The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  Then Tommy remembered a field trip he had taken here, back in the second grade. There was a large infirmary—a miniature hospital, the tour guide had called it—on one of the lower floors. There had been a pretty young nurse in white hat and shoes. She would know what to do. Tommy stood up and started for the door. Then he turned to look back at Joe lying on the floor. What would they do, though, once they had revived him and bandaged his cut? Would they put him in jail for sleeping in his office night after night? Would they think he was some kind of nut? Was he some kind of nut? Would they lock him up in a “nutbin”?

  Tommy’s hand was on the knob, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn it. He was paralyzed; he had no idea of what to do. And now, for the first time, he appreciated Joe’s dilemma. It was not that he did not wish further contact with the world in general, and the Clays in particular. Maybe that was how it had started out for him, in those strange days after the war, when he came back from some kind of secret mission—this was what Tommy’s mother had said—and found out that his mother had been put to death in the camps. Joe had run away, escaped without a trace, and come here to hide. But now he was ready to come home. The problem was that he didn’t know how to do it. Tommy would never know how much effort it cost Joe to make that trip out to Long Island, how ardent his desire was to see the boy, speak to him, hear his thin reedy voice. But Tommy could see that Secretman was trapped in his Chamber of Secrets, and that the Bug was going to have to rescue him.

  At that moment, Joe groaned and his eyes fluttered open. He touched a finger to his forehead and looked at the blood that came away. He sat up on one elbow, rolling toward Tommy by the door. The look on Tommy’s face must have been easy to read.

  “I’m fine,” Joe said, his voice thick. “Get back in here.”

  Tommy let go of the doorknob.

  “You see,” Joe said, rising slowly to his feet, “goes to show you shouldn’t smoke. It’s bad for the health.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said, marveling at the strange resolve that he had formed.

  When he left Joe that afternoon, he went to the Smith-Corona typewriter that was chained to a podium in front of Reliant Office Supplies. He rolled out the sheet of typing paper that was there so that people could try out the machine. It featured its regular weekly fable, one sentence long, of the quick brown fox and the lazy dog, and exhorted him that now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. He rolled in the usual piece of stationery, at the bottom of which Joe had forged his mother’s name. “Dear Mr. Savarese,” he typed, using the tips of his index fingers. Then he stopped. He rolled out the paper and set it to one side. He looked up at the polished black stone of the storefront. His reflection looked back at him. He went over to open the chrome-handled door and was immediately intercepted by a thin, white-haired man whose trousers were belted at the diaphragm. This man often watched Tommy from the doorway of his shop as the boy typed out his excuses, and every week, Tommy thought the man was going to tell him to get lost. At the threshold of the store, which he had never crossed before, he hesitated. In the man’s stiffened shoulders and the backward cant of his head, Tommy recognized his own manner when faced with a big strange dog or other sharp-toothed animal.

  “Whaddaya want, sonny?” the man said.

  “How much is a sheet of paper?”

  “I don’t sell paper by the sheet.”

  “Oh.”

  “Run along now.”

  “Well, how much for a box, then?”

  “A box of what?”

  “Paper.”

  “What kind of paper? What for?”

  “A letter.”

  “Business? Personal? This is for you? You’re going to write a letter?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, what kind of a letter is it?”

  Tommy considered the question for a moment, seriously. He didn’t want to get the wrong kind of paper.

  “A death threat,” he said at last.

  For some reason, this cracked the man up. He went around behind the sales counter and bent down to open a drawer.

  “Here,” he said, handing Tommy a sheet of heavy tan paper as smooth and cool to the touch as marzipan. “My best twenty-five-pound cotton rag.” He was still laughing. “Make sure you kill them good, all right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Tommy. He went back out to the typewriter, rolled in the sheet of fancy paper, and in half an hour typed the message that would eventually draw a crowd to the sidewalk around the Empire State Building. This was not necessarily the outcome he anticipated. He didn’t know exactly what he was hoping for as he pecked out his missive to the editor of the New York Herald-Tribune. He was just trying to help Cousin Joe find his way home. He wasn’t sure what it would all lead to, or if his letter, though it sounded awfully official and realistic to his own ears, would even be believed. When he finished, he carefully withdrew it from the typewriter and went back into the shop.

  “How much for an envelope?” he said.

