Tommy carried the scissors and the cereal to his room. There was half an inch of mostly crumbs left in the wax-paper bag, and he munched them dutifully. As he had done every morning for the last week, he studied the text printed on the back panel of the box, which described the scientifically formulated merits of the cereal in sober tones and which he now knew by heart. When he was through, he balled up the bag and threw it into the wastebasket. He picked up the scissors and carefully cut the back panel off the box. He laid it flat on his desk. With a pencil and a ruler, he drew a box around every instance of the words "Post Toasties." Then he took the scissors and cut on the lines he had marked. He took the panel, with its eleven rectangular holes, and fit it over the purported list of magic tricks from Tannen's.

That was how he learned that he was to catch the 10:04 train at the Bloomtown LIRR station on December 3, wearing an eye patch that would be supplied, under cover of constituting part of a spurious trick called Pieces o' Eight, in a second letter from Joe. Tommy was to sit in the last car, at the back, transfer at Jamaica, disembark at Penn Station, then walk the two long blocks to, of all places, the Empire State Building. He was to ride the elevator to the seventy-second floor, go to Suite 7203, and rap out his initials on the door in Morse code. If he encountered some family friend or other adult who questioned him and his destination, he was to point to the eye patch and say, simply, "Ophthalmologist."

Every Thursday for the next seven months, Tommy followed the routine established by that first secret letter from Joe. He left the house at eight forty-five, like every day, and started walking toward William Floyd Junior High, where he was in the seventh grade. At the corner of Darwin Avenue, however, he turned left instead of right, slipped through the Marchettis' backyard, crossed Rutherford Drive, and then took his sweet time (unless it was raining) ambling across the half-built east side of Bloomtown toward the bland new cinder-block-and-steel structure that had replaced the old Manticock station. He spent the day with Cousin Joe, in his strange digs nine hundred feet above Fifth Avenue, and left at three o'clock. Then, again following Joe's original prescription, he stopped outside Reliant Office Supplies on Thirty-third Street and typed out an excuse to hand to the principal, Mr. Savarese, the next morning, on a piece of paper that Joe had already furnished with a perfect simulacrum of Rosa Clay's signature.

In the first months, Tommy loved everything about the trips into New York. The cloak-and-dagger protocols, the risk of capture, and the soaring view from the windows of Joe's home could not have been better designed to appeal to the mind of an eleven-year-old boy who spent large parts of every day pretending to pose as the secret identity of a super-powered humanoid insect. He loved, first of all, the ride into the city. As with many lonely children, his problem was not solitude itself but that he was never left free to enjoy it. There were always well-meaning adults trying to jolly him, to improve and counsel him, to bribe and cajole and bully him into making friends, speaking up, getting some fresh air; teachers poking and wheedling with their facts and principles, when all he really needed was to be handed a stack of textbooks and left alone; and, worst of all, other children, who could not seem to play their games without including him if they were cruel ones or, if their games were innocent, pointedly keeping him out. Tommy's loneliness had found a strangely happy expression in the pitch and rumble of the LIRR trains, the stale breath of the heat blowers, the warm oatmeal smell of cigarettes, the sere featureless prospect from the windows, the hours given over entirely to himself, his book, and his imaginings. He also loved the city itself. Coming to and leaving Cousin Joe's, he would gorge himself on hot dogs and cafeteria pie, price cigarette lighters and snap-brim hats in store windows, follow the pushboys with their rustling racks of furs and trousers. There were sailors and prizefighters; there were bums, sad and menacing, and ladies in piped jackets with dogs in their handbags. Tommy would feel the sidewalks hum and shudder as the trains rolled past beneath him. He heard men swearing and singing opera. On a sunny day, his peripheral vision would be spangled with light winking off the chrome headlights of taxicabs, the buckles on ladies' shoes, the badges of policemen, the handles of pushcart lunch-wagons, the bulldog ornaments on the hoods of irate moving vans. This was Gotham City, Empire City, Metropolis. Its skies and rooftops were alive with men in capes and costumes, on the lookout for wrongdoers, saboteurs, and Communists. Tommy was the Rug, on solitary patrol in New York City, soaring up from the underground like a cicada, hopping on his mighty hind legs along Fifth Avenue in hot pursuit of Dr. Hate or the Finagler, creeping unnoticed as an ant amid the hurrying black-and-gray herds of briefcase-carrying humans, whose crude mammalian existences he had sworn to protect and defend, before at last dropping in on the secret aerial lair of one of his fellow masked crime-fighters, whom he sometimes dubbed the Eagle but who went more generally, in Tommy's fancy, by the moniker Secretman.

Secretman lived in a two-room office suite with four windows that looked out toward Bloomtown and Greenland. He had a desk, a chair, a drafting table, a stool, an armchair, a floor lamp, a complicated multi-band radio array festooned with yards of rambling antenna, and a special little cabinet whose many shallow drawers were filled with pens, pencils, twisted tubes of paint, erasers. There was no telephone; nor was there any stove, icebox, or proper bed.

"It's illegal," Cousin Joe told Tommy, the first time he visited. "You're not allowed to live in an office building. That's why you can't tell anyone I'm here."

Even then, before he learned the depth and extent of Secretman's superhuman powers of self-concealment, Tommy did not entirely believe this explanation. He sensed from the first, though he could not have expressed it—at his age, both the name and the experience of grief were not so much foreign to as latent in him, and as yet undetected—that something was the matter with, or had happened to, Joe. But he was too thrilled with his cousin's style of life, and the opportunity it afforded, to think the problem over too carefully. He watched as Joe went to a door on the other side of the room and opened it. It was a supply closet. There were stacks of paper and bottles of ink and other supplies. There were also a folded cot, an electric hot plate, two boxes of clothes, a canvas garment bag, and a small porcelain sink.

"Isn't there a janitor?" Tommy asked him on the second trip, having given the question some consideration. "Or a guard?"

"The janitor comes at five minutes before midnight, and I make sure everything is all right before he gets here. The guard and I are old friends by now."

Joe answered all of Tommy's questions about the particulars of his life, and showed him all of the work he had done since leaving the comic book business. But he declined to tell Tommy how long he had been holed up in the Empire State Building, and why he stayed there, and for what reason he kept his return a secret. He would not say why he never left his rooms except to purchase those supplies that could not be delivered, often wearing a false beard and sunglasses, or to pay regular visits to Tannen's back room, or why, one afternoon in July, he had made an exception and gone all the way out to Long Island. These were the mysteries of Secretman. Such questions had occurred to Tommy, in any case, only in a fragmentary and inarticulate way. After the first two visits, and for a while thereafter, he just took the entire situation for granted. Joe taught him card tricks, coin tricks, bits with handkerchiefs and needles and thread. They ate sandwiches brought in from the coffee shop downstairs. They shook hands in greeting and farewell. And, month after month, Tommy kept Secretman's secrets, though they were always bubbling up on his lips and trying to escape.

Tommy was caught only twice before the day on which it all came out. The first time he attracted the attention of an LIRR conductor with nystagmus who soon plumbed the shallow surface of Tommy's cover story. Tommy spent much of November 1953, as a result, confined to his bedroom. But in school—he considered it part of his punishment that they continued to send him to school during the month he was grounded—he consulted with Sharon Simchas, who was nearly blind in one eye. He sent his cousin an explanatory letter in care of Louis Tannen. On the Thursday following the lifting of the punishment, he set off again for Manhattan, equipped this time with the name and address of Sharon's doctor, one of the doctor's business cards, and a plausible diagnosis of strabismus. The wobble-eyed ticket puncher, however, never reappeared.

The second time he was caught came a month before the leap of the Escapist. Tommy settled into his seat at the back of the last car and opened his copy of Walter B. Gibson's Houdini on Magic. Cousin Joe had given it to him the week before; it was signed by the author, the creator of the Shadow, with whom Joe still played cards from time to time. Tommy had his shoes off, his eye patch on, and half a pack of Black Jack in his mouth. He heard a clatter of heels and looked up in time to see his mother, in her sealskin coat, stumble into the train car, out of breath, mashing her best black hat down onto her head with one arm. She was at the opposite end of a relatively full car, and there was a tall man positioned directly in her line of sight. She sat down without noticing her son. This stroke of good fortune took a moment to sink in. He glanced down at the book in his lap. The dark gray wad of gum lay in a small pool of saliva on the left-hand page; it had fallen out of his mouth. He put it back in and lay down across the pair of seats in his row, his face hidden in the hood of his coat and behind the screen of his book. His sense of guilt was exacerbated by the knowledge that Harry Houdini had idolized his own mother and doubtless never would have deceived or hidden from her. At Elmont, the conductor came by to check his ticket, and Tommy scrabbled up onto one elbow. The conductor gave him a skeptical look, and though Tommy had never seen him before, he tapped the patch with a Fingertip and tried to echo the nonchalance of Cousin Joe.

"Ophthalmologist," he said.

The conductor nodded and punched his ticket. Tommy lay back down.

