The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  Joe had received letters from readers over the past months, boys and girls—mostly boys—scattered all over the United States from Las Cruces to LaCrosse, but these were usually limited to rather simple expressions of appreciation and requests for signed pinups of the Escapist, enough that Joe had evolved a standard pinup pose, which at first he drew each time by hand but had recently had photostatted, complete with his signature, to save time. Reading the Ebling memorandum marked the first time that Joe became aware of the possibility of an adult readership for his work, and the degree of Ebling’s passion, his scholarly enthusiasm replete with footnotes, thematic analyses, and lists of dramatis personae, however reluctant and shamed, touched him strangely. He was aware—he could not deny it—of a desire to meet Ebling. He looked around at the havoc he had created in the poor, sad offices of the Aryan-American League and felt a momentary pang of remorse.

  Then, abruptly, it was his turn to feel ashamed, not only for having extended, however momentarily, the consideration of his sympathy to a Nazi, but for having produced work that appealed to such a man. Joe Kavalier was not the only early creator of comic books to perceive the mirror-image fascism inherent in his anti-fascist superman—Will Eisner, another Jew cartoonist, quite deliberately dressed his Allied-hero Blackhawks in uniforms modeled on the elegant death’s-head garb of the Waffen SS. But Joe was perhaps the first to feel the shame of glorifying, in the name of democracy and freedom, the vengeful brutality of a very strong man. For months he had been assuring himself, and listening to Sammy’s assurances, that they were hastening, by their make-believe hammering at Haxoff or Hynkel or Hassler or Hitler, the intervention of the United States into the war in Europe. Now it occurred to Joe to wonder if all they had been doing, all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination.

  He never knew afterward whether he failed to hear the sounds of Carl Ebling entering the building, climbing the stairs, and fingering the violated knob of the door because he was so lost in thought, or because Ebling walked with a light tread, or if the man had sensed an intruder and hoped to catch him unaware. In any case, it was not until the hinges squealed that Joe looked up to find an older, pastier version of Franchot Tone, the weak chin weaker, the recessive hairline farther along in its flight. He was zipped into a ratty gray parka, standing in the doorway of the Aryan-American League. He was holding a fat black sap in his hand.

  “Who the hell are you?” The accent was not the elegant Tone drawl but something more or less local. “How did you get in here?”

  “The name is Mayflower,” Joe said. “Tom Mayflower.”

  “Who? Mayflower? That’s—” His gaze lighted on the fat Empire file. His mouth opened, then shut again.

  Joe closed the file and rose slowly to his feet. Keeping his eyes on Ebling’s hands, he began to circle sideways around the desk.

  “I was just leaving,” Joe said.

  Ebling nodded and narrowed his eyes. He looked frail, consumptive perhaps, a man in his late thirties or forties, his skin pale and freckled. He blinked and swallowed repeatedly. Joe took advantage of what he perceived to be an irresolute nature and made a dash for the door. Ebling caught him on the back of the head with the blackjack. Joe’s skull rang like a coppery bell, and his knees buckled, and Ebling hit him again. Joe caught hold of the doorway, then turned, and another blow caught his chin. The pain swept away the last of the shame and remorse that had been muddling his thinking, and he was aware of a fast freshet of anger in his heart. He lunged at Ebling and caught hold of the arm that swung the sap, yanking it so hard that there was a pop of the joint. Ebling cried out, and Joe swung him by his arm and threw him up against the wall. Ebling’s head struck the corner of the shelf on which the Nazi literature had been piled, and he dropped like an empty pair of trousers to the floor.

  In the aftermath of his first victory, Joe hoped—he never forgot this wild, evil hope—that the man was dead. He stood breathing and swallowing, ears ringing, over Ebling and wished the twisted soul from his body. But no, there was the breath, lifting and lowering the fragile frame of the American Nazi. The sight of this involuntary, rabbitlike motion stanched the flow of Joe’s anger. He went back to the desk and gathered up his jacket, cigarettes, and matches. He was about to leave when he saw the Empire Comics file, with a corner of the Ebling memorandum poking out of the top. He opened the folder, tugged the memorandum free of its clip, and flipped it over. On the back of the last page, using his mechanical pencil, he drew a quick sketch of the Escapist in the standard pose he had developed for pinups: the Master of Escape smiling, arms outstretched, the sundered halves of a pair of handcuffs braceleting his wrists.

