captain Venture and Major Victory, the Flame and the Flash and the Ray, the Monitor, the Guardian, the Shield and the Defender, the Green Lantern, the Red Bee, the Crimson Avenger, the Black Hat and the White Streak, Cat-Man and the Kitten, Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, the Star-Spangled Rid and Stripesy, Dr. Mid-Nite, Mr. Terrific, Mr. Machine Gun, Mr. Scarlet and Miss Victory, Doll Man, the Atom and Minimidget, all had fallen beneath the whirling thresher blades of changing tastes, an aging readership, the coming of television, a glutted marketplace, and the unbeatable foe that had wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of the great heroes of the forties, only the stalwarts at National—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and a few of their cohorts—soldiered on with any regularity or commercial clout, and even they had been forced to suffer the indignity of seeing their wartime sales cut in half or more, of receiving second billing in titles where formerly they headlined, or of having forced upon them by increasingly desperate writers various attention-getting novelties and gimmicks, from fifteen different shades and flavors of Kryptonite to Bat-Hounds, Bat-Monkeys, and a magical-powered little elf-eared nudnick known as the Bat-Mite.

"He's dead," Sammy said wonderingly. "I can't believe it."

"Believe it," Anapol said. "This whole industry is dead after these hearings. You heard it here first, boys." He stood up. "That's why I'm getting out."

"Getting out? You mean you're selling Empire?"

Anapol nodded. "After I called Louis Nizer, I called
my
lawyer and told him to start working on the papers now. I want to get some sucker in there before the roof falls in." He looked around at the stacks of crates. "Look at this place," he said. "You always were a slob, Kavalier."

"True," Joe said.

Anapol started to walk out, then turned back. "You remember that day?" he said. "You two came in with that picture of the Golem and told me you were going to make me a million bucks."

"And we did," Sammy said. "A lot more than a million."

Anapol nodded. "Good night, boys," he said. "Good luck."

When he had gone, Sammy said, "I wish
I had
a million dollars." He said it tenderly, watching something lovely and invisible before him.

"Why?" Joe said.

"I'd buy Empire."

"You would? But I thought you hate comic books. You are embarrassed by them. If you had a million dollars, you could do anything else you wanted."

"Yeah," Sammy said. "You're right. What am I saying? Only you got me all stirred up with this Golem thing of yours. You always did have a way of confusing my priorities like that."

"Did I? Do I?"

"You always used to make it seem okay to
believe
in all this baloney."

"I think it
was
okay," Joe said. "I don't think maybe neither of us should have stopped."

"You were frustrated," Sammy said. "You wanted to get your hands on some real Germans."

Joe didn't say anything for so long that he could feel his silence beginning to speak to Sammy.

"Huh," he said finally.

"You killed Germans?"

"One," Joe said. "It was an accident."

"Did you—did it make you feel—"

"It made me feel like the worst man in the world."

"Hmm," Sammy said. He had gone back over to the final chapter of
The Golem
and stood staring down at a panel in which the clapper in the porter's bell on the doorpost of Heaven's gate was revealed to be a grinning human skull.

"Funny about the Escapist," Joe said, feeling that he wanted to get a hug from Sammy but checked somehow by the thought that it was something he had never done before. "I mean, not funny, but."

"Isn't it, though."

"Do you feel sad?"

"A little." Sammy looked up from the last page of
The Golem
and pursed his lips. He seemed to be shining a light on some dark corner of his feelings, to see if there was anything in it. "Not as much as I would have thought. It's been such a, you know. A long time." He shrugged. "What about you?"

"Like you." He took a step toward Sammy. "It was a long time."

He laid an arm, awkwardly, around Sammy's shoulders, and Sammy hung his head, and they rocked back and forth a little, remembering aloud that morning in 1939 when they had borne the Escapist and his company of fellow adventurers into Sheldon Anapol's office in the Kramler Building, Sammy whistling "Frenesi," Joe filled with the rapture and rage of the imaginary punch he had just landed on the jaw of Adolf Hitler.

"That was a good day," Joe said.

"One of the best," said Sammy.

"How much money
do
you have?"

"Not a million, that's for sure." Sammy stepped out from under Joe's arm. His eyes narrowed, and he looked suddenly shrewd and Anapolian. "Why? How much do
you
have, Joe?"

"It isn't quite a million," Joe said.

"It isn't quite—you mean to say that you—oh. That money."

Every week for two years, starting in 1939, Joe had socked money into the fund that he intended for the support of his family when they reached America. He anticipated that their health might have suffered, and that it might be difficult for them to get work. Most of all, he wanted to buy them a house, a detached house on its own patch of grass somewhere in the Bronx or New Jersey. He wanted them never to have to share a roof with anyone again. By the end of 1941, he was putting in more than a thousand dollars at a time. Since then—apart from the ten thousand dollars he had spent to doom fifteen children to lie forever among the sediments of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—he had barely touched it; in fact, the account had been swelled, even in his absence, by royalties from the Escapist radio program, which had aired well into 1944, and by the two largish lump payments he had received as his share of the Parnassus serial deal.