Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Back in the workroom-once again alive with chitchat and gum-snap and some shivery Hampton on the radio-George Deasey stood in the doorway to his office. He knit his ginger eyebrows and pursed his lips, looking uncharacteristically moved.

"Gentlemen," he said to Joe and Sammy. "A word."

He went into his office and, as was his wont, lay down in the middle of the floor and began to pick his teeth. He had been trampled by a fly-maddened cavalry horse while covering one of the U.S. Marine Corps' numerous attempts to capture A. C. Sandino, and on chill afternoons like this one, his back tended to stiffen up on him. His toothpick was solid gold, a legacy from his father, a former associate justice of the New York State Court of Appeals. "Close the door," he told Sam Clay after the boys came in. "I don't want anyone to hear what I'm going to say."

"Why not?" Sammy said, obediently shutting the door as he followed Joe in.

"Because it would cause me considerable pain if anyone should form the mistaken impression that I actually give a tinker's damn about you, Mr. Clay."

"Fat chance of that," said Sammy. He flopped into one of the two straight-backed chairs that flanked Deasey's enormous desk. If he was stung by the insult, he gave no sign of it. He had toughened under the constant administration of tiny mallet blows from Deasey. During their first months working for him, on days when Deasey had ridden Sammy particularly hard, Joe had often listened in the dark, pretending to be asleep, as Sammy lay clenched tight in the bed beside him, barking into his pillow. Deasey mocked his grammar. In restaurants, he made fun of Sammy's poor table manners, unsophisticated palate, and amazement with such simple things as sculpted butter pats and cold potato soup. He offered Sammy a chance to write a Gray Goblin novel for Racy Police Stories, sixty thousand words at half a cent a word; Sammy, sleeping two hours a night for a month, wrote three books, which Joe had read and enjoyed, only to have Deasey dissect one after another, each time with terse, bitter criticism that was infallibly accurate. In the end, however, he had bought all three.

"First of all," Deasey said, "Mr. Clay, where is Strange Frigate?"

"Halfway done," Sammy said. This was a fourth Goblin novel that Racy Publications, now operating very much in the shadow of its younger sibling but still turning a profit for Jack Ashkenazy, had commissioned from Sam Clay. Like all seventy-two of its predecessors in the series, it would be published, of course, under the house name of Harvey Slayton. Actually, as far as Joe knew, Sammy had not even started it yet. The title was one of two hundred and forty-five that George Deasey had dreamed up during a two-day bender in Key West in 1936 and had been working his way through ever since. Strange Frigate was number seventy-three on the list. "I'll have it for you by Monday."

"You must."

"I shall."

"Mr. Kavalier." Deasey had a sneaky way of lolling his head around toward you, one hand half-covering his face as if he were about to drop off for a catnap-an impression made all the stronger if he was, as now, stretched out on the floor. Then, suddenly, his drooping eyelids would snap open, and you would find yourself on the point of a sharp inquisitorial gaze. "Please reassure me that my suspicions of your involvement in this afternoon's charade are unfounded."

Joe struggled to meet Deasey's sleepy Torquemada stare. Of course he knew that the bomb threat had been made by Carl Ebling, in direct retaliation for his attack on the headquarters of the AAL two weeks before. Clearly, Ebling had been casing the Empire offices, tracking the move from the Kramler Building, observing the comings and goings of the employees, preparing his big red comic book bomb. Such fixity of purpose ought to have been, in spite of the harmlessness of today's reprisal, cause for alarm. Joe really ought to have told the police about Carl Ebling right away, and had the man arrested and jailed. And the prospect of the man's imprisonment, by rights, ought to have given him satisfaction. But why, instead, did it feel like surrender? It seemed to Joe that Ebling could have just as easily reported him, for breaking and entering, destruction of property, even assault, but instead had pursued his solitary and furtive course, engaging Joe-all right, the man was under the false impression that his antagonist was Sam Clay, Joe was somehow going to have to set him straight about that-in a private battle, a concours a deux. And Joe had known, somehow, from the moment Anapol's secretary took the call, with an illusionist's instinct for hooey, that the threat was a sham, the bomb a fiction. Ebling wanted to frighten Joe, to threaten him into calling off the comic book war that he found so offensive to the dignity of the Third Reich and the person of Adolf Hitler, and yet, at the same time, he was unwilling actually to annihilate the source of a pleasure that in his lonely verbitterte life must be all too rare. If the bomb had been real, Joe thought, I would naturally turn him in. It did not occur to him that if the bomb had been real he would now, quite possibly, be dead; that the next blow in their battle, if it were struck not by the impersonal force of the law but by Joe himself, might well reify the conflict in Ebling's unbalanced mind; and least of all, that he had begun to lose himself in a labyrinth of fantastical revenge whose bone-littered center lay ten thousand miles and three years away.

"Completely," Joe said. "I don't even know the guy."

"What guy is that?"

"What I said. I don't know him."

"I can smell it," Deasey said dubiously. "But I just can't figure it out."

"Mr. Deasey," Sammy said. "What did you want us for?"

"Yes. I wanted- God help me, I wanted to warn you."

Like a wreck being winched from the sea bottom, Deasey lumbered to his feet. He had been drinking since before lunch and, as he got himself upright, nearly fell over again. He went over to the window. The desk, a scarred, tiger-oak behemoth with fifty-two pigeonholes and twenty-four drawers, had followed him from his old office in the Kramler, its drawers stocked with fresh ribbons, blue pencils, pints of rye, black twists of Virginia shag, clean sheets of foolscap, aspirin, Sen-Sen, and sal hepatica. Deasey kept both it and his office spotless, uncluttered, and free of dust. This was the first time in his entire career that he had ever had an office all to himself. This-these fifty square feet of new carpet, blank paper, and inky black ribbons-was the mark and clear summation of what he had attained. He sighed. He slipped two fingers between the slats of the Venetian blinds and let a wan slice of autumn light into the room.

"When they did the Gray Goblin on the DuMont network," he said. "You remember that, Mr. Clay?"

"Sure," Sammy said. "I used to listen sometimes."

"What about Crack Carter! Remember that one?"

"With the bullwhip?"

"Fighting evil amid the tumbleweeds. Sharpe of the Mounties?"

"Sure, absolutely. They all started in the pulps, is that it?"

"They have their common origin in a far more exclusive and decrepit locale than that," Deasey said.

Sammy and Joe looked at each other uncertainly. Deasey tapped his forehead with the tip of the toothpick.

"You were Sharpe of the Mounties?" Sammy asked.

Deasey nodded. "He started out in Racy Adventure."

"And Whiskey, the husky dog with whom he shares an almost uncanny bond?"

"That one ran for five years on NBC Blue," Deasey said. "I never made a dime." He turned from the window. "Now, boys, it's your turn in the barrel."

"They have to pay us something," Sammy said. "After all. I mean, it may not be in the contract-"