“I never said that.” Anapol sat down, the springs of his chair creaking like the hull of an imperiled ship. His sitting down was a bad sign; Anapol did business only on his feet. “I’m not going to do that. Jack’s not going to do that. George Deasey has been in the business for thirty years. He’s smart. Unlike you or I, he went to college. To Columbia College, Sammy. He knows writers, he knows artists, he meets deadlines, and he doesn’t waste money. Jack trusts him.”
It is easy to say, at this remove, that Sammy ought to have seen this coming. In fact, he was shocked. He had trusted Anapol, respected him. Anapol was the first successful man Sammy had ever known personally. He was as dedicated to his work, as tireless a wanderer, as imperious, as remote from his family as Sammy’s father, and to be betrayed by him, too, came as a terrible blow. Day after day, Sammy had listened to Anapol’s lectures about taking the initiative, and the Science of Opportunity, and as these jibed with his own notions of how the world functioned, Sammy had believed. He didn’t think it would be possible to show more initiative, or seize an opportunity more scientifically, than he had in the last three days. Sammy wanted to argue, but once deprived of their central pillar of Enterprise Rewarded, the arguments in favor of making him editor, and not the unquestionably qualified and proven George Deasey, struck him, abruptly, as ludicrous. So he sat back down. His cigar had gone out.
A moment later, wearing a corn-colored jacket over green velour pants and an orange-and-green-plaid tie, Jack Ashkenazy came in, followed by George Deasey, who, as ever, appeared to be in a testy mood. He was, as Anapol had mentioned, a graduate of Columbia, class of 1912. Over the course of his career, George Debevoise Deasey had published symbolist poetry in the Seven Arts, covered Latin America and the Philippines as a correspondent for the American and the Los Angeles Examiner, and written over a hundred and fifty pulpwood novels under his and a dozen other names, including, before he was made editor in chief of all their titles, more than sixty adventures of Racy’s biggest seller, the Shadow-like Gray Goblin, star of Racy Police Stories. Yet he took no pride or true satisfaction in these or any of his other experiences and achievements, because when he was nineteen, his brother Malcolm, whom he idolized, had married Oneida Shaw, the love of Deasey’s life, and taken her down to a rubber farm in Brazil, where they both died of amoebic dysentery. The bitter memory of this tragic episode, while long since corrupted by time and crumbled to an ashy gray powder in his breast, had outwardly hardened into a well-known if not exactly beloved set of mannerisms and behaviors, among them heavy drinking, prodigious work habits, an all-encompassing cynicism, and an editorial style based firmly on ruthless adherence to deadlines and on the surprise administration, irregular and devastating as the impact of meteors from space, of the scabrous and literate tongue-lashings with which he regularly flensed his quavering staff. A tall, corpulent man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a drooping ginger mustache, he still dressed in the stiff-collared shirts and highbutton waistcoats of his generation of literary men. He professed to despise the pulps and never lost an opportunity to ridicule himself for earning his living by them, but all the same he took the work seriously, and his novels, each of them composed in two or three weeks, were written with verve and an erudite touch.
“So it’s to be comic books, now, is it?” he said to Anapol as they shook hands. “The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward.” He took his pipe from his hip pocket.
“Sammy Klayman and his cousin Joe Kavalier,” Anapol said. He put a hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “Sammy, here, is pretty much responsible for this whole thing. Aren’t you, Sammy?”
Sammy had the shakes. His teeth were chattering. He wanted to pick up something heavy and spray Anapol’s brains across his blotter. He wanted to run weeping from the room. He just stood there, staring at Anapol until the big man looked away.
“You boys sure you want to work for me?” said Deasey. Before they could answer, he gave a nasty little chuckle and shook his head. He held a match to the bowl of his pipe and took six small sips of cherry smoke. “Well, let’s have a look.”
“Sit down, George, please,” said Anapol, his normal saturnine hauteur giving way, as usual, in the proximity of a gentile with a diploma to arrant toadyism. “I think the boys here did a very nice job.” Deasey sat down and dragged the pile of pages toward his right side. Ashkenazy pressed in close behind to peer over Deasey’s shoulder. As Deasey lifted the protective sheet of tracing paper on the cover art, Sammy glanced over at Joe. His cousin was sitting stiffly in his chair, hands in his lap, watching the editor’s face. Deasey’s air of ruined integrity and confidence in his own judgments had made an impression on Joe.
