“What about that old partner of his,” Lee said. “I ran into him here a couple of days ago. He looked pretty down in the mouth.”
“Sammy Clay?”
“I don’t know him very well. We’ve always been friendly. He never worked for us, but—”
“He’s worked just about every place else.”
“Anyway, the guy did not look good. And he barely gave me the time of day.”
“He is not a happy man,” Glovsky said. “Is old Sam. He is just not very happy over there at Pharaoh.” Glovsky drew the violent Mack Granite feature for Pharaoh’s Brass Knuckle.
“Frankly, he’s never happy anywhere,” Pantaleone said, and everyone agreed. They all knew Sammy’s story, more or less. He had returned to the comic book business in 1947, covered in failure at everything else he had tried. His first defeat had been in the advertising game, at Burns, Baggot & DeWinter. He had managed to quit just before he was going to be asked to turn in his resignation. After that, he had tried going out on his own. When his advertising shop duly died a quiet and unremarked death, Sammy had found work in the magazine business, selling well-researched lies to True and Yankee and one miraculous short story to Collier’s—it was about a crippled young boy’s visit to a Coney Island steambath with his strong-man father, before the war—before settling into a deep and narrow groove at the third-tier magazine houses and what was left of the once-mighty pulps.
All along, there were regular offers from old funny-book friends, some of them seated around this table at the back of the Excelsior, which Sammy always refused. He was an epic novelist—that was a great thing to be, after the war—and though his literary career was not advancing as quickly as he would have liked, at least he could ensure that he was not moving backward. He swore, to anyone who would listen, and even on his mother’s then-fresh grave, that he was never going back to comic books. Everybody who visited the Clays was taken to see some draft or other of his amorphous and wandering book. By day, he wrote articles on psittacosis and proustite for Bird Lover and Gem and Tumbler. He tried his hand at industrial writing, and had even written catalog copy for a seed company. The pay was mostly abysmal, the hours long, and Sammy was at the mercy of editors whose bitterness, as Sammy said, made George Deasey look like Deanna Durbin. Then, one day, he heard of an editor’s job opening up at Gold Star, a now-forgotten publisher of comic books on Lafayette Street. The line was tattered and derivative, the circulation low, and the pay far from wonderful, but the position, if he took it, would at least give him authority and room to maneuver. Sammy’s correspondence school for writers had enrolled only three pupils, one of whom lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, and spoke almost no English. Sammy had bills and debts and a family. When the Gold Star job came along, he had at last thrown in the towel on his old caterpillar dreams.
“No, you’re right,” Kane said. “He’s never been happy anywhere.”
Bob Powell leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I always thought he seemed a little bit—you know …”
“I have to agree with that,” said Gold. “He’s got that thing with the sidekicks. It’s like an obsession with him. Have you noticed that? He takes over a character, first thing he does, no matter what, he gives the guy a little pal. After he came back to the business, he was at Gold Star doing the Phantom Stallion. All of a sudden the Stallion’s hanging around with this kid, what was his name? Buck something.”
“Buck Naked.”
“Buckskin. The kid gunslinger. Then he goes to Olympic, and what, now the Lumberjack has Timber Lad. The Rectifier gets Little Mack the Boy Enforcer.”
“The Rectifier, that already sounds a little bit—”
“Then he comes to Pharaoh, all of a sudden it’s the Argonaut and Jason. The Lone Wolf and Cubby. Christ, he even gave a sidekick to the Lone Wolf!”
“Yeah, but he’s hired every one of you guys at one time or another, hasn’t he?” Lee said. He looked at Marty Gold. “He’s been very loyal to you over the years, Gold, God only knows why.”
“Hey, shut up, already,” said Kane. “That’s him now coming through the door.”
Sam Clay stepped into the moist, steam-table warmth of the Excelsior and was hailed from the table at the back. He nodded and waved, a little uncertainly, as if he didn’t really care to join their party that morning. But after he had purchased his ticket for a cup of coffee and a doughnut he started toward them, head lowered a little in a bulldog way he had.
