It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  “Clark. For goodness’ sake. You read too many of those magazines.”

  “It was a rocket, Dad.”

  “It was an airship.”

  “Okay. Where from?”

  Mr. Kent didn’t have an answer.

  “Dad …”

  “You’re not from outer space. You’d have four tentacles and a nose like, I don’t know what—a horn.”

  Clark stood up from the table. “I need to go out for a while.”

  And now, after quitting the tangled undergrowth, he limps back out of the wood, returning to where he entered it. He stands in high bluestem grass, with a light breeze carrying a scent of hay across the meadow, and looks south, beyond the Big Pasture, the calf pasture, the broomcorn, the barn, back to his house bathed in the milky light of a near-full moon. He puts back his head, breathes in, and looks up at the stars.

  Around him all the noises of an early summer night erupt again, dissonant and perfect.

  VII

  New York City. Pressing municipal matters.

  Dick Sandglass. Lex visits his mother.

  A pleasant evening with Governor Lehman.

  Adventure in the hospital.

  ●

  1

  Lex Luthor can’t believe it. He watched Stick fire three shots into that sneaky little bastard, into his back—how could he survive? And now, according to the papers, Willi Berg is expected to “make a full recovery.”

  Misdialing twice because of trembling fingers, Lex makes several phone calls. Each calms him down a little bit more. Okay. All right. It’s going to be fine.

  The cops like the kid for Leon’s murder …

  Excellent. Very excellent.

  But once he comes off the dope and starts to talk … ?

  The thing to do is to make certain he never comes off the dope.

  Within an hour that becomes Paulie Scaffa’s job. “And Paulie? See that he doesn’t sprout another wound. You know how to use a hypodermic needle?”

  Hard as he tries, though, Paulie can’t get close to Willi Berg’s room at Roosevelt Hospital. If it’s not his skinny girlfriend hovering over the guy, it’s some blond nurse with a Jean Harlow chassis times ten. Then suddenly there’s an armed bull posted outside his door around the clock.

  Lex has considerable sway with the New York City police department, and in ordinary circumstances it would be simple enough to scrounge up some narcoleptic potsy and stick him in the hospital midnight to eight, the only time safe to do this thing. But it turns out that a plainclothes dick working out of Headquarters’ Detective Division down on Centre Street, someone named Dick Sandglass, reputedly clean and apparently not a brownnose, either sits guard himself at Willi Berg’s door overnight or else selects others for the job.

  Lex’s hands have begun shaking again. For long periods of time he has to keep them held in his pockets. And he’s started to notice that clumps of his hair come out whenever he brushes or combs it.

  Calm down, he tells himself. It’s going to be all right.

  It’s going to be okay.

  But why should he have to worry about this idiot Willi Berg when he has so many other things on his plate? Such as the careful awarding of contracts easily worth twenty-five million dollars for the construction of playgrounds, promenades, and ball fields between the Hudson River and Riverside and Fort Washington parks. Such as the brokering of deals for the expansions of subway trunk lines in Brooklyn and the digging of a new Sixth Avenue subway in Manhattan. That construction alone will run in the neighborhood of sixty million dollars. If Lex plays his cards right, cements certain friendships and eliminates certain gadflies, he can see clear to pocketing two or even three percent of the final budget.

  So many things to do.

  Not the least of which is the destruction of Lucky Luciano’s alliances and various enterprises by means both legal and illegal.

  Everything’s going to be all right.

  It’s going to be okay.

  But why has he suddenly started losing his hair?

  And why the hell is this Dick Sandglass character taking a personal interest in the Willi Berg case?

  2

  “I appreciate you coming here like this, Mr. Sandglass,” says Willi.

  “No problem. I don’t know how I can really help you, kid, but you were always a good pal to my son and that’s worth something. He never had it easy, having a cop for an old man.” You can say that again. And not just a cop, a real Dick Tracy who never takes so much as a free sinker and a cup of coffee. He is a good guy, though, and when Spider and Willi were young, Dick Sandglass would take them both out to Yankee Stadium two or three times every season, and on one memorable occasion, in 1926, to the World Series. It’s how Willi got to see Grover Alexander strike out Tony Lazzeri in the seventh game with bases loaded.