  To my pal Carl Ebling, he wrote across the bottom in big cheerful American cursive script. Lots of luck, The Escapist.

  * “Fighting Fascism in His Underwear,” issue of August 17, 1940.

  SHORTLY AFTER THREE on the afternoon of Friday, October 25, 1940 (according to both his journal and the statement that he made to police), James Haworth Love, majority shareholder and chairman of the board of Oneonta Mills, was sitting with Alfred E. Smith, president-for-life of the Empire State Building Corporation, in the latter’s souvenir-cluttered office on the thirty-second floor of the world’s tallest building, when the building manager entered “ashen-faced and looking,” as the industrialist put it in his private account of the day’s events, “quite as if he were going to be ill.” After a careful sideways glance at Love, the building manager, Chapin L. Brown, informed his boss that they had themselves a tricky situation down on twenty-five.

  Alfred Emanuel Smith—trounced by Herbert Hoover in his 1928 bid for the White House—had been a political crony and business associate of Love’s ever since his days as governor of New York. Love was in Smith’s office that afternoon, in fact, to enlist Smith as the front man for a syndicate hoping to revive Gustav Lindenthal’s old dream of a Hudson River Bridge, eight hundred feet tall and two hundred feet wide, at Fifty-seventh Street, its eastern approaches to be constructed on a large parcel of West Side real estate that had recently come into Love’s possession. Smith and Love were by no means confidants—James Love made do without confidants, as far as Smith could tell—but the textile magnate was a man of almost legendary reticence, even secretiveness, well known for keeping his own counsel. With a confidential nod toward his guest, meant to signal his implicit trust in Mr. Love’s discretion and good judgment, Smith said he supposed that Brown had better just go ahead and spill it. Brown nodded in turn to Mr. Love, clamped his hands onto his hips as if to steady himself, and let out a brief sigh which seemed intended to express both incredulity and pique.

  “We may have a bomb in the building,” he said.

  At three o’clock, he went on, a man who claimed to represent a group of American Nazis—Brown pronounced it “nazzies”—had telephoned to say, in a handkerchief-muffled false baritone, that he had hidden, somewhere in the offices of the tenants on the twenty-fifth floor, a powerful explosive device. The bomb was set to detonate, the caller had claimed, at three-thirty, killing everyone in its vicinity, and possibly doing harm to the fabric of the celebrated building itself.

  In his police statement, Mr. Love reported that His Honor took the news as gravely as it was delivered, though, as he noted in his journal, no amount of anxiety could have induced a pallor in that rubicund face.

  “Have you called M’Naughton?” Smith said. His gravelly voice was soft and his demeanor calm, but there was a strangled quality, as of anger suppressed, in his tone, and his brown eyes, which tended to have the slightly sorrowful cast common among convivial men, bulged from his jowly old-baby’s face. Captain M’Naughton was the chief of the building’s private fire battalion. Brown nodded. “Harley?” This was the captain of the building’s private police force. Brown nodded again.

  “They’re evacuating the floor,” he said. “M’Naughton’s boys are in there now, looking f
or the goddamned thing.”

  “Call Harley and say I’m coming down,” Smith said. He was already on his feet and headed around his desk for the door. Smith was a native of the Lower East Side, a tough boy from the old Fourth Ward, and his feelings for the building of which he was, in the eyes of New York and the nation, the human symbol were intensely proprietary. He took one last backward glance at his office when they went out, as if just in case, Love thought, he would never see it again. It was crammed like an old attic with trophies and mementos of his career, which had taken him nearly to Washington but in the end had led him to reign over this (normally) far more harmonious kingdom in the sky. Smith sighed. Today marked the start of the final weekend in the grand two-year adventure of the New York World’s Fair, whose official headquarters were in the Empire State Building, and a lavish banquet was on the schedule for tonight in the dining room of the Empire State Club, down on the twenty-first floor. Smith hated to see a lavish banquet spoiled for any reason. He shook his head regretfully. Then, settling his trademark brown derby on his head, he took his visitor’s arm and led the way out to the elevator bank. Ten elevators served this floor, all locals running between twenty-five and forty-one.

