The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (42 page)

“Oh.”

“But I do thank you.”

All at once Anapol looked very tired. What with phony bombs and millionaires and threatening letters from famous attorneys hand-delivered by messengers, he had not slept well since Friday. Last night
he had tossed and turned for hours, while beside him Mrs. Anapol growled at him to lie still.

“Shark!” she had called him. “Shark, be still.” She called him “shark” because she had read in Frank Buck’s column that this animal literally could not stop moving or it would die. “What’s the matter with you, my God, it’s like trying to sleep with a cement mixer in the bed.”

I almost got blown up!
he wanted to tell her for the one hundredth time. He had decided to say nothing about the cheap-novelty bomb in the Empire offices, as he had said nothing about the threatening letters that had been trickling in steadily ever since Kavalier & Clay had declared unilateral war on the Axis.

“I’m going to lose my shirt,” he had said instead.

“So you’ll lose your shirt,” his wife said.

“It’s a goddamn very nice shirt I’m going to lose. Do you know how much money there is in radio? With the pins, the pencils, the cereal boxes. We’re not just looking at novelties, you know. This is Escapist pajamas. Bath towels. Board games. Soft drinks.”

“They won’t take it away.”

“They’re going to try.”

“So let them try. In the meantime, you get on the radio, and I have a chance to meet an important and cultivated man like James Love. I saw him in the newsreel once. He looks just like John Barrymore.”

“He does look like John Barrymore.”

“So what’s the matter with you? Why can’t you ever
enjoy
anything you get?”

Anapol shifted a little in bed and produced the latest entry in an encyclopedic display of groaning. As was the case every night since Empire had made the move to the Empire State Building, his knees ached, his back was sore, and there was a sharp crick in the side of his neck. His beautiful black-marble office was so spacious and high-ceilinged that it made him uncomfortable. He couldn’t get used to having so much room. As a result, he had a tendency to sit hunched all day, balled up in his chair, as if to simulate the paradoxically comforting effects of more cramped and uncomfortable quarters. It gave him a pain.

“Sammy Klayman,” she said finally.

“Sammy,” he agreed.

“So then don’t cut him out.”

“I have to cut him out.”

“And why is that.”

“Because cutting him in would set what your brother calls ‘a dangerous president.’ ”

“Because.”

“ ‘Because.’ Because those two signed a contract. A perfectly legal, standard industry contract. They signed all their rights to the character away, now and forever. They’re just not entitled.”

“So it would be against the law, you’re saying,” his wife said with her usual light ironic touch, “for you to give them a piece of the radio money.”

A fly came into the room. Anapol, wearing green silk pajamas with black piping, got out of bed. He turned on the bedside light and pulled on his dressing jacket. He took a copy of
Modern Screen
with Dolores Del Rio’s picture on the cover, rolled it up, and greased the fly against the window. He cleaned up the mess, took off his dressing jacket, climbed back into bed, and turned out the light.

“No,” he said, “it would not be against the goddamn law.”

“Good,” Mrs. Anapol had said. “I don’t want you breaking any laws. A jury hears that you’re in the comic book business, they’ll lock you away in Sing Sing just like that.” Then she rolled over and settled in for the night. Anapol had groaned and flopped and drunk three glasses of Bromo-Seltzer, until at last he hit on the general outlines of a plan that eased the pangs of a modest but genuine conscience and allayed his anxieties about the mounting ire that Kavalier & Clay’s war appeared to be drawing down on Empire Comics. He had not had time to run it past his brother-in-law, but he knew that Jack would go along.

“So,” he said now. “You can have in on the radio show. Assuming there is a radio show. We’ll give you credit, all right, something like, what, ‘Oneonta Woolens, et cetera, presents
The Adventures of the Escapist
, based on the character by Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay appearing every month in the pages of et cetera.’ Plus, for every episode that airs, let’s say you two receive a payment. A royalty. Call it fifty dollars per show.”

“Two hundred,” Sammy said.

“One.”

“One fifty.”

“
One
. Come on, that’s three hundred a week. You’re looking at possibly fifteen grand a year to split between you.” Sammy looked at Joe, who nodded. “Okay.”

