Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"He's afraid you'll be angry with him," Saks said. "We told him you wouldn't be."

"You've seen him?"

"Oh, much more than see him." He smirked. "He's-"

"You've seen Joe, and you never said anything to me or Rosa?"

"Joe? You mean Joe Kavalier?" Saks looked dumbfounded. He opened his mouth and then closed it again. "Hmm," he said. Something seemed to be not quite adding up in his mind.

"This is my father-in-law, Mr. Harkoo," Sammy told Lieber. "Mr. Harkoo, this is Detective Lieber. I don't know if you've seen the Herald today, but there's-"

"Who's that behind you?" Lieber said, peering into the elevator, around the great dun bulk of Siggy Saks. The big man stepped deftly, and not without an air of happy anticipation, to one side, as though raising the curtain on a completed illusion. The bit of hocus-pocus produced an eleven-year-old boy named Thomas Edison Clay.

"I found him on the doorstep. Quite literally."

God damn it, Tommy," Sammy said. "I walked you into the building. I saw you go into your homeroom. How did you get out?"

Tommy didn't say anything. He just stood looking down at the eye Patch in his hands.

Another escape artist," Detective Lieber said. "It must run in the family."

A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction. Since its completion, the Empire State Building, a gigantic shard of the Hoosier State torn from the mild limestone bosom of the Midwest and upended, on the site of the old Waldorf-Astoria, in the midst of the heaviest traffic in the world, had been a magnet for dislocated souls hoping to ensure the finality of their impact, or to mock the bold productions of human vanity. Since its opening almost twenty-three years earlier, a dozen people had attempted to leap from its ledges or its pinnacle to the street below; about half had managed the trick. None, however, had ever before given such clear and considerate warning of his intentions. For the building's private police and firefighting squadrons, working in concert with their municipal brethren, there had been ample time to post officers at all the street entrances and points of ingress, at the stairwell doors and elevator banks. The twenty-fifth floor, where the offices of Empire Comics were still to be found, swarmed with building cops in their big-shouldered brass and wool uniforms, with those old-fashioned peaked caps designed, legend had it, by the late Al Smith himself. Alerts had been issued to the building's fifteen thousand tenants, warning them to be on the lookout for a lean, hawk-faced madman, perhaps dressed in a dark blue union suit, or perhaps in a moth-eaten blue tuxedo with extravagant tails. Firefighters in canvas coveralls ringed the building on three sides, from Thirty-third Street, around Fifth Avenue, to Thirty-fourth. They peered up through fine German binoculars, scanning the infinite planes of Indiana rock for any emerging hand or foot. They were ready, insofar as readiness was possible. Should the madman actually make it through a window and out into the darkening stuff of the evening, their course of action was less clear. But they were hopeful.

"We'll get him before he goes," predicted Captain Harley, still in command of the building's police force after all these years, his blighted eye glittering brighter and more irascible than ever. "We'll get the poor dumb mud-turk."

The daily circulation of the New York Herald-Tribune in 1954 was four hundred and fifty thousand. Of these readers, some two hundred had been drawn, by the letter printed in their newspaper that morning, to stand in wondering clumps behind police lines, gazing up. They were mostly men in their twenties and thirties, in jackets and ties, shipping clerks, commercial draftsmen, clothing and textile wholesalers working their way up in their fathers' businesses. Many of them were employed in the neighborhood. They checked their watches and made the hard-bitten remarks of New Yorkers at the prospect of a suicide-"I wish he'd do it already, I got a date"-but they did not take their eyes from the sides of the building. They had grown up on the Escapist, or had discovered him and his adventures in a foxhole in Belgium or in a transport off Bougainville. In some of these men, the name Joe Kavalier stirred long-dormant memories of reckless, violent, beautiful release.

Then there were the passersby, the shoppers and office workers headed for home, drawn by the flashing lights and uniforms. Word of the promised entertainment had spread quickly among them. Where the flow of information flagged or was retarded by tight-lipped policemen, the small but voluble contingent of comic book men was on hand to fill in and embellish the details of Joe Kavalier's misfortunate career.

"I hear it's all a hoax," said Joe Simon, who, with his own partner, Jack Kirby, had created Captain America. The rights to Captain America had earned, and in the future would continue to earn, great sums for their owner, Timely Publications, one day to be better known as Marvel Comics. "I heard that from Stan."

By five-thirty, when no one had been found skulking in the building or had inched himself out onto a windblown sill, Captain Harley began to come to the same conclusion. He was standing with some of his men just in front of the Thirty-third Street entrance, chewing on the end of a briar pipe. For the eighth time, he took out a gold pocket watch and consulted its face. He snapped it shut and chuckled.

"It's a hoax," he said. "I knew it all along."

"More and more I'm inclined to agree," said Detective Lieber.

"Maybe his watch stopped," Sammy Clay said almost hopefully. Lieber got the feeling that if the threat did turn out to be a hoax, Clay was going to be disappointed.

"Tell me this," Lieber said to Clay. As a family member, the little writer-that was how Lieber thought of him-had been permitted within the police cordon. In the event that Joe Kavalier appeared, his cousin would be on hand for last-minute pleas and counsel. There was also the boy. Ordinary procedure would have barred children from such an event, but experience had taught Lieber, who had spent nine years as a patrolman in Brownsville, that every so often the face of a child, or even its voice over a telephone, could draw a person in from the ledge. "Before today, how many people knew this whole story about how you and your cousin were robbed and cheated and taken advantage of?"

"I resent that, Detective," said Sheldon Anapol. The big man had come down from the Empire offices at five o'clock precisely. He was wrapped in a long black overcoat, a tiny gray tyrolean cap roosting on his head like a pigeon, its feather troubled by the breeze. The day was turning cold and bitter now. The light was failing. "You don't know enough about this matter to pass judgment like that. There were contracts involved, copyrights. Not to mention the fact that, while they were working for us, both Mr. Kavalier and Mr. Clay made more money than almost anyone in the business."

"I'm sorry," Lieber said, unapologetically. He turned back to Sammy. "But you see my point."

Sammy shrugged, nodding, mouth pursed. He saw the detective's point.

"Not a hell of a lot before today. A few dozen guys in the business. A lot of them jokers, I have to admit. Some lawyers, probably. My wife."

"Well, now, look at this."

Lieber gestured toward the swelling crowd, pushed back to the opposite sidewalk, the streets blocked off and filled with honking cabs, the reporters and photographers, everyone looking up at the building around which the untold Escapist millions had coalesced for so many years. They had been told the names of the principal players, Sam Clay, Sheldon Anapol; they gestured and murmured and scowled at the publisher in his funereal coat. The sum of money out of which the team of Kavalier & Clay had been cheated by Empire Comics, though no one had ever actually sat down and calculated it, was widely current in the crowd, and growing by the moment.