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The offices of the Empire Novelty Company, Inc., were on the fourth floor of the Kramler Building, in a hard-luck stretch of Twenty-fifth Street near Madison Square. A fourteen-story office block faced with stone the color of a stained shirt collar, its windows bearded with soot, ornamented with a smattering of moderne zigzags, the Kramler stood out as a lone gesture of commercial hopefulness in a block filled with low brick "taxpayers" (minimal structures generating just enough in rent to pay property taxes on the land they occupied), boarded-up woolens showrooms, and the moldering headquarters of benevolent societies that ministered to dwindling and scattered populations of immigrants from countries no longer on the map. It had been dedicated in late 1929, then repossessed by the lien-holding bank when the developer leaped from the window of his office on the fourteenth floor. In the ten years since, it had managed to attract a small but varied number of tenants, among them a publisher of sexy pulp magazines; a distributor of hairpieces, false beards, male corsets, and elevator shoes; and the East Coast booking agents for a third-rate midwestern circus; all of them attracted, as Shelly Anapol had been, by the cut-rate rents and a collegial atmosphere of rascality.
Despite the air of failure and disrepute that permeated the neighborhood, Sheldon P. Anapol-whose brother-in-law Jack Ashkenazy owned Racy Publications, Inc., on the Kramler's seventh floor-was a talented businessman, likable and cruel. He had gone to work for Hyman Lazar, the founder of Empire Novelty, in 1914, at the age of twenty, as a pe
As with all great salesmen, Anapol's past comprehended tragedy and disappointment. He was an orphan of pogrom and typhus, raised by unfeeling relations. His physical bulk, inherited from generations of slab-jawed, lumbering Anapols, had for much of his early life rendered him the butt of jokes and the object of women's scorn. As a young man, he had played the violin well enough to hope for a musical career, until a hasty marriage and the subsequent upkeep on his two dreadnought daughters, Belle and Candace, forced him into a life of commercial traveling. All of this left him hardened, battered, rumpled, and addicted to the making of money, but not, somehow, embittered. He had always been welcome, during his days on the road, in the lonely shops of the dealers in jokes and novelties, men who were often in their third or fourth line of work and almost universally broken, after years of guessing and disaster, of the ability to know what was amusing and what was not. The unambiguously comical sight of Anapol, with his vast, unbuttoned suits and mismatched socks, his sad violinist's eyes, modeling a blond horsehair wig or demonstrating a dentifrice that turned the teeth of victims black, had been the keystone of many a big sale in WilkesBarre or Pittsfield.
In the last decade, however, he had traveled no farther than Riverdale; and over the past year, following an intensification in his pere
"So talk," said Anapol. He was wearing, as usual at this early hour, only socks, garters, and a pair of brightly patterned boxer shorts wide enough to qualify, Sammy thought, as a mural. He was bent over a tiny sink at the back of his office, shaving his face. He had been up, as every morning, since before dawn, settling on a move in one of the chess games he played by mail with men in Cinci
"Let me ask you this first, Mr. Anapol," Sammy said. He was standing, clutching his portfolio, on the threadbare oval of Chinese carpet that covered most of the wooden floor of Anapol's office, a large room set off from the desks of Mavis Magid, Anapol's secretary, and the five shipping, inventory, and account clerks by partitions of veneered presswood and glass. A hat rack, side chairs, and rolltop desk were all secondhand, scavenged in 1933 from the offices of a neighboring life-insurance company that went belly-up, and trucked on dollies down the hall to their present location. "What are they charging you over at National for the back cover of Action Comics this month?"
"No, let me ask you a question," Anapol said. He stepped back from the mirror and tried, as he did every morning, to induce a few long strands of hair to lie flat across the bald top of his head. He had said nothing so far about Sammy's portfolio, which Sammy had never before had the courage to show him. "Who is that kid sitting out there?"
Anapol did not turn around, and he hadn't taken his eyes from the tiny shaving mirror since Sammy had come into the room, but he couldsee Joe in the mirror. Joe and Sammy were sitting back to back, separated by the glass and wood partition that divided Anapol's office from the rest of his empire. Sammy craned around to get a look at his cousin. There was a pine drawing board on Joe's lap, a sketchpad, and some pencils. On the chair beside him lay a cheap pasteboard portfolio they had bought in a five-and-dime on Broadway. The idea was for Joe to fill it quickly with exciting sketches of muscular heroes while Sammy pitched his idea to Anapol and played for time. "You'll have to work fast," he had told Joe, and Joe had assured him that in ten minutes he would have assembled an entire pantheon of crime-fighters in tights. But then on the way in, as Sammy was talking up Mavis Magid, Joe had wasted precious minutes rummaging through the shipment of Amazing Midget Radios whose arrival yesterday morning from Japan had sent Anapol into a rage; the whole shipment was defective and, even by his relaxed standards, unsaleable.
"That's my cousin Joe," said Sammy, sneaking another glance over his shoulder. Joe was bent over his work, staring at his Fingers and craning his head slowly from left to right, as if some invisible force beam from his eyes were dragging the tip of the pencil across the page. He was sketching in the bulge of a mighty shoulder that was co