It's Superman! A Novel
Page 37
“What? He’s there?”
“Sitting right in front of me. Would you care to say hello?”
“Perry, kick him out! I don’t care what he’s telling you, he wasn’t anywhere near Thirty-ninth Street!”
“See you when you get here.”
He breaks the connection.
“No! Perry! It’s my story, I was there! Perry!”
She clubs the telephone receiver against the metal armrest, then keeps it up till the door folds open beside her and a lobby guard asks, “Something the matter, miss?”
Storming past him, Lois very nearly leaves the hospital without first going upstairs to check on Ben.
She’s not coldhearted, though. Steamed, yes, stunned and brutally humiliated, check—but not coldhearted.
Sixth floor, Intensive Care.
Flashing her press card, she races past the head nurse’s station, then reluctantly has to backtrack and meekly ask for Ben’s room number.
6115.
The attending nurse is just stepping out into the corridor when Lois arrives in such an overwrought state that she doesn’t recognize her old pal and former roommate till Skinny Simon lets out with a strictly forbidden whoop of surprise.
“Honey! Your coat! It’s covered with blood.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not mine, it’s his,” says Lois, meaning Ben Jaeger’s. “How’s he doing?”
“Better than he should. What’s he to you? The news?”
Lois shakes her head. “Kind of a boyfriend. But not really. What are you doing here, I thought you were in California?”
“I was. But here I am.”
“How’s Charlie?”
“I’m not sure, but my guess is pretty nervous. It’s a long story. How are you?”
“At the moment, Skin, not so great. I nearly got run down by a car and incinerated by a robot. And now I just found out I was scooped by a four-eyed farm boy from Kansas.”
“A robot?”
“That’s a long story, too. But I got to run. Where’re you staying?”
“A hotel for the time being. Need a roommate?”
“I might. Call me. Or maybe I’ll see you back here. Tell him I came by, all right?”
“Sure. Hey, am I imagining things or is he the same cop that used to stand guard on our mutual friend that time at Roosevelt?”
“Same cop, yeah.”
“Cute.” Then Skinny adds, “I mean, not at the moment. But otherwise.”
As Lois hurries back down the hallway (You could have at least taken a peek at Ben, she berates herself), Skinny Simon calls, “Hey! I saw Willi out in Hollywood! He took pictures of me in my underwear!”
Lois glances sourly over a shoulder.
No, she really doesn’t need a roommate.
2
Not long after Joseph Pulitzer II sold the once-great but long-ailing New York World to the Scripps-Howard company in 1930, it was merged with the Evening Telegraph and moved uptown, leaving only two dailies in operation along lower Manhattan’s legendary Newspaper Row: the Sun and the Planet. The Sun’s editorial and business offices, as well as its printing plant, are housed in the Stewart Building near City Hall Park on the northeast corner of Chambers Street and Broadway. The Planet, at Spruce and Nassau streets, exclusively occupies a sixteen-story building made of brick with a front facing of polished granite designed by Richard Morris Hunt. A revolving sidereally precise gilded globe of the earth seems, in light both natural and artificial, to be suspended wondrously in midair twenty feet above the rooftop.
While the Daily Planet remains located in a neighborhood that is a relic of the newspapering past, its grand old building with its light-filled offices, below-ground printing plant, and spacious marbled lobby (supposedly modeled after a ballroom in the Versailles palace) are all turbines of activity and nervous energy at any time of the day or night.
For example, here it is late on a Sunday evening … The giant rotary presses’ rumbling can be heard as far away as a quarter mile, and dozens of delivery trucks, big Federals, are lining up along three sides of the building, waiting for tomorrow’s first edition, the night owl, to come trundling out to the loading docks in bound wet bales. Around in front, taxicabs come and go, dropping off and picking up reporters, photographers, freelancers, press agents. Delivery men from a score of different Jewish delicatessens and late-kitchen restaurants hustle inside, lugging pasteboard cartons packed with bialys shmeared with cream cheese, corned beef sandwiches, coffee and beer and celery soda.
