Anapol stopped rubbing his chin. “The Academy of Fine Art?”
“What is that? Who are these guys? What’s going on in here?” Jack Ashkenazy burst into the office without warning or a knock. He had all his hair, and was a much snappier dresser than his brother-in-law, favoring checked vests and two-tone shoes. Because he had prospered, in a Kramler Building kind of way, more easily than Anapol, he had not been forced to develop the older man’s rumpled salesman’s charm, but he shared Anapol’s avidity for unburdening America’s youth of the oppressive national mantle of tedium, ten cents at a time. He plucked the cigar from his mouth and yanked the sketchpad out of Anapol’s hands.
“Beauteeful,” he said. “The head is too big.”
“The head is too big?” said Anapol. “That’s all you can say?”
“The body’s too heavy. Looks like he’s made out of stone.”
“He is made out of stone, you idiot, he’s a golem.”
“Clay, actually,” said Joe. He coughed. “I can do something more lighter.”
“He can do anything you want,” said Sammy.
“Anything,” Joe agreed. His eyes widened as an inspiration seemed to strike, and he turned to Sammy. “Maybe I ought to show them my fart.”
“He’s only ever read one comic book,” Sammy said, ignoring this suggestion. “But I’ve read them all, boss. I’ve read every issue of Action. I’ve studied this stuff. I know how it’s done. Look.” He picked up his own portfolio and untied the strings. It was a cheap pasteboard number from Woolworth’s, like Joe’s, but battered, scraped, and carefully dented. You couldn’t sit around in some art director’s waiting room with a brand-new-looking portfolio. Everyone would know you were a tyro. Sammy had spent an entire afternoon last fall hitting his with a hammer, walking across it in a pair of his mother’s heels, spilling coffee on it. Unfortunately, since purchasing it he had managed to land only two cartoons, one in a completely humor-free magazine called Laff and the other in Belle-Views, house organ of the psychiatric ward where his mother worked.
“I can do it all,” he boasted, pulling out a fistful of sample pages and passing them around. What he meant, more precisely, was that he could steal it all.
“It isn’t half bad,” Anapol said.
“It ain’t beauteeful, either,” said Ashkenazy.
Sammy glared at Ashkenazy, not because Ashkenazy had insulted his work—no one was ever more aware of his own artistic limitations than Sam Clay—but because Sammy felt that he was standing on the border of something wonderful, a land where wild cataracts of money and the racing river of his own imagination would, at last, lift his makeshift little raft and carry it out to the boundless freedom of the open sea. Jack Ashkenazy, whose watery eyes could easily, Sammy imagined, be stabbed out with the letter opener on Anapol’s desk, was threatening to get in his way. Anapol caught the look of visionary murder in Sammy’s eyes and took a chance on it.
“What say we let these boys go home over the weekend and try to come up with a Superman for us.” He fixed Sammy with a hard look. “Our own kind of a Superman, naturally.”
“Of course.”
“How long is a Superman story?”
“Probably twelve pages.”
“I want a character and a twelve-page story by Monday.”
“We’re going to need a lot more than that,” said Ashkenazy. “They got typically five or six characters in there. You know, a spy. A private eye. A shadowy avenger of the helpless. An evil Chinaman. These two can’t come up with all that themselves and draw it. I got artists, Shelly. I got George Deasey.”
“No!” said Sammy. George Deasey was the editor in chief of Racy Publications. He was a tyrannical, ill-tempered old newspaperman who filled the Kramler Building’s elevators with the exacerbated smell of rye. “It’s mine. Ours, me and Joe. Boss, I can handle it.”
“Absolutely, boss,” said Joe.
Anapol grinned. “Get a load of this guy,” he said. “You just get me a Superman,” he went on, putting a placating hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “Then we’ll see about what you can handle or not. All right, Jack?”
Ashkenazy twisted his usually genial features into a grimace. “I have to tell you, Shelly. I got serious doubts. I’m going to have to say—”
“The radios,” Joe said. “The little radios outside.”
“Aw, forget the damn radios, Joe, will you?” Sammy said.
“What, the midgets?” Anapol said.
Joe nodded. “They are just wrong in the wires. All in the same way. One little wire is not, hmm. So.” He kissed the tip of one index finger with the other. “Stuck together to the resistance.”
“You mean to the resistor?”
“Okay.”
“You know from radios?” Anapol narrowed his eyes doubtfully. “You’re saying you could fix them?”
“Oh, assuredly, boss. It is simple to me.”
“How much is it going to cost?”
“Not anything. Some few pence for the—I do not know the word.” He angled his fingers into the form of a pistol. “Weichlöte. You must to melt it.”
“Solder? A soldering gun?”
“Okay. But perhaps I can to borrow that.”
“Just a few pence, huh?”
“Maybe one penny for the radio, each radio.”
“That’s cutting it pretty close to my cost.”
“But okay, I don’t charge to do the work.”
Sammy looked at his cousin, amazed and only a little put out at his having shanghaied the negotiation. He saw Anapol raise a meaningful eyebrow at his brother-in-law, promising or threatening something.
At last Jack Ashkenazy nodded. “There’s just one thing,” he said. He put a hand on Joe’s arm, restraining him before he could sidle out of the office, with his blank-eyed Golem and his empty portfolio. “This is a comic book we’re talking about, okay? Half bad is maybe better than beauteeful.”
THE FIRST OFFICIAL MEETING of their partnership was convened outside the Kramler Building, in a nimbus compounded of the boys’ exhalations and of subterranean steam purling up from a grate in the pavement.
“This is good,” Joe said.
“I know.”
“He said yes,” Joe reminded his cousin, who stood patting idly with one hand at the front of his overcoat and a panicked expression on his face, as though worried that he had left something important behind in Anapol’s office.
“Yes, he did. He said yes.”
“Sammy.” Joe reached out and grabbed Sammy’s wandering hand, arresting it in its search of his pockets and collar and tie. “This is good.”
“Yes, this is good, god damn it. I just hope to God we can do it.”
Joe let go of Sammy’s hand, shocked by this expression of sudden doubt. He had been completely taken in by Sammy’s bold application of the Science of Opportunity. The whole morning, the rattling ride through the flickering darkness under the East River, the updraft of Klaxons and rising office blocks that had carried them out of the subway station, the ten thousand men and women who immediately surrounded them, the ringing telephones