“Who did this cover?” Deasey looked at the signature, then over the tops of his round glasses at Joe. “Kavalier, is that you?”
Joe got to his feet, literally holding his hat in his hand, and extended the other to Deasey.
“Josef Kavalier,” Joe said. “How do you do.”
“I’m fine, Mr. Kavalier.” They shook. “And you’re hired.”
“Thank you,” Joe said. He sat back down and smiled. He was just happy to get the job. He had no idea what Sammy was going through, the humiliation he was undergoing. All of his boasting to his mother! His strutting around Julie and the others! How in God’s name would he ever be able to face Frank Pantaleone again?
Deasey set the cover art to his left, reached for the first page, and started to read. When he finished, he put it under Joe’s cover and took the next page. He didn’t look up again until the entire pile was on his left side and he had read through to the end.
“You put this together, son?” He smiled at Sammy. “You know, don’t you, that this is pure trash. Superman is pure trash, too, of course. Batman, the Blue Beetle. The whole menagerie.”
“You’re right,” said Sammy through his teeth. “Trash sells.”
“By God, it does,” said Deasey. “I can testify to that personally.”
“Is it all trash, George?” said Ashkenazy. “I like that guy that comes out of the radio.” He turned to Sammy. “How’d you come up with that?”
“Trash I don’t mind,” said Anapol. “Is it the same kind of trash as Superman, that’s what I want to know.”
“Might I confer with you gentlemen in private?” said Deasey.
“Excuse us, boys,” Anapol said.
Sammy and Joe went and sat in the chairs outside Anapol’s office. Sammy tried to listen through the glass. Deasey could be heard murmuring gravely but indecipherably. Sometimes Anapol interrupted him with a question. After a few minutes, Ashkenazy came out, winked at Sammy and Joe, and left the Empire offices. When he came back a few minutes later, he was carrying a thin rattling sheaf of paper. It looked like a legal contract. Sammy’s left leg started to twitch. Ashkenazy stopped in front of the door to Anapol’s office and gestured grandly for them to enter.
“Gentlemen?” he said.
Sammy and Joe followed him in.
“We want to buy the Escapist,” said Anapol. “We’ll pay you a hundred and fifty dollars for the rights.”
Joe looked at Sammy, eyebrows raised. Big money.
“What else?” said Sammy, though he had been hoping for a hundred at most.
“The other characters, the backups, we’ll pay eighty-five dollars for the lot of them,” Anapol continued. Seeing Sammy’s face fall a little, he added, “It would have been twenty dollars apiece, but Jack felt that Mr. Radio was worth a little extra.”
“That’s just for the rights, kid,” said Ashkenazy. “We’ll also take you both on, Sammy for seventy-five dollars a week and Joe at six dollars a page. George wants you for an assistant, Sam. Says he sees real potential in you.”
“You certainly know your trash,” Deasey said.
“Plus we’ll pay Joe, here, twenty dollars for every cover he does. And for all your pals and associates, five dollars a page.”
“Though of course I’ll have to meet them first,” sai
d Deasey.
“That’s not enough,” said Sammy. “I told them the page rate would be eight dollars.”
“Eight dollars!” said Ashkenazy. “I wouldn’t pay eight dollars to John Steinback.”
“We’ll pay five,” said Anapol gently. “And we want a new cover.”
“You do,” Sammy said. “I see.”
“This hitting Hitler thing, Sammy, it makes us nervous.”
“What? What is this?” Joe’s attention had wandered a little during the financial discussions—he had heard one hundred and fifty dollars, six dollars a page, twenty per cover. Those numbers sounded very good to him. But now he thought he had just heard Sheldon Anapol declaring that he would not use the cover in which Hitler got his jaw broken. Nothing that Joe had painted had ever satisfied him more. The composition was natural and simple and modern; the two figures, the circular dais, the blue and white badge of the sky. The figures had weight and mass; the foreshortening of Hitler’s outflying body was daring and a little off, but in a way that was somehow convincing. The draping of the clothes was right; the Escapist’s uniform looked like a uniform, like jersey cloth bunched in places but tight-fitting, and not merely blue-colored flesh. But most of all, the pleasure that Joe derived from administering this brutal beating was intense and durable and strangely redemptive. At odd moments over the past few days, he had consoled himself with the thought that somehow a copy of this comic book might eventually make its way to Berlin and cross the desk of Hitler himself, that he would look at the painting into which Joe had channeled all his pent-up rage and rub his jaw, and check with his tongue for a missing tooth.
