It's Superman! A Novel (47 page)

When she is connected to the
Planet
’s City Room she says, still tickled to say it, “Get me rewrite; this is Lois Lane.”

“Hold on.”

First graf: New York’s latest marvel em-dash call him a miracle em-dash appeared last night in the form of a super hyphen man with the strength of twenty comma make that fifty comma Goliaths cap-G comma the speed of—

“Lois? Perry White.”

Recently hired away from the Cleveland
Plain-Dealer,
Perry White is the paper’s new managing editor, and so far they haven’t hit it off so well. He thinks she’s careless; she thinks he’s stodgy.

“Perry, I asked for rewrite!”

“If this is about that pandemonium on Thirty-ninth Street, relax, we got it covered.”

“But I was
there
! I know what happened at every—”

“I’m pretty sure we do, too.” Then he breaks into a soft chuckle. “Say, do you happen to know a guy named Clark Kent? He’s using you as a reference.”

“What? He’s
there
?”

“Sitting right in front of me. Would you care to say hello?”

“Perry, kick him out! I don’t care what he’s telling you, he wasn’t anywhere
near
Thirty-ninth Street!”

“See you when you get here.”

He breaks the connection.

“No! Perry! It’s
my
story, I was there!
Perry!”

She clubs the telephone receiver against the metal armrest, then keeps it up till the door folds open beside her and a lobby guard asks, “Something the matter, miss?”

Storming past him, Lois very nearly leaves the hospital without first going upstairs to check on Ben.

She’s not coldhearted, though. Steamed, yes, stunned and brutally humiliated, check—but
not
coldhearted.

Sixth floor, Intensive Care.

Flashing her press card, she races past the head nurse’s station, then reluctantly has to backtrack and meekly ask for Ben’s room number.

6115.

The attending nurse is just stepping out into the corridor when Lois arrives in such an overwrought state that she doesn’t recognize her old pal and former roommate till Skinny Simon lets out with a strictly forbidden whoop of surprise.

“Honey! Your coat! It’s covered with blood.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not mine, it’s his,” says Lois, meaning Ben Jaeger’s. “How’s he doing?”

“Better than he should. What’s he to you? The news?”

Lois shakes her head. “Kind of a boyfriend. But not really. What are you
doing
here, I thought you were in California?”

“I was. But here I am.”

“How’s Charlie?”

“I’m not sure, but my guess is pretty nervous. It’s a long story. How are
you?”

“At the moment, Skin, not so great. I nearly got run down by a car and incinerated by a robot. And now I just found out I was scooped by a four-eyed farm boy from Kansas.”

“A
robot
?”

“That’s a long story, too. But I got to run. Where’re you staying?”

“A hotel for the time being. Need a roommate?”

“I might. Call me. Or maybe I’ll see you back here. Tell him I came by, all right?”

“Sure. Hey, am I imagining things or is he the same cop that used to stand guard on our mutual friend that time at Roosevelt?”

“Same cop, yeah.”

“Cute.” Then Skinny adds, “I mean, not at the
moment.
But otherwise.”

As Lois hurries back down the hallway (You could have at
least
taken a
peek
at Ben, she berates herself), Skinny Simon calls, “Hey! I saw Willi out in Hollywood! He took pictures of me in my underwear!”

Lois glances sourly over a shoulder.

No, she really doesn’t need a roommate.

2

Not long after Joseph Pulitzer II sold the once-great but long-ailing New York
World
to the Scripps-Howard company in 1930, it was merged with the
Evening Telegraph
and moved uptown, leaving only two dailies in operation along lower Manhattan’s legendary Newspaper Row: the
Sun
and the
Planet.
The
Sun’s
editorial and business offices, as well as its printing plant, are housed in the Stewart Building near City Hall Park on the northeast corner of Chambers Street and Broadway. The
Planet,
at Spruce and Nassau streets, exclusively occupies a sixteen-story building made of brick with a front facing of polished granite designed by Richard Morris Hunt. A revolving sidereally precise gilded globe of the earth seems, in light both natural and artificial, to be suspended wondrously in midair twenty feet above the rooftop.

While the
Daily Planet
remains located in a neighborhood that is a relic of the newspapering past, its grand old building with its light-filled offices, below-ground printing plant, and spacious marbled lobby (supposedly modeled after a ballroom in the Versailles palace) are all turbines of activity and nervous energy at any time of the day or night.

