It's Superman! A Novel (6 page)

When he turned fourteen and it was legally permitted, Willi quit school to work. His parents approved. He would, he agreed, fork over three-quarters of whatever he earned. He found a two-dollar-a-day job pearl diving at a Village restaurant, but his hands got so chapped he quit after a month and found another one—general assistant at a passport-photo studio.

That was the first time Willi Berg ever had been around camera equipment, and it was love at first sight.

Ingratiating himself like crazy, Willi soon traded in his push broom and dustpan for an 8x10 view camera and tripod, spending his days touching off loads of flash powder, developing glass plates, making proofs by running outside and exposing paper to the sun. I can do this! he’d think. And in a short time he did it far more skillfully than his boss.

He moved on to a commercial house where he took pictures of merchandise for mail-order catalogs—pianos, brass beds, chandeliers, caskets. Occasionally he would rent one of his employer’s 5x7 cameras for the weekend, lug it up to Central Park, and earn some money photographing children at Rowboat Lake, Belvedere Castle, Bethesda Fountain, the zoo. He had cards printed that read: Willi the Great/“Photography like life.” He gave them to parents, who were instantly charmed by his cockiness and subsequently pleased by the quality of his work.

Late one Saturday afternoon on his way back to the subway, Willi saw a man who’d just been shot dead lying half on the sidewalk, half in the curb, and a big Pontiac whizzing away. He set up his tripod and waited for a cop. When at last one came along, Willi took a picture of him stooped beside the body. He sold it that evening to the
Star,
and next day it ran on the front page, first three editions. That earned him ten bucks and a photo credit. He was flush, he was happy, and later that same week he turned fifteen. It was autumn 1929.

Crash!

It took a few months for the photography studio to fail, but eventually it did, and then Willi couldn’t find more work. Who could? His father still had his job—rolling a push-boy through the Garment District—but he’d had to take a severe pay cut. Two of Willi’s big brothers (Harry and Gene) continued to contribute to the family, but rarely more than three bucks a week. Freddy was an invalid by then, thanks to a fall from a scaffold, and half off his rocker. His older sister Ida could sew like the dickens, so she did all right, working a Singer machine. She gladly forked over eighty cents of every dollar she earned, but the rest she deposited into a piggy bank heavy as a cinder block that her fiancé “Murph” Silverman had won for her at Luna Park.

That damn piggy bank.

Using the edge of a butter knife to pry open the tin plug on the pig’s underbelly, Willi started helping himself to a few dimes and nickels, a quarter, or a dollar bill now and then, then every day, using the money to rent a German Ica and buy darkroom time to develop his plates. Happening upon that freshly dead gangster on Central Park West had steered him to his specialty, showed him his true calling—he and the city’s picture newspapers, the tabloids, were meant for each other.

Nights, he trawled the boroughs of New York, photographing auto wrecks and blazing tenements, husbands in bracelets grieving for wives they’d just murdered, the occasional live baby in an ash can. Rubouts in spaghetti joints, lady burglars being led from Central Booking, always between a robust matron and a grinning detective. He loitered around police headquarters, local precincts. He’d sell a picture and replace the money he’d “borrowed” from Ida. But then he’d borrow it back the next day, and maybe a little extra.

He rented a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic, faster, lighter, and no more plates. No more of that explosive flash powder, either! But then of course he had to buy flashbulbs and sheet film. Wouldn’t it be great if he didn’t have to
rent
his camera—if he could
buy
one? By then he’d saved up some money of his own, just not quite enough.

That damn piggy bank.

So with more of Ida’s coins and cash, he purchased a secondhand Speed that the first owner—a Romanian who worked at the Empire City racetrack—had ingeniously adapted to use roll film. As soon as he’d sold some pictures that he took with it, he put the money right back into his sister’s bank. Well, he couldn’t put it
all
back, not yet. But he
would.
Eventually. Long before she needed it.

When he finally got his comeuppance (and Willi never denied he didn’t
deserve
it) should have been a night to celebrate. In one twelve-hour shift he’d sold a picture of the vice-president of the United States picking his nose outside the Waldorf, a barge collision, a killer’s old mother weeping at his arraignment, and a safecracker who’d been worked over plenty by the most vicious plainclothes cop in Brooklyn. He was whistling “Stardust” when he came home around six in the morning, walking on air. But as soon as he opened the door, it was uh-oh.

