Страница 150 из 154
"Sit down, Mr. Clay," Deasey said.
Sammy sat, a little in awe of George Deasey, as ever.
"Yes, I was there, to answer your question," Deasey said. "I happened to be in town for a few weeks. I saw you were on the bill."
George Deasey had left the comics business during the war, never to return. An old school chum had recruited him into some kind of intelligence work, and Deasey had moved to Washington, remaining there after the war was over, doing things with men like Bill Donovan and the Dulles brothers, which, the few times that Sammy had run into him, he neither refused nor agreed to discuss. He was still dressed quaintly, in one of his trademark Woodrow Wilson suits, gray fla
"Only I can't swim," Sammy said.
"Ah, well," Deasey said lightly. He finished his drink and signaled to the bartender for another. "Tell me, has my old friend Mr. Kavalier truly returned? Can the fantastic tale I heard possibly be accurate?"
"Well, he wasn't really going to jump," Sammy said. "If that's what you heard. And he didn't write the letter. It was all-my son-it's a long story. But he's living in my house now," Sammy said. "Actually, I think that he and my wife-"
Deasey held up a hand. "Please," he said, "I've heard enough unsavory details about your private life today, Mr. Clay."
Sammy nodded; he wasn't going to argue with that.
"It really was something, wasn't it?" he said.
"Oh, you were all right, I suppose. But I found the pornographer extremely touching." Deasey turned to Sammy and licked his lips, as if wondering whether he ought to drop the bantering tone. "How are you holding up?"
Sammy tried again to decide how he was feeling.
"When I'm sober," he said, "I'm probably going to want to kill myself?'
"Status quo for me," Deasey said. The bartender smacked down another glass of rye in front of him.
"I don't know," Sammy said. "I know I ought to feel really bad.
Ashamed, or what have you. I know I ought to be feeling what that asshole there"-he jerked a thumb toward the bartender-"was trying to make me feel. Which I guess is what I've more or less been feeling for the last ten years of my life."
"But you don't."
"No, I don't. I feel-I don't know what the word for it would be. Relieved, I guess."
"I have been in the secrets business for a long time now, Clay," Deasey said. "Take it from me, a secret is a heavy kind of chain. I don't cotton very well to these proclivities of yours. In fact, I find them fairly revolting, particularly when I picture you personally indulging in them."
"Thanks a lot."
"But I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out in the end that Senator C. Estes Kefauver and his pals just handed you your own golden key."
"My God," Sammy said, "I think you might be right."
"Of course I'm right."
Sammy could not even begin to imagine what it would feel like to live through a day that was not fueled or deformed by a lie.
"Mr. Deasey, have you ever been to Los Angeles?"
"Once. I sensed that I could be extremely happy there."
"Why don't you go back?"
"I'm much too old to be happy, Mr. Clay. Unlike you."
"Yeah," Sammy said. "L.A."
"And what would you do out there, I wonder?"
"I don't know. Try to get work in television, maybe."
"Television, yes," Deasey said with a show of distaste. "Yes, you'd be very good at that."
19
There were a hundred and twoafter all; the man from the moving company said so. He and his partner had just finished stacking the last of them in the garage, around and on top of and alongside the crate that contained the pearly residue of the Golem of Prague. Joe came out to the driveway to sign for everything; he looked a little fu
"How was school?"
"We watched Dad on TV," Tommy told Joe. "Mr. Landauer brought his TV into the class."
"Uh-huh," Joe said, watching Tommy with a strange expression on his face.
"He was, well, he was sweating a lot," Tommy said.
"Oh, he was not."
"The kids all said he looked sweaty."
"What else did they say?"
"That's what they said. Can I read your comic books?"
"By all means," Joe said. "They're yours."
"You mean I can have them?"
"You're the only one that wants them."
Looking at the crates stacked like masonry in the garage gave the boy an idea; he would build himself a Bug's Nest [20] When Joe went back into the house, Tommy started dragging and shoving the stacks here and there, and after an hour he had succeeded in transferring space from the edges to the center, hollowing out a shelter for himself at the heart of the pile; a hogan of splintery, knotholed pine, open at the top to let in light from the ceiling fixture, breached by a narrow passage whose mouth he disguised with an easily moved stack of three crates. When it was done, he dropped to his hands and knees, and scrambled on his belly through the Secret Access Tube to the I
As he sat, biting down on the ridged metal collar of his pencil, stirring a sour-tasting electromagnetic ache in the filling of a molar, the Bug noticed that one of the crates that made up the walls of his Nest was different somehow from the others: time-blackened, whiskered with splinters, more spindly-looking than the other crates in Joe's hoard. He rolled onto his knees and inched toward it. He recognized it. He had seen it a thousand times, in the years before the arrival of Joe's things; lying under a canvas tarp at the back of the garage, with a bunch of other old stuff-a fabulous but sadly defunct Capehart self-changing record player, an inexplicable box full of men's combs. The crate had a loose lid of slats, crudely hinged with loops of thick wire, and a clasp of the same crooked wire, tied with a length of green string. French words and the name of France were stamped, or maybe burned into, its sides; he guessed it had once held bottles of wine.
To any boy, but in particular to one whose chronicle was contained in the sound of a roomful of adults falling silent all at once, the contents of the wine crate, ossified by dust and weather into a kind of solid unit of oblivion, would have seemed a treasure. With the precision of an archaeologist, mindful that he would have to put everything back just as he had found it, he prized apart the layers, one by one, inventorying the chance survivals of his prehistory.
1) A copy of the first issue of Radio Comics, tucked inside a translucent green cellophane school folder. Its pages yellowed and, held in the hand, bulky and swollen. The very source, the beating heart of the old-blanket odor that the box exuded.
2) Another green cellophane folder, this one stuffed with old newspaper clippings, press notices, and publicity a
[20] At this time in the history of comic books, it was a mark of only the most successful heroes that they had a secret lair. Superman had his Fortress of Solitude, Batman his Batcave, the Blackhawks their windswept Blackhawk Island, and the Escapist his posh digs under the boards of the Empire Palace. These redoubts would be depicted, from time to time, in panels mat showed detailed cutaway diagrams of the secret lair, each 3-D Televisor Screen, Retractable Helipad, Trophy Room, and Rogue's Gallery carefully labeled with arrows. Only one of these cross-section plans was ever published for the Keyhole, a special two-page drawing in the centerfold of Escapist Adventures #46.