The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  Back in the workroom—once again alive with chitchat and gum-snap and some shivery Hampton on the radio—George Deasey stood in the doorway to his office. He knit his ginger eyebrows and pursed his lips, looking uncharacteristically moved.

  “Gentlemen,” he said to Joe and Sammy. “A word.”

  He went into his office and, as was his wont, lay down in the middle of the floor and began to pick his teeth. He had been trampled by a fly-maddened cavalry horse while covering one of the U.S. Marine Corps’ numerous attempts to capture A. C. Sandino, and on chill afternoons like this one, his back tended to stiffen up on him. His toothpick was solid gold, a legacy from his father, a former associate justice of the New York State Court of Appeals. “Close the door,” he told Sam Clay after the boys came in. “I don’t want anyone to hear what I’m going to say.”

  “Why not?” Sammy said, obediently shutting the door as he followed Joe in.

  “Because it would cause me considerable pain if anyone should form the mistaken impression that I actually give a tinker’s damn about you, Mr. Clay.”

  “Fat chance of that,” said Sammy. He flopped into one of the two straight-backed chairs that flanked Deasey’s enormous desk. If he was stung by the insult, he gave no sign of it. He had toughened under the constant administration of tiny mallet blows from Deasey. During their first months working for him, on days when Deasey had ridden Sammy particularly hard, Joe had often listened in the dark, pretending to be asleep, as Sammy lay clenched tight in the bed beside him, barking into his pillow. Deasey mocked his grammar. In restaurants, he made fun of Sammy’s poor table manners, unsophisticated palate, and amazement with such simple things as sculpted butter pats and cold potato soup. He offered Sammy a chance to write a Gray Goblin novel for Racy Police Stories, sixty thousand words at half a cent a word; Sammy, sleeping two hours a night for a month, wrote three books, which Joe had read and enjoyed, only to have Deasey dissect one after another, each time with terse, bitter criticism that was infallibly accurate. In the end, however, he had bought all three.

  “First of all,” Deasey said, “Mr. Clay, where is Strange Frigate?”

  “Halfway done,” Sammy said. This was a fourth Goblin novel that Racy Publications, now operating very much in the shadow of its younger sibling but still turning a profit for Jack Ashkenazy, had commissioned from Sam Clay. Like all seventy-two of its predecessors in the series, it would be published, of course, under the house name of Harvey Slayton. Actually, as far as Joe knew, Sammy had not even started it yet. The title was one of two hundred and forty-five that George Deasey had dreamed up during a two-day bender in Key West in 1936 and had been working his way through ever since. Strange Frigate was number seventy-three on the list. “I’ll have it for you by Monday.”

  “You must.”

  “I shall.”

  “Mr. Kavalier.” Deasey had a sneaky way of lolling his head around toward you, one hand half-covering his face as if he were about to drop off for a catnap—an impression made all the stronger if he was, as now, stretched out on the floor. Then, suddenly, his drooping eyelids would snap open, and you would find yourself on the point of a sharp inquisitorial gaze. “Please reassure me that my suspicions of your involvement in this afternoon’s charade are unfounded.”

  Joe struggled to meet Deasey’s sleepy Torquemada stare. Of course he knew that the bomb threat had been made by Carl Ebling, in direct retaliation for his attack on the headquarters of the AAL two weeks before. Clearly, Ebling had been casing the Empire offices, tracking the move from the Kramler Building, observing the comings and goings of the employees, preparing his big red comic book bomb. Such fixity of purpose ought to have been, in spite of the harmlessness of today’s reprisal, cause for alarm. Joe really ought to have told the police about Carl Ebling right away, and had the man arrested and jailed. And the prospect of the man’s imprisonment, by rights, ought to have given him satisfaction. But why, instead, did it feel like surrender? It seemed to Joe that Ebling could have just as easily reported him, for breaking and entering, destruction of property, even assault, but instead had pursued his solitary and furtive course, engaging Joe—all right, the man was under the false impression that his antagonist was Sam Clay, Joe was somehow going to have to set him straight about that—in a private battle, a concours à deux. And Joe had known, somehow, from the moment Anapol’s secretary took the call, with an illusionist’s instinct for hooey, that the threat was a sham, the bomb a fiction. Ebling wanted to frighten Joe, to threaten him into calling off the comic book war that he found so offensive to the dignity of the Third Reich and the person of Adolf Hitler, and yet, at the same time, he was unwilling actually to annihilate the source of a pleasure that in his lonely verbitterte life must be all too rare. If the bomb had been real, Joe thought, I would naturally turn him in. It did not occur to him that if the bomb had been real he would now, quite possibly, be dead; that the next blow in their battle, if it were struck not by the impersonal force of the law but by Joe himself, might well reify the conflict in Ebling’s unbalanced mind; and least of all, that he had begun to lose himself in a labyrinth of fantastical revenge whose bone-littered center lay ten thousand miles and three years away.

