It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  In the still-current number of the Herald-Progress, Clark’s name appears below “Ewing L. Herbert Celebrates 95th Birthday,” “History of Basketball to Be Topic at S’ville Study Club,” and “Farm Growth Since ’31 Is Epic of Toil.” In addition to reporting those long stories, he contributed several unsigned squibs, about a sawmill boiler explosion, the proposed teachers’ contract for School District No. 43, and the robbery at a farmer’s cooperative in Paola, over near the Missouri line, being attributed to members of the Jiggs Makley gang.

  The final sentence reminds readers that Jiggs Makley died right here in Smallville, killed last May by a freakishly ricocheting bullet fired from his own gun.

  Clark’s father scowls over that last item prior to taking up scissors and cutting it out of the paper. Most of his son’s other stories from the current edition, clipped out and neatly trimmed, are spread over the kitchen table, where there is also a jar of mucilage and a scrapbook. Mr. Kent keeps every story Clark writes, even those not amounting to more than public notices. Well, he can’t help it, he’s proud. And Clark, who claims to be embarrassed by the sheer thoroughness of his dad’s new hobby, is deeply touched by his diligence.

  It is ten o’clock in the morning and Clark is slathering two thick slices of bread with mayonnaise, piling on ham. He carefully cuts the sandwich in half on a diagonal, wraps it in paper, and sticks it in a carryall he bought at the mercantile store with his graduation money. In the carryall, which he can either sling over a shoulder or wear like a backpack, he keeps two notepads, a clutch of pencils bound with a rubber band, a cheap pencil sharpener, and a book he borrowed recently from the public library—the collected journalism of Richard Harding Davis. His interest in the science-fiction pulps has waned, may have even lapsed entirely. He no longer feels compelled to write that stuff, either.

  “I’ll be back sometime this afternoon,” he says, buckling the flap on his carryall.

  “Whenever’ll be fine.”

  “I think I got all my chores done.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “But I can help you with that sump later, if you like.”

  “Alger and I’ll take care of it.” As soon as he says that, Mr. Kent detects an ambient shift in the kitchen air, a chilling-down. He lays aside the mucilage brush and looks over a shoulder, meeting Clark’s gaze. “You can’t do everything, son. Well, maybe you can, but there’s no need to. Alger’s a good kid.”

  “I’m not saying he’s not.”

  “No, I don’t think you are. But don’t be jealous of him, either. Okay?”

  For almost a month—ever since Mr. Kent learned that Alger Lee’s mother left suddenly for Detroit because her husband had been injured during a strike at the Ford plant—the boy has been helping around the farm three days a week. Sometimes four. Five, occasionally.

  “Dad, come on. ‘Jealous.’ I just don’t—I mean, can we afford to pay somebody?”

  “Let me worry about that,” says Mr. Kent. “So what’s the scoop today?”

  “Ah, big doings. Nellie Colman is donating her collection of colored postcards to the Smallville Library.”

  “Sounds like a slow news day.”

  Clark makes a face, hitching his carryall onto his left shoulder. “They all are,” he says.

  3

  In Washington, D.C., where buildings and monuments shimmer like mirages in the swampy heat, Willi Berg and Lois Lane are disagreeing about hair dye.

  “I’ll look ridiculous with blond hair! You want me to look like Buster Crabbe?”

  “Believe me, cookie, nothing’s gonna make you look like Buster Crabbe.” She puts a hand to her forehead and it slides across the moisture there. Her blouse clings to her back and there are embarrassing half-moons of perspiration below her breasts. She desperately wants to take a cold shower, but there is no shower, no tub, in this suffocating little room they’ve rented. “So not blond, what then? Red?”

  Despite their physical discomfort and cramped surroundings, despite even the constant dread they’ve been living with—Lois since Willi called her yesterday morning from a telephone booth in Jersey City, Willi since this whole bad dream started almost two months ago—despite that, they burst into laughter. Feels good.

  “That’s it!” he says. “Willi Berg the Irishman!”

  “Straight from the Old Sod.”

