by Tom De Haven
“When did he get here?”
“We both got here four days ago. No, five.” Clark nods toward Avenue A, toward St. Mark’s Place. “How about we start walking?”
Two Greek Orthodox priests join Clark and Lois on the curb, their long wiry black beards reminding Clark of that character in Popeye, Mr. Geezil, the hot-tempered guy who hates Wimpy to pieces. Clark notices one of the priests ogling Lois, especially her ankles and calves, and feels like punching him in the nose.
At last there’s a break in traffic. Clark and Lois rush across Avenue A, then continue west on St. Mark’s Place past stoops and tenements, dodging fatigued-looking women pushing baby strollers or dragging small children, weaving around sidewalk clusters of young Jewish men in skullcaps, older Slavic men in shabby suits smoking brown cigarettes and arguing politics. Stalin is good, Stalin is bad, Stalin is this, Stalin is that. As they’re coming up on a grocery store, someone inside begins to shout: “Did you pay for that? Stop! Thief!”
A lithe and lean thirtyish-looking man leaps through the open doorway, a loaf of Silvercup bread squeezed in each fist. His lips are skinned back over yellow teeth and red gums, making him seem both feral and unstrung. He dashes in front of Clark and into the street, then takes off sprinting in the direction of Cooper Union. The grocer runs outside, swears a Yiddish oath while glaring at Clark, who looks down at his shoes and hurries on—Lois saying as she trots after him, “So. You a bleeding heart or were you just afraid the guy’d bop you with a loaf of bread?”
“People are hungry.”
“That’s true, some people are. But what about that poor guy who owns the grocery store? People keep stealing his bread whenever they’re hungry, pretty soon he’ll be hungry himself. Or don’t you see it that way?”
“What are you, a Republican? The guy was hungry. I’m supposed to grab a hungry man and send him to jail?”
Lois smiles. “So he was hungry. He needed to steal two loaves of bread?”
Clark grunts. “Maybe he’s got a big family.”
“Oh, for the luvva—”
“Okay, okay, so he was a thief, I should’ve tripped him,” says Clark, and if someone were to walk up to him now and ask, How’s Diana? he most likely would say, Diana? Diana who?
3
Lois says, “Fifth floor, huh?”
“Two more flights.”
“Fifth floor, huh?”
The tenement is quiet for a change, but as always cooking odors (last night’s, last week’s, last year’s, last century’s) are heavy and oppressive in the stairwell. On the fourth-floor landing they meet one of the housewives who lives in the building, the young and stout Mrs. Palubiski. She glances at Lois and gives Clark a sly Old World wink. He blushes.
With Lois following him along the hallway, Clark takes out his door key.
Two clogged ashtrays sit on the kitchen table and the air is sour with the stench of tobacco smoke.
“Well?”
“He was here.”
“Look, Kent, this—”
Rushing up to her from behind the door, Willi throws his arms around Lois and squeezes.
Casually, she drives an elbow into his stomach, then whirls around and with a blazing smile slaps him with her right hand. “Hello, Willi. It’s been a long time.”
“Maybe not long enough,” he says, rubbing the blotch on his cheek. He laughs and shuts the door and puts on the chain. “Shall we … get reacquainted?” Gesturing to a chair at the kitchen table, he says, “Coffee, cuppa tea? Clark has some Yoo-hoo.”
“What are you doing in New York?”
“Couldn’t that wait a minute?”
“No.”
He looks at her levelly and then laughs again. “Okay. All right. The plan was, I’d hook back up with you and you’d hook me back up with Dick Sandglass …”
“You’ve heard?”
“We heard,” says Clark. “But not till we got here and saw what’s in the papers.”
Lois doesn’t take her eyes from Willi’s face. “Perfect timing.”
“Yeah,” says Willi. “That’s what me and Clark’ve been saying.” He pauses to light a cigarette. “Dick Sandglass was a good guy.”
“There’ve been a lot of rumors circulating that he was anything but that.”
“Luthor’s doing.”
“Oh, I agree,” says Lois, “but they’re doing their damage.”