  WHEN THEY GOT OUT on seventy-two, the boy led them to the left, past the doorways of an import company and a wig manufacturer, to a door whose opaque glass light was painted with the words KORNBLUM VANISHING CREAMS, INC. The boy turned to look at them, an eyebrow raised, seeing, the captain thought, if they got the joke, although Lieber wasn’t sure just what the joke was supposed to be. Then the boy knocked. There was no reply. He knocked again.

  “Where is he?” he said.

  “Captain Harley.”

  They turned. A second building cop, Rensie, had joined them. He put a finger to his nose as if he was about to impart some delicate or embarrassing information.

  “What is it?” Harley said warily.

  “Our boy is up there,” Rensie said. “The leaper. Up on the o.d.”

  “What?” Lieber stared at the kid, more bewildered than he considered it competent for a detective to be.

  “Costume?” Harley said.

  Rensie nodded. “Nice blue one,” he said. “Big nose. Skinny. It’s him.”

  “How’d he get there?”

  “We don’t know, Captain. Swear to God, we were watching everything. We had a man on the stairs, and another on the elevators. I don’t know how he got in there. He just kind of showed up.”

  “Come on,” Lieber said, already moving for the elevators. “And bring your son,” he told Sammy Clay; you had to bring a cleat to lash them to. The boy’s face had gone blank and bloodless with what looked to Lieber like astonishment. Somehow his hoax had come true.

  They stepped into the elevator, with its elaborate chevrons and rays of inlaid wood.

  “He’s on the parapet?” said Captain Harley. Rensie nodded.

  “Wait a minute,” said Sammy. “I’m confused.”

  Lieber allowed as how he was a tiny bit confused himself. He had thought that the mystery of the letter to the Herald-Tribune was solved: it was a harmless if inscrutable stunt, pulled by an eleven-year-old boy. No doubt, he thought, he had been fairly inscrutable himself at that age. The kid was looking for attention; he was trying to make a point that no one outside the family could possibly understand. Then, somehow, it had appeared that this long-lost cousin whom Lieber had assumed until that point to be a dead man, run down on the shoulder of some godforsaken road outside of Cat Butt, Wyoming, was actually holed up, somehow or other, in an office suite on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State. And now it looked as if the kid was not the author of the letter after all; the Escapist had kept his grim promise to the city of New York.

  They had gone fourteen stories—special express all the way—when Rensie said in a small, unwilling voice, “There are orphans.”

  “There are what?”

  “Orphans,” said Clay. He had his arm crooked around his kid’s neck in a fatherly display of reproof masquerading as solicitude. It was an embrace that said Wait till I get you home. “Why are there—?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Harley said. “Why are there?”

  “We
ll, it didn’t look like the, uh, the gentleman in the, uh, the blue suit was going to show,” Rensie said. “And the little brats came all the way down from Watertown. Ten hours on a bus.”

  “An audience. Of little children,” Harley said. “Perfect.”

  “What about you?” Lieber said to the boy. “You confused, too?”

  The boy stared, then nodded slowly.

  “You want to have your wits about you, Tom,” Lieber said. “We need you to talk to this uncle of yours.”

  “First cousin,” Clay said. He cleared his throat. “Once removed.”

  “Maybe you could talk to your first cousin once removed about those rubber bands,” Rensie said. “That’s a new one on me.”

  “Rubber bands,” Captain Harley said. “And orphans.” He rubbed at the wrecked half of his face. “I’m guessing there’s also a nun?”

  “A padre.”

  “Okay,” said Captain Harley. “Well, that’s something.”

  TWENTY-TWO ORPHANS from the Orphanage of St. Vincent de Paul huddled on the windswept roof of the city, a thousand feet up. Gray light was smeared across the sky like ointment on a bandage. The heavy steel zippers of the children’s dark blue corduroy coats—donated by a Watertown department store the previous winter, along with the twenty-two chiming pairs of galoshes—were zipped tightly against the April chill. The children’s two keepers, Father Martin and Miss Mary Catherine Macomb, circled the children like a couple of nipping sheepdogs, trying to cinch them with their voices and hands. Father Martin’s eyes watered in the sharp breeze, and Miss Macomb’s thick arms were stippled with gooseflesh. They were not excitable people, but things had gotten out of hand and they were shouting.