For example, here it is late on a Sunday evening . . . The giant rotary presses’ rumbling can be heard as far away as a quarter mile, and dozens of delivery trucks, big Federals, are lining up along three sides of the building, waiting for tomorrow’s first edition, the night owl, to come trundling out to the loading docks in bound wet bales. Around in front, taxicabs come and go, dropping off and picking up reporters, photographers, freelancers, press agents. Delivery men from a score of different Jewish delicatessens and late-kitchen restaurants hustle inside, lugging pasteboard cartons packed with bialys shmeared with cream cheese, corned beef sandwiches, coffee and beer and celery soda.

Plenty of cops around, twirling their billys, trading quips with the boxing writers, checking out the pins on the society-page editor, seeing if there are any hot tips to be cadged from the track reporters.

The lobby is bedlam tonight, unsavory-looking men dashing for the elevators, punching the buttons impatiently, smashing into the riders who seem propelled out of the cars when the doors finally unseal. Carny Oates, who has operated the candy and cigar concession for three decades, has seen his share of nights like this one, big-news nights—war, peace, the stock market bust, the Lindbergh snatch, the Ruth Snyder fricassee, the Will Rogers smash-up, the Morro Castle, the Hindenburg, John Dillinger down.

He’s been trying for the past hour and change to get the lowdown on what’s going on, hailing practically every pencil-and-pad man he’s seen race by, even the ones who aren’t his regular customers, but nobody has stopped. Business stinks. Carny relights his stogie, blows out the match. Then he snaps to attention when a cop-house reporter veers over and scoops up a handful of cheap Florida cigars and a box of Chiclets. “Hey! Wilson, what’s going on?”

“Benny Jaeger got shot.”

“The Luthor patsy? No kidding! Who by?”

“I heard it was a robot.”

“What?”

“Gotta run, Carn.” And he does.

A
robot
?

Carny is still puzzling over that when a heavyset woman appears in front of him, red-faced and very bright-eyed, clutching a fat envelope and reeking of alcohol. And because Carny Oates has no truck with soakers, no truck at all, he glowers.

“Where do I go if I want to report something?”

“Depends on what you want to report,” says Carny. “You want to report a giant octopus in the harbor, you go wait on that bench,” he says, pointing to a disheveled man seated over there, clutching himself as though he’s freezing; that’s Mr. Spencer, who drops by three times a week to report an octopus-sighting in the waters between the Battery and Governors Island, although he’ll admit it’s possible it could have been a giant squid, even a German submarine. “And if you want to report cannibalism among the Hebrew citizenry, you can go sit down on that bench,” says Carny, using his cigar to gesture at a rail-thin gray-haired woman seated ramrod straight on a different bench against the same wall. “And if you want to report a pink elephant, sister, whyn’t you just walk around the corner to McCutcheon’s bar and tell it to the fine patrons you’ll encounter there?”

The fat woman blinks at him, seems as though she might burst into tears, then turns abruptly, stumbling when an ankle buckles, and walks purposely across the lobby to one of the uniformed guards.

Carny Oates grins when the guard takes the hippo by an arm and steers her right over to Mr. Spencer’s bench, plonks her down there, and wags a finger in her face.

Glancing at a clock he keeps on a shelf, Carny sees that it’s already midnight—time for a break. He parks his Be Right Back sign in the brass change bowl and ducks under the counter. He is doing some deep-knee bends when he sees Lois Lane trot briskly across the lobby. “Hiya, sweetheart,” he calls. “What do you have to tell old Carny to brighten his lonely night?”

She ignores him and heads for an elevator.

3

Clark Kent is sitting in Perry White’s glass-enclosed office talking to both White and George Taylor when Lois flings the door open without knocking. It bangs against the wall and she barges in. Clark jumps to his feet. The perfect gentleman—that rat!

“Well, hel-lo,” says George Taylor. “You don’t look any the worse for wear.” He smiles and gives her a quick head-to-toe. “Okay, maybe you do.”

“I nearly got myself killed for this story. It’s mine—not his!” she says, pointing like an accuser from a witness box. Him!
That’s
the man!