In the kitchen Willi’s mother stood planted with her arms folded like the Golem of Prague. By the window, looking out as if contemplating a jump, his father pressed the heel of a hand against his forehead. His older brothers, even Freddy on his crutches, milled around drinking coffee. Quickly they all put down their cups. The little ones were either holding hands with great solemnity, or else bawling their heads off somewhere in a corner. And Ida, poor plain Ida, looked stricken. She sat at the table with her piggy bank in front of her, a measly pile of coins beside it.

Lucky for Willi he’d left his camera, as he always did, in a rented locker. Otherwise he might have had his head dented in with that too, not just the piggy bank. Harry did the honors. And then, except for his father, everybody kicked him while he was lying on the floor curled like a shrimp.

4

It takes some doing, but at last Willi convinces a cracksman friend named Patsy Cudhy to loan him a good set of picks, but under two conditions: that Willi is gone no longer than half an hour, and that he brings Patsy back a Buescher saxophone, preferably a True-Tone model. Tenor, not alto. And with the satin-gold finish, if he can find one in the dark. Patsy fancies himself quite the virtuoso on a gobble-pipe; his little apartment off Times Square is full of them.

But on his walk to the pawnshop—on Seventh Avenue in the high Thirties—Willi has second thoughts about the whole thing. Does he really want to do this? If he gets caught, he’ll land in jail. With criminals! Is it worth it just to get his camera out of hock—well, off the shelf, off the
premises
—a couple of days sooner than he would otherwise?

Yeah, but I
really
want to shoot that fire, he thinks.

But what if some potsy strolls by checking doors?

By this time he’s walked past the hockshop and the coast, damn it, is clear.

He pretends to study a window display of flatware, phonographs, trumpets, guitars, baseball mitts, paste jewelry, toasters . . .

His heart is racing, kicking.

Either do it, he tells himself, or go.

He turns to go, but then he does it.

And to his enormous surprise, he does it quickly, efficiently.

Second pick he chooses:
bingo.

Now Willi is inside the pawnshop, the door shut, and his head is throbbing arhythmically. Get your stupid camera and blow, he thinks, carefully moving through the gloom toward the waist-high counter that runs half the length of a side wall. Behind it are deep metal shelves jammed with good and bad cameras and camera equipment, but Willi knows exactly where his Speed is. Yesterday he watched where Chodash the pawnbroker randomly stuck it. So just grab.

As Willi rounds the far end of the counter, his left foot collides with a solid object and the sole of his right shoe comes down in a puddle of something gummy and slides. A moment later he lands hard on his prat. What the
hell?
He scrambles to get up but keeps slipping. The seat of Willi’s trousers is wet and so is one of his shirtsleeves, the cuff a sodden blotter. Both palms feel slathered with warm paste.

What’s that
smell
?

Then all at once he knows.

And knows what he slipped in, as well.

“Mr. Chodash?” he says, reaching.

Good news. Gruesome discoveries.
Willi plies his trade. Trapped!
Lois calls her mother to talk about men.
●

1

“Lois?”

“Professor Gurney?
Oh my God, I thought you were someone else.”

“Boyfriend?”

“
Ex
-boyfriend. And I’m so sorry—believe me, sir, I don’t go telling everybody that calls to please drop dead.”

“ ‘Sir’? School is out, Lois. Call me John.”

“There are still exams.”

“You don’t think we actually
read
those things, do you?”

“Professor Gurney, was there a reason . . . ?”

“As a matter of fact, there was. I have some very good news I thought I’d pass on. Lois, my star pupil, you are no longer speaking to an associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, you are speaking to the national tours editor for the Federal Writers Project.”

“Oh my gosh! That’s
incredible
!”

“Sought out by Harry Hopkins himself.”

“You must be thrilled,” says Lois.

“Can’t say I’m crazy about living in D.C., but yes. To the gills. Play your cards right, my girl, and I’ll get you a job writing for the American Guide series. Or better yet, I’ll find one for your ex-boyfriend. In North Dakota. Say, is that a giggle? I love a girl that giggles.”