  “Willi O’Berg.”

  “Leprechaun Willi.”

  Lois is enjoying this, but it’s not getting them anywhere. “Maybe you should just shave your head.”

  Wrong thing to say.

  New York dailies are scattered around the room, on the table, the floor, the narrow studio couch where they slept last night. In the Mirror, the Post, and the Planet: pictures of the newly bald and lustrous-pated Lex Luthor.

  “I’m sorry,” says Lois, “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Willi twists open the cold-water tap on the tiny sink basin. Water trickles out warm. To hell with it, he splashes some on his face, then slicks back his hair. Lifting his eyes, he peers into the shaving mirror. “Maybe I should just get some Brylcreem, go for that Valentino look. Nobody’ll recognize me then.” He savagely twists off the tap.

  “You really want to do it red?”

  “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care!” Willi throws himself down on the couch and moans at the ceiling grooved with cracks and missing chunks of plaster. He flops out one arm and grabs his package of Camels. “I’m dead anyway.”

  “Cut it out. You’re luckier than you know.”

  “Oh yeah?” He rolls onto his stomach. “How you figure that?”

  “Right now you should be sitting in a cell on Riker’s Island. Or did you forget?”

  He strikes a match.

  “Or lying on the bottom of the river with two buckets of cement on your feet.”

  Touching the match to the end of his cigarette, Willi inhales, then lets smoke jet through his nostrils. “They weren’t ever gonna dump me. They liked me.”

  The driver of the Dodge sedan that took Willi Berg through Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge was named, or called, Dakota. “Like the states,” he said, actually reaching back to shake Willi’s hand while they were stopped for a light. The man who’d snatched Willi from Roosevelt Hospital introduced himself as Carol, which sounded like a girl’s name, unless it was spelled C-a-r-r-o-l-l and was his last name. Willi didn’t feel he should ask.

  “Dakota, you think we should stop and put a blindfold on this bird?”

  “Should we? I dunno.” Willi sensed Dakota was not a man who liked the burden of decision making.

  “If you want,” said Willi, “I’ll close my eyes.”

  “What do you think, Carol?”

  “All right, kid, close your eyes.”

  Willi closed them, kept them closed, and they rolled through the streets of Red Hook. The car finally stopped. Dakota helped Willi from the back, then he and Carol walked him to a door that somebody else opened from inside.

  They brought him to a room and said he could open his eyes. The third man, the man who’d let them all in, was small and fat with sparse sand-colored hair combed in strings across the top of his head. There was a card table and several chairs, that’s all. “You’re gonna wait here,” said Dakota.

  Willi nodded. He wanted to ask for how long, for who? But didn’t.

  “You hungry?” asked the fat man, whose name Willi never got. “We could bring you something.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Thirsty?”

  “A little.”

  The three men went out and locked the door. Willi sat down, bewildered, elated, terrified. He had no idea what time it was. Did it matter? He was running a low fever.

  Soon the fat man returned with a half-filled bottle of red wine and a glass that once contained jelly and was stenciled with pictures of Popeye the Sailor and Olive Oyl and Wimpy.

  He hadn’t meant to, but Willi finished the bottle, and what with all the tension of the evening h
e had a real buzz going by the time the door opened again and Meyer Lansky walked in with Joe Adonis and Benny Siegel.

  “Did you recognize them all right away?” Lois asks him now as she cuts Willi’s hair preparatory to washing and coloring it. She can’t imagine what he’ll look like with red hair! She loves it glossy black.

  “Sure. I even seen Adonis once before, down at police headquarters. I might’ve taken his picture, as a matter of fact.”

  “Did they have guns?”

  “I guess. Although Meyer doesn’t pack, I’m told.”

  “Oh, it’s Meyer, is it?”

  “Well …”

  “I’m just teasing you.” She drags a comb through Willi’s hair and snips again with the scissors. “Did they sit down, or—what?”

  “Lois, I told you all this before.”

  “I need details.”

  “You ‘need’ details? What for? You gonna write up the story?”

  “I might.”

  Willi twists around. “Don’t even joke!”

