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 connected to a thick left arm. Other than this arm and a number of faint, cryptic guidelines, there was nothing on the page. “My mother’s nephew.”
“He’s a foreigner? Where’s he from?”
“Prague. How did you know?”
“The haircut.”
Anapol stepped over to the pushboy’s rack and took a pair of trousers from their hanger.
“He just got here last night,” Sammy said.
“And he’s looking for a job.”
“Well, naturally—”
“I hope, Sammy, that you told him I have no jobs for anybody.”
“Actually … I may have misled him a little on that score, boss.”
Again Anapol nodded, as another of his unerring snap judgments was confirmed. Sammy’s left leg started to twitch. It was the worst-lamed of the two and the first to weaken when he was nervous or about to be caught in a lie.
“And all this has something to do,” Anapol said, “with how much they charge me over at National for the back cover of Action Comics.”
“Or Detective.”
Anapol frowned. He lifted his arms and then disappeared into a huge linen undershirt that did not exactly look freshly laundered. Sammy checked Joe’s work. A massive frame had begun to emerge, a squarish head, a thick, almost tubular chest. While confidently rendered, the figure had something bulky about it. The legs were mighty and booted, but the boots were stout workman’s boots, laced prosaically up the front. Sammy’s leg began to shake a little harder now. Anapol’s head reemerged from his undershirt. He tucked it over his furred walrus belly and down into his trousers. He was still frowning. He lifted his suspenders up over his shoulders and let them snap into place. Then, his eyes fixed on the back of Joe’s head, he went over to his desk and flicked a switch.
“I need Murray,” he said into the speaker. “It’s a slow week,” he added to Sammy. “That’s the only reason I’m indulging you this way.”
“I understand,” said Sammy.
“Sit down.”
Sammy sat and rested the portfolio against his legs, relieved to set it down. It was stuffed almost to bursting with his own sketches, concepts, prototypes, and finished pages.
Mavis Magid got Murray Edelman on the phone. The advertising manager for Empire Novelty told him, as Sammy had known he would because he voluntarily worked extra hours in Edelman’s department every week, absorbing what he could of the old man’s skewed and exclamatory slant on the advertising game, that National was charging almost seven times the going rate for the space on the back cover of its bestselling titles—the August issue of Action, the last for which there were figures, had sold close to a million and a half copies. There was, according to Murray, one reason and one reason alone for the skyrocketing sales of certain titles in the still relatively inchoate comic book market.
“Superman,” said Anapol when he hung up the phone, with the tone of someone ordering an unknown dish in an outlandish restaurant. He started to pace behind his desk, hands clasped behind his back.
“Think of how much product we could sell if we had our own Superman,” Sammy heard himself saying. “We can call them Joy Buzzer Comics. Whoopie Cushion Comics. Think of how much you’ll save on advertising. Think—”
“Enough,” said Anapol. He stopped pacing and flicked the switch on his telephone console again. The cast of his face had altered, taking on a taut, faintly squeamish expression Sammy could recognize, after a year in his employ, as the repressed foreconsciousness of money. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “I need Jack,” he said.
Mavis placed a call upstairs to the offices of Racy Publications, Inc., home of Racy Police Stories, Racy Western, and Racy Romance. Jack Ashkenazy was summoned to the phone. He confirmed what Murray Edelman had already said. Every pulp and magazine publisher in New York had taken notice of the explosive sales of National’s Action Comics and its caped and booted star.
“Yeah?” Anapol said. “Yeah? You are? Any luck?”
He took the receiver from his ear and stuffed it under his left armpit.
“They’ve been looking around for a Superman of their own upstairs,” he told Sammy.
Sammy jumped out of his chair.
“We can get him one, boss,” he said. “We can have him his very own Superman by Monday morning. But just between you and me,” he added, trying to sound like his great hero, John Garfield, tough and suave at the same time, the street boy ready to wear fancy suits and go where the big money was, “I’d advise you to keep a little piece of this for yourself.”
Anapol laughed. “Oh, you would, would you?” he said. He shook his head. “I’ll bear that in mind.” He kept the receiver tucked under his arm and took a cigarette from the box on his desk. He lit it and inhaled, mulling things over, his big jaw tensed and bulging. Then he rescued the receiver and blew smoke into the mouthpiece.
“Maybe you’d better come down here, Jack,” he said. He hung up again and nodded in Joe Kavalier’s direction. “Is that your artist?”
“We both are,” said Sammy. “Artists, I mean.” He decided to match Anapol’s dubiety with a burst of self-confidence he was rapidly inducing himself to feel. He went over to the partition and rapped, with a flourish, on the glass. Joe turned, startled, from his work. Sammy, not wanting to endanger his own display of confidence, didn’t let himself look too closely at what Joe had done. At least the whole page seemed to have been filled in.
“May I—?” he said to Anapol, gesturing toward the door.
“Might as well get him in here.”
Sammy signaled for Joe to come in, a ringmaster welcoming a famous aerialist into the spotlight. Joe stood up, gathering the portfolio and his stray pencils, then sidled into Anapol’s office, sketchpad clutched to his chest, in his baggy tweed suit, with his hungry face and borrowed tie, his expression at once guarded and touchingly eager to please. He was looking at the owner of Empire Novelty as if all the big money Sammy had promised had been packed into the swollen carapace of Sheldon Anapol and would, at the slightest prick or tap, come pouring out in an uncontrollable green torrent.
“Hello, young man,” said Anapol. “I’m told you can draw.”
“Yes, sir!” Joe said, in a voice that sounded oddly strangled, startling them all.
“Give it here.” Sammy reached for the pad and found, to his surprise, that he couldn’t pry it loose. For an instant, he was afraid that his cousin had done something so abominable that he was afraid to show it. Then he caught a glimpse of the upper left corner of Joe’s drawing, where a fat moon peered from behind a crooked tower, a crooked bat flapping across its face, and he saw that, on