It's Superman! A Novel Page 6

  “No, boss. We’ll find him.”

  “Yes, Paulie, we will.”

  “I don’t know how he got in—”

  “But we certainly know how he got out, don’t we?”

  “I thought Stick closed the door.”

  “Hey! You came in last, you shoulda closed it.”

  “Shut up, the both of you. And take a left here, Paulie. At Thirty-eighth.”

  “But how do you figure he’d go east, boss? He’s some kind of news-hawk, right? So the closest paper’d be the Times. Or the HT. And they’re a couple blocks up on—”

  “He’s a tabloid rat, Paulie. He’ll head for the Mirror or the Daily News. East.”

  “But why do you think he took Thirty-eighth?”

  “Because Thirty-seventh is closest, and he’d expect us to think he took it.”

  “How do you know he’s on foot?”

  “I don’t. I’m hoping. And for your sake, Paulie, you’d better hope I’m right.” His eyes lock on the driver’s profile and don’t blink.

  “I thought I closed it, boss. It musta stuck.”

  “Just drive. And Stick? When we spot him?”

  “I’m out in a flash, sir, you bet. And I’ll get you that camera, no problem.”

  “I expect you to get more than just the camera.”

  “Yes, sir. Goes without saying. That stinkin’ little hebe is history.”

  “Stick, please. I don’t want to hear that kind of name calling.”

  Then: “Paulie, speed up a little, I think I see him!” says Lex, thinking if that picture ever were developed, which it won’t be, he might look surprised, possibly shocked, but not terrified, not craven. Not caught. Not him. Never.

  He’s not his father.

  “Stick! Now! Go, go!”

  2

  Not again. Lois feels as though she’s wasted half the evening on the telephone—who’s calling her now, dammit?

  (Be Willi.)

  “Oh, it’s you,” she says. “Flat leaver.”

  “Cut it out, Lo, and lis—”

  “You really left me in the lurch, you know it? Moving in with your hotshot boyfriend, thank you so very much.”

  “Lois, Willi’s been shot. They just brought him in.”

  “What are you talking about, in? In where? What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying, Lois, that somebody shot Willi, and they just brought him into Roosevelt. I’ll meet you down in Emergency. ”

  “Skinny! That’s not funny! Skinny!”

  3

  Seated in the rear of a gray Lincoln town car parked with the motor running on West Thirty-seventh Street, Lex Luthor idly jiggles a roll of twelve-exposure Kodak film in his left palm while observing a large-bellied cop at the Seventh Avenue corner smoking a cigarette.

  Lex hates smoking, detests the habit. First thing, soon as he’s the mayor? It becomes a felony. Smoking becomes a Class A felony—you get caught with those things, expect to do some hard time. Or maybe he’ll have to wait till he’s governor. Or president. Or king. But you smokers, all you nicotine fiends? Your day is coming. Gum chewers, too.

  Hooking three fingers around the edge of the film container, he pulls, first bending, then cracking the metal. He tears out the sprocketed acetate. Then he lights it with a match and tosses it through the open curbside window, watches it burn in the gutter. A tune starts playing in his mind and Lex hums it. Just a month ago, a columnist at the Mirror stuck in a jokey little item about Alderman Luthor’s “endearing” habit of humming half-aloud during soporific budget meetings—“When I Grow Too Old to Dream” was the tune the columnist specifically mentioned. That, and “Moonglow.”

  Now he’s humming “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

  A panel truck with its headlights off noses slowly from the alley just ahead but stops before it rolls into Thirty-seventh Street. That would be all the punchboards, the slot and pinball machines. The driver sets the brake.

  Paulie gets out of the cab’s passenger door smoking a cigarette. He walks over to the big Lincoln and smiles down at the still-burning tangle of film.

  “All set, boss. The Ince brothers are in the back with the stuff, and that’s Frank Wrobble at the wheel.”

  “All right,” says Lex, “here’s what you do. Tell Frank to go on up to Inwood without you—and remind him what I said about checking before just walking in there.”

  “I’ll do that, boss.”

