"Yes, god damn it, I want the money," Joe said. "But I can't stop fighting now."

"Okay," Sammy said. He sighed and looked around the workroom with a slump in his shoulders and a valedictory expression on his face.

It was the end of the dream that had flickered into life a year ago, in the darkness of his bedroom in Brooklyn, with the scraping of a match and the sharing of a hand-rolled cigarette. "That's what we'll tell them, then." He started to walk back into Anapol's office.

Deasey reached out and took hold of his shoulder. "Just a minute, Clay," he said.

Sammy turned back. He had never seen the editor look so uncertain before.

"Oh, Jesus," Deasey said. "What am I doing?"

"What are you doing?" said Joe.

The editor reached into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and took out a folded sheet of paper. "This was in my in box this morning."

"What is it?" Sammy said. "Who's it from?"

"Just read it," Deasey said.

It was a photostatted copy of a letter from the firm of Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin & Krim.

Dear Messrs. Ashkenazy and Anapol:

This letter is being written to you on behalf of National Periodical Publications, Inc. ("National"). National is the exclusive owner of all copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights in and to the comic book magazines "Action Comics" and "Superman" and the character of "Superman" featured therein. National has recently learned of your magazine, "Radio Comics," featuring the fictional character "The Escapist." This character represents a blatant attempt to copy the protected work of our client, namely the various series that feature the adventures of the fictional character known as "Superman," which our client has been publishing since June of 1938. As such, your character constitutes a blatant infringement of our client's copyrights, trademarks, and common-law rights. We hereby demand that you immediately cease and desist from any further publication of your comic book magazine "Radio," and that all existing copies of these comic books be destroyed with a letter verifying destruction signed by an officer of your corporation.

If you fail to cease and desist from such publication, or fail to submit such a verification letter within five days of this letter, National Periodical Publications, Inc., shall forthwith pursue all of its legal and equitable remedies, including seeking to enjoin your further publication of "Radio Comics." This letter is written without waiver of any of our client's rights and remedies, at law and in equity, all of which are hereby expressly reserved.

"But he's nothing like Superman," Sammy said when he had finished. Deasey gave him a baleful look, and Sammy realized he was missing the point. He tried to work his way through to what the point might be. There was clearly something about this letter that Deasey felt would be helpful to them, though he was unwilling to go so far as to tell them what it was. "But that doesn't matter, does it?"

"They've already beaten Victor Fox and Centaur on this," Deasey said. "They're going after Fawcett, too."

"I heard about this thing," Joe said. "They made Will Eisner go in there, Sammy, and he had to tell them that Victor Fox told him, 'Make me a Superman.' "

"Yeah, well, that's what Shelly said to me, too, remember? He said- oh. Oh."

"It's very likely," Deasey said steadily and slowly, as if speaking to an idiot, "that you will be deposed as a witness. I imagine your testimony could be damaging."

Sammy slapped Deasey's arm with the letter.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, hey, thanks, Mr. Deasey."

"What are you going to say?" Joe asked Sammy, as his cousin stared at the door to Anapol's office.

Sammy drew himself up and ran a hand across the top of his head.

"I guess I'm going to go in there and offer to perjure myself," he said.

In 1941, its best year ever, the partnership of Kavalier & Clay earned $59,832.27. Total revenues generated that year for Empire Comics, Inc.-from sales of all comic books featuring characters created either in whole or in part by Kavalier & Clay, sales of two hundred thousand copies apiece for each of two Whitman's Big Little Books featuring the Escapist, sales of Keys of Freedom, of key rings, pocket flashlights, coin banks, board games, rubber figurines, windup toys, and diverse other items of Escapism, as well as the proceeds from the licensing of the Escapist's dauntless puss to Chaffee Cereals for their Frosted Chaff-Os, and from the Escapist radio program that began broadcasting on NBC in April-though harder to calculate, came to something in the neighborhood of $12 to $15 million. Out of his twenty-nine thousand and change, Sammy gave a quarter to the government, then half of what remained to his mother to spend on herself and his grandmother.

On the leftovers, he lived like a king. He ate lox at breakfast every morning for seven weeks. He went to baseball games at Ebbets Field and sat in a box. He might spend as much as two dollars on dinner, and once, on a day when his legs were feeling tired, he rode seventeen blocks in a taxi. He had an entire week's worth of big, visible suits, five gray skyscrapers of pinstripe and worsted, made for himself at twenty-five dollars a pop. And he bought himself a Capehart Panamuse phonograph. It cost $645.00, nearly half as much as a new Cadillac Sixty-one. It was finished in a ridiculously beautiful Hepplewhite style, maple and birch inlaid with ash, and in the cousins' otherwise modern, rather spartan apartment-soon after taking up with Joe, Rosa had begun to lobby him to move out of the Chelsea Rathole-it stood out disturbingly.

It demanded that you play music on it and then maintain the respectful silence of a sinner being sermonized. Sammy loved it as he had never loved anything in his life. The sad flutter of Benny Goodman's clarinet came so poignantly through its deluxe "panamusical" loudspeakers that it could make Sammy cry. The Panamuse was fully automatic; it could store twenty records and play them, in any order, on both sides. The marvelous operations of the record-changing mechanism, in the manner of the time, were on proud display inside the cabinet, and new guests to the apartment, like visitors to the U.S. Mint, were always given a look at the works. Sammy was smitten for weeks, and yet every time he looked at the phonograph, he was racked with guilt and even horror over the cost. His mother would die without ever having learned of its existence.

The funny thing was that, after you threw in the large but still piddling sum Sammy spent every month on books, magazines, records, cigarettes, and amusements, and his half of the $110 monthly rent, there was still more money left over than Sammy knew what to do with. It piled up in his bank account, making him nervous.

"You should get married," Rosa liked to tell him.

Her name was not on the lease, but Rosa had become the apartment's third occupant, and in a very real sense its animating spirit. She had helped them find it (it was a new building on Fifth Avenue, just north of Washington Square), to furnish it, and, when she realized that she would never otherwise be able to share a bathroom with Sammy, to obtain the weekly services of a cleaning woman. At first she would just drop by once or twice a week, after work. She had quit her job at Life for a job retouching, in lurid hues, color pictures of prune-and-noodle casseroles, velvet crumb cakes, and bacon canapes for a publisher of cheap cookbooks that were given away as premiums in five-and-dimes. It was tedious work, and when things got really bad, Rosa liked to indulge minute Surrealist impulses. With an airbrush she would equip a pineapple in the background with a slick black tentacle, or conceal a tiny polar explorer in the frigid peaks of a meringue desert. The publisher's offices were on East Fifteenth, ten minutes from the apartment. Rosa would often come in at five with a bag full of unlikely roots and leaves and cook strange recipes that her father had acquired a taste for in his travels: tagine, mole, something green and slippery that she called sleek. In general these dishes tasted very good; and their exotic dress served to conceal fairly well, Sammy thought, her fairly retrograde approach to winning Joe's heart via the kitchen. She herself never took more than a bite of any of it.