The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (30 page)

Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier exchanged a look in which Love saw the smoldering coals of a grudge.

"Moo," Sam Clay said, with a shrug of his enormous false shoulders.

"I'm going to need a statement from you, Mr. Anapol," Captain Harley said. "And from you, Governor, and your guest. It won't take long."

"What do you say we do it down at the club," Al Smith said. "I could use a drink."

At that moment a messenger in blue livery walked in, carrying a special-delivery letter.

"Sheldon Anapol?" he said.

"Here," Anapol said, signing for it. "George, stay here and see that things get settled down."

Deasey nodded. Anapol tipped the messenger and exited behind Al Smith. Love signaled to Smith that he would follow, then turned back to the two young men. Sam Clay stood, his shoulder against his partner's, looking a little woozy, as if he had been sandbagged. Then he went over to a low shelf in a corner of the room. He quickly gathered a stack of magazines and brought them to Love, looking the older man right in the eye.

"Maybe you'd like to get to know the character a little better," he said.
"Our
character."

" 'Ours' as in ... ?"

" 'Ours' as in Joe and myself. The Escapist. Also the Monitor, the Four Freedoms, Mr. Machine Gun. All of Empire's leading sellers. Here. Joe, do you have— Yeah." He scrabbled around in the clutter under Joe Kavalier's table to find a sheet of stationery on whose elaborate letterhead a group of handsome, muscular men and boys lounged, relaxing on and about the letters, one wild-haired, hook-nosed boy perched atop the ampersand of the words "Kavalier Clay." "I've always thought the Escapist would be perfect for radio."

"Well, I'm really not qualified to judge, Mr. Clay," Love said, not unkindly, taking the magazines and the sheet of paper. "To be perfectly honest, my only concern is whether or not he'll sell socks. But I will say"—and here his face took on an odd expression that Joe almost would have called a leer—"I do like what I've seen here today. Take care, boys."

He exited the workroom, troubled, but not unduly, by a pang of sympathy for Kavalier Clay. Love saw how it was. These boys had come up with this Escapist character and then, in exchange for some token payment and the opportunity of seeing their names in print, signed away all the rights to Anapol and company. Now Anapol and company were prospering—enough to let a quarter of a floor in the Empire State Building, enough to exert an impressive mass-cultural influence over the vast American marketplace of children and know-nothings. And while, to judge from their attire, Messrs. Kavalier Clay were sharing to some degree in the general prosperity, Sheldon Anapol had just made it apparent to both of them that the course of the river of money beside which they had pitched their camp had been diverted, and would henceforth flow no more around them. In bis life as a businessman, Love had seen plenty of boy geniuses left deserted amid the bleached bones and cacti of their dreams. These two would, no doubt, have other brilliant ideas, and furthermore, no one was ever born smart in business. Love's feeling of pity, while sincere—and inspired in part by Joe's dark good looks and the quickness of spirit of the two young men—lasted no longer than it took for the elevator to deposit him in the richly paneled lobby of the Empire State Club. He did not imagine for a moment that he had just set in motion the wheels not of another minor midtown ruination but, very nearly, his own.

Back in the workroom—once again alive with chitchat and gum-snap and some shivery Hampton on the radio—George Deasey stood in the doorway to his office. He knit his ginger eyebrows and pursed his lips, looking uncharacteristically moved.

"Gentlemen," he said to Joe and Sammy. "A word."

He went into his office and, as was his wont, lay down in the middle of the floor and began to pick his teeth. He had been trampled by a fly-maddened cavalry horse while covering one of the U.S. Marine Corps' numerous attempts to capture A. C. Sandino, and on chill afternoons like this one, his back tended to stiffen up on him. His toothpick was solid gold, a legacy from his father, a former associate justice of the New York State Court of Appeals. "Close the door," he told Sam Clay after the boys came in. "I don't want anyone to hear what I'm going to say."

"Why not?" Sammy said, obediently shutting the door as he followed Joe in.

"Because it would cause me considerable pain if anyone should form the mistaken impression that I actually give a tinker's damn about you, Mr. Clay."

