It's Superman! A Novel (14 page)

As long as Willi was there he never lost a patient.

In time Willi realized the ward was just the top floor of two side-by-side brownstone houses whose dividing wall had been broken through. Looking out the window near his bed one morning, he noticed that the buildings faced a small park. By squinting he could read the name of it on a sign by the entrance. More importantly, he read: “Frank Hague, Mayor.”

So he was in Jersey City.

Until he left Ali Baba’s clinic—until he crept out of there sometime around three
A.M.
yesterday morning—Willi had no idea how much time had passed since Brooklyn. If he had to guess, he would have said a week. Actually it was a week and five days.

He wandered around downtown Jersey City collecting pop bottles for the deposits. When he had five, he found a grocery store that had just opened for the day, cashed them in, and used the dime to call Lois Lane. “Don’t talk, just listen. I need you to rent a car . . .”

“You’d better get moving,” Willi is saying now. “It’s twenty past four.”

“Wish me luck.”

“You think this guy’ll go for it?”

“I have no idea.” Lois takes a deep breath, exhales, then turns like a cadet and goes out.

He waits till he hears her get all the way down the creaking stairs before he unfurls the turban in front of the little mirror.

Touching his still-damp hair, he cocks his head to the left, to the right.

Ay-yi-yi.

Willi the Red.

Miss Colman. Courage. Homicide in the cemetery.
Lois begs a favor. Secret of the Sherpas, Good catch.
●

1

Nellie Colman, proudly eighty-seven, is one of Smallville’s most cherished eccentrics. She brews tea from gnarly roots and dried sea grasses guaranteed to stimulate everything from appetite and regularity to mental telepathy, believes in supernatural visitations, conducts séances whenever she can find enough believers to fill the seats at a table, and claims to hear the midnight moanings of Corley McKinley and his oldest son Deet, lynched back in 1891 from a linden tree now part of her property. Weekly she writes to the
Herald-Progress,
complaining about taxes, locusts, and the insolence of youth, which she blames on radio. And she is forever finding “interesting relics” in her garden and side yards—usually chunks of rusted metal, Indian implements, Civil War bullets, the heel from a cavalryman’s boot. But once she claimed to have unearthed bones that proved
some
dinosaurs were as small as dogs. Miss Colman feels it is her civic duty to share all of these finds with others in the community not fortunate enough to live on property quite so full of wonderment.

Her neighborhood is on the west side of Smallville, with all of the largest homes, built in high Victorian style and situated deep on four- and five-acre lots. Long ago some wag dubbed this part of town “Bigville,” and that’s how people still refer to it, although naturally not by anyone who lives there on streets named after railroad men, bankers, merchants, and land developers, some of whom are still alive.

The street Clark is walking along now, shortly past one o’clock in the afternoon, is the only one named after a tree: Maple. Nellie Colman’s house is number 88, on a corner lot. Miss Colman’s late father fought under General Nathan Lyon at the battle of Wilson’s Creek and later operated a livery stable on Jayhawker Street, over on the far East End. James Dram Colman once ran for mayor of Smallville and another time for a seat in the state legislature. He lost both races, which might explain why the street is still called Maple rather than Colman.

Clark knows these things. He
likes
knowing these things. This is his hometown, and he always imagined he would live here forever.

Lately, though, he’s begun to wonder about that, seeing as how he is so talented and all. And it’s not just those
big
talents, either. He’s been thinking that he might, with diligent application and stick-to-itiveness, become in time far too skilled a reporter for a dinky paper like the
Herald-Progress.
Is that vanity? Or self-knowledge? Good old American stocktaking? Or self-importance? At his mother’s knee Clark learned that misplaced ambition is Lucifer’s reel, but does he truly want to spend the rest of his life writing anniversary stories about the Sacrament Christian Church and reporting on the town council’s latest efforts to restore the old log stockade out on Highway 75? Does he honestly want to spend this steaming but gorgeously blue August day listening to Miss Colman talk about tinted postal cards?