At Jamaica, he waited until the car emptied completely, then dashed out onto the platform. He got to the train for Penn Station just as the doors were closing. There was no time for him to try to guess which car his mother might have boarded. The idea of waiting for a later train did not occur to him until several minutes later, when—soon after she let go of his earlobe—it was suggested to him by his mother.

He ran right into her, almost literally, smelling her perfume an instant before a hard corner of her imitation-tortoiseshell handbag poked him in the eye.

"Oh!"

"Ouch!"

He stumbled backward. She grabbed him by the hood of his coat and dragged him toward her, then, tightening her grip, actually raised him half an inch off the ground, like a magician brandishing by the ears the rabbit he was about to dematerialize. His legs kicked at the pedals of an invisible bicycle. Her cheeks were rouged, her eyelids lined with black paint like a Caniff girl's.

"What are you doing? Why aren't you in school?"

"Nothing," he said. "I'm just... I was just..."

He glanced around the car. Naturally, all of the other passengers were staring at them. His mother lifted him a little higher and brought her face close to his. The perfume blowing off her was called Ambush.

It sat on a mirrored tray on her dresser, under a mantle of dust. He could not remember the last time he had smelled it on her.

"I can't—" she began, but then she couldn't finish her sentence because she had started to laugh. "Take off that damned eye patch," she said. She lowered him to the floor of the train and lifted the patch. He blinked. She flicked the patch back over his eye. Keeping her grip on the hood of his Mighty Mac, she dragged him down to the end of the car and pushed him into a seat. He was sure she was going to yell at him now, but once more she surprised him by sitting down beside him and putting her arms around him. She rocked back and forth, holding him tight.

"Thank you," she said, her voice throaty and rough, the way it sounded the morning after a bridge night when she had gone through a pack of cigarettes. "Thank you."

She nuzzled his head and he felt that her cheeks were wet. He sat back.

"What's the matter, Mom?"

She snapped open her purse and took out a handkerchief.

"Everything," she said. "What's the matter with you? How come you keep doing this? You were going to Tannen's again?"

"No."

"Don't lie, Tommy," she said. "Don't make this worse than it already is."

"Okay."

"You can't do this. You can't just skip school whenever you want to and go to Tannen's Magic Shop. You're eleven years old. You aren't a hoodlum."

"I know."

The train shuddered and the brakes screeched. They were pulling into Pennsylvania Station now. Tommy stood up and waited for her to get up and drag him off the train, across the platform, back out to Jamaica, and then home. But she didn't move. She just sat there, checking her eyes in the mirror of her compact, shaking her head ruefully at the mess her tears had made.

"Mom?" he said.

She looked up.

"I don't see any reason to waste these clothes and this hat just because you would rather saw a lady in half than learn fractions," she said.

"You mean I'm not punished?"

"I thought we could spend the day in the city. The two of us. Eat at Schrafft's. Maybe see a show."

"So you aren't going to punish me?"

She shook her head, once, dismissively, as if the question bored her. Then she took hold of his hand. "I don't see any reason to tell your father about any of this, do you, Tommy?"

"No, ma'am."

"Your father has enough to worry about without this."

"Yes, ma'am."

"We'll just keep this whole little incident to ourselves."

He nodded, though there was an eager look in her eyes that made him uneasy. He felt a sudden mad desire to be grounded again. He sat down.

"But if you ever do this again," she added, "I'll take all of your cards and wands and all that other nonsense and toss them into the incinerator."

He sat back and relaxed a little. As she promised, they lunched at Schrafft's, she on stuffed peppers, he on a Monte Cristo sandwich. They spent an hour in Macy's and then took in It Should Happen to You at the Trans-Lux Fifty-second. They caught the 4:12 for home. Tommy was asleep by the time his father came in, and said nothing the next morning when he came in to wake him for school. The encounter on the train was scattered in the cracks in their family. Once, long afterward, he summoned up the courage to ask his mother what she had been doing on that inbound train, dressed in her fanciest clothes, but she had merely put a finger to her lips and gone on struggling over another of the lists she always left behind.

On the day that everything had changed, Tommy and Cousin Joe were sitting in the outer room of the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams, where there was a false receptionist's desk. Tommy was in the armchair, a big wingback covered in a rough fabric like burlap, pool-table green, legs dangling, drinking a can of cream soda. Joe was lying on the floor with his arms folded under his head. Neither of them had said anything for what felt to Tommy like several minutes. They often passed long periods of their visits without saying very much. Tommy would read his book, and Cousin Joe would work on the comic book that he had been drawing, he said, ever since taking up residence in the Empire State Building.

"How's your father?" Joe said abruptly.

"Fine," said Tommy.

"That's what you always say."

"I know."

"He is worried about this book by Dr. Wertham, I imagine? The Seduction of the Innocents?"

"Real worried. Some senators are coming from Washington."

Joe nodded. "Is he very busy?"

"He's always busy."

"How many titles is he putting out?"

"Why don't you ask him yourself?" Tommy said, with an unintended sharpness.

There was no reply for a moment. Joe took a long drag on his cigarette. "Maybe I will," he said. "Some of these days."

"I think you should. Everybody really misses you."

"Your father said that he misses me?"

"Well, no, but he does," Tommy said. Lately, he had begun to worry about Joe. In the months since his foray into the wilds of Long Island, he had by his own admission been leaving the building less and less frequently, as if Tommy's visits had become a substitute for regular experience of the external world. "Maybe you could come home with me, on the train. It's nice. There's an extra bed in my room."

"A 'trundle' bed."

"Yeah."

"Could I use your Brooklyn Dodgers bath towel?"

"Yeah, sure! I mean, if you wanted."

Joe nodded. "Maybe I will, some of these days," he said again.

"Why do you keep staying here?"

"Why do you keep asking me that?"

"Well, don't you—doesn't it bother you to be in the same building with them? With Empire Comics? If they treated you so bad and all?"

"It doesn't bother me at all. I like being near to them. To the Escapist. And you never know. Some of these days I could maybe bother them."

He sat up as he said this, rolling onto his knees brusquely.

"What do you mean?"

Joe waved the question away with his cigarette, obscuring it in a cloud of smoke. "Never mind."

"Tell me."

"Forget it."

"I hate it when people do that," said Tommy.

"Yeah," said Joe. "So do I." He dropped the cigarette on the bare cement floor and ground it under the toe of his rubber sandal. "To tell the truth, I've never quite figured out just what I'm going to do. I'd like to embarrass them somehow. Make that Shelly Anapol look bad. Maybe I will dress up as the Escapist and ... jump off this building! I have only to figure out some way to make it look like I jumped and killed myself." He smiled thinly. "But, of course, without it actually killing myself."

"Could you do that? What if it didn't work and you were, like, smashed flat as a pancake on Thirty-fourth Street?"

"That would certainly embarrass them," Joe said. He patted his chest. "Where did I leave—ah."

That was the moment when everything had changed. Joe stepped toward his drawing table to get his pack of Old Golds and tripped over Tommy's satchel. He pitched forward, reaching for the air in front of him, but before he could catch hold of anything, his forehead, with a loud, disturbingly wooden knock, hit the corner of his drafting table. He uttered one broken syllable and then hit the ground, hard. Tommy sat, waiting for him to curse or roll over or burst into tears. Joe didn't move. He lay facedown with his long nose bent against the floor, hands splayed beside him, motionless and silent. Tommy scrambled out of the chair and went to his side. He grabbed one of his hands. It was still warm. He took hold of Joe's shoulders and pulled him, rocking him twice and then rolling him over like a log. There was a small cut on his forehead, beside the pale crescent-moon scar of an old wound. The cut looked deep, although there was only a small amount of blood. Joe's chest rose and fell, shallow but steady, and his breath came rattling through his nose. He was out cold.

"Cousin Joe," Tommy said, giving him a shake. "Hey. Wake up. Please."

He went into the other room and opened the tap. He wet a ragged washcloth with cool water and carried it back to Joe. Gently, he dabbed at the uninjured portion of Joe's forehead. Nothing happened. He lay the towel on Joe's face and rubbed it vigorously around. Still, Joe lay breathing. A constellation of concepts that were vague to Tommy, comas and trances and epileptic fits, now began to trouble him. He had no idea what to do for his cousin, how to revive or help him, and now the cut was beginning to bleed more freely. What should Tommy do? His impulse was to go for help, but he had sworn to Joe that he would never reveal his presence to anyone. Still, Joe was a tenant of the building, illegal or not. His name must appear on some lease or document The management of the building knew he was here. Would they be able or willing to help?

Then Tommy remembered a field trip he had taken here, back in the second grade. There was a large infirmary—a miniature hospital, the tour guide had called it—on one of the lower floors. There had been a pretty young nurse in white hat and shoes. She would know what to do. Tommy stood up and started for the door. Then he turned to look back at Joe lying on the floor. What would they do, though, once they had revived him and bandaged his cut? Would they put him in jail for sleeping in his office night after night? Would they think he was some kind of nut? Was he some kind of nut? Would they lock him up in a "nutbin"?

