The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Part 26

"You also look very handsome."

"Thank you."

"So are we going to have one of these things one day?"

"We are too old," he said, not quite paying attention. Then he caught on. "Oh," he said. "Well."

"I suppose we might have girls."

"A girl can have them, too, now. Somebody told me this. Then it's called a boss mitzvah."

"Which do you prefer?"

"Bas mitzvah. Bas or boss, I'm not really sure."

"Joe?"

"I don't know, Rosa," he said. He sensed that he should stop what he was doing and go over to her, but something about the topic irritated him and he felt himself closing up inside. "I can't be sure I want to have children at all."

The playfulness had left her manner. "That's okay, Joe," she said. "I'm not sure I do either."

"I mean, is this really the time or the kind of world that we want a child to be born, is all the thing."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said. "Forget it." She blushed and smoothed out her skirt. "Those purple rocks look so so familiar." familiar."

"I think so, too."

"I can't believe this room," she said. "I've never really, you know, dipped into the Talmud or anything like that, but it's hard to imagine that they were leaping out of giant clamsh.e.l.ls back in Tars.h.i.+sh or wherever."

"So long as they did not eat eat the clams," Joe said. the clams," Joe said.

"Did you have one of these?"

"No, I did not. I considered it. But no. We were not religious."

"Uh-huh."

"Are," he said. "Are not." He looked stricken. He stood up straight and flexed his fingers a few times. "We are are not religious." not religious."

"No, we aren't either."

He walked back over to the chair where he had hung his jacket. He reached into the pocket and took out the letter in its pale-blue envelope and held it, looking at it.

"Why are you carrying that around?" Rosa said. "Did you open it? What does it say?"

There were voices; the ballroom doors burst open and the musicians came in, followed by one of the white-jacketed hotel waiters, pus.h.i.+ng a cart. The musicians climbed up onto the bandstand and began opening their cases. Joe had worked with some of them before, and they nodded to one another, and Joe accepted their whistles and teasing about his new clothes. Joe replaced the envelope, then put his jacket back on. He shot his cuffs, smoothed back his hair, and tied on the silken mask. When the musicians saw that, they burst into applause.

"Well?" he said, turning to Rosa. "What do you think?"

"Very mysterious," Rosa said. "Indeed."

There was a strange, strangled cry by the door, and Joe turned in time to see the white-jacketed waiter dash out of the ballroom.

5

The Steel Gauntlet, Kapitan Evil, the Panzer, Siegfried, Swastika Man, the Four Hors.e.m.e.n, and Wotan the Wicked all confine their nefarious operations, by and large, to the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, but the Saboteur, Ring of Infiltration, Vandal Supreme, lives right in Empire City-in a secret redoubt, disguised as a crumbling tenement, in h.e.l.l's Kitchen. That is what makes him so effective and feared. He is an American citizen, an ordinary man from a farm in small-town America. By day he works as a humble unknown in one of the anonymous trades of the city. By night he creeps forth from his Lair, with his big black bag of dirty tricks, and makes war on the infrastructure of the city and the nation. He is every bit the dark obverse of the Escapist, as skilled at worming his way into something as the Escapist is at fighting his way out. As the Escapist's power has increased, so has the Saboteur's, until the latter can walk through walls, leap thirty feet straight up, and befog men's minds so that he may pa.s.s unseen among them.

