The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  “We give it five minutes,” Smith said. “Then I have Harley drag the bastard out by his suspenders.”

  The waiting room of Empire Comics was a cold expanse of marble and leather moderne, a black tundra frosted over with glass and chrome. The effect was huge and intimidating and coldly splendid, rather like its designer, Mrs. Sheldon Anapol, though neither Love nor Smith had any way, of course, of drawing this parallel. There was a long hemicircular reception desk opposite the entry, faced with black marble and ribbed with Saturn’s rings of glass, behind which three black-coated firemen, their faces concealed by heavy welder’s masks, crouched, poking around carefully with broom handles. On the wall over the reception desk, there was a painting of a lithe masked giant in a dark blue union suit, his arms outspread in ecstatic embrace as he burst from a writhing nest of thick iron chains that entangled his loins, belly, and chest. On his chest, he wore the emblem of a stylized key. Above his head arched foot-high letters proclaiming boldly THE ESCAPIST! while at his feet a pair of firefighters crawled around on their hands and knees, searching the drawers and kneeholes of the reception desk for a bomb. The firemen, their visors glinting, looked up as Harley led Governor Smith and Mr. Love past.

  “Find anything?” Smith said. One of the firemen, an elderly fellow whose helmet looked far too large for him, shook his head.

  The comic book workshop, or whatever it was called, had none of the polish and gleam of the waiting room. The floor was concrete, painted light blue and littered with fag ends and crumpled carnations of drawing paper. The tables were a homely jumble of brand-new and semidecrepit, but there was full daylight on three sides, with spectacular if not quite breathtaking views of the hotel and newspaper towers of midtown, the green badge of Central Park, the battlements of New Jersey, and the dull metal glint of the East River, with a glimpse of the iron mantilla of the Queensboro Bridge. The windows were shut, and a pall of tobacco lay over the room. In a far corner, against a wall from which his built-in drawing table canted downward and out, hunched a pale young man, lean, rumpled, shirttails dangling, adding billowing yards of smoke to the pall. Al Smith signaled to Harley to leave them. “Five minutes,” Harley said as he withdrew.

  As soon as the police captain spoke, the young man whirled around on his stool. He squinted nearsightedly in the direction of Smith and Love as they approached, looking mildly annoyed. He was a good-looking Jewish kid, with large blue eyes, an aquiline nose, a strong chin.

  “Young man,” Smith said. “Mr. Kavalier, is it? I’m Al Smith. This is my friend Mr. Love.”

  “Joe,” the young man said. His grip in Love’s was firm and dry. Though he appeared to have been wearing his clothes rather too long, they were good enough clothes: a broadcloth shirt with a monogram stitched onto the breast pocket, a raw silk necktie, gray worsted trousers with a generous cuff. But he had the undernourished look of an immigrant, his deep-set eyes bruised and wary, the tips of his fingers stained yellow. The careful manicure of his nails had been ruined by ink. He looked ill rested, dog-tired, and—it was a surprising thought to Love, who was not a man especially sensitive to the feelings of others—sad. A less refined New Yorker probably would have asked him, Where’s the funeral?

  “Look here, young man,” Smith said. “I’ve come to make a personal request. Now, I admire your dedication to your work here. But I’d like you just to do me a favor, a personal favor to me, you understand. Here it is. Come along now, and let me stand you to a drink. All right? We’ll get this little problem cleared up, and then you’ll be my guest at the club. Okay, kid? What do you say?”

  If Joe Kavalier was impressed by this generous offer from one of the best-known, most beloved characters in contemporary American life, a man who once might have been president of the United States, he didn’t show it. He merely looked amused, Love thought, and behind this amusement there were hints of irritation.

  “I’d like to another time, maybe, thank you,” he said, in an indeterminate Hapsburg accent. He reached for a stack of art board and took a fresh piece from the top. It appeared to the observant Love, who always took a ready interest in learning the secrets and methods of any kind of manufacturing or production, to have been preprinted with nine large square frames, in three tiers of three. “Only I have so much work.”

  “You’re quite attached to your work, I can see that,” Love said, catching the younger man’s air of amused unconcern.

  Joe Kavalier looked down at his feet, where a pair of metal cuffs linked his left ankle, in a gray sock with white and burgundy clocks, to one of the legs of his table. “I was not wanting to be interrupted, you know?” He tap-tap-tapped the end of his pencil against the piece of board. “So many little boxes to fill.”

  “Yes, all right, that’s very admirable, son,” Smith said, “but for gosh sakes, how much drawing will you be able to do when your arm is lying down on Thirty-third Street?”

  The young man gazed around the studio, empty but for the smoke of his cigarette and a pair of grunting firemen, the buckles on their raincoats rattling as they clambered around the room.

  “There isn’t no bomb,” he said.

  “You think this thing’s a hoax?” Love said.