Removing a pencil and a small notepad from her coat pocket, she takes a seat at the kitchen table. “So where’ve you been since you … got out of jail?”
“Mexico. For about three weeks.” He reaches over and crushes out his Camel in an abalone shell. “Seemed like a good idea to go where nobody was looking to arrest me. And kind of take stock. Figure out what next.”
“And you decided to come back here and see Dick Sandglass.”
“You and Dick. The both of you. But yeah. That’s what we decided.”
“Why didn’t you do this a year ago?”
Willi shrugs. “We weren’t ready yet.” He looks drolly—or is it critically?—at Clark. Lois doesn’t seem to register the plural.
“Well, let’s get down to business,” she says. “First, I want to know how you managed to break out of jail. Then we’ll talk about the situation here.” She flips through her pad—full of quotes she jotted during her long interview yesterday with Manhattan D.A. William C. Dodge—till she finds a fresh page. “Do we have a deal?”
“Are you sure you’re the same Lois Lane that I used to know? Come on, Lo, it’s Willi!” He sounds amused, looks annoyed. “ ‘Do we have a deal.’ ”
“Do we?”
Willi scratches at his throat. “Yes,” he finally says, “we have a deal, Miss Lane.”
4
There is no refrigerator in the apartment, so the Yoo-hoo drink that Clark goes and gets for himself from the cardboard carrier is room temperature. Following instructions on the cap, he shakes it well before opening, then sits down at the table. The place came furnished with that table, three shaky chairs, a boxy sofa covered in worn chenille, and a painful cast-iron bed, the flophouse kind that Clark and Willi slept on occasionally during their vagabond days. When they moved in they flipped a coin to see who took the bed. Clark lost, got the sofa and the much better deal.
Lois is saying, “Okay. Somebody put a hole through the wall of your cell. A guy in a red cape. Care to enlighten me?”
“Superman,” says Willi with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.
“Excuse me?”
“His name is Superman, and he’s a buddy of mine and Clark’s. Red cape and blue tights. Superman.”
“With no hyphen,” Clark puts in. He’s flip-flopped over this—hyphen, no hyphen—and has decided finally: no hyphen. “Superman is one word.”
Willi throws Clark a look pointed enough that he stands up and wanders off through an archway into the poky living room. Going to the window, he looks down into a courtyard full of loose garbage and sodden old mattresses, then across the air space to a heavyset woman framed in her bedroom window. She is stretching a shirt over an ironing board, sprinkling on water from a 7-Up bottle. She’s wearing only her slip, and Clark is curious, even thrilled, despite the woman’s age and bulk.
Not to be caught looking, he takes a few steps back, then peers through a narrow crevice between tenements and watches people passing along the sidewalk on St. Mark’s Place. Small people. And not just small people, small … witches, cone-hatted witches, a horned red devil, a princess wearing an Alice-blue gown and a sparkly tiara, a blacksmith, a cop, two little cops, a cowboy, a cowgirl, a pilot, a soldier, a sailor, a fairy with gauzy wings, and a pint-sized magician in a top hat and opera cape.
Children from the nearby parochial school on their way home for lunch on the Friday before Halloween.
Smiling, Clark strains to look closer, his irises bulging slightly and his pupils narrowing, turning to lozenges, till he is seeing telescopically: the dirty knuckles and chewed-back fingernails of the
World War soldier; where the batting is taped to the wire armature of the fairy’s wings; the Mutt & Jeff cover of the comic book clutched in a hand of the tiny blacksmith.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen Lois asks, “You met him in a boxcar?”
Moving his lips, Clark matches Willi’s reply word for word: “Somewhere in Oklahoma. And the three of us decided to bum it together.”
They discussed it a lot, “The Story,” rehashed it and rehearsed it—first down in Mexico, then during the seemingly interminable flight from Sonoito to Albuquerque to Omaha to Philadelphia to New York City. (Willi squirmed a lot, embarrassed to be carried scooped up in Clark’s arms across the United States. He complained nonstop: he was nauseous, he was freezing, couldn’t Clark fly lower, where the air was a little bit warmer?) Once they were holed up in their apartment they covered every detail of The Story they could think of and agreed that when the time came Willi would do all of the talking, he could be the storyteller. It made sense and felt safer.
