The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (32 page)

“What?” Smith closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “How the hell did he manage that? Where did he get the handcuffs?”

Here Harley flushed deeply, and muttered a barely audible reply.

“What’s that?” Smith said.

“They’re mine, Your Honor,” said Harley. “And to tell you the truth, I’m not really sure how he got ahold of them.”

Love’s coughing fit had by now become quite genuine. He was a three-pack-a-day man, and his lungs were in terrible shape. To prevent public embarrassment, he generally laughed as little as possible.

“I see,” Smith said. “Well, then, Captain, get a couple of your biggest boys and carry out the goddamn table, too.”

“It’s, uh, well, it’s built in, Your Honor. Bolted to the wall.”

“
Then unbolt it!
Just get the stupid S.O.B. out of there! His damn pencil sharpener is probably booby-trapped!”

Harley signaled to a couple of his stoutest men.

“Wait a minute,” Smith said. He checked his watch. “God damn it.” He pushed his derby toward the back of his head, making himself look at once younger and more truculent. “Leave me have a word with this pup. What is his name again?”

“It’s Kavalier with a K, Your Honor, only I don’t see the use or the sense in letting you—”

“In all my eleven years as president of this building, Captain Harley, I have never once sent you or your men in to lay a hand on one of the tenants. This isn’t some flophouse on the Bowery.” He started toward the door of Empire Comics. “I hope we can afford to devote a minute to reason before we give Mr. Kavalier with a K the bum’s rush.”

“Mind if I come with you?” Love said. He had recovered from his spasm of mirth, though his pocket handkerchief now contained the evidence of something evil and brown inside him.

“I can’t let you do that, Jim,” Smith said. “It would be irresponsible.”

“You have a wife and children to lose, Al. All I have is my money.”

Smith looked at his old friend. Before Chapin Brown had rushed in to interrupt them with word of the bomb threat, they had been discussing not the Hudson River Bridge, a scheme that with Love’s subsequent, abrupt retirement from public life came, once again, to nothing, but rather the man’s strongly held and oft-aired views on the war that Britain was losing in Europe. A loyal Willkie man, James Love was among a small number of powerful industrialists in the country who had been actively in favor of American entry into the war almost from its beginning. Though he was the son and grandson of millionaires, he had been troubled all his life, much like the president of the United States, by wayward liberal impulses that, however fitful—the Love mills were all open shops—made him a natural anti-fascist. Also figuring into his views, undoubtedly, was the memory, handed down from millionaire to millionaire in Love’s family, of the colossal and enduring
prosperity that war and government contracts had brought to Oneonta Woolens during the Civil War. All of this was known, or more or less understood, by Al Smith, and led him to conclude that the thought of risking death at the hands of American Nazis held a certain appeal to someone who had been trying to get into the war, one way or another, for almost two years now. Then, too, the man had lost his famously beautiful wife to cancer back in ’36 or ’37; since that time, vague rumors had reached Smith’s ear of profligate conduct that might suggest the behavior of a man who had, in that tragedy, also lost his moorings, or at least his fear of death. What Smith did not know was that the one great and true friend of James Love’s life, Gerhardt Frege, had been one of the first men to die—of internal injuries—at Dachau, shortly after the camp opened in 1933.
^*
Smith did not suspect, and never would have imagined, that the animus James Love held against Nazis and their American sympathizers was, at bottom, a personal matter. But there was an eagerness in the man’s eyes that both worried Smith and touched him.

“We give it five minutes,” Smith said. “Then I have Harley drag the bastard out by his suspenders.”

The waiting room of Empire Comics was a cold expanse of marble and leather moderne, a black tundra frosted over with glass and chrome. The effect was huge and intimidating and coldly splendid, rather like its designer, Mrs. Sheldon Anapol, though neither Love nor Smith had any way, of course, of drawing this parallel. There was a long hemicircular reception desk opposite the entry, faced with black marble and ribbed with Saturn’s rings of glass, behind which three black-coated firemen, their faces concealed by heavy welder’s masks, crouched, poking around carefully with broom handles. On the wall over the reception desk, there was a painting of a lithe masked giant in a dark blue union suit, his arms outspread in ecstatic embrace as he burst from a writhing nest of thick iron chains that entangled his loins, belly, and chest. On his chest, he wore the emblem of a stylized key.
Above his head arched foot-high letters proclaiming boldly
THE ESCAPIST!
while at his feet a pair of firefighters crawled around on their hands and knees, searching the drawers and kneeholes of the reception desk for a bomb. The firemen, their visors glinting, looked up as Harley led Governor Smith and Mr. Love past.

