The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (41 page)

“Gee whiz!”

“Take care—there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.”

“Yes. I mean, yes, mistress.”

“Usually the girls come up with something involving boots. I don’t know why.” She shrugs, then outspreads the mighty span of her wings. “Now go, and remember, if ever you should need me, you have only to come to me in your dreams.”

Worlds and aeons hence, in a dilapidated old tenement along the river, two of the thieves set to work with chisel and tongs on the gems in the ancient book’s case. In a chair, in a corner, bound and gagged, Officer O’Hara sits slumped. It is still raining, there is a chill in the air, and the third thief is trying to start a fire in an old black potbellied stove.

“Here,” says the first thief as he reaches to tear a sheaf of pages from the Book of Lo. “I’ll bet this old thing’ll burn real nice.”

There is a silken rustle, like a billowing ball gown or an immense, soft pair of wings. They look up and see a giant shadow flit in through the window.

“It’s a bat!” says a thief.

“It’s a bird!” says another.

“It’s a
lady
!” says the third, no fool, starting to run for the door.

The lady turns, eyes flashing. The garment she has imagined for herself is iridescent green, part Merry Widow, part Norman Bel Geddes, tricked out with fins and vanes and laced, with evident complexity, up the front. Her lower parts, in their tight green underpants, are barely covered by the merest suggestion of a skirt, her nine miles of leg are enmeshed in black fishnet, and the heels on her ankle boots are stingingly high. She wears a purple cowl, topped with a pair of lushly furred antennae, that covers her eyes and nose but leaves her black curls free to tumble around her bare shoulders. And from her back bloom, no longer ghostly but green as leaves, a pair of great swallowtailed moth’s wings, each jeweled with a staring blind eye.

“That’s right, little mouse,” she cries to the man headed for the door. “Run!”

She extends her arm. Bright green light ripples from her outspread fingers and enmeshes the thief before he can reach the door. There is an unpleasant crackling sound, a snapping of twigs and pinecones, as an entire skeleton of human bones is compressed rapidly into a very small skin; then silence; then a tiny thin squeak.

“Holy cats!” the moth woman says.

“She turned Louie into a mouse!” cries the first thief. Now he is running, too.

“Freeze!” Green light leaps again, and with a crunching even more sickening than before the atoms and fibers of the thief’s body are rearranged and simplified into cold blue crystals of ice. He stands gleaming like a man of diamond. The corners of his fedora glint. “Oops,” the moth woman mumbles. “Goodness me!”

“What kind of a dolly are you?” the remaining thief demands. “What are you trying to do to us?”

“I just want to give you a hot time, big boy,” she says, and at once the man bursts into flames of such intensity that they melt his erstwhile confederate to a shallow puddle on the floor. The mouse, its tail singed and smoking, dives for the safety of the nearest floorboard.

“Guess I still have a little bit to learn,” muses the newly minted Mistress of the Night. She unties the policeman, who has begun, in all the excitement, to revive. He opens his eyes in time to see a scantily clad woman with enormous green wings jump into the sky. For a while to come he will tell himself, and half believe, that what he saw was the last apparition of a fading dream. It is not until he gets home, and goes to examine his battered handsome mug in the mirror, that he finds, on his cheek, the red butterfly imprint of her lips.

D
EASEY
, as they had known he would, objected to the latest bit of degeneracy from Kavalier & Clay.

“I can’t allow this to happen to my country,” he said. “Things are bad enough already.”

Sammy and Joe were not caught unprepared. “She’s not showing anything any kid can’t see at Jones Beach” was the line that they had decided on. Sammy gave it.

Joe said, “Just like at Jones Beach.” He had never been to Jones Beach.

The morning was gloomy, and as usual in cool weather, Deasey lay spread out on the floor like an old bearskin. Now he pulled himself carefully up to a sitting position, his considerable bulk shifting audibly on his arthritic joints.

“Let me have another look,” he said.

Sammy handed him the sheet of Bristol board with the character design for Luna Moth, “the first sex object,” in Jules Feiffer’s memorable phrase, “created expressly for consumption by little boys.” It was a pinup. A woman with the legs of Dolores Del Rio, black witchy hair, and breasts each the size of her head. Her face was long, her chin pointed, and her mouth a bright red hyphen, downturned at one corner in a saucy little smirk. The pair of furry antennae hung at playful angles, as if tasting the viewer’s desire.

The golden toothpick waggled up and down. “Your usual wasted effort, Mr. Kavalier, my condolences.”

“Thank you.”

“That means you think it could be a hit,” said Sammy.

“It’s very difficult to fail at pornography,” said Deasey. He gazed out
beyond the river at the sere brown cliffs of New Jersey and allowed himself to recall a winter afternoon twelve years before, on a cool, sunny terrace overlooking Puerto Concepción and the Sea of Cortez, when he had sat down at the keys of his portable Royal and begun work on a great and tragic novel, about the love between two brothers and a woman who died. Although the novel was long since abandoned, the typewriter was on his desk even now, page 232 of
Death Wears a Black Sarong
rolled around its platen. Surely, Deasey thought, that
fonda
, that terrace, that heartbreaking sky, that novel—they were all still there, waiting for him. He had only to make his way back.

“Mr. Deasey?” said Joe.

Deasey left off looking out at the expanse of sandstone sky and rusty palisade and went over to his desk. He picked up the phone.

“Fuck it,” he said. “We’ll leave it up to Anapol. I have a feeling they may be looking for a new kind of character, anyway.”

“Why’s that?” Sammy said.

