“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 LIKE 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.*
“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.”
“They just started,” Lieber said. “I’m kind of the prototype.”
The elevator thudded into place, and Sammy dragged the rattling cage to one side.
Sammy’s father-in-law stood there in a tweed suit. The jacket had epaulets, and there was enough tweed in it to clothe at least two grouse-hunting Scotsmen. Four or five years earlier, Longman Harkoo had delivered a series of lectures at the New School on the intimate relations between Catholicism and Surrealism, entitled “The Superego, the Ego, and the Holy Ghost.” They had been desultory, mumbling, and sparsely attended, but since that time Siggy had abandoned his former caftans and magister’s robes in favor of a more professorial attire. All of his enormous suits were made, badly, by the same Oxford tailor who ill-clothed the woolen flower of English academe.
“He’s afraid you’ll be angry with him,” Saks said. “We told him you wouldn’t be.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Oh, much more than see him.” He smirked. “He’s—”
“You’ve seen Joe, and you never said anything to me or Rosa?”
“Joe? You mean Joe Kavalier?” Saks looked dumbfounded. He opened his mouth and then closed it again. “Hmm,” he said. Something seemed to be not quite adding up in his mind.
“This is my father-in-law, Mr. Harkoo,” Sammy told Lieber. “Mr. Harkoo, this is Detective Lieber. I don’t know if you’ve seen the Herald today, but there’s—”
“Who’s that behind you?” Lieber said, peering into the elevator, around the great dun bulk of Siggy Saks. The big man stepped deftly, and not without an air of happy anticipation, to one side, as though raising the curtain on a completed illusion. The bit of hocus-pocus produced an eleven-year-old boy named Thomas Edison Clay.
“I found him on the doorstep. Quite literally.”
“God damn it, Tommy,” Sammy said. “I walked you into the building. I saw you go into your homeroom. How did you get out?”
Tommy didn’t say anything. He just stood looking down at the eye patch in his hands.
“Another escape artist,” Detective Lieber said. “It must run in the family.”
* Sammy liked to tell a story about a hungry young artist named Roy Lichtenstein who had once wandered into his office at Pharaoh looking for a job. There is no evidence, however, that the story is true.
A GREAT FEAT OF ENGINEERING is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction. Since its completion, the Empire State Building, a gigantic shard of the Hoosier State torn from the mild limestone bosom of the Midwest and upended, on the site of the old Waldorf-Astoria, in the midst of the heaviest traffic in the world, had been a magnet for dislocated souls hoping to ensure the finality of their impact, or to mock the bold productions of human vanity. Since its opening almost twenty-three years earlier, a dozen people had attempted to leap from its ledges or its pinnacle to the street below; about half had managed the trick. None, however, had ever before given such clear and considerate warning of his intentions. For the building’s private police and firefighting squadrons, working in concert with their municipal brethren, there had been ample time to post officers at all the street entrances and points of ingress, at the stairwell doors and elevator banks. The twenty-fifth floor, where the offices of Empire Comics were still to be found, swarmed with building cops in their big-shouldered brass and wool uniforms, with those old-fashioned peaked caps designed, legend had it, by the late Al Smith himself. Alerts had been issued to the building’s fifteen thousand tenants, warning them to be on the lookout for a lean, hawk-faced madman, perhaps dressed in a dark blue union suit, or perhaps in a moth-eaten blue tuxedo with extravagant tails. Firefighters in canvas coveralls ringed the building on three sides, from Thirty-third Street, around Fifth Avenue, to Thirty-fourth. They peered up through fine German binoculars, scanning the infinite planes of Indiana rock for any emerging hand or foot. They were ready, insofar as readiness was possible. Should the madman actually make it through a window and out into the darkening stuff of the evening, their course of action was less clear. But they were hopeful.
“We’ll get him before he goes,” predicted Captain Harley, still in command of the building’s police force after all these years, his blighted eye glittering brighter and more irascible than ever. “We’ll get the poor dumb mud-turk.”
The daily circulation of the New York Herald-Tribune in 1954 was four hundred and fifty thousand. Of these readers, some two hundred had been drawn, by the letter printed in their newspaper that morning, to stand in wondering clumps behind police lines, gazing up. They were mostly men in their twenties and thirties, in jackets and ties, shipping clerks, commercial draftsmen, clothing and textile wholesalers working their way up in their fathers’ businesses. Many of them were employed in the neighborhood. They checked their watches and made the hard-bitten remarks of New Yorkers at the prospect of a suicide—“I wish he’d do it already, I got a date”—but they did not take their eyes from the sides of the building. They had grown
up on the Escapist, or had discovered him and his adventures in a foxhole in Belgium or in a transport off Bougainville. In some of these men, the name Joe Kavalier stirred long-dormant memories of reckless, violent, beautiful release.
Then there were the passersby, the shoppers and office workers headed for home, drawn by the flashing lights and uniforms. Word of the promised entertainment had spread quickly among them. Where the flow of information flagged or was retarded by tight-lipped policemen, the small but voluble contingent of comic book men was on hand to fill in and embellish the details of Joe Kavalier’s misfortunate career.