“Professor Gurney . . .”

“I’m calling to invite you to a celebration. Tonight. Say yes.”

“That’s so thoughtful of you, but—”

“Stork Club.”

“I really don’t—”

“Harold Ross’ll be there. Westbrook Pegler. George Jean Nathan.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Lois! For shame. I’m a journalist, I don’t ‘make things up.’ Hemingway might drop by. And Irving Berlin.”

“Stop!”

“Lenny Lyons, Clare Boothe Luce. Walter Winchell.”

“Now I know you’re fibbing. You
hate
Walter Winchell.”

“It’s a party, Lois! Grudges are buried, feuds forgotten. Morals forbidden.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

“Like what? Oh, that. Lois, you’re in New York City, not back home in darkest Poughkeepsie.”

“I don’t
come
from Poughkeepsie. And I thank you, Professor, but I won’t be able to attend your party. It was kind of you to ask.”

“ ‘Kind of you to ask.’ Don’t polite me to death, darling.”

“I should get off the phone. I’m expecting another call.”

“From the Drop Dead Kid?”

“From my boyfriend. Yes.”

“I thought he was the ex.”

“Maybe I’ve changed my mind.”

“Positive you won’t come out?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, then . . .”

“Wait!”

“Still here.”

“Professor Gurney, you’ve . . . you’ve been a really good teacher.”

“Obviously not good
enough.
So long, Miss Lane.”

2

By the flame of a paper match, Willi confirms it: what he fell over was a body, what he slipped in was blood. Mr. Chodash and Mr. Chodash’s. The pawnbroker’s throat has been sliced open from ear to ear.

Willi shakes out the match, and despite being scared clammy he carefully stands and grabs a gooseneck lamp from the counter, squats down again, switching on the light, aiming it to create a dramatic clash of shadows. Then he finds his beloved Speed Graphic—thank God it still has film—and gets to work.

Following each exposure, he pops out the gooey flashbulb and fits in another.

Now for the unpleasant business—calling the cops, going through all of that.
I came by to get my camera, the door was open and there was poor Mr. Chodash
—
can I leave now?

But the telephone wire has been torn from the wall. He wants just to leave, scram out, but he can’t—because he can’t sell any pictures without bringing in the bulls. They’ll murder him if he doesn’t. Is there another phone? In the back? Worth a go-see, Willi decides, and that’s how he comes to find, in an aisle between floor-to-ceiling shelving, an open trapdoor. Half a dozen wooden steps lead to a cellar with lights burning.

He creeps down.

Willi has seen his share of handbook and wire joints, has even tagged along on a few gambling raids, thanks to his pull with a vice cop named Dick Sandglass (he used to play three-sewer stickball with Dick’s kid, Spider), and they all look roughly the same, whether in a candy store, a dry cleaners, a social club, or a hockshop: you have your cashier’s cage, your trestle table, your totalizers, your blackboard, your pencils, your sharpeners, your parlay slips, and your telephones.

There are a dozen here in the cellar, their cords all sliced.

This particular setup is slightly larger than most, to accommodate an inventory of pinball machines, punch-boards, and nickel slots overlaid with bedsheets and jammed together at the far end of the cellar near a garage-style rolling steel door that seems like it could withstand an assault by a Whippet tank. Apparently the place is both a working house and a warehouse.

It’s also a death house.

Five seated men with their faces turned left-cheek-down on the table in front of them like schoolchildren napping have been shot at very close range.

Definitely, Willi Berg owns the front page, the third page,
and
the centerfold tomorrow of whichever tabloid he wants, but right now he’d gladly settle for the fire at the toy factory, page six, and fifty bucks.

He’s snapped off half a dozen shots when he hears mumbled voices in the alley behind the building, then a clasp lock snapping open. As the steel door rumbles up, Willi ducks under a pinball machine, reaching back to tug gently down on the bedsheet to give himself a tad more cover, praying he doesn’t pull the whole
ferschlugginer
thing off.

“—pect you, sir, but I’m glad you came.”

“Tell.”

“It’s pretty bad, sir, and I seen some stuff in my day.”

“The boss said tell, he didn’t ask you what you seen in your day.”