On one wall of the command room in his Lair there is a giant electrical map of the United States. On it, military bases are marked with a blue light, munitions plants with a yellow, s.h.i.+pyards with a green. After the Saboteur strikes, the lightbulb for that target, whatever its original hue, turns an evil shade of red. The Saboteur is fond of declaring that he will not rest until the entire nation is alight with blood-red bulbs. On another wall hangs the Videoscope, by means of which the Saboteur keeps in constant contact with his network of agents and operatives throughout the country. There is a laboratory, in which the Saboteur devises sinister new kinds of explosives, and a machine shop in which he crafts the novelty bombs-the Exploding Seagull, the Exploding Derby Hat, the Exploding Pine Tree-for which he is known and reviled. There are also a fully equipped gymnasium, a library filled with all the most advanced texts on science and world domination, and a posh paneled bedroom with a canopy bed that the Saboteur (implicitly) shares with Renata von Voom, the Spy Queen, his girlfriend and a founding member of the United Snakes. It is in the Saboteur's well-appointed Lair that the Snakes hold their regular meetings. Ah, the raucous and jolly gatherings, over rare sweetmeats and good lager, of the United Snakes of America! They sit around the gleaming obsidian table, the Fifth Columnist, Mr. Fear, Benedict Arnold, Junior, the Spy Queen, and he, regaling one another with tales of the havoc, hate, and destruction they have sown over the past week, laughing like the maniacs they are, and plotting out new courses of action for the future. Ah, the terror they will cause! Ah, the subnormals, mixed bloods, and inferior races they will string up by their mongrel necks! Ah, Renata, in her slick black trench coat and gleaming hip boots!

One Sat.u.r.day afternoon, after a particularly boisterous convocation of the Snakes, the Saboteur wakes in his sumptuous chambers and prepares to leave the Lair for the menial job that is a cover for his subversive activities. He peels off his night-black action suit and hangs it from a hook in his armory, alongside its six duplicates. His symbol, a crimson crowbar, is outlined in silver on the chest. Is there a smell of beer and sausages on the shoulder of the costume, and of Mexican cigars? He will have to send it out to be cleaned. The Saboteur is particular about such things; he cannot abide dirt or filth or disorder, unless it be the mess, the splendid entropy of a fire, an explosion, or a train wreck. Having removed his costume, he pulls on a pair of black trousers piped in black. He runs a damp comb through his thinning colorless hair and shaves his babyish pink face. Then he puts on a boiled white s.h.i.+rt, attaches the collar, ties on a black bow tie, and takes down a white dinner jacket. It has just come back from the cleaners and hangs in a crinkly paper bag. He slings it over his shoulder and then exits, not without regret, the clean and cavernous armory. Next he goes into his laboratory and picks up the disa.s.sembled parts of the Exploding Trident, cleverly concealed inside of a pink cake box from a Ninth Avenue bakery. With the box under his arm and the jacket over his shoulder, he turns and waves goodbye to Renata, who lies, gazing lazily at him through half-lowered long-lashed lids, under the portrait of the Fuhrer, in the great oak bed.

"Knock 'em dead, Big Boy," she says in her vermouth voice, as he lets himself out through the Lair's air lock and enters the grit, filth, and foul atmosphere, ripe with the stench of immigrants and Negroes and mongrels, of Empire City. He does not reply to her languid farewell; he is on the job, all business now.

He hops a bus across town to Fifth Avenue, then another to ride the twenty blocks uptown. Ordinarily he dislikes taking the bus, but he is late already, and if you are late, they take it out of your pay. His rent on the Lair is cheap, but his pay is low enough without being docked again for lateness. He knows he can not afford to lose another job; his sister Ruth has already warned him that she will not "prop him up." Absurd that the Saboteur should have to trouble with such mundane concerns, but these are the sacrifices entailed by maintaining a secret ident.i.ty- look at all the headaches and trouble that Lois Lane, for example, makes for Clark Rent.

He arrives ten minutes late-that's fifty cents, five Te Amos, lost- and, when he gets there, finds that they have already begun to set up the ballroom for the affair. The swish decorator is busy bossing around his employees, getting them to hang the fishnets, a.s.semble the cardboard s.h.i.+pwreck, and roll in the big rubber rock formations that were salvaged, so Mr. Dawson, the ballroom manager, has told him, from that Dream of Venus Dream of Venus girlie show on the midway at the World's Fair. The Saboteur is well informed on the particulars of this evening's reception, for it is the one he has chosen to make the scene of his greatest exploit to date. girlie show on the midway at the World's Fair. The Saboteur is well informed on the particulars of this evening's reception, for it is the one he has chosen to make the scene of his greatest exploit to date.

