It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  Beside him Colluzo was staring with horror at the first of a dozen photographs inside the folder. Without looking at any of the others he snapped the folder closed.

  “Just so you won’t be kept in suspense,” said Lex, “I’m very open-minded. Personally I don’t care what a man does on his own time. What two men do. Of course, most people in the world are not quite so open-minded. Policemen and judges, for example. And prison guards.”

  “You are blackmailing me?”

  “Engaging your services.” Lex took back the file folder.

  “To do what?”

  “Build me a few robots,” said Lex. “Isn’t that what you’ve always dreamed about doing?”

  3

  “I wouldn’t object to another one of those martinis,” Lex says now, and Caesar Colluzo glumly snatches up the remote-control device—it resembles a model-train transformer—and presses a tablet.

  At the same moment Lex Luthor’s general factotum appears in the library: Mrs. O’Shea, a fiftyish Irish woman with a bubble of snowy white hair and a very slight brogue. She conveys a white telephone whose dial and disconnect buttons are made of 24-karat gold. Its cord snakes across the parquet floor, through the open doorway, and out into the hall. “It’s that Polish woman again,” she tells Lex. After putting the phone down on the table, she makes a tiny sneer at the LR-1, whose right arm lifts with a hydraulic hum to hover over the martini pitcher.

  Mrs. O’Shea leaves the room.

  Lex says, “Luthor,” then patiently listens. “Ceil? Calm down, it’s—please, Ceil, I want you to calm down. That’s better. All right? Now I’ll see what I can do, I’ll try to stop by. I’ll try.”

  He ends the connection by pressing and holding down one of the buttons. Then he releases it and dials 0. “I’ll need my car, Henry. Ten minutes?” After he’s pronged the receiver, Lex rubs a hand across his chin, his features composed into an unlikely expression, equal parts disgust and empathy.

  When he strides toward the door, the LR-1, carrying a fresh martini, pivots and follows. Seeing it, Lex stops. So does the robot. Lex pinches the glass by its stem, raises and drains it. “I’ll be gone for a couple of hours,” he tells Caesar Colluzo. Then he sets his glass down on the flat surface of the robot’s head and walks out.

  4

  Ceil Stickowski thinks Lex Luthor is the greatest, kindest, smartest man on planet Earth, and if you are prepared to argue that with her, she is prepared to slug with you toe-to-toe.

  Ever since Herman went to the doctor in April complaining about shortness of breath and was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the alderman has taken care of all of the medical bills, the drugstore prescriptions, even the sick-room rental equipment. And he never fails to visit Stick every other day, usually in the late afternoon. He’ll sit bedside and talk to Stick for a few minutes, then read to him for an hour. He’s a prince, that Mr. Luthor!

  In Ceil and Herman’s time of crisis, Lex Luthor, God bless him, has even found a way for Ceil to make an income of her own. He’s put her in charge of the mail-order catalogs. There have been two so far: the original Smokin’ Dynamite catalog and the Smokin’ Dynamite Summer Supplement. A third—the Smokin’ Dynamite Fall Arsenal of Values—is ready to be printed, and a fourth, the last, a clearance catalog, is in the works. Because Ceil does all of the production work (layouts, photostats, pasteups), then oversees the print runs at a clandestine typography shop in Hoboken, Lex now puts another sixty dollars cash into Stick’s pay envelope each Friday. She wishes he would give her the money she’s earned in a separate envelope, one with her own name on it, but wouldn’t dream of suggesting it.

  When Mr. Luthor arrives at half past seven this evening, Ceil greets him pleasurably, taking both of his hands in hers and drawing him inside.

  The Stickowskis rent a two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a brownstone in Turtle Bay, the rooms dark and sparsely, inexpensively furnished. Hung on the walls are framed pictures of scenic wonders—the Matterhorn, Arizona canyons, natural bridges. The only extravagances are a Stromburg-Carlson radio-phonograph in the living room and an African parrot named Zulu that Ceil keeps in a rattan cage out in the kitchen.

  “I shouldn’t have called, Mr. Luthor. I hope you’ll forgive me but he seems so listless today and I guess I just—”

  “It’s fine, Ceil. I’m glad you called. Is he awake?”

  “Last I checked.”