  “I don’t mean tomorrow.”

  “Never! Are you crazy?”

  “Do you want this haircut or don’t you?”

  “You can’t ever write about this.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, I mean it. Promise me you won’t ever write about this.”

  “I promise,” she says, but to herself she defines “this” as right now, as the haircut she is giving Willi, and she can promise, without hesitation, never to write about it.

  She resumes carefully trimming around his right ear. “So. Did they sit down with you? Or stand?”

  “Lansky sat. The other two stood.”

  “You don’t have to call him Lansky just for me.”

  Meyer Lansky was short and coarse-featured, but unlike his companions, whose eyes stayed frosty even when they smiled, even when they laughed, he could express amusement with his whole face—lips, eyes, nostrils—and Willi felt that it was genuine, that here was a guy who could enjoy himself and didn’t believe you had to be sour to be a good mobster.

  Meyer removed his homburg and sat down at the card table. He picked up the wine bottle and tipped it over Willi’s empty glass. Not a drop left. “Can I get you more?”

  “No, thank you, Mr. Lansky.”

  “Ah. So introductions are not in order. You know my associates?”

  “Not personally.” That was the wine talking, and Willi wished it would shut up.

  Meyer smiled: mouth, nostrils, eyes. “We’ve heard some things you’ve been saying, supposedly saying, and thought we should hear them confirmed or denied directly by you. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know which things I’m talking about?”

  Willi was in a panic now. It was like sprays of chipped ice had spumed through his upper chest and down his legs. He had to slide his hands from the table and sit on them. Was Meyer Lansky hooked up with Lex Luthor, was that it? Had Lansky heard about the story Willi told the cops? Oh God, he didn’t want to be shot again. “I didn’t kill Leon Chodash, if that’s what you mean.”

  Meyer frowned. “I know you didn’t kill Leon Chodash, Mr. Berg. He did.”

  Joe Adonis, a thick, sloppy-fleshed man in an exorbitant gray silk suit that glimmered when he moved, raised a hand—doing it in a comic manner, like a schoolchild who knew the answer to a question.

  “We’re only interested,” said Meyer Lansky, “in who you saw in the basement of Mr. Chodash’s establishment.”

  “I saw three men.”

  “Okay,” said Meyer, rubbing his palms together. “If you think you’re being coy, we’ll be glad to show you that’s not the thing to be.”

  “I’m not coy. I’m scared.”

  “No need.”

  “And a little drunk.”

  “Jeezus Ka-rist,” said Benny Siegel, “is this sheik for real?”

  Meyer smiled again, taking out a package of cigarettes and a box of matches and putting them down in front of Willi. “Smoke. It’ll sober you up.”

  “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”

  “Smoke!”

  “Yes, sir.” With fumbling hands Willi lighted up.

  “You need an aspirin?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Good,” said Meyer. Then following a long pause, he said, “Lex Luthor.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “He was there.”

  “You saw him?”

  “I took his picture. That’s why they came after me.”

  “And this picture is gone?”

  “I wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t.”

  “None of us would, Mr. Berg. How’s that cigarette?”

  Willi had not been smoking it, just letting the tobacco burn to an outcurving ash, but now, fixed by Meyer Lansky’s no-longer-amused gaze, he took a long drag. “It’s fine, thank you,” he said.

  “Keep the pack.” Meyer pushed his chair back.

  “Thank you, but I really don’t—”

  “Keep it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now as he sits in this airless rented room with a towel wrapped in a turban around his head, Willi Berg lights a fresh Camel from the coal of the one he just finished. He never smoked before in his life, and now he’s a nicotine fiend. A chain-smoker. And these things aren’t cheap, either. Nickel a pack. Thank you, Mr. Lansky. Thank you very much.

  “It’s incredible,” says Lois. Dressed only in her brassiere, bloomers, and a garter belt, she stands with her back to Willi, shaking clouds of talcum powder oyer her chest and stomach, along her arms, down her thighs and calves. She begins to smooth it in. “Just incredible.”

  “What is?”

