It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  Everybody got out of there except the prisoner. For safekeeping he’d been locked inside the district attorney’s vault and now because of the fire nobody could get to it.

  I ran inside and kept blowing hard to keep the flames away. I wasn’t afraid of being burned, I just didn’t want my clothes all ruined. But they got ruined anyway, by spark holes. I’m ashamed that I worried about such a thing at a time like that, but I did.

  I had heard someone say the vault was on the third floor. It was and I found it and pulled off the door. But the prisoner was dead. I don’t know if the smoke got to him or what, but he was dead. His skin was red-hot in my arms. I carried him down the stairs and back outside.

  Then a couple hundred people rushed at me and grabbed that poor colored man from my arms, they just snatched him away! You should have seen their faces. No, I wouldn’t have wanted you to. They were like a pack of dogs. They were like that, exactly. And they tied that dead man, whose name I never got, by a rope to the bumper of a Ford car and dragged him around the public square. Then they cut him off the bumper and pulled him to a tree and hanged him.

  They tortured and hanged a dead man, Dad. It was the worst thing I have ever seen.

  And do you remember how when I was a boy and whenever I stared at something too long it would start to smolder and even catch fire? Remember when I set those old magazines of Mom’s on fire? I did that again yesterday, but on purpose.

  Every single automobile and truck that I could find, I looked at real hard till the gas tank blew up.

  Those people in Panterville, they all just ran like hell, is what they did, excuse my language. But they ran like hell in all directions.

  Willi must have seen something in my face because he dragged me away from there and back to the freight yards. And it’s a good thing he did too, because otherwise I would have burned down that whole town, Dad. I wanted to.

  I’m not sorry I did what I did no matter how much money those cars and trucks cost. I was glad and I still am as I write this letter to you. I guess I have a temper and should be a monk or a hermit! I have a bad temper, Dad, I do, and that could be a real disaster some day. People could hate me. They probably will. And if they can find nails that won’t break, they might just crucify me.

  loving

  Your ^ son,

  Clark

  p.s. We have both had enough of this being on the bum and have decided to go to California to live and work. I will write again just as soon as we are settled, p.p.s. It was wrong, wasn’t it? Please don’t be too disappointed in me.

  PART THREE

  THE SAUCER-MAN FROM

  TINSELTOWN

  XIV

  Jealousy. The martini maker. Caesar Colluzo.

  Cell’s hero. Smokin’ Dynamite. Death of a henchman.

  ●

  1

  Despite Lex Luthor’s savvy and sensitive draft report on the Harlem race riot, and despite his many contributions to both the unification of the transit system and the preparation of a new city charter; despite the federal loans and work projects Lex facilitated due to his agile handling of Harold Ickes, the notoriously ill-tempered Secretary of the Interior; and despite the fact that Lex’s universal popularity has bolstered Fiorello La Guardia’s own flagging public approval—despite all of that, by the summer of 1937 the portly mayor of New York City has cooled significantly toward the affable young alderman.

  He has snubbed Lex at City Hall, at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds; seen to it that Lex was not included in group pictures of dignitaries taken during groundbreaking ceremonies for the World’s Fair, the opening of the Lincoln Tunnel, and the dedication of the Triborough Bridge. He has left him out of strategy meetings, dropped him from steering committees. Arranged for him to be seated with cranks and boorish old coots at political banquets, no longer invites him to late-night games of Russian Bank at his family’s apartment in East Harlem, and most recently he interrupted a budget conference to upbraid Lex for what he called his “incessant, irritating, tuneless, retardate humming.”

  Does the mayor feel that Lex Luthor is becoming too popular? Is he piqued that Lex’s low-altitude piloting antics at the Montauk Air Show eclipsed his own cornet solo that very same day with the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall? Is La Guardia angered by Lex’s active lobbying efforts to be named either deputy mayor or city planning commissioner once the new charter is instituted? Or does he suspect that the alderman, observed on two occasions having drinks with Jeremiah Titus Mahoney, the Democratic candidate in the upcoming mayoral election, is hedging his bets, plotting disloyalty, possibly treachery?