  “Stay back!” Miss Macomb told the children, several hundred times.

  “For pity’s sake, man,” Father Martin told the leaper, “come down.”

  There was something stunned in the faces of the children, blinking and tentative. The slow, dull, dark submarine of the lives in which they were the human cargo had abruptly surfaced. Their blood was filled with a kind of crippling nitrogen of wonder. Nobody was smiling or laughing, though with children, entertainment often seemed to be a grave business.

  Atop the thick concrete parapet of the eighty-sixth floor, like a bright jagged hole punched in the clouds, balanced a smiling man in a mask and a gold-and-indigo suit. The suit clung to his lanky frame, dark blue with an iridescent glint of silk. He had on a pair of golden swim trunks, and on the front of his blue jersey was a thick golden appliqué, like the initial on a letterman’s jacket, in the shape of a skeleton key. He wore a pair of soft gold boots, rather shapeless, with thin rubber soles. The trunks were nubbly and had a white streak on the seat, as if their wearer had once leaned against a freshly painted doorjamb. The tights were laddered and stretched out at the knees, the jersey sagged badly at the elbows, and the rubber soles of the flimsy boots were cracked and spotted with grease. His broad chest was girdled by a slender cord, studded with thousands of tiny knots, looped under his armpits, then stretched across the open-air promenade some twenty feet to the steel prong of an ornamental sun ray that jutted from the roof of the observation lounge. He gave the knotted cord a tug, and it twanged out a low D-flat.

  He was putting on a show for them, for the children and for the policemen who had gathered at his feet, cursing and cajoling and begging him to climb down. He was promising a demonstration of human flight of the sort still routinely found, even in this diminished era of super-heroism, in the pages of comic books.

  “You will see,” he cried. “A man can fly.”

  He demonstrated the strength of the elastic rope, woven out of eight separate strands, each strand made up of forty of the extra-long, extra-thick rubber bands he had picked up at Reliant Office Supplies. The policemen remained suspicious, but they were not sure what to believe. The midnight-blue costume, with its key symbol and its weird Hollywood sheen, affected their judgment. And then there was Joe’s professional manner, still remarkably smooth and workmanlike after so many years of disuse. His confidence in his ability to pull off the trick of leaping from the roof, plunging to a maximum of 162 feet in the direction of the far-distant sidewalk, then reascending, tugged skyward by the enormous rubber band, to alight smiling at the feet of the policemen, appeared to be absolute.

  “The children won’t be able to see me flying,” Joe said, the glint of misdirection in his eyes. “Let them come to the edge.”

  The children agreed, pressing forward. Horrified, Miss Macomb and Father Martin held them back.

  “Joe!” It was Sammy. He and various policemen, uniformed and plainclothes, came stumbling in a confusion of waving arms out onto the windswept promenade. They were led by a wary-looking Tommy Clay.

  When Joe saw the boy, his son, join the motley crowd that had convened on the observation deck to observe as a rash and imaginary promise was fulfilled, he suddenly remembered a remark that his teacher Bernard Kornblum had once made.

  “Only love,” the old magician had said, “could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.”

  He had offered this observation toward the end of Joe’s last regular visit to the house on Maisel Street, as he rubbed a dab of calendula ointment into the skin of his raw, peeling cheeks. Generally, Kornblum said very little during the final portion of every lesson, sitting on the lid of the plain pine box that he had bought from a local coffin maker, smoking and taking his ease with a copy of Di Cajt while, inside the box, Joe lay curled, roped and chained, permitting himself sawdust-flavored sips of life through his nostrils, and making terrible, minute exertions. Kornblum sat, his only commentary an occasional derisive blast of flatulence, waiting for the triple rap from within which signified that Joe had loosed himself from cuffs and chains, prized out the three sawn-off dummy screw heads in the left-hand hinge of the lid, and was ready to emerge. At times, however, if Joe was particularly dilatory, or if the temptation of a literally captive audience proved too great, Kornblum would begin to speak, in his coarse if agile German—always limiting himself, however, to shoptalk. He reminisced fondly about performances in which he had, through bad luck or foolishness, nearly been killed; or recalled, in apostolic and tedious detail, one of the three golden occasions on which he had been fortunate enough to catch the act of his prophet, Houdini. Only this once, just before Joe attempted his ill-fated plunge into the Moldau, had Kornblum’s talk ever wandered from the path of professional retrospection into the shadowed, leafy margins of the personal.