  As a kid, Willi used to wish that Dick Sandglass was his pop, despite all of Spider’s complaints about the old man. No, really—what other dad used to be a drummer in a dance band? On summer evenings he’d come outside with a pair of sticks and beat hell out of the tenement stoop like he was still hunched behind skins on some nightclub stage. Yeah, and he owned a terrific Victrola he’d crank up for spinning disks by Red Nichols and Pinetop Smith, Louis Armstrong, the Goofus Five, the Ipana Troubadours. Willi’s musical education started in Dick Sandglass’s little front parlor. “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider.” “Boogie Woogie.” “Sugar Foot Stoop.” A real good guy, Spider’s dad. It used to be said the reason his wife left him was because she’d got fed up by his honesty. A bull’s wife was expected to own some jewels that weren’t paste, a seasonal wardrobe, her own Ford motorcar, and a summer cottage in the Catskills.

  “So what’s Spider doing these days?”

  “Three to five in Dannemorra,” says Lieutenant Sandglass. “Atrocious assault.”

  “And you couldn’t—?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  Oh.

  Sandglass sends Willi a look that wipes the hopefulness right off his face. But he reaches a hand out and pats Willi’s knee through the bedcovers. “Spider’s holding his own, like I know you will.” He looks at the small radio that Lois brought over yesterday and that’s playing softly on the night table. “Well, I’ll be.” He twists the volume knob. It’s Mildred Bailey singing “Heaven Help This Heart of Mine.” Sandglass listens with obvious pleasure. “Old Mildred,” he says. “The pipes on her!”

  Willi just nods.

  “That’s Buck Clayton on trumpet—you hear that? You couldn’t miss him.”

  You couldn’t? Willi could.

  “Who’s on drums, kid? Can you tell me who’s on drums?”

  “Cozy Cole?”

  “The Coze don’t play with Mildred Bailey! Where you been? That’s either Maurice Purtill or Jo Jones, and I’m leaning toward Jo Jones.” He listens a few more seconds, then lowers the volume.

  “Hey. Kid. I really am sorry you got yourself in such a jam.”

  “You and me both, Mr. Sandglass. And like I said, thanks for coming. Thanks for being here. Those other cops today, jeez, I thought they were gonna tear out my stitches and stick their hands in there.”

  “They won’t rough you up, Willi. I promise. But they won’t lay off, either, not till you start telling the truth.”

  “I swear to God, Mr. Sandglass. I am. Why would I make up something like that?”

  “Maybe it was the first dumb thing that popped into your head. You remember when you and Spider got caught roaming around that Catholic school on Thompson Street? You remember what you said?”

  “I was thirteen!”

  “You said four nuns grabbed you and locked you both inside till you promised to convert.”

  “I was thirteen! ”

  “When somebody comes by tomorrow to ask you more questions, tell the truth.”

  “I been! I swear on my mother!” Who hasn’t visited Willi in the hospital, incidentally. His father, either. Or any of his brothers and sisters. What, they’re going to wa
ste their time on a no-goodnik like him? “I swear on my sweet mother! It was Lex Luthor!”

  “Please.” Dick Sandglass turns to leave.

  “And somebody named Paulie and somebody called Stick. The three of them. I seen them there, believe me.”

  “Stick? Stickowski? Herman Stickowski?”

  “I don’t know any Herman Stickowski, I’m just telling you Lex Luthor was there. I seen him there, him and a guy called Stick and a guy named Paulie.”

  Dick Sandglass rubs his jaw. Then he says, “Ah, you’ve always been full of it, Willi. But I’ll see they treat you right.”

  “I’m telling the truth!”

  “I’ll be outside.”

  “What, I’d kill somebody for my lousy camera?”

  “Willi, from what I hear, you’d kill anybody for your lousy camera. Good night.”

