It's Superman! A Novel

by Tom De Haven

  Maybe she won’t answer the door when Lois Lane arrives, maybe she’ll return to work tomorrow. After all, she did name that robot, everything is okay now, and Lex Luthor will go on paying her a generous salary: she can continue living the way she’s been, a radio and telephone in every room, subscriptions to whichever magazines she cares to look at. New hats and shoes whenever the impulse sweeps her.

  No.

  She saw something in those eyes today that scared her half to death.

  Just as she is getting up to go put the coffee on, her doorbell rings. Ceil glances at her wristwatch. It’s only quarter of nine and she told that girl to come by after nine.

  The bell sounds again.

  Ceil walks back into the kitchen and plugs the electric percolator into the wall.

  Then, rubbing her palms against her skirt, she goes and answers the door.

  Mrs. O’Shea stands in the vestibule.

  “Good evening, Ceil,” she says, then punches her viciously in the face, a blow that shatters the cartilage in Ceil’s nose and sends her staggering backward. Before Ceil can recover from the shock, Mrs. O is upon her, both hands locked around her throat, killing her …

  6

  Mrs. O was angry enough when it took Paulie Scaffa more than twice the time she estimated it should have to drive from his flat to the Waldorf-Astoria, but when she found out why—

  “Who gave you permission to bring one of those things home with you?”

  “I didn’t think there’d be a problem.” Paulie tried to control his own anger by speaking through gritted teeth and squeezing the wheel and driving hunched way over it. And he wouldn’t look at Mrs. O.

  “Where is it now?”

  “In the luggage compartment.”

  “Is it back in its—”

  “Yes, it’s back in its box. But you’re missing the point. What the hell did it do, you see what I’m saying? It blew up my chair. I thought these things were supposed to … mix drinks and play music.”

  Mrs. O didn’t respond.

  “So I’m thinking maybe there’s something wrong with that stupid guinea’s machine. Some flaw, like. We should tell the boss.”

  “How on earth did he ever find you?”

  “Lady, you give me a pain in my neck.”

  “Do you think you could put on a little speed? It’s already eight-thirty, thanks to your robot demonstration. I want to be in and out before her company arrives.”

  “I thought you called the skirt’s house and she was still home.”

  “I’m assuming she was if her boyfriend was there. But I can’t know for sure.”

  It was twenty minutes before nine when they turned off Second Avenue into East Thirty-ninth Street.

  “There!” said Mrs. O. “That’s the house.”

  “I know the house, lady. I only been inside it two thousand times.” Paulie parked and set the brake. Mrs. O put a hand on his knee before he had the chance to open his door.

  “You can wait here. I’ll go in.”

  He looked at her incredulously.

  “You brought me all the way from Brooklyn so you can do the job? Why didn’t you just take a taxi?”

  “Because taxi drivers can be questioned about fares.”

  “Then you coulda walked!”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “You got a weapon?”

  “I don’t need one.”

  “Ceil outweighs you by fifty pounds!” He pulled up his shirt and removed a .45-caliber automatic from the waistband of his trousers. “Take this.”

  “I don’t need a weapon, I said.”

  She slammed the door, hesitated a moment at the foot of the stoop, then squared her shoulders and walked up the steps. Opened the street door and went into the vestibule.

  Paulie shook his head. Then he leaned over in the dark automobile and thumped his right hand along the top of the instrument panel searching for his cigarettes and matches. He found them, but only after accidentally tapping the Lexbot’s remote-control device, which he’d tossed there when he left home.

  That gave him a little twinge.

  But nothing, thank God, moved in the luggage compartment.

  7

  Kneeling squarely upon Ceil’s chest, Mrs. O removes one hand from her throat and snatches hold of her hair.

  Now she is both strangling Ceil and hammering the floor with the back of her skull.