Obviously the first thing anyone was going to ask was how Willi escaped from the Los Angeles County Jail, so it ought to be Willi who answered, especially since—especially since—Clark would be in no position to speak with authority. After all, he hadn’t been there. Had not. Clark hadn’t had anything to do with that, it was—
“Superman,” says Lois, and Clark can hear derision and downright disbelief in her voice. No big surprise. “And what’s Superman’s real name?”
“That is his real name.”
“You call some guy Superman? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, right. We’ll say, ‘Hey, Superman, get a load of that sunset. Hey, Superman, check out the sweet trick in the bobby socks.’ Look, toots, scoff all you like but I did get out of jail and there was a hole in the damn wall afterward and a lot of people did see a guy dressed in a blue union suit and a red cape flying all over the place. Scoff on, Lo, but you asked.”
Clark smiles, then squints till his vision becomes normally binocular again.
Across the courtyard the woman stands her iron on its heel rest, plucks her smoking cigarette from an ashtray on the windowsill, takes a short puff, and then turns to say something to a man who sits bolt upright suddenly on the bed.
Lois is saying, “So you, the four-eyes from Kansas and this … Superman from Oklahoma—”
“I don’t know if he’s from Oklahoma, Lois, we just met him there.”
“—you all just wandered around together for how long?”
“Little over a year. Him, Clark, and me, correct.”
There it is. The gist of The Story: it hasn’t been just Willi and Clark, it’s been Willi and Clark and … Superman. The lie is simple, easy to keep straight. Two become three. One becomes two. Will it work? Can it?
Now Willi is telling Lois how their pal Superman capped an oil well fire “… while Clark and me stood there with our mouths wide open.” And the funny thing is, Clark can visualize the scene at the boomer site as if he had been standing right next to Willi, just watching. It gives him an unpleasant tingling in the pit of his stomach. But it’s also exciting, the prospect of living not one life but two different lives. If he can pull it off.
Across the courtyard in the opposite apartment the man and the woman are quarreling. He grabs her hair in a fist and shakes her.
Now the little girl in the fairy costume, the same kid Clark saw just a minute ago down on the street, walks into her parents’ bedroom. She can’t be much older than eight.
“… So when I got pinched,” Willi is saying, “I knew he’d get me out. He took his sweet time about it but he finally came through. Our pal Superman.”
Lois says, “And who bombed your apartment, Willi?”
“I was thinking Lex Luthor.”
“You think he found out where you were?”
“What, that’s not possible?”
Clark draws in a sharp breath as the little girl in the opposite apartment flings up a defensive hand when her father pivots and charges at her.
Throwing up the casement window, Clark bites hard into his bottom lip. Pulls off his glasses.
The man raises his right arm—but in the instant before he can deliver a blow, the edge and palm of his big white hand turn bright red and break out in blisters. He screams and stumbles from view, probably heading for a sink and cold water.
On Second Avenue and Stuyvesant Street, the steeple bells at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie begin tolling the hour.
Clark puts his glasses back on.
5
“Lex?” Mrs. O’Shea grips his elbow gently, barely touches it. “It’s noon, don’t you think you might want to get up?”
He rubs his forehead with the tips of his fingers. Fully awake now. Alert. Refreshed. “Has Hadorn called?” Philip Hadorn: Lex Luthor’s personal attorney and one of the best in New York City. Two years ago he poisoned his first wife in order to marry his secretary—an undiscovered, unpunished homicide that Lex spent twenty thousand dollars (midnight exhumation, laboratory forensics, college tuition for all five children of a certain druggist in Chelsea) proving beyond the shadow of a doubt. But the proof will remain locked inside of a safety-deposit box so long as Hadorn provides Lex with expert legal counsel—pro bono, of course.
“He phoned around ten, yes. But I didn’t wake you since he was still waiting to hear from Dodge. He thinks it’ll be today though.”
Lex tosses off his sheet and blanket. “Excellent.”
