Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"It isn't"

"But Anapol isn't a thief. He's an honorable person."

Deasey pressed his lips together tightly and hoisted the corners. It took Joe a moment to realize that he was smiling.

"It's my experience that honorable people live by the contracts they sign," Deasey said at last. "And not a tittle more."

Sammy looked at Joe. "He isn't cheering me up," he said. "Is he cheering you up?"

The question of a radio program, indeed the entire exchange that had taken place with the slim, silver-haired man wearing the eager expression, had largely escaped Joe. He was still far less proficient in English than he pretended to be, particularly when the subject ran to sports, politics, or business. He had no idea how socks or barrels figured into the discussion.

"That man wants to make a show on the radio about the Escapist," Joe said, slowly, feeling slow, thick-witted, and obscurely abused by inscrutable men.

"He seemed at least to be interested in having his flacks explore the possibility," Deasey said.

"And if they do, you are saying that they will not have to pay us for it."

"I'm saying that."

"But of course they must."

"Not a dime."

"I want a look at that contract," Sammy said.

"Look all you want," Deasey said. "Look it up and down. Hire a lawyer and have him nose around in it. All the rights-radio, movies, books, tin whistles, Cracker Jack prizes-they all belong to Anapol and Ashkenazy. One hundred percent."

"I thought you said you wanted to warn us." Sammy looked annoyed. "It seems to me the time for a warning would have been about a year ago, when we put our names to that piece-of-shit-excuse-my-language contract."

Deasey nodded. "Fair enough," he said. He went to a glass-fronted lawyer's bookcase, stocked with a copy of every pulp magazine in which one of his novels had appeared, each bound in fine morocco and stamped soberly in gold characters racy policeman or racy ace, with the issue number and date of publication and, beneath these, the uniform legend complete works of george deasey. [5]He stepped back and studied the books with, it seemed to Joe, a certain air of regret, though for what, exactly, Joe could not have said. "For what it's worth, here's the warning now. Or call it advice, if you like. You boys were powerless when you signed that contract last year. You aren't quite so powerless anymore. You've had a good run. You've come up with some good ideas that have sold well. You've begun to make a name for yourselves. Now, we could debate the merits of making a name for yourselves in a third-rate industry by cranking out nonsense for numbskulls, but what isn't in doubt is that there's money to be found in this game right now, and you two have shown a knack for dowsing it. Anapol knows it. He knows that, if you wanted to, you could probably walk over to Donenfeld or Arnold or Goodman and write yourself a much better deal to dream up nonsense over there. So that's my warning: stop handing this crap over to Anapol as if you owed it to him."

"Make him pay for it from now on. Make him give us a piece," Sammy said.

"You didn't hear it from me."

"But in the meantime-"

"You are screwed, gentlemen." He consulted his pocket watch. "Now get out. I have duds of my own to secrete about the premises before I-" He broke off and looked at Joe, then stared down at his watch as if trying to make up his mind about something. When he looked up again, his face had twisted in a false, almost sickeningly cheery, rictus. "The hell with it," he said. "I need a drink. Mr. Clay-"

"I know," Sammy said. "I have to finish Strange Frigate."

"No, Mr. Clay," Deasey said, awkwardly settling an arm over the shoulders of each of them and dragging them toward the door. "Tonight you are going to sail on it."

when Carl Ebling looked in the News the next morning, he was disappointed to find not the slightest mention of a bomb scare at the Empire State Building, of the Aryan-American League, or of a fiendish (if for the time being sham) bomber who called himself-deriving the moniker from a shrouded villain who made scattered appearances in the pages of Radio Comics throughout the prewar years-the Saboteur. The last would have been pretty unlikely, since Ebling had, in his nervous haste to squirrel the device in the desk of his imagined nemesis Sam Clay, forgotten to leave the note that he had prepared specially and signed with his nom de guerre. When he checked all the other Saturday papers, once again he found not a word to connect him to anything that had gone on in the city the previous day. The whole matter had been hushed up.

The party thrown for Salvador Dali that last Friday of the New York World's Fair got considerably more play. It rated twenty lines in Leonard Lyons's column, a mention in Ed Sullivan's, and an unsigned squib by E. J. Kahn in "Talk of the Town" the following week. It was also described in one of Auden's letters to Isherwood in L.A., and figured in the published memoirs of at least two mainstays of the Greenwich Village art scene.

The guests of honor, the satrap of Surrealism and his Russian wife, Gala, were in New York to close The Dream of Venus, an attraction, conceived and designed by Dali, that had been among the wonders of the Fair's Amusement Area. Their host, a wealthy New Yorker named Longman Harkoo, was the proprietor of Les Organes du Facteur, a Surrealist art gallery and bookshop on Bleecker Street, inspired by the dreaming postman of Hauterives. Harkoo, who had sold more of Dali's work than any other dealer in the world, and who was a sponsor of The Dream of Venus, had met George Deasey in school, at Collegiate, where the future Underminister of Agitprop for the Unconscious was two years ahead of the future Balzac of the Pulps; they had renewed their acquaintance in the late twenties, when Hearst had posted Deasey to Mexico City.

"Those Olmec heads," Deasey said in the cab on the way downtown. He had insisted on their taking a cab. "That was all he wanted to talk about. He tried to buy one. In fact, I once heard that he did buy it, and he's hidden it in the basement of his house."

"You used them in The Pyramid of Skulls," Sammy said. "Those big heads. There was a secret compartment in the left ear."

"It's bad enough you read them," Deasey said. Sammy had prepared for the composition of his first work as Harvey Slayton by immersing himself deeply in Deasey's oeuvre. "I find it incredibly sad, Clay, that you also remember the titles." Actually, he looked, Joe thought, quite flattered. He probably had never expected, at this point in a career that he so publicly accounted a failure, to encounter a genuine admirer of his work. He seemed to have discovered in himself a tenderness- unsuspected by no one more than he-for both of the cousins, but particularly for Sammy, who still viewed, as a springboard to literary renown, work that Deasey had long since concluded was only "a long, spiraling chute, greased with regular paychecks, to the Tartarus of pseudonymous hackdom." He had shown some of his old poems to Sammy, and the yellowed manuscript of a serious novel that he had never completed. Joe suspected that Deasey had intended these revelations to be warnings to Sammy, but his cousin had chosen to interpret them as proof that success in the pulpwoods was not incompatible with talent, and that he ought not to abandon his own novelistic dreams. "Where was I?"

" Mexico City," Joe said. "Heads."

"Thank you." Deasey took a pull from his flask. He drank an extremely cheap brand of rye called Brass Lamp. Sammy claimed that it was not rye at all but actual lamp oil, as Deasey was strongly nearsighted. "Yes, the mysterious Olmecs." Deasey returned the magic lamp to his breast pocket. "And Mr. Longman Harkoo."