“We’re not in a war with Germany,” Ashkenazy said, shaking his finger at Sammy. “It’s illegal to make fun of a king, or a president, or somebody like that, if you’re not at war with them. We could get sued.”
“May I suggest that you keep Germany in the story if you change the name and don’t call them Germans. Or Nazis,” said Deasey. “But you’ll have to figure out a different kind of image for the cover. If not, I can give it to Pickering or Clemm or one of my other regular cover artists.”
Sammy looked over at Joe, who stood looking down, nodding his head a little bit, as if he should have known all along that it would come to something like this. When he looked up again, however, his face was composed, his voice measured and calm.
“I like the cover,” he said.
“Joe,” said Sammy. “Just think about it a minute. We can figure something else out. Something just as good. I know it’s important to you. It’s important to me, too. I think it ought to be important to these gentlemen, too, and frankly I’m a little ashamed of them right now”—he shot Anapol a dirty look—“but just think about it a minute. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I do not need to do that, Sam. I will not agree to the other cover, no matter.”
Sammy nodded, then turned back to Sheldon Anapol. He closed his eyes, very tight, as though about to jump into a swiftly moving ice-choked stream. His faith in himself had been shaken. He didn’t know what was right, or whose welfare he ought to consider. Would it be helping Joe if they walked out over this? If they stayed and compromised, would it be hurting him? Would it be helping the Kavaliers in Prague? He opened his eyes and looked straight at Anapol.
“We can’t do it,” said Sammy, though it cost him great effort. “No, I’m sorry, that has to be the cover.” He appealed to Deasey. “Mr. Deasey, that cover is dynamite and you know it.”
“Who wants dynamite?” said Ashkenazy. “Dynamite blows up. A guy could lose a finger.”
“We’re not changing the cover, boss,” Sammy said, and then, bringing to bear all his powers of dissimulated pluck and false bravado, he picked up one of the portfolios and began filling it with pieces of illustration board. He did not allow himself to think about what he was doing. “The Escapist fights evil.” He tied the portfolio shut and handed it to Joe, still without looking at his cousin’s face. He picked up another portfolio. “Hitler is evil.”
“Calm down, young man,” said Anapol. “Jack, maybe we can push the page rate for the others up to six, nu? Six dollars a page, Sammy. And eight for your cousin here. Come, Mr. Kavalier, eight dollars a page! Don’t be foolish.”
Sammy handed the second portfolio to Joe and started on the third.
“They aren’t all your characters, don’t forget,” said George Deasey. “Maybe your friends would see things differently.”
“Come on, Joe,” said Sammy. “You heard what he said before. Every publisher in town wants in on this thing. We’ll be all right.”
They turned and walked out to the elevator.
“Six and a half!” called Anapol. “Hey, what about my radios?”
Joe looked back over his shoulder, then at Sammy, who had settled his snub features into an impassive mask. Sammy pushed the DOWN button with a determined jab of his finger. Joe inclined his head toward his cousin.
“Sammy, is this a trick?” he whispered. “Or are we serious?”
Sammy thought it over. The elevator chimed. The operator threw open the door.
“You tell me,” Sammy said.
HIS EARS STILL RINGING with artillery shells, screaming rockets, and the clattering ack-ack of Gene Krupa from the Crosley in a corner of the studio, Joe Kavalier laid down his brush and closed his eyes. He had been drawing, painting, smoking cigarettes, and nothing else for much of the past seven days. He clapped a hand to the back of his neck and engaged the bones that supported his battle-blown head in a few slow rotations. The vertebrae clicked and creaked. The joints of his hand throbbed, and the ghost of a brush notched his index finger. Each time he took a breath, he could feel a hard little billiard of nicotine and phlegm rattling around in his lungs. It was six o’clock on a Monday morning in October 1940. He had just won the Second World War, and he was feeling pretty good about it.