  “Completely,” Joe said. “I don’t even know the guy.”

  “What guy is that?”

  “What I said. I don’t know him.”

  “I can smell it,” Deasey said dubiously. “But I just can’t figure it out.”

  “Mr. Deasey,” Sammy said. “What did you want us for?”

  “Yes. I wanted—God help me, I wanted to warn you.”

  Like a wreck being winched from the sea bottom, Deasey lumbered to his feet. He had been drinking since before lunch and, as he got himself upright, nearly fell over again. He went over to the window. The desk, a scarred, tiger-oak behemoth with fifty-two pigeonholes and twenty-four drawers, had followed him from his old office in the Kramler, its drawers stocked with fresh ribbons, blue pencils, pints of rye, black twists of Virginia shag, clean sheets of foolscap, aspirin, Sen-Sen, and sal hepatica. Deasey kept both it and his office spotless, uncluttered, and free of dust. This was the first time in his entire career that he had ever had an office all to himself. This—these fifty square feet of new carpet, blank paper, and inky black ribbons—was the mark and clear summation of what he had attained. He sighed. He slipped two fingers between the slats of the venetian blinds and let a wan slice of autumn light into the room.

  “When they did the Gray Goblin on the DuMont network,” he said. “You remember that, Mr. Clay?”

  “Sure,” Sammy said. “I used to listen sometimes.”

  “What about Crack Carter? Remember that one?”

  “With the bullwhip?”

  “Fighting evil amid the tumbleweeds. Sharpe of the Mounties?”

  “Sure, absolutely. They all started in the pulps, is that it?”

  “They have their common origin in a far more exclusive and decrepit locale than that,” Deasey said.

  Sammy and Joe looked at each other uncertainly. Deasey tapped his forehead with the tip of the toothpick.

  “You were Sharpe of the Mounties?” Sammy asked.

  Deasey nodded. “He started out in Racy Adventure.”

  “And Whiskey, the husky dog with whom he shares an almost uncanny bond?”

  “That one ran for five years on NBC Blue,” Deasey said. “I never made a dime.” He turned from the window. “Now, boys, it’s your turn in the barrel.”

  “They have to pay us something,” Sammy said. “After all. I mean, it may not be in the contract—”

  “It isn’t.”

  “But Anapol isn’t a thief. He’s an honorable person.”

  Deasey pressed his lips together tightly and hoisted the corners. It took Joe a moment to realize that he was smiling.

  “It’s my experience that honorable people live by the contracts they sign,” Deasey said at last. “And not a tittle more.”

  Sammy looked at Joe. “He i
sn’t cheering me up,” he said. “Is he cheering you up?”

  The question of a radio program, indeed the entire exchange that had taken place with the slim, silver-haired man wearing the eager expression, had largely escaped Joe. He was still far less proficient in English than he pretended to be, particularly when the subject ran to sports, politics, or business. He had no idea how socks or barrels figured into the discussion.

  “That man wants to make a show on the radio about the Escapist,” Joe said, slowly, feeling slow, thick-witted, and obscurely abused by inscrutable men.

  “He seemed at least to be interested in having his flacks explore the possibility,” Deasey said.

  “And if they do, you are saying that they will not have to pay us for it.”

  “I’m saying that.”

  “But of course they must.”

  “Not a dime.”

  “I want a look at that contract,” Sammy said.