Tommy's hand was on the knob, but he couldn't bring himself to turn it. He was paralyzed; he had no idea of what to do. And now, for the first time, he appreciated Joe's dilemma. It was not that he did not wish further contact with the world in general, and the Clays in particular. Maybe that was how it had started out for him, in those strange days after the war, when he came back from some kind of secret mission— this was what Tommy's mother had said—and found out that his mother had been put to death in the camps. Joe had run away, escaped without a trace, and come here to hide. But now he was ready to come home. The problem was that he didn't know how to do it. Tommy would never know how much effort it cost Joe to make that trip out to Long Island, how ardent his desire was to see the boy, speak to him, hear his thin reedy voice. But Tommy could see that Secretman was trapped in his Chamber of Secrets, and that the Bug was going to have to rescue him.

At that moment, Joe groaned and his eyes fluttered open. He touched a finger to his forehead and looked at the blood that came away. He sat up on one elbow, rolling toward Tommy by the door. The look on Tommy's face must have been easy to read.

"I'm fine," Joe said, his voice thick. "Get back in here."

Tommy let go of the doorknob.

"You see," Joe said, rising slowly to his feet, "goes to show you shouldn't smoke. It's bad for the health."

"Okay," Tommy said, marveling at the strange resolve that he had formed.

When he left Joe that afternoon, he went to the Smith-Corona typewriter that was chained to a podium in front of Reliant Office Supplies. He rolled out the sheet of typing paper that was there so that people could try out the machine. It featured its regular weekly fable, one sentence long, of the quick brown fox and the lazy dog, and exhorted him that now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. He rolled in the usual piece of stationery, at the bottom of which Joe had forged his mother's name. "Dear Mr. Savarese," he typed, using the tips of his index fingers. Then he stopped. He rolled out the paper and set it to one side. He looked up at the polished black stone of the storefront. His reflection looked back at him: He went over to open the chrome-handled door and was immediately intercepted by a thin, white-haired man whose trousers were belted at the diaphragm. This man often watched Tommy from the doorway of his shop as the boy typed out his excuses, and every week, Tommy thought the man was going to tell him to get lost. At the threshold of the store, which he had never crossed before, he hesitated. In the man's stiffened shoulders and the backward cant of his head, Tommy recognized his own manner when faced with a big strange dog or other sharp-toothed animal.

"Whaddaya want, sonny?" the man said.

"How much is a sheet of paper?"

"I don't sell paper by the sheet."

"Oh."

"Run along now."

"Well, how much for a box, then?"

"A box of what?"

"Paper."

"What kind of paper? What for?"

"A letter."

"Business? Personal? This is for you? You're going to write a letter?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, what kind of a letter is it?"

Tommy considered the question for a moment, seriously. He didn't want to get the wrong kind of paper.

"A death threat," he said at last.

For some reason, this cracked the man up. He went around behind the sales counter and bent down to open a drawer.

"Here," he said, handing Tommy a sheet of heavy tan paper as smooth and cool to the touch as marzipan. "My best twenty-five-pound cotton rag." He was still laughing. "Make sure you kill them good, all right?"

"Yes, sir," said Tommy. He went back out to the typewriter, rolled in the sheet of fancy paper, and in half an hour typed the message that would eventually draw a crowd to the sidewalk around the Empire State Building. This was not necessarily the outcome he anticipated. He didn't know exactly what he was hoping for as he pecked out his missive to the editor of the New York Herald-Tribune. He was just trying to help Cousin Joe find his way home. He wasn't sure what it would all lead to, or if his letter, though it sounded awfully official and realistic to his own ears, would even be believed. When he finished, he carefully withdrew it from the typewriter and went back into the shop.

"How much for an envelope?" he said.

7

WHEN THEY GOT OUT on seventy-two, the boy led them to the left, past the doorways of an import company and a wig manufacturer, to a door whose opaque glass light was painted with the words KORNBLUM VANISHING CREAMS, INC. The boy turned to look at them, an eyebrow raised, seeing, the captain thought, if they got the joke, although Lieber wasn't sure just what the joke was supposed to be. Then the boy knocked. There was no reply. He knocked again.

"Where is he?" he said.

"Captain Harley."

They turned. A second building cop, Rensie, had joined them. He put a finger to his nose as if he was about to impart some delicate or embarrassing information.

"What is it?" Harley said warily.

"Our boy is up there," Rensie said. "The leaper. Up on the o.d."

"What?" Lieber stared at the kid, more bewildered than he considered it competent for a detective to be.

"Costume?" Harley said.

Rensie nodded. "Nice blue one," he said. "Big nose. Skinny. It's him."

"How'd he get there?"

"We don't know, Captain. Swear to God, we were watching everything. We had a man on the stairs, and another on the elevators. I don't know how he got in there. He just kind of showed up."

"Come on," Lieber said, already moving for the elevators. "And bring your son," he told Sammy Clay; you had to bring a cleat to lash them to. The boy's face had gone blank and bloodless with what looked to Lieber like astonishment. Somehow his hoax had come true.

They stepped into the elevator, with its elaborate chevrons and rays of inlaid wood.

"He's on the parapet?" said Captain Harley. Rensie nodded.

"Wait a minute," said Sammy. "I'm confused."

Lieber allowed as how he was a tiny bit confused himself. He had thought that the mystery of the letter to the Herald-Tribune was solved: it was a harmless if inscrutable stunt, pulled by an eleven-year-old boy. No doubt, he thought, he had been fairly inscrutable himself at that age. The kid was looking for attention; he was trying to make a point that no one outside the family could possibly understand. Then, somehow, it had appeared that this long-lost cousin whom Lieber had assumed until that point to be a dead man, run down on the shoulder of some godforsaken road outside of Cat Butt, Wyoming, was actually holed up, somehow or other, in an office suite on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State. And now it looked as if the kid was not the author of the letter after all; the Escapist had kept his grim promise to the city of New York.

They had gone fourteen stories—special express all the way—when Rensie said in a small, unwilling voice, "There are orphans."

"There are what?"

"Orphans," said Clay. He had his arm crooked around his kid's neck in a fatherly display of reproof masquerading as solicitude. It was an embrace that said Wait till I get you home. "Why are there—?"

"Yes, Sergeant," Harley said. "Why are there?"

"Well, it didn't look like the, uh, the gentleman in the, uh, the blue suit was going to show," Rensie said. "And the little brats came all the way down from Watertown. Ten hours on a bus."

"An audience. Of little children," Harley said. "Perfect."

"What about you?" Lieber said to the boy. "You confused, too?"

The boy stared, then nodded slowly.

"You want to have your wits about you, Tom," Lieber said. "We need you to talk to this uncle of yours."

"First cousin," Clay said. He cleared his throat. "Once removed."

"Maybe you could talk to your first cousin once removed about those rubber bands," Rensie said. "That's a new one on me."

"Rubber bands," Captain Harley said. "And orphans." He rubbed at the wrecked half of his face. "I'm guessing there's also a nun?" "A padre." "Okay," said Captain Harley. "Well, that's something."

8

TWENTY-TWO ORPHANS from the Orphanage of St. Vincent de Paul huddled on the windswept roof of the city, a thousand feet up. Gray light was smeared across the sky like ointment on a bandage. The heavy steel zippers of the children's dark blue corduroy coats—donated by a Watertown department store the previous winter, along with the twenty-two chiming pairs of galoshes—were zipped tightly against the April chill. The children's two keepers, Father Martin and Miss Mary Catherine Macomb, circled the children like a couple of nipping sheepdogs, trying to cinch them with their voices and hands. Father Martin's eyes watered in the sharp breeze, and Miss Macomb's thick arms were stippled with gooseflesh. They were not excitable people, but things had gotten out of hand and they were shouting.

"Stay back!" Miss Macomb told the children, several hundred times.

"For pity's sake, man," Father Martin told the leaper, "come down."

There was something stunned in the faces of the children, blinking and tentative. The slow, dull, dark submarine of the lives in which they were the human cargo had abruptly surfaced. Their blood was filled with a kind of crippling nitrogen of wonder. Nobody was smiling or laughing, though with children, entertainment often seemed to be a grave business.

Atop the thick concrete parapet of the eighty-sixth floor, like a bright jagged hole punched in the clouds, balanced a smiling man in a mask and a gold-and-indigo suit. The suit clung to his lanky frame, dark blue with an iridescent glint of silk. He had on a pair of golden swim trunks, and on the front of his blue jersey was a thick golden applique, like the initial on a letterman's jacket, in the shape of a skeleton key. He wore a pair of soft gold boots, rather shapeless, with thin rubber soles. The trunks were nubbly and had a white streak on the seat, as if their wearer had once leaned against a freshly painted doorjamb. The tights were laddered and stretched out at the knees, the jersey sagged badly at the elbows, and the rubber soles of the flimsy boots were cracked and spotted with grease. His broad chest was girdled by a slender cord, studded with thousands of tiny knots, looped under his armpits, then stretched across the open-air promenade some twenty feet to the steel prong of an ornamental sun ray that jutted from the roof of the observation lounge. He gave the knotted cord a tug, and it twanged out a low D-flat.

He was putting on a show for them, for the children and for the policemen who had gathered at his feet, cursing and cajoling and begging him to climb down. He was promising a demonstration of human flight of the sort still routinely found, even in this diminished era of super-heroism, in the pages of comic books.