The Pierre is a popular venue for the wedding and bar mitzvah receptions of the rich Jews of the city, as the Saboteur discovered shortly after taking the job. Almost every week, they crowd in like pigs to a trough and throw their money around (they just come right up to the pimply kid-of-the-week, for G.o.d's sake, and stuff packets of cash into his c.u.mmerbund!) and get drunk and dance their tedious dances to the music of their whining violins. While it galls him to have to serve and wait upon such people, the Saboteur has known from the first that this secret ident.i.ty will afford him, in due course, the opportunity to strike a terrible blow. For months he bided his time, improving his skills, under the guidance of a drunken old anarcho-syndicalist named Fiordaliso, as a bomb constructor, reading Feuchtw.a.n.gler and Spengler (and Radio Comics), Radio Comics), watching for his moment. Then, at a bar mitzvah one night last winter, the Amazing Cavalieri appeared on the bill, pa.s.sing cigarettes through handkerchiefs and making flowers bloom in his boutonniere, and turned out to be none other than Joe Kavalier. (The Saboteur had long since rectified his misapprehension that it was the Sam Clay half of the team who had been responsible both for the destruction of the AAL offices and for the autographed sketch of the Escapist, which now hung from a dartboard in the gymnasium at the Lair.) The Saboteur was too astonished to act at the time, but he began to sense then that his moment might soon be at hand. For weeks after that night, he chatted up Mr. Dawson and, through him, monitored the programs for upcoming events, watching the big schedule book for a reappearance of the Amazing Cavalieri. And tonight is the night. When he arrived at work, it was with the intention of showing Joe Kavalier that while Carl Henry Ebling may be a s.h.i.+ftless b.u.mbler and pamphleteer, the Saboteur is not one to be trifled with, and his memory is long. At the same time, he would be removing with masterly precision whatever other mongrels happened to be standing in the young Jew's vicinity. Yes, he would have been contented with just that. How surprising, disturbing, marvelous, strange it is, then, to roll into the Grand Ballroom, pus.h.i.+ng the service cart that conceals the Exploding Trident, and discover that the performing magician hired for the Saks bar mitzvah is not some moonlighting scribbler but the Escapist himself, the Saboteur's dark idol, his opposite number, masked and fully costumed and wearing in his lapel the symbol of his cursed League. watching for his moment. Then, at a bar mitzvah one night last winter, the Amazing Cavalieri appeared on the bill, pa.s.sing cigarettes through handkerchiefs and making flowers bloom in his boutonniere, and turned out to be none other than Joe Kavalier. (The Saboteur had long since rectified his misapprehension that it was the Sam Clay half of the team who had been responsible both for the destruction of the AAL offices and for the autographed sketch of the Escapist, which now hung from a dartboard in the gymnasium at the Lair.) The Saboteur was too astonished to act at the time, but he began to sense then that his moment might soon be at hand. For weeks after that night, he chatted up Mr. Dawson and, through him, monitored the programs for upcoming events, watching the big schedule book for a reappearance of the Amazing Cavalieri. And tonight is the night. When he arrived at work, it was with the intention of showing Joe Kavalier that while Carl Henry Ebling may be a s.h.i.+ftless b.u.mbler and pamphleteer, the Saboteur is not one to be trifled with, and his memory is long. At the same time, he would be removing with masterly precision whatever other mongrels happened to be standing in the young Jew's vicinity. Yes, he would have been contented with just that. How surprising, disturbing, marvelous, strange it is, then, to roll into the Grand Ballroom, pus.h.i.+ng the service cart that conceals the Exploding Trident, and discover that the performing magician hired for the Saks bar mitzvah is not some moonlighting scribbler but the Escapist himself, the Saboteur's dark idol, his opposite number, masked and fully costumed and wearing in his lapel the symbol of his cursed League.

At that moment, the sheet of paper on which the contours of Carl Ebling's mind have been drawn is like a map that has been folded and carelessly refolded too many times. The reverse shows through; the poles meet; at the heart of a ramifying gray grid of city streets lies an expanse of virgin blue sea.

Was there ever a moment when Superman lingered a second too long in his timid Rent aspect and suffered a fatal hesitation? Did the Escapist ever forget to clasp his talisman and stumble on crippled legs into the fray? The Saboteur tries to remain calm, but the stuttering doormat with whom he must share his existence is a bundle of nerves and, like a fool, goes running out of the room.