  “Look all you want,” Deasey said. “Look it up and down. Hire a lawyer and have him nose around in it. All the rights—radio, movies, books, tin whistles, Cracker Jack prizes—they all belong to Anapol and Ashkenazy. One hundred percent.”

  “I thought you said you wanted to warn us.” Sammy looked annoyed. “It seems to me the time for a warning would have been about a year ago, when we put our names to that piece-of-shit-excuse-my-language contract.”

  Deasey nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. He went to a glass-fronted lawyer’s bookcase, stocked with a copy of every pulp magazine in which one of his novels had appeared, each bound in fine morocco and stamped soberly in gold characters RACY POLICEMAN or RACY ACE, with the issue number and date of publication and, beneath these, the uniform legend COMPLETE WORKS OF GEORGE DEASEY.* He stepped back and studied the books with, it seemed to Joe, a certain air of regret, though for what, exactly, Joe could not have said. “For what it’s worth, here’s the warning now. Or call it advice, if you like. You boys were powerless when you signed that contract last year. You aren’t quite so powerless anymore. You’ve had a good run. You’ve come up with some good ideas that have sold well. You’ve begun to make a name for yourselves. Now, we could debate the merits of making a name for yourselves in a third-rate industry by cranking out nonsense for numbskulls, but what isn’t in doubt is that there’s money to be found in this game right now, and you two have shown a knack for dowsing it. Anapol knows it. He knows that, if you wanted to, you could probably walk over to Donenfeld or Arnold or Goodman and write yourself a much better deal to dream up nonsense over there. So that’s my warning: stop handing this crap over to Anapol as if you owed it to him.”

  “Make him pay for it from now on. Make him give us a piece,” Sammy said.

  “You didn’t hear it from me.”

  “But in the meantime—”

  “You are screwed, gentlemen.” He consulted his pocket watch. “Now get out. I have duds of my own to secrete about the premises before I—” He broke off and looked at Joe, then stared down at his watch as if trying to make up his mind about something. When he looked up again, his face had twisted in a false, almost sickeningly cheery, rictus. “The hell with it,” he said. “I need a drink. Mr. Clay—”

  “I know,” Sammy said. “I have to finish Strange Frigate.”

  “No, Mr. Clay,” Deasey said, awkwardly settling an arm over the shoulders of each of them and dragging them toward the door. “Tonight you are going to sail on it.”

  * Frege, a socialist, an alpine skier, and, like Love, a Rhodes scholar (they had met at Trinity College), was stripped of his title as German national downhill champion and sentenced to Dachau for “soliciting an act of depravity” in the Munich Bahnhof.

  * This legendary library of self-mortification was lost, and widely considered apocryphal, until 1993, when one of its volumes, Racy Attorney #23, turned up at an IKEA store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it was mutely serving as a dignified-looking stage property on a floor-model “Hjörp” wall unit. It is signed by the author and bears the probably spurious but fascinating inscription To my pal Dick Nixon.

  WHEN CARL EBLING looked in the News the next morning, he was disappointed to find not the slightest mention of a bomb scare at the Empire State Building, of the Aryan-American League, or of a fiendish (if for the time being sham) bomber who called himself—deriving the moniker from a shrouded villain who made scattered appearances in the pages of Radio Comics throughout the prewar years—the Saboteur. The last would have been pretty unlikely, since Ebling had, in his nervous haste to squirrel the device in the desk of his imagined nemesis Sam Clay, forgotten to leave the note that he had prepared specially and signed with his nom de guerre. When he checked all the other Saturday papers, once again he found not a word to connect him to anything that had gone on in the city the previous day. The whole matter had been hushed up.

  The party thrown for Salvador Dalí that last Friday of the New York World’s Fair got considerably more play. It rated twenty lines in Leonard Lyons’s column, a mention in Ed Sullivan’s, and an unsigned squib by E. J. Kahn in “Talk of the Town” the following week. It was also described in one of Auden’s letters to Isherwood in L.A., and figured in the published memoirs of at least two mainstays of the Greenwich Village art scene.

