Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"I saw him, I tell you."

"Sure you did. Yes, Shabbes dinner. At my mother's. Bad food. House like an oven. You don't want to miss that."

"I have a date with Rosa," Joe said. "I think we're supposed to eat with her father at the house."

"You do that almost every night! Come on, Joe, don't make me go alone. I'll go mad, mad, I tell you."

" Rosa is right," Joe said.

"As usual, but this time about what?"

"You need a girl."

It was cool and dark in the lobby of the RCA Building. The soft knocking of shoe heels on stone floors and the somber, reassuring pomposity of the Sert and Brangwyn murals allowed Sammy to experience what he dimly recognized as tranquility for the first time all day. A chubby young fellow was waiting for them at the guard's desk, nibbling on a manicured finger. He introduced himself as Larry Sneed, assistant to the producer George Chandler, and showed them how to sign in and pin passes to their jackets.

"Mr. Chandler's really glad you could make it over," Sneed said over his shoulder.

"It was nice of him to invite us."

"Well, he's become quite a fan of your work."

"He reads it?"

"Oh, he studies it like the Bible."

They got out of the elevator, went down a stairwell and across a hall into another stairwell, this one gray cinder-block and iron stairs, then into a dingy white corridor, past the closed door of a studio with the on air light illuminated, left, and into another studio. It was cool and smoky and dim. At one end of the big yellow room, three casually dressed groups of actors, holding scripts, were loitering around a trio of microphones. In the middle of the room, two men sat at a small table, listening. Pages of script lay everywhere, scattered on the ground and blown into drifts in the corners. There was a gunshot. Sammy was the only one in the room who jumped. He looked wildly around. Three men stood off to the left in the midst of an assortment of kitchen utensils, lumber, and scrap metal. One of them was holding a gun. They were all sweating profusely in spite of the air-conditioning.

"Ooh, got me!" cried Larry Sneed. He clutched his silk-fronted pot-belly and spun around. "Ha ha ha." He pretended to laugh. The actor who was delivering his line stopped talking, and everyone turned to look. They seemed to welcome the distraction, Sammy thought, except for the director, who scowled. "Hi, folks, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Mr. Chandler, here's a couple of bright young fellows like me who want to meet our marvelous cast. Mr. Sam Clay and Mr. Joe Kavalier."

"Hello, boys," said one of the two men at the center table, rising from his chair. He was about the same age as Sammy's father would have been, but tall and refined, with a trim Vandyke and extra-big black glasses that made him look, Sammy thought, like a man of science. He shook their hands. "This is Mr. Cobb, our director." Cobb nodded. Like Chandler, he was wearing a suit and tie. "And this ragged bunch is our cast. Forgive their appearance, but they've been rehearsing all week." Chandler pointed to the actors around the microphones, anointing each one from a distance with a momentary dab of his finger as he gave the name and role. "That's Miss Verna Kaye, our Plum Blossom; Pat Moran, our Big Al; and Howard Fine as the evil Kommandant X. Over there may I present Miss Helen Portola, our Poison Rose; Ewell Conrad as Omar; Eddie Fontaine as Pedro; and our announcer, Mr. Bill Parris."

"But Poison Rose is dead," said Joe.

"We haven't killed her on the radio yet," said Chandler. "And that big, handsome fellow over there is our Escapist, Mr. Tracy Bacon."

Sammy was too distracted just then to notice Mr. Tracy Bacon.

"Pedro?" he said.

"The old Portuguese stagehand." Chandler nodded. "For comic relief. The sponsor felt we ought to lighten things up a little."

"Nize to mitts your ekwentinz," said Eddie Fontaine, with a tip of his imaginary Portuguese hat.

"And old Max Mayflower?" Sammy wanted to know. "And the man from the League of the Golden Key? You aren't having the League?"

"We tried it with the League, didn't we, Larry?"

"Yes, we did, Mr. Chandler."

"When you're debuting a series, it's better to get right down to business," said Cobb. "Skip the preliminaries."

"We take care of all that with the intro," Chandler explained. "Bill?"

"Armed with superb physical and mental training," Bill Parris began, "a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats-"

The whole cast chimed in for the tag.

"And coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!"

"This-is-the Escapist!"

Everyone laughed, except Joe, who clapped his hands. But for some reason, Sammy was irritated.

"And what about Tom Mayflower?" he persisted. "Who's going to be him?"

A cheerful, scratchy teenage voice rang out from the corner.

"I'm going to be Tom, Mr. Clay! And golly, I'm awful darn excited about it!"

That busted everybody up again. Tracy Bacon was looking right at Sammy, grinning, his cheeks flushed, mostly with pleasure, it seemed, at the astonished look on Sammy's face. Bacon was such a perfect Escapist that one would have thought he had been cast to play the role in a film, not on the air. He was well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a dimple in his chin and glossy blond hair fitted to the top of his head like a polished brass plate. He wore an oxford shirt unbuttoned over a ribbed undershirt, blue jeans, and socks with no shoes. His muscles were not as large, perhaps, as the Escapist's, but they were distinctly visible. Clean-favored, thought Sammy, and imperially slim.

"Please, gentlemen, take a seat," said Chandler. "Larry, find them a place to sit down."

"That guy looks exactly like the Escapist," said Joe. "It gives me the creep."

"I know," said Sammy. "And he sounds just like Tom Mayflower."

They sat in the corner and watched the rehearsal. The script had been adapted-very freely-from Sammy's third Escapist story, which had introduced the character of Miss Plum Blossom's evil sister Poison Rose, a straight steal from Caniff's Dragon Lady whom Sammy, embarrassed by the blatancy of his theft, had killed off in Radio #4. In the Grand Opera House on the Bund in Shangpo, Rose had thrown herself between a bullet meant for Tom Mayflower and the pistol of a Razi agent with whom she had, until that moment, been allied. But the radio boys had revived her, and Sammy had to admit she certainly appeared to be well. Helen Portola was the only cast member not dressed casually, and in her bright green poplin dress she looked cool and refined and appetizing. When she growled her diabolical lines at the Escapist, whom she had rendered powerless with the stolen, legendary Eye of the Moon Opal, she looked at Tracy Bacon with accurate love in her eyes and made it sound like flirtation. Walter Winchell had already linked their names in his column.

On the whole, Sammy found it a depressing couple of hours. It was his first experience, though by no means his last, with having one of his creations appropriated and made to serve the purposes of another writer, and it upset him to such a degree that he was ashamed. It was all pretty much the same stuff-except for Pedro, of course-and yet somehow it was all totally different. It all seemed to have a lighter, more playful tone than in the comic books, no doubt in part because of the audible brilliance of Tracy Bacon's smile. The dialogue sounded a lot like the dialogue on Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. This was logical, but somehow it, too, depressed Sammy. He had written dialogue as bad-although, at Deasey's suggestion, he had been studying the work of snappy dialogue writers like Irwin Shaw and Ben Hecht-but spoken aloud, it sounded worse. All the characters seemed to be slow on the uptake, vaguely retarded. Sammy shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Joe got lost in the proceedings for a while, but then abruptly seemed to snap out of it. He leaned over.