It's Superman! A Novel (43 page)

And of course a good many of the movie serials that Clark enjoyed as a young teenager had nifty robots shuffling through them—
Phantom Empire, Flash Gordon, The Undersea Kingdom.

So, yes, Clark Kent is more than just passingly familiar with robots.

Even so . . . when the automobile’s luggage compartment twangs open in his face and he is confronted by a genuine all-steel robot, a robot that assembles itself as it sprouts up and up from a square box, Clark’s first thought is to misconstrue the Lexbot for the latest advance in dairy technology.

He mistakes it for an automatic milking machine.

His fingers are curled under the rear bumper and he is still holding the street coupe lifted a foot and a half off the ground.

The rear tires spin futilely.

The engine is straining.

Or maybe it’s not the engine at all.

Maybe it’s
that
thing.

It is. The whining noise definitely comes from the robot. The whine changes abruptly to a sibilant whistle. That’s followed by a loud clap, a flash of red light. And Clark is blown out of his boots (literally) and sent hurtling backward toward First Avenue,
across
First Avenue, headed for the East River. His cape snapping and billowing and tattered, he shoots down East Thirty-ninth Street at a velocity in excess of a major-league fastball.

The acetate mask sails off his face and spins away.

His blue jersey is scorched black at his solar plexus.

Half of the threads that have kept the big red
S
sewn into place have dissolved into ash, and the appliqué flaps and flutters like a shingle in a gale.

Just before Clark smashes into and pulverizes part of the rocky bluff below and to the south of the Tudor City apartments, and before he is stunned into unconsciousness, he becomes aware of a tremendous explosion.

Somewhere.

Lois sees the cape-man. Faith and Carl Krusada.
Clark’s breakdown. Willi clicks a few. Trapped.
●

1

Lois will always remember—and each time with the same troubling mixture of shame and self-regard—that immediately after Ben Jaeger was shot, two bullets in his chest, the first thing she did was glance at her wristwatch: six past nine by the radium dial.

Former New York City police officer Benjamin Jaeger, who resigned last Friday in the wake of the controversial Lex Luthor criminal investigation, was killed Sunday evening when a gunman suddenly opened fire
—

Shot.
He was
shot
Sunday evening.

That’s all Lois knew for certain, all that she’d witnessed: Ben was
shot.
What kind of a reporter is she, jumping to conclusions? What kind of a person?

Afraid to move, certain she couldn’t, Lois broke from the sidewalk’s protective shadows and ran into the street.

When she dropped to her knees beside him, Ben was laboring to breathe, struggling to lift his head.

A pinkish foam bubbled through his lips.

“Just lie still, okay? ’Kay, baby? Don’t try to get up,” she said, then stupidly (she
knew
it was stupid, so why was she doing it?) Lois forced a hand under Ben’s shoulders and elevated him slightly.

He gasped but then gulped a breath. Breathed out, breathed in again.

So maybe it hadn’t been stupid.

At the hard slam of a car door, Lois looked up. The gunman (Ben had called him Paul;
Paulie)
had slid under the wheel of his two-door—
what?
What make was it? A Hudson, a Gen? DeSoto? Her glance shifted to the cowl of the automobile where the chromium hood ornament—an Art Deco winged locomotive—identified it as a Nash-Lafayette. (Only last month a police-beat reporter had told her to be a “smart girly” and memorize grilles, bumpers, hubcaps, and hood ornaments; it might come in handy, you never know. She’d done just that.) A Nash-Lafayette 3-window coupe, 1936. Okay, but what
color
? Too dark to tell. It looked black but could’ve been green, it could’ve been maroon, could’ve—

She met Paulie’s eyes in the outside mirror.

Lois scuttled crablike around behind Ben, tried dragging him toward the curb. She hadn’t gotten far when the continental heel on her left pump wobbled and snapped off. She sat down hard in the street, legs splayed. Ben toppled against her chest and into her arms.

The Nash made a wide, careless U-turn, slammed hard into a parked Cadillac, stalled, started again, then backed up and roared straight at them.

Lois flung an arm across her eyes.

This couldn’t be happening.

But it was.

Then it wasn’t.