In this curious mood—a little nostalgic, a bit cranky, somewhat full of himself, vaguely at loose ends—Clark ambles along Maple Street. As he nears the Colman place, he stops, noticing a hopscotch pattern sketched with blue chalk. In one of the numbered squares lies a plump brown sparrow. Clark frowns and continues on. But a quarter of the way up Miss Colman’s front walk, he stops again and goes back to pick up the dead bird, deposits it in one of the old spinster’s trash cans. There is a short muffled airburst, then another sparrow—no, a finch, see those yellow tail feathers?—drops like a plumb bob into the street. Clark looks around, seeing no one and nothing out of the ordinary. He walks into the street and picks up the finch. It’s warm but dead, with a tiny bleeding hole in its belly.

The sparrow, Clark discovers when he goes back to the trash barrel, has an identical wound. Why didn’t he notice before? Some reporter.

He is still standing at the foot of the walk, a dead bird in each hand, a quizzical expression on his face, when the big glassed front door opens and Miss Colman steps out onto her wraparound porch. Before he can explain, she marches down the steps, shaking a fist. With her fluffy white hair, tiny crabbed face, almond-shaped spectacles, and old-fashioned swishing black dress, she reminds Clark of pictures of Carry Nation invading a saloon. “You devil!” she says.

“Miss Colman, I—”

But she isn’t hollering at Clark or even looking at him. Charging off across her green trimmed lawn, she comes to a halt directly below a thick-trunked leafy oak. “You little devil! Do they teach you on the radio to murder God’s gracious little creatures? Well,
do they
?”

From high in the foliage a voice calls down, “Don’t you yell at me, you old witch!”

Branches shake, then a blond boy’s head appears, followed by the barrel and stock of a BB rifle.

“Donald Poore, get down from my tree this very minute, you radio heathen!”

“Old witch, can’t pay her taxes, don’t you yell at me! Why don’t you just go pay your taxes, ’stead of yelling at me, old witch, old witch!”

“How dare you!”

“My father says if you don’t pay your taxes soon you won’t be living here with the people that
do,
come nineteen hundred and thirty-six.” Donald Poore’s father, F. H. Poore, owns the Smallville Bank and is the wealthiest man in town. Poore is rich: a common quip. “Old crazy witch!”

Miss Colman is livid, trembling with rage, but curiously now unable to speak.

Clark says, “Donny, do what Miss Colman tells you.”

“Don’t have to!”

“Yes, you do.”

“Clark Kent, this is
my
property, thank you very much.” Miss Colman has found her voice again. “I’ll handle things here, if you don’t mind.” She raises her wizened face and calls up at Donny Poore, “I’m going inside right now to telephone your father, you insolent little heathen!”

“Don’t care if you do!”

Setting her jaw, Miss Colman turns and trudges back across the lawn. The heels of her sensible shoes
clonk
on the porch steps. She pulls the door shut behind her.

“Donny, I advise you to come down now while you have your chance.”

“Go away and maybe I will.”

“All right.” Carefully, Clark sets the two birds down on the ground near the tree trunk. “And you might consider taking your game with you.”

Donny shinnies lower, crouches on a branch about eight feet above the ground, his Daisy rifle in a small fist. He is nine years old, dressed in new dungarees with the cuffs rolled twice and a polo shirt sprayed with red, yellow, and green comets and planets. Most of the planets have rings around them like Saturn. “Go on, don’t stand close.”

“All right.” Clark ambles back across the lawn and up onto the porch. Little Donny Poore tosses down his rifle, then drops to the grass. Snubbing his nose at Clark, he tears off without taking the birds with him.

Donny lives directly opposite Miss Colman in a white-and-blue Italianate-style mansion with narrow tall windows, ornamental ironwork, and fish-scale siding. In the side yard is a peaked garden house where the boy is heading now, clutching his rifle by its breech.

Clark shakes his head, wondering how come Maple Street hasn’t ever been changed to Poore Street. Wondering if Miss Colman will be in any mood now to grant him his pointless interview. Wondering if he has outgrown Smallville.

2

Lex Luthor’s mother was buried two weeks ago in Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island. There had been no wake or funeral or burial service, but Lex paid for the plot and the interment. Anonymously.

This afternoon he is climbing the cemetery’s neatly terraced acres and laboriously winding his way past and between headstones. Covering nearly eighty acres, the place is a packed-crowded city of death, and even below the merciless glare of the sun the long shadows crisscrossing helter-skelter from all of the gravestones, needles, crosses, crypts, and monumental angels make it seem weirdly dusklike.