“I hear it’s all a hoax,” said Joe Simon, who, with his own partner, Jack Kirby, had created Captain America. The rights to Captain America had earned, and in the future would continue to earn, great sums for their owner, Timely Publications, one day to be better known as Marvel Comics. “I heard that from Stan.”
By five-thirty, when no one had been found skulking in the building or had inched himself out onto a windblown sill, Captain Harley began to come to the same conclusion. He was standing with some of his men just in front of the Thirty-third Street entrance, chewing on the end of a briar pipe. For the eighth time, he took out a gold pocket watch and consulted its face. He snapped it shut and chuckled.
“It’s a hoax,” he said. “I knew it all along.”
“More and more I’m inclined to agree,” said Detective Lieber.
“Maybe his watch stopped,” Sammy Clay said almost hopefully. Lieber got the feeling that if the threat did turn out to be a hoax, Clay was going to be disappointed.
“Tell me this,” Lieber said to Clay. As a family member, the little writer—that was how Lieber thought of him—had been permitted within the police cordon. In the event that Joe Kavalier appeared, his cousin would be on hand for last-minute pleas and counsel. There was also the boy. Ordinary procedure would have barred children from such an event, but experience had taught Lieber, who had spent nine years as a patrolman in Brownsville, that every so often the face of a child, or even its voice over a telephone, could draw a person in from the ledge. “Before today, how many people knew this whole story about how you and your cousin were robbed and cheated and taken advantage of?”
“I resent that, Detective,” said Sheldon Anapol. The big man had come down from the Empire offices at five o’clock precisely. He was wrapped in a long black overcoat, a tiny gray tyrolean cap roosting on his head like a pigeon, its feather troubled by the breeze. The day was turning cold and bitter now. The light was failing. “You don’t know enough about this matter to pass judgment like that. There were contracts involved, copyrights. Not to mention the fact that, while they were working for us, both Mr. Kavalier and Mr. Clay made more money than almost anyone in the business.”
“I’m sorry,” Lieber said, unapologetically. He turned back to Sammy. “But you see my point.”
Sammy shrugged, nodding, mouth pursed. He saw the detective’s point.
“Not a hell of a lot before today. A few dozen guys in the business. A lot of them jokers, I have to admit. Some lawyers, probably. My wife.”
“Well, now, look at this.”
Lieber gestured toward the swelling crowd, pushed back to the opposite sidewalk, the streets blocked off and filled with honking cabs, the reporters and photographers, everyone looking up at the building around which the untold Escapist millions had coalesced for so many years. They had been told the names of the principal players, Sam Clay, Sheldon Anapol; they gestured and murmured and scowled at the publisher in his funereal coat. The sum of money out of which the team of Kavalier & Clay had been cheated by Empire Comics, though no one had ever actually sat down and calculated it, was widely current in the crowd, and growing by the moment.
“You can’t buy this kind of publicity.” Lieber’s experience with suicides was fairly extensive. There was a very small set of them who chose to do away with themselves publicly, and, within this group, an even smaller subset who would provide an exact time and place in advance. Of these—and he could think of perhaps two in all the years since he got his badge in 1940—none was ever late for his appointment. “Mr. Anapol here”—he nodded to the publisher—“through no fault of his own, naturally, ends up looking like the bad guy.”
“Character assassination,” Anapol agreed. “That’s what it amounts to.”
Again Captain Harley of the building police snapped the watch shut, this time with greater finality. “I’m going to send my boys home,” he said. “I don’t think any of you have anything to worry about.”
Lieber winked at the boy, a sullen, staring kid who, for the last forty-five minutes, had been standing in the lee of his vast grandfather with a finger in his mouth, looking as if he was going to vomit. When Lieber winked, the kid turned pale. The detective frowned. In his years as a beat cop on and off Pitkin Avenue, he had frightened children with a friendly wink or hello many times, but rarely one so old who did not have something on his conscience.
“I don’t get it,” said Sammy. “I mean, I see what you’re saying. I thought the same thing. Maybe it is all just a stunt to get attention and he never had any intention of jumping at all. But then why did he steal the costume from my office?”
“Can you prove that he took the costume?” Lieber said. “Look, I don’t know. Maybe he just got cold feet. Maybe he was run down by a pushcart or a taxicab. I’ll check the hospitals, just in case.”
He nodded to Captain Harley and agreed that it was time to pack up the show. Then he turned back to the boy. He didn’t know exactly what he was going to say; the chain of reasons and possibilities lay still unconnected in his mind. It was just a fleeting policeman’s impulse, a nose for trouble, that prompted his question. He was one of those men who couldn’t help giving a squirrelly little kid a hard time.
“I hear you’ve been skipping school, young man, to come into our fair city and be a gadabout,” he said.