  Summoning what little strength she has left, Ceil slaps at the floor with her left arm, fingers scrabbling till the tips scrape against the leg of a small drop-leaf table. She pulls the table toward her, then whirls it down like a club. The curved edge of a leaf opens a deep gash above Mrs. O’s right eye. A crosspiece slams against her mouth, lacerating her top gum line, knocking out teeth. The drawer shoots free and slams into her forehead with force enough to brand it with the tiny fleur-de-lis design on the pewter knob.

  Mrs. O is stunned.

  And Ceil is quick.

  She is on her feet, bracing herself against the Morris chair and shaking her head to clear it.

  Anger burns up the back of her neck. She’s never felt this furious, this crazy-furious—probably the closest she ever came to it before was thirty years ago: age fourteen, in the eighth grade, a rainy day in April when she failed three tests, forgot her lunch, and then was called, without provocation, a “dumb pollock” by Geraldine Walsh, hands down the stupidest girl in her class.

  Before this minute, that was the angriest Ceil has ever been.

  She kicked Geraldine Walsh, too, when she was down on her knees.

  Although not nearly as many times as she kicks Mrs. O. Or with anything close to the ferocity.

  Geraldine Walsh ended up with four broken ribs.

  Ceil has no way of knowing how many of Mrs. O’s ribs she breaks but she hears bones crack and that is satisfaction enough.

  Face flushed, her breathing labored, she takes a step back, intending to land one final, perfect, and incapacitating blow to that sobbing bitch. But when she lashes out with her right foot, somehow she turns it. When it strikes flesh, an acute and stabbing pain flares through Ceil’s ankle and radiates to her groin.

  Even with a broken foot, even with her nose swollen, Ceil laughs as openly and boisterously as she does at Laurel and Hardy when a house crashes around them or a piano bounces after them down a hundred and fifty steps.

  She laughs and then collapses into the Morris chair. Her ankle is purpling and her foot seems on fire inside her shoe.

  Mrs. O pushes with her hands, managing to lift the upper half of her body. Her lips are balloonlike. Blood streams from her mouth.

  Her eyes find Ceil’s.

  “Think you’re great?” says Ceil. “Think you’re so great? Guess what, girly, you stink! You stink on ice!”

  It’s what Ceil Wojcicki, aged fourteen, had screamed in the face of Geraldine Walsh thirty years ago, and it seems just as apt tonight with this other, older Irisher.

  “On ice you stink!”

  There are droplets and thick strings of blood clotted in Mrs. O’s white hair.

  She tries to speak.

  “What? I can’t hear you! You want to say something, speak up, you mick piece of—”

  “Ceil, I’m surprised at you! You know what Mr. Luthor thinks about that kind of talk.”

  Paulie Scaffa is standing now in the arched entryway to the living room. He looks at Mrs. O down on the floor, raising his eyebrows when he sees the bloated ruins of her lips and the red circle impressed into her forehead, the tiny image of a lily inside of it. Then he looks at Ceil in the chair and notices the raw scratches on her face, the broken nose, the bruises on her throat. He clucks.

  At last Mrs. O manages to say something clearly. “Kill her, Paulie.”

  “Oh? I thought you wanted to handle this.”

  “Kill her!”

  He takes out the .45 automatic. It is silver-plated and looks brand-new.

  Ceil’s eyes widen. “Paulie, no. Please, Paulie. You we
re Herman’s partner, don’t hurt me, please. Herman loved you!”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, Ceil. But we got along okay.”

  “Kill her, Paulie! Shoot her!”

  “Paulie, please. You ate Thanksgiving dinner here, how many times? Please!”

  “Ceil, I hate to tell you this, but I never really liked you that much.”

  Mrs. O makes a gurgling sound and pink froth appears between her lips.

  She’s laughing.

  Paulie turns the gun on her. “You think that’s funny? Here’s something even funnier. I don’t like you either.”

  He swivels his wrist and trains the gun back on Ceil.

  Then right away he turns it back on Mrs. O.

  “I don’t like either one of you, if you wanna know the truth.”

  8

  “Herman says hello, Herman says hello!”

  Paulie considers shooting the damn parrot too, but that would just gum up his brilliant idea.

  He is almost sorry Mrs. O is dead because he really wants to rub his idea right in her snooty face.

