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when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him.
was in the base camp abandoned by this expedition that Joseph Kavalier, Radioman Second Class, was found by the navy icebreaker William Dyer.
He had been in intermittent contact with the ship via a portable radio set, giving more or less accurate readings of his position. Commander Frank J. Kemp, skipper of the Dyer, noted in his log that the young man had been through considerable hardship in the last three weeks, surviving two long solo flights conducted with only limited skill as a pilot and a dying man for a navigator, a crash, a bullet wound to the shoulder, and a ten-mile hike, on a fractured ankle, to this ghost town of Augustaburg.
He was taken to the base at Guantánamo Bay, where he remained under psychiatric examination and investigation by a court-martial until shortly before V-E Day.
Ensign Kavalier was awarded the Navy’s Distinguished Service Cross.
Writing, and an apartment in Miami Beach for Sam’s mother, in which she had died of a brain aneurysm after eleven days of retired discontentment, and which was then sold—six months after purchase—at a considerable loss.
Bloomtown had been announced in 1948, with ads in Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and all the big
the valuable services of Rose Saxon (her professional name) as well.
Even leaving their car, a 1951 Studebaker Champion, at the train station
favorite morning haunt of funny-book men, circa April 1954:
Senator Kefauver of Tennessee and his Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency had determined to make a formal inquiry into the shocking charges leveled by Wertham in his book: that the reading of comic books led directly to antisocial behavior, drug addiction, sexual perversion, even rape and murder.
“You know who it just crossed my mind it could be. If it isn’t a hoax, I mean. Hell, even if it is. In fact, if it’s him, it definitely is a hoax.” “What is this, a game show? Tell us who he is.” “Joe Kavalier.” “Joe Kavalier, yes! That’s exactly who I was thinking of.” “Joe Kavalier! Whatever happened to that guy?” “I heard he’s in Canada. Somebody saw him up there.” “Mort Meskin saw him at Niagara Falls.”
Stan Lee, Frank Pantaleone, Gil Kane, Bob Powell, Marty Gold, and Julie Glovsky—agreed
“Frankly, he’s never happy anywhere,” Pantaleone said, and everyone agreed. They all knew Sammy’s story, more or less. He had returned to the comic book business in 1947, covered in failure at everything else he had tried. His first defeat had been in the advertising game, at Burns, Baggot & DeWinter.
Gold Star job came along, he had at last thrown in the towel on his old caterpillar dreams.
have to agree with that,” said Gold. “He’s got that thing with the sidekicks.
of a sudden the Stallion’s hanging around with this kid, what was his name? Buck something.” “Buck Naked.”
“Tom Mayflower,” Kane said, and everybody laughed, and then Kane went on to explain that someone signing himself “The Escapist” had, in this morning’s Herald-Tribune, publicly announced his intention to jump from the Empire State Building at five o’clock that very afternoon.
Now he moved his latest Remington to one side. Julie Glovsky saw a little brass key lying in the center of a square patch of blotter that was free of ash and dust. Sammy took the key and went to a large wooden cabinet, dragged up from a defunct photographical processing lab on a lower floor of the building. “You have an Escapist costume?” Julie said. “Yeah.” “Where’d you get it?” “From Tom Mayflower,” Sammy said.
Sammy told the detective, a man named Lieber, that he had not seen Joe Kavalier since the evening of December 14, 1941,
Pier 11, when Joe sailed for basic training in Newport, Rhode Island,
Miskatonic
“He’s afraid you’ll be angry with him,” Saks said. “We told him you wouldn’t be.” “You’ve seen him?” “Oh, much more than see him.” He smirked. “He’s—”
partner, Jack Kirby, had created Captain America. The rights to Captain America had earned, and in the future would continue to earn, great sums for their owner, Timely Publications, one day to be better known as Marvel Comics. “I heard that from Stan.”