“Morning, Sam,” Glovsky said.
“I drove in,” he said. He was looking a little dazed. “It took two hours.”
“Seen the Herald?”
Clay shook his head.
“Looks like an old friend of yours is back in town.”
“Yeah? Who would that be?”
“Tom Mayflower,” Kane said, and everybody laughed, and then Kane went on to explain that someone signing himself “The Escapist” had, in this morning’s Herald-Tribune, publicly announced his intention to jump from the Empire State Building at five o’clock that very afternoon.
Pantaleone dug around in the pile of newspaper in the center of the big table and found a Herald-Tribune. “ ‘Numerous grammatical and spelling errors,’ ” he read aloud, skimming quickly through the article, to which were devoted three column inches on page 2. “ ‘Threatened to expose the “unfair robberies and poor mistreatments of his finest artists by Mr. Sheldon Anapol.” ’ Huh. ‘Mr. Anapol when reached refused to speculate publicly on the identity of the author. “It could be anyone,” Mr. Anapol said. “We get a lot of nuts.” ’ Well,” Pantaleone finished, shaking his head, “Joe Kavalier never struck me as any kind of nut. A little eccentric, maybe.”
“Joe,” Clay said wonderingly. “You guys think it’s Joe.”
“Is he in town, Sam? Have you heard from him?”
“I haven’t heard from Joe Kavalier since the war,” Clay said. “It can’t be him.”
“I say it’s a hoax,” Lee said.
“The costume.” Clay had begun to light a cigarette—he still had not sat down—but now he stopped with the flame halfway to the tip. “He’ll want a costume.”
“Who will?”
“The guy. If there really is a guy. He’ll want a costume.”
“He could make one.”
“Yeah,” Clay said. “Excuse me.”
He turned, his cigarette still unlit in his fingers, and walked back toward the glass doors of the Excelsior.
“He just walked out of here with his meal ticket.”
“He looked pretty upset,” Julie Glovsky said. “You guys shouldn’t have been teasing him.”
He was already on his feet. He drained the last inch of coffee from his cup, then started after Sammy.
As fast as Sammy’s pipe-stem legs could carry him, they headed over to the offices of Pharaoh Comics, in a loft on West Broadway, where Sammy was the editor in chief.
“What are you going to do?” Julie asked him. The fog that had lain over the city all morning had not lifted. Their breath issued from their mouths and seemed to be absorbed into the general gray gauziness of the morning.
“What do you mean? What can I do? Some kook wants to pretend he’s the Escapist, he has a right.”
“You don’t think it’s him?”
“Nah.”
They rode up in the grinding iron cage of the elevator. When they walked into the offices, Sammy seemed to survey them with an ill-concealed shudder: the scarred cement floor, the bare white walls, the exposed, grease-blackened girders of the ceiling.