Deasey looked at Sammy and then at Joe. There was something he wanted to tell them. “Why is what?”

“Why might Shelly and Jack be looking for a new kind of character?”

“I never said that. Let’s call him. Get me Mr. Anapol,” he said into the phone.

“What about Ashkenazy?” said Joe. “What will he say?”

Deasey said, “Do you seriously have any doubts?”

B
EAUTEEFUL.”
Ashkenazy sighed. “Look at those … those …”

“They’re called knockers,” said Anapol.

“
Look at them!
Which one of you thought this up?” said Ashkenazy. He looked at Joe with one eye while he kept the other on Luna Moth. Affluence had brought with it an entire panoply of new suits, striped and checked and boldly herringboned, madly checkered three-piece numbers, each of them the color of a different variety of squash, from butternut to Italian green. The fabrics were rich woolens and cashmeres, the cuts jazzy and loose, so that he no longer looked like a racetrack tout, with his chewed cigar end and his thumbs in his waistcoat. Now he looked like a big-time gangster with a fix in on the third at Belmont. “I bet it was you, Kavalier.”

Joe looked at Sammy. “We did it together,” he said. “Sammy and I. Mostly Sammy. I just said something about a moth.”

“Aw, now don’t be modest, Joe,” Sammy said, stepping over to pat Joe on the shoulder. “He pretty much slapped the whole thing together himself.”

The practice of magic, which Joe had resumed in front of the mirror in Jerry Glovsky’s bedroom immediately after meeting with Hermann Hoffman, also seemed to have played a role in her parturition. It was true, however, that Sammy, for some time, had been digging around for a female superbeing. The addition of sex to the costumed-hero concept was a natural and, apart from a few minor efforts at other companies—the Sorceress of Zoom, the Woman in Red—yet to be attempted. Sammy had been toying with ideas for a cat-woman, a bird-woman, a mythological Amazon (all of them soon to be tried elsewhere), and a lady boxer named Kid Vixen when Joe had proposed his secret tribute to the
girl from Greenwich Village. The idea of a moth-woman was also, in its way, a natural. National had another huge hit on its hands with Batman in
Detective Comics
, and the appeal of a nocturnal character, one who derived her power from the light of the moon, was evident.

“I don’t know,” said Shelly Anapol. “It makes me a little nervous.” He took from his partner, and held with the tips of his fingers, the painting of Luna Moth, which Joe had invested with all the hopefulness and desire that Rosa, admittedly in person a somewhat less buxom creature, had stirred in him—he had worked most of the time with an erection. Anapol pushed aside a letter that lay open on his desk blotter and dropped the painting there, as if it were extremely hot or had been dipped in carbolic. “Those are very large breasts, boys.”

“We know it, Mr. Anapol,” said Sammy.

“But a moth, I don’t know, it’s not a popular insect. Why can’t she be a butterfly? There must be some good names there. Red, uh, what? Red Dot … Bluewing … Pearly … I don’t know.”

“She can’t be a
butterfly
,” said Sammy. “She’s the Mistress of the
Night
.”

“That’s another thing: we can’t say ‘mistress.’ Already I’m getting fifty letters a week from priests and ministers. A rabbi from Schenectady. Luna Moth. Luna Moth.” The look of incipient nausea had come into his eyes and slack jaw. They were going to make themselves a pile with this.

“George, you think this is a good idea?”

“Oh, it’s drivel, Mr. Anapol,” Deasey said brightly. “Extremely pure.”

Anapol nodded. “You haven’t been wrong yet,” he said. He picked up the letter that he had pushed aside, scanned it quickly, then put it back down. “Jack?”

“They got nothing like it,” Ashkenazy said.

Anapol turned to Sammy. “It’s settled, then. Call Pantaleone, the Glovskys, whoever you need to fill in the rest of the book. What the hell, make ’em all dollies. Maybe we could call it
All Doll
. Huh? Huh?
All Doll
. That’s new. Is that new?”

“I never heard of anything like it.”

“Let
them
infringe on us for a change. Yeah, good, get the kids in here, George, and get them started on this. I want something by Monday.”

“Here we go again,” said Sammy. “There’s just one thing, Mr. Anapol.”

Ashkenazy and Anapol looked at him. You could see they knew what was coming. Sammy glanced at Deasey, remembering the speech the editor had made on Friday night, hoping to find some encouragement. Deasey was watching intently, his face expressionless but pale, his forehead beaded with perspiration.

“Uh-oh,” Anapol said. “Here it comes.”

“We want in on the Escapist radio program, that’s first.”

“That’s
first
?”

“Second is, you agree that this character, Luna Moth, is half ours. Fifty percent to Empire Comics, fifty percent to Kavalier & Clay. We get half of the merchandising, half the radio program if there is one. Half of everything. Otherwise we take her, and our services, elsewhere.”

Anapol half turned his head toward his partner. “You were right,” he said.

“And we want raises, too,” Sammy said, with another glance at Deasey, deciding, now that the subject seemed to be open for discussion, to press it as far as he could.

“Another two hundred dollars a week,” Joe said. The
Ark of Miriam
was scheduled to sail in the early spring of next year. At that rate, if he put away an additional two hundred a week, he would be able to underwrite four, five, perhaps half a dozen passages more than he had promised.

“Two hundred dollars a week!”
Anapol shouted.

Deasey chuckled and shook his head. He seemed genuinely tickled.

“And, uh, yeah, the same for Mr. Deasey, here, too,” said Sammy. “He’s going to have a lot more to do.”

“You can’t
negotiate
for me, Mr. Clay,” Deasey said dryly. “I’m management.”