Last July 3, his eleventh birthday, Tommy’s father had taken him to The Story of Robin Hood at the Criterion, to lunch at the Automat, and to visit a reproduction, at the
The mystery of his real father, who—he had decided, deciphering the overheard hints and swiftly hushed remarks of his parents and his grandmother before her death—had been a soldier killed in Europe, was
The man nodded solemnly. “One we must respect.” He reached into his pocket and took out a package of Old Gold cigarettes. He lit one with a snap of his lighter and inhaled slowly, his eyes on Tommy, his expression troubled, as Tommy somehow expected it to be. “I’m your cousin,” the man said. “Josef Kavalier.”
The dreamlike sense of calm with which he had reencountered, in a Long Island pharmacy, the cousin who had disappeared from a military transport off the coast of Virginia eight years before, abandoned him. Joe Kavalier was the great silencer of adults in the Clay household;
Cousin Joe gave his other hand a squeeze. “Escapist Adventures,” he said, his tone light and mocking. “I was just looking at it,” said Tommy. “Get it,” Joe said. He plucked the four current Escapist titles from the rack. “Get them all. Go ahead.” He waved at the wall, his gesture wild, his eyes flashing. “I’ll buy you any ones you want.”
the painful tragedy of Eugene Begelman’s departure for Florida, the origin of the mysterious Bug.
“That sounds good. Your mother was always a very good cook.”
If he encountered some family friend or other adult who questioned him and his destination, he was to point to the eye patch and say, simply, “Ophthalmologist.”
He left the house at eight forty-five, like every day, and started walking toward William Floyd Junior High, where he was in the seventh grade.
dropping in on the secret aerial lair of one of his fellow masked crime-fighters, whom he sometimes dubbed the Eagle but who went more generally, in Tommy’s fancy, by the moniker Secretman.
“It’s illegal,” Cousin Joe told Tommy, the first time he visited. “You’re not allowed to live in an office building. That’s why you can’t tell anyone I’m here.”
“How’s your father?” Joe said abruptly. “Fine,” said Tommy. “That’s what you always say.” “I know.” “He is worried about this book by Dr. Wertham, I imagine? The Seduction of the Innocents?” “Real worried. Some senators are coming from Washington.”
Maybe I will dress up as the Escapist and … jump off this building! I have only to figure out some way to make it look like I jumped and killed myself.” He smiled thinly. “But, of course, without it actually killing myself.”
He was just trying to help Cousin Joe find his way home.
THEY GOT OUT on seventy-two, the boy led them to the left, past the doorways of an import company and a wig manufacturer, to a door whose opaque glass light was painted
“Our boy is up there,” Rensie said. “The leaper. Up on the o.d.”
“You want to have your wits about you, Tom,” Lieber said. “We need you to talk to this uncle of yours.” “First cousin,” Clay said. He cleared his throat. “Once removed.”
“Maybe you could talk to your first cousin once removed about those rubber bands,” Rensie said. “That’s a new one on me.”
“Rubber bands,” Captain Harley said. “And orphans.” He rubbed at the wrecked half of his face. “I’m guessing ...
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His broad chest was girdled by a slender cord, studded with thousands of tiny knots, looped under his armpits, then stretched across the open-air promenade some twenty feet to the steel prong of an ornamental sun ray that jutted from the roof of the observation lounge. He gave the knotted cord a tug, and it twanged out a low D-flat.
When Joe saw the boy, his son,
The sporting spirit prevailed; a glass of water was brought, and Mrs. Houdini carried it to her husband. Five minutes later, Houdini stepped from the cabinet for the last time, brandishing the cuffs over his head like a loving cup.
“It was in the glass of water,” Joe guessed, when he had managed to free himself at last from the far simpler challenge of the canvas sack and a pair of German police cuffs gaffed with buckshot. “The key.”
“Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.”
and at thirty-two he seemed to have acquired at last the deep-set eyes of the Kavaliers.
Rosa’s father emerged from the observatory. With his dyed penny-red hair
