The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ the helpless. An evil Chinaman. These two can’t come up with all that themselves and draw it. I got artists, Shelly. I got George Deasey.”

      “No!” said Sammy. George Deasey was the editor in chief of Racy Publications. He was a tyrannical, ill-tempered old newspaperman who filled the Kramler Building’s elevators with the exacerbated smell of rye. “It’s mine. Ours, me and Joe. Boss, I can handle it.”

      “Absolutely, boss,” said Joe.

      Anapol grinned. “Get a load of this guy,” he said. “You just get me a Superman,” he went on, putting a placating hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “Then we’ll see about what you can handle or not. All right, Jack?”

      Ashkenazy twisted his usually genial features into a grimace. “I have to tell you, Shelly. I got serious doubts. I’m going to have to say—”

      “The radios,” Joe said. “The little radios outside.”

      “Aw, forget the damn radios, Joe, will you?” Sammy said.

      “What, the midgets?” Anapol said.

      Joe nodded. “They are just wrong in the wires. All in the same way. One little wire is not, hmm. So.” He kissed the tip of one index finger with the other. “Stuck together to the resistance.”

      “You mean to the resistor?”

      “Okay.”

      “You know from radios?” Anapol narrowed his eyes doubtfully. “You’re saying you could fix them?”

      “Oh, assuredly, boss. It is simple to me.”

      “How much is it going to cost?”

      “Not anything. Some few pence for the—I do not know the word.” He angled his fingers into the form of a pistol. “Weichlöte. You must to melt it.”

      “Solder? A soldering gun?”

      “Okay. But perhaps I can to borrow that.”

      “Just a few pence, huh?”

      “Maybe one penny for the radio, each radio.”

      “That’s cutting it pretty close to my cost.”

      “But okay, I don’t charge to do the work.”

      Sammy looked at his cousin, amazed and only a little put out at his having shanghaied the negotiation. He saw Anapol raise a meaningful eyebrow at his brother-in-law, promising or threatening something.

      At last Jack Ashkenazy nodded. “There’s just one thing,” he said. He put a hand on Joe’s arm, restraining him before he could sidle out of the office, with his blank-eyed Golem and his empty portfolio. “This is a comic book we’re talking about, okay? Half bad is maybe better than beauteeful.”

       3

      THE FIRST OFFICIAL MEETING of their partnership was convened outside the Kramler Building, in a nimbus compounded of the boys’ exhalations and of subterranean steam purling up from a grate in the pavement.

      “This is good,” Joe said.

      “I know.”

      “He said yes,” Joe reminded his cousin, who stood patting idly with one hand at the front of his overcoat and a panicked expression on his face, as though worried that he had left something important behind in Anapol’s office.

      “Yes, he did. He said yes.”

      “Sammy.” Joe reached out and grabbed Sammy’s wandering hand, arresting it in its search of his pockets and collar and tie. “This is good.”

      “Yes, this is good, god damn it. I just hope to God we can do it.”

      Joe let go of Sammy’s hand, shocked by this expression of sudden doubt. He had been completely taken in by Sammy’s bold application of the Science of Opportunity. The whole morning, the rattling ride through the flickering darkness under the East River, the updraft of Klaxons and rising office blocks that had carried them out of the subway station, the ten thousand men and women who immediately surrounded them, the ringing telephones and gum-snapping chitchat of the clerks and secretaries in Sheldon Anapol’s office, the sly and harried bulk of Anapol himself, the talk of sales figures and competition and cashing in big, all this had conformed so closely to Joe’s movie-derived notions of life in America that if an airplane were now to land on Twenty-fifth Street and disgorge a dozen bathing-suit-clad Fairies of Democracy come to award him the presidency of General Motors, a contract with Warner Bros., and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a swimming pool in the living room, he would have greeted this, too, with the same dreamlike unsurprise. It had not occurred to him until now to consider that his cousin’s display of bold entrepreneurial confidence might have been entirely bluff, that it was 8°C and he had neither hat nor gloves, that his stomach was as empty as his billfold, and that he and Sammy were nothing more than a couple of callow young men in thrall to a rash and dubious promise.

      “But I have belief in you,” Joe said. “I trust you.”

      “That’s good to hear.”

      “I mean it.”

      “I wish I knew why.”

      “Because,” said Joe. “I don’t have any choice.”

      “Oh ho.”

      “I need money,” Joe said, and then tried adding, “god damn it.”

      “Money.” The word seemed to have a restorative effect on Sammy, snapping him out of his daze. “Right. Okay. First of all, we need horses.”

      “Horses?”

      “Arms. Guys.”

      “Artists.”

      “How about we just call them ‘guys’ for right now?”

      “Do you know where we can find some?”

      Sammy thought for a moment. “I believe I do,” he said. “Come on.”

      They set off in a direction that Joe decided was probably west. As they walked Sammy seemed to get lost quickly in his own reflections. Joe tried to imagine the train of his cousin’s thoughts, but the particulars of the task at hand were not clear to him, and after a while he gave up and just kept pace. Sammy’s gait was deliberate and crooked, and Joe found it a challenge to keep from getting ahead. There was a humming sound everywhere that he attributed first to the circulation of his own blood in his ears before he realized that it was the sound produced by Twenty-fifth Street itself, by a hundred sewing machines in a sweatshop overhead, exhaust grilles at the back of a warehouse, the trains rolling deep beneath the black surface of the street. Joe gave up trying to think like, trust, or believe in his cousin and just walked, head abuzz, toward the Hudson River, stunned by the novelty of exile.

      “Who is he?” Sammy said at last, as they were crossing a broad street which a sign identified, improbably somehow, as Sixth Avenue. Sixth Avenue! The Hudson River!

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