  “Mr. Luciano might not be entirely finished with his little games tonight.”

  “Is that who we’re dealing with?”

  “It’s who I’m dealing with, Paulie. You’re dealing with me.”

  “Sure, boss.”

  “What about the second part of the effort?”

  “Boss?”

  “The bodies.”

  “Just finishing up.”

  “Who’s driving?”

  “Stan Elder.”

  “Make sure he knows he’s driving upstate.”

  “Or Jersey, you said.”

  “Or Jersey. And tell him to call the police from a pay phone just before he leaves the city.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s a good citizen. Because he saw something suspicious going on here and wants the cops should take a look. Make sure he knows the address.”

  “Sure thing. Anything else?”

  “Yes. Get rid of that cigarette.”

  “Why, boss? It aids digestion!”

  “What’d I just tell you?”

  Paulie removes the cigarette from his mouth, looks at it almost quizzically, and pitches it away, down on top of the gummy remains of the Kodak film.

  4

  No such person as Lex Luthor was in the public record anywhere prior to September 1923. Before that he was, serially, Alexander Bankton, Clay Alexander Plenty, Douglas Alexander Little, Alexander Todd Biggs, then Lex Robbins, then, following the death of his father, Luthor Dunn—Dunn being his mother’s maiden name—and finally Lex no-middle-name Luthor.

  When he registered at City College’s School of Civic Administration and Business, it was the first time he had ever used the name or dashed off the signature. His high school transcripts were impeccably bogus, and, with the exceptions of his height and weight and his address at the time (he’d taken a small apartment on Fifteenth Street, near Union Square), every piece of documentation and each filled-in line of every standardized form was a carefully considered, always plausible lie. He even claimed to be twenty, when in fact he was eighteen.

  His father may have been a gross disappointment, foolish and finally unmanned, but by example he had taught Lex both the rudiments and the nuances of creating, maintaining, and—if necessary—sloughing off full-blown counterfeit identities. He, or rather the last fifteen years of his poisoned, fugitive life, also had taught Lex that violence without ruthlessness only made you vulnerable and weak, left you defenseless against self-contempt.

  How could the dark-eyed gambler whose photographs Lex once discovered buried in a steamer trunk have turned into the chain-smoking, gum-chewing grocery clerk/factory hand/short-order cook who sneered at him, resented him, and probably would have beaten him three times to the month if his mother had not always intervened?

  Yet the man Lex Luthor has become, is still becoming, that man, he has often mused, is undeniably the offspring of Wesley Bankton, who once cut a dashing, aggressive figure, taking options on thousands of acres in the Middle West, establishing towns—Wesley, Iowa; Bankton, Missouri; Wesdale, Nebraska—and serving as mayor of each one, at least till it failed or he grew bored or, in the case of Wesdale, he fled under cover of the night.

  A thousand times during his childhood, Lex heard about Gorsline Easy, a wild-eyed Holy Roller who owned less than fifty acres planted in corn, a nobody, a shabby, drawling down-and-outer with a rawboned homely wife. Gorsline Easy. Gorsline! What kind of name was that? And what kind of fool was he to imagine he could win an election against Wesley Bankton? Not only that, what kind
of imbecile was this corn farmer to think he could publicly accuse Wes Bankton of looting the town’s treasury and get away with it?

  On the ninth of September 1908, Wesley Bankton found this stupid nobody at work in his smokehouse and shot him dead.

  Good. Lex Luthor would have done the same thing.

  But then?

  Then his father hastened away in darkness with his imperious wife and their three-year-old redheaded boy, and was ruined forever. It was not doing murder that changed him, unmanned him. It was the crushing fear that followed—fear of capture, trial, humiliation, imprisonment, execution. Fear was what a man could least afford. That was the only useful lesson that Lex ever learned from his father, the father he knew as Dick Plenty, Jerome Little, John Biggs …

  The father whose memory continues to fill him with disgust.

  “Well, finally!” says Lex as Paulie and Stick climb into the front of the town car. “I was beginning to think you boys were conducting funeral services.”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  “You said you wanted us to clean it up real good. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t find no blood in there, sir.”