“Smart boy. All right, as for Miss Moth here. Fifty percent is out of the question. You have no right to any part of her. You boys came up with her as employees of Empire Comics, on our payroll. She’s ours. We have the law on our side here, I know, because I have spoken to my attorney, Sid Foehn of Harmattan, Foehn & Buran, about this very subject in the past. The way he explained it to me, it’s just like they do at the Bell Laboratories. Any invention a guy comes up with there, no matter who thought it up or how long they worked on it, even if they did it all by themselves, it doesn’t matter, as long as they were employed there, it belongs to the laboratory.”

“Don’t cheat us, Mr. Anapol,” Joe put in abruptly. Everyone looked shocked. Joe had misjudged the force of the word “cheat” in English. He thought it merely meant to treat someone unfairly, without any necessary implication of evil intent.

“I would never
cheat
you boys,” said Anapol, looking profoundly hurt. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “Excuse me. Coming down with a cold. Let me finish, all right? Fifty percent is, like I say, we’d be crazy and foolish and stupid to go along with that, and you can’t threaten me with taking this dolly to somebody else because, like I say, you made her up on my payroll and she’s mine. Talk to a lawyer of your own if you want. But, look, let’s avoid confrontation, why don’t we? In recognition of the fine track record you two have so far, coming up with this stuff, and just to show you boys, you know, that we appreciate what you’ve done for us, we’d be willing to cut you in on this Moth deal to the tune of what—”

He looked at Ashkenazy, who shrugged elaborately.

“Four?” he croaked.

“Call it five,” Anapol said. “Five percent.”

“Five percent!” Sammy said, looking as though Anapol’s meaty hand had slapped him.

“Five percent!” said Joe.

“To split between you.”

“What!” Sammy leapt from his chair.

“Sammy.” Joe had never seen his cousin so red in the face. He tried to remember if he had ever seen him lose his temper at all. “Sammy, five percent, even so, this could be talking about the hundreds of thousands of dollars.” How many ships could be fitted out, for that, and filled with the lost children of the world? With enough money, it might not matter if the doors of all the world’s nations were closed—a very rich man could afford to buy some island somewhere, empty and temperate, and build the damned children a country of their own. “Maybe the millions someday.”

“But five percent, Joe. Five percent of something we created one hundred percent!”

“And owe to Jack and me one hundred percent,” said Anapol. “You know, it wasn’t so long ago a hundred dollars sounded like a lot of money to you boys, as I recall.”

“Sure, sure,” said Joe. “Okay, look, Mr. Anapol, I’m sorry for what I said about cheating. I think you are being very much square.”

“Thank you,” Anapol said.

“Sammy?”

Sammy sighed. “Okay. I’m in.”

“Hold on a minute,” Anapol said. “I’m not done. You get your radio royalty. And the credit I mentioned. And the raises. Hell, we’ll raise George’s pay, too, and happy to do it.” Deasey tipped an imaginary hat to Anapol. “And cut you two in for five percent of the Moth character. There’s just one condition.”

“What is it?” Sammy asked warily.

“We can’t have any more nonsense around here like we had on Friday. I’ve always thought you were taking this Nazi business too far, but we were making money and I didn’t think I could really complain. But now we’re putting a stop to it. Right, Jack?”

“Lay off the Nazis for a while, boys,” Ashkenazy said. “Let Marty Goodman get the bomb threats.” This was the publisher of Timely Periodicals, home of the Human Torch and the Submariner, both of whom were giving the Empire heroes a run for the money now in the anti-fascist sweepstakes. “All right?”

“What does this mean, ‘lay off’?” Joe said. “You mean no fighting the Nazis at all?”

“Not a one.”

Now it was Joe’s turn to rise from his chair. “Mr. Anapol—”

“No, now listen, you two know I bear no goodwill toward Hitler, and I’m sure eventually we’re going to have to deal with him, et cetera. But bomb threats? Crazy maniacs that live right here in New York writing me letters saying they’re going to stave in my big fat Jewish head? That I don’t need.”

“Mr. Anapol—” Joe felt the ground falling away under his feet. “We’ve got plenty of problems right here at home, and I don’t mean spies and saboteurs. Gangsters, crooked cops. I don’t know. Jack?”

“Rats,” said Ashkenazy. “Bugs.”

“Let the Escapist and the rest of ’em take care of that sort of thing for a while.”

“Boss—” Sammy said, seeing the blood drain from Joe’s face.

