The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Two Shriners in fezzes drape him with chains and help him into a heavy canvas mailbag. A lady from the suburbs cinches the neck of the mailbag and fixes the ends of the cord with a ham-sized padlock. Big Al lifts him as if lifting a swaddled babe and carries him tenderly to the coffin, which has been carefully inspected beforehand by the mayor of Empire City, its chief of police, and the head of its fire department, and pronounced tight as a drum. Now these same worthies, to the delight of the house, are given hammers and big twenty-penny nails. Gleefully, they seal Tom into the coffin. If anyone notices that Misterioso has, in the last ten minutes, put on twenty pounds and grown an inch, he or she keeps it to himself; what difference could it make, anyway, if it is not the same man? He will still have to contend with chains and nails and two solid inches of ash wood. And yet among the women in the audience, at least, there is an imperceptible shade of difference, a deepening or darkening, in the pitch of their admiration and fear. “Look at the shoulders on him,” says one to another. “I never noticed.”

Inside the thoroughly rigged coffin, which has been eased into an elaborate marble sarcophagus by means of a winch that was then used to lower the marble lid into place with a ringing tocsin of finality, Tom tries to banish images of bloody stars and bullet holes from his mind. He concentrates on the routine of the trick, the series of quick and patient stages that he knows so well; and, one by one, the necessary thoughts drive out the terrible ones. He frees himself of them. His mind, as he pries open the lid of the sarcophagus with the crowbar that has conveniently been taped to its underside, is peaceful and blank. When he steps into the spotlight, however, he is nearly upended by the applause, blown over, laved by it as by some great cleansing tide. All of his years of limping self-doubt are washed away. When he sees Omar signaling to him from the wings, his face even graver than usual, he is loath to surrender the moment.

“My curtain call!” he says as Omar leads him away. It is the second remark he will come to regret that day.

The man known professionally as Misterioso has long lived, in a detail borrowed without apologies from Gaston Leroux, in secret apartments under the Empire Palace Theatre. They are gloomy and sumptuous. There is a bedroom for everyone—Miss Blossom has her own chambers, naturally, on the opposite side of the apartment from the Master’s—but when they are not traveling the world, the company prefers to hang around in the vast obligatory Organ Room, with its cathedral-like, eighty-pipe Helgenblatt, and it is here, twenty minutes after the bullet entered his rib cage and lodged near his heart, that Max Mayflower dies. Before doing so, however, he tells his ward, Tom Mayflower, the story of the golden key, in whose service—and not that of Thalia or Mammon—he and the others circled the globe a thousand times.

When he was a young man, he says, no older than Tom is now, he was a wastrel, a rounder, and a brat. A playboy, spoiled and fast. From his family’s mansion on Nabob Avenue, he sallied night after night into the worst dives and fleshpots of Empire City. There were huge gambling losses, and then trouble with some very bad men. When they could not collect on their loans, these men instead kidnapped young Max and held him for a ransom so exorbitant that the revenue from it easily would have funded their secret intention, which was to gain control over all the crime and criminals in the United States of America. This would in turn enable them, they reasoned, to take over the country itself. The men abused Max violently and laughed at his pleas for mercy. The police and the federals searched for him everywhere but failed. Meanwhile, Max’s father, the richest man in the state of which Empire City was the capital, weakened. He loved his profligate son. He wanted to have him back again. The day before the deadline for payment fell, he came to a decision. The next morning the Eagle newsboys hit the streets and exposed their veteran uvulas to the skies. “FAMILY TO PAY RANSOM!” they cried.

Now, imagine that somewhere, says Uncle Max, in one of the secret places of the world (Tom envisions a vague cross between a bodega and a mosque), a copy of the Empire City Eagle bearing this outrageous headline was crushed by an angry hand emerging from a well-tailored white linen sleeve. The owner of the hand and the linen suit would have been difficult to make out in the shadows. But his thoughts would be clear, his anger righteous, and from the lapel of his white suit there would have been dangling a little golden key.

Max, it turns out, was being held in an abandoned house on the outskirts of Empire City. Several times he tried to escape from his bonds, but could not loosen even one finger or toe. Twice a day he was unfettered enough to use the bathroom, and though several times he tried for the window, he could not manage even to get it unlatched. So after a few days he had sunk into the gray timeless hell of the prisoner. He dreamed without sleeping and slept with his eyes open. In one of his dreams, a shadowy man in a white linen suit came into his cell. Just walked right in through the door. He was pleasant and soothing and concerned. Locks, he said, pointing to the door of Max’s cell, mean nothing to us. With a few seconds’ work, he undid the ropes that bound Max to a chair and bid him to flee. He had a boat waiting, or a fast car, or an airplane—in his old age and with death so near, old Max Mayflower could no longer remember which. And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others. At that moment, one of Max’s captors came into the room. He was waving a copy of the Eagle with the news of Max’s father’s capitulation, and until he saw the stranger in white he looked very happy indeed. Then he took out his gun and shot the stranger in the belly.