The engine sound changed from a brash throb to a high-pitched caterwaul. Tires screeched and the air thickened with oily smoke, the fetor of heated rubber. When she lowered her arm Lois was pelted with stinging chunks and morsels of tire tread, and the Nash’s fender-mounted headlamps glanced off the street surface and beamed obliquely over her head.

And now . . .

Motor howling, overdrive in clear distress, the street coupe not only has come to a dead stop, it’s raked like a seesaw, the rear section elevated, the front end and waterfall grille sloped acutely down.

Lois checks on Ben, who has lapsed into unconsciousness, and then looks back toward the Nash. The glare-and-dark is disorienting, her eyes water, everything shimmers, refracts, but still—her vision registers something red behind the car, something pennantlike,
flaglike
billowing up, snapping and swirling above the roof.

The back end of the Nash crashes down, the undercarriage kindling sparks and the shock coils twanging. The motor falters before growling back into full power.

Inside the car Paulie-in-silhouette twists around.

Then: more gunfire
(three shots,
Lois notes for later, now that “later” seems at least a possibility).

Glass pelts the street like drenching rain.

Bracing a hand on the ground, Lois secures her balance. As she stands her skull throbs and her legs tremble with the aftershocks of panic. Her focus narrows till she is certain this is no dirty trick of poor light and heavy shadow, no stress-created illusion . . .

(An eyewitness at the scene reported seeing . . . )

(This reporter personally observed . . . )

Half clouded by exhaust smoke, a man in a weight-lifter’s squat is crouched in back of the Nash, holding onto the narrow bumper. Chips of window glass wink in his dark hair, cling to his shoulders, and spangle his—cape; it’s a
cape,
not a pennant or a flag,
a red cape.
Billowing out behind him, lifting, floating down, lifting . . .

The long sloping lid to the luggage compartment springs up, blocking her view.

What are those
sounds
?

Before she can isolate them with nouns and adjectives (piercing whistle? hissing whine?), the luggage lid tears violently from its hinges and somersaults high into the air. Instantly there is a loud sizzling noise and all of the house fronts and grillwork and wrought-iron fences, the leafless trees and parked cars, the garbage cans set out for Monday-morning pickup, are illuminated by an arc of red and yellow-green fireworks that spume from the Nash’s boot.

And the cape-man is gone.

Behind Lois the luggage lid strikes paving with a metallic clatter, bounces, bounces, and hits a curb, spins up, wheels serenely, and crashes through someone’s front window.

Flames lick an ornamental pear tree before they envelop it.

Canted to her right, her weight on the foot in the broken shoe, Lois just stares.

A hand clamps firmly down on her shoulder, spins her.

Willi Berg thrusts a press camera at her. “Here,” he says, “take this.”

She already has it.

“Now run for it, kid—run!”

He shoves her away from the Nash, toward the curb.

Then he scoops up Ben Jaeger in a fireman’s carry.

Farther down the block, another tree, this time an English oak, bursts into flame. The front stoop and enormous bay of a Gilded Age house explode into chunks of brownstone, glass, sash, sills, weatherboard, and jamb.

Suddenly Ronald Colman’s mellifluous voice recites the first sentence of Lois Lane’s favorite childhood novel: “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name being Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.”

Lois turns her head and what she sees now spinning around and around in the street looks like the bastard child of an Electrolux and a knight in shining armor.

“So I called myself Pip,” booms Ronald Colman’s voice from a round mesh loudspeaker in its chest, “and came to be called Pip.”

A low brick wall explodes, a lawn fountain, a post lantern, a wall lantern, a Ford cabriolet.

The Nash-Lafayette.

“Lois!”

Finally she runs for it.

2

While Carl Krusada was in the seminary he knew he was nothing but a phonus-balonus, an imposter-postulant whose professed piety and religious “vocation” were just means to an end, the end being safety in a world gone smash: a roof over his head, three squares a day, and clean clothes on his back (although the clothing, God knows, left something to be desired).

When the Depression
really
hit, back in 1930, and there were no jobs and scant prospects of any turning up soon, Carl panicked and seized the first opportunity that came to mind (actually it first came to his mother’s mind, and she relayed the thought).