Plenty of cops around, twirling their billys, trading quips with the boxing writers, checking out the pins on the society-page editor, seeing if there are any hot tips to be cadged from the track reporters.
The lobby is bedlam tonight, unsavory-looking men dashing for the elevators, punching the buttons impatiently, smashing into the riders who seem propelled out of the cars when the doors finally unseal. Carny Oates, who has operated the candy and cigar concession for three decades, has seen his share of nights like this one, big-news nights—war, peace, the stock market bust, the Lindbergh snatch, the Ruth Snyder fricassee, the Will Rogers smash-up, the Morro Castle, the Hindenburg, John Dillinger down.
He’s been trying for the past hour and change to get the lowdown on what’s going on, hailing practically every pencil-and-pad man he’s seen race by, even the ones who aren’t his regular customers, but nobody has stopped. Business stinks. Carny relights his stogie, blows out the match. Then he snaps to attention when a cop-house reporter veers over and scoops up a handful of cheap Florida cigars and a box of Chiclets. “Hey! Wilson, what’s going on?”
“Benny Jaeger got shot.”
“The Luthor patsy? No kidding! Who by?”
“I heard it was a robot.”
“What?”
“Gotta run, Carn.” And he does.
A robot?
Carny is still puzzling over that when a heavyset woman appears in front of him, red-faced and very bright-eyed, clutching a fat envelope and reeking of alcohol. And because Carny Oates has no truck with soakers, no truck at all, he glowers.
“Where do I go if I want to report something?”
“Depends on what you want to report,” says Carny. “You want to report a giant octopus in the harbor, you go wait on that bench,” he says, pointing to a disheveled man seated over there, clutching himself as though he’s freezing; that’s Mr. Spencer, who drops by three times a week to report an octopus-sighting in the waters between the Battery and Governors Island, although he’ll admit it’s possible it could have been a giant squid, even a German submarine. “And if you want to report cannibalism among the Hebrew citizenry, you can go sit down on that bench,” says Carny, using his cigar to gesture at a rail-thin gray-haired woman seated ramrod straight on a different bench against the same wall. “And if you want to report a pink elephant, sister, whyn’t you just walk around the corner to McCutcheon’s bar and tell it to the fine patrons you’ll encounter there?”
The fat woman blinks at him, seems as though she might burst into tears, then turns abruptly, stumbling when an ankle buckles, and walks purposely across the lobby to one of the uniformed guards.
Carny Oates grins when the guard takes the hippo by an arm and steers her right over to Mr. Spencer’s bench, plonks her down there, and wags a finger in her face.
Glancing at a clock he keeps on a shelf, Carny sees that it’s already midnight—time for a break. He parks his Be Right Back sign in the brass change bowl and ducks under the counter. He is doing some deep-knee bends when he sees Lois Lane trot briskly across the lobby. “Hiya, sweetheart,” he calls. “What do you have to tell old Carny to brighten his lonely night?”
She ignores him and heads for an elevator.
3
Clark Kent is sitting in Perry White’s glass-enclosed office talking to both White and George Taylor when Lois flings the door open without knocking. It bangs against the wall and she barges in. Clark jumps to his feet. The perfect gentleman—that rat!
“I nearly got myself killed for this story. It’s mine—not his!” she says, pointing like an accuser from a witness box. Him! That’s the man!
Clark says, “Lois, please, I wouldn’t—”
“Shut up, you! George, I told him you’d give him a job if he came in with a front-page story and now he’s trying to swindle you. Swindler! He wasn’t there! He wasn’t there!”
Taylor turns to Clark. “Were you there?”
“No, sir. But—”
“Shut up, kid,” says Taylor, and turns back to Lois. “He wasn’t there. But he never said he was. However, and just in case this might be news to you, at least fifty other reporters were. Including a few of ours.”
“But I was there first!”
“Did you phone it in?”
Lois clamps her jaws, grinds her teeth, and breathes in through her nose with such aggression it sounds like water boiling. When she can speak again she says, “Just do not hire that—farmer. He’s a fraud!”
