"What are you doing?" Sammy asked him. "Are you crazy?"

"I'm sorry," Joe said. "I thought he said something."

"Why are you smiling, god damn it?"

"I don't know."

That night, when he and Sammy went to dinner at Ethel Klayman's, he bent down to pick up the napkin he had dropped, and when he sat up again, there was a bright exclamation mark of blood on his cheek.

"You need sutures," said his aunt in her most inarguable tone.

Joe protested. He had given out to his friends that he was afraid of needles and doctors, but the truth was that he felt edified by the wound to his head. It was not that he felt he deserved the pain so much as that it suited him. No matter how well he cleaned the cut, how tightly he compressed it, how thick the bandage he applied, within an hour or so, the first telltale freckle of red would have reappeared. It was like the memory of home, a tribute to his father's stoical denial of illness, injury, or pain.

"It's going to be fine," he said.

His aunt took hold of his elbow with her five-pronged iron grapple and sat him down on the lid of the toilet in the bathroom. She had Sammy fetch a bottle of slivovitz that had been left behind by a friend of her late husband in 1935 and not touched since. Then she crooked his head under her left arm and sewed him up. The thread was dark blue, exactly the color of the Escapist's uniform.

"Don't go looking for trouble," she begged him as she worked the long thin needle into his skin. "You'll be getting plenty of trouble soon enough."

After that, Joe went looking for trouble. For no good reason, he started going up, every day, to Yorkville, where there were numerous German beer halls, German restaurants, German social clubs, and German-Americans. Most of the time, he merely skulked around for a while and returned home from these forays without incident, but sometimes one thing led to another. The ethnic neighborhoods of New York have always been alert to the incursions of intemperate strangers. He got himself punched in the stomach yet again, on East Ninetieth Street, waiting for a bus, by a man who did not take kindly to the sneer that Joe armed himself with whenever he ventured uptown. Hanging around a candy store one afternoon, Joe attracted the attention of some little neighborhood boys, one of whom, for reasons having nothing to do with politics or racial theories, shot him in the back of the head with a big wet oyster of a spitball. These boys were all regular readers of the Escapist, and admirers of Joe Kavalier's work. If they had known who it was, they would probably have felt very sorry for peashooting him. But they just didn't like the way Joe looked. They had observed, with the ruthless acuity of boys, that there was something funny about Joe Kavalier, about his rumpled suit, his air of banked and smoldering testiness, the curly strands standing up from his imperfectly slicked-back hair like an exploded clockworks. He looked like a patsy for pranksters and practical jokers. He looked like a man who was looking for trouble.

It must be said at this point that a very large number of German New Yorkers were vehemently opposed to Hitler and the Nazis. They wrote outraged letters to the editors of the major dailies, condemning Allied and American inaction after the Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenland. They joined anti-fascist leagues, brawled with brown-shirts-Joe was far from the only young man who went out into the streets of New York that autumn spoiling for a fight-and vigorously supported the president and his policies when they took action against Hitler and his war. Nevertheless, there was a fair number of New York Germans who took open pride in the accomplishments, civil, cultural, sporting, and military, of the Third Reich. Among these was a smaller group that was regularly active in various patriotic, nationalistic, generally racist, and sometimes violent organizations sympathetic to the aims of the homeland. Joe frequently returned from Yorkville with anti-Jewish newspapers and tracts that he read through from front to back, stomach tight with fury, then stuffed into one of three peach crates that he used for a filing cabinet. (The other two held his letters from home and his comic books.)

One day, as he was haunting the streets of Yorkville, Joe noticed a sign painted in the window of a second-floor office: ARYAN-AMERICAN LEAGUE

Standing there, staring up at the window, Joe underwent a dark fantasy of running up to that office and bursting into that warren of snakes, feet flying right up at you out of the panel as jagged splinters of the door shot in all directions. He saw himself wading into a roiling tangle of brown-shirts, fists and boots and elbows, and finding, in that violent surf of men, triumph, or if not that then atonement, retribution, or deliverance. He watched the window for nearly half an hour, trying to catch a glimpse of an actual party member. No one entered the building or walked in front of the second-floor window. Joe soon gave up and went home.

Inevitably, he went back to Yorkville. There was a konditorei called Haussman's across the street from the headquarters of the AAL, and from a table by the window Joe had a good view of the door to the building's lobby and of the window. He ordered a slice of the house's excellent Sacher torte and a cup of coffee that was unusually drinkable for New York, and waited. Another slice and two cups later there was still no sign of any Aryan-American at work. He paid his tab and crossed the street. The building's directory, as he had already observed, listed an optometrist, an accountant, a publisher, and the AAL, but none of these concerns appeared to have any patients, clients, or employees. The building-it was called the Kuhn Building-was a graveyard. When he climbed the stairs to the second floor, the door to the AAL offices was locked. Gray daylight through the frosted glass of the door suggested that there were no lamps turned on inside. Joe tried the knob. Then he got down on one knee to examine the lock. It was a Chubb, old and solid, but if he'd had his tools, it would have presented no problem. Unfortunately, his picks and wrench were in a drawer beside his bed down at Palooka Studios. He felt around in his pockets and found a mechanical pencil whose metal pocket clip, attached to the shaft with a two-pronged collar, would serve well enough, suitably deformed, as a tension wrench. But there was still the matter of a pick. He went back downstairs and walked around the block until he found a child's bicycle chained to a window grate on East Eighty-eighth Street. It looked like a new bike, sugary red, its chrome parts bright as mirrors and its tires glossy and stubbled. He waited for a moment to make sure that no one was coming. Then he grasped the shiny handlebars and, with savage jabs of the heel of his shoe at the bike's front wheel, managed to spring loose a spoke. He wiggled it free of the wheel rim and then ran back to the corner of Eighty-seventh and York. Using an iron railing as a crimping form and the sidewalk itself as a rough file, he was able to fashion a serviceable pick from the thin strong wire of the spoke.

When he got back up to the offices of the Aryan-American League, he knocked on the scarred oak frame of the door. There was no reply. He hitched up his trousers, knelt down, put his forehead to the door, and set to work. The crude tools, lack of practice, and pulsation of his own excitement in his arteries and joints made the work more difficult than it ought to have been. He took off his jacket. He rolled up his sleeves. He tipped his hat into his hands and set it on the floor beside him. Finally he opened his collar and yanked his tie to one side. He cursed and sweated and listened so avidly for the sound of the door opening downstairs that he could not hear the lock through his fingers. It took him nearly an hour to get inside.