He slid off of his stool and went to look down on the autumn morning through the windows of the Kramler Building. Steam purled from the orifices of the street. A crew of a half-dozen workers in tan canvas coveralls, with peaked white caps perched atop their heads, used a water hose and long disheveled brooms to sluice a grimy tide down the gutters toward the storm drains at the corner of Broadway. Joe threw open the rattling sash of the window and poked his head out. It looked like it was going to be a fine day. The sky in the east was a bright Superman blue. There was a dank Octoberish smell of rain in the air with a faint acrid tang from a vinegar works along the East River, seven blocks away. To Joe, at that moment, it was the smell of victory. New York never looks more beautiful than to a young man who has just pulled off something he knows is going to knock them dead.
Over the course of the last week, in the guise of the Escapist, Master of Elusion, Joe had flown to Europe (in a midnight-blue autogyro), stormed the towered Schloss of the nefarious Steel Gauntlet, freed Plum Blossom from its deep dungeon, defeated the Gauntlet in protracted two-fisted combat, been captured by the Gauntlet’s henchmen and dragged off to Berlin, where he was strapped to a bizarre multiple guillotine that would have sliced him like a hard-boiled egg while the Führer himself smugly looked on. Naturally, patiently, indomitably, he had worked his way loose of his riveted steel bonds and hurled himself at the throat of the dictator. At this point—with twenty pages to go until the Charles Atlas ad on the inside back cover—an entire Wehrmacht division had come between the Escapist’s fingers and that gravely desired larynx. Over the course of the next eighteen pages, in panels that crowded, jostled, piled one on top of the other, and threatened to burst the margins of the page, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Escapist had duked it out. With the Steel Gauntlet out of the picture, it was a fair fight. On the very last page, in a transcendent moment in the history of wishful figments, the Escapist had captured Adolf Hitler and dragged him before a world tribunal. Head finally bowed in defeat and shame, Hitler was sentenced to die for his crimes against humanity. The war was over; a universal era of peace was declared,
the imprisoned and persecuted peoples of Europe—among them, implicitly and passionately, the Kavalier family of Prague—were free.
Joe leaned forward, the heels of his hands pressed against the windowsill and the lowermost edge of the sash digging into his back, and breathed in a cool vinegar whiff of the morning. He felt contented and hopeful and, in spite of having slept no more than four hours at a stretch in the last week, not in the least tired. He looked up and down the street. He was struck by a sudden sense of connectedness to it, of knowing where it led to. The map of the island—which looked to him like a man whose head was the Bronx, raising an arm in greeting—was vivid in his mind, flayed like an anatomical model to reveal its circulatory system of streets and avenues, of train, trolley, and bus routes.
When Marty Gold finished inking the pages that Joe had just completed, they would be strapped to the back of a motorcycle by the kid from Iroquois Color and carried along Broadway, down past Madison Square and Union Square and Wanamaker’s, to the Iroquois plant on Lafayette Street. There, one of four kindly, middle-aged women, two of whom were named Florence, would guess with surprising violence and aplomb at the proper coloration for the mashed noses, the burning Dorniers, the Steel Gauntlet’s diesel-driven suit of armor, and all the other things that Joe had drawn and Marty had inked. The big Heidelberg cameras with rotating three-color lenses would photograph the colored pages, and the negatives, one cyan, one magenta, one yellow, would be screened by the squinting old Italian engraver, Mr. Petto, with his corny green celluloid visor. The resulting color halftones would be shipped uptown once more, along the ramifying arterials, to the huge loft building at West Forty-seventh and Eleventh, where men in square hats of folded newsprint labored at the great steam presses to publish the news of Joe’s rapturous hatred of the German Reich, so that it could be borne once more into the streets of New York, this time in the form of folded and stapled comic books, lashed with twine into a thousand little bundles that would be hauled by the vans of Seaboard News to the newsstands and candy stores of the city, to the outermost edges of its boroughs and beyond, where they would be hung up like laundry or marriage banns from wire display racks.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Page 18