The Auction

The arrival of the dignitaries at the Grangerford-Shepherdson Galleries that afternoon in early March was the most impressive show that that end of Seventy-Second Street had seen all day.  Seventy-Second Street was accustomed to good shows.

That morning at a little past three, a turbaned Iraqi diplomat attached to the consulate on Third Avenue ran out of a hotel on the corner of Seventy-Second and Fifth, ordered a cab to a halt and demanded to be taken to his consulate.  He threw a hundred-dollar bill at the cabbie and told him not to stop for anything.  The diplomat railed in two languages and four dialects about a female agent of the Pakistani government who had lured him into the hotel and planned to extort secret information from him.  He sputtered this way for no more than half a minute before the cab screamed into a stationary oil truck and was totaled like a fallen angel food cake.  The Iraqi leaped out without a thought for the driver, who was thrown clear and, except for his dignity, was uninjured.  The diplomat scurried around the wreckage and ordered the driver of the oil truck to finish the trip to the consulate.  The truck driver would have done it, since the diplomat had stuffed several fifty-dollar bills into his fist, if a pair of policemen had not gotten there first.  Both doubled over with laughter at the scene.

Later, during the morning rush hour, a well-known actress led a procession of people clustered around a horse-drawn wagon from the park to a brownstone on Seventy-Second Street where the president of a large seafood distribution company lived.  The wagon carried a plain wooden coffin.  When the group reached the businessman's house, the actress proclaimed a boycott of canned tuna in order to protest the slaughter of dolphins caught by fishermen employed by the company.  Then the group of people cheered and turned over the coffin, which cracked open against the steps leading to the executive's door, spilling hundreds of cans of tuna into the middle of the morning rush.  The seafood mogul was, at that moment, sunning himself on a beach in Florida.

Around lunchtime a well-dressed man with an attaché case walked toward the corner of Seventy-Second and Lexington where another well-dressed man with a zip-up leather folder was waiting for him.  As the one man exchanged his attaché case for the other man's leather folder, a freakish bolt of wind somehow threw both containers open.  Out of the leather folder flew thirty loose sheets of photocopied diagrams and records, and out of the attaché case flew three hundred wrinkly, laundered twenty-dollar bills.  Both well-dressed men panicked and tried to fly after all three hundred thirty slips of paper, but they slipped on the ice at the curb.  Before either of them hit the ground, Superman swooped out of the sky, caught all the money and records, as well as the two men.  He whisked the whole bundle off to the police station at Seventy-Second Street and First Avenue - enough evidence to send more than a dozen oil company officials into a court battle which would, at the very least, deplete two corporations' budgets for legal affairs.

The best show on Seventy-Second Street that day, though, was put on by Wainwright McAfee, the eminent artist's agent and art collector, and Lucius D. Tommytown, the eccentric billionaire.  The Grangerford-Shepherdson Galleries had scheduled, for two o'clock that afternoon, an auction of some of the sculptures done by the late Jeremy McAfee.  Wainwright McAfee, Jeremy's younger brother, claimed that he wanted his brother's art pieces for their sentimental value.  According to one report, Tommytown had remarked that McAfee was as sentimental as any brother could be whose brother's effects were likely to appreciate to the value of a king's ransom.  Tommytown also said, according to this report, that he wanted them more than McAfee did, and that he would prove it.  On the day of the auction McAfee arrived first.

At half past one, a pair of small trucks, each carrying a huge spotlight, crawled down Seventy-Second Street and parked in front of the venerable gallery.  A man dressed in a black dinner jacket and ruffles hopped out of one truck with a cordless microphone.  He had on white vampire makeup and prominent canine teeth.  His hair was perfect.  A policeman, one of those who had been on duty when the actress unloaded her tuna cans down the block, asked the vampire for a parade permit.  The vampire produced one; it was perfectly in order.

Men from the trucks set up loudspeakers, and the spotlights sat on either side of the gallery building, blocking off half a lane of traffic on their side of the street.  The spotlights flashed clear blue beams into the overcast afternoon and the vampire began to speak into his microphone in the middle of a sentence as though he had been doing it all day:

"And the excitement here is mounting as the great event draws closer.  The crowd waits with bated breath to see which celebrity of the art world will appear next, to bid for the works of the late great Jeremy McAfee here at the Grangerford-Shepherdson auction.  It's a giant of a- Excuse me?  Is it?  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I've just received word that the next arrival will be Wainwright McAfee himself, the brother and sole heir of the renowned artist.  I think we can already hear him coming down the street."