He stands in the foyer outside the ballroom, leaning against a wall, his cheek pressed against the soft, cool flocked wallpaper. He lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, calms himself. There is no call for panic; he is the King of Infiltration, and he knows what to do. He stubs out the cigarette in the sand of a nearby ashtray, and takes hold of the cart once again. This time, when he enters the ballroom, he has the presence of mind to keep his head down, to avoid being recognized by the Escapist.

"Sorry, folks," he murmurs. He pushes the cart across to the far side of the stage, by the s.h.i.+vered timbers of the sunken s.h.i.+p. It has a squeaky wheel, and he feels certain that he must be attracting the attention of the musicians on the bandstand, of the magician and his big-nose girl. But when he looks back, they are absorbed in their own preparations. She is a pretty enough girl, he supposes, and her black mannish overcoat reminds him with a twinge of the queen of his own desire. When he reaches the s.h.i.+p, he stops, crouches behind the cart, and opens the compartment in which hot plates of food are stored by the room-service waiters on their way up to rooms.

Until now the ballroom has been too crowded with decorators, waiters, and hotel staff, coming and going as they prepared the room for the event, for him to find the opportunity to a.s.semble the parts of his Exploding Trident. Now he works quickly, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the length of thin pipe that contains the black powder and cut-up nails into a second length of pipe that is empty. This will be the shaft. At the dummy end, he affixes tines of stiff red cellophane, copped from a costume-shop devil-suit pitchfork, with a piece of masking tape. It looks a little suspicious, he knows, but fortunately, verisimilitude is not something people generally expect from a sea G.o.d's trident. He unrolls the six-inch strip of fuse that protrudes through a hole drilled in the thing's business end. Then he stands up and, checking to see that he is not being observed, edges over toward one of the fishnets tacked to the wall, filled with its catch of fake crustaceans. No one sees; his rich lifelong powers of invisibility remain his truest ally. Gingerly, he slides the trident down through the heavy mesh of the fishnet until the fuse end b.u.mps the carpet. When the time comes-when the Escapist has begun his legendary act-the Saboteur will contrive to pa.s.s by here again. He will rest half a lighted Camel against a strand of the net, so that the unlit end touches the fuse. Then he will hie himself out of harm's way and wait. And five minutes after that, the mongrels of Empire City will begin to know something of the terror their mongrel brothers and sisters are undergoing halfway around the world.

The Saboteur pushes the cart back toward the ballroom doors. At the last moment, as he is pa.s.sing the magician, he cannot prevent himself from raising his head and looking his adversary in the eye. If there is a flicker of recognition there, it is extinguished in an instant as the doors to the ballroom fly open and, laughing and shouting and crying out in their loud barnyard voices, the first of the guests arrive.

6

What follows is the intended program for the performance given by the Amazing Cavalieri on the evening of April 12, 1941. A copy, printed by the performer himself using a "Printer's Devil" Genuine Junior Printing Press that he had dug out of the Empire Novelties stockroom just before the move from the Kramler Building, was handed out to every guest just prior to the show.

The Wanderings of a Handkerchief.

Magic Bananas.

A Miniature Conflagration.

Fly Away Home.

Please Don't Eat the Pets.

A Contagious Knot.

Adrift in the Stream of Time.

Ice and Fire.

Where Have I Been?

The Tail Has Lost Its Monkey.

Joe's self-consciousness about his English, and a suspicion of patter inherited from his great teacher, kept his performance swift and wordless. Frequently he was told, usually by the mother or an aunt of the bar mitzvah boy, that the show had been very nice, but would it kill him to smile a little now and then? Tonight was no exception. If anything, it seemed to those scattered guests at the Saks reception who had caught his act before, he was even more guarded, more workmanlike in his approach than usual. His movements and his pacing were neither too hasty nor too slow, and there were no-as had sometimes happened in the past-dropped cards or spilled pitchers of water. But he took no apparent pleasure in the marvelous feats he performed. One would have thought it meant nothing to him that he could produce a bowlful of goldfish from a tin of sardines, or pa.s.s a bunch of bananas one at a time through the skull of a thirteen-year-old boy. Rosa supposed that he was troubled by something he had read in that latest letter from home, and wished, as she had wished many times, that he was more willing to share with her his fears, his doubts, and whatever bad news there was from Prague.