  Joe Kavalier nodded, then lowered his head to his work. He considered the page’s first little box from one angle, then another. Then, rapidly, in a firm and certain manner and without stopping, he began to draw. In choosing the image he was now putting to paper, he didn’t appear to be following the typewritten script lying stacked at his elbow. Perhaps he had committed it all to memory. Love craned his head to get a better look at what the kid was drawing. It seemed to be an airplane, one with the fierce-looking jambeaux of a Stuka. Yes, a Stuka in a streaking power dive. The detail was impressive. The plane had solidity and rivets. And yet there was something exaggerated in the backward sweep of the wings that suggested great speed and even a hint of falconish malevolence.

  “Governor?” It was Harley. He sounded as if he was irritated with Al Smith now, too. “I got two men with a wrench ready and waiting.”

  “Just a moment,” Love said, and then felt himself blush. It was Al Smith’s decision, of course—it was Al Smith’s building—but Love was impressed by the young man’s good looks, his air of certainty with regard to the bomb’s fraudulence; and he was fascinated, as always, by the sight of someone making something skillfully. He wasn’t ready to leave either.

  “You’ve got half a moment,” Harley said, ducking out again. “With all due respect.”

  “Well, now, Joe,” Smith said, checking his watch once again, looking and sounding more nervous than before. His tone grew patient and slightly condescending, and Love sensed that he was trying to be psychological. “If you won’t evacuate, maybe you’ll tell me why the Bund—would this be the Bund?”

  “The Aryan-American League.”

  Smith looked at Love, who shook his head. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of them,” Smith said.

  Joe Kavalier’s mouth bunched up at one corner in a small, eloquent smirk, as if to suggest that this was hardly surprising.

  “Why are these Aryans so upset with you people here? How did they come across these controversial drawings of yours? I wasn’t aware that Nazis read comic books.”

  “All kinds of people are reading them,” said Joe. “I get mail from all over the country. California. Illinois. From Canada, too.”

  “Really?” Love said. “How many of your comic books do you sell every month?”

  “Jimmy—” Smith began, tapping the crystal of his wristwatch with a fat finger.

  “We have three titles,” the young man said. “Though now it’s going to be five.”

  “And how many do you sell in a month?”

  “Mr. Kavalier, this is fascinating stuff, but if you won’t agree to come quietly I’m going to be obliged to—”

  “Close to three million,” Joe Kavalier said. “But they all get passed along at least once. They get traded for other ones, between the
kids. So the number of people reading them, Sam—my partner, Sam Clay—says it’s maybe two times how many we sell, or more.”

  “Das ist bemerkenswert,” said Love.

  For the first time, Joe Kavalier looked surprised. “Ja, no kidding.”

  “And that fellow out there in the lobby, with the key on his chest. That your star attraction?”

  “The Escapist. He is the world-greatest escape artist, no chains to hold him, sending him to liberate the enprisoned peoples in the world. It’s good stuff.” He smiled for the first time, a smile that was self-mocking but not quite enough to conceal his evident professional pride. “He is made up by my partner and me.”

  “I take it your partner had sense enough to evacuate,” Smith said, returning them to the ostensible purpose of this conversation.

  “He is with an appointment. And there isn’t any bomb.”

  At that moment, just as Joe Kavalier said “bomb,” there was a burst of clamor—brrrang!—right over their heads. James Love jumped and let go of his cigarette.

  “All clear,” Smith said, mopping his forehead with a hankie. “Well, thank God for that.”

  “Good heavens.” There was ash all down Love’s jacket, and he brushed it away, blushing.

  “All clear!” called a husky voice. A moment later, the elderly firefighter stuck his head into the workroom. “It was just an old clock, your honor,” he told Smith, looking at once relieved and disappointed. “In the desk of a Mister … Clay. Taped to a couple of dowels painted red.”

  “I knew it,” said Joe softly, starting in on the second little box.

  “Dynamite isn’t even red,” the old fireman said, walking off. “Not really.”

  “The guy reads too much comic books,” Joe said.

  “Governor Smith!”

  They turned, and three men came into the workroom. One of them, balding and vast in every part and extremity, had the air of a high official in some disreputable labor union; the other, tall and merely potbellied, had thinning rusty hair, a football hero gone to seed. Behind the two big fellows stood a tiny, quarrelsome-looking young man, dressed in an outsize gray pinstriped suit with padded shoulders that were almost comical in their breadth. The little one immediately came over to the drawing table where Joe Kavalier was working. He nodded to Love, sizing him up, and put a hand on Kavalier’s shoulder.

  “Mr. Anapol, isn’t it?” Smith said, shaking the fat man’s hand. “We’ve had a little excitement around here.”

  “We were at lunch!” Anapol cried, coming to shake Al Smith’s hand. “We came running back as soon as we heard! Governor, I’m so sorry for all the trouble we caused you. I guess maybe”—here he shot a look at Kavalier & Clay—“these two young hotheads have been taking things a little too far in our magazines.”

  “Maybe so,” Love said. “But they’re brave young men, and I congratulate them.”

  Anapol looked taken aback.

  “Mr. Anapol, may I present an old friend, Mr. James Love. Mr. Love is—”

  “Oneonta Mills!” Anapol said. “Mr. James Love! What a pleasure. I regret that we’re obliged to meet under such—”

  “Nonsense,” Love said. “We’ve been having a fine time.” He ignored the scowl this statement produced on Al Smith’s puss. “Mr. Anapol, this may be neither the time nor the place for this. But my firm has just brought all of our various accounts together under one umbrella and placed them with Burns, Baggot & DeWinter,” Love went on. “Perhaps you’ve heard of them.”

