The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (34 page)

Deasey pressed his lips together tightly and hoisted the corners. It took Joe a moment to realize that he was smiling.

“It’s my experience that honorable people live by the contracts they sign,” Deasey said at last. “And not a tittle more.”

Sammy looked at Joe. “He isn’t cheering me up,” he said. “Is he cheering you up?”

The question of a radio program, indeed the entire exchange that had taken place with the slim, silver-haired man wearing the eager expression, had largely escaped Joe. He was still far less proficient in English than he pretended to be, particularly when the subject ran to sports, politics, or business. He had no idea how socks or barrels figured into the discussion.

“That man wants to make a show on the radio about the Escapist,” Joe said, slowly, feeling slow, thick-witted, and obscurely abused by inscrutable men.

“He seemed at least to be interested in having his flacks explore the possibility,” Deasey said.

“And if they do, you are saying that they will not have to pay us for it.”

“I’m saying that.”

“But of course they must.”

“Not a dime.”

“I want a look at that contract,” Sammy said.

“Look all you want,” Deasey said. “Look it up and down. Hire a lawyer and have him nose around in it. All the rights—radio, movies, books, tin whistles, Cracker Jack prizes—they all belong to Anapol and Ashkenazy. One hundred percent.”

“I thought you said you wanted to warn us.” Sammy looked annoyed. “It seems to me the time for a warning would have been about a year ago, when we put our names to that piece-of-shit-excuse-my-language contract.”

Deasey nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. He went to a glass-fronted lawyer’s bookcase, stocked with a copy of every pulp magazine in which one of his novels had appeared, each bound in fine morocco and stamped soberly in gold characters
RACY POLICEMAN
or
RACY ACE
, with the issue number and date of publication and, beneath these, the uniform
legend
COMPLETE WORKS OF GEORGE DEASEY
.
^*
He stepped back and studied the books with, it seemed to Joe, a certain air of regret, though for what, exactly, Joe could not have said. “For what it’s worth, here’s the warning now. Or call it advice, if you like. You boys were powerless when you signed that contract last year. You aren’t quite so powerless anymore. You’ve had a good run. You’ve come up with some good ideas that have sold well. You’ve begun to make a name for yourselves. Now, we could debate the merits of making a name for yourselves in a third-rate industry by cranking out nonsense for numbskulls, but what isn’t in doubt is that there’s money to be found in this game right now, and you two have shown a knack for dowsing it. Anapol knows it. He knows that, if you wanted to, you could probably walk over to Donenfeld or Arnold or Goodman and write yourself a much better deal to dream up nonsense over there. So that’s my warning: stop handing this crap over to Anapol as if you owed it to him.”

“Make him pay for it from now on. Make him give us a piece,” Sammy said.

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

“But in the meantime—”

“You are screwed, gentlemen.” He consulted his pocket watch. “Now get out. I have duds of my own to secrete about the premises before I—” He broke off and looked at Joe, then stared down at his watch as if trying to make up his mind about something. When he looked up again, his face had twisted in a false, almost sickeningly cheery, rictus. “The hell with it,” he said. “I need a drink. Mr. Clay—”

“I know,” Sammy said. “I have to finish
Strange Frigate
.”

“No, Mr. Clay,” Deasey said, awkwardly settling an arm over the shoulders of each of them and dragging them toward the door. “Tonight you are going to
sail
on it.”

W
HEN
C
ARL
E
BLING
looked in the
News
the next morning, he was disappointed to find not the slightest mention of a bomb scare at the Empire State Building, of the Aryan-American League, or of a fiendish (if for the time being sham) bomber who called himself—deriving the moniker from a shrouded villain who made scattered appearances in the pages of
Radio Comics
throughout the prewar years—the Saboteur. The last would have been pretty unlikely, since Ebling had, in his nervous haste to squirrel the device in the desk of his imagined nemesis Sam Clay, forgotten to leave the note that he had prepared specially and signed with his nom de guerre. When he checked all the other Saturday papers, once again he found not a word to connect him to anything that had gone on in the city the previous day. The whole matter had been hushed up.

The party thrown for Salvador Dalí that last Friday of the New York World’s Fair got considerably more play. It rated twenty lines in Leonard Lyons’s column, a mention in Ed Sullivan’s, and an unsigned squib by E. J. Kahn in “Talk of the Town” the following week. It was also described in one of Auden’s letters to Isherwood in L.A., and figured in the published memoirs of at least two mainstays of the Greenwich Village art scene.

The guests of honor, the satrap of Surrealism and his Russian wife, Gala, were in New York to close
The Dream of Venus
, an attraction, conceived and designed by Dalí, that had been among the wonders of the Fair’s Amusement Area. Their host, a wealthy New Yorker named Longman Harkoo, was the proprietor of Les Organes du Facteur, a Surrealist art gallery and bookshop on Bleecker Street, inspired by the dreaming postman of Hauterives. Harkoo, who had sold more of Dalí’s
work than any other dealer in the world, and who was a sponsor of
The Dream of Venus
, had met George Deasey in school, at Collegiate, where the future Underminister of Agitprop for the Unconscious was two years ahead of the future Balzac of the Pulps; they had renewed their acquaintance in the late twenties, when Hearst had posted Deasey to Mexico City.

“Those Olmec heads,” Deasey said in the cab on the way downtown. He had insisted on their taking a cab. “That was all he wanted to talk about. He tried to buy one. In fact, I once heard that he did buy it, and he’s hidden it in the basement of his house.”

“You used them in
The Pyramid of Skulls
,” Sammy said. “Those big heads. There was a secret compartment in the left ear.”