"You will see," he cried. "A man can fly."

He demonstrated the strength of the elastic rope, woven out of eight separate strands, each strand made up of forty of the extra-long, extra-thick rubber bands he had picked up at Reliant Office Supplies. The policemen remained suspicious, but they were not sure what to believe. The midnight-blue costume, with its key symbol and its weird Hollywood sheen, affected their judgment. And then there was Joe's professional manner, still remarkably smooth and workmanlike after so many years of disuse. His confidence in his ability to pull off the trick of leaping from the roof, plunging to a maximum of 162 feet in the direction of the far-distant sidewalk, then reascending, tugged skyward by the enormous rubber band, to alight smiling at the feet of the policemen, appeared to be absolute.

"The children won't be able to see me flying," Joe said, the glint of misdirection in his eyes. "Let them come to the edge."

The children agreed, pressing forward. Horrified, Miss Macomb and Father Martin held them back.

"Joe!" It was Sammy. He and various policemen, uniformed and plainclothes, came stumbling in a confusion of waving arms out onto the windswept promenade. They were led by a wary-looking Tommy Clay.

When Joe saw the boy, his son, join the motley crowd that had convened on the observation deck to observe as a rash and imaginary promise was fulfilled, he suddenly remembered a remark that his teacher Bernard Kornblum had once made.

"Only love," the old magician had said, "could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks."

He had offered this observation toward the end of Joe's last regular visit to the house on Maisel Street, as he rubbed a dab of calendula ointment into the skin of his raw, peeling cheeks. Generally, Kornblum said very little during the final portion of every lesson, sitting on the lid of the plain pine box that he had bought from a local coffin maker, smoking and taking his ease with a copy of Di Cajt while, inside the box, Joe lay curled, roped and chained, permitting himself sawdust-flavored sips of life through his nostrils, and making terrible, minute exertions. Kornblum sat, his only commentary an occasional derisive blast of flatulence, waiting for the triple rap from within which signified that Joe had loosed himself from cuffs and chains, prized out the three sawn-off dummy screw heads in the left-hand hinge of the lid, and was ready to emerge. At times, however, if Joe was particularly dilatory, or if the temptation of a literally captive audience proved too great, Kornblum would begin to speak, in his coarse if agile German—always limiting himself, however, to shoptalk. He reminisced fondly about performances in which he had, through bad luck or foolishness, nearly been killed; or recalled, in apostolic and tedious detail, one of the three golden occasions on which he had been fortunate enough to catch the act of his prophet, Houdini. Only this once, just before Joe attempted his ill-fated plunge into the Moldau, had Kornblum's talk ever wandered from the path of professional retrospection into the shadowed, leafy margins of the personal.

He had been present, Kornblum said—his voice coming muffled through the inch of pine plank and the thin canvas sack in which Joe was cocooned—for what none but the closest confidants of the Handcuff Ring, and the few canny confreres who witnessed it, knew to be the hour when the great one failed. This was in London, Kornblum said, in 1906, at the Palladium, after Houdini had accepted a public challenge to free himself from a purportedly inescapable pair of handcuffs. The challenge had been made by the Mirror of London, which had discovered a locksmith in the north of England who, after a lifetime of tinkering, had devised a pair of manacles fitted with a lock so convoluted and thorny that no one, not even its necromantic inventor, could pick it. Kornblum described the manacles, two thick steel circlets inflexibly welded to a cylindrical shaft. Within this rigid shaft lay the sinister mechanism of the Manchester locksmith—and here a tone of awe, even horror, entered Kornblum's voice. It was a variation on the Bramah, a notoriously intransigent lock that could be opened—and even then with difficulty—only by a long, arcane, tubular key, intricately notched at one end. Devised by the Englishman Joseph Bramah in the 1760s, it had gone unpicked, inviolate, for over half a century until it was finally cracked. The lock that now confronted Houdini, on the stage of the Palladium, consisted of two Bramah tubes, one nested inside the other, and could be opened only by a bizarre double key that looked something like the collapsed halves of a telescope, one notched cylinder protruding from within another.

As five thousand cheering gentlemen and ladies, the young Kornblum among them, looked on, the Mysteriarch, in black cutaway and waistcoat, was fitted with the awful cuffs. Then, with a single, blank-faced, wordless nod to his wife, he retreated to his small cabinet to begin his impossible work. The orchestra struck up "Annie Laurie." Twenty minutes later, wild cheering broke out as the magician's head and shoulders emerged from the cabinet; but it turned out that Houdini wanted only to get a look at the cuffs, which still held him fast, in better light. He ducked back inside. The orchestra played the Overture to Tales of Hoffmann. Fifteen minutes later, the music died amid cheers as Houdini stepped from the cabinet. Kornblum hoped against hope that the master had succeeded, though he knew perfectly well that when the first, single-barreled Bramah was, after sixty years, finally picked, it had taken the successful lock-pick, an American master by the name of Hobbs, two full days of continuous effort. And now it turned out that Houdini, sweating, a queasy smile on his face, his collar snapped and dangling free at one end, had merely—oddly—come out to announce that, though his knees hurt from crouching in the cabinet, he was not yet ready to throw in the towel. The newspaper's representative, in the interests of good sportsmanship, allowed a cushion to be brought, and Houdini retreated to his cabinet once more.

When Houdini had been in the box for nearly an hour, Kornblum began to sense the approach of defeat. An audience, even one so firmly on the side of its hero, would wait only so long while the orchestra cycled, with an air of increasing desperation, through the standards and popular tunes of the day. Inside his cabinet, the veteran of five hundred houses and ten thousand turns could doubtless sense it, too, as the tide of hope and goodwill flowing from the galleries onto the stage began to ebb. In a daring display of showmanship, he emerged once again, this time to ask if the newspaper's man would consent to remove the cuffs long enough for the magician to take off his coat. Perhaps Houdini was hoping to learn something from watching as the cuffs were opened and then closed again; perhaps he had calculated that his request, after due consideration, would be refused. When the gentleman from the newspaper regretfully declined, to loud hisses and catcalls from the audience, Houdini pulled off a minor feat that was, in its way, among the finest bits of showmanship of his career. Wriggling and contorting himself, he managed to pluck from the pocket of his waistcoat a tiny penknife, then painstakingly transfer it to, and open it with, his teeth. He shrugged and twisted until he had worked his cutaway coat up over to the front of his head, where the knife, still clenched between his teeth, could slice it, in three great sawing rasps, in two. A confederate tore the sundered halves away. After viewing this display of pluck and panache, the audience was bound to him as if with bands of steel. And, Kornblum said, in the uproar, no one noticed the look that passed between the magician and his wife, that tiny, quiet woman who had stood to one side of the stage as the minutes passed, and the band played, and the audience watched the faint rippling of the cabinet's curtain.

After the magician had reinstalled himself, coatless now, in his dark box, Mrs. Houdini asked if she might not prevail upon the kindness and forbearance of their host for the evening to bring her husband a glass of water. It had been an hour, after all, and as anyone could see, the closeness of the cabinet and the difficulty of Houdini's exertions had taken a certain toll. The sporting spirit prevailed; a glass of water was brought, and Mrs. Houdini carried it to her husband. Five minutes later, Houdini stepped from the cabinet for the last time, brandishing the cuffs over his head like a loving cup. He was free. The crowd suffered a kind of painful, collective orgasm—a "Krise," Kornblum called it—of delight and relief. Few remarked, as the magician was lifted onto the shoulders of the referees and notables on hand and carried through the theater, that his face was convulsed with tears of rage, not triumph, and that his blue eyes were incandescent with shame.

"It was in the glass of water," Joe guessed, when he had managed to free himself at last from the far simpler challenge of the canvas sack and a pair of German police cuffs gaffed with buckshot. "The key."

Kornblum, massaging the bands of raw skin at Joe's wrists with his special salve, nodded at first. Then he pursed his lips, thinking it over, and finally shook his head. He stopped rubbing at Joe's arms. He raised his head, and his eyes, as they did only rarely, met Joe's.

"It was Bess Houdini," he said. "She knew her husband's face. She could read the writing of failure in his eyes. She could go to the man from the newspaper. She could beg him, with the tears in her eyes and the blush on her bosom, to consider the ruin of her husband's career when put into the balance with nothing more on the other side than a good headline for the next morning's newspaper. She could carry a glass of water to her husband, with the small steps and the solemn face of the wife. It was not the key that freed him," he said. "It was the wife. There was no other way out. It was impossible, even for Houdini." He stood up. "Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks." He wiped at his raw cheek with the back of his hand, on the verge, Joe felt, of sharing some parallel example of liberation from his own life.

"Have you—did you ever—?"

"That terminates the lesson for today," Kornblum said, snapping shut the lid of the box of ointment, and then managing to meet Joe's eyes again, not, this time, without a certain tenderness. "Now, go home."