  Meanwhile, the handful of people in New York with some (but not full, not even close to full) knowledge of Lex Luthor’s illegitimate enterprises are wondering if the mayor—self-styled racket buster and smasher of slot machines—has tumbled somehow onto the humming alderman’s secret career. La Guardia is no dope. He’s a pain in the tuchis, a boil, a rat bastard, but no dope.

  Lex, however, has no need to speculate: he knows exactly what’s going on. “La Guardia’s a prude, that’s his problem,” he tells Caesar Colluzo one evening in the first week of August. Lex started in again ranting about the mayor just as soon as he switched off his shortwave radio, and then pressed a button, sending the receiving-and-transmitting station revolving back to its concealed niche behind the living-room wall. One of Lex’s minor, but still lucrative, innovations in crime has been the establishment of a metropolitan wiretapping service, available to anyone willing and able to pay the price, and he just received his weekly update from a supervisor at the bootleg telephone exchange in Woodside, Queens. Along with a declaration of receipts, the woman—“Operative X12”—reported that yesterday afternoon at three-eleven P.M. Mayor La Guardia was heard telling Robert Moses over the telephone that Lex would no longer be consulted regarding building contracts for the upcoming World’s Fair. “He thinks I’m ostentatious for living in a place like this, and him still knocking around in that crummy little flat on the Upper East Side. He’s so morally superior I’d like to strangle him.”

  Caesar Colluzo merely shrugs one shoulder.

  “And it’s driving him crazy that I’m a trendsetter. Have you noticed how many men are wearing tuxedos in the daytime ever since I started to do it? Have you?”

  “No,” says Colluzo, “I have not.”

  “Well, just look around and you’ll see.”

  As Lex paces and Colluzo reclines on a claret-colored sofa in the library of Lex’s new apartment in the Waldorf Towers, one of the phlegmatic Italian’s latest robots—the prototype LR-1—handily mixes a pitcher of martinis. Thirty-eight inches tall, aluminum, noiseless, and with ball bearings in lieu of feet, it scoops pimentoed olives from a bottle with a long-handled spoon and deposits one into each of two martini glasses. “Amazing,” says Lex. “I’ve seen grown men with less dexterity.”

  Colluzo nods. “Yes, and he can pick up a dime, as well.”

  “That’s wonderful. But can he pick up a showgirl?”

  The Italian doesn’t even smile. He is a slightly built, round-headed man in his early thirties with thinning black hair and the effete kind of mustache Continental royalty affect, the sort that reminds Lex Luthor of two sardines on a collision course. As always Caesar is dressed in a tatty black suit, a white shirt, and a black string tie. The shirt buttons are yellow and brittle, and the frayed cuffs spill from his coat sleeves, ending just shy of his big knuckles.

  When the robot delivers a martini in a frosted glass, Lex says, “Thank you.” Then: “Can he hear me?”

  “It is a machine, Mr. Luthor. It does not need your gratitude, nor can it respond to politeness. It cannot decode the sounds you make.”

  “The sounds I make,” says Lex in a musing voice. He sips his drink. “Delicious!”

  “I took the recipe from a bartender’s guide I found in your kitchen.”

  “How resourceful of you.” Finishing the martini, Lex smacks his lips. Then he clears his throat and chan
ges his tone: “Fatty wants me to throw a public tantrum. But it’s not going to happen.”

  Colluzo moves one shoulder again.

  “I know when to turn the other cheek,” says Lex, “and when to strike.”

  The robot glides over to the side of the chromium bar cabinet, and with a hard emphatic click turns itself off.

  “But he’ll get his eventually. I’ll see to it.”

  “Why do you keep talking to me about the mayor? Do I care? I don’t. I am an engineer.”

