The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  “What is it?” Rosa said.

  He had taken off the cutaway jacket, with the key pinned to its lapel, in order to drape it over the back of a chair, and as he did so the letter had rustled in its envelope.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Okay, sit there. I have to get to work.”

  This was his third time playing the Pierre, and he knew its characteristics fairly well, but he always liked to take ten minutes to reconnoiter or reacquaint himself with the room. He went up onto the low bandstand, at the back of which there were three tall panels faced with gilded mirrors. They had to be detached and lugged, one at a time, down the steps and around to a side of the room where they would not betray the secrets of his magician’s table. He dialed the five rheostats to a medium setting, so that the light of five massive chandeliers would not reveal his black silk threads or expose the false bottom of a pitcher. The crystal chandeliers had been draped for the occasion with some green crepey stuff that was supposed to represent seaweed: the theme of tonight’s reception was, according to the printed programs laid across each gleaming plate, Neptune’s Kingdom. There were weird purple stalagmites jutting up from the carpet all around the room, to the right of the bandstand leaned the prow and bosomy figurehead, in papier-mâché, of a sunken galleon buried in real sand, and in the center of it all yawned a giant opalescent clamshell from which Joe sincerely hoped Leon Douglas Saks was not planning to emerge. From the ceiling hung two mannequins with scallops covering their waxen breasts, and the sequined tails of hake and halibut where their legs ought to have been. Heavy fishing nets beaded with wooden floats hung from the walls, each filled with a catch of rubber starfish and lobster.

  “You really look like you know what you’re doing,” Rosa said, watching him dismantle the mirrors and adjust the lights.

  “That is the greatest of Cavalieri’s illusions.”

  “You also look very handsome.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So are we going to have one of these things one day?”

  “We are too old,” he said, not quite paying attention. Then he caught on. “Oh,” he said. “Well.”

  “I suppose we might have girls.”

  “A girl can have them, too, now. Somebody told me this. Then it’s called a boss mitzvah.”

  “Which do you prefer?”

  “Bas mitzvah. Bas or boss, I’m not really sure.”

  “Joe?”

  “I don’t know, Rosa,” he said. He sensed that he should stop what he was doing and go over to her, but something about the topic irritated him and he felt himself closing up inside. “I can’t be sure I want to have children at all.”

  The playfulness had left her manner. “That’s okay, Joe,” she said. “I’m not sure I do either.”

  “I mean, is this really the time or the kind of world that we want a child to be born, is all the thing.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “Forget it.” She blushed and smoothed out her skirt. “Those purple rocks look so familiar.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “I can’t believe this room,” she said. “I’ve never really, you know, dipped into the Talmud or anything like that, but it’s hard to imagine that they were leaping out of giant clamshells back in Tarshish or wherever.”

  “So long as they did not eat the clams,” Joe said.

  “Did you have one of these?”

  “No, I did not. I considered it. But no. We were not religious.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Are,” he said. “Are not.” He looked stricken. He stood up straight and flexed his fingers a few times. “We are not religious.”

  “No, we aren’t either.”

  He walked back over to the chair where he had hung his jacket. He reached into the pocket and took out the letter in its pale-blue envelope and held it, looking at it.

  “Why are you carrying that around?” Rosa said. “Did you open it? What does it say?”

  There were voices; the ballroom doors burst open and the musicians came in, followed by one of the white-jacketed hotel waiters, pushing a cart. The musicians climbed up onto the bandstand and began opening their cases. Joe had worked with some of them before, and they nodded to one another, and Joe accepted their whistles and teasing about his new clothes. Joe replaced the envelope, then put his jacket back on. He shot his cuffs, smoothed back his hair, and tied on the silken mask. When the musicians saw that, they burst into applause.

  “Well?” he said, turning to Rosa. “What do you think?”

  “Very mysterious,” Rosa said. “Indeed.”

  There was a strange, strangled cry by the door, and Joe turned in time to see the white-jacketed waiter dash out of the ballroom.

  * Lost.