  He shot her first. Once in the stomach so it hurt, then once—at close range—between the eyes.

  Ceil looked stunned, but you’d also have to say relieved. Paulie could understand that.

  She thought because he’d shot Mrs. O he wouldn’t shoot her.

  And if that made her last few moments less terrifying, Paulie was glad to do it. He didn’t like Ceil but he didn’t hate her. He wasn’t a bad guy. If the way he’d played this gave her some comfort, cause to hope, he was glad to do it.

  He smiled at Ceil when he walked over and stood next to her chair. Stooped a little and frowned at her broken nose. “That must hurt,” he said. “We’ll have to see about getting that fixed up.”

  He put the automatic to her right temple and gently squeezed the trigger.

  And then he lifted her right hand, pressed her pinky, third, and second fingers around the grip of the .45 and her index finger through the trigger guard. When he let her hand fall, the gun dropped where it might have fallen naturally to the floor.

  He is quite certain the cops and the press will flag this as a Forbidden Love Turns Fatal thing.

  There hasn’t been one of those in the news for a while.

  One murder, one suicide. And one hell of a brawl beforehand.

  “Herman says hello, Herman says hello!”

  “Hello to you too, Herman,” Paulie calls to the parrot. “I sent you your lovely wife, hope you appreciate that, pally.”

  He turns out all the lights.

  The only thing that worries Paulie now is how Mr. Luthor might react.

  Ceil had to go, Mrs. O was right about that. So no problem there.

  But will the boss be angry that he also shot that white-haired—

  As soon as Paulie shuts the outside door and it locks behind him he wonders if Ceil had even been right-handed. What if she’d been left-handed?

  Ah, she was right-handed. Forget about it.

  Then he realizes he probably shouldn’t have turned off all the lights.

  Screw it. Ceil might’ve done it before blowing out her brains.

  She was a woman, right? You made allowances for their screwy behavior.

  He lights a cigarette. A man and a woman are standing across the street in deep shadow, and Paulie figures them for a couple on a date. He hurries down the steps to his automobile.

  But as soon as he starts to get in, everything turns bad.

  “Paulie! Wait up—I need a word with you,” says Ben Jaeger, coming into the street at a jog.

  And there goes Paulie’s beautiful Lesbian Sweethearts angle.

  He is so chagrined—it’s like some moron piping up after you’ve worked your way through an entire joke and spoiling your punch line—that he yanks out a revolver and shoots Jaeger twice in the chest.

  He jumps behind the wheel, keys the ignition, releases the hand brake, lets out the clutch.

  Glancing into the sideview mirror he sees a woman—has to be that Lois Lane—run out and stoop down beside Jaeger.

  She looks toward the car and her eyes meet Paulie’s in the side mirror.

  That decides it.

  He steers away from the curb, then twists the wheel, making a U-turn but sideswiping a boat-size Cadillac 60 parked on the opposite side of the street.

  The Caddy’s chromium door handle sails out in front of Paulie’s hood, gleaming like an ingot when it arcs across the headlights.

  Paulie shoves the transmission into reverse, backs up, and then guns the engine.

  But less than ten feet away from its targets, the car stops with such precipitate suddenness that Paulie slams against the steering wheel, hard. Something breaks inside of his chest.

  The front tires are spinning, the rubber burning, great chunks splatting off to bounce freely down the street.

  The rear wheels are still spinning too, but they’re no longer touching blacktop.

  Paulie lurches again as the car tips forward.

  Reflected in the rearview mirror is a man wearing a Lone Ranger mask.

  Paulie doesn’t know what’s going on. But whatever it is, it’s not good.

  He twists around in his seat and something sharp inside his chest pierces something soft. Which bursts and starts to leak.

  He manages nevertheless to extend his right arm and fire his revolver three times.

  The rear window shatters.

  There is now a big hole punched through the bridge of the guy’s black mask. And two angry red welts on his forehead.

  But he’s still there holding back the damn car!

