by Tom De Haven
“If he rented one, nobody’s found a receipt.”
“So now what?” Willi again: no longer smirking.
“Well,” says Lois, “there’s always ‘Superman.’ ” She takes a mincing bite of her sandwich.
“He’s real, Lois.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He is. You’ll see.”
“I can’t wait.”
But Clark is thinking that he sure can. He can wait. Gladly. Because no matter how strong he is or how fast or how far he can see, he is still a farm boy, as Lois rightly called him, a twenty-year-old wheat from Kansas who never figured out the mysteries of the slide rule, who can’t fathom electricity or the principles of music theory, much less radio transmission, and who is utterly mystified by the atom, the X-ray, and the salinity of the ocean. So just how is a guy like him supposed to take on and best somebody like Lex Luthor, a grown-up, a millionaire, a genius who evidently can snap his fingers and make whatever he wants or doesn’t want vanish into the air?
In Clark’s mouth his bite of sandwich tastes like mucilage.
“Do you have any mustard?” Lois lifts the top off her sandwich to frown at the spiced ham.
“Gee,” says Clark, “no.”
When she pushes her plate aside, rejecting lunch, Clark—on top of everything else he’s feeling, worrying about, even suffering at this particular moment—is all of a sudden ardently and utterly in love.
2
The special task force assembled to investigate Alderman Lex Luthor commandeered office space in the sub-basement of police headquarters on Centre Street. Ordinarily by seven A.M. the place was packed with uniformed and plainclothes cops, accountants, clerk-typists, and assistant D.A.s. But when Ben Jaeger arrived that Friday morning at quarter of eight he walked into an empty room. Several desks that had been crammed in there only last night were gone, both rolling blackboards had been wiped clean, the telephones were disconnected (he tried three of them), and even the electric percolator was cold.
On the desk he’d been using, Ben discovered an envelope with his name on it. He picked it up and for more than a minute stood holding it in both hands before he took a long breath and tore open the flap. He’d half expected reassignment orders—to a potsy beat in Totenville or Inwood. But it was simply a handwritten note telling him to report immediately upstairs, Room 411.
Twenty minutes later Ben was saying, “Yes, sir. I understand that, sir, but if you—”
He listened and nodded, said, “Yes, sir” again. And: “I know, sir, and I’m grateful. But, Mr. Mayor, if you could just—”
Once more he stopped, squinting against tears that sprang into his eyes, and listened. “Of course, sir. I can see how that’s probably … best. Thank you, sir.”
He unpinned his shield from the breast of his tunic and placed it on the desk, his fingers reluctant to withdraw. But finally they did. Ben nodded to the mayor of New York City, the commissioner of investigation, the commissioner of police, and the Manhattan district attorney. Nothing more was said. He opened the door and walked out. Downstairs in the locker room he changed back into civilian clothes. When he turned in his uniform and brogans, the property clerk told him he had to pay a dollar-ten for dry cleaning and twenty-five cents for new heels. Those were the rules. “You can take it out of my last paycheck,” said Ben. He left the building and walked from Centre Street over to Canal, and along Canal only as far as the first saloon.
3
Willi Berg stands on the roof of the tenement, smoking another cigarette and looking west down St. Mark’s Place. And there’s Clark, trotting after Lois Lane, catching up to her—the dog. And now they’re walking together, stopping. Lois walking again, Clark watching. Catching up with her again. His old girlfriend and his best pal. His only pal. Some pal. You’d think he might’ve asked Willi if it was okay before he started flossing with Lois.
That hick’s got some crust.
Not that Willi is still interested in Lois, that’s all done, that’s ancient history.
But still.
He coughs, clears his throat, and reaches again for his packet of cigarettes. That’s not what he wants, though. What he wants is a life. His real life. His old life. His Willi the Great life.