Predictably, from down the block toward the park came the insistent whirring of a pair of sirens.  Twin Harley-Davidsons carrying the two meanest-looking hell drivers Seventy-Second Street had seen for some time blared out a path for twenty-six feet of heaven-white Fleetwood limousine.  Clapping with the wind over the giant car's hood were a pair of flags, one American and one Irish.  The car ground to a halt in front of the gallery and between the searchlight trucks as the choppers reared up on hind wheels and roared off toward the river.

A long narrow chauffeur with ebony skin and shiny black boots, a black coat and black turtleneck, strode around to the passenger side and opened the backseat door.  Wainwright McAfee, a great white buffalo of a man, got out in full ivory glitter, swept back a collection of hair that might last have been used by Arthur Fiedler, and offered a hand to the lady he escorted.  Her skin and flowing gown were as black as the chauffeur.

The pair acknowledged the cheering crowd that had gathered around the lights and loudspeakers, nodded to the vampire, and waltzed into the gallery building.  Then the vampire, the chauffeur, the limousine, the loudspeakers and searchlights, and the crew who came with them, all packed up and rode off as though they had never been there.

Among the crowd were thirteen heavily bearded men wearing the dark hats and coats over fringed shawls of the Hasidic Jewish community.  These were retiring, taciturn men, a mystery and often apparently invisible to most of the denizens of this city.  The men stopped their walking and astute murmurings when they came to the crowd watching the vampire announce the arrival of Wainwright McAfee.  They stood there for the entire display, the thirteen of them, through the vampire's verbosity, through the spectacular arrival of the art collector, through the packing up and leaving.  Nearly the entire crowd, who now blocked most of Seventy-Second Street, stayed for a minute or two after McAfee disappeared and the company who had heralded him dispersed.  They were perhaps wondering if some more sense could be made of the event before they had it explained to them on the society page of the next morning's newspapers.

As the throng showed signs of leaving, however, the witnesses to this street madness were further confused.  The thirteen Hasids strode, shoulders hunched and heads down, into a line in front of the gallery.  Simultaneously, they threw off their coats, hats, pants, shawls and false beards, and there in the March chill, arm in bare arm, stood a leggy row of twelve chorus girls in feathers and net stockings, and one disco-suited barker who held up the lapels of one of the discarded coats on whose lining was embroidered the words: THE TOMMYTOWN FOLLIES.  The barker, tall, thin and bald with just a thick pair of muttonchop sideburns to decorate his face, looked to be Lucius D.  Tommytown himself, his renowned basso booming over the din of the city.

"Gather 'round, folks, don't be shy.  It's the Tommytown Follies here for your entertainment pleasure.  No contributions please.  Girls, how about a number?"

In approximate unison, all twelve chorusers sang the tune of "Let Me Entertain You," and the crowd piled in on three sides of them.  Among the crowd were six process servers who had been tipped off to the fact that the elusive billionaire would make an appearance at this auction.  The six fought and elbowed through the mob, showed identification to police who were keeping the street in a state of stable chaos, and the six descended almost at once on the big-voiced barker who clapped and sang along.

As the process servers stuffed their subpoenas into the disco king's hands, pockets and coat, one of the chorusers, a tall, husky, long-haired lady with hair over most of her face, grabbed up one of the discarded coats and bolted up the steps to the gallery entrance

"He's not Tommytown," the choruser yelled in a decidedly masculine voice.  Tommytown pulled off the long wig to reveal a monstrous pair of muttonchop sideburns framing a fleshy pate as he wrapped himself in the coat.  "It's me!  It's me!  You missed me!" he howled and disappeared behind the gallery door.

To get into the auction, one had to identify oneself as something other than a process server.  The spurious Tommytown tore off the fake sideburns and politely handed each of the six subpoenas back to its respective server.  Then, the remaining dancing girls and the hairless master of ceremonies shook hands through the crowd and made their way across the street to four waiting cars.  Inside the gallery, by the time a valet greeted Lucius D.  Tommytown with a dignified Artis-A suit and helped him into it, the auction was ready to begin.

The room where the auction took place looked more like a church sanctuary than an auction hall.  Potential bidders sat in pews before a platform which was decorated with McAfee sculptures of all shapes and sizes.  There was a lectern on the platform where the auctioneer stood, and a table at stage center where the auctioneer's aides would bring the items that were not too large to be lifted.  The only thing that detracted from the churchlike quality of the room was the nature of the sculpture itself.

Jeremy McAfee was one of those contemporary artists whose classification art scholars and critics left to a later, more ambitious generation.  Fitting him into a pigeonhole was too much work.  For Dali and Picasso they had found words.  For Calder they had gone so far as to make up new words that seemed suitable.  For McAfee they were at a loss.  Some thought McAfee was a charlatan, tossing together disparate shapes and colors for no reason other than to make a buck and confound art critics.  Others insisted that he was a genius, beyond classification, whose creativity and innovation knew no bounds.  Both points of view, astonishingly enough, were correct.  Jeremy McAfee, lately killed off in a helicopter accident while he was allegedly dangling from a rope ladder making a sketch of the sunrise over Castile, actually never existed.