  Lex nods but makes no movement toward the bedroom. “I was wondering,” he says, “about those proofs.”

  “Oh! They’re all corrected. You can look at them before you leave, if you want.”

  “Why don’t I do that?”

  Ceil walks a step behind him as far as the bedroom. He goes in and leaves the door open. She remains outside. Lex starts to sit down in a chair but changes his mind and comes back and shuts the door.

  As he does he gives Ceil a sympathetic smile.

  In Stick’s room Lex always feels conflicted and uncomfortable. He is sorry that Stick is dying, he truly is (the man was a most efficient triggerman), but wishes he’d just go ahead and do it, croak already. Let’s get this show on the road.

  Braced against three pillows in a hospital bed that rents for a dollar a day, Stick is pressing an oxygen mask to his face. It makes him look like a fatally ill bomber pilot.

  On the nightstand, along with the medicine bottles, spoons, and crumpled tissues, are a thick wooden crucifix, two stubby white unlit candles, and a pygmy-size bottle of chrism.

  “Priest been to see you?”

  Stick nods yes while letting his hand drop away from the mask. The mask plops onto his stomach. He looks so tired and wasted that Lex feels drained of vitality himself just being near him. “Had Extreme Unction and everything.”

  “Excellent, Stick. Just terrific.” He leans forward and pats Stick on the wrist. “Come up with any new ideas lately?”

  “Wish I had, sir. But I think the medicine must be interfering with the old imagination.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it.”

  Stick is pretty far gone in the head. Sometimes he’ll hear quarreling voices and see crazy things: blue lizards that scramble over the walls and red bats that cling upside down to the ceiling, fish squirting out of his pillowcase to flop around in his bed, fall off, and die on the floor. It’s the morphine.

  But long before he started dosing with that stuff, Stick passed his days in bed dreaming up new criminal opportunities for Lex to pursue (restaurants, bakeries, trucking companies) and suggesting fresh variations on the old standbys of policy, extortion, and loan-sharking. Most of his ideas were pure cockamamie. One of them, however, was a real beaut.

  Flipping idly through a pile of Sears-Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs one day, it dawned on him that mail-order might be the perfect way to move a warehouse inventory of small ordnance—hand grenades, rifle grenades, smoke bombs, gas bombs, time bombs, dumb bombs, and novelty bomblets disguised as pencils, spaldeens, and lumps of coal—that Lex had acquired along with a score of bordellos in the aftermath of Lucky Luciano’s imprisonment and Meyer Lansky’s relocation to southern California.

  Lex hadn’t planned on becoming involved in the sale of incendiaries and small arms, but once he acquired that warehouse he got interested. With the U.S. Neutrality Act in effect, and an embargo on weapon sales to European and Asian belligerents, Lex decided to explore arms merchandising.

  But, he decided, there might also be American markets for light-and medium-grade explosives—corporations needed to stockpile that kind of thing in the face of labor strikes; strikers needed to do the same thing. It stood to reason. And there were the native fascist groups. And the communists too, of course, although they were notoriously bad credit risks. The Ku Klux Klan. Not to mention racketeers in other cities.

  The problem was that Lex had no idea how to unload the stuff. So for several months he’d done nothing. (The Italian government offered to buy whatever Lex could sell them, but they proposed delivery to a
submarine off the southern coast of New Jersey, and Lex balked at that.)

  When Stick mentioned his idea—beautifully printed, carefully distributed catalogs with a dozen postal blinds and automatic forwarding addresses to handle the direct-mail business—Lex got it immediately. It was simple and it was beautiful and it would work. You could, said Stick, probably set up a system where a dummy telephone number would switch incoming calls to an untraceable other number. Lex thought definitely could, not probably, and right away put Caesar Colluzo to work developing such a system.

  It was also Stick who suggested that there might be another market for these kinds of products scattered among ordinary citizens, and he proposed distributing the catalogs at gun shows and rodeos and stock-car races, at smokers and bachelor parties, bowling alleys and cabana clubs.

  While Lex was fully prepared to recruit one of the chief copywriters at the largest advertising agency in New York (incriminating photographs, once again, would be involved), Stick proposed letting Ceil, who had done some editorial work as a young woman for a boosterism magazine in Putnam County, write all of the copy as well as lay everything out.

  The first catalogs were mailed at the end of May.