Twenty minutes later he is sitting at the kitchen table and reaching for a carton of Wheaties when Mrs. O’Shea comes in with the telephone. “Hadorn,” she says.
Brusquely, Lex takes the receiver. “Well?” He listens, nods, speaks softly, and hangs up. Passing back the phone, he says, “Done.”
“No chance they’ll suddenly change their—”
“It’s done,” says Lex. He throws back his head and laughs. “Call Paulie Scaffa and tell him to grab that other monkey and be over here in twenty minutes. Then call the papers.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And say I’ll be happy to meet with reporters today at one o’clock … no, make it one-fifteen. In City Hall Park.”
“Why not at City Hall?”
“The park, Mrs. O. At the statue of Civic Virtue.” He picks up the Wheaties carton and fills his bowl. A square white packet drops out. He plucks it up and nearly tosses it aside. Instead he tears off a corner and shakes free a small green toy, a rocket ship exhibiting a starringed decal transfer that reads: “Solar Scouts.”
Behind Lex, Mrs. O laughs.
Lex is silent for a long time just looking at the toy. Then he gets up, no longer hungry. “I think you have some calls to make,” he tells Mrs. O’Shea. Carrying his coffee cup on its saucer, he walks down the hall and into his office, where he sits behind his desk, rolls a sheet of paper into the typewriter, and begins to draft remarks for his upcoming press conference.
XX
Further self-doubt. Willi ponders the hazards and profits
of friendship. Ben Jaeger’s haircut. More about robots.
Civic Virtue. Clark Kent, reporter. Lex meets the press.
●
1
While Clark uses up the last of the spiced ham and sliced bread fixing three sandwiches, Willi has both elbows planted on the kitchen table and his face squeezed between his hands. “Tell me it ain’t so—please.”
“Wish I could,” says Lois.
As she has just finished explaining, the special investigation of Lex Luthor announced four weeks earlier by Fiorello La Guardia has spluttered into a metropolitan farce, generating titters on the street, skepticism in the press, and gag cartoons in The New Yorker.
Each and every locale that the late (and lately much maligned) Richard Sandglass planned to identify as housing one or more of Lex Luthor’s felonious enterprises turned out to be completely and unimpeachably … legitimate. The alleged brothels in Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Turtle Bay, as w
ell as in the outer boroughs, were just rental apartments, single-family dwellings, and licensed nursing homes. (The administrator of one of those hushed residences, a still-grieving widow named Ceil Stickowski, was not amused when the premises were invaded one morning by a squad of uniformed policemen.) In Hoboken the “counterfeit printing operation” was only a laundry and dry cleaner’s. No munitions were found stockpiled in a warehouse on Staten Island; instead, it was filled with Persian rugs. And there was no telephone call-tapping station on Blofeld Street in Queens, merely a permanent-waving establishment.
The originals of incorporation papers and real estate transfers—documents Sandglass presumably had photographed with a spy camera—turned up either missing or telling a very different story than the one the slain police lieutenant would have claimed they told.
And so on.
“How did Luthor do it?”
“I already told you. He got hold of the file that Dick put together.”
“But how did he manage to undo everything? So quickly?”
“He was ready for this,” says Lois. “Or at least prepared for it.”
“Wasn’t there a copy?” says Clark. He slides one plate down in front of Lois, another in front of Willi, “You said there were photographs—where are the negatives? Didn’t he keep the negatives?” He takes a bite from his own sandwich.
“If he did—”
“If?”
“Listen, farm boy, quit talking when I’m talking. And don’t talk with food in your mouth.” She glares. “If he did keep a copy, nobody’s found it.”
“Did they search his apartment?”
“Of course. Ben went through the whole place the same night Dick Sandglass was murdered.”
“Ben? Ben did?” That’s Willi: with a smirk. “This wouldn’t by some chance be the cop you’re dating?”
“How do you know who I’m dating?”
Willi folds his arms. “Is it?”
“That’s none of your business—but yes.”
Clark figures he’d better step in or else the conversation might quickly go awry. “But maybe he didn’t keep a copy at home. Maybe someplace else? What about a safe-deposit box?”