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“You?” the goddess says, her feelers wilting in evident dismay. “You are the one the book has chosen? You are to be the next Mistress of the Night?”
“We want in on the Escapist radio program, that’s first.” “That’s first?” “Second is, you agree that this character, Luna Moth, is half ours. Fifty percent to Empire Comics, fifty percent to Kavalier & Clay. We get half of the merchandising, half the radio program if there is one. Half of everything. Otherwise we take her, and our services, elsewhere.” Anapol half turned his head toward his partner. “You were right,” he said. “And we want raises, too,” Sammy said, with another glance at Deasey, deciding, now that the subject seemed to be open for discussion, to press it as far as he could.
“So,” he said now. “You can have in on the radio show. Assuming there is a radio show. We’ll give you credit, all right, something like, what, ‘Oneonta Woolens, et cetera, presents
Adventures of the Escapist, based on the character by Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay appearing every month in the pages of et cetera.’ Plus, for every episode that airs, let’s say you two receive a payment. A royalty. Call it fifty dollars per show.” “Two hundred,” Sammy said. “One.” “One fifty.”
Will Eisner
Ben Hecht—but
beau geste—he
Then, at a bar mitzvah one night last winter, the Amazing Cavalieri appeared on the bill, passing 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.)
When he arrived at work, it was with the intention of showing Joe Kavalier that while Carl Henry Ebling may be a shiftless bumbler and pamphleteer, the Saboteur is not one to be trifled with, and his memory is long.
Grand Ballroom, pushing the service cart that conceals the Exploding Trident,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“What did you do?” Joe heard, or rather he felt, the words somewhere down in his throat. “Ebling, god damn it, what did you do?”
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.
Rosa’s father brushed Joe’s hair back from his bandaged brow with a soft motherly hand.
was like the classic 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.
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 albums on the coffee tables of the Upper West Side, Joe would sometimes find himself thinking about the pale-blue envelope from Prague.
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.
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,
the April night on which Sammy felt most aware of the luster 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.
Before coming on to his shift 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 shirt that he kept in his locker there and wore three nights a week throughout the war, taking them home after his Friday shift to wash them in time for Monday’s.
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 airspace that
“Is this Men’s Sportswear?” said Tracy Bacon.
“No.” Sammy laughed. “No, I—I committed perjury. In a legal deposition. I told the lawyers for Superman that Shelly Anapol never asked me to copy their character. When he really just out-and-out had.”
“For some reason,” Bacon continued, “she was under the misapprehension that I intended to propose marriage to her this evening. God knows who told her that.”
“No, but I remember running into Ed Sullivan at Lindy’s a couple of nights ago.” “Did you tell him you were going to ask Helen to marry you?” “Could have.” “But you aren’t.” “Didn’t.”
“Don’t worry,” Sammy said, “the whole building acts like one gigantic—Oh.” Bacon’s breath was sour with wine, but one sweet drop of the stuff lingered on his lips as he pressed his mouth against Sammy’s.
was already kissing Tracy Bacon back. They angled their bodies half toward each other. The bottle of wine clinked against the window
shouting, and there was a general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick. Sammy had gone white as a sheet. “Sam?” Rosa said. “You look like you saw a ghost.” “He’s just worried we’re going to make him pay the fare,” said Bacon, reaching for his wallet.
Orson Welles
This, though he never forgot and in later years embellished it, was the extent of his interaction with Orson Welles, on that night or any other.
That was the extent of Joe’s interaction with Dolores Del Rio, though he and Orson Welles continued to see each other from time to time at the bar of the Edison Hotel.
But in July 1941, Radio #19 hit the stands, and the nine million unsuspecting twelve-year-olds of America who wanted to grow up to be comic book men nearly fell over dead in amazement.
The reason was Citizen Kane. The cousins sat, with Rosa and Bacon between them, in the
Sammy’s notes not only for “Kane Street,” the first of the so-called modernist or prismatic Escapist stories, but also ideas for a dozen other stories that had come to Sammy, not just for the Escapist but for Luna Moth and the Monitor and the Four Freedoms, since last night. They went down the hall to find Anapol.
At any rate, the circulation figures for the Kavalier & Clay titles increased steadily until, by the abrupt termination of the partnership,
“What is this all about?” she said, taking Joe’s arm. “I just signed the lease,” he said. “Come on up and see.” “A lease? You’re moving out? You’re moving here? Did you and Sammy have a fight?” “No, of course not. I never fight with Sammy. I love Sammy.” “I know you do,” she said. “You guys are a good team.”
he’s moving to Los Angeles. Okay, he says for three months only to write the movie, but I bet you good money after the bad he will stay there when he goes. What’s in the package?”
The third portrait of Joe Kavalier was the last painting Rosa ever made, and it differed from the first two in that it
“This is what I have for you.” He held out a fist to her, knuckles up. She turned the hand over and pried the fingers apart. On the palm of his hand lay a brass key. “I’m going to need help to do this,” he said. “I hope with all my heart, Rosa, that you will want to help me.”
knowing perfectly well that it was the key to this apartment,
Joe was now asking her for the very thing she had been on the verge of asking for herself—that she be allowed to act as a mother, or at least a big sister, to Thomas Kavalier. She was disappointed in the same measure that she had been expecting a ring, and thrilled to the degree that she was horrified by her desire for one.
Amazing Cavalieri in his memory for the next sixty years, then the singular performance Joe gave at the Hotel Trevi on the evening of December 6, 1941, undoubtedly would have been enough.
“and I am getting married. That is, I hope I am. I have decided I am going to ask her tonight.”
This morning, her doctor had called to confirm the tale of a missed period and of a week of sudden squalls and unexpected flare-ups of emotion such as the one that had sent her into hysterics over the loan of an old pocket square. Thomas was going to be an uncle. That was how she had decided that she was going to put it to Joe.
