Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"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, Canada 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 [12]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.