  The Lincoln follows a brewery truck to the corner of Seventh Avenue. When the truck turns left, heading south, Paulie asks, “Where to, boss?”

  Lex checks his watch. No point going back to the Broadhurst now. Besides which, the play he was watching when he got the tap on his shoulder—phone call for you, Alderman, says it’s an emergency—was a complete bow-wow. One of those phony jobs with a “cross-section of humanity” stranded together, this time in a Bar-B-Q on the Arizona desert, everybody speechifying like they were giving lectures at the Cooper Union.

  “Boss?”

  “Oh,” says Lex offhandedly, “why don’t you just run me up to Rockefeller Center and drop me off? Ray Noble’s playing at the Rainbow Room.”

  V

  Skinny Simon. Lois Lane, reporter.

  Murder in the first degree. Insult to injury.

  ●

  1

  Betty Simon—the girl all the boys call Skinny because she is anything but—meets Lois Lane just inside the entrance to the Emergency Room. Taking her by a wrist, she leads her to a row of chairs. Nearby, a deli-man in a grimy apron hunches over, cradling a hand wrapped with a bloody towel. Despite his misery, he is unable to conquer the temptation to give a side glance at Skinny’s extravagant breasts, hips, and rear end. Now, that’s a nurse.

  “Sit. Lois?”

  “But what are they saying?”

  “He’s still in surgery.”

  “So why aren’t you there?”

  “Because I’m not. Sit. Do you want some coffee?”

  “No, I don’t want any coffee. I want to know if Willi’s going to be all right! ”

  “We all do, Lois, okay?”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “I’m not sure—somewhere on the East Side. Had you seen him tonight?”

  “We had a big stupid fight …”

  “Listen, why don’t I go check, see what I can find out?”

  The deli-man lifts his eyes again to watch Skinny Simon leave, but when Lois glowers at him, he looks back down, abashed, at his bundled-up hand.

  She begins to stride up and down the waiting room, oblivious to everyone who comes limping in or is called out for treatment or just sits there with fretful patience. But then she spots a cop outside speaking with a group of men who are obviously reporters. The pads, the pencils, the cigarettes fitted behind their ears.

  “… not too far from one of them university clubs,” the cop is saying when Lois comes through the heavy glass door, “but nobody seen anything, is what I’m told. Nah, I don’t know which club.”

  Scribbling as he speaks, one of the pad-and-pencil men says, “We heard his camera got smashed—that so?”

  “Well, I can set you fellers straight about that. I wouldn’t say it was smashed, more like it just fell and broke when the poor lad got it in the back.”

  Lois feels a cold pain move in her chest, crawling up from her sternum to the lower part of her throat.

  “But you birds might like this. Seems our triggerman helped himself to the film.”

  “Any idea what was on it, Danny?” asks another reporter.

  “Nope,” says the cop. Then “You,” he says to still another reporter.

  “Where was he coming from?”

  “Beats me.”

  That same reporter asks, “What’s this about a set of burglar’s picks?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “So what about it? Willi have ’em or not?”

  “No comment.”

  “Danny, Danny—what do you know about this stiff they just found in a pawnshop with his throat cut? That’s only a couple blocks from where little Willi got shot. Any connection?”

  “No comment,” says the cop, then, “Yes, ma’am, you,” he says, nodding at Lois, who by now has dug out her own pencil and nickel pad from her purse and pushed rudely through the pack of newshounds.

  Putting a sneer on her mouth, adding speed to her voice, and arching an eyebrow—the way Professor Gurney taught her to do it—Lois says, “So what are the doctors saying about his chances? This joe gonna make it?”

  2

  On Tuesday the eighteenth of June, Willi Berg finally opens his eyes again only to be told that a bill of indictment was handed down yesterday in the City and County of New York charging him with first-degree murder in the death of Leon Seymour Chodash.

  Murder during the commission of an armed robbery.

  There is the little matter of a claim ticket from the victim’s place of business discovered in Willi’s billfold.

  Plus that kit of flagrantly illegal jimmies and picks stuffed in his jacket.