Perry White has had enough. “He well may be. But are these?” he says, grabbing a batch of damp prints from his desk and smacking them into Lois’s hand.
She riffles through them as a phantom buzz starts deep in her ears. The car, the cape. The robot. The robot again, that time blurred, speed dramatically smudging its shape. Then him. Then him again. Him again. His hair like a bomb flash, his gymnasiast clothing in such tatters that he looks almost comical and the print like a production still from a Hal Roach comedy. Him again. The big red S dangling by a thread or two. Him again, him again.
Willi’s pictures.
Lois tosses them all back on the desk. Willi’s pictures. What is she going to say now? Does she have to talk? She puts a hand up to her lips. Can’t she just leave? Where’s a phone? She needs to call her father.
“I want a sidebar,” she says, “for the red-eye edition.”
Both Taylor and White stare at her.
For all she knows Clark Kent does, too.
But she can’t look at him.
“A sidebar,” says Taylor. “Convince me.”
Then as her two editors look on in amazement (only Taylor blushes), Lois undoes her top buttons, sticks a hand inside a brassiere cup, and plucks out the small metal plate mark she’s kept hidden there for the past two hours. She holds it up, pinching it between her thumb and first finger so that her hand won’t tremble. “We finally got Lex Luthor dead to rights.”
Struggling to keep her breathing natural, she passes over the plate mark to George Taylor.
His eyebrows go up, as do the corners of his mouth.
“Kent,” he says, “you’ll have to excuse us. See the paymaster on your way out, he’ll settle up. And Kent?”
“Yes, sir?”
Lois cringes at how suddenly hopeful he looks. Pitiful.
“Tell your shy friend if he wants a job he’s got one. Otherwise we’d be happy to look at anything else he’d care to show us.”
“Yes, sir,” he says quietly and looks as if he might cry.
“Nice meeting you, Kent,” says Perry White, showing him to the door.
“You too. And you too, sir,” he says back to George Taylor. “But I was wondering …”
“Kent, we’re really busy now,” says Taylor.
“Of course. I’m sorry. But if, well, if anything does come up in the way of a job for me …”
“Get us a front-page story of your own and I’ll give you a job. All right? Now beat it.”
As Clark is stepping through the doorway looking melancholic, looking very young, a copyboy ducks underneath his arm, scoots around him and, with near-triumphant brio, slaps down a copy of the night-owl edition on Perry White’s desk.
The war-declared-size headline screams: IT’S SUPERMAN!
4
He’s embarrassed and sore. Angry. And heartsick. More heartsick than angry. But that’s stupid. How can he measure, how can he gauge? He’s upset. Mostly about how she treated him.
She really thought he’d sneaked around behind her back to scoop her. That he’s the kind of a guy who would do such a thing. Is capable of it.
She hates me.
Clark is standing at the paymaster’s window, two floors below the City Room. Third in line. It’s twenty minutes past twelve by the wall clock. Yesterday seems like it took a whole week, this past week seemed like a month, two months. What if every day, every week seems as long? A person couldn’t stand it.
He doesn’t want to plow into robots all the time. That much he knows. He wants to go to work in the morning like regular people. Have a desk, drawers full of rubber bands, his own typewriter. He wants to talk to guys at the water fountain. And girls. One in particular.
Although at the moment she’s the last person on Earth he’d talk to.
A farmer.
And just what was so wrong, Clark wants to know, with being a farmer? Do you like green vegetables? Do you like fruit? Do you like bread? Do you like Cream of Wheat? Then quit insulting farmers.
There is nothing wrong with being a farmer.
But Clark wants to be a reporter. And he wants to work here.
She hates me.
“Son? Step up, step up,” says the paymaster. He sits on a stool behind a banker’s grille. Has on a green visor and almond-shaped spectacles, wears old-fashioned garters on his shirtsleeves.
Clark passes him the voucher he got from Perry White.