  “You’re my engineer,” says Lex. He glares but can’t bring himself to grow angry at the little genius. Flinging himself down in a chair, he lifts his feet onto the hassock and crosses his ankles. My engineer. My robot. My grand and perfect plan …

  2

  The scruffy little man was a fascination from the moment Lex first noticed him seated in a tiered lecture room at New York University a year ago this coming November. Lex was there in his official capacity to attend a seminar entitled “Public Works and Civil Engineering,” and while the hall was crowded, so crowded that a number of attendees were perched on the steps or stood along the back wall, the chairs on either side of Caesar Colluzo remained unoccupied. Lex supposed it was because the little man (who was he?) was dressed like a ragamuffin, smelled of garlic, and seemed far more the knife-sharpening, organ-grinding, cart-pushing kind of Italian than he did the Enrico Fermi, Franco Rasetti sort. Lex was sitting two rows above and once his attention began to drift, as it always did during those sorts of things, he found himself staring down at Caesar with gathering absorption. He was astounded by the way Caesar’s right hand never stopped moving as he jotted down every droning word the panelists uttered in an elegant stenography.

  But that wasn’t what caused Lex’s real fascination. That came about when he realized that while Caesar Colluzo was taking notes with his right hand, he was simultaneously sketching and labeling diagrams in a separate notebook with his left.

  Robots.

  Caesar Colluzo was filling page after page of a red-covered notebook with sketches, diagrams, even preliminary blueprints for the kind of square-headed, block-bodied, tubular-legged robots that proliferated on the covers of science-fiction magazines and clanked across the floors of subterranean laboratories in Saturday-morning chapter-plays.

  Lex decided then and there to learn more about this strange-looking little Italian.

  And so he charged Paulie and Stick with finding out whatever they could. The first thing they discovered was that Caesar Colluzo was neither a public official nor a city engineer, but instead was the most active, albeit unregistered, university student in the five boroughs of New York City. In any week from early in the morning till late in the evening he sat in on classes—undergraduate, graduate, doctorate, postdoctorate, and always classes in the pure or applied sciences—at NYU, as well as at Hunter, Fordham, Columbia, Brooklyn College, City College, Queens College, even the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Taking copious notes with his right hand while sketching, revising, finessing, and providing schematics for a veritable fleet of man-shaped robots with his left.

  This guy’s a real cold shudder, boss, why you so interested in him?

  Mind, your own business, Paulie. Where’s he live?

  Some dump hotel, Forty-nine and Ninth.

  Where’s he get his money?

  Money? He jumps every turnstile. Hides from the landlord.

  How does he eat?

  With his fingers.

  Paulie …

  He gets a roll and a cuppa every morning at six over at the Salvation Army.

  Thank you, Paulie.

  You want we should kill him?

  Kill him? Of course not, Stick. I love this guy.

  Lex didn’t really, but he was mesmerized by him. And tantalized by certain possibilities that were becoming ever clearer in his mind.

  Same as Lex, Caesar Colluzo was self-invented; he just hadn’t pulled it off with anything near to Lex’s high degree of polish. Born in Florence, he’d tell people; family impoverished by the Great War, he’d say; attended the Free University of Rome, he’d boast, where he received his first degrees, in theoretical physics, civil engineering, radiochemistry.

  He attended the first international Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1927, Caesar would say, where he delivered a paper on quantum theory; Einstein applauded, Bohr applauded, everyone applauded. Immigrated to the United States in ’28, he’d say, and took several more advanced degrees. He worked for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he’d say, where he personally confirmed the existence of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen. Then he spent a year, he’d say, working as a reliability engineer at the Picatinny arsenal in New Jersey. No, wait. First he worked at the arsenal, then he worked for the NIST. No, first he worked for NIST, then at the Westinghouse lab on the Televox automaton, and then he went to Picatinny. And then …

  Caesar Colluzo’s biography was a complete fabrication. It had taken Lex scarcely a week to dope out the real stuff.