  “That they didn’t even know who their rival was.”

  “Until I showed up. Yeah, it is.”

  Willi is fascinated by the little bumps of her spine, and by the satin tag that sticks out below where fastening hooks secure the narrow band of fabric across her back. Last night he read the tag: 34B. What does that mean? he wanted to know, and she explained that it’s how they’re sizing these things now. Oh.

  “When are you meeting this guy?”

  “Five.”

  “Trust him?”

  Lois slips into a clean blouse. Buttoning it up, she turns around to Willi. “I can handle John Gurney.”

  “He ever put the moves on you?”

  “He was my college professor

  Willi says, “Mmmm.” He watches her sit down and roll on and secure her nylon hosiery. She stands again and steps into her skirt, tucks in her blouse, zippers up the skirt. She rummages through her handbag and takes out a small cylinder.

  “Lip paint?”

  “Oh, stop. Do you want to be safe or not?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Then hand me my hairbrush and shut up.”

  He does.

  “How do I look?”

  “Too good.”

  “Thank you.” She glances at her watch. “I still have time.”

  “For what?” He walks up behind her and puts his arms around her middle, his cheek to hers, and cinches hard.

  “I’m glad you’re all recovered, but don’t you dare.” Pushing him away gently, Lois tosses a couple of flat pillows off the studio couch, carefully smoothes the seat of her skirt, and sits down. Pats a place beside her. As soon as he joins her, she touches his face. “Willi … ?”

  “Yeah?” he says nuzzling her hand, enjoying the touch.

  “… do you think Meyer Lansky and those others will try to kill the alderman?”

  Disgruntled, he leans away. “Why not? But who knows?”

  “You must’ve heard them talk.”

  “Not really. Meyer came back only once. The very next day, with Mr. Luciano …”

  “ ‘Mister’ Luciano.”

  “Politest guy you ever heard, makes Amy Vanderbilt sound like Tugboat Annie.”

  “He came with Meyer Lansky and … ?”r />
  “I told him the same story. And let me tell you, Mr. Luciano forgot his good manners for a minute there.”

  “But you didn’t hear them say what they might do?”

  “Sweetie, they weren’t about to make their plans in front of me. And besides, I wasn’t feeling so great by then. At first the little fat man gave me some aspirin. But when I got worse, that’s when they moved me out of there.”

  “Why do you think they did it, Willi? I mean … ?”

  “Instead of just letting me croak?”

  “Yeah, instead of that.”

  “I don’t know.” He goes and gets his cigarettes. “Maybe ’cause I did them a favor or maybe they wanted something more from me later. I don’t know. And I hope I never find out.”

  “God. So what was this ‘clinic’ like?”

  “Lois, aren’t you supposed to go meet somebody?”

  “I still have time. What was it like?”

  For the first several days he was there, it was like nothing since he lay in a constant state of delirium, the bacterial infection that had run wild through his body spiking Willi’s temperature so high he was lucky his brains didn’t braise. But eventually whatever it was the Egyptian doctor kept injecting him with had an effect. The fever broke, and Willi finally got sleep that wasn’t frantic.

  Some, of his strength returned, then his color, then his appetite. And when he finally was focused enough to notice a few things, he noticed that everybody—Dakota and Carol, who came twice to check on Willi, the other “patients” recuperating in their own beds on the ward (mostly they were gunshot cases, although one guy had been shellacked with a baseball bat), and the orderlies, all of whom looked like stevedores—everybody called the doctor “Ali Baba.” A gray-haired, dark brown man of sixty or so, Ali Baba would race around his secret dispensary, zipping from bed to bed with both a desperate urgency and the slapstick giant steps of Groucho Marx. He even moved with his torso nearly parallel to the floor.

  As long as Willi was there he never lost a patient.

  In time Willi realized the ward was just the top floor of two side-by-side brownstone houses whose dividing wall had been broken through. Looking out the window near his bed one morning, he noticed that the buildings faced a small park. By squinting he could read the name of it on a sign by the entrance. More importantly, he read: “Frank Hague, Mayor.”