Afterward, Joe found there was some reason to doubt Kornblum's account. The famous London Mirror handcuff challenge had taken place, he learned, at the Hippodrome, not the Palladium, and in 1904, not 1906. Many commentators, Joe's chum Walter B. Gibson among them, felt that the entire performance, including the pleas for light, water, time, a cushion, had been arranged beforehand between Houdini and the newspaper; some even went so far as to argue that Houdini himself had designed the cuffs, and that he had coolly whiled away his time of purported struggling in his cabinet, Kornblum-like, by reading the newspaper or by humming contentedly along with the orchestra down in the pit.

Nevertheless, when he saw Tommy step out onto the tallest rooftop in the city, wearing a small, horrified smile, Joe felt the passionate, if not the factual, truth behind Kornblum's dictum. He had returned to New York years before, with the intention of finding a way to reconnect, if possible, with the only family that remained to him in the world. Instead he had become immured, by fear and its majordomo, habit, in his cabinet of mysteries on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State Building, serenaded by a tirelessly vamping orchestra of air currents and violin winds, the trumpeting of foghorns and melancholy steamships, the plangent continuo of passing DC-3s. Like Harry Houdini, Joe had failed to get out of his self-created trap; but now the love of a boy had sprung him, and drawn him at last, blinking, before the footlights.

"It's a stunt!" cried an old blond trooper whom Joe recognized as Harley, chief of the building police force.

"It's a gimmick," said a thickset, younger man standing beside Sammy. A plainclothesman, by the look of him. "Is that what it is?"

"It's a great big pain in the ass," Harley said.

Joe was shocked to see how haggard Sammy's face had grown; he was pale as dough, and at thirty-two he seemed to have acquired at last the deep-set eyes of the Kavaliers. He had not changed much, and yet somehow he looked entirely different. Joe felt as if he were looking at a clever impostor. Then Rosa's father emerged from the observatory. With his dyed penny-red hair and the eternal youthfulness of cheek enjoyed by some fat men, he did not appear to have changed at all, though he was, for some reason, dressed like George Bernard Shaw.

"Hello, Mr. Saks," Joe said.

"Hello, Joe." Saks was relying, Joe noticed, on a silver-topped walking stick, in a way that suggested the cane was not (or not merely) an affectation. So that was one change. "How are you?"

"Fine, thank you," Joe said. "And you?"

"We are well," he said. He was the only person on the entire deck— children included—who looked entirely delighted by the sight of Joe Kavalier, standing on the high shoulder of the Empire State Building in a suit of blue long johns. "Still steeped in scandal and intrigue."

"I'm glad," Joe said. He smiled at Sammy. "You've put on weight?"

"A little. For Christ's sake, Joe. What are you doing standing up there?"

Joe turned his attention to the boy who had challenged him to do this, to stand here at the tip of the city in which he had been buried. Tommy's face was nearly expressionless, but it was riveted on Joe. He looked as if he was having a hard time believing what he saw. Joe shrugged elaborately.

"Didn't you read my letter?" he said to Sammy.

He threw out his arms behind him. Hitherto he had approached this stunt with the dry dispassion of an engineer, researching it, talking it over with the boys at Tannen's, studying Sidney Radner's secret monograph on Hardeen's abortive but thrilling Paris Bridge Leap of 1921.[14][14] Now, to his surprise, he found himself aching to fly.

"It said you were going to kill yourself," Sammy said. "It didn't say anything about doing a Human Yo-Yo act."

Joe lowered his arms; it was a good point. The problem, of course, was that Joe had not written the letter. Had he done so, he would not have promised, in all likelihood, to commit public suicide in a moth-eaten costume. He recognized the idea as his own, of course, filtered through the wildly elaborating imagination that, more than anything else—more than the boy's shock of black hair or delicate hands or guileless gaze, haunted by tenderness of heart and an air of perpetual disappointment—reminded Joe of his dead brother. But he had felt it necessary, in fulfilling the boy's challenge, to make a few adjustments here and there.

"The possibility of dying is small," Joe said, "but it is of course there."

"And it's just about the only way for you to avoid arrest, Mr. Kavalier," said the plainclothesman.

"I'll keep that in mind," Joe said. He threw his arms back again.

"Joe!" Sammy ventured a hesitant couple of inches toward Joe. "God damn it, you know damn well the Escapist doesn't fly!"

"That's what I said," said one of the orphans knowledgeably.

The policemen exchanged a look. They were getting ready to rush the parapet.

Joe stepped backward into the air. The cord sang, soaring to a high, bright C. The air around it seemed to shimmer, as with heat. There was a sharp twang, and they heard a brief, muffled smack like raw meat on a butcher block, a faint groan. The descent continued, the cord drawing thinner, the knots pulling farther apart, the note of elongation reaching into the dog frequencies. Then there was silence.

"Ow!" Captain Harley slapped the back of his head as if a bee had stung him. He looked up, then down, then jumped quickly to one side. Everybody looked at his feet. There, to one side, wobbly and distended, lay the elastic cord, tipped by the severed loop that had engirdled Joe Kavalier's chest.

All warnings and prohibitions were forgotten. The children and adults ran to the parapet, and those lucky or industrious enough to get themselves up onto it peered down at the man lying spread-eagled, a twisted letter K, on the projecting roof-ledge of the eighty-fourth floor.

The man lifted his head.

"I'm all right," he said. Then he lowered his head once more to the gray pebbled surface onto which he had fallen, and closed his eyes.

9

THE BEARERS CARRIED HIM DOWN to the subterranean garage of the building, where an ambulance had been waiting since four o'clock that afternoon. Sammy rode down with them in the elevator, having left Tommy with his grandfather and the captain of the building police, who would not permit the boy to ride along. Sammy was a little hesitant about leaving Tommy, but it seemed crazy just to let Joe be taken away again like that, not ten minutes after his reappearance. Let the boy spend a few minutes in the hands of the police; maybe it would do him good.

Every time Joe shut his eyes, the bearers told him rather curtly to wake up. They were afraid that he might have a concussion.

"Wake up, Joe," Sammy told him.

"I am awake."

"How are you doing?"

"Fine," Joe said. He had bit his lip, and there was blood from it on his cheek and shirt collar. It was the only blood that Sammy could see. "How are you?"

Sammy nodded.

"I read Weird Date every month," Joe said. "It's very good writing, Sam."

"Thanks," Sammy said. "Praise means so much when it comes from a lunatic."

"Sea Yarns is also good."

"Think so?"

"I always learn something about boats or something."

"I do a lot of research." Sammy took out his handkerchief and dabbed at the bloody spot on Joe's lip, remembering the days of Joe's war against the Germans of New York. "It's all in my face, by the way," he said.

"What is?"

"The weight you mentioned. It's all in my face. I still swing the dumbbells every morning. Feel my arm."

Joe raised his arm, wincing a little, and gave Sammy's biceps a squeeze.

"Big," Joe said.

"You don't look so swell yourself, you know. In this ratty old getup."

Joe smiled. "I was hoping Anapol would see me in it. It was going to be like a bad dream coming true."

"I have a feeling a lot of his bad dreams are about to come true," Sammy said. "When did you take it, anyway?"

"Two nights ago. I'm sorry. I hope you don't mind. I realize that it... has sentimental value for you."

"It doesn't mean anything special to me."

Joe nodded, watching his face, and Sammy looked away.

"I'd like a cigarette," Joe said.

Sammy fished one out of his jacket and stuck it between Joe's lips.

"I'm sorry," Joe said.

"Are you?"

"About Tracy, I mean. I know it was a long time ago but I..."

"Yeah," Sammy said. "Everything was a long time ago."

"Everything I'm sorry about, anyway," Joe said.

10

THE VIEW OUT THE WINDOWS was pure cloud bank, a gray woolen sock pulled down over the top of the building. On the walls of Joe's strange apartment hung sketches of the head of a rabbi, a man with fine features and a snowy white beard. The studies were tacked up with pushpins, and they depicted this noble-looking gentleman in a variety of moods: rapturous, commanding, afraid. There were fat books on the tables and chairs; thick reference volumes and tractates and dusty surveys: Joe had been doing a little research himself. Sammy saw, stacked neatly in a corner, the wooden crates in which Joe had always kept his comics—only there were ten times as many as he remembered. Over the room lay the smell of long occupation by a solitary man: burned coffee, hard sausage, dirty linens.

"Welcome to the Bat Cave," Lieber said when Sammy came in.

"Actually," Longman Harkoo said, "it's apparently known as the Chamber of Secrets."

"Is it?" Sammy said.

"Well, uh, that's what I call it," said Tommy, coloring. "But not really."

You came into the Chamber of Secrets from a small anteroom that had been painstakingly decorated to simulate the reception area of a small but going concern. It had a steel desk and typist's table, an armchair, a filing cabinet, a telephone, a hat stand. On the desk stood a nameplate promising the daily presence behind it of a Miss Smyslenka, and a vase of dried flowers, and a photograph of Miss Smyslenka's grinning baby, played by a six-month-old Thomas E. Clay. On the wall was a large commercial painting of a sturdy-looking factory, luminous in the rosy glow of a New Jersey morning, chimneys trailing pretty blue smoke. KORNBLUM VANISHING CREAMS, read the engraved label affixed to the bottom of the frame, HO-HO-KUS, NEW JERSEY.