“Find anything?” Smith said. One of the firemen, an elderly fellow whose helmet looked far too large for him, shook his head.

The comic book workshop, or whatever it was called, had none of the polish and gleam of the waiting room. The floor was concrete, painted light blue and littered with fag ends and crumpled carnations of drawing paper. The tables were a homely jumble of brand-new and semidecrepit, but there was full daylight on three sides, with spectacular if not quite breathtaking views of the hotel and newspaper towers of midtown, the green badge of Central Park, the battlements of New Jersey, and the dull metal glint of the East River, with a glimpse of the iron mantilla of the Queensboro Bridge. The windows were shut, and a pall of tobacco lay over the room. In a far corner, against a wall from which his built-in drawing table canted downward and out, hunched a pale young man, lean, rumpled, shirttails dangling, adding billowing yards of smoke to the pall. Al Smith signaled to Harley to leave them. “Five minutes,” Harley said as he withdrew.

As soon as the police captain spoke, the young man whirled around on his stool. He squinted nearsightedly in the direction of Smith and Love as they approached, looking mildly annoyed. He was a good-looking Jewish kid, with large blue eyes, an aquiline nose, a strong chin.

“Young man,” Smith said. “Mr. Kavalier, is it? I’m Al Smith. This is my friend Mr. Love.”

“Joe,” the young man said. His grip in Love’s was firm and dry. Though he appeared to have been wearing his clothes rather too long, they were good enough clothes: a broadcloth shirt with a monogram stitched onto the breast pocket, a raw silk necktie, gray worsted trousers with a generous cuff. But he had the undernourished look of an immigrant, his deep-set eyes bruised and wary, the tips of his fingers stained yellow. The careful manicure of his nails had been ruined by ink. He looked ill rested, dog-tired, and—it was a surprising thought to Love,
who was not a man especially sensitive to the feelings of others—sad. A less refined New Yorker probably would have asked him,
Where’s the funeral?

“Look here, young man,” Smith said. “I’ve come to make a personal request. Now, I admire your dedication to your work here. But I’d like you just to do me a favor, a personal favor to me, you understand. Here it is. Come along now, and let me stand you to a drink. All right? We’ll get this little problem cleared up, and then you’ll be my guest at the club. Okay, kid? What do you say?”

If Joe Kavalier was impressed by this generous offer from one of the best-known, most beloved characters in contemporary American life, a man who once might have been president of the United States, he didn’t show it. He merely looked amused, Love thought, and behind this amusement there were hints of irritation.

“I’d like to another time, maybe, thank you,” he said, in an indeterminate Hapsburg accent. He reached for a stack of art board and took a fresh piece from the top. It appeared to the observant Love, who always took a ready interest in learning the secrets and methods of any kind of manufacturing or production, to have been preprinted with nine large square frames, in three tiers of three. “Only I have so much work.”

“You’re quite
attached
to your work, I can see that,” Love said, catching the younger man’s air of amused unconcern.

Joe Kavalier looked down at his feet, where a pair of metal cuffs linked his left ankle, in a gray sock with white and burgundy clocks, to one of the legs of his table. “I was not wanting to be interrupted, you know?” He tap-tap-tapped the end of his pencil against the piece of board. “So many little boxes to fill.”

“Yes, all right, that’s very admirable, son,” Smith said, “but for gosh sakes, how much drawing will you be able to do when your arm is lying down on Thirty-third Street?”

The young man gazed around the studio, empty but for the smoke of his cigarette and a pair of grunting firemen, the buckles on their raincoats rattling as they clambered around the room.

“There isn’t no bomb,” he said.

“You think this thing’s a hoax?” Love said.