  “Of course,” Anapol said. “The Knackfalder Trousers Man. The dancing nuts.”

  “They’re smart boys, and one of the smart things they’ve been talking about is taking a fresh look at our radio accounts. I’d like to have some of their fellows sit down with you and Mr. Kavalier, here, and Mister—Clay, is it?—and talk about finding a way for Oneonta Mills to sponsor this Escaper of yours.”

  “Sponsor?”

  “On the radio, boss,” said the little one, catching on quickly. He jutted his chin and deepened his voice and clutched an imaginary microphone. “Oneonta Mills, makers of Ko-Zee-Tos brand thermal socks and undergarments, presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist!” He looked at Love. “That the idea?”

  “Something like that,” Love said. “Yes, I like that.”

  “The idea,” said Anapol. “A radio show.” He pressed a hand to his belly as if he was not feeling well. “It makes me a little nervous. With all due respect, and I don’t say I’m not interested, but …”

  “Well, think it over, Mr. Anapol. I suppose there must be other characters available, but I have a feeling this is the one for me. Let’s say I’ll telephone Jack Burns and make arrangements to have you sit down and talk about it this week,” Love said. “That is, if you gentlemen are free.”

  “I’m free,” Anapol said, recovering himself. “My partner, Jack Ashkenazy, will also, I am sure, be free. And this is our editor in chief, Mr. George Deasey.”

  Love shook Deasey’s hand, recoiling at the smell of cloves covering the whiskey on his breath.

  “But these young fellows over here,” Anapol continued, “well, they do good work, as you’ve seen, and they’re very good boys, if maybe a little bit excitable. But they’re, how should I put it, they’re the hired hands on this farm.”

  Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier exchanged a look in which Love saw the smoldering coals of a grudge.

  “Moo,” Sam Clay said, with a shrug of his enormous false shoulders.

  “I’m going to need a statement from you, Mr. Anapol,” Captain Harley said. “And from you, Governor, and your guest. It won’t take long.”

  “What do you say we do it down at the club,” Al Smith said. “I could use a drink.”

  At that moment a messenger in blue livery walked in, carrying a special-delivery letter.

  “Sheldon Anapol?” he said.

  “Here,” Anapol said, signing for it. “George, stay here and see that things get settled down.”

  Deasey nodded. Anapol tipped the messenger and exited behind Al Smith. Love signaled to Smith that he would follow, then turned back to the two young men. Sam Clay stood, his shoulder against his partner’s, looking a little woozy, as if he had been sandbagged. Then he went over to a low shelf in a corner of the room. He quickly gathered a stack of magazines and brought them to Love, looking the older man right in the eye.

  “Maybe you’d like to get to know the character a little better,” he said. “Our character.”

  “ ‘Ours’ as in …?”

  “ ‘Ours’ as in Joe and myself. The Escapist. Also the Monitor, the Four Freedoms, Mr. Machine Gun. All of Empire’s leading sellers. Here. Joe, do you have—Yeah.” He scrabbled around in the clutter under Joe Kavalier’s table to find a sheet of stationery on whose elaborate letterhead a group of handsome, muscular men and boys lounged, relaxing on and about the letters, one wild-haired, hook-nosed boy perched atop the ampersand of the words “Kavalier & Clay.” “I’ve always thought the Escapist would be perfect for radio.”

  “Well, I’m really not qualified to judge, Mr. Clay,” Love said, not unkindly, taking the magazines and the sheet of paper. “To be perfectly honest, my only concern is whether or not he’ll sell socks. But I will say”—and here his face took on an odd expression that Joe almost would have called a leer—“I do like what I’ve seen here today. Take care, boys.”

  He exited the workroom, troubled, but not unduly, by a pang of sympathy for Kavalier & Clay. Love saw how it was. These boys had come up with this Escapist character and then, in exchange for some token payment and the opportunity of seeing their names in print, signed away all the rights to Anapol and company. Now Anapol and company were prospering—enough to let a quarter of a floor in the Empire State Building, enough to exert an impressive mass-cultural influence over the vast American marketplace of children and know-nothings. And while, to judge from their attire, Messrs. Kavalier & Clay were sharing to some degree in the general prosperity, Sheldon Anapol
had just made it apparent to both of them that the course of the river of money beside which they had pitched their camp had been diverted, and would henceforth flow no more around them. In his life as a businessman, Love had seen plenty of boy geniuses left deserted amid the bleached bones and cacti of their dreams. These two would, no doubt, have other brilliant ideas, and furthermore, no one was ever born smart in business. Love’s feeling of pity, while sincere—and inspired in part by Joe’s dark good looks and the quickness of spirit of the two young men—lasted no longer than it took for the elevator to deposit him in the richly paneled lobby of the Empire State Club. He did not imagine for a moment that he had just set in motion the wheels not of another minor midtown ruination but, very nearly, his own.