No one, not even Tommy, was quite sure how long Joe had been living in the Empire State Building, but it was clear that during this time he had been working very hard and reading a lot of comic books. On the floor stood ten piles of Bristol board, every sheet in each pile covered in neat panels of pencil drawings. At first Sammy was too overwhelmed by the sheer number of pages—there must have been four or five thousand—to look very closely at any of them, but he did notice that they seemed to be uninked. Joe had been working in a variety of gauges of lead, letting his pencils do the tricks of light and mass and shadow that were usually pulled off with ink.

In addition to the rabbis, there were studies of organ-grinders, soldiers in breastplates, a beautiful girl in a headscarf, in various attitudes and activities. There were buildings and carriages, street scenes. It didn't take Sammy long to recognize the spiky elaborate towers and crumbling archways of what must be Prague, lanes of queer houses huddled in the snow, a bridge of statues casting a broken moonlit shadow on a river, twisting alleyways. The characters, for the most part, appeared to be Jews, old-fashioned, black-garbed, drawn with all of Joe's usual fluidity and detail. The faces, Sammy noticed, were more specific, quirkier, uglier, than the lexicon of generic comic book mugs that Joe had learned and then exploited in all his old work. They were human faces, pinched, hungry, the eyes anticipating horror but hoping for something more. All except for one. One character, repeated over and over in the sketches on the walls, had barely any face at all, the conventional V's and hyphens of a comic physiognomy simplified to almost blank abstraction.

"The Golem," Sammy said.

"Apparently he was writing a novel," Lieber said.

"He was," Tommy said. "It's all about the Golem. Rabbi Judah Ben Beelzebub scratched the word 'truth' into his forehead and he came to life. And one time? In Prague? Joe saw the real Golem. His father had it in a closet in their house."

"It really does look marvelous," Longman said. "I can't wait to read it."

"A comic book novel," Sammy said. He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and moving on. It had taken the form, at various times, of a bitter comedy, a stoical Hemingwayesque tragedy, a hard-nosed lesson in social anatomy like something by John O'Hara, a bare-knuckles urban Huckleberry Finn. It was the autobiography of a man who could not face himself, an elaborate system of evasion and lies unredeemed by the artistic virtue of self-betrayal. It had been two years now since his last crack at the thing, and until this very instant he would have sworn that his ancient ambitions to be something more than the hack scribbler of comic books for a fifth-rate house were as dead, as the saying went, as vaudeville. "My God."

"Come on, Mr. Clay," Lieber said. "You can ride over to the hospital with me."

"Why are you going to the hospital?" Sammy said, though he knew the answer.

"Well, I feel pretty strongly that I have to arrest him. I hope you understand."

" Arrest him?" Longman said. "What for?"

"Disturbing the peace, I suppose. Or maybe we'll get him for illegal habitation. I'm sure the building is going to want to press charges. I don't know. I'll figure it out on the way over."

Sammy saw his father-in-law's smirk shrink down to a hard little button, and his generally genial blue eyes went dead and glassy. It was an expression Sammy had seen before, on the floor of Longman's gallery,[15][15] when he was dealing with a painter who overvalued his own work or some lady with a title and most of a dead civet around her shoulders, who was better equipped with money than judgment. Rosa called it, in reference to her father's origins in retail, "his rug-merchant stare."

"We'll see about that," Longman said, with deliberate indiscretion and a sideways look at Sammy. "Surrealism has agents at every level of the machinery of power. I sold a painting to the mayor's mother last week."

Your father-in-law is kind of a blowhard, said Detective Lieber's eyes. I know it, Sammy's replied.

"Excuse me." There was a new visitor to the offices of Kornblum Vanishing Creams. He was young, good-looking in a featureless governmental way, wearing a dark blue suit. In one hand he held a long white envelope.

"Sam Clay?" he said. "I'm looking for Mr. Sam Clay. I was told I might find him—"

"Here." Sammy came forward and took the envelope from the young man. "What's this?"

"That is a congressional subpoena." The young man nodded to Lieber, touching the brim of his hat with two fingers. "Sorry to disturb you gentlemen," he said.

Sammy stood for a moment, tap-tap-tapping the envelope against his hand.

"You better call Mom," said Tommy.

11

HOSE SAXON, the Queen of Romance Comics, was at her drawing board in the garage of her house in Bloomtown, New York, when her husband phoned from the city to say that, if it was all right with her, he would be bringing home the love of her life, whom she had all but given up for dead.

Miss Saxon was at work on the text of a new story, which she intended to begin laying out that night, after her son went to bed. It would be the lead story for the June issue of Kiss Comics. She planned to call it "The Bomb Destroyed My Marriage." The story would be based on an article that she had read in Redbook about the humorous difficulties of being married to a nuclear physicist employed by the government at a top-secret facility in the middle of the New Mexico desert. She was not writing so much as planning out her panels, one by one, at the typewriter. Over the years, Sammy's scripts had grown no less detailed but looser; he never bothered with telling an artist what to draw. Rosa couldn't operate that way; she hated working from Sammy's scripts. She needed to have everything figured out in advance—storyboarded, they called it in Hollywood—shot by shot, as it were. Her scripts were a tightly numbered series of master shots, the shooting scripts for ten-cent epics that, in their sparse elegance of design, elongated perspectives, and deep focus, somewhat resemble, as Robert C. Harvey has pointed out,[16][16] the films of Douglas Sirk. She worked at a bulky Smith-Corona, typing with such intense slowness that when her boss and husband called, she did not at first hear the ringing phone.

Rosa had gotten her start in comics soon after Sammy's return to the business, after the war. Upon taking over the editor's desk at Gold Star, Sammy's first move had been to clear out many of the subcompetents and alcoholics who littered the staff there. It was a bold and necessary-step, but it left him with an acute shortage of artists, in particular of inkers.

Tommy had started kindergarten, and Rosa was just beginning to understand the true horror of her destiny, the arrant purposelessness of her life whenever her son was not around, one day when Sammy came home at lunch, harried and frantic, with an armload of Bristol board, a bottle of Higgins ink, and a bunch of #3 brushes, and begged Rosa to help him by doing what she could. She had stayed up all night with the pages—it was some dreadful Gold Star superhero strip, The Human Grenade or The Phantom Stallion—and had the job finished by the time Sammy left for work the next morning. The reign of the Queen had commenced.

Rose Saxon had emerged slowly, lending her ink brush at first only now and then, unsigned and uncredited, to a story or a cover that she would spread out on the dinette table in the kitchen. Rosa had always had a steady hand, a strong line, a good sense of shadow. It was work done in a kind of unreflective crisis mode—whenever Sammy was in a jam or shorthanded—but after a while, she realized that she had begun to crave intensely the days when Sammy had something for her to do.

Then one night, as they lay in bed, talking in the dark, Sammy told her that her brushwork already far exceeded that of the best people he could afford to hire at lowly Gold Star. He asked her if she had ever given any thought to penciling; to layouts; to actually writing and drawing comic book stories. He explained to her that Simon and Kirby were just then having considerable success with a new kind of feature they'd cooked up, based partly on teen features like Archie and A Date with Judy and partly on the old true-romance pulps (the last of the old pulp genres to be exhumed and given new life in the comics). It was called Young Romance. It was aimed at women, and the stories it told were centered on women. Women had been neglected until now as readers of comic books; it seemed to Sammy that they might enjoy one that had actually been written and drawn by one of their own. Rosa had accepted Sammy's proposal at once, with a flush of gratitude whose power was undiminished even now.

She knew what it had meant to Sammy to return to comics and take the editor's job at Gold Star. It was the one moment in the course of a long and interesting marriage when Sammy had stood on the point of following his cousin into the world of men who escaped. He had sworn, screamed, said hateful things to Rosa. He had blamed her for his penury and his debased condition and the interminable state of American Disillusionment. If there were not a wife and a child for him to support, a child not even his own... He had gone so far as to pack a suitcase, and walk out of the house. When he returned the next afternoon, it was as the editor in chief of Gold Star Publications, Inc. He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man. He had stayed. Years later, Rosa found a ticket in a dresser drawer, dating from around that terrible time, for a seat in a second-class compartment on the Broadway Limited: yet another train to the coast that Sammy had not been on.

The night he offered her the chance to draw "a comic book for dollies," Rosa felt, Sammy had handed her a golden key, a skeleton key to her self, a way out of the tedium of her existence as a housewife and a mother, first in Midwood and now here in Bloomtown, soi-disant Capital of the American Dream. That enduring sense of gratitude to Sammy was one of the sustaining forces of their life together, something she could turn to and summon up, grip like Tom Mayflower gripping his talisman key, whenever things started to go wrong. And the truth was that their marriage had improved after she went to work for Sammy. It no longer seemed (to mistranslate) quite as blank. They became colleagues, coworkers, partners in an unequal but well-defined way that made it easier to avoid looking too closely at the locked cabinet at the heart of things.

