Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

He got down from the train at Union Station in Albany and stood on the platform, getting in the way of people who were boarding. A man with round rimless spectacles brushed past, and Joe remembered the man on the Rotterdam 's gangway whom he had mistaken for his father. In retrospect, it seemed like an omen.

The conductor urged Joe to make up his mind; he was holding up the train. Joe wavered. All his doubts were counterbalanced by a powerful urge to kill German soldiers.

Joe let the train go without him, then suffered sharp stabs of regret and self-reproach. He stood outside by the taxi stand. He could get in a cab and order the driver to take him to Troy. If he missed the train at Troy, then he could have the driver take him straight on to Montreal. He had plenty of money in his wallet.

Five hours later, Joe was back in New York City. He had suffered through seven changes of mind on the way down the Hudson. He had spent the entire trip back in the train's club car, and he was much the worse for drink. He stumbled out in the evening. A cold front seemed to have moved in. The air burned his nostrils, and his eyes felt raw. He wandered up Fifth Avenue and then went into a Longchamps and ordered himself whiskey and soda. Then he went once again to the phone.

It took Sammy half an hour to get there; by that time, Joe was drunk enough, if not yet quite filthy stinking. Sammy walked into Long-champs' boisterous bar, pulled Joe off his stool, and caught him in his arms. Joe tried, but this time he could not stop himself. His weeping sounded to his own ears like sad, hoarse laughter. None of the people in the bar knew what to make of him. Sammy guided him to a booth at the back of the barroom and handed Joe his handkerchief. After Joe had swallowed the rest of his sobs, he told Sammy the little he knew.

"Could there be some mistake?" Sammy said.

"Such things are always possible," Joe said bitterly.

"Oh, Jesus," Sammy said. He had ordered two bottles of Ruppert's and was staring down at the neck of his. He was not a drinker and had not taken even a sip. "I hate to tell my mother this."

"Your poor mother," Joe said. "And my poor mother." The thought of his mother a widow started him crying all over again. Sammy came around from the other side of the table and slid into the booth alongside him. Then they just sat there for a while. Joe thought back to that morning, when he had stuck his head out into the day and felt as powerful as the Escapist, surging with the mystic Tibetan energies of his rage.

"Useless," he said.

"What is?"

"I am."

"Joe, don't say that."

"I'm worthless," Joe said. He felt that he must leave the bar. He did not want to sit around drinking and crying anymore. He wanted to do something. He would find something that could be done. He grabbed Sammy by the sleeve and shoulder of his peacoat and gave him a push, nearly knocking him out of the booth.

"Out," he said. "Let's go."

"Where are we going?" Sammy said, rising to his feet.

"I don't know," Joe said. "Work. I'm going to work."

"But you just-all right," Sammy said, looking into Joe's face. "Maybe that isn't a bad idea." They left Longchamps and went down into the cool, foul gloom of the subway.

On the southbound platform, a few feet from the cousins, stood a dark, glowering gentleman-reading the cut of his topcoat, or some indefinable emission radiating from his chin or eyes or haircut, Joe felt certain that he was German. This man was giving them the fish-eye. Even Sammy had to agree afterward that the man had been giving them the fish-eye. He was a German right out of a panel by Joe Kavalier, massive, handsome in a prognathous, lupine way, wearing a beautiful suit. As the wait for the train dragged on, Joe decided that he did not like what he considered to be the superior manner in which the theoretically German man was looking at him. He considered a number of possible styles, in German and in English, of expressing his feelings about the man and his fish-eye. Finally opting for a more universal statement, he spat, as if casually, onto the platform between him and the man. Public spitting was common enough at the time in that city of smokers, and the gesture might have remained safely ambiguous if Joe's missile had not overshot its mark. Spittle frosted the tip of the man's shoe.

Sammy said, "Did you just spit at that man?"

"What?" said Joe. He was a little surprised himself. "Eh, yes."

"He didn't mean it, mister," Sammy told the man. "He's just a little upset right now."

"Then he makes the apology," the man suggested not unreasonably.

His accent was thick and unquestionably German. He waited for his apology with the air of one accustomed to receiving apologies when he asked for them. He took a step closer to Joe. He was younger than Joe had thought at first, and even more imposing. He looked as if he could more than handle himself in a fight.

"Oh, my God," Sammy said in an undertone. "Joe, I think that man is Max Schmeling."

There were other people waiting for the train, and they had taken an interest. They started to argue about whether the man whose shoes Joe had spat on was or was not Schmeling, the Black Bull of the Uhlan, former heavyweight champion of the world.

"I'm sorry," Joe mumbled, sort of meaning it.

"What was that?" said the man, cupping a hand to his ear.

"Go to hell," Joe said, this time with greater sincerity.

"Shit-head," the man said, taking care with his English. With pugilistic quickness, he crowded Joe against an iron pillar, crooked an arm around Joe's neck, and gave him a swift punch in the stomach. Joe's breath deserted his body in a single hard gust and he pitched forward, striking his chin on the concrete platform. His eyeballs seemed to clang in their sockets. He felt as if someone had opened an umbrella inside his rib cage. He waited, flopped on his belly, unblinking as a fish, to see if he would ever again be able to draw a breath. Then he let out a long, low moan, a little at a time, testing the muscles of his diaphragm. "Wow," he said finally. Sammy knelt beside him and helped him to one knee. Joe gulped up big lopsided gouts of air. The German man turned to the other people on the platform, one arm raised in challenge or, perhaps, it seemed to Joe, in appeal. Everyone had seen Joe spit on his shoe, hadn't they? Then the big man turned and stalked off, way down to the far end of the platform. The train came, and the people all got on it, and that was the end of that. When they got back to Palooka Studios, Sammy, at Joe's request, said nothing about Joe's father. But he did tell everyone that Joe had gotten his ass kicked by Max Schmeling. Joe received their ironic congratulations. He was informed that he was lucky Schmeling had pulled his punch.

"Next time I see that guy," Joe said, to his surprise, "I am going to hit him back."

Joe never did encounter Max Schmeling, or his doppelganger, again. In any case, there is good reason to believe that Schmeling was not in New York at all but in Poland, having been drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the front as punishment for his defeat by Joe Louis in 1938.

There could not have been more than a couple of thousand German citizens in New York at that time, but in the following two weeks, wherever Joe went in the city, he managed to run across at least one. He seemed to have acquired, as Sammy remarked, a superpower of his own: he had become a magnet for Germans. He found them in elevators, on buses, in Gimbel's and at Longchamps restaurants. At first he would just watch them, or eavesdrop, sizing them up as good Germans or evil ones with sweeping certainty even if they were just talking about the rain or the taste of their tea, but it wasn't long before he began to approach them and attempt to engage them in conversation that was menacingly bland and suggestive. Often enough, his advances were met with a certain amount of resistance.