And despite being a hick, Clark is the guy to get it for him, get it back, especially now that Dick Sandglass, dammit, is dead. Simple as that. For two years Willi has been using Clark for a bodyguard, his ace in the hole, and maybe that was crummy, maybe it was even chickenshit, but so? So what? It was self-preservation. Besides, he’d been good for Clark—got him out of the sticks, didn’t he? Showed him the big, wide world, or at least part of it. And hasn’t he encouraged Clark to practice every day, to inventory all of his crazy ripening talents and figure out what he could do with them? Lift that, toss that, boil this. See where I’m pointing? What’s on the other side? And don’t give me any baloney about eyestrain—just tell me. Willi had done, was still doing, a lot for Clark Kent. So what kind of thanks does he get? Big lug tries to steal his girlfriend!
Well, former.
But still.
Even though he doesn’t want another cigarette he lights one anyway and wonders what the hell he is going to do for the rest of the day.
There are no magazines, no books in the apartment, and he’s finished with the morning dailies. The only thing on the radio till the late afternoon are soap operas for women, and it would take a lot more than boredom, it would take brainsickness, before Willi Berg would consider tuning in to Pretty Kitty Kelly or The Road to Life. Hold on, though. Not so fast. Thinking of women—but not, he hopes, soap operas—has just reminded him that Mrs. Palubiski said only yesterday that he ought to drop by sometime. They met on the roof, right over there. Mrs. Palubiski, Christina, was hanging sheets, Willi was doing calisthenics. Come visit, she said. She could offer him coffee or a ginger ale. Or if he preferred something stronger, she also had that. She owned a phonograph and half a dozen Bing Crosby sides. Ted Lewis stuff, too, and Benny Goodman. His version of “Moon Glow.” And she had “Stormy Weather” by that colored girl—Ethel Waters. He told her his name was Ace and prayed she wouldn’t ask him for his last name because he hadn’t made one up yet. She had not. Instead she’d asked him could he dance. No? She could teach him. Days were long, yes? Too long. And her husband, she let drop, never came home before six-thirty, quarter of seven.
Willi is thinking now, what the hell. He’s still miffed at Clark—pfui to you, pal, and to you too, Lois—but what the hell. Just … what the hell.
Till he got his life back he still had to live.
4
The barber shop is below sidewalk level on Broadway just above Canal. The barber is Italian, in his fifties, small and short—he wears lifts on his shoes. As he wields a comb and scissors now around Ben Jaeger’s head he keeps saying, “Hold still or I cut your ear.”
Ben is drunk, very drunk, sliding down and shifting around in the chair, rolling his head, snoozing off and then flinching awake.
“You don’t keep still, I cut your ear.”
“Sorry, paisan.” Ben sits up and squares his shoulders, looks straight ahead at a wall of framed and autographed celebrity photographs: Don Budge, Clyde Beatty, Eddie Arcaro, Joel McCrea.
On the radio Little Jack Little’s recording of “I’m in the Mood for Love” is playing. Dick Sandglass had no use for Little Jack Little—he’s one of those lightweights, like Rudy Vallee or Paul Whiteman. Ben remembers how Sandglass would tease him for being so crazy about Bing Crosby: You got no taste, kid. One of these days, when I got a year or two, I’ll teach you how to listen. And now Ben is remembering the names of some of the drummers that Sandglass admired (Jo Jones, Gene Krupa, Stan King), the ones he’d booshwash about while they were tailing Lex Luthor at three in the morning or taking sneaky photographs of brothels in Queens and Brooklyn, a warehouse out by New Dorp Beach, a print shop in Hoboken. Ben remembers how Sandglass would solo on the steering wheel with his index fingers, on the dashboa
rd with a couple of pencils.
“You okay?”
“Sure, sure,” says Ben. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
The barber continues to work on the right side of Ben’s head, carefully snipping.
“I’m in the Mood for Love” finishes playing and is followed by a gong and then by an announcer who comes on to read the one o’clock news in a high-hat baritone. To end insurgency in the Holy Land, he says, British authorities today are burning the homes of Arab terrorists. The barber lowers the volume. Emperor Hirohito, says the announcer, has again declared that Japan will continue its war in China until victory is achieved. Local news and weather in a moment, says the announcer, but first this important word from Kreml Shampoo—it removes dandruff and checks falling hair because it’s made from an 80 percent olive oil base.
