It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  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.

  III

  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, punchboards, 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.”

  So far, all that Willi can make out are trousered legs. Blue serge. Blue denim. But somebody—presumably “sir”—is wearing a tuxedo.

  “Oh, Christ,” says the tuxedoed man.

  “I told you it was pretty bad.” Blue Denim speaking.

  “And you got here when?”

  “Nine, little bit after.”

  “Where’s Leon?”

  “Upstairs, sir. They cut his throat.”

  “Go see if they took the records, Paulie.”

  “Sticky checked when he got here the first time, boss. They’re all gone.”

  So Blue Serge is Paulie, Blue Denim is Sticky.

  But what about the “boss”? Who is “sir”? Willi is certain he’s heard the man’s voice before. There’s something about it. Something … “tony”? That, yeah, but not exactly, not Ivy League tony; it’s not in the vowels or the sinuses, it’s just … there’s something practiced about it, and confident, like a radio voice you’d listen to if it told you to run out and buy Silvercup bread. Gingerly, Willi lifts the hem of the sheet, hoping to see a little better. No dice.

  “I want all these men removed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And disposed of. And I don’t mean the river. Jersey. Or the Adirondacks.”

  “Sure, boss, no problem. But what about Leon?”

  “Leave him. They’ll call it a robbery.”

  “But they didn’t take any money, sir.”

  “Then empty the register, Stick.”

  “And where do you want all this stuff?”

  “Take it up to Inwood. But, Paulie, before you go sailing in there, check first. Make sure nobody’s waiting for you.”

  “I’ll take along five, six guys.”

  “Excellent. Very excellent, indeed,” says the man in the tuxedo, and boom, Willi suddenly knows who it is standing not ten feet away and giving silky-voiced orders to remove five shot-dead bodies and a ton of illegal gambling equipment. And if he doesn’t manage somehow to click a picture of him, he might just as well tear up all of those Willi the Great business cards and toss ’em off the Chrysler Building!

  The trick of, course, will be to take the damn picture and live long enough to develop it.

  3

  “Your father wants to know if you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine, Mother. Now tell him to go away.”

  “In case you forgot, Lois, he lives here.”

  “Doesn’t he need to brush his teeth or something?”

  “Hold on.”

  While Lois waits, she empties her ashtray into the wastepaper basket and lights another Lucky.

  “Turtle? He’s putting out the trash. What’s going on?”

  Turtle? All of a sudden Lois feels twelve again, the last thing she needs now. “Mom? How come men are such goofs?”

  “For the love of mike! This is a long-distance phone call.”

  “How come?”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “No!”

  “Then I don’t know what to tell you. How do I know about men?”

  “I hate them.”

  “Your father’s a man.”

  “Well, he’s all right.”

  “ ‘Goof,’ ” says Mrs. Lane. “I’m not sure I’m even clear what a goof is.”

  “I’d use a stronger term, but you’re my mother.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Name me one that’s not a sneaky, selfish, sponging liar. And Daddy doesn’t count.”

  “Douglas MacArthur.”

  “Douglas MacArthur.”

  “You asked.”

  “No, I mean—”

  “Will Rogers. Bing Crosby. Fred Astaire.” Then she pauses for a moment and says, “F.D.R.”

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Because your father just came back, and you know how he feels about him. Oh Lois, honey, there are millions of nice men.”

  “I haven’t met any.”

  “Was there anything else, dear? Because your father would like to close up down here and go to bed.”

  On her end of the wire, Lois sobs out, but then says, “No, nothing else.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Who?”

  “The sneaky, selfish, sponging liar that broke your heart tonight.”

  “My heart is not broken, Mother. Where would you get that idea?”

  “Then good night, Lois.”

  “Night, Mom.”

  “Lois?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Dick Powell. Dick Powell seems like a genuinely nice man. From what I’ve read.”

  “Okay.”

  “And what about your mayor? The little fat man? You like him, don’t you? And what about that other one, the mayor’s friend? You sent us that wonderful story about him, that you wrote for your class.”

  “Oh, you mean—?”

  “The way you described him, he sounded like the cat’s whiskers.”