  “Twenty-five,” Smith snapped to the operator as they got in. Bill Roy, Smith’s bodyguard, came along to guard Smith’s old Irish body. “Twenty-five,” Smith repeated. He squinted at Mr. Brown. “The funny-book people?”

  “Empire,” said Mr. Brown. Then he added sourly, “Very funny.”

  At twenty-nine, the elevator slowed as if to stop, but the operator pressed a button, and the local, having received a kind of battlefield promotion to express, continued on its way down.

  “What Empire?” Love wanted to know. “What funny books?”

  “They call them comic books,” said Mr. Brown. “The outfit’s called Empire Comics. New tenants.”

  “Comic books.” Love was a widower with no children of his own, but he had observed his nephews reading comic books a couple of summers back, up at Miskegunquit. At the time, he had taken note only of the charming scene: the two boys lying shirtless and barefoot, in a swinging hammock stretched between a pair of unblighted elms, in a dappled bend dexter of sunlight, their downy legs tangled together, the restless attention of each wholly absorbed in a crudely stapled smear of violent color labeled Superman. Love had followed the subsequent conquest by the strapping, tights-wearing hero of the newspapers, of cereal boxes, and lately of the Mutual Broadcasting System, and was not unknown to cast an eye toward Superman’s funny-page adventures. “And what could Bundists possibly have against them?”

  “Ever seen one of these funny books, Jim?” Smith said. “If I was a ten-year-old boy, I’d be amazed there was still any Nazis left over there in Germany, the way our friends here at Empire have been poundin’ away at ’em.”

  The elevator doors opened onto the unnerving dreamlike spectacle of a hundred people moving in complete silence toward the stairs. Except for the occasional urgent, not especially polite, reminder from one of the dozens of building policemen swarming the elevator lobby that pushing and shoving was only going to get somebody a busted leg, the only sounds to be heard were the drumskin rumble of rubber boots and raincoats, the squeak and clatter of soles and heels, and the impatient tapping of umbrella tips on tile. As his party got off the elevator, James Love noticed that a big policeman, with a nod to Chapin Brown, stepped in behind them to block the doors. All of the elevators had been cordoned by blue-coated guards who stood rocking back on their heels, hands clasped behind their backs, a grim-faced, impenetrable line.

  “Captain Harley thought we’d better get ’em out as a group and keep ’em all together,” said Brown. “I tended to concur.”

  Al Smith nodded once. “No need to spook the whole building,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “Not yet, at any rate.”

  Captain Harley now came hurrying over. He was a tall, broad Irishman with a scarred left eye socket, clenched like a fist around the white and blue bauble of the eye.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Governor,” he said. He turned his angry eye on Love. “I gave orders to clear the floor. With all due respect, that means you, too, and your guest.”

  “Have you found the bomb, Harley, or haven’t you?” said Smith.

  Harley shook his head. “They’re still in there poking around.”

  “And what are you going to do with all these people?” said Smith, watching as the last few stragglers, among them a stooped, sullen-looking, bespectacled young man who appeared to be swathed in four or five layers of clothing, were herded into the stairwell.

  “We’re taking them down to the station room—”

  “Send all those good people on over to Nedick’s. Buy them an orange drink on me. I don’t want them milling around on the sidewalk blabber-mouthing.” Smith lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper not entirely devoid, even under the circumstances, of congeniality. “In fact,” he said. “No. I’ll tell you what. Have one of your boys walk them all over to Keen’s, all right, and tell Johnny, or whoever it is, to give everyone a drink and put it on Al Smith’s tab.”

  Harley signaled to one of his men, and sent him after the evacuees.

  “If you haven’t found the thing in”—Smith checked his watch again—“ten minutes, I want you to clear out twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-six, and twenty-seven, too. Send them to … I don’t know, Stouffer’s or someplace like that. You got it?”

  “Yes, Governor. Tell you the truth, I was only going to give it five minutes before I evacuated the other floors.”

  “I have faith in M’Naughton,” Smith said. “Take ten.”

  “All right, now there’s only one more problem, Your Honor,” Captain Harley went on, working a meaty hand first over his lips, then across the whole lower half of his face, leaving a mottled flush. It was the frustrated gesture of a big man fighting a natural inclination to snap something in half. “I was working on it when I heard you come down.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s one of ’em won’t come out.”