  3

  “Happy Independence Day, Mother.” He let himself in with his key and finds her alone on the terrace in her unnecessary invalid’s chair.

  “I just had a feeling you’d come by today. Do I get a kiss?”

  Lex bends down and lightly brushes his lips against her flaccid cheek, then straightens back up with pressed powder and face paint clinging to them like grit and glue.

  Despite the broiling glare of the midday sun—her apartment’s terrace faces west with views of the Palisades, the Hudson, and the high conical roof of Grant’s Tomb—Lex’s mother has on a black woolen dress from Arnold Constable’s. Around her shoulders she’s draped a fringed maroon shawl. Her legs are covered with a plaid blanket. She’s tucked it snugly around her hips.

  On a small glass-topped table within easy reach stands a small, squat glass filled, Lex knows, with Kentucky bourbon. Beside the glass is a candy dish containing prescription tablets, barbiturates entirely. Around the clock she keeps that dish near to hand, but every time Lex pays her a visit there are more pills in it. He can’t estimate how many there are at the moment, but fifty at least.

  “Sit down, Lex. Are your hands shaking?”

  “No, Mother.”

  “They certainly look it. And for heaven’s sake, will you please stop humming.”

  “I am not humming, Mother.”

  “I beg to differ, Lex. You were just humming ‘Isle of Capri.’ ”

  “Then I beg your pardon.”

  “Sit, child.”

  He does, directly across from her. She seems smaller than she did even last week, more wrinkled, more crabbed and forlorn, more deeply deranged. “And I think you’re beginning to lose your hair. You should see a doctor. Or else shave it all off. You have a nicely shaped skull, which you can be sure you inherited from my side of the family. My dear father had a skull shaped like the world. Excellent. A very excellent skull. He was not, however, bald. None of the men in the Dunn family, to my knowledge, ever were bald. You should do something, Lex. It looks spotty.”

  Lex grunts.

  “How are you coming along with your engineering studies?”

  “I haven’t begun them yet, Mother. I haven’t had time.”

  “Then see that you make time. You know how I feel. Politics are all well and good, but look where they got your father.”

  “My career is quite different from his.”

  “Let us hope. But the future belongs to the engineers, son.”

  “So you say.”

  “So I know. Oh, do what you like, I won’t be around long enough to see what becomes of you anyway.”

  “Mother …” Brows furrowed, he stands up. Just below his diaphragm, his stomach begins to ripple in little fluttering spasms. Bracing both palms on the terrace rail, he looks out over the dark blue Hudson. Firecrackers are exploding somewhere off to the north, probably in Fort Washington Park. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that. You’re not even sixty-five years old.”

  “Am too. I’m seventy. Seventy-one.”

  “Mother! And for all these years …”

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” she says, then leans over the small table, her nose hovering above the glass of bourbon, shifting six inches to hover and twitch above the dish of pills. “What shall it be today, oh what shall it be … ?”

  “Must we go through this every time I come?”

  “The bourbon? Or the barbiturates? Bourbon? Or barbiturates? Eeeny, meeny, miney, moe …”

  “I should be going.”

  “You only just got here!”

  “Have to show my face at a parade or two.”

  “Do you enjoy all that?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “I have plans, Mother.”

  “And what might those be, Alexander?”

  “I don’t think I need to tell you everything I’m doing.”

  “No. You don’t need to. But I’d hoped you might want to.”

  “All right, Mother. I’ve decided to take over all of the criminal rackets in New York City—that’s all five boroughs—and with the money from that … well, I’m not quite sure yet.”

  “Oh Lex, really. I don’t find this at all amusing. Now, sit down!”

  He smiles and remains standing.

  “I’d always thought we had a special bond, you and I. Seeing what we went through together. Fifteen years of hell. But no matter what, I always had you. And I liked to believe that you had me.”

  “I did. I still do.”

  “But you don’t love me. You’ve never loved me.”

  “Mother, that’s not fair.”

  “Ha! Fair.” She plucks out a dark green pill from the candy dish. “Barbiturate? Or bourbon?”

