It's Superman! A Novel by Tom De Haven Read Free Book Online Page A

brothers (Harry and Gene) continued to contribute to the family, but rarely more than three bucks a week. Freddy was an invalid by then, thanks to a fall from a scaffold, and half off his rocker. His older sister Ida could sew like the dickens, so she did all right, working a Singer machine. She gladly forked over eighty cents of every dollar she earned, but the rest she deposited into a piggy bank heavy as a cinder block that her fiancé “Murph” Silverman had won for her at Luna Park.
    That damn piggy bank.
    Using the edge of a butter knife to pry open the tin plug on the pig’s underbelly, Willi started helping himself to a few dimes and nickels, a quarter, or a dollar bill now and then, then every day, using the money to rent a German Ica and buy darkroom time to develop his plates. Happening upon that freshly dead gangster on Central Park West had steered him to his specialty, showed him his true calling—he and the city’s picture newspapers, the tabloids, were meant for each other.
    Nights, he trawled the boroughs of New York, photographing auto wrecks and blazing tenements, husbands in bracelets grieving for wives they’d just murdered, the occasional live baby in an ash can. Rubouts in spaghetti joints, lady burglars being led from Central Booking, always between a robust matron and a grinning detective. He loitered around police headquarters, local precincts. He’d sell a picture and replace the money he’d “borrowed” from Ida. But then he’d borrow it back the next day, and maybe a little extra.
    He rented a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic, faster, lighter, and no more plates. No more of that explosive flash powder, either! But then of course he had to buy flashbulbs and sheet film. Wouldn’t it be great if he didn’t have to rent his camera—if he could buy one? By then he’d saved up some money of his own, just not quite enough.
    That damn piggy bank.
    So with more of Ida’s coins and cash, he purchased a secondhand Speed that the first owner—a Romanian who worked at the Empire City racetrack—had ingeniously adapted to use roll film. As soon as he’d sold some pictures that he took with it, he put the money right back into his sister’s bank. Well, he couldn’t put it all back, not yet. But he would. Eventually. Long before she needed it.
    When he finally got his comeuppance (and Willi never denied he didn’t deserve it) should have been a night to celebrate. In one twelve-hour shift he’d sold a picture of the vice-president of the United States picking his nose outside the Waldorf, a barge collision, a killer’s old mother weeping at his arraignment, and a safecracker who’d been worked over plenty by the most vicious plainclothes cop in Brooklyn. He was whistling “Stardust” when he came home around six in the morning, walking on air. But as soon as he opened the door, it was uh-oh.
    In the kitchen Willi’s mother stood planted with her arms folded like the Golem of Prague. By the window, looking out as if contemplating a jump, his father pressed the heel of a hand against his forehead. His older brothers, even Freddy on his crutches, milled around drinking coffee. Quickly they all put down their cups. The little ones were either holding hands with great solemnity, or else bawling their heads off somewhere in a corner. And Ida, poor plain Ida, looked stricken. She sat at the table with her piggy bank in front of her, a measly pile of coins beside it.
    Lucky for Willi he’d left his camera, as he always did, in a rented locker. Otherwise he might have had his head dented in with that too, not just the piggy bank. Harry did the honors. And then, except for his father, everybody kicked him while he was lying on the floor curled like a shrimp.
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    It takes some doing, but at last Willi convinces a cracksman friend named Patsy Cudhy to loan him a good set of picks, but under two conditions: that Willi is gone no longer than half an hour, and that he brings Patsy back a Buescher saxophone,