Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"So, when are you two leaving?"

"Tomorrow," Bacon said. "Arriving Wednesday. I have an appearance. Someone from Republic is supposed to be coming on the train at Salt Lake City with my costume so it can be the Escapist who gets off in L.A."

There followed some prolonged teasing of Tracy Bacon on the subject of tight pants, veering amid general amusement into the question of codpieces. Love expressed his satisfaction that Bacon would be able to keep doing the Escapist on the radio, with the broadcast originating in Los Angeles. Sammy sank deeper into his Burgundy-fueled reverie. There was a faint disturbance in the air to his back, a murmur, a muffled cry.

"But won't they miss you at your cartoon factory?"

"What's that?" Sammy sat up straight in his chair. "I think someone's calling you, Mr. Love. I hear someone saying your-"

"I'm truly sorry to do this, Mr. Love," said a clear flat voice behind Sammy. "But I'm afraid you and your ladyfriends are under arrest."

A brief rout followed this announcement. The room filled with a bewildering variety of sheriff's deputies, policemen from Asbury Park, state highway patrolmen, newspaper reporters, and a couple of vacationing G-men from Philly who had been drinking in the Fly Trap, a roadhouse in Sea Bright favored by representatives of coastal New Jersey law enforcement, when the word went around that they were going to flush a fairy nest out at the beach house of one of the richest men in America. When they saw how large and powerfully built many of the fairies appeared to be, not to mention how surprisingly ordinary-looking, they suffered a moment of hesitation during which Quentin Towle managed to slip out. He was later caught on the county road. Only the two big men put up any resistance at all. John Pye had been raided before, twice, and he was tired of it. He knew that in the end it would cost him, but before he could be subdued, he managed to bloody the nose of one sheriff and break a bottle of Montrachet over the head of a second. He also smashed the camera of a photographer who sold to the Hearst papers, an act for which all of his friends were later grateful. Love, in particular, never forgot this service, and after Pye was killed in North Africa, where he had gone to drive an ambulance because the army would not take homosexuals, saw to it that Pye's mother and sisters were provided for. As for Tracy Bacon, he did not give the question of fighting or not fighting the police a moment's thought. Without revealing too much of the true history that he had so assiduously labored to erase and reconstitute, it can be said that Bacon had been falling afoul of the police since the age of nine, and defending himself with his fists since well before that. He waded into the writhing knot of nightsticks and broad-brimmed hats and cowering men, and began swinging. It took four men to subdue him, which they did with considerable brutality.

While Sammy, too drunk and confused to move, watched his lover and John Pye go down in a sea of tan shirts, he was engaged in a fierce struggle of his own. Someone had gotten hold of his legs and would not let go, no matter how hard Sammy kicked and flailed away at whoever it was. In the end, however, his attacker got the best of him, and Sammy found himself dragged down under the table.

"Idiot!" said Dave Fellowes, his eye closed and his nose bleeding from where Sammy had kicked him. "Get down."

He forced Sammy to crouch beside him under the table, and together they watched the boots and bodies thudding against the carpet from beneath the lacy hem of the tablecloth. It was in this ignoble position that they were found, five minutes later, when the two vacationing FBI agents, schooled in thoroughness, made a last sweep through the house.

"Your friends are all waiting for you," said one of them. He smiled at the other, who took hold of the collar of Fellowes's shirt and dragged him out from under the table.

"Be right there," said the other agent.

"I know you will," said the one who was taking Dave Fellowes away, with a harsh laugh.

The G-man, down on one knee, gazed in at Sammy with mock tenderness, as if trying to lure a recalcitrant child out of hiding.

"Come on, sweetheart," he said. "I won't hurt you."

The reality of the situation had begun to penetrate the fog of Sammy's drunkenness. What had he done? How could he possibly tell his mother that he had been arrested, and why? He closed his eyes, but when he did, he was tormented by a vision of Bacon going down under a tide of fists and boot heels.

"Where's Bacon?" he said. "What did you do to him?"

"The big fella? He'll be all right. More of a man than the rest of you. You his girlfriend?"

Sammy blushed.

"You're a lucky girl. He's a good-looking piece of beef."

Sammy felt a strange ripple in the air between him and the policeman. The room, the entire house, seemed to have gotten very quiet. If the cop was planning to arrest him, it seemed to Sammy as if he ought to have done it by now.

"Myself, I'm partial to darker types. Little guys."

"What?"

"I'm a federal agent, did you know that?"

Sammy shook his head.

"That's right. If I mention to those eager pie-hats out there that they ought to let you go, they will."

"Why would you do that?"

The G-man glanced over his shoulder slowly, almost in a parody of a man checking to see if the coast were clear, then scrambled in under the table with Sammy. He put Sammy's hand on the fly of his suit pants.

"Why indeed," said the G-man.

Ten minutes later, the pair of vacationing federal agents were reunited in the foyer of the house. Dave Fellowes and Sammy, pushed along in front of their respective champions, could hardly look at each other, let alone at Ruth Ebling, who was supervising the cleanup efforts of her staff. The bitter taste of Agent Wyche's semen was in Sammy's mouth, along with the putrid sweet flavor of his own rectum, and he would always remember the feeling of doom in his heart, a sense that he had turned some irrevocable corner and would shortly come face-to-face with a dark and certain fate.

"They've all gone," Ruth said, sounding surprised to see them. "You missed them."

"These two men are not suspects," Fellowes's agent said. "They're merely witnesses."

"We need to interrogate them further," said Agent Wyche, not bothering to disguise his amusement at his own implicit meaning. "Thank you, ma'am. We have our own vehicle."

Sammy managed to raise his head and saw that Ruth was looking at him curiously, with the same faint air of pity he thought he had spotted there earlier that afternoon.

"I just want to know this," she said. "How does it feel, Mr. Clay, to make your living preying off the weak-minded? That's the only thing I want to know."

Sammy sensed that he ought to know what she was talking about, and he was sure that under ordinary circumstances he would have. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I have no idea what-"

"A boy jumped off a building, I heard," she said. "Tied a tablecloth around his neck and-"

A telephone rang in a nearby room, and she stopped. She turned and went to answer it. Agent Wyche yanked Sammy's collar and dragged him to the door, and they went out into the burning cold night.

"Just a minute," came the housekeeper's voice from within. "There's a call for a Mr. Klayman. That him?"

Afterward, Sammy would often wonder what might have become of him, what alley or ditch his broken and violated body might have ended up in, if his mother had not telephoned the house at Pawtaw with the news that Thomas Kavalier had died. Agent Wyche and his colleague looked at each other, their expressions no longer quite professionally blank.

"Aw, shoot, Frank," said Fellowes's agent. "How 'bout that. It's his mom."

When Sammy came out of the kitchen, Dave Fellowes stood slumped against the doorway, an arm over his red, damp face. The two G-men were gone; they had mothers of their own.