  His fingerprints on the cash register, the counter, the telephone.

  And if he wasn’t stitched up and so full of drains, the two homicide detectives that arrest Willi in his hospital bed would show him exactly what they think of his cockamamie story about a bookmakers’ parlor, a bunch of dead bodies—only five? Why not ten, Willi? Or twenty?—and the secret criminal career of Alderman Lex Luthor, the newest, youngest, and most popular member of the board.

  “So who shot you, Willi? Have a little falling out with your accomplice? Didn’t want to split the take?”

  “What take?”

  “Who shot you, kid?”

  “I told you!”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Not us, you little mockie. You’re the one’s gonna have a hot date with the electric chair.”

  That same day Willi’s picture runs on the front page of all of the two-, three-, and five-cent papers. Both the News and the Mirror refer to him as a “Mad Dog Killer.” But that doesn’t bother him half as much as what the Planet calls him: a “Would-be Fotog.” Now, that hurts.

  VI

  Sad day. An infidel in Smallville. Mrs. Kent’s baking skills

  are recalled. Eighteen years ago. Clark takes a long walk

  in the woods and ruins a good pair of shoes.

  ●

  1

  Funeral services for Martha Clark Kent are scheduled for ten A.M. this morning at the Tomahawk Methodist Church, corner of Fourth and Union streets, Smallville, Kansas; Dr. Thomas B. Calais (pronounced: “Callus”) will officiate.

  Clark, however, isn’t sure his father plans to attend.

  It’s not that Jonathan Kent is unreligious, or anti-religion, he just has no truck with sectarianism, with doctrine, with trifling dos and fiddling don’ts. Never has had. Not in his makeup. And he is not a Christian, either, although he is probably as familiar with the New Testament as anyone in town, “Dr. Tom” included. He’s fond of the narratives, admires their hero, often quotes from the parables, and once told Clark that the bedrock of his personal philosophy—if an ordinary American farmer with an eighth-grade education ever could presume to use such a word or claim to have any such highfalutin a t
hing—is the Sermon on the Mount.

  Certainly Mr. Kent believes in God, in a conscious life after death, in the sodality of souls. After his own plain and pell-mell fashion he regularly ponders spiritual matters. Over the years of his life, particularly during the long winter nights of those many years, he has read a number of books with Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, and even Spiritualism in the titles. And all of those paths, so far as he can tell, have their good points.

  Beginning some time ago, however, Mr. Kent made the mistake of sharing a few of those good points. During the general gab at church suppers and picnics, he would casually mention something he’d come across in the Talmud or the Bhagavad Gita, or something Mohammed or Mary Baker Eddy had said, but soon enough he realized it was just earning him a reputation as a contrarian, a crackpot. Dr. Calais’s immediate predecessor once called him an infidel, but he did it with a tiny smile, so it didn’t amount to anything serious. And since Mr. Kent could appreciate the social value of church membership, he might well have continued accompanying his family, at least semi-regularly, to Tomahawk Methodist services and functions had it not been for a couple of things he found impossible to ignore.

  First was that damn temperance statue. Imagine spending the congregation’s money to erect a seven-foot concrete skeleton of King Alcohol holding aloft a bottle of whiskey! It was plain foolishness, and Jon Kent let everyone know how he felt. Dr. Calais, though, had not appreciated the input, which included two long letters published in the Smallville Herald-Progress.

  And then there was the unforgivable business with Dan Tauy. For Mr. Kent it was the last straw when that supercilious prig Tom Calais told the Chippewa handyman that while he could maintain—at a salary too low to be called even a pittance—the church building and cemetery grounds all week long, he and his family could not worship with the congregation on Sunday; they were not welcome.

  That did it. Mr. Kent never again set foot in the Tomahawk Methodist Church.

  Naturally, he wished Martha had joined him in his boycott, but he recognized that he’d put her in a difficult position. After all, it was her grandfather, R. H. Clark, who’d founded the church, back in 1879, when the original town site was plotted out. So Martha continued to attend services, though sporadically, until her illness. Clark usually went with her.