Longman Harkoo, though he tried, was one of those people incapable, due to some abnormality of vision or comprehension, of following the movements of a magic act, the way some people go to baseball games and never manage to see the ball in flight; a towering home run is just ten thousand people craning their necks. He soon gave up trying to pay attention to the things that were supposed to be amazing him, and found himself watching the boy's eyes behind the black silk mask. They continually scanned the room-that in itself was impressive enough, that he could manipulate the cards and other props of his act without looking at his hands-and they seemed, Harkoo noticed, to follow in particular the movements of one of the waiters.

Joe had recognized Ebling at once, though it took him a while, amid the distractions of greeting his hosts and Rosa's family and of pulling dimes and matchsticks out of the bar mitzvah boy's nose, to place him. The Aryan seemed to have lost weight since their last encounter. Then, too, the sheer surprise of seeing Ebling again had interfered with his ability to identify him. He had given no thought to the man, or to his own war on the Germans of New York, in many weeks. He no longer went looking for trouble; after the bomb scare last fall, Joe felt he had bested Carl Ebling in their duel. The man simply seemed to have abandoned the field. Joe had gone back up to Yorkville once, to leave a calling card or a nyah-nyah-nyah on the Aryan-American League. The sign was no longer in the window, and when Joe broke into the office for a second time, he found it empty. The desks and the files had been moved out, the portrait of Hitler taken down, leaving not even a discolored square on the wall. There was nothing left but an old potato chip lying like a moth in the middle of the scarred wooden floor. Carl Ebling had disappeared, leaving no forwarding address.

Now here he was, working as a waiter at the Hotel Pierre, and clearly-Joe knew this as surely as he knew that the goldfish in his bowl were only hunks of carrot that he had carved with an apple knife-up to no good. As Ebling hurried back and forth across the ballroom with a tray on his shoulder, he kept looking up at Joe, not at the silks and golden hoops in his hand but at him, him, right into his face, with an expression that struggled to remain blank and anonymous but which was tinged at the corners with a flush of bitter mischief. right into his face, with an expression that struggled to remain blank and anonymous but which was tinged at the corners with a flush of bitter mischief.

As Joe was about to begin A Contagious Knot, in which, with a puff of breath, the knot that he had tied in a silk scarf appeared to transfer itself along the row of ordinary silk scarves held up by volunteers from the audience, one after another before their very eyes, Joe smelled smoke. For an instant he thought it must be the lingering odor of A Miniature Conflagration, but on further exposure he knew that it was unquestionably tobacco-and something more, something acrid like burning hair. Then he noticed a thin plume of smoke coming from the side of the bandstand, down to his left, by the sunken s.h.i.+p. At once he dropped the scarf with its devilish knot and walked, swiftly but without appearing to panic, toward the smoke that was scribbling the air. His first thought was that someone had dropped a cigarette; then he felt a tickle of suspicion, and the face of Ebling flashed through his mind. And then he saw it all; the cylinder of ash burned down almost to the printed tip of the cigarette, the singed carpet, the length of grayish fuse, the length of steel pipe crudely disguised with some gaudy red cellophane. He stopped, turned, and went back to his table, where the bowl from Please Don't Eat the Pets still sat, filled with bright swimming bits of carrot.

There was some murmuring from the tables as he picked up the bowl.

"Excuse me," he said, "we seem to have a little fire."

As he went to pour the water onto the cigarette, he felt something large, heavy, and extremely hard smash into the small of his back. It felt a good deal like a human head. Joe went flying forward, and the goldfish bowl tumbled from his hands and shattered on the bandstand. Ebling climbed on top of Joe, clawing at his cheeks from behind, and as Joe tried to roll onto his back, he looked over and saw that the fuse was throwing a tiny shower of sparks. He gave up trying to roll and instead pushed upward on his hands and knees and proceeded to crawl, Ebling riding him, wild as an ape on the back of a pony, toward the pipe bomb. By now the people sitting closest to the bomb had taken note of the burning, and there was a general sense in the room that none of this was part of the show. A woman screamed, and then a lot of women were screaming, and Joe was lumbering forward with his rider ripping at his face and yanking on his ears. Ebling got his arms around Joe's throat and started to choke him. At that point, Joe ran out of bandstand. He lost his balance, and he and Ebling toppled over the side to the floor. Ebling rolled, tumbling against the outspread fishnet. It snapped loose from the wall, spilling a pile of rubber starfish and lobsters across him.