  Now it rises at a steeper angle, now it crashes down. Paulie’s cigarettes spew from their packet, his matchbox striking him in the face, ricocheting off. And that Bakelite remote-control device lands plop in his lap.

  Snatching it up, Paulie haphazardly pushes buttons. Red green, green black red, black gray black, green red, red red black …

  And despite his being the button pusher, Paulie Scaffa is just as surprised as the masked guy behind him when, in the wake of a loud juddering vibration, the luggage compartment lid bursts suddenly open.

  9

  Clark Kent is more than just passingly familiar with robots.

  As a boy, he read all of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels, and from his introduction in Ozma of Oz, Tik-Tok the Clockwork Man became Clark’s favorite of all of the series characters.

  In high school he was a voracious reader of the “scientifiction” stories he found in dime pulps at Pinky Wargo’s cigar shop on South Main Street. And while he read every story in each chunky issue that he purchased (his mother said to do any less would be a waste of good money), the types of stories Clark liked most were about either alien invasions or robots. In his opinion John W. Campbell wrote the best robot yarns, although he had to admit that Edmond Hamilton and Harl Vincent wrote some pretty good stuff too.

  And of course a good many of the movie serials that Clark enjoyed as a young teenager had nifty robots shuffling through them—Phantom Empire, Flash Gordon, The Undersea Kingdom.

  So, yes, Clark Kent is more than just passingly familiar with robots.

  Even so … when the automobile’s luggage compartment twangs open in his face and he is confronted by a genuine all-steel robot, a robot that assembles itself as it sprouts up and up from a square box, Clark’s first thought is to misconstrue the Lexbot for the latest advance in dairy technology.

  He mistakes it for an automatic milking machine.

  His fingers are curled under the rear bumper and he is still holding the street coupe lifted a foot and a half off the ground.

  The rear tires spin futilely.

  The engine is straining.

  Or maybe it’s not the engine at all.

  Maybe it’s that thing.

  It is. The whining noise definitely comes from the robot. The whine changes abruptly to a sibilant whistle. That’s followed by a loud clap, a flash of red light. And Clark is blown out of h
is boots (literally) and sent hurtling backward toward First Avenue, across First Avenue, headed for the East River. His cape snapping and billowing and tattered, he shoots down East Thirty-ninth Street at a velocity in excess of a major-league fastball.

  The acetate mask sails off his face and spins away.

  His blue jersey is scorched black at his solar plexus.

  Half of the threads that have kept the big red S sewn into place have dissolved into ash, and the appliqué flaps and flutters like a shingle in a gale.

  Just before Clark smashes into and pulverizes part of the rocky bluff below and to the south of the Tudor City apartments, and before he is stunned into unconsciousness, he becomes aware of a tremendous explosion.

  Somewhere.

  XXIV

  Lois sees the cape-man. Faith and Carl Krusada.

  Clark’s breakdown. Willi clicks a few. Trapped.

  ●

  1

  Lois will always remember—and each time with the same troubling mixture of shame and self-regard—that immediately after Ben Jaeger was shot, two bullets in his chest, the first thing she did was glance at her wristwatch: six past nine by the radium dial.

  Former New York City police officer Benjamin Jaeger, who resigned last Friday in the wake of the controversial Lex Luthor criminal investigation, was killed Sunday evening when a gunman suddenly opened fire—

  Shot. He was shot Sunday evening.

  That’s all Lois knew for certain, all that she’d witnessed: Ben was shot. What kind of a reporter is she, jumping to conclusions? What kind of a person?

  Afraid to move, certain she couldn’t, Lois broke from the sidewalk’s protective shadows and ran into the street.

  When she dropped to her knees beside him, Ben was laboring to breathe, struggling to lift his head.

  A pinkish foam bubbled through his lips.

  “Just lie still, okay? ’Kay, baby? Don’t try to get up,” she said, then stupidly (she knew it was stupid, so why was she doing it?) Lois forced a hand under Ben’s shoulders and elevated him slightly.

  He gasped but then gulped a breath. Breathed out, breathed in again.