“Signature here. And initials there,” says the paymaster, indicating with a fountain pen two places on the form. And now he counts from a sheaf of bills, counts again, a third time. “Three hundred twenty-five and no cents.”
Three hundred twenty-five dollars?
Clark is amazed by the amount, almost stunned, he’s never—
“Stand aside,” says the paymaster. “Next.”
“That’s all right,” says Lois Lane, “I’m just waiting for Hayseed Harry.”
“Excuse me,” says Clark, brushing past her, stuffing the money into his pocket without counting it—something that would’ve earned him his mother’s severest reproach.
“Clark! I was only kidding. I’m kidding.”
He pushes through a pair of plate doors and crosses the hall to the elevators.
She catches up to him. “Forgive me?”
He presses the call button.
“I’m sorry—okay? I just thought you’d, you know.”
“Stabbed you in the back?”
“Yeah!” She smiles.
The elevator bell rings, the doors slide open. He puts a hand out to stop them from closing right away.
He doesn’t want to leave.
“I really am sorry.”
He says, “Okay. Thanks.” With a shrug he turns to go.
“Clark! Wait!”
He turns quickly back around.
“I want to interview your friend.”
He looks at her.
“Superman. Can you arrange it?”
Clark steps into the elevator car and without turning around punches the button.
It cracks into fifty bits of hard plastic that sprinkle to the floor.
All the way down Clark stares at his vague unhappy reflection in burled walnut.
Crossing the lobby he is waylaid by a very large woman (he was taught it’s impolite to describe people as fat) who galumphs along beside him and clutches his sleeve with a manic intensity that makes him flinch. “Can you help me?” she says. “Are you a reporter?”
“I wish!” says Clark.
“All right, lady, that’s the last time you get to bother anybody tonight.” A uniformed guard is dragging her away before he’s even finished speaking. “Out you go!”
Clark says, “That’s all right, we were just having a conversation. It’s okay, really.”
“Then she’s yours, mister.” The guard turns a hard look on t
he woman. “And no more trouble, you.”
“What trouble?” she says. “This is supposed to be a newspaper? I should’ve picked another one.”
“We all wish you did,” says the guard.
“Aren’t you the rudest thing! I only picked this one because I found a copy in the back of my cab.” She turns to Clark. “I thought it was like a sign. Finding a copy of the Daily Planet in the back of my cab. So I came here. I should’ve picked another paper.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, ma’am,” says Clark as if—as if what? As if he is personally distressed, even mortified, that the poor woman might leave here with an unfavorable opinion of the Daily Planet. Why should he care? “I’m not sure I can help you, but if I can, I will.”
The guard looks at them both. “Quack, quack,” he says, spinning a finger at his temple as he walks off. “Quack, quack, quack!”
The fat woman looks at Clark in a sidelong way. “Thank you.”
“I’m not a reporter,” he says. “To finally answer your question.”
“Well, that’s what I need. But they don’t make it easy for you. It’s easier to get into Fort Knox.”
When she laughs Clark realizes two things: she’s very pretty and she’s not drunk, no matter how cloying the alcohol smell that conveys with her.
“I’m not a reporter now,” says Clark. “But I used to be.” He is unsure why he feels a need, and he definitely does, to prolong this encounter. He feels sorry for her, yes. But that’s not it. “Would you like to sit down?”
“I’m Edith Wauters.”
“Clark Kent.”
“Good to meet you, Clark. Sure, we can sit. I’m exhausted.”
She leads him to a long varnished bench occupied by a man with thick snarled hair. His coat and trousers are filthy, his shoes are caked with tar, and he is tapping an envelope against one knee. Edith Wauters curtly nods to him, then tells Clark, “Have a seat. Nobody here except us squirrels, right, Mr. Spencer?” Then she explains, “This is where they store the nuts.”
Spencer takes umbrage. He brandishes his own envelope. “I have proof!”
“We all have proof, darling. Just nobody wants to see it.” She turns back to Clark and sighs. “I’ve been on quite an odyssey. Do you know what time it is?”