  “For God’s sake!”

  “Bourbon,” she says and takes another sip. “I was thinking just earlier today, don’t ask me why—but do you recall that pot-metal spaceship, that toy I got for you once at a Woolworth’s in Madison, Wisconsin?”

  “Columbus, Ohio. And it wasn’t a Woolworth’s, it was a Kresge’s.”

  “You remember it? Red and yellow with tiny little portholes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you also remember how I was so despondent one day, feeling so worn out from everything, all the running, and your father was already sick, hardly ever working—do you remember?”

  “You were always feeling worn out, Mother.”

  “Oh, Lex, you haven’t grown up to be the kindest man, have you?”

  “You were saying?”

  “That I found you on the rug this one day playing with that little spaceship and I got down there with you … you remember that?”

  “No.”

  “No. Well, I said, ‘Honey, wouldn’t it be nice if we could both just climb into that spaceship and blast off—go to another planet, just you and me?’ I was sick of everything.”

  His hands, Lex realizes, are trembling again.

  “I said, ‘Let’s just you and me get in your spaceship and blast off!’ And you said, ‘I’m sorry, Mother, but there’s only room for one.’ ” She laughs. “ ‘I’m sorry, Mother, there’s only room for one.’ You really don’t remember?”

  “I really don’t remember.”

  She nods. “Always the solemn little boy.”

  “Practical.”

  “And practical. Yes. Well, run along, my solemn and practical little boy, you’ll be late for all your picnics and parades.” She scoops up several pills and, with a tiny wince, puts them all in her mouth. Washes them down with bourbon. “And happy Independence Day to you too, Lex,” she says, turning away her face, then tipping it back, full in the sun.

  4

  On Tuesday evening, July 9, 1935, Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York has dinner in Manhattan with Alderman Lex Luthor at the Hotel Brevoort, Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. Afterward they go by town car to the Booth Theater on West Forty-fourth Street and take in a musical revue (not especially tuneful, but Jimmy Durante and Beatrice Lillie are quite good). Later, they have drinks at Versailles, a nightclub at 151 East Fiftieth Street, where they are joined by Public Works Commissioner Robert M
oses, golfer Gene Sarazen, and wrestling promoter Jack Curley. Later still, they huddle privately for an hour in the Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf-Astoria, Park Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. They conclude their evening in the governor’s suite. Shortly after two o’clock on the morning of July 10, Alderman Luthor is picked up by his driver.

  Early in the afternoon of July 11, Governor Lehman confers in his downtown office with the district attorney of New York County, William C. Dodge.

  On the morning of July 12, D.A. Dodge meets with Thomas E. Dewey, an impeccably dressed prosecutor with black wavy hair and a thick mustache. The discussion lasts until noon.

  The following Monday, July 15, promptly at eleven A.M., it’s announced to members of the press assembled below the steps of the Old County Court House on Chambers Street that Mr. Dewey enthusiastically has accepted a position as special deputy assistant attorney general, charged with conducting a thorough investigation of citywide vice and racketeering before an extraordinary grand jury.

  Although he is not mentioned by name, everyone there knows the target of that investigation is Charles (“Lucky”) Luciano, the undisputed “czar of organized crime.”

  Or at any rate the presumably undisputed czar.

  5

  On Thursday, the first of August, Willi Berg is informed that his doctors have deemed him sufficiently recovered to be moved from his bed in Roosevelt Hospital to the hospital ward in one of the new fireproof brick buildings constituting the model penitentiary on Riker’s Island. The transfer will take place sometime within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, once the paperwork is completed.

  Later that morning, Dick Sandglass tells him, “I’ll still try to keep my eye out for you, kid, but it won’t be quite so easy from here.” Removing a 3 x 5 deckle-edged photograph from his billfold, he inches forward in the chair, closer to Willi. “Recognize this guy?”

  “No.”

  Sandglass sits back, looking disappointed and beginning to put away the snapshot.

  “Who is it?”

  “I thought you might’ve told me …”