“It’s bad enough you read them,” Deasey said. Sammy had prepared for the composition of his first work as Harvey Slayton by immersing himself deeply in Deasey’s oeuvre. “I find it incredibly sad, Clay, that you also remember the
titles
.” Actually, he looked, Joe thought, quite flattered. He probably had never expected, at this point in a career that he so publicly accounted a failure, to encounter a genuine admirer of his work. He seemed to have discovered in himself a tenderness—unsuspected by no one more than he—for both of the cousins, but particularly for Sammy, who still viewed, as a springboard to literary renown, work that Deasey had long since concluded was only “a long, spiraling chute, greased with regular paychecks, to the Tartarus of pseudonymous hackdom.” He had shown some of his old poems to Sammy, and the yellowed manuscript of a serious novel that he had never completed. Joe suspected that Deasey had intended these revelations to be warnings to Sammy, but his cousin had chosen to interpret them as proof that success in the pulpwoods was not incompatible with talent, and that he ought not to abandon his own novelistic dreams. “Where was I?”

“Mexico City,” Joe said. “Heads.”

“Thank you.” Deasey took a pull from his flask. He drank an extremely cheap brand of rye called Brass Lamp. Sammy claimed that it was not rye at all but actual lamp oil, as Deasey was strongly nearsighted. “Yes, the mysterious Olmecs.” Deasey returned the magic lamp to his breast pocket. “And Mr. Longman Harkoo.”

Harkoo, Deasey said, was a Village eccentric of long standing, connected to the founders of one of the posh Fifth Avenue department stores. He was a widower—twice over—who lived in a queer house with a daughter from his first marriage. In addition to looking after the day-to-day affairs of his gallery, orchestrating his disputes with fellow members of the American Communist Party, and pulling off his celebrated fetes, he was also, in idle moments, writing a largely unpunctuated novel, already more than a thousand pages long, which described, in cellular detail, the process of his own birth. He had taken his unlikely name in the summer of 1924, while sharing a house at La Baule with André Breton, when a pale, hugely endowed figure calling himself the Long Man of Harkoo recurred five nights running in his dreams.

“Right here,” Deasey called out to the driver, and the cab came to a stop in front of a row of indistinct modern apartment blocks. “Pay the fare, will you, Clay? I’m a little short.”

Sammy scowled at Joe, who considered that his cousin really ought to have expected this. Deasey was a classic cadger of a certain type, at once offhand and peremptory. But Joe had discovered that Sammy was, in his own way, a classic tightwad. The entire concept of taxicabs seemed to strike Sammy as recherché and decadent, on a par with the eating of songbirds. Joe took a dollar from his wallet and passed it to the driver.

“Keep the change,” he said.

The Harkoo house lay entirely hidden from the avenue, “like an emblem (heavy-handed at that) of suppressed nasty urges,” as Auden put it in his letter to Isherwood, at the heart of a city block the whole of which subsequently passed into the hands of New York University, was razed, and now forms the site of the massive Levine School of Applied Meteorology. The solid rampart of row houses and apartment blocks that enclosed the Harkoo house and its grounds on all four sides could be breached only by way of a narrow ruelle that slipped unnoticed between two buildings and penetrated, through a tunnel of ailanthus trees, to the dark, leafy yard within.

The house, when they reached it, was a vest-pocket Oriental fantasy, a miniature Topkapi, hardly bigger than a firehouse, squeezed onto its tiny site. It curled like a sleeping cat around a central tower topped with
a dome that resembled, among other items, a knob of garlic. Through skillful use of forced perspective and manipulation of scale, the house managed to look much bigger than it really was. Its luxurious coat of Virginia creeper, the gloom of its courtyard, and the artless jumble of its gables and spires gave the place an antique air, but it had in fact been completed in September 1930, around the time that Al Smith was laying the cornerstone for the Empire State Building. Like that structure, it was a kind of dream habitation, having, like the Long Man of Harkoo himself, originally appeared to Longman Harkoo in his sleep, giving him the excuse he had long sought to pull down the dull old Greek Revival house that had been the country home of his mother’s family since the founding of Greenwich Village.
That
house had itself replaced a much earlier structure, dating to the first years of British dominion, in which—or so Harkoo claimed—a Dutch-Jewish forebear of his had entertained the devil during his 1682 tour of the colonies.

Joe noticed that Sammy was hanging back a little, looking up at the miniature tower, absently massaging the top of his left thigh, his face solemn and nervous in the light of the torches that flanked the door. In his gleaming pinstriped suit, he reminded Joe of their character the Monitor, armored for battle against perfidious foes. Suddenly Joe felt apprehensive, too. It had not quite sunk in until now, with all the talk of bombs and woolens and radio programs, that they had come downtown with Deasey to attend a
party
.

Neither of the cousins was much for parties. Though Sammy was mad for swing, he could not, of course, dance on his pipe-cleaner legs; his nerves killed his appetite, and at any rate, he was too self-conscious about his manners to eat anything; and he disliked the flavor of liquors and beer. Introduced into a cursed circle of jabber and jazz, he would drift helplessly behind a large plant. His brash and heedless gift of conversation, by means of which he had whipped up
Amazing Midget Radio Comics
and with it the whole idea of Empire, deserted him. Put him in front of a roomful of people at work and he would be impossible to shut up; work was not work for him. Parties were work. Women were work. At Palooka Studios, whenever there occurred the chance conjunction of girls and a bottle, Sammy simply vanished, like Mike Campbell’s fortune, at first a little at a time, and then all at once.