Ebling just had time to say "No." Then a sheet of heavy foil seemed to fall onto Joe's head, to wrap his face and throat and ears in crumpling steel. He was thrown backward, and something hot, a burning wire, was laid with a hiss across his forehead. There followed almost immediately an awful sound like a heavy club falling on a bag of tomatoes, and then an autumnal whiff of gunpowder.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," Carl Ebling said, sitting up, blinking, licking his lips, blood on his forehead, blood in his hair, tiny red pawprints of blood all over his bright white jacket.

"What did you do?" Joe heard, or rather he felt, the words somewhere down in his throat. "Ebling, G.o.d d.a.m.n it, what did you do?"

They were taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital. Joe's injuries were minor compared to Ebling's, and after he had been cleaned up, his facial wounds treated, and the laceration on his forehead b.u.t.terflied shut, he was able to return, by popular demand, to the Grand Ballroom of the Pierre, where he was hailed and toasted and showered with money and praise.

As for Ebling, he was first charged only with unlawful possession of explosives; but this was later expanded to a charge of attempted murder. He was eventually indicted for a number of minor fires, synagogue vandalizings, phone-booth bombings, and even an attempted subway derailment the previous winter that had gotten a good deal of attention in the papers but, until the Saboteur confessed to it and to all of his other exploits, had gone unsolved.

Late that night, Rosa and her father helped Joe from the taxi to the curb and thence along the narrow lane up to the steps of the Harkoo house. His arms were draped across their shoulders and his feet seemed to glide two inches off the ground. He had not touched a drop all night, on orders from the emergency-room doctor at Mt. Sinai, but the morphine painkillers he had been given had finally taken their toll. Of that journey from the taxi to the curb, Joe was later to retain only the faint pleasant memory of Siggy Saks's kolnischwa.s.ser smell and of the coolness of Rosa's shoulder against his own abraded cheek. They dragged him up to the study and laid him out on the couch. Rosa unlaced his shoes, unb.u.t.toned his trousers, helped him off with his s.h.i.+rt She kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his chest, his belly, pulled a blanket up to his chin, and then kissed his lips. Rosa's father brushed Joe's hair back from his bandaged brow with a soft motherly hand. Then there was darkness, and the sound of their voices draining out of the room. Joe felt sleep gathering around him, coiling like smoke or cotton wool about his limbs, and he fought against it for a few minutes with an agreeable sense of struggle, as a child in a swimming pool might attempt to stand buoyed atop a football. Just as he surrendered to his opiate exhaustion, however, the echo of the bomb burst began to chime again in his ears, and he sat up, his heart pounding. He switched on a table lamp and went over to the low settee on which Rosa had laid his blue tuxedo, and lifted the jacket. In a strange slow panic, as if his hands were wrapped in layers of gauze, he felt around the pockets. He took the jacket by the tails and dangled it upside down, and shook it and shook it again. Out tumbled wads of cash, stacks of business cards and cartes de visite, cartes de visite, silver dollars and subway tokens, cigarettes, his pocketknife, torn corners of his program scrawled with the addresses and phone numbers of the people he had saved. He turned the jacket and each of its ten pockets inside out. He fell to his knees and shuffled over and over through the pile of cards and dollars and torn sc.r.a.ps of program. It was like the cla.s.sic magician's nightmare in which the dreamer riffles, with mounting dread, through a deck at once ordinary and infinite, looking for a queen of hearts or a seven of diamonds that somehow never turns up. silver dollars and subway tokens, cigarettes, his pocketknife, torn corners of his program scrawled with the addresses and phone numbers of the people he had saved. He turned the jacket and each of its ten pockets inside out. He fell to his knees and shuffled over and over through the pile of cards and dollars and torn sc.r.a.ps of program. It was like the cla.s.sic magician's nightmare in which the dreamer riffles, with mounting dread, through a deck at once ordinary and infinite, looking for a queen of hearts or a seven of diamonds that somehow never turns up.

