There was nobody home—nobody conscious, at any rate. The three young men pounded on the door until Mrs. Waczukowsi, her hair tied up in pink paper knots and a robe pulled around her shoulders, at last dragged herself up from the first floor and told them to scram.
“Just another minute, madam,” said Sammy, “and we shall trouble you no more.”
“We have left some valuable antiquities in there,” Julie said, in the same clench-jawed Mr. Peanut accent.
Sammy winked, and the two young men smiled at her with as many of their teeth as they could expose until finally she turned, consigning them all to hell with the eloquent back of her hand, and retreated down the stairs.
Sammy turned to Julie. “So where is Jerry?”
“Beats me.”
“Shit, Julius, we’ve got to get in there. Where is everybody else?”
“Maybe they went with him.”
“Don’t you have a key?”
“Do I live here?”
“Maybe we could get in the window.”
“Five stories up?”
“Damn it!” Sammy gave the door a feeble kick. “It’s past noon and we haven’t drawn a line! Christ.” They would have to go back to the Kramler Building and ask to work at the rutted tables in the offices of Racy Publications, a course that would inevitably bring them within the baleful circumference of George Deasey’s gaze.
Joe was kneeling by the door, running his fingers up and down the jamb, fingering the knob.
“What are you doing, Joe?”
“I could get us in, only I leave behind my tools.”
“What tools?”
“I can pick the locks,” he said. “I was trained to, to what, to get out of things. Boxes. Ropes. Chains.” He stood up and pointed to his chest. “Ausbrecher. Outbreaker. No, what it is? ‘Escape artist.’”
“You are a trained escape artist.”
Joe nodded.
“You.”
“Like Houdini.”
“Meaning you can get out of things,” Sammy said. “So you can get us in?”
“Normally. In, out, it’s only the same thing in the other direction. But sadly, I leaved my tools in the Flat Bush.” He pulled a small penknife from his pocket and began to probe the lock with its thin blade.
“Hold on,” Julie said. “Wait a second, Houdini. Sammy. I don’t think we ought to go breaking in—”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Sammy said.
“You’re right,” Joe said. “We’re in a hurry.” He put the knife away and started back down the stairs. Sammy and Julie went after him.
In the street, Joe pulled himself up onto the newel that topped the right-hand baluster of the front steps, a chipped cement sphere onto which some long-vanished tenant had inked a cruel caricature of the querulous lunar face of the late Mr. Waczukowski. He pulled off his jacket and threw it to Sammy.
“Joe, what are you doing?”
Joe didn’t answer. He perched for a moment atop the pop-eyed newel, his long feet side by side in their rubber-soled oxfords, and studied the retractable iron ladder of the fire escape. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and cupped a match. He let out a thoughtful cloud of smoke, then fit the cigarette between his teeth and rubbed his hands together. Then he sprang from the top of Mr. Waczukowski’s head, reaching out. The fire escape rang against the impact of his palms, and the ladder sagged and with a rusted groan slid slowly downward, six woozy inches, a foot, a foot and a half, before jamming, leaving Joe to dangle five feet off the pavement. Joe chinned himself, trying to loosen it, and swung his legs back and forth; but it stayed latched.
“Come on, Joe,” said Sammy. “That won’t work.”
“You’ll break your neck,” said Julie.
Joe let go of the ladder with his right hand, snatched a puff from his cigarette, then replaced it. Then he took hold of the ladder again and swung himself, throwing his entire body into it, with each swing describing an increasingly wider arc. The ladder rattled and chimed against the fire escape. Suddenly he folded himself in half, let go of the ladder completely, and allowed his momentum to jackknife him out, up and over, onto the bottom platform of the fire escape, where he landed on his feet. It was a completely gratuitous performance, done purely for effect or for the thrill of it; he easily could have pulled himself up the ladder hand over hand. He easily could have broken his neck. He paused for a moment on the landing, flicking ash from the end of his cigarette.
At that instant, the steady northerly wind that had been harrying the clouds over New York City all day succeeded at last in scattering them, sweeping clear over Chelsea a patch of wispy blue. A shaft of yellow sunlight slanted down, twisting with ribbons of vapor and smoke, a drizzling ribbon of honey, a seam of yellow quartz marbling the featureless gray granite of the afternoon. The windows of the old red row house pooled with light, then spilled over. Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce.
“Look at him,” said Sammy. “Look what he can do.”
Over the years, reminiscing for friends or journalists or, still later, the reverent editors of fan magazines, Sammy would devise and relate all manner of origin stories, fanciful and mundane and often conflicting, but it was out of a conjunction of desire, the buried memory of his father, and the chance illumination of a row-house window, that the Escapist was born. As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing—common enough among the inventors of heroes—to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.
At the same time, as he watched the reckless exercise of Joe’s long, cavalier frame, the display of strength for its own sake and for the love of display, the stirring of passion was inevitably shadowed, or fed, or entwined by the memory of his father. We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place; but as Sammy watched Joe, he felt the heartbreak of that day in 1935 when the Mighty Molecule had gone away for good.
“Remarkable,” Julie said dryly, in a voice that suggested there was something funny, and not in the sense of humorous, about the expression on his old friend’s face. “Now if only he could draw.”
“He can draw,” said Sammy.
Joe ran clanking up the steps of the fire escape to the fourth-floor window, threw up the sash, and fell headfirst into the room. A moment later there was an impossibly musical Fay Wray scream from the apartment.
“Huh,” Julie said. “The guy might do all right in the cartoon business.”