  He had been present, Kornblum said—his voice coming muffled through the inch of pine plank and the thin canvas sack in which Joe was cocooned—for what none but the closest confidants of the Handcuff King, and the few canny confreres who witnessed it, knew to be the hour when the great one failed. This was in London, Kornblum said, in 1906, at the Palladium, after Houdini had accepted a public challenge to free himself from a purportedly inescapable pair of handcuffs. The challenge had been made by the Mirror of London, which had discovered a locksmith in the north of England who, after a lifetime of tinkering, had devised a pair of manacles fitted with a lock so convoluted and thorny that no one, not even its necromantic inventor, could pick it. Kornblum described the manacles, two thick steel circlets inflexibly welded to a cylindrical shaft. Within this rigid shaft lay the sinister mechanism of the Manchester locksmith—and here a tone of awe, even horror, entered Kornblum’s voice. It was a variation on the Bramah, a notoriously intransigent lock that could be opened—and even then with difficulty—only by a long, arcane, tubular key, intricately notched at one end. Devised by the Englishman Joseph Bramah in the 1760s, it had gone unpicked, inviolate, for over half a century until it was finally cracked. The lock that now confronted Houdini, on the stage of the Palladium, consisted of two Bramah tubes, one nested inside the other, and could be opened only by a bizarre double key that looked something like the collapsed halves of a telescope, one notched cylinder protruding from within another.

  As five tho
usand cheering gentlemen and ladies, the young Kornblum among them, looked on, the Mysteriarch, in black cutaway and waistcoat, was fitted with the awful cuffs. Then, with a single, blank-faced, wordless nod to his wife, he retreated to his small cabinet to begin his impossible work. The orchestra struck up “Annie Laurie.” Twenty minutes later, wild cheering broke out as the magician’s head and shoulders emerged from the cabinet; but it turned out that Houdini wanted only to get a look at the cuffs, which still held him fast, in better light. He ducked back inside. The orchestra played the Overture to Tales of Hoffmann. Fifteen minutes later, the music died amid cheers as Houdini stepped from the cabinet. Kornblum hoped against hope that the master had succeeded, though he knew perfectly well that when the first, single-barreled Bramah was, after sixty years, finally picked, it had taken the successful lock-pick, an American master by the name of Hobbs, two full days of continuous effort. And now it turned out that Houdini, sweating, a queasy smile on his face, his collar snapped and dangling free at one end, had merely—oddly—come out to announce that, though his knees hurt from crouching in the cabinet, he was not yet ready to throw in the towel. The newspaper’s representative, in the interests of good sportsmanship, allowed a cushion to be brought, and Houdini retreated to his cabinet once more.

  When Houdini had been in the box for nearly an hour, Kornblum began to sense the approach of defeat. An audience, even one so firmly on the side of its hero, would wait only so long while the orchestra cycled, with an air of increasing desperation, through the standards and popular tunes of the day. Inside his cabinet, the veteran of five hundred houses and ten thousand turns could doubtless sense it, too, as the tide of hope and goodwill flowing from the galleries onto the stage began to ebb. In a daring display of showmanship, he emerged once again, this time to ask if the newspaper’s man would consent to remove the cuffs long enough for the magician to take off his coat. Perhaps Houdini was hoping to learn something from watching as the cuffs were opened and then closed again; perhaps he had calculated that his request, after due consideration, would be refused. When the gentleman from the newspaper regretfully declined, to loud hisses and catcalls from the audience, Houdini pulled off a minor feat that was, in its way, among the finest bits of showmanship of his career. Wriggling and contorting himself, he managed to pluck from the pocket of his waistcoat a tiny penknife, then painstakingly transfer it to, and open it with, his teeth. He shrugged and twisted until he had worked his cutaway coat up over to the front of his head, where the knife, still clenched between his teeth, could slice it, in three great sawing rasps, in two. A confederate tore the sundered halves away. After viewing this display of pluck and panache, the audience was bound to him as if with bands of steel. And, Kornblum said, in the uproar, no one noticed the look that passed between the magician and his wife, that tiny, quiet woman who had stood to one side of the stage as the minutes passed, and the band played, and the audience watched the faint rippling of the cabinet’s curtain.