Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"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?"

"Well, 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 applique, 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.