He did well enough at the seminary, primarily because he was a good dissembler, but also because he was talented at memorization. That’s a chasuble, that’s an alb, that’s a cruet, that’s a Pastoral candle.
Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo.
Nothing to it.

Following his ordination and his surprise posting to the same parish in Carrolton, Brooklyn, where he’d been baptized, confirmed, and educated through high school, Carl discovered that he didn’t hate what he was doing, despite doing it under false pretenses. Although he disobeyed as many rules as he followed (fish on Friday?
Every
Friday?), he liked being told what to do, enjoyed being a servant of a kind. He didn’t really believe in God but he completely believed in serving the Lord. It was hard to explain, not that he tried explaining it to anyone, but it made sense to him.

Being a parish priest was okay: he played a lot of basketball with the boys at St. Rocco’s, always had time for an afternoon nap, and he got to hear confession. Hands down it was the most interesting of the sacraments, although it quickly destroyed any lingering illusions that Carl still held regarding human beings.

As he chauffeurs Lex Luthor this evening, Carl regales him with tales from the confessional box (the beloved old barber who sold pornography, the Cub Scout den mother who laced her husband’s eggs each morning with atropine), and Mr. Luthor nods and smiles at everything. (Naturally Lex initiated the conversation; Carl wouldn’t have dreamed of initiating anything when it came to the boss.)

For almost three hours they’ve been motoring around with no destination. Midtown. Uptown. Harlem. Inwood. Now on the drive back down Broadway, Carl is saying, “This guy used to come in every few months, local committeeman that everybody liked ’cause he was always taking baskets of food and stuff to the poor. He’d come in, kneel down and go, ‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned, it’s been ten weeks since my last confession. I had impure thoughts fifteen times, I lost my temper five times, and I strangled another prostitute last Thursday.’ You know how the
Daily News
would print all those scare stories about the White Glove Killer? I
talked
to the guy.”

“Human beings,” says Lex.

“Oh, yeah, we’re something else, we are.”

“Yes, you are,” says Lex.

He asks Carl for the name of the White Glove Killer, and Carl gives it to him, watching as Lex jots it down in a small notebook.

After being “dismissed from the clerical state,” Carl briefly considered soldiering, almost joined the French Foreign Legion. He checked and you really could do such a thing! But he never got around to filling out the paperwork. And how lucky was
that
? Otherwise he wouldn’t have ended up with Mr. Luthor.

Once Paulie Scaffa helped him land this job, Carl realized that abiding service was his one true and legitimate vocation. Previously he’d pledged his allegiance to the wrong god.

Now Carl has it straight, and Lex seems to recognize his devotion, his reverence toward him, his worship of him.

Well, sure: now it’s Carl Krusada, not Paulie Scaffa, driving Lex around in the big Lincoln. Carl, not Paulie, that Lex had orchestrate that little elevator-shaft accident back at the Chrysler Building. And it’s Carl, not Paulie, whose tales of human perfidy amuse Lex so much, cause him to smile, chuckle even, and crinkle his eyes.

At twenty-two minutes past nine—Carl checks the dashboard clock—Lex decides he’s ready to head back to the Waldorf. “I’ve thought my thoughts,” he says, “and now I could use a little dinner. It’s been a most satisfactory day.”

“I’m glad, sir.”

“The Lexbot.”

“Perfect name.”

“By this time next year there’ll be one in every household. Probably several.”

“Won’t that be something.”

“And I’ll be announcing a no-interest guaranteed loan program this winter so that even the most unfortunate among us will have
at least
one of his own.”

“I can’t wait to get mine.”

“Don’t be naïve. Believe me, Carl, you don’t want one. I wouldn’t let you
have
one.”

“Sir?”

“You’re too valuable.”

“Thank you, sir.” Carl is thrilled that Lex thinks he’s so “valuable,” but . . .
Why
won’t he let him own a Lexbot? And why is it “naïve” for Carl to
want
one? He wishes he could ask.

Lex sits back against the plush upholstery. “Do you know what I was doing while we took our nice cruise around the city?”

“No, sir.”

“I was making a list. Of who’s to get the first hundred Lexbots that come off the assembly line. They’ll all be gifts. To prime the pump.”