Neither, of course, did the artist's brother Wainwright McAfee exist, nor, as it happened, did the spectacularly wealthy Lucius D.  Tommytown.  All three were rather brilliant constructs out of the mind of a man who stood behind the back row of the hall as the auction began; a man who, under his Pinkerton rent-a-cop uniform, mustache and graying blond toupee, was Lex Luthor.  These people, along with a score of other owned-and-operated people in a number of different lines of business, were part of a great clandestine holding company that had evolved, over the years, from Luthor's far-flung illegal and semilegal enterprises.

Luthor started out as a tinkerer when he was still a young boy.  He could easily have landed a job-if he had not gone off to reform school before he was old enough to get working papers-as an inventor with any major industrial firm, commissioned to spend all the money he needed to research any area of study that struck his fancy and produce whatever wondrous gadgets he wanted.  He tinkered and invented anyway, even in stir, because his mind would not sit still.  When he started putting together bigger gadgets-some of which were illegal, some of which there would have been laws against if lawmakers could have foreseen them, and some of which district attorneys wanted for evidence against him-Luthor had to find some way of stashing these objects where nobody could locate them.

The solution was to put them on display in museums as sculpture.  Luthor invented Jeremy McAfee to pose as the artist who created the criminal's more outlandish constructions.  So McAfee's "Collage of Flight," a large plastic and aluminum triangular kite with a propeller at each corner of the triangle, was actually a particularly efficient copter-glider device for one or two riders, sitting now in the courtyard garden of the Museum of Modern Art.  The Whitney housed a corkscrew-nosed missile which could actually hold as many as six passengers while it tunneled twelve miles underground.  Decorating the marble steps in front of the Bronfield Distilleries building out on Fifth Avenue for passersby to admire, was a ten-meter-tall, nuclear-powered, fire-belching, mechanical dragon that Luthor was saving for a special occasion.  Luthor had dreams of building a harmless-looking obelisk at the site of McAfee's home near Gibraltar in Spain, an obelisk which would actually be a geological-activation station that was capable of sending an impulse through the ground under the strait to a similar site on land Luthor also owned in northern Morocco.  This impulse would cause the western Mediterranean to pulse and roil until it constructed a levee of earth and rock across the Gates of Hercules, damming the sea from its principal tributary, the Atlantic Ocean, and making Luthor the proprietor of a hydroelectric plant that could provide more power than the world would need for a thousand years.  He would do it, too, if those guys in the Persian Gulf got any more uppity.

Luthor did not yet have any particular purpose for this trip outside the world of the Pocantico Correctional Facility other than to see to the liquidation of the assets of Jeremy McAfee.  He decided, while standing at the rear of the auction hall, that the guys in the Persian Gulf were already uppity as hell, and that maybe it was time he actually did dam up the Straits of Gibraltar and take the world off the oil standard.  When he left here he would find a phone booth, dial a secret number and tell B.  J.  Tolley, his chief of operations, that she should set the Gibraltar Plan into operation.

The auction was beginning.  The first item up for bid was something by someone other than McAfee.  Luthor let it go by.  The second was a McAfee sculpture called "Crystal Cave," a conical mound of glass and granite prisms about a foot high on their stand, that took two orderlies to carry it to the altar at center stage.  It was actually a chemical tracing device which, when attached to an ordinary shortwave radio, could detect the whereabouts of any individual on Earth by homing in on that person's peculiar organic makeup.  The opening bid of three hundred dollars came from somewhere near the front of the room.

Luthor pressed a small button in the palm of his right hand three times in quick succession, and on the right-hand side of the room, the actor who had convinced Seventy-Second Street that he was the fictional Lucius D.  Tommytown rose and said, "Let's get this rolling.  A thousand dollars."

Luthor pressed a similar button in his left palm, and to his left and in front of him the eminence grise who had driven up with his motorcycle escort said in overstated brogue, "A thousand and one."

"Some brotherly love," Tommytown said to his contrived adversary.  "Fifteen hundred."

"Fifteen-nought-one," returned the great white buffalo.

"This man is annoying me," Tommytown said, pointing at Wainwright McAfee.  "Isn't there a rule against what he's doing?"

"Look at the summons evader talking of rules," McAfee grumped.

"Every reputable auction hall has a minimum overbid rule.  You can't bid just a dollar more than I bid.  What kind of bulldink is this anyway?"