He finds himself in the oldest part of the cemetery, where the graves dating from the eighteenth century are segregated by sex according to Moravian custom. No women
here,
no men
there.
Lex stops and wipes his forehead with the back of a hand.

Where’s his damn mother?

He has half a mind to chuck the wrapper of flowers he’s carrying and just drive back to Manhattan. Nonetheless he strikes off again in a new direction.

Now he is at a little fieldstone house with a push mower leaning against one side, heavy bags of lime stacked below a window, and, visible inside through the half-open door, sundry picks, spades, and shovels. But no one to ask for directions. Lex removes his suit coat, drapes it over an arm, and humming a catchy tune he can’t identify but that has been stuck maddeningly in his mind for the past hour, he tramps on.

He doesn’t know why he’s here. Drove all this way. He finished his discussions with the mayor before noon (the talk had centered upon a variety of upcoming federal works projects, which Lex felt presented ample opportunities for looting), then went on to a fairly pro forma meeting of the Board of Aldermen, finally put in a brief appearance at the Salmagundi Club’s summer art sale. Returning to his Graham 8—he drives the supercharged model—he found himself driving south on Seventh Avenue toward the Holland Tunnel. Yes, all right, he told himself, I should probably scoot over to Hoboken, check on things there. He meant at the commercial printing facility that he owns on Washington Street. Before Lex took it over, purchasing it under the name of Clay Alexander Plenty with cash “left over” from his election campaign, the company’s four large Hoe presses had printed Saturday rotogravures and all of the two-color work for
Time
magazine; now they printed money. Beautiful $10 and $20 counterfeit bills. Lex passed a sheaf of them last week at the Saratoga racetrack.

Even before he went through the tunnel, he realized there was no good reason to visit the shop in Hoboken today. What was the matter with him? He was off, somehow. He lifted a hand from the steering wheel and ran it over the top of his smooth skull. Personally he thinks he looks good, certainly better than he looked once his hair started falling out. His skull
does
resemble the globe—anything wrong with that? Isn’t the globe a symbol? It is. It’s a symbol of wealth and power, a symbol of
everything.

In Jersey City he stopped the car at a florist’s, bought some calla lilies, then got on Hudson Boulevard. He followed that south through Bayonne and across the silvery new bridge that spans the Kill Van Kull to Staten Island. Then onto Richmond Road and over to Todt Hill and the Moravian Cemetery.

Bewildering, really. He never dreamed he would be the sort of man to visit his mother’s grave.

But life is full of surprises.

And here’s another one now: the gravesite he’s been looking for.

After tossing the wrapper of lilies on the still-fresh grave, Lex eases down on a small ornamental iron bench. “You know,” he says, “I was recalling the last thing you ever said to me—you wished me a happy Independence Day. I wonder if after I left you realized it was just too good an exit line to waste. Was
that
it? I mean, for heaven’s sake, Mother, what a thing to do!” He waves a hand in disgust. “I suppose you’d been crazy for a long time, so there’s no blame, of course. Certainly not from me.” He slowly shakes his head.

Somewhere not far off a car door slams, followed by another, then another. Lex vaguely registers the sounds as he gets up and stands at the foot of his mother’s grave. “I’m very disappointed in you—not that I believe you can hear me tell you so. We don’t believe in that stuff, do we?”

He sits down on the bench again.

“I won’t be coming back, Mother.”

His hands are shaking badly. He looks at them in horror.

Springing to his feet again, he paces up and down.

“No, I
didn’t
love you, is that such a crime? Love! If you wanted
that,
you should’ve given birth to Irving Berlin, not me. I gave you something far better than love!”

Even as he says it, Lex isn’t sure what he means, or what the “something far better” might have been—
himself?
His personality, his drive, his retaliatory nature? But as it turns out he won’t have to finish his speech, he doesn’t have the chance, because from the corner of an eye he spots three hatted men in inappropriate black raincoats walking quickly toward him, wending around headstones and monuments.

One of the men reaches inside his coat, and that’s enough for Lex. He ducks and runs. And running, he suddenly and absurdly recalls the title of the song he’s been humming half the afternoon: “These Foolish Things Remind Me of You.”