  THE STEEL GAUNTLET, Kapitan Evil, the Panzer, Siegfried, Swastika Man, the Four Horsemen, and Wotan the Wicked all confine their nefarious operations, by and large, to the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, but the Saboteur, King of Infiltration, Vandal Supreme, lives right in Empire City—in a secret redoubt, disguised as a crumbling tenement, in Hell’s Kitchen. That is what makes him so effective and feared. He is an American citizen, an ordinary man from a farm in small-town America. By day he works as a humble unknown in one of the anonymous trades of the city. By night he creeps forth from his Lair, with his big black bag of dirty tricks, and makes war on the infrastructure of the city and the nation. He is every bit the dark obverse of the Escapist, as skilled at worming his way into something as the Escapist is at fighting his way out. As the Escapist’s power has increased, so has the Saboteur’s, until the latter can walk through walls, leap thirty feet straight up, and befog men’s minds so that he may pass unseen among them.

  On one wall of the command room in his Lair there is a giant electrical map of the United States. On it, military bases are marked with a blue light, munitions plants with a yellow, shipyards with a green. After the Saboteur strikes, the lightbulb for that target, whatever its original hue, turns an evil shade of red. The Saboteur is fond of declaring that he will not rest until the entire nation is alight with blood-red bulbs. On another wall hangs the Videoscope, by means of which the Saboteur keeps in constant contact with his network of agents and operatives throughout the country. There is a laboratory, in which the Saboteur devises sinister new kinds of explosives, and a machine shop in which he crafts the novelty bombs—the Exploding Seagull, the Exploding Derby Hat, the Exploding Pine Tree—for which he is known and reviled. There are also a fully equipped gymnasium, a library filled with all the most advanced texts on science and world domination, and a posh paneled bedroom with a canopy bed that the Saboteur (implicitly) shares with Renata von Voom, the Spy Queen, his girlfriend and a founding member of the United Snakes. It is in the Saboteur’s well-appointed Lair that the Snakes hold their regular meetings. Ah, the raucous and jolly gatherings, over rare sweetmeats and good lager, of the United Snakes of America! They sit around the gleaming obsidian table, the Fifth Columnist, Mr. Fear, Benedict Arnold, Junior, the Spy Queen, and he, regaling one another with tales of the havoc, hate, and destruction they have sown over the past week, laughing like the maniacs they are, and plotting out new courses of action for the future. Ah, the terror they will cause! Ah, the subnormals, mixed bloods, and inferior races they will string up by their mongrel necks! Ah, Renata, in her slick black trench coat and gleaming hip boots!

  One Saturday afternoon, after a particularly boisterous convocation of the Snakes, the Saboteur wakes in his sumptuous chambers and prepares to leave the Lair for the menial job that is a cover for his subversive activities. He peels off his night-black action suit and hangs it from a hook in his armory, alongside its six duplicates. His symbol, a crimson crowbar, is outlined in silver on the chest. Is there a smell of beer and sausages on the shoulder of the costume, and of Mexican cigars? He will have to send it out to be cleaned. The Saboteur is particular about such things; he cannot abide dirt or filth or disorder, unless it be the mess, the splendid entropy of a fire, an explosion
, or a train wreck. Having removed his costume, he pulls on a pair of black trousers piped in black. He runs a damp comb through his thinning colorless hair and shaves his babyish pink face. Then he puts on a boiled white shirt, attaches the collar, ties on a black bow tie, and takes down a white dinner jacket. It has just come back from the cleaners and hangs in a crinkly paper bag. He slings it over his shoulder and then exits, not without regret, the clean and cavernous armory. Next he goes into his laboratory and picks up the disassembled parts of the Exploding Trident, cleverly concealed inside of a pink cake box from a Ninth Avenue bakery. With the box under his arm and the jacket over his shoulder, he turns and waves goodbye to Renata, who lies, gazing lazily at him through half-lowered long-lashed lids, under the portrait of the Führer, in the great oak bed.

  “Knock ’em dead, Big Boy,” she says in her vermouth voice, as he lets himself out through the Lair’s air lock and enters the grit, filth, and foul atmosphere, ripe with the stench of immigrants and Negroes and mongrels, of Empire City. He does not reply to her languid farewell; he is on the job, all business now.