Clark says, “Lois, please, I wouldn’t—”

“Shut up, you! George, I told him you’d give him a job if he came in with a front-page story and now he’s trying to swindle you. Swindler! He wasn’t there! He wasn’t there!”

Taylor turns to Clark. “Were you there?”

“No, sir. But—”

“Shut up, kid,” says Taylor, and turns back to Lois. “He wasn’t there. But he never said he was. However, and just in case this might be
news
to you, at least fifty other reporters
were.
Including a few of ours.”

“But I was there first!”

“Did you phone it in?”

Lois clamps her jaws, grinds her teeth, and breathes in through her nose with such aggression it sounds like water boiling. When she can speak again she says, “Just do not hire that—
farmer.
He’s a fraud!”

Perry White has had enough. “He well may be. But are
these
?” he says, grabbing a batch of damp prints from his desk and smacking them into Lois’s hand.

She riffles through them as a phantom buzz starts deep in her ears. The car, the cape. The robot. The robot again, that time blurred, speed dramatically smudging its shape. Then
him.
Then him again. Him again. His hair like a bomb flash, his gymnasiast clothing in such tatters that he looks almost comical and the print like a production still from a Hal Roach comedy. Him
again.
The big red
S
dangling by a thread or two. Him again, him again.

Willi’s pictures.

Lois tosses them all back on the desk.
Willi’s
pictures. What is she going to say now? Does she have to talk? She puts a hand up to her lips. Can’t she just leave? Where’s a phone? She needs to call her father.

“I want a sidebar,” she says, “for the red-eye edition.”

Both Taylor and White stare at her.

For all she knows Clark Kent does, too.

But she can’t look at him.

“A sidebar,” says Taylor. “Convince me.”

Then as her two editors look on in amazement (only Taylor blushes), Lois undoes her top buttons, sticks a hand inside a brassiere cup, and plucks out the small metal plate mark she’s kept hidden there for the past two hours. She holds it up, pinching it between her thumb and first finger so that her hand won’t tremble. “We finally got Lex Luthor dead to rights.”

Struggling to keep her breathing natural, she passes over the plate mark to George Taylor.

His eyebrows go up, as do the corners of his mouth.

“Kent,” he says, “you’ll have to excuse us. See the paymaster on your way out, he’ll settle up. And Kent?”

“Yes, sir?”

Lois cringes at how suddenly hopeful he looks. Pitiful.

“Tell your shy friend if he wants a job he’s got one. Otherwise we’d be happy to look at anything else he’d care to show us.”

“Yes, sir,” he says quietly and looks as if he might cry.

“Nice meeting you, Kent,” says Perry White, showing him to the door.

“You too. And you too, sir,” he says back to George Taylor. “But I was wondering . . .”

“Kent, we’re really busy now,” says Taylor.

“Of course. I’m sorry. But if, well, if anything
does
come up in the way of a job for me . . .”

“Get us a front-page story of your own and I’ll
give
you a job. All right? Now beat it.”

As Clark is stepping through the doorway looking melancholic, looking very young, a copyboy ducks underneath his arm, scoots around him and, with near-triumphant brio, slaps down a copy of the night-owl edition on Perry White’s desk.

The war-declared-size headline screams: IT’S SUPERMAN!

4

He’s embarrassed and sore.
Angry.
And heartsick. More heartsick than angry. But that’s stupid. How can he measure, how can he gauge? He’s upset. Mostly about how she treated him.

She really thought he’d sneaked around behind her back to scoop her. That he’s the kind of a guy who would
do
such a thing. Is capable of it.

She hates me.

Clark is standing at the paymaster’s window, two floors below the City Room. Third in line. It’s twenty minutes past twelve by the wall clock. Yesterday seems like it took a whole
week,
this past week seemed like a month,
two
months. What if every day, every week seems as long? A person couldn’t stand it.

He doesn’t want to plow into robots all the time. That much he knows. He wants to go to work in the morning like regular people. Have a desk, drawers full of rubber bands, his own typewriter. He wants to talk to guys at the water fountain.
And
girls. One in particular.

Although at the moment she’s the last person on
Earth
he’d talk to.

A farmer.

And just what was so wrong, Clark wants to know, with being a farmer? Do you like green vegetables? Do you like fruit? Do you like
bread
? Do you like Cream of Wheat? Then quit insulting farmers.