These were not the first headquarters of the company—those had been a suite of seven large rooms in the McGraw-Hill Building, all green lacquer and ivory Bakelite, with everything from the washroom fixtures to the team of buxom receptionists trimmed in chrome, and all of it paid for with the money Jack Ashkenazy had pocketed in 1943 when Sheldon Anapol had bought him out. Ashkenazy had next invested millions in a Canadian real estate venture predicated on his odd belief that, after the war, Ca
nada and the United States would merge into one country. When, to his astonishment, this failed to pan out, he had gone back to the source of all his still-considerable wealth: the costumed hero. He had rented the gleaming offices on West Forty-second, hired away some of Empire’s best writers and artists, and charged them with making a star out of a character of his own creation, the eponymous Pharaoh, a reincarnated Egyptian ruler, naturally, who sported an elaborate Tutankhamen headdress, metal armbands, and a loincloth made apparently of stiff cement, and went around thus, discreetly half-naked, foiling evil with the mystic power of his Scepter of Ra. The writers and artists had come up with a raft of even more unlikely heroes and heroines—Earthman (with his superhuman control over rocks and dirt), the Snowy Owl (with his “supersonic hoot”), and the Rolling Rose (with her shiny red skates)—to fill the pages of Pharaoh Comics’ nine inaugural titles. Unfortunately, Jack Ashkenazy had bet heavily on the costumed superhero just as readers’ interest in that genre was beginning to flag. The defeat of those actual world-devouring supervillains, Hitler and Tojo, along with their minions, had turned out to be as debilitating to the long-underwear hero trade as the war itself had been an abundant source of energy and plots; it proved to be hard for the cashiered captains and supersoldiers, on their return from tying Krupp artillery into half-hitches and swatting Zeros like midges over the Coral Sea, to muster the old pre-1941 fervor for busting up rings of car thieves, rescuing orphans, and exposing crooked fight promoters. At the same time, a new villain, the lawless bastard child of relativity and Satan, had appeared to cast its roiling fiery pall over even the mightiest of heroes, who could no longer be entirely assured that there would always be a world for them to save. The tastes of returning GIs, who had become hooked on the regular shipments of comic books provided them along with candy bars and cigarettes, turned to darker, more “adult-oriented” fare: true-crime comics had their vogue, followed by romances, horror tales, Westerns, science fiction; anything, in short, but masked men. Millions of unsold copies of Pharaoh Comics #1 and its eight companion titles came back from the distributors; after a year, none of the remaining six titles was making a profit. Ashkenazy, sensing catastrophe, had moved downtown, fired the expensive talent, and retrenched, overhauling his line through a program of cost-cutting and slavish imitation, transforming it into a modest success very like Racy Publications, the fourth-rate pulp-magazine house, home of retreads, copycats, and cheap imitations at which he had begun his career as a publisher in the lean Depression years before two foolish young men laid the Escapist in his lap. But his pride had never quite recovered from the blow, and it was generally felt that Pharaoh’s failure, along with the Canadian debacle, had started him down the road to his decline and eventual death two years ago.
Sammy crossed the broad grimy expanse of the workroom to his office. Julie hesitated at the door before following him in. The prohibition against entering Sam Clay’s office, except in the case of family emergency, was absolute and closely observed. He would admit no one if he was working, and he was always working. His bursts of fevered composition, during which he might knock out an entire year’s worth of Brass Knuckle or Weird Date in a single night, were celebrated not only in the Pharaoh offices but throughout the small, collegial world of the New York comic book business. He unplugged his intercom, took the telephone off the hook, sometimes stuffed his ears with cotton, paraffin, gobbets of foam rubber.
He had typed stories for comic books for the past seven years: costumed hero, romance, horror, adventure, true-crime, science fiction and fantasy stories, Westerns, sea yarns, and Bible stories, a couple of issues of Classics Illustrated,* Sax Rohmer imitations, Walter Gibson imitations, H. Rider Haggard imitations, Rex Stout imitations, tales of both world wars, the Civil War, the Peloponnesian War, and the Napoleonic Wars; every genre but funny animals. Sammy drew the line at funny animals. The success in the trade of these dot-eyed, three-fingered imports from the world of animated cartoons, with their sawdusty gags and childish antics, was one of the thousand little things to have broken Sammy Clay’s heart. He was a furious, even romantic, typist, prone to crescendos, diminuendos, dense and barbed arpeggios, capable of ninety words a minute when under deadline or pleased with the direction his story was taking, and over the years his brain had become an instrument so thoroughly tuned to the generation of highly conventional, severely formalistic, eight-to-twelve-page miniature epics that he could, without great effort, write, talk, smoke, listen to a ball game, and keep an eye on the clock all at the same time. He had reduced two typewriters to molten piles of slag iron and springs since his return to comics, and when he went to bed at night his mind remained robotically engaged in its labor while he slept, so that his dreams were often laid out in panels and interrupted by surrealistic advertising, and when he woke up in the morning he would find that he had generated enough material for a full issue of one of his magazines.