Early the next morning he returned, groggy and aching and half-mad with tinnitus, to the Pierre and made a thorough search of its ballroom. He inquired several times over the next week at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and contacted the lost-and-found office of the Hack Bureau.

Later, after the world had been torn in half, and the Amazing Cavalieri and his blue tuxedo were to be found only in the gilt-edged pages of deluxe photo alb.u.ms on the coffee tables of the Upper West Side, Joe would sometimes find himself thinking about the pale-blue envelope from Prague. He would try to imagine its contents, wondering what news or sentiments or instructions it might have contained. It was at these times that he began to understand, after all those years of study and performance, of feats and wonders and surprises, the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

7

One of the st.u.r.diest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the j.a.panese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to this axiom. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World's Fair, a sizable portion of the citizens of New York City had the odd experience of feeling for the time in which they were living, at the very moment they were living in it, that strange blend of optimism and nostalgia which is the usual hallmark of the aetataureate delusion. The rest of the world was busy feeding itself, country by country, to the furnace, but while the city's newspapers and newsreels at the Trans-Lux were filled with ill portents, defeats, atrocities, and alarms, the general mentality of the New Yorker was not one of siege, panic, or grim resignation to fate but rather the toe-wiggling, tea-sipping contentment of a woman curled on a sofa, reading in front of a fire with cold rain rattling against the windows. The economy was experiencing a renewal not only of sensation but of perceptible movement in its limbs, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six straight games, and the great big bands reached their suave and ecstatic acme in the hotel ballrooms and moth-lit summer pavilions of America. Given the usual urge of those who believe themselves to have lived through a golden age to expatiate upon the subject at great length afterward, it is ironic that the April night on which Sammy felt most aware of the l.u.s.ter of his existence-the moment when, for the first time in his life, he was fully conscious of his own happiness-was a night that he would never discuss with anyone at all.

It was one o'clock on a Wednesday morning, and Sammy stood alone atop the city of New York, gazing in the direction of the storm clouds, both literal and figurative, that were piling up away to the east. Before coming on to his s.h.i.+ft at ten o'clock, he had showered in the rough stall Al Smith had arranged to have built for the spotters, down in their quarters on the eighty-first floor, and changed into the loose twill trousers and faded blue oxford s.h.i.+rt that he kept in his locker there and wore three nights a week throughout the war, taking them home after his Friday s.h.i.+ft to wash them in time for Monday's. For appearances' sake, he put his shoes back on for the quick trip up to the observatory, but when he got there he always took them off again. It was his habit, his conceit, and his strange comfort to prowl the sky of Manhattan Island, on the lookout for enemy bombers and aerial saboteurs, in his stocking feet. As he made his regular rounds of the eighty-sixth floor, clipboard in hand, heavy army-issue binoculars on a cord around his neck, he whistled to himself, unaware that he was doing so, a tune at once tuneless and involved.

It promised to be a typically quiet s.h.i.+ft; night flights of an authorized nature were rare even in good weather, and tonight, with warnings of thundershowers and electrical storms blowing in, there would be even fewer airplanes in the sky than usual. Affixed to Sammy's clipboard, as always, was a typed list provided by the Army Interceptor Command, in whose service he was a volunteer, of the seven aircraft that had been cleared for transit across New York metropolitan airs.p.a.ce that night. All but two were military, and by eleven-thirty Sammy had already spotted six of them, on schedule and in position, and made the required notation of their pa.s.sages in his log. The seventh was not expected until around five-thirty, just before his s.h.i.+ft ended and he went back down to the spotters' quarters to catch a few hours' sleep before his day at Empire Comics began.

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 pa.s.sage 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 gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.s 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, 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- 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 pa.s.sing 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, n.o.body'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 not want a n.a.z.i spy like me hanging around. What was I want a n.a.z.i spy like me hanging around. What was I thinking?" 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. 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." "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 d.i.c.kie 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?"