  Orders poured in almost immediately.

  Lex considered his catalog business nothing short of an imaginative breakthrough in the annals of crime …

  “Shall we continue with our story?” Lex says now, picking up the copy of Northwest Passage from Stick’s bedside table. He opens it to the bookmark and glances at the page number: 159. Then he flips to the last page: 709. “We’ll never make it to the end, Sticky,” he says, keeping his tone light, almost joking.

  Stick looks surprised and suddenly begins to gasp for air. He fumbles with both hands, searching after the oxygen mask. When he finds it and holds it over his nose and mouth, his chest relaxes.

  Lex turns and examines the green oxygen cylinder.

  Removing the mask from his face, Stick says, “Yeah, I’d like it if you just read a little, sir.”

  “Chapter … twenty-seven,” says Lex after deciphering the Roman numerals. “ ‘Rogers, it seemed to me, could go beyond the limits of human endurance; and then, without rest, buoyantly hurl himself against the fiercest opposition of Nature or man, or both. There was something elemental about—’ ”

  “Boss, you can’t imagine what it’s like. It’s awful.”

  “Knowing that you’re a dead man?” Lex shuts the book around his index finger.

  “I’m worried all the time.”

  “Ceil’s going to be okay,” says Lex. “Don’t worry about Ceil. I’ll see to it that she’s well taken care of.”

  He has a cathouse in mind, a little place over in Chelsea. One of those that formerly belonged to Lucky Luciano. Like the whole string of them, it could use strong new management. Ceil has the starch, not to mention the heft, and the perfect madam’s bosom.

  “I’m not just worried about Ceil, of course.”

  “Of course not,” says Lex. He heaves himself to his feet and tosses the book on the table. Stands with his hands clasped in front of him. “There’s nothing afterward, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Once you die, that’s it.”

  “Don’t say that. Oh, don’t say that, sir. Don’t say things like that.”

  “I’d think it would be a comfort to you, Stick. Once you’re dead you’ll never know you ever existed. You’re nothing.”

  Stick’s eyes dart uneasily. On his chest the oxygen mask quietly hisses. “What about God, sir? What about heaven?”

  “Think about it, Stick. Why would God surround himself in heaven with billions of idiotic human beings when he can have anything he wants?” Lex glances at his watch.

  Stick begins to wheeze, his eyes bulge, and he claps the mask back onto his face.

  “Why would he do such a thing? It’s just not logical,” says Lex as he turns off the oxygen flow; lefty-loosey, righty-tighty.

  Stick is thumping his hands on the mattress and turning blue.

  But taking one last grab at life he flings away the mask, struggles for breath, for energy, juddering his lips and finally managing to say, “… op Sandglass came to see me.”

  Lex turns the oxygen back on and Stick absorbs it, gulps it.

  “Richard Sandglass? From the Detective Bureau?”

  Stick nods.

  “Came to see you?”

  Stick nods again.

  “You two pals or something?” Leaning over the bed, Lex takes the mask from Stick’s hand. “You pals with a cop?”

  “He pinched me twice as a fly dick. Both times when I was Jimmy Walker’s bootlegger. We’re not pals but he feels sorry for me, I guess. More than you can say for Paulie.”

  “Forget Paulie.”

  “He never comes to visit me!”

  “I said forget Paulie. We’re talking about Richard Sandglass. Who didn’t come by here just to cheer you up. What’d he want?”

  “First you got to promise you won’t turn off that oxygen tank again.”

  “Fair enough.” Lex sits back down on his chair. “What did he want?”

  “He said he was sorry to hear I wasn’t going to get better and told me that a deathbed confession has the weight of sworn testimony.”

  Lex feels a sharp cramp in his abdomen and looks down at his hands lying flat on his thighs. Not a tremble. But his fingers have turned cold. “So far as a cop like Sandglass is concerned you’re a legger who went legit after Repeal. Why would he care about your deathbed confession?”

  “He wanted me to tell him what I knew about you. What I did for you.”

  “And you said … ?”

  “ ‘Take a hike.’ What else would I say? But he says you’re nothing but a crook passing himself off as a politician. No offense, sir. I’m just repeating his words.”

  “And when were you going to tell me about all this?”

