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“We want to buy the Escapist,” said Anapol. “We’ll pay you a hundred and fifty dollars for the rights.” Joe looked at Sammy, eyebrows raised. Big money. “What else?” said Sammy, though he had been hoping for a hundred at most. “The other characters, the backups, we’ll pay eighty-five dollars for the lot of them,” Anapol continued. Seeing Sammy’s face fall a little, he added, “It would have been twenty dollars apiece, but Jack felt that Mr. Radio was worth a little extra.” “That’s just for the rights, kid,” said Ashkenazy. “We’ll also take you both on, Sammy for seventy-five dollars a week and
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Joe Kavalier
It was six o’clock on a Monday morning in October 1940. He had just won the Second World War, and he was feeling pretty good about it.
Over the course of the last week, in the guise of the Escapist, Master of Elusion, Joe had flown to Europe (in a midnight-blue autogyro), stormed the towered Schloss of the nefarious Steel Gauntlet, freed Plum Blossom from its deep dungeon, defeated the Gauntlet in protracted two-fisted combat, been captured by the Gauntlet’s henchmen and dragged off to Berlin, where he was strapped to a bizarre multiple guillotine that would have sliced him like a hard-boiled egg while the Führer himself smugly looked on.
“Look at this.” It was Shelly Anapol. He had on a pale-gray sharkskin suit that Joe didn’t recognize, as giant and gleaming as the lens of a lighthouse.
the words “Amazing” and “Midget,” which had been shrinking each month until they were a vestigial ant-high smudge in the upper left-hand corner, had been dropped forever, and along with them the whole idea of promoting novelties through comics.
He had broken off his affair with Maura Zell, moved back in with his wife, attended High Holiday services for the first time in forty years.
The only people winning the war that Joe had been fighting in the pages of Empire Comics since January were Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy. Between them, they had pocketed something in the neighborhood, according to Sammy’s guess, of six hundred thousand dollars. “Excuse me.”
“Well, well,” he said. “This is regrettable. I don’t—It appears that your father has died.”
encounter Max Schmeling, or his doppelgänger, again. In any case, there is good reason to believe that Schmeling was not in New York at all but in Poland, having been drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the front as punishment for his defeat by Joe Louis in 1938.
konditorei
“Carl Ebling,”
Alfred E. Smith, president-for-life of the Empire State Building Corporation,
Alfred Emanuel Smith—trounced by Herbert Hoover in his 1928 bid for the White House—had been a political crony and business associate of Love’s ever since his days as governor of New York.
rubicund
Today marked the start of the final weekend in the grand two-year adventure of the New York World’s Fair, whose official headquarters were in the Empire State Building,
What Smith did not know was that the one great and true friend of James Love’s life, Gerhardt Frege, had been one of the first men to die—of internal injuries—at Dachau, shortly after the camp opened in 1933.*
“It’s my experience that honorable people live by the contracts they sign,” Deasey said at last. “And not a tittle more.”
So that’s my warning: stop handing this crap over to Anapol as if you owed it to him.”
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.
Longman Harkoo.”
“May I—present—Longman Harkoo, known to those who prefer not to indulge him as Mr. Siegfried Saks.”
classic instance of the Mystic Potentate species, managing to look at once commanding, stylish, and ultramundane in a vast purple-and-brown caftan, heavily embroidered, that hung down almost to the tops of his Mexican sandals. The little toe of his horny right foot, Joe saw, was adorned with a garnet ring. A venerable Kodak Brownie hung from an Indian-beaded strap around his neck.
He was wearing a deep-sea diving costume, complete with rubberized canvas coverall and globular brass helmet.
“Miss Uta Hagen,” Harkoo explained. “She’s married to José Ferrer, he’s around here someplace. They’re doing Charley’s Aunt.”
“Saks,” Joe said, producing the card at last. “Rosa Luxemburg Saks.” “Nah,” Sammy said. “Is it?”
“We’ve met,” Rosa said.
don’t believe so,” said Joe.
“Someone like you I would absolutely remember,” he said.
“I know who you are,” she said, coloring again. “I mean, I … remember you now.” “I remember you, too,” he said, hoping it did not sound salacious. “How would you … I’d like you to see my paintings,” she said. “If you want to, I mean. I have a—a studio upstairs.”
epinephrine
He took a deep breath and turned his back on the man.*
was probably just as well. The man was Max Ernst, not merely an artist whose work Joe admired but a committed anti-fascist, public enemy of the Nazis, and fellow exile.
tulle
Joe remembered the Fall of Madrid. It had come two weeks after the fall, uncapitalized, disregarded, of Prague.
Caddie Horslip.”
“Lampedusa,”
Here he had come upon the unlikely sight of two men, each wearing, with the overdetermination of a dream, a necktie and a mustache, embracing, their mustaches interlocked in a way that had reminded Sammy, for some reason, of
He knew about homosexuality, of course, as an idea, without ever
“Is he a fairy?” Rosa was, at that moment, asking Joe. They were still sitting on her bed, holding hands.
subbasement of the Empire City Public Library. Here, at a desk that lies deeper in the earth than even the subway tracks, sits young Miss Judy
There is a policeman by the front doors. He is there to help guard the book.
smiling. O’Hara takes advantage of her confusion to keep her there talking for a moment longer. “Did you have a chance to see the book in all the confusion today, Miss Dark? Would you like me to show it to you?”
She has not, in fact, been to see the Book of Lo, though she is dying
The Book of Lo
It is the oldest book in the world, three hundred ancient pages, in a leather case encrusted with rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, devoted to the strange particulars of the worship of the great Cimmerian moth goddess, Lo.
fallen body of Officer O’Hara. Miss Dark ducks behind a convenient arras. She thrills with horror as the men—an apelike trio in stevedore sweaters and newsdealer caps—use a diamond-tipped can opener to slice the lid from the glass case and so relieve Empire City
Now many watts of power course through her slender frame, and through the circuitry of gems and gold wire on the leather case of the Book of Lo.
The first thing we notice about her may not be, surprisingly, that she appears to be flying in the nude, the zones of her modesty artfully veiled by the coils of the astral helix. No, what we notice first is that she appears to have grown an immense pair of swallowtailed moth’s wings.
for, dead or alive, there is no question that Judy Dark, that human umbrella, has, at long last, opened to the sky.