Now he moved his latest Remington to one side. Julie Glovsky saw a little brass key lying in the center of a square patch of blotter that was free of ash and dust. Sammy took the key and went to a large wooden cabinet, dragged up from a defunct photographical processing lab on a lower floor of the building.
“You have an Escapist costume?” Julie said.
“Yeah.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“From Tom Mayflower,” Sammy said.
He rummaged around inside the cabinet until he came up with an oblong blue box stamped KING FAT HAND LAUNDRY in crooked black letters. On the side, in grease pencil, someone had, for some reason, written the word BACON. Sammy gave the box a shake, and something rattled dryly within; he looked puzzled. He pulled the box open, and a small yellow card, about the size of a matchbook, fluttered out and corkscrewed to the floor. Sammy stooped over, picked it up, and read the legend printed on its face in brightly colored ink. When he looked up, his face was pinched, his jaw set, but Julie caught an unmistakable glint of amusement in his eyes. Sammy handed Julie the card. It featured a drawing of two ornate, old-fashioned skeleton keys, one on either side of the following brief text:
Welcome, faithful Foe of Tyranny, to the
LEAGUE OF THE GOLDEN KEY!!!
This card bestows on
__________________________________________________________
(print name above)
all the rights and duties
of a true-blue friend of Liberty and Humanity!
“It’s him,” Julie said. “Isn’t it? He was here. He took it.”
“How do you like that,” said Sammy. “I haven’t seen one of those in years.”
* Gargantua and Pantagruel, and possibly Vathek.
AT LUNCHTIME, the police showed up. They were taking the letter to the Herald seriously, and the detective in charge had a few questions for Sammy about Joe.
Sammy told the detective, a man named Lieber, that he had not seen Joe Kavalier since the evening of December 14, 1941, at Pier 11, when Joe sailed for basic training in Newport, Rhode Island, aboard a Providence-bound packet boat called the Comet. Joe had never answered any of their letters. Then, toward the end of the war, Sammy’s mother, as next of kin, had received a letter from the office of James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy. It said that Joe had been wounded or taken ill in the line of duty; the letter was vague about the nature of the injury and the theater of war. It said also that he had, for some time, been recuperating at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but that he was now being given a medical discharge and a commendation. In two days, he would be arriving at Newport News aboard the Miskatonic. Sammy had gone down to Virginia on a Greyhound bus to meet him and bring him home. But somehow or other, Joe had managed to escape.
“Escape?” Detective Lieber said. He was a young man, surprisingly young, a fair-haired Jew with pudgy hands, wearing a gray suit that looked expensive but not at all flashy.
“It was a talent he had,” Sammy said.
At the time, Joe’s vanishing had been a loss in some ways more genuine t
han that which death represents. He was not merely dead—and thus, in a sense, always locatable. No, they really had managed to lose him. He had gotten on the boat in Cuba; of this fact there was documentary evidence in the form of signatures and serial numbers on a medical transport record. But when the Miskatonic docked in Newport News, Joe was no longer aboard. He had left a brief letter; though its contents were classified, one of the navy investigators had assured Sammy that it was not a suicide note. When Sammy returned from Virginia, after an interminable gray trip back up U.S. 1, he found their house in Midwood aflutter with bunting. Rosa had prepared a cake and a banner that welcomed Joe home. Ethel had bought a new dress and had her hair done, allowing the hairdresser to rinse out the gray. The three of them—Rosa, Ethel, and Tommy—were sitting in the living room, under the crepe-paper swags, crying. In the months that followed, they had generated all manner of wild and violent theories to explain what had happened to Joe, and pursued every lead and rumor. Because he had not been taken from them, they could not seem to let him go. Over the years, however, the intensity of Sammy’s anger and of his shock over Joe’s behavior had, inevitably, dwindled. The thought of his lost cousin was a sore one still; but it had, after all, been nearly nine years. “He was trained in Europe as an escape artist,” he told Detective Lieber. “That’s where we got the whole idea for the Escapist.”