“That stuff’s no good,” says the barber.
“No?”
“Not so good, no.”
The announcer resumes his sonorous reading of the news: “Embattled alderman Alexander Luthor has …”
“Hold still!”
“Shhh!”
“—alled a news conference for one-fifteen this afternoon at City Hall Park.”
With half of his hair barbered and the other half not, Ben Jaeger is out the front door before the snooty broadcaster can finish observing a rhetorical pause.
“A major announcement is expected.”
5
Lex Luthor arrives at City Hail Park at seven minutes past the hour. When his limousine turns off Broadway and passes the old triangular post office he tells Paulie Scaffa, “Drive around. I shouldn’t be early.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Carl Krusada sits up front with Paulie. Carl is wearing his cleric’s suit but not a Roman collar.
A number of reporters already congregated at the statue of Civic Virtue spot the big Lincoln and dash madly away from the monument’s dry basin and into the street. “Alderman! Alderman!” Before Lex can tell him to, Paulie speeds up. He turns off Park Row onto Frankfort Street, heading east and rolling parallel to the elevated railroad and the plaza entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Just for that,” says Lex, “I think I’ll show up late.”
Beside him but not touching, Mrs. O smiles.
“Paulie, why don’t you go on over to Water Street?”
At twelve minutes past one Lex climbs from the back of the car. He glances around, making certain no reporters have followed. Only a few blocks away is the bustling Fulton fish market, but over here the cobblestone street and broken sidewalks are deserted. Identical low brick buildings, former tanneries dating back to the early nineteenth century, face each other across Water Street. Lex uses a key to let himself into the most decrepit-looking one.
Inside is a long, freshly plastered room lighted by fluorescent tubing on the ceiling. Against the south wall stand more than a dozen robot prototypes, the original LR series, each partly disassembled. Against the north wall, stacked three deep, four high, and numbering over a hundred, are square and softly lustrous metal boxes. Except for the suitcase-style leather grips mounted on the lids, they resemble doorstep milk boxes, the kind provided to customers by local dairies. In a crate nearby are an equal number of small, flat radio transmitters in Bakelite housings. Positioned against the east wall and taking up nearly its full length is an electrostatic generator with crackling sparks jumping from electrode to electrode.
At a semicircular worktable centered in the room, Caesar Colluzo is bent over a circuit board no bigger than a playing card. He is applying solder. A twist of smoke rises and breaks when it touches his forehead. Scattered across the tabletop are various transistors, plug fuses, miniature vacuum tubes, a radio-frequency oscillator, pipes of different lengths, and a few small black cubes equipped with terminals and ground wires.
“Well?” says Lex. He strolls over to the wall of metal boxes, lifts the hinged lid on one, peeks inside, and shuts it again. “Any progress?”
Colluzo swivels around on his stool and—quite out of character—he smiles.
6
When Lois asked where was the closest place with a public telephone, Clark said there was a candy store just a block and a half away—then offered to walk her there. He didn’t want her to—you know. Walk past it. “Why should I?” said Lois. “Is it disguised as a Chinese laundry?”
“Just let me walk you.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“No, I insist.”
“So do I,” she said, and left.
He waited ten seconds then followed her down and out to St. Mark’s Place. Falling into step beside her, Clark couldn’t help but admire her profile. He liked her chin, he liked her throat, he liked the way that her eyebrows arched. She didn’t pluck them, did she? It didn’t look like it.
“Can I ask you something?”
She stops but looks in a hurry. “What?”
Seeking the courage to ask her out, Clark doesn’t find it. “I used to be a reporter for the Smallville Herald-Progress, that’s in Kansas, and I was wondering if you could help me get a job with your newspaper.”
She rolls her eyes (he likes those, too) and resumes walking.
“I’m serious!”
She stops again, this time to laugh.
“You don’t have to do that.”
Lois shuts her mouth, then opens it, then shuts it.
“You could’ve just said no, you can’t help me. But you didn’t have to laugh in my face.”
“Oh my,” she says.