Max was enraged. Without reflecting, without a thought for his own safety, he rushed at the gangster and tried to wrestle away the gun. It rang like a bell in his bones, and the gangster fell to the floor. Max returned to the stranger and cradled his head in his lap. He asked him his name.

“I wish I could tell you,” the stranger said. “But there are rules. Oh.” He winced. “Look, I’m done for.” He spoke in a peculiar accent, polished and British, with a strange western twang. “Take the key. Take it.”

“Me? Take your key?”

“No, you don’t seem likely, it’s true. But I have no choice.”

Max undid the pin from the man’s lapel. From it dangled a little golden key, identical to the one that Max had given Tom a half hour before.

“Stop wasting your life,” were the stranger’s last words. “You have the key.”

Max spent the next ten years in a fruitless search for the lock that the golden key would open. He consulted with the master locksmiths and ironmongers of the world. He buried himself in the lore of jailbreaks and fakirs, of sailor’s knots and Arapaho bondage rituals. He scrutinized the works of Joseph Bramah, the greatest locksmith who ever lived. He sought out the advice of the rope-slipping spiritualists who pioneered the escape-artist trade and even studied, for a time, with Houdini himself. In the process, Max Mayflower became a master of self-liberation, but the search was a costly one. He ran through his father’s fortune and, in the end, still had no idea how to use the gift that the stranger had given him. Still he pressed on, sustained without realizing it by the mystic powers of the key. At last, however, his poverty compelled him to seek work. He went into show business, breaking locks for money, and Misterioso was born.

It was while traveling through Canada in a two-bit sideshow that he had first met Professor Alois Berg. The professor lived, at the time, in a cage lined with offal, chained to the bars, in rags, gnawing on bones. He was pustulous and stank. He snarled at the paying public, children in particular, and on the side of his cage, in big red letters, was painted the come-on SEE THE OGRE! Like everyone else in the show, Max avoided the Ogre, despising him as the lowest of the freaks, until one fateful night when his insomnia was eased by an unexpected strain of Mendelssohn that came wafting across the soft Manitoba summer night. Max went in search of the source of the music and was led, to his astonishment, to the miserable iron wagon at the back of the fairgrounds. In the moonlight he read three short words: SEE THE OGRE! It was then that Max, who had never before in all this time considered the matter, realized that all men, no matter what their estate, were in possession of shining immortal souls. He determined then and there to purchase the Ogre’s freedom from the owner of the sideshow, and did so with the sole valuable possession he retained.

“The key,” Tom says. “The golden key.”

Max Mayflower nods. “I struck the irons from his leg myself.”

“Thank you,” the Ogre says now, in the room under the stage of the Palace, his cheeks wet with tears.

“You’ve repaid your debt many times, old friend,” Max Mayflower tells him, patting the great horny hand. Then he resumes his story. “As I pulled the iron cuff from his poor, inflamed ankle, a man stepped out of the shadows. Between the wagons,” he says, his breath growing short now. “He was dressed in a white suit, and at first I thought it must be him. The same fellow. Even though I knew. That he was where. I’m about to go myself.”

The man explained to Max that he had, at last and without meaning to, found the lock that could be opened by the little key of gold. He explained a number of things. He said that both he and the man who had saved Max from the kidnappers belonged to an ancient and secret society of men known as the League of the Golden Key. Such men roamed the world acting, always anonymously, to procure the freedom of others, whether physical or metaphysical, emotional or economic. In this work they were tirelessly checked by agents of the Iron Chain, whose goals were opposite and sinister. It was operatives of the Iron Chain who had kidnapped Max years before.

“And tonight,” Tom says.

“Yes, my boy. And tonight it was them again. They have grown strong. Their old dream of ruling an entire nation has come to pass.”

“Germany.”

Max nods weakly and closes his eyes. The others gather close now, somber, heads bowed, to hear the rest of the tale.

The man, Max says, gave him a second golden key, and then, before returning to the shadows, charged him and the Ogre to carry on the work of liberation.

“And so we have done, have we not?” Max says.