  The guests of honor, the satrap of Surrealism and his Russian wife, Gala, were in New York to close The Dream of Venus, an attraction, conceived and designed by Dalí, that had been among the wonders of the Fair’s Amusement Area. Their host, a wealthy New Yorker named Longman Harkoo, was the proprietor of Les Organes du Facteur, a Surrealist art gallery and bookshop on Bleecker Street, inspired by the dreaming postman of Hauterives. Harkoo, who had sold more of Dalí’s work than any other dealer in the world, and who was a sponsor of The Dream of Venus, had met George Deasey in school, at Collegiate, where the future Underminister of Agitprop for the Unconscious was two years ahead of the future Balzac of the Pulps; they had renewed their acquaintance in the late twenties, when Hearst had posted Deasey to Mexico City.

  “Those Olmec heads,” Deasey said in the cab on the way downtown. He had insisted on their taking a cab. “That was all he wanted to talk about. He tried to buy one. In fact, I once heard that he did buy it, and he’s hidden it in the basement of his house.”

  “You used them in The Pyramid of Skulls,” Sammy said. “Those big heads. There was a secret compartment in the left ear.”

  “It’s bad enough you read them,” Deasey said. Sammy had prepared for the composition of his first work as Harvey Slayton by immersing himself deeply in Deasey’s oeuvre. “I find it incredibly sad, Clay, that you also remember the titles.” Actually, he looked, Joe thought, quite flattered. He probably had never expected, at this point in a career that he so publicly accounted a failure, to encounter a genuine admirer of his work. He seemed to have discovered in himself a tenderness—unsuspected by no one more than he—for both of the cousins, but particularly for Sammy, who still viewed, as a springboard to literary renown, work that Deasey had long since concluded was only “a long, spiraling chute, greased with regular paychecks, to the Tartarus of pseudonymous hackdom.” He had shown some of his old poems to Sammy, and the yellowed manuscript of a serious novel that he had never completed. Joe suspected that Deasey had intended these revelations to be warnings to Sammy, but his cousin had chosen to interpret them as proof that success in the pulpwoods was not incompatible with talent, and that he ought not to abandon his own novelistic dreams. “Where was I?”

  “Mexico City,” Joe said. “Heads.”

  “Thank you.” Deasey took a pull from his flask. He drank an extremely cheap brand of rye called Brass Lamp. Sammy claimed that it was not rye at all but actual lamp oil, as Deasey was strongly nearsighted. “Yes, the mysterious Olmecs.” Deasey returned the magic lamp to his breast pocket. “And Mr. Longman Harkoo.”

  Harkoo, Deasey said, was a Village eccentric of long standing, connected to the founders of one of the posh Fifth Avenue department stores. He was a widower—twice
over—who lived in a queer house with a daughter from his first marriage. In addition to looking after the day-to-day affairs of his gallery, orchestrating his disputes with fellow members of the American Communist Party, and pulling off his celebrated fetes, he was also, in idle moments, writing a largely unpunctuated novel, already more than a thousand pages long, which described, in cellular detail, the process of his own birth. He had taken his unlikely name in the summer of 1924, while sharing a house at La Baule with André Breton, when a pale, hugely endowed figure calling himself the Long Man of Harkoo recurred five nights running in his dreams.

  “Right here,” Deasey called out to the driver, and the cab came to a stop in front of a row of indistinct modern apartment blocks. “Pay the fare, will you, Clay? I’m a little short.”

  Sammy scowled at Joe, who considered that his cousin really ought to have expected this. Deasey was a classic cadger of a certain type, at once offhand and peremptory. But Joe had discovered that Sammy was, in his own way, a classic tightwad. The entire concept of taxicabs seemed to strike Sammy as recherché and decadent, on a par with the eating of songbirds. Joe took a dollar from his wallet and passed it to the driver.

  “Keep the change,” he said.

  The Harkoo house lay entirely hidden from the avenue, “like an emblem (heavy-handed at that) of suppressed nasty urges,” as Auden put it in his letter to Isherwood, at the heart of a city block the whole of which subsequently passed into the hands of New York University, was razed, and now forms the site of the massive Levine School of Applied Meteorology. The solid rampart of row houses and apartment blocks that enclosed the Harkoo house and its grounds on all four sides could be breached only by way of a narrow ruelle that slipped unnoticed between two buildings and penetrated, through a tunnel of ailanthus trees, to the dark, leafy yard within.