  “I guess. But I’m not really talking about—”

  “So we’ve established that there are many fine and good men in this world, and now we can both go to sleep with grateful hearts.”

  “Did you really like that story, Mother?”

  “Of course.”

  “I did that one back in October. I’m writing much better now.”

  “Well, it was wonderful, and you’re wonderful, and men—most of them—are perfectly wonderful too. And now, my darling Turtle, sweet dreams.”

  After Lois puts the telephone receiver back on its hook, she walks the floor trying to gauge whether her mood has been lifted or whether she’s still wallowing in the Men All Stink Blues. She considers fixing a cocktail, but that’s not what she wants. What she wants is for Willi Berg to call her now and say that he’s sorry, horribly, wretchedly, incalculably sorry. And beg forgiveness.

  Yes, but what she also wants, and quite suddenly, is to go dig out that news story she did for her Local Political Reporting class. She wrote it during her first semester, just before a special election to the Board of Aldermen was called in the wake of the previous office-holder’s inexplicable suicide. It wasn’t the best thing she ever wrote, but as she recalls it now it was pretty decent work.

  She still has it, of course. She keeps everything, has always kept everything, including short stories, poems, themes, and diaries going back as far as the first grade, and clippings and tear sheets from all of her school newspapers, country day through college.

  Her mother liked that story, did she? That silly old thing?

  Without any trouble she finds the typescript in a folder on a shelf in the bedroom closet—she received an “A” for the assignment, naturally—and sits on her bed reading it through. As she does, Lois recalls the terror she felt “covering the story” that morning. Naturally, it wasn’t an exclusive—after all, she was a mere journalism student. She arrived at the Commodore Hotel with Willi Berg, who blithely waved his press card, gripped her by an elbow, and shunted her into one of the ballrooms. He left her then to find a good spot for picture-taking. The place was crowded, but somehow Lois managed to nab a seat in front.

  When the candidate appeared finally for his press conference, she was electrified to see that La Guardia himself had come along to lend support.

  The mayor at her first press conference!

  Could it get much better than that?

  Yes. Yes, it could. Because practically the same moment she summoned the nerve to raise a hand, the candidate—“tall and athletic-looking,” she would later write, “with a full head of wavy red hair”—pointed to her from behind his podium. “Yes, ma’am?”

  Praying her face didn’t look half as drained as it felt, and speaking in a firm, clear voice, the way Professor Gurney had taught her, she asked, “How would you rate your chances for election, sir?”

  Lois smiles now, remembering.

  How would you rate your chances for
election, sir?

  And of course she also remembers the candidate’s single impudent wink and the beguiling way he looked at her, as if she were the only other person in the room.

  “My chances?” said Lex Luthor. “Excellent. Very excellent, indeed.”

  IV

  An incriminating photograph is sought.

  Smoking condemned. The sins of the father and

  the names of the son. The humming alderman.

  ●

  1

  Over the last few months, Lex Luthor has had his picture taken more times, far more times, than in all of his previous life. But while surely that’s a good thing, since it means his political career is flourishing, still Lex feels cold dread whenever someone points a camera at him. For the split second he’s blinded by the flash light he has to quash an imperative instinct to cut and run. No matter who he is now, and he has worked hard to create himself, to build formidable identities both public and secret, at base he remains his father’s son, and his father killed a man, then lived the rest of his miserable existence as a fugitive in constant fear of being recognized, seized, and punished.

  Once, when the family—calling itself the Littles that year—was living in Ashland, Virginia, and Lex was eleven, a photographer snapped a picture of him parading on stilts at the town’s July Fourth picnic. Next morning, it appeared on the front page of the daily newspaper, and there for all to see was Lex’s father cringing in the background, one hand flung up to conceal his face. God, that look of sheer terror. Lex never forgot it. Or forgave it, either.

  Now, decades later and just minutes after Willi Berg leapt out of nowhere and clicked a jeopardizing picture of him, of Alderman Lex Luthor standing in a bookie joint with two known criminals and five murdered men, he wonders if his face looked as stricken as his father’s had on that Independence Day. Jesus Christ, he hopes not.

  But he will never find out—will he?—since that film is never going to be developed. Is it?