“And what’s more, I don’t care what James Love feels personally, I know the Oneonta Woolens Company, the board of that company is a bunch of conservative, rock-rib Yankee gentlemen, and they are goddamned well not going to want to sponsor anything that’s going to get them bombed, not to mention Mutual or NBC or whoever we end up taking this to.”

“No one is going to get bombed!” Joe said.

“You were right once, young man,” Anapol said. “That may be all the being right you get.”

Sammy folded his thick arms across his broad chest, elbows out. “And so what if we don’t agree to the condition?”

“Then you don’t get any five percent of Luna Moth. You don’t get the raise. You don’t get a piece of the radio money.”

“But we could still keep on doing our stuff. Joe and I could keep fighting those Nazis.”

“Certainly,” said Anapol. “I’m sure Marty Goodman would be more than happy to hire you two to lob grenades at Hermann Göring. But you’d be finished here.”

“Boss,” said Sammy, “don’t do this.”

Anapol shrugged. “Not up to me. It’s up to you. You have an hour,” he
said. “I want to get this all squared away before we meet with the radio people, which we are doing over lunch today.”

“I don’t need an hour,” Joe said. “The answer is no. Forget it. You are cowards, and you are weak, and no.”

“Joe?” Sammy said, calming himself now, trying to take everything in. “You’re sure?”

Joe nodded.

“That’s it, then,” said Sammy. He put his hand on the small of Joe’s back, and they started out of the office.

“Mr. Kavalier,” George Deasey said now, pulling himself up out of his chair. “Mr. Clay. A word. Excuse us, gentlemen?”

“Please, George,” Anapol said, handing the editor the painting of Luna Moth. “Talk some sense into them.”

Sammy and Joe followed Deasey out of Anapol’s office and into the workroom.

“Gentlemen,” Deasey said. “I apologize for this, but I feel another little speech coming on.”

“There’s no point,” Sammy said.

“This one is aimed more at Mr. K., here, I think.”

Joe lit a cigarette, blew out a long stream of smoke, looked away. He didn’t want to hear it. He knew that he was being unreasonable. But for a year now, unreason—the steadfast and all-consuming persecution of a ridiculous, make-believe war against enemies he could not defeat, by a means that could never succeed—had offered the only possible salvation of his sanity. Let people be reasonable whose families were not held prisoner.

“There is only one sure means in life,” Deasey said, “of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.”

Joe didn’t say anything. Sammy laughed nervously. He was prepared to back Joe up, of course, but he wanted to make sure, insofar as you could ever be sure, that it was really the right thing to do. He was hungry to follow Deasey’s advice—to follow any fatherly guidance that came his way—but at the same time, he hated the thought of conceding so decisively to the man’s cynical view of everything.

“Because, Mr. K., when I look at the way you have our various costumed friends punching the lights out of Herr Hitler and his associates month after month, tying their artillery into pretzels and so forth, I sometimes get the feeling, well, that you may have, let’s say, other ambitions for your work here.”

“Of course I do,” said Joe. “You know that.”

“It makes me very sorry to hear,” Deasey said. “This kind of work is a graveyard of every kind of ambition, Kavalier. Take my word for it. Whatever you may hope to accomplish, whether from the standpoint of art or out of … other considerations, you will fail. I have very little faith in the power of art, but I remember the flavor of that faith, if you will, from when I was your age; the taste of it on the back of my tongue. Out of respect for you and the graceful idiot I once was, I concede the point. But this.” He nodded toward the drawing of Luna Moth, then expanded the gesture with a weary spiral of his hand to take in the offices of Empire Comics. “Powerless,” he said. “Useless.”

“I … I do not believe that,” Joe said, feeling himself weaken as his own worst fears were given voice.

“Joe,” Sammy said. “Think of what you could do with all the money they’re talking about. Think of how many kids you could afford to bring over here. That’s something
real
, Joe. Not just a comic book war. Not just getting a fat lip from some kraut in the IRT.”

And that was the problem, Joe thought. Giving in to Anapol and Ashkenazy would mean admitting that everything he had done until now had been, in Deasey’s phrase, powerless and useless. A waste of precious time. He wondered if it could possibly be simple vanity that made him want to refuse the offer. Then the image of Rosa came into his mind, sitting on her disordered bed, head cocked to one side, eyes wide, listening and nodding as he told her about his work. No, he thought. Regardless of what Deasey says, I believe in the power of my imagination. I believe—somehow, when saying this to the image of Rosa, it did not sound trite or overblown—in the power of my art.