"Fat chance of that," said Sammy. He flopped into one of the two straight-backed chairs that flanked Deasey's enormous desk. If he was stung by the insult, he gave no sign of it. He had toughened under the constant administration of tiny mallet blows from Deasey. During their first months working for him, on days when Deasey had ridden Sammy particularly hard, Joe had often listened in the dark, pretending to be asleep, as Sammy lay clenched tight in the bed beside him, barking into his pillow. Deasey mocked his grammar. In restaurants, he made fun of Sammy's poor table manners, unsophisticated palate, and amazement with such simple things as sculpted butter pats and cold potato soup. He offered Sammy a chance to write a Gray Goblin novel for
Racy Police Stories,
sixty thousand words at half a cent a word; Sammy, sleeping two hours a night for a month, wrote three books, which Joe had read and enjoyed, only to have Deasey dissect one after another, each time with terse, bitter criticism that was infallibly accurate. In the end, however, he had bought all three.

"First of all," Deasey said, "Mr. Clay, where is
Strange Frigate?"

"Halfway done," Sammy said. This was a fourth Goblin novel that Racy Publications, now operating very much in the shadow of its younger sibling but still turning a profit for Jack Ashkenazy, had commissioned from Sam Clay. Like all seventy-two of its predecessors in the series, it would be published, of course, under the house name of Harvey Slayton. Actually, as far as Joe knew, Sammy had not even started it yet. The title was one of two hundred and forty-five that George Deasey had dreamed up during a two-day bender in Key West in 1936 and had been working his way through ever since.
Strange Frigate
was number seventy-three on the list. "I'll have it for you by Monday."

"You must."

"I shall."

"Mr. Kavalier." Deasey had a sneaky way of lolling his head around toward you, one hand half-covering his face as if he were about to drop off for a catnap—an impression made all the stronger if he was, as now, stretched out on the floor. Then, suddenly, his drooping eyelids would snap open, and you would find yourself on the point of a sharp inquisitorial gaze. "Please reassure me that my suspicions of your involvement in this afternoon's charade are unfounded."

Joe struggled to meet Deasey's sleepy Torquemada stare. Of course he knew that the bomb threat had been made by Carl Ebling, in direct retaliation for his attack on the headquarters of the AAL two weeks before. Clearly, Ebling had been casing the Empire offices, tracking the move from the Kramler Building, observing the comings and goings of the employees, preparing his big red comic book bomb. Such fixity of purpose ought to have been, in spite of the harmlessness of today's reprisal, cause for alarm. Joe really ought to have told the police about Carl Ebling right away, and had the man arrested and jailed. And the prospect of the man's imprisonment, by rights, ought to have given him satisfaction. But why, instead, did it feel like surrender? It seemed to Joe that Ebling could have just as easily reported
him,
for breaking and entering, destruction of property, even assault, but instead had pursued his solitary and furtive course, engaging Joe—all right, the man was under the false impression that his antagonist was Sam Clay, Joe was somehow going to have to set him straight about that—in a private battle, a
concours a deux.
And Joe had
known,
somehow, from the moment Anapol's secretary took the call, with an illusionist's instinct for hooey, that the threat was a sham, the bomb a fiction. Ebling wanted to frighten Joe, to threaten him into calling off the comic book war that he found so offensive to the dignity of the Third Reich and the person of Adolf Hitler, and yet, at the same time, he was unwilling actually to annihilate the source of a pleasure that in his lonely
verbitterte
life must be all too rare. If the bomb had been real, Joe thought, I would naturally turn him in. It did not occur to him that if the bomb had been real he would now, quite possibly, be dead; that the next blow in their battle, if it were struck not by the impersonal force of the law but by Joe himself, might well reify the conflict in Ebling's unbalanced mind; and least of all, that he had begun to lose himself in a labyrinth of fantastical revenge whose bone-littered center lay ten thousand miles and three years away.

"Completely," Joe said. "I don't even know the guy."

"What guy is that?"

"What I said. I don't know him."

"I can smell it," Deasey said dubiously. "But I just can't figure it out."

"Mr. Deasey," Sammy said. "What did you want us for?"

"Yes. I wanted— God help me, I wanted to warn you."