The more immediate result of Sammy's offer had been Working Gals, "shocking but true tales from the fevered lives of career girls." It debuted in the back pages of Spree Comics, at the time the lowest-selling title put out by Gold Star. After three months of steadily increasing sales, Sammy had moved Working Gals to the front of the book and allowed Rosa to sign it with her best-known pseudonym.[17][17] A few months after that, Working Gals was launched in its own title, and shortly thereafter, Gold Star, led by three "Rose Saxon Romance" books, began to show a profit for the first time since the heady early days of the war. Since then, as Sammy had moved on from Gold Star to editorships at Olympic Publications and now Pharaoh House, Rosa, in a tireless and (for the most part) financially successful campaign to portray the heart of that mythical creature, the American Girl, whom she despised and envied in equal measure, had filled the pages of Heartache, Love Crazy, Lovesick, Sweetheart, and now Kiss with all the force and frustration of a dozen years of lovelessness and longing.

After Sammy had hung up, Rosa stood for a moment holding the phone, trying to make sense of what she had just heard. Somehow—it was a little confusing—their truant son had managed to find the man who had fathered him. Joe Kavalier was being fetched back, alive, from his secret hideaway in the Empire State Building ("Just like Doc Savage," according to Sammy). And he was coming to sleep in her house.

She took clean linens from the built-in cupboard in the hall and carried them toward the couch on which, a few hours from now, Joe Kavalier would lay down his well-remembered, unimaginable body. Where the hallway met the living room, she passed a kind of star-shaped atomic squiggle with a mirror at its nucleus, and caught sight of her hair. She turned around, went into the bedroom she and Sammy shared, put down her fragrant armful of sheets, and yanked out the variety of junk, office supplies, and small bits of hardware she used to keep her hair out of her face when she was at home. She sat down on the bed, got up, went to her closet, and stood there, the sight of her wardrobe filling her with doubt and a mild sense of amusement that she recognized as, somewhat magically, Joe's. She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned. Now they struck her as, to a skirt, appallingly sensible and dull. She took off her sweatshirt and rolled dungarees. She lit a cigarette and walked into the kitchen in her underpants and brassiere, the bramble of her loosed hair flapping around her head like a crown of plumes.

In the kitchen she took out a saucepan, melted half a cup of butter, and thickened it with flour to a paste. To the paste she added milk, a little at a time, then salt, pepper, and onion powder. She took her roux off the stove and started a pot of water for noodles. Then she went into the living room and put a record on the hi-fi. She had no idea what record it was. When the music began she did not listen, and when it finished she took no notice. It puzzled her to see that there were no sheets on the couch. Her hair was in her face. When flakes of ash had fallen into her roux, she now perceived, she had stirred them right in, as if they were dried bits of parsley. She had, however, forgotten to add the actual dried parsley. And for some reason, she was walking around in her bra.

"All right," she told herself. "And so what?" The sound of her voice calmed her and focused her thoughts. "He doesn't know from suburbia." She ground out her cigarette in an ashtray that was shaped like an eyebrow arched in surprise. "Get dressed."

She went back into the bedroom and put on a blue dress, knee-length, with a white waistband and a collar of dotted swiss. Various contradictory and insidious voices arose within her at this point to say that the dress made her look stout, hippy, matronly, that she ought to wear slacks. She ignored them. She brushed out her hair till it shot from her head in all directions like the mane of a dandelion, then brushed it back and tucked it up at the nape and fastened it there with a silver clasp. A dazed hesitancy returned to her manner over the question of makeup, but she settled quickly on lipstick alone, two plum streaks not especially well applied, and went out to the living room to make up the bed. The pot in the kitchen was boiling now, and she shook a rattling box of macaroni into the water. Then she began to shred into a mixing bowl a block of school-bus-yellow cheese. Macaroni and cheese. It seemed, as a dish, to exist at the very center of her sense of embarrassment over her life; but it was Tommy's favorite, and she felt an impulse to reward her son for the feat he had performed. And somehow she doubted that Joe—had he really been cooped up in an office in the Empire State Building since the nineteen-forties?—would be sensitive to the socioeconomic message inherent in the bubbling brown-and-gold square, in its white Corning casserole with the blue flower on the side.

After she had slid the casserole into the oven, she returned to the bedroom to put on a pair of stockings and blue pumps with white buckles that were covered in the same glossy fabric as the waistband of the dress.

They would be here in two hours. She went back to her table and sat down to work. It was the only sensible thing she could think of to do. Sorrow, irritation, doubt, anxiety, or any other turbulent emotion that might otherwise keep her from sleeping, eating, or, in extreme cases, speaking coherently or getting out of bed, would disappear almost completely when she was in the act of telling a story. Though she had not told as many as Sammy over the years, working, as she did, exclusively in the romance genre, she had told them perhaps with greater intensity. For Rosa (who, from the first, and uniquely among the few women then working in the business, had not only drawn but, thanks to the indulgence of her editor husband, also written nearly all of her own texts), telling the story of pretty Nancy Lambert—an ordinary American girl from a small island in Maine who put all her foolish trust in the unstable hands of handsome and brilliant Lowell Burns, socialite and nuclear physicist—was an act that absorbed not merely the whole of her attention and craft but of her senses and memories as well. Her thoughts were Nancy's thoughts. Her own fingers turned white at the knuckles when Nancy learned that Lowell had lied to her again. And little by little, as she peopled and developed the world she was building out of rows and columns of blocks on sheets of eleven-by-fifteen Bristol board, Nancy's past was transformed into her own. The velvet tongues of tame Maine deer had once licked her childish palms. The smoke from burning piles of autumn leaves, fireflies writing alphabets against the summer night sky, the sweet jets of salt steam escaping from baked clams, the creaking of winter ice on tree limbs, all of these sensations racked Rosa's heart with an almost unbearable nostalgia as, contemplating the horrific red bloom of the bomb that had become her Other Woman, she considered the possible destruction of everything she had ever known, from kindly Miss Pratt in the old island schoolhouse to the sight of her father's old dory among the lobster boats returning in the evening with the day's catch. At such moments, she did not invent her plots or design her characters; she remembered them. Her pages, though neglected by all but a few collectors, retain an imprint of the creator's faith in her creation, the beautiful madness that is rare enough in any art form, but in the comics business, with its enforced collaborations and tireless seeking-out of the lowest common denominator, all but unheard of.

All this is by way of explaining why Rosa, who had been stricken with panic and confusion at the telephone call from Sammy, gave so little thought to Josef Kavalier once she had sat down to work. Alone in her makeshift studio in the garage, she smoked, listened to Mahler and Faure on WQXR, and dissolved herself in the travails and shapely contours of poor Nancy Lambert, as she would have on a day that included no reports of her son's wild truancy or revenants from the deepest-buried history of her heart. It was not until she heard the scrape of the Studebaker against the driveway that she even looked up from her work.

The macaroni and cheese turned out to be a superfluous gesture; Tommy was asleep by the time they got him home. Sammy struggled into the house with the boy in his arms.

"Did he have dinner?"

"He had a doughnut."

"That isn't dinner."

"He had a Coke."

He was deeply asleep, cheeks flushed, breath whistling through his teeth, mysteriously lost in an extra-large Police Athletic League sweatshirt.

"You broke your ribs," Rosa told Joe.

"No," Joe said. "Just a bad bruise." There was a fiery welt on his cheek, partially covered by a taped square of gauze. His nose looked luminous at the nostrils, as if it had recently been bleeding.

"Out of my way," Sammy said, through his teeth. "I don't want to drop him."

"Let me," Joe said.

"Your ribs—"

"Let me."

I want to see this, thought Rosa. In fact, there had been nothing in her life that she had ever wanted to see more.

"Why don't you let him?" she said to Sammy.

So Sammy, holding his breath, wincing in sympathy and wrinkling his brow, tipped the sleeping boy into Joe's arms. Joe's face tightened in pain, but he bore it and stood holding Tommy, gazing with alarming tenderness down at his face. Rosa and Sammy stood ardently watching Joe Kavalier look at his son. Then, at the same instant, they each seemed to notice that this was what the other was doing, and they blushed and smiled, awash in the currents of doubt and shame and contentment that animated all the proceedings of their jury-rigged family.

Joe cleared his throat, or perhaps he was grunting in pain.

They looked at him.

"Where is his room?" Joe said.

"Oh, sorry," said Rosa. "God. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"It's this way."

She led him down the hall and into Tommy's bedroom. Joe laid the boy on top of the bedspread, which was patterned with colonial tavern signs and with curl-cornered proclamations printed in a bumpy Revolutionary War typeface. It had been quite some time since the duty and pleasure of undressing her son had fallen to Rosa. For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general proficiency beyond his years, as if hoping to skip him like a stone across the treacherous pond of childhood, and now she was touched by a faint trace of the baby in him, in his pouting lips and the febrile sheen of his eyelids. She leaned over and untied his shoes, then pulled them off. His socks clung to his pale, perspired feet. Joe took the shoes and socks from her. Rosa unbuttoned Tommy's corduroy trousers and tugged them down his legs, then pulled up his shirt and the sweatshirt until his head and arms were a lost bundle within. She gave a kind of slow practiced tug, and the top portion of her boy popped free.

"Nicely done," Joe said.