  He hops a bus across town to Fifth Avenue, then another to ride the twenty blocks uptown. Ordinarily he dislikes taking the bus, but he is late already, and if you are late, they take it out of your pay. His rent on the Lair is cheap, but his pay is low enough without being docked again for lateness. He knows he can not afford to lose another job; his sister Ruth has already warned him that she will not “prop him up.” Absurd that the Saboteur should have to trouble with such mundane concerns, but these are the sacrifices entailed by maintaining a secret identity—look at all the headaches and trouble that Lois Lane, for example, makes for Clark Kent.

  He arrives ten minutes late—that’s fifty cents, five Te Amos, lost—and, when he gets there, finds that they have already begun to set up the ballroom for the affair. The swish decorator is busy bossing around his employees, getting them to hang the fishnets, assemble the cardboard shipwreck, and roll in the big rubber rock formations that were salvaged, so Mr. Dawson, the ballroom manager, has told him, from that Dream of Venus girlie show on the midway at the World’s Fair. The Saboteur is well informed on the particulars of this evening’s reception, for it is the one he has chosen to make the scene of his greatest exploit to date.

  The Pierre is a popular venue for the wedding and bar mitzvah receptions of the rich Jews of the city, as the Saboteur discovered shortly after taking the job. Almost every week, they crowd in like pigs to a trough and throw their money around (they just come right up to the pimply kid-of-the-week, for God’s sake, and stuff packets of cash into his cummerbund!) and get drunk and dance their tedious dances to the music of their whining violins. While it galls him to have to serve and wait upon such people, the Saboteur has known from the first that this secret identity will afford him, in due course, the opportunity to strike a terrible blow. For months he bided his time, improving his skills, under the guidance of a drunken old anarcho-syndicalist named Fiordaliso, as a bomb constructor, reading Feuchtwangler and Spengler (and Radio Comics), watching for his moment. Then, at a bar mitzvah one night last winter, the Amazing Cavalieri appeared on the bill, passing cigarettes through handkerchiefs and making flowers bloom in his boutonniere, and turned out to be none other than Joe Kavalier. (The Saboteur had long since rectified his misapprehension that it was the Sam Clay half of the team who had been responsible both for the destruction of the AAL offices and for the autographed sketch of the Escapist, which now hung from a dartboard in the gymnasium at the Lair.) The Saboteur was too astonished to act at the time, but he began to sense then that his moment might soon be at hand. For weeks after that night, he chatted up Mr. Dawson and, through him, monitored the programs for upcoming events, watching the big schedule book for a reappearance of the Amazing Cavalieri. And tonight is the night. When he arrived at work, it was with the intention of showing Joe Kavalier that while Carl Henry Ebling may be a shiftless bumbler and pamphleteer, the Saboteur is not one to be trifled with, and his memory is long. At the same time, he would be removing with masterly precision whatever other mongrels happened to be standing in the young Jew’s vicinity. Yes, he would have been contented with just that. How surprising, disturbing, marvelous, strange it is, then, to roll into the Grand Ballroom, pushing the service cart that conceals the Exploding Trident, and discover that the performing magician hired for the Saks bar mitzvah is not some moonlighting scribbler but the Escapist himself, the Saboteur’s dark idol, his opposite number, masked and fully costumed and wearing in his lapel the symbol of his cursed League.

  At that moment, the sheet of paper on which the contours of Carl Ebling’s mind have been drawn is like a map that has been folded and carelessly refolded too many times. The reverse shows through; the poles meet; at the heart of a ramifying gray grid of city streets lies an expanse of virgin blue sea.

  Was there ever a moment when Superman lingered a second too long in his timid Kent aspect and suffered a fatal hesitation? Did the Escapist ever forget to clasp his talisman and stumble on crippled legs into the fray? The Saboteur tries to remain calm, but the stuttering doormat with whom he must share his existence is a bundle of nerves and, like a fool, goes running out of the room.