  “Won’t come out?”

  “A Mr. Joe Kavalier. Foreign kid. Can’t be more than twenty.”

  “Why won’t this fellow come out?” said Al Smith. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He says he has too much work to do.”

  Love snorted, then averted his face so as not to offend the policeman or his host with his amusement.

  “Well, of all the—Carry him out, then,” Smith said. “Whether he likes it or not.”

  “I’d love to, Your Honor. Unfortunately …” Harley hesitated, and mauled his jowls a little more with his big hand. “Mr. Kavalier has seen fit to handcuff his self to his drawing table. At the ankle, to be exact.”

  This time Mr. Love contrived to cover his laughter with a spasm of coughing.

  “What?” Smith closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “How the hell did he manage that? Where did he get the handcuffs?”

  Here Harley flushed deeply, and muttered a barely audible reply.

  “What’s that?” Smith said.

  “They’re mine, Your Honor,” said Harley. “And to tell you the truth, I’m not really sure how he got ahold of them.”

  Love’s coughing fit had by now become quite genuine. He was a three-pack-a-day man, and his lungs were in terrible shape. To prevent public embarrassment, he generally laughed as little as possible.

  “I see,” Smith said. “Well, then, Captain, get a couple of your biggest boys and carry out the goddamn table, too.”

  “It’s, uh, well, it’s built in, Your Honor. Bolted to the wall.”

  “Then unbolt it! Just get the stupid S.O.B. out of there! His damn pencil sharpener is probably booby-trapped!”

  Harley signaled to a couple of his stoutest men.

  “Wait a minute,” Smith said. He checked his watch. “God damn it.” He pushed his derby toward the back of his head, making himself look at once younger and more truc
ulent. “Leave me have a word with this pup. What is his name again?”

  “It’s Kavalier with a K, Your Honor, only I don’t see the use or the sense in letting you—”

  “In all my eleven years as president of this building, Captain Harley, I have never once sent you or your men in to lay a hand on one of the tenants. This isn’t some flophouse on the Bowery.” He started toward the door of Empire Comics. “I hope we can afford to devote a minute to reason before we give Mr. Kavalier with a K the bum’s rush.”

  “Mind if I come with you?” Love said. He had recovered from his spasm of mirth, though his pocket handkerchief now contained the evidence of something evil and brown inside him.

  “I can’t let you do that, Jim,” Smith said. “It would be irresponsible.”

  “You have a wife and children to lose, Al. All I have is my money.”

  Smith looked at his old friend. Before Chapin Brown had rushed in to interrupt them with word of the bomb threat, they had been discussing not the Hudson River Bridge, a scheme that with Love’s subsequent, abrupt retirement from public life came, once again, to nothing, but rather the man’s strongly held and oft-aired views on the war that Britain was losing in Europe. A loyal Willkie man, James Love was among a small number of powerful industrialists in the country who had been actively in favor of American entry into the war almost from its beginning. Though he was the son and grandson of millionaires, he had been troubled all his life, much like the president of the United States, by wayward liberal impulses that, however fitful—the Love mills were all open shops—made him a natural anti-fascist. Also figuring into his views, undoubtedly, was the memory, handed down from millionaire to millionaire in Love’s family, of the colossal and enduring prosperity that war and government contracts had brought to Oneonta Woolens during the Civil War. All of this was known, or more or less understood, by Al Smith, and led him to conclude that the thought of risking death at the hands of American Nazis held a certain appeal to someone who had been trying to get into the war, one way or another, for almost two years now. Then, too, the man had lost his famously beautiful wife to cancer back in ’36 or ’37; since that time, vague rumors had reached Smith’s ear of profligate conduct that might suggest the behavior of a man who had, in that tragedy, also lost his moorings, or at least his fear of death. What Smith did not know was that the one great and true friend of James Love’s life, Gerhardt Frege, had been one of the first men to die—of internal injuries—at Dachau, shortly after the camp opened in 1933.* Smith did not suspect, and never would have imagined, that the animus James Love held against Nazis and their American sympathizers was, at bottom, a personal matter. But there was an eagerness in the man’s eyes that both worried Smith and touched him.