Tommy had apparently been plied with ice cream and soda pop at the police station, to loosen his tongue. His face was going to have to be washed. Rosa went for a cloth. Joe followed her into the bathroom, carrying the shoes in one hand and the pair of socks, rolled into a neat ball, in the other.

"I have dinner in the oven."

"I'm very hungry."

"You didn't break a tooth or anything?"

"Luckily, no."

It was crazy; they were just talking. His voice sounded like his voice, orotund but with a slight bassoon reediness; the droll Hapsburg accent was still there, sounding doctoral and not quite genuine. Out in the living room, Sammy had turned over the record she'd put on earlier; Rosa recognized it now: Stan Kenton's New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm. Joe followed her back into the bedroom, and Rosa scrubbed the sweet epoxy from Tommy's baby-boy lips and fingers. An unwrapped Charms Pop that he had plunged, half-sucked, into his pants pocket had mapped out a sticky continent on the smooth hairless hollow of his hip. Rosa wiped it away. Tommy muttered and winced throughout her attentions; once, his eyes shot open, filled with alarmed intelligence, and Rosa and Joe grimaced at each other: they had woken him up. But the boy closed his eyes again, and with Joe lilting and Rosa pulling, they got him into his pajamas. Joe hefted him, groaning again, as Rosa peeled back the covers of the bed. Then they tucked him in. Joe smoothed the hair back from Tommy's forehead.

"What a big boy," he said.

"He's almost twelve," Rosa said.

"Yes, I know."

She looked down at his hands, by his sides. He was still holding on to the pair of shoes.

"Are you hungry?" she said, keeping her voice low.

"I'm very hungry."

As they went out of the room Rosa turned to look at Tommy and had an impulse to go back, to get into his bed with him and just lie there for a while feeling that deep longing, that sense of missing him desperately, that came over her whenever she held him sleeping in her arms. She closed the door behind them.

"Let's eat," she said.

It wasn't until the three of them were seated around the dinette in the kitchen that she got her first good look at Joe. There was something denser about him now. His face seemed to have aged less than Sammy's or than, God knew, her own, and his expression, as he puzzled out the unfamiliar sights and smells of the cozy kitchen of their Penobscott, had something of the old bemused Joe that she remembered. Rosa had read about the Einsteinian traveler at the speed of light who returned after a trip that had taken a few years of his life to find everyone he knew and loved bent or moldering in the ground. It seemed to her as if Joe had returned like that, from somewhere distant and beautiful and unimaginably bleak.

As they ate, Sammy told Rosa the story of his day, from the time he had run into the boys at the Excelsior Cafeteria until the moment of Joe's leap into the void.

"You could have died," Rosa said in disgust, slapping gently at Joe's shoulder. "Very easily. Rubber bands."

"The trick was performed with success by Theo Hardeen in 1921, from the Pont Alexandre III," Joe said. "The elastic band was specially prepared in that case, but I studied, and the conclusion was that my own was even stronger and more elastic."

"Only it snapped," Sammy said.

Joe shrugged. "I was wrong."

Rosa laughed.

"I don't say I wasn't wrong, I'm just saying I didn't think there was much chance I was going to die at all."

"Did you think there was any chance they were going to lock you up on Rikers Island?" Sammy said. "He got arrested."

"You got arrested?" said Rosa. "What for? 'Creating a public nuisance'?"

Joe made a face, at once embarrassed and annoyed. Then he helped himself to another shovelful of casserole.

"It was for squatting," Sammy said.

"It's not anything." Joe looked up from his plate. "I have been in a jail before."

Sammy turned to her. "He keeps saying things like that."

"Man of mystery."

"I find it very irritating."

"Did you make bail?" said Rosa.

"Your father helped me."

"My father? He was helpful?"

"Apparently the elder Mrs. Wagner owns two Magrittes," Sammy said. "The mayor's mother. The charges were dropped."

"Two late Magrittes," said Joe.

The telephone rang.

"I'll get it," Sammy said. He went to the phone. "Hello. Uh-huh. Which paper? I see. No, he won't talk to you. Because he would not be caught dead talking to a Hearst paper. No. No. No, that isn't true at all." Apparently, Sammy's desire to set the record straight was greater than his disdain for the New York Journal-American. He carried the receiver into the dining room; they had just had an extra-long cord put on so that it could reach the dining table Sammy used as a desk whenever he worked at home.

As Sammy began to harangue the reporter from the Journal-American, Joe put down his fork.

"Very good," he said. "I haven't eaten anything like this in so long I can't remember."

"Did you get enough?"

"No."

She served him another chunk from the dish.

"He missed you the most," she said. She nodded in the direction of the dining room, where Sammy was telling the reporter from the Journal-American how he and Joe had first come up with the idea for the Escapist, on a cold October night a million years ago. The day a boy had come tumbling in through the window of Jerry Glovsky's bedroom and landed, wondering, at her feet. "He hired private detectives to try to find you."

"One of them did find me," Joe said. "I paid him off." He took a bite, then another, then a third. "I missed him, too," he said finally. "But I used to always imagine that he was happy. When I would be sitting there at night sometimes thinking about him. I would read his comic books—I could alwavs tell which ones were his—and then I would think, well, Sam is doing all right there. He must be happy." He washed down the last bite of his third helping with a swallow of seltzer water. "It's a very disappointment to me to find out that he is not."

"Isn't he?" Rosa said, not so much out of bad faith as from the enduring power of what a later generation would have termed her denial. "No. No, you're right, he really isn't."

"What about the book, the Disillusioned American? I have often thought of it, too, from time to time."

His English, she saw, had deteriorated during his years in the bush, or wherever he'd been.

"Well," Rosa said, "he finished it a couple of years ago. For the fifth time, actually, I think it was. And we sent it out. There were some nice responses, but."

"I see."

"Joe," she said. "What was the idea?"

"What was the idea of what? My jump?"

"Okay, let's start with that."

"I don't know. When I saw the letter in the newspaper, you know, I knew that Tommy wrote it. Who else could it be? And I just felt, well, since I am the one to mention to him about it... I wanted... I just wanted to have it be ... true for him."

"But what were you trying to accomplish? Was the idea to shame Sheldon Anapol into giving you two more money, or ... ?"

"No," Joe said. "I don't guess that was ever the idea."

She waited. He pushed his plate back and picked up her cigarettes. He lit two at once, then passed one to her, just the way he used to do, long, long ago.

"He doesn't know," he said after a moment, as if offering a rationale for his leap from the top of the Empire State Building, and although she didn't grasp it at once, for some reason the statement started her heart pounding in her chest. Was she keeping so many secrets, so many different kinds of guilty knowledge from the men in her life?

"Who doesn't know what?" she said. She reached, as if casually, to take an ashtray from the kitchen counter just behind Joe's head.

"Tommy. He doesn't know ... what I know. About me. And him. That I—"

The ashtray—red and gold, stamped with the words EL MOROCCO in stylish gold script—fell to the kitchen floor and shattered into a dozen pieces.

"Shit!"

"It's all right, Rosa."

"No, it isn't! I dropped my El Morocco ashtray, god damn it." They met on their knees, in the middle of the kitchen floor, with the pieces of the broken dish between them.

"So all right," she said, as Joe started sweeping the shards together with the flat of his hand. "You know."

"I do now. I always thought so, but I—"

"You always thought so? Since when?"

"Since I heard about it. You wrote me, remember, in the navy, back in 1942, I think. There were pictures. I could tell."

"You have known since 1942 that you"—she lowered her voice to an angry whisper—"that you had a son, and you never—"

The rage that welled up suddenly felt dangerously satisfying, and she would have let it out, heedless of the consequences to her son, her husband, or their reputation in the neighborhood, but she was held back, at the very last possible moment, by the fiery blush in Joe's cheeks. He sat there, head bowed, stacking the pieces of the ashtray into a neat little cairn. Rosa got up and went to the broom closet for a dustpan and broom. She swept up the ashtray and sent the pieces jingling into the kitchen trash.

"You didn't tell him," she said at last.

He shook his bent head. He was still kneeling in the middle of the kitchen floor. "We always never spoke very much," he said.

"Why does that not surprise me?"

"And you never told him."

"Of course not," Rosa said. "As far as he knows, that"—she lowered her voice and nodded again toward the dining room—"is his father."

"This is not the case."

"What?"

"He told me that Sammy adopted him. He overheard this or some such thing. He has a number of interesting theories about his real father."

"He ... did he ever ... do you think he ..."

"At times I felt he might be leading up to asking me," Joe said. "But he never has."

She gave him her hand then, and he took it in his own. For an instant, his felt much drier and more callused than she remembered, and then it felt exactly the same. They sat back down at the kitchen table, in front of their plates of food.

"You still haven't said," she reminded him. "Why you did it. What was the point of it all?"

Sammy came back into the kitchen and hung up the phone, shaking his head at the profound journalistic darkness that he had just wasted ten minutes attempting to illuminate.

"That's what the guy was just asking me," he said. "What was the point of it?"

Rosa and Sammy turned to Joe, who regarded the inch of ash at the tip of his cigarette for a moment before tapping it into the palm of his hand.