  He stands in the foyer outside the ballroom, leaning against a wall, his cheek pressed against the soft, cool flocked wallpaper. He lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, calms himself. There is no call for panic; he is the King of Infiltration, and he knows what to do. He stubs out the cigarette in the sand of a nearby ashtray, and takes hold of the cart once again. This time, when he enters the ballroom, he has the presence of mind to keep his head down, to avoid being recognized by the Escapist.

  “Sorry, folks,” he murmurs. He pushes the cart across to the far side of the stage, by the shivered timbers of the sunken ship. It has a squeaky wheel, and he feels certain that he must be attracting the attention of the musicians on the bandstand, of the magician and his big-nose girl. But when he looks back, they are absorbed in their own preparations. She is a pretty enough girl, he supposes, and her black mannish overcoat reminds him with a twinge of the queen of his own desire. When he reaches the ship, he stops, crouches behind the cart, and opens the compartment in which hot plates of food are stored by the room-service waiters on their way up to rooms.

  Until now the ballroom has been too crowded with decorators, waiters, and hotel staff, coming and going as they prepared the room for the event, for him to find the opportunity to assemble the parts of his Exploding Trident. Now he works quickly, screwing the length of thin pipe that contains the black powder and cut-up nails into a second length of pipe that is empty. This will be the shaft. At the dummy end, he affixes tines of stiff red cellophane, copped from a costume-shop devil-suit pitchfork, with a piece of masking tape. It looks a little suspicious, he knows, but fortunately, verisimilitude is not something people generally expect from a sea god’s trident. He unrolls the six-inch strip of fuse that protrudes through a hole drilled in the thing’s business end. Then he stands up and, checking to see that he is not being observed, edges over toward one of the fishnets tacked to the wall, filled with its catch of fake crustaceans. No one sees; his rich lifelong powers of invisibility remain his truest ally. Gingerly, he slides the trident down through the heavy mesh of the fishnet until the fuse end bumps the carpet. When the time comes—when the Escapist has begun his legendary act—the Saboteur will contrive to pass by here again. He will rest half a lighted Camel against a strand of the net, so that the unlit end touches the fuse. Then he will hie himself out of harm’s way and wait. And five minutes after that, the mongrels of Empire City will begin to know something of the terror their mongrel brothers and sisters are undergoing halfway around the world.

  The Saboteur pushes the cart back toward the ballroom doors. At the last moment, as he is passing the magician, he cannot prevent himself from raising his head and looking his adversary in the eye. If there is a flicker of recognition there, it is extinguished in an instant
as the doors to the ballroom fly open and, laughing and shouting and crying out in their loud barnyard voices, the first of the guests arrive.

  WHAT FOLLOWS IS the intended program for the performance given by the Amazing Cavalieri on the evening of April 12, 1941. A copy, printed by the performer himself using a “Printer’s Devil” Genuine Junior Printing Press that he had dug out of the Empire Novelties stockroom just before the move from the Kramler Building, was handed out to every guest just prior to the show.

  The Wanderings of a Handkerchief.

  Magic Bananas.

  A Miniature Conflagration.

  Fly Away Home.

  Please Don’t Eat the Pets.

  A Contagious Knot.

  Adrift in the Stream of Time.

  Ice and Fire.

  Where Have I Been?

  The Tail Has Lost Its Monkey.

  Joe’s self-consciousness about his English, and a suspicion of patter inherited from his great teacher, kept his performance swift and wordless. Frequently he was told, usually by the mother or an aunt of the bar mitzvah boy, that the show had been very nice, but would it kill him to smile a little now and then? Tonight was no exception. If anything, it seemed to those scattered guests at the Saks reception who had caught his act before, he was even more guarded, more workmanlike in his approach than usual. His movements and his pacing were neither too hasty nor too slow, and there were no—as had sometimes happened in the past—dropped cards or spilled pitchers of water. But he took no apparent pleasure in the marvelous feats he performed. One would have thought it meant nothing to him that he could produce a bowlful of goldfish from a tin of sardines, or pass a bunch of bananas one at a time through the skull of a thirteen-year-old boy. Rosa supposed that he was troubled by something he had read in that latest letter from home, and wished, as she had wished many times, that he was more willing to share with her his fears, his doubts, and whatever bad news there was from Prague.