Big Al nods, and, looking around at the sorrowing faces of the company, Tom realizes that each of them is here because he was liberated by Misterioso the Great. Omar was once the slave of a sultan in Africa; Miss Plum Blossom had toiled for years in the teeming dark sweatshops of Macao.

“What about me?” he says, almost to himself. But the old man opens his eyes.

“We found you in an orphanage in Central Europe. That was a cruel place. I only regret that at the time I could save so few of you.” He coughs, and his spittle is flecked with blood. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I meant to tell you all this. On your twenty-first birthday. But now. I charge you as I was charged. Don’t waste your life. Don’t allow your body’s weakness to be a weakness of your spirit. Repay your debt of freedom. You have the key.”

These are the Master’s last words. Omar closes his eyes. Tom buries his face in his hands and weeps for a while, and when he looks up again he sees them all looking at him.

He calls Big Al, Omar, and Miss Blossom to gather around him, then raises the key high in the air and swears a sacred oath to devote himself to secretly fighting the evil forces of the Iron Chain, in Germany or wherever they raise their ugly heads, and to working for the liberation of all who toil in chains—as the Escapist. The sound of their raised voices carries up through the complicated antique ductwork of the grand old theater, rising and echoing through the pipes until it emerges through a grate in the sidewalk, where it can be heard clearly by a couple of young men who are walking past, their collars raised against the cold October night, dreaming their elaborate dream, wishing their wish, teasing their golem into life.

9 (#ulink_2064d6c6-a15d-5df6-902b-9420a8a74a0c)

THEY HAD BEEN WALKING for hours, in and out of the streetlights, through intermittent rainfall, heedless, smoking and talking until their throats were sore. At last they seemed to run out of things to say and turned wordlessly for home, carrying the idea between them, walking along the trembling hem of reality that separated New York City from Empire City. It was late; they were hungry and tired and had smoked their last cigarette.

“What?” Sammy said. “What are you thinking?”

“I wish he was real,” said Joe, suddenly ashamed of himself. Here he was, free in a way that his family could only dream of, and what was he doing with his freedom? Walking around talking and making up a lot of nonsense about someone who could liberate no one and nothing but smudgy black marks on a piece of cheap paper. What was the point of it? Of what use was walking and talking and smoking cigarettes?

“I bet,” Sammy said. He put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Joe, I bet you do.”

They were at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, in a boisterous cloud of light and people, and Sammy said to hold on a minute. Joe stood there, hands in his pockets, helplessly ordering his thoughts with shameful felicity into the rows and columns of little boxes with which he planned to round out the first adventure of the Escapist: Tom Mayflower donning his late master’s midnight-blue mask and costume, his chest hastily emblazoned by the skilled needle of Miss Plum Blossom with a snappy gold-key emblem. Tom tracking the Nazi spy back to his lair. A full page of rousing fisticuffs, then, after bullet-dodging, head-knocking, and collapsing beams, an explosion: the nest of Iron Chain vipers wiped out. And the last panel: the company gathered at the grave of Misterioso, Tom leaning again on the crutch that will provide him with his disguise. And the ghostly face of the old man beaming down at them from the heavens.

“I got cigarettes.” Sammy pulled several handfuls of cigarette packages from a brown paper bag. “I got gum.” He held up several packs of Black Jack. “Do you like gum?”

Joe smiled. “I feel I must learn to.”

“Yeah, you’re in America now. We chew a lot of gum here.”

“What are those?” Joe pointed to the newspaper he saw tucked under Sammy’s arm.

Sammy looked serious.

“I just want to say something,” he said. “And that is, we are going to kill with this. I mean, that’s a good thing, kill. I can’t explain how I know. It’s just—it’s like a feeling I’ve had all my life, but I don’t know, when you showed up … I just knew.…” He shrugged and looked away. “Never mind. All I’m trying to say is, we are going to sell a million copies of this thing and make a pile of money, and you are going to be able to take that pile of money and pay what you need to pay to get your mother and father and brother and grandfather out of there and over here, where they will be safe. I—that’s a promise. I’m sure of it, Joe.”

Joe felt his heart swell with the longing to believe his cousin. He wiped at his eyes with the scratchy sleeve of the tweed jacket his mother had bought for him at the English Shop on the Graben.

“All right,” he said.

“And in that sense, see, he really will be real. The Escapist. He will be doing what we’re saying he can do.”

“All right,” Joe said. “Ja ja, I believe you.” It made him impatient to be consoled, as if words of comfort lent greater credence to his fears. “We will kill.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“What are those papers?”

Sammy winked and handed over a copy each of the issues for Friday, October 27, 1939, of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold and of a Czech-language daily called New Yorske Listy.