Like a wreck being winched from the sea bottom, Deasey lumbered to his feet. He had been drinking since before lunch and, as he got himself upright, nearly fell over again. He went over to the window. The desk, a scarred, tiger-oak behemoth with fifty-two pigeonholes and twenty-four drawers, had followed him from his old office in the Kramler, its drawers stocked with fresh ribbons, blue pencils, pints of rye, black twists of Virginia shag, clean sheets of foolscap, aspirin, Sen-Sen, and sal hepatica. Deasey kept both it and his office spotless, uncluttered, and free of dust. This was the first time in his entire career that he had ever had an office all to himself. This—these fifty square feet of new carpet, blank paper, and inky black ribbons—was the mark and clear summation of what he had attained. He sighed. He slipped two fingers between the slats of the Venetian blinds and let a wan slice of autumn light into the room.

"When they did the
Gray Goblin
on the DuMont network," he said. "You remember that, Mr. Clay?"

"Sure," Sammy said. "I used to listen sometimes."

"What about
Crack Carter!
Remember that one?"

"With the bullwhip?"

"Fighting evil amid the tumbleweeds.
Sharpe of the Mounties?"

"Sure, absolutely. They all started in the pulps, is that it?"

"They have their common origin in a far more exclusive and decrepit locale than that," Deasey said.

Sammy and Joe looked at each other uncertainly. Deasey tapped his forehead with the tip of the toothpick.

"You were
Sharpe of the Mounties?"
Sammy asked.

Deasey nodded. "He started out in
Racy Adventure."

"And Whiskey, the husky dog with whom he shares an almost uncanny bond?"

"That one ran for five years on NBC Blue," Deasey said. "I never made a dime." He turned from the window. "Now, boys, it's your turn in the barrel."

"They have to pay us something," Sammy said. "After all. I mean, it may not be in the contract—"

"It isn't"

"But Anapol isn't a thief. He's an honorable person."

Deasey pressed his lips together tightly and hoisted the corners. It took Joe a moment to realize that he was smiling.

"It's my experience that honorable people live by the contracts they sign," Deasey said at last. "And not a tittle more."

Sammy looked at Joe. "He isn't cheering me up," he said. "Is he cheering you up?"

The question of a radio program, indeed the entire exchange that had taken place with the slim, silver-haired man wearing the eager expression, had largely escaped Joe. He was still far less proficient in English than he pretended to be, particularly when the subject ran to sports, politics, or business. He had no idea how socks or barrels figured into the discussion.

"That man wants to make a show on the radio about the Escapist," Joe said, slowly, feeling slow, thick-witted, and obscurely abused by inscrutable men.

"He seemed at least to be interested in having his flacks explore the possibility," Deasey said.

"And if they do, you are saying that they will not have to pay us for it."

"I'm saying that."

"But of course they must."

"Not a dime."

"I want a look at that contract," Sammy said.

"Look all you want," Deasey said. "Look it up and down. Hire a lawyer and have him nose around in it. All the rights—radio, movies, books, tin whistles, Cracker Jack prizes—they all belong to Anapol and Ashkenazy. One hundred percent."

"I thought you said you wanted to warn us." Sammy looked annoyed. "It seems to me the time for a warning would have been about a year ago, when we put our names to that piece-of-shit-excuse-my-language contract."

Deasey nodded. "Fair enough," he said. He went to a glass-fronted lawyer's bookcase, stocked with a copy of every pulp magazine in which one of his novels had appeared, each bound in fine morocco and stamped soberly in gold characters racy policeman or racy ace, with the issue number and date of publication and, beneath these, the uniform legend complete works of george deasey.
[5]
^[5]
He stepped back and studied the books with, it seemed to Joe, a certain air of regret, though for what, exactly, Joe could not have said. "For what it's worth, here's the warning now. Or call it advice, if you like. You boys were powerless when you signed that contract last year. You aren't quite so powerless anymore. You've had a good run. You've come up with some good ideas that have sold well. You've begun to make a name for yourselves. Now, we could debate the merits of making a name for yourselves in a third-rate industry by cranking out nonsense for numbskulls, but what isn't in doubt is that there's money to be found in this game right now, and you two have shown a knack for dowsing it. Anapol knows it. He knows that, if you wanted to, you could probably walk over to Donenfeld or Arnold or Goodman and write yourself a much better deal to dream up nonsense over there. So that's my warning: stop handing this crap over to Anapol as if you owed it to him."