Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

He made another circuit through the long chrome expanse of the observation-deck restaurant, which initially had been built as the baggage and ticket counter for a planned worldwide dirigible service that had never materialized, and had then spent the last two years of Prohibition as a tearoom. The passage through the bar was the only real perturbation Sammy had ever experienced in his career as a plane spotter, for the temptation of the gleaming spigots, coffee urns, and orderly rows of glasses and cups had to be counterbalanced against the eventual subsequent need, should he indulge his thirst, to urinate. Sammy was certain that if a fatal black line of Junkers was ever to appear in the skies over Brooklyn, it would unquestionably be while he was in the bathroom taking a leak. He was just on the point of helping himself to a few inches of seltzer from the elaborate chrome tap under the still-illuminated neon Ruppert's sign when he heard a dark rumble. For a moment he thought it must have been the approaching thunder, but then, in his memory, he heard again the mechanical hiss that had underlaid it. He put down his glass and ran to the bank of windows on the other side of the room. The darkness of a Manhattan night, even at this late hour, was far from absolute, and the radiant carpet of streets reaching as far as Westchester, Long Island, and the wilds of New Jersey cast an upward illumination so bright that the stealthiest intruder flying without landing lights would have had a difficult time concealing itself from Sammy's gaze, even without binoculars. There was nothing in the sky, however, but the great cloud of light.

The rumble grew louder and somehow smoother; the hiss modulated to a soft hum; from the center of the building, there was a faint clacking of gears and cams: the elevators. It was not a sound he was accustomed to hearing at this hour, in this place. The fellow who generally relieved him at six, an American Legionnaire and retired oysterman named Bill McWilliams, always took the stairs up from the quarters on eighty-one. Sammy walked toward the elevator bank, wondering if he ought to pick up the telephone that connected him to the office of the Army Interceptor Command in the telephone-company building down on Cortlandt Street. In the pages of Radio Comics, the groundwork for an invasion of New York City could be laid in just a few panels, one of which would unquestionably depict the braining with a blackjack of a hapless plane spotter by the gloved fist of an Axis saboteur. Sammy could see the jagged star of impact, the sprung letters spelling out KR-RACK!, the word balloon in which the poor fool was shown saying, "Say, you can't come in- ohhh!"

It was one of the express elevators from the lobby. Sammy checked his clipboard again. If anyone was expected-his supervisor, some other military type, some colonel of the Interceptor Command making an inspection-surely his night's orders would have noted it. But there was only, as he had known there would be, the same list of seven planes and flight plans, and a terse notation about the bad weather expected. Perhaps this was a surprise inspection. As Sammy looked down at his stocking feet, wiggling his nonregulation toes, his thoughts took another turn: maybe this visit was unannounced because something unforeseen had occurred. Perhaps someone was coming to tell Sammy that the country was at war with Germany, or even, somehow, that the war in Europe had ended, and it was time for him to go home.

There was a metallic shiver as the car drew up to the eighty-sixth floor, a rattle of cables. Sammy ran a damp hand through his hair. Locked in a bottom drawer of the guard station, he knew, there was a service.45, but Sammy had lost track of the key, and would not even have known, in any case, how to get the safety off. He raised his clipboard, ready to bring it down on the skull of the spy. The binoculars were heavier. He took them from his neck and prepared to swing them like a mace on their leather strap. The doors slid open.

"Is this Men's Sportswear?" said Tracy Bacon. He wore a tuxedo jacket, a white silk cravat stiff and glossy as meringue, and a mien that was grave but volatile, stretched thin over an underlying smirk, as if some kind of prank were under way. A brown paper shopping bag dangled from each hand. "Have you got anything in a gabardine?"

"Bacon, you can't-"

"I was just passing by," the actor said. "Thought I'd, you know, stop in."

"We're a thousand feet up!"

"Are we?"

"It's one o'clock in the morning."

"Is it?"

"This is a U.S. Army facility," Sammy went on, sounding self-important and knowing it, struggling to ascribe a reason to the giddy flush of guilt, so like exhilaration, that suffused him at the arrival of Tracy Bacon on the eighty-sixth floor. He was perilously happy to see his new friend. "Technically speaking. After hours, nobody's allowed in or out without clearance from Command."

"Yikes," said Bacon. The magnificent Otis machinery that enclosed him gave a sigh, as of impatience. Bacon took a step backward. "Then you absolutely do not want a Nazi spy like me hanging around. What was I thinking?" The elevator doors stuck out their black rubber tongues. Sammy watched the sundered halves of his own reflection reach toward each other in the brushed chrome panels of the doors. "Auf wiedersehen."

Sammy thrust his hand through the doors. "Wait."

Bacon waited, looking at Sammy, one eyebrow raised in the challenging manner of an auctioneer about to bring his gavel down. His jacket was a charcoal silk cutaway, with piped lapels, and his broad chest was plated in the largest and whitest dickie Sammy had ever seen. In his formal attire, he seemed to beam down from a greater height than usual, certain as ever that in the end he would be, even a thousand feet up, at one in the morning, and contrary to military regulations, welcome. Even with the incongruous pair of shopping bags, or perhaps because of them, he looked impossibly comfortable in his monkey suit, shoulders pressed against the back wall of the elevator, legs crooked at the knee, the great right foot in its long black Lagonda of a shoe twisting ever so slightly on its toe tip. The elevator sighed again.

"Well," Sammy said, "seeing as how your father's a general…"

Sammy stepped aside, keeping a hand on the door that was struggling to close. Bacon hesitated a moment longer, as if daring Sammy to change his mind again. Then he pushed himself off the elevator wall and sauntered out. The doors closed. Sammy was in gross violation of the code.

"Only a brigadier," Bacon said. "You all right, Clay?"

"Fine, I'm fine, come in."

"That's the lowest, you know."

"What is?"

"Brigadier. It's the lowest grade of general they make."

"That must chafe."

"Eats him away. Wow." Bacon looked around the cool marble sweep of the observation floor's lobby, kept dim at night to cut down on reflection and permit better viewing through the great dark windows, and he squinted a little as he peered off into the glints and shadows of the bar on one hand and the long bank of windows on the other. "Wow!"

"Yeah, wow," Sammy said, suddenly feeling less exhilarated than awkward, even slightly afraid. What had he done? What was Bacon upto? What was the faintly acrid but not unpleasant smell that seemed to be emanating from the actor's direction? "So, uh. Welcome."

"This is great!" Bacon said. He strode toward the windows that looked out over the Hudson River, toward the black cliffs and neon billboards of New Jersey. There was something faintly lurching, Frankensteinian, in Bacon's gait, and Sammy followed him closely to make sure nothing got broken. Bacon pressed his face to the window, smashing his straight, slightly pointed nose flat against it with a vehemence that made Sammy's heart leap. The windows were made of thick tempered glass, but Tracy Bacon possessed that brand of glamorous stupidity-or so it would come to seem to Sammy-which acts as a charm against such technological safeguards. He would wriggle his way out onto a theater balcony that had been closed because it was on the verge of collapse, enter any stairway marked No Admittance, and, as Sammy would later learn, Bacon especially liked, when there was no one looking, to sneak from subway platforms down onto the tracks, penetrating some ways into the tunnels by the pale glow of his platinum cigarette lighter. It had been a terrible mistake letting him up here tonight. "I must say, I couldn't figure out why anybody in his right mind would want to sign himself up for this kind of work… unpaid… but now… you have all this to yourself, every night?"