“Yes,” he says right back. “Oh my.”
“I apologize. I’m sorry.”
Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t. He can’t tell. “Thank you,” says Clark. Then he points. “The candy store. Now you can make your phone call.” He turns around and starts back down the block.
“Kent.”
He hates it whenever somebody calls him by his last name.
“I practically just got hired myself,” says Lois. “I don’t have any clout.”
Two little boys Clark might have seen an hour ago from his window, one dressed as a pirate, the other as a cowboy, scoot around Lois into the candy store.
“But for what it’s worth, my editor has this standing offer: If you scoop everybody else and bring him a story that makes the front page, he’ll hire you on the spot.”
“Yeah? That how you did it?”
She makes a face. “I graduated from journalism school. First in my class.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah—‘oh.’ ” She walks into the candy store just as the two boys in Halloween costumes walk out chewing on braided sticks of red licorice.
Clark is still waiting when she comes rushing back out and points beyond him, saying, “I need that cab!”
In a moment Clark has sped twenty yards up the street and is keeping pace with the Checker, thumping a hand on the roof. Just short of the corner of St. Mark’s and Third Avenue the cab finally stops. Clark pulls open the back door and waits for Lois to arrive at a trot.
“You have some legs, mister.”
He grins but wishes she’d start calling him Clark.
Climbing into the back of the cab, Lois says, “Tell Willi our friend the alderman is having a press conference right now.”
“That where you’re going?”
“City Hall Park,” she tells the hackie.
“Can I come with you?”
She closes the door and the Checker pulls away. At the corner it turns right and disappears.
By the candy store clock it’s one twenty-five when Clark plucks a pamphlet-style tourist map from the spinner rack and turns to the index, runs a finger down the list. City College, City Court, City Hall … City Hall Park. H5. The counter lady barks Hey! it’s not a public library. So he buys the map for a dime and several deckle-edge penny postcards. Then he plonks down another penny and helps himself to two sticks of red licorice.
7
Lex Luthor arrives b
ack at City Hall Park at twenty minutes before two—Lois checks her watch when he steps from his limousine. A dozen of her colleagues do the same. It’s an odd salad of general assignment and wire reporters, political writers and police-beat veterans, even some chatter columnists. Winchell is present, and Runyon, Bugs Baer, Ed Sullivan. Thirty, forty newsmen altogether, including photographers. Lois is the only woman—“news hen,” is what the others all call her—but that’s no problem. She can hold her own. She’s disappointed Dorothy Kilgallen isn’t here. Lois still hasn’t met her and is dying to. Kilgallen, she heard, is in Europe, sent by Hearst to interview Hitler, an assignment Lois cannot imagine being up to herself. Yet.
Lex quickly makes his way toward the enormous marble statue of Civic Virtue, nodding this way and that but not smiling, not joshing or pointing or shaking hands the way that he usually does at public events. Nor does he pause to hum a snatch of a popular tune to get a cheap laugh and butter up the pen-and-pencil men. He goes and stands on the rim of the fountain basin with his arms folded across his chest, displaying confident balance. Behind him is the giant marble figure of a muscular sword-wielding young man, naked but for an inexplicable scrap of seaweed that covers his privates.
Lex withdraws a sheet of onion-skin paper from his tuxedo jacket.
“Gentlemen,” he begins, “… and Miss Lane,” he adds with a chilly smile, “thank you all for coming. For the past month, as you know, I’ve been the subject of something called a ‘special investigation.’ From the start I have proclaimed both my outrage and my innocence. This afternoon I have the great pleasure to inform you that Mr. Dodge’s task force, a task force assembled at the instruction of Mayor La Guardia, has completed its work and that I have been found completely innocent of any wrongdoing of any kind.
“I’m relieved, of course, but more than that I’m sorrowful.” He doesn’t look it. “Sorrowful that despite all of my efforts on behalf of the citizens of Greater New York I could have had my reputation impugned and my freedom imperiled by a series of wild accusations made against me by two members of our city’s otherwise superb police department. Officers corrupted by their association with known criminal elements.”