  He was born in Florence, all right—Florence, Pennsylvania. And yes, his parents were both Italians. A bricklayer and a seamstress. But the family name wasn’t Colluzo, it was DiLappa. Caesar’s birth name was Jacopo. He’d been in jail twice, each time for petty theft. And it was during his time in jail, apparently, while hiding from bullies in a surprisingly well-stocked library, that he first developed an interest in physics and chemistry, radio technology, and engineering in practically all of its branches (he wasn’t particularly interested in building buildings). And where had his interest in robots come from? From Metropolis, of course. The German picture by Fritz Lang. Caesar Colluzo had fallen in love with the movie’s female robot, the one who led the revolt of the masses.

  Less than two weeks after the conference at NYU, Lex telephoned Caesar Colluzo, introduced himself, and invited him for drinks at the Waldorf.

  Colluzo said, “That is very kind of you, I accept.” Then, following a long pause, he inquired, “What exactly is an alderman?”

  “Someone,” said Lex, “who can make all of your dreams come true.”

  They met on a rainy weekday afternoon. Lex deliberately arrived early and sat at the bar with his briefcase on the floor leaning against his right leg. As he waited for Colluzo to appear he sipped a whiskey and watched in the back bar mirror as the fat English movie director Alfred Hitchcock entertained a table full of reporters. Hitchcock was waving an ice cream cone, his wife and small daughter sitting there with him at the table with tight smiles on their faces. With orotund delivery he was singing the praises of American ice cream, which he wouldn’t trade for a steak-and-kidney pie, he said, or a broiled silversmith with carrots and dumplings, or even Kentish chicken pudding. It sounded rehearsed to Lex. Hitchcock was doing publicity for his new picture. The review that Lex had read in the Times made it sound good—but he just hadn’t gotten around to seeing it. He hadn’t gotten around to a lot of things.

  All he seemed to have time for lately was city and criminal business, and at night he was too exhausted to do anything but go to bed and lie awake for hours, wondering why he had chosen to do what he’d done with his life.

  When he was younger he’d operated by instinct, knowing before the age of fifteen that he needed to, was fated to, become a public figure as well as one of the most secretive men on the planet. But for the past year he’d wondered constantly just why he was doing it all. Why did he still work harder than anyone else in city government, the mayor included? Why take such pains with his wardrobe, with his persona? Why keep gobbling up, consolidating, reinvigorating the traditional New York rackets? Why keep launching new ones? Just because he could? It was an awful lot of work, and he no longer needed the money.

  Perhaps he did, though. Perhaps he needed far more of it than he already had. Not for any personal use—he had no real love of luxury—but to underwrite something vast and historical. Something complicated and irrevocable. Some … grand scheme. The undertaking of, the commitment
to. But a grand scheme to achieve what? There was the rub. Lex had no real idea what his goal should be. He was no longer interested in becoming mayor or governor, or the greatest racketeer since Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. The early appeal was gone, had vanished.

  Nothing seemed compelling enough.

  Was he having a moral crisis? Or just fed up to the gills?

  But his long night of the soul ended the morning he first laid eyes upon Caesar Colluzo …

  And now here came the little scruffy Italian, seemingly unimpressed by the Waldorf bar and the tuxedoed alderman who stood up immediately to shake his hand. What would he like to drink? Nothing. Well, perhaps a glass of seltzer. “You mentioned on the telephone about making my dreams come true. I’m curious, sir, how you might presume that I even have dreams. Or what they might entail.” He really talked like that.

  Smiling, Lex reached down and, while humming to himself (“How Deep Is the Ocean?”), picked up his briefcase. It weighed ten pounds and was filled with file folders and accordion folders stuffed with city ordinances and resolutions, revised budgetary figures, and correspondence that dealt with current labor negotiations, employee certifications, audits.

  He undid the clasp, flicked through standing folders, then slid one out.

  Colluzo’s eyes widened when he realized it contained photostatic copies of roughly one hundred of his robot schematics.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “No, I expect you don’t,” said Lex. He removed another file from his briefcase and passed that one to Colluzo as well. Then he took a sip from his drink. Straightened his cocktail napkin and carefully set down his glass.