Joe Kavalier nodded, then lowered his head to his work. He considered
the page’s first little box from one angle, then another. Then, rapidly, in a firm and certain manner and without stopping, he began to draw. In choosing the image he was now putting to paper, he didn’t appear to be following the typewritten script lying stacked at his elbow. Perhaps he had committed it all to memory. Love craned his head to get a better look at what the kid was drawing. It seemed to be an airplane, one with the fierce-looking jambeaux of a Stuka. Yes, a Stuka in a streaking power dive. The detail was impressive. The plane had solidity and rivets. And yet there was something exaggerated in the backward sweep of the wings that suggested great speed and even a hint of falconish malevolence.

“Governor?” It was Harley. He sounded as if he was irritated with Al Smith now, too. “I got two men with a wrench ready and waiting.”

“Just a moment,” Love said, and then felt himself blush. It was Al Smith’s decision, of course—it was Al Smith’s building—but Love was impressed by the young man’s good looks, his air of certainty with regard to the bomb’s fraudulence; and he was fascinated, as always, by the sight of someone making something skillfully. He wasn’t ready to leave either.

“You’ve got half a moment,” Harley said, ducking out again. “With all due respect.”

“Well, now, Joe,” Smith said, checking his watch once again, looking and sounding more nervous than before. His tone grew patient and slightly condescending, and Love sensed that he was trying to be psychological. “If you won’t evacuate, maybe you’ll tell me why the Bund—would this be the Bund?”

“The Aryan-American League.”

Smith looked at Love, who shook his head. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of them,” Smith said.

Joe Kavalier’s mouth bunched up at one corner in a small, eloquent smirk, as if to suggest that this was hardly surprising.

“Why are these Aryans so upset with you people here? How did they come across these controversial drawings of yours? I wasn’t aware that Nazis
read
comic books.”

“All kinds of people are reading them,” said Joe. “I get mail from all over the country. California. Illinois. From Canada, too.”

“Really?” Love said. “How many of your comic books do you sell every month?”

“Jimmy—” Smith began, tapping the crystal of his wristwatch with a fat finger.

“We have three titles,” the young man said. “Though now it’s going to be five.”

“And how many do you sell in a month?”

“Mr. Kavalier, this is fascinating stuff, but if you won’t agree to come quietly I’m going to be obliged to—”

“Close to three million,” Joe Kavalier said. “But they all get passed along at least once. They get traded for other ones, between the kids. So the number of people reading them, Sam—my partner, Sam Clay—says it’s maybe two times how many we sell, or more.”

“Das ist bemerkenswert,”
said Love.

For the first time, Joe Kavalier looked surprised. “
Ja
, no kidding.”

“And that fellow out there in the lobby, with the key on his chest. That your star attraction?”

“The Escapist. He is the world-greatest escape artist, no chains to hold him, sending him to liberate the enprisoned peoples in the world. It’s good stuff.” He smiled for the first time, a smile that was self-mocking but not quite enough to conceal his evident professional pride. “He is made up by my partner and me.”

“I take it your partner had sense enough to evacuate,” Smith said, returning them to the ostensible purpose of this conversation.

“He is with an appointment. And there isn’t any bomb.”

At that moment, just as Joe Kavalier said “bomb,” there was a burst of clamor—
brrrang!
—right over their heads. James Love jumped and let go of his cigarette.

“All clear,” Smith said, mopping his forehead with a hankie. “Well, thank God for that.”

“Good heavens.” There was ash all down Love’s jacket, and he brushed it away, blushing.

“All clear!” called a husky voice. A moment later, the elderly firefighter stuck his head into the workroom. “It was just an old clock, your honor,” he told Smith, looking at once relieved and disappointed. “In the desk of a Mister … Clay. Taped to a couple of dowels painted red.”

“I knew it,” said Joe softly, starting in on the second little box.

“Dynamite isn’t even red,” the old fireman said, walking off. “Not really.”

“The guy reads too much comic books,” Joe said.

“Governor Smith!”

They turned, and three men came into the workroom. One of them, balding and vast in every part and extremity, had the air of a high official in some disreputable labor union; the other, tall and merely potbellied, had thinning rusty hair, a football hero gone to seed. Behind the two big fellows stood a tiny, quarrelsome-looking young man, dressed in an outsize gray pinstriped suit with padded shoulders that were almost comical in their breadth. The little one immediately came over to the drawing table where Joe Kavalier was working. He nodded to Love, sizing him up, and put a hand on Kavalier’s shoulder.