  Stick closes his eyes. “Leave me alone, sir. You don’t know what it’s like facing what I’m facing. Every second is precious. Don’t spoil it.”

  Lex thinks about that, weighs it, and finally nods. Case made. He picks up the Kenneth Roberts novel, finds his place. “There was something elemental about him,” he reads, “something that made it possible for men who were dead with fatigue to gain renewed energy from him, just as a drooping wheat-field is stirred to life by the wall of wind that runs before a thunder storm.” Lex pauses, glances up, and meets Stick’s gaze. They both smile.

  Lex resumes, “We’d no sooner made camp that night …”

  5

  From where she is sitting in the kitchen Ceil can see Lex Luthor step out of Herman’s room and gently close the door.

  While he picks up the phone and makes a call, she puts water on for tea, then drapes a towel over Zulu’s cage. The parrot screeches in protest.

  A few minutes later Lex walks into the kitchen.

  “I bet Herman was glad to see you.”

  “He was. These the blues?” he asks, picking up the proofs for the Fall Arsenal of Values. He flips through several pages. Headings read: “The Crown Prince,” “the Medley,” “the Salvo,” “the Hoopla.” All of the copy is illustrated by photographs of rifles and hand grenades, bomblets, cluster bomblets, stench and stink bombs (there’s a difference), infernal bombs, and gravity bombs, everything offered at sharply reduced prices. There are special offers on rifle dischargers, deep discounts for ordering large quantities. Lex finds a typo: Combo, in Combo Pak, is spelled Comba. When he points it out, Ceil puts a circle around it with a red grease pencil, scores out the “a,” draws a line, and carets in an “o.”

  Then: “Ceil, I want to talk to you about an opportunity you might be interested in. But we’ll wait till after the funeral.”

  “The funeral?”

  “He’s gone, Ceil. That was Stick’s doctor I just called. He’ll call Mahoney’s.”

  “Mahoney’s?”

  “The funeral parlor.”

  Lex promised Sti
ck he would leave the oxygen tank alone and he did. He was a man of his word. He used a pillow.

  It wasn’t as though he expected Stick to betray him to Richard Sandglass, but why take chances? And besides, Stick’s illness had dragged on. Lex did the man a favor.

  Ceil reaches a hand to her forehead and leaves it there, pressing. “I should go see him.”

  “If you absolutely need to,” says Lex, “but otherwise I wouldn’t.” As he is putting on his hat and coat he tells her, “By the way, you’ve done an excellent job on the catalog. Very excellent, indeed.”

  XV

  Charlie Brunner makes a purchase. Prehistoric life.

  Recent news of Lois Lane. A strange visitor.

  Alger in Kansas City. Skinny gets even.

  ●

  1

  The Smokin’ Dynamite Fall Arsenal of Values is printed on August 9, 1937, between bootleg runs of How to Win Friends and Influence People and Gone with the Wind. (That was Lex’s own brainstorm, producing cheap copies of best-selling books for the English-language markets in South and Central America. Booming business.) The catalogs are printed in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a counterfeit union bug as well as bogus state and federal licensing notices. They are then put into cartons, and the cartons trucked to a direct mailer in Newark who runs the catalogs through his machines, attaching labels. Reboxed, the catalogs are sent by train to Brownsville, Texas, then by truck to Mexico and mailed. Thus they reenter the country and disappear into the U.S. postal routes.

  Before the end of August the orders start pouring in.

  One of them comes from a first-time customer in Hollywood, California, named Charles V. Brunner.

  Brunner is a thirty-five-year-old trumpeter with the Bob Crosby Orchestra, a very decent Dixieland-style swing band despite the bandleader’s complete lack of musical talent. But young Bob is good at fronting talent and he has name recognition, being kid brother to Bing.

  Currently the band is playing an extended engagement at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. That’s where Brunner picked up the Smokin’ Dynamite catalog. It was lying around the dressing room in a messy pile of slicks and pulp magazines. The handsome painted cover caught his attention: in the style of James Montgomery Flagg at his most genially patriotic, it showed Uncle Sam on the porch of a log cabin accepting a parcel from his friendly mailman on the rural route; the Smokin’ Dynamite logo appeared on the upper left-hand corner of Uncle Sam’s parcel. Once Brunner realized what the catalog was offering, he found himself wholly absorbed in the array of products.