The boy’s eyes widened. He was good-looking, a little overfed but with thick black curls and big blue eyes that now grew even larger. The detective wasn’t sure yet whether the boy was dreading punishment or longing for it. Usually, with solemn little reprobates of this sort, it was the latter.
“I don’t want to catch you loose in my town again, you hear me? You stay out on Long Island where you belong.”
He winked at the father now. Sam Clay laughed.
“Thank you, Detective,” he said. He grabbed a fistful of his son’s hair and shook the boy’s head back and forth in a way that looked quite painful to Lieber. “He’s become quite the forger, this one. Does his mother’s signature on his excuses better than she can.”
Lieber felt the links of the chain beginning to reach toward each other.
“Is that so?” he said. “Tell me, do you have one of these little masterpieces all ready to go for tomorrow?”
With three swift, mute nods of his head, the boy confessed that he did. Lieber held out his hand. The boy reached into his satchel and took out a manila folder. He opened it. A single leaf of good paper lay within, neatly typed and signed. He handed the paper over to Lieber. His movements were precise and preternaturally careful, almost showily so, and Lieber remembered that the boy’s father believed his son had been sneaking into the city to hang out with stage magicians at Louis Tannen’s Magic Shop. Lieber scanned the boy’s note.
Dear Mr. Savarese,
Please excuse Tommy’s absence from school yesterday. Once again as I told you previously I believe he required ophthalmologic type treatments from his specialist in the city.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Rosa Clay
“I’m afraid your boy was responsible for all this,” Lieber said, passing the letter to the boy’s father. “He wrote the letter to the Herald-Tribune.”
“I had a feeling,” the grandfather said. “I thought I recognized the style.”
“What?” Sam Clay said. “What makes you say that?”
“Typewriters have personalities,” said the b
oy in a small voice, looking down at his feet. “Like fingerprints.”
“That is very often the case,” Lieber agreed.
Sammy examined the note, then gave the boy a queer look. “Tommy, is this true?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You mean nobody is going to jump?”
Tommy shook his head.
“You made up this whole thing yourself?”
He nodded.
“Well,” said Lieber. “This is a serious thing you’ve done, son. I’m afraid you may have committed a crime.” He looked at the father. “I’m sorry about your cousin,” he said. “I know you were hoping he had come back.”
“I was,” Sammy said, surprised, either by the realization or by the fact that Lieber had guessed it. “You know, I guess I really was.”
“He has come back!” The boy shouted this, and even Lieber jumped a little. “He’s here.”
“In New York?” the father said. The boy nodded. “Joe Kavalier is here in New York.” Another nod. “Where? How do you know? Tommy, god damn it, where is your cousin Joe?”
The boy muttered something, his voice nearly inaudible. Then, to their surprise, he turned and walked into the building. He went over to the banks of express elevators and pressed the button for those that went all the way to the top.
IT ALL BEGAN—or had begun again—with the Ultimate Demon Wonder Box.
Last July 3, his eleventh birthday, Tommy’s father had taken him to The Story of Robin Hood at the Criterion, to lunch at the Automat, and to visit a reproduction, at the Forty-second Street Library, of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment, complete with unopened letters addressed to the sleuth, a curl-toed slipper filled with tobacco, the paw print of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and a stuffed Giant Rat of Sumatra. All of this was by Tommy’s request, and in lieu of the usual birthday party. Tommy’s one friend, Eugene Begelman, had moved to Florida at the end of fourth grade, and Tommy had had no desire to fill the Clays’ living room with antsy, sullen, eye-rolling kids whose parents had forced them, out of politeness to his own, to attend. He was a solitary boy, unpopular with teachers and students alike. He still slept with a stuffed beaver named Bucky. But he was, at the same time, proud—even belligerent in defense—of his estrangement from the world of the normal, stupid, happy, enviable children of Bloomtown. The mystery of his real father, who—he had decided, deciphering the overheard hints and swiftly hushed remarks of his parents and his grandmother before her death—had been a soldier killed in Europe, was at once a source of amour propre and of bitter yearning, a grand opportunity that he had missed out on but that nevertheless could have befallen only him. He always sympathized with young people in novels whose parents had died or abandoned them (as much to help them fulfill their singular destinies as future Emperors or Pirate Kings, as out of the general grinding cruelty toward children of the world). There was no doubt in his mind that such a destiny awaited him, perhaps in the Martian colonies or the plutonium mines of the asteroid belt. Tommy was a little pudgy, and small for his age. He had been the target of some standard-issue cruelty over the years, but his taciturnity and his spectacularly average performance in school had earned him a certain measure of safe invisibility. Thus, over time, he had won the right to opt completely out of the usual theaters of juvenile strategy and angst—the playground coups, the permanent floating card-flipping games, the Halloween and pool and birthday parties. These interested him, but he forbade himself to care. If he could not see his health drunk in the huge oaken banquet room of a castle, filled with the smell of spit-roasted boar and venison, by tankard-clinking stalwart bowmen and adventurers, then a day in New York City with his father would have to do.