McAfee finally acquired the "Crystal Cave" for twenty-seven hundred fifty-one dollars when Tommytown finally threw up his hands in disgust.  For all subsequent purchases, the auctioneer ruled, a bidder would have to bid at least fifty dollars more than the previous bidder.  This had not been a rule before, simply because the Grangerford-Shepherdson Galleries had never before been witness to behavior as ungentlemanly as that between the put-on McAfee and Tommytown.  Lucius D.  Tommytown successfully bid for all the McAfee sculptures that followed the "Crystal Cave." Luthor, from his disguise in the back of the room, engineered the entire proceeding.  Even the ersatz McAfee and Tommytown did not know it was Luthor for whom they were working.  They were just a pair of off-Broadway actors looking to fill up a day with an extra gig, and Luthor paid better than scale.

By the time the jubilant Tommytown gallantly gave a depressed McAfee a ride to McAfee's hotel roof by helicopter and flew off to a hangar on the east side of town, everyone had had a fine time.  The auctioneer had an unusual day.  The process servers had at least been able to see Tommytown from across a row of people.  The society and art reporters who attended the auction had a winning story.  The art collectors had a good show.  The Grangerford-Shepherdson Galleries had lots of publicity.  Luthor had his sculptures back.  And the pair of actors had their best payday of the year.  Neither knew that the other was an actor.  The man playing Tommytown had played him before, and was under the impression that although the real Tommytown liked the notoriety, a public appearance was simply too dangerous.  The man playing McAfee had no idea why he was hired to do this, and cared less.

Lex Luthor now had sculptures that were actually an illusion caster, a weather controller, a sonic cannon, a chemical tracer, and a navigational compass for an interstellar vehicle which homes in on Earth's sun from halfway across the galaxy.  Luthor had never been that far from home, but he did enjoy travel.  The devices would all be shipped by the gallery to a warehouse upstate where they would sit until Luthor could be sure Superman did not know where they were.  Then he would use them as he needed them.  Meanwhile, still dressed in his rent-a-cop outfit, he would walk across town to his small apartment on Sixty-Sixth Street.  He could not go to the penthouse where his main headquarters were.  He probably would not be able to go there at all this time out.  He was not secure.

Superman had found out Luthor was Jeremy McAfee the artist.  These things slip sometimes, Luthor realized.  He could shed identities like disposable razors or used Band-Aids.  He had no psychological dependence on Jeremy McAfee, so, for the benefit of the art world, he invented a story of the artist's strange and spectacular death by swinging into the steeple of an old Spanish church while dangling from a helicopter, and then falling two hundred feet to the ground, taking a large chunk of the church's roof with him.  Not only would the story benefit the art world, but it would benefit Luthor.  Stories like that, and displays like that of Tommytown and brother McAfee today would, for a time, cause the market price of a McAfee work of art to skyrocket.  Whenever Luthor needed some spot cash now, he could simply throw together a few scraps, say it was done by Jeremy McAfee before his death-which would be true enough-and have somebody like Wainwright McAfee sell it to a museum or a collector somewhere for an outrageous sum.

It would probably have be a simple matter, had he chosen to do so, for Luthor to figure out what Superman's secret identity was.  Luthor did not think the information would do him any good.  He assumed that Superman had the same sort of setup as Luthor had with his made-to-order people, and that if he were exposed, Superman would simply create new aliases.  Luthor had always assumed that Morgan Edge, the communications tycoon who had appeared out of nowhere sometime in the 1960s, was one of Superman's elaborate disguises.  He was probably at least two or three other people Luthor had heard of.  Maybe he had been Joe Namath.  Possibly Bruce Wayne.  In Smallville there was a kid named Pete Ross who always seemed to disappear when Superboy came around.  Pete Ross was probably Superboy.  Luthor had once considered that Superman could also be someone like Graig Nettles or Jim Rice, but a baseball player's schedule is much too demanding for someone who has to fly off unexpectedly at all hours of the day.  He was probably Muhammad Ali.  Or maybe even Edward Kennedy.  None of that mattered.

What Luthor did not realize was that while his own aliases were tools and nothing else, Clark Kent was Superman's fetish and preoccupation.  Kent was Superman's demon.

"We must have words, Lex Luthor," said the voice he heard from behind him.

Luthor was a block from the Grangerford-Shepherdson Galleries and he was about to slip a dime into the phone at the corner to call the penthouse.  Still in his Pinkerton guard disguise, he decided to walk among the plow-piled snow to the next telephone and hope the owner of the voice would go away.

"That is not likely, Lex Luthor," the voice said, following him.  "I will not be avoided."

Luthor walked a few more steps until a hand, the iciness of which he could feel through his coat, gripped one shoulder.  Before Luthor could turn to face whoever it was, there arose in his pathway a shrouded human figure, far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men.  And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of fresh snow.