Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

This paperback edition published in 2001

First published in Great Britain in 2000 by

Fourth Estate

A Division of HarperCollins Publishers

77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

London W6 8JB

vrww.4thestate.co.uk

7 9 10 8

The right of Michael Chabon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs

and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-84115-495-8

without permission in writing from Fourth Estate.

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

To my father

We have this history of impossible solutions for insoluble problems.

—Will Eisner, in conversation

Wonderful escape!

-Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Wakefield"

C0NTENTS

part/ THE ESCAPE ARTIST

part// A COUPLE OF BOY GENIUSES

part/// THE FUNNY-BOOK WAR

part/V THE GOLDEN AGE

PART V RADIOMAN

part VI THE LEAGUE OF THE GOLDEN KEY

Author's Note

PART /

The ESCAPE ARTIST

1

IN later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos

of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New

York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Rent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were

one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. "You weren't the

same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was

called 'Metamorphosis.' It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation." The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had

only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London.

Yet his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist's birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams

had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.

Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began:

bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was

not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt,

quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went

forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish

penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his

face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for

the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in

his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed

an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition—one of a

thousand—of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving

streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his

self-improvement regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passion—one of them, at any rate—was for those two-bit

argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was

well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.

The long run of Kavalier & Clay—and the true history of the Escapist's birth—began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that

Sammy's mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to

move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In the livid light

of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like a question mark against

the door frame, a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his face. This, Mrs. Klayman

said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward the wall, was Josef Kavalier, her brother Emil's son, who had arrived in New York tonight on a

Greyhound bus, all the way from San Francisco.

"What's the matter with him?" Sammy said. He slid over until his shoulders touched cold plaster. He was careful to take both of the pillows

with him. "Is he sick?"

"What do you think?" said his mother, slapping now at the vacated expanse of bedsheet, as if to scatter any offending particles of himself that

Sammy might have left behind. She had just come home from her last night on a two-week graveyard rotation at Bellevue, where she worked

as a psychiatric nurse. The stale breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform gave off a faint whiff of the lavender

water in which she bathed her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings. "He

can barely stand on his own two feet."

Sammy peered over his mother, trying to get a better look at poor Josef Kavalier in his baggy tweed suit. He had known, dimly, that he had

Czech cousins. But his mother had not said a word about any of them coming to visit, let alone to share Sammy's bed. He wasn't sure just

how San Francisco fitted into the story.

"There you are," his mother said, standing up straight again, apparently satisfied at having driven Sammy onto the easternmost five inches of

the mattress. She turned to Josef Kavalier. "Come here. I want to tell you something." She grabbed hold of his ears as if taking a jug by the

handles, and crushed each of his cheeks in turn with her lips. "You made it. All right? You're here."

"All right," said her nephew. He did not sound convinced.

She handed him a washcloth and went out. As soon as she left, Sammy reclaimed a few precious inches of mattress while his cousin stood

there, rubbing at his mauled cheeks. After a moment, Mrs. Klayman switched off the light in the kitchen, and they were left in darkness.

Sammy heard his cousin take a deep breath and slowly let it out. The stack of newsprint rattled and then hit the floor with a heavy thud of

defeat. His jacket buttons clicked against the back of a chair; his trousers rustled as he stepped out of them; he let fall one shoe, then the

other. His wristwatch chimed against the water glass on the nightstand. Then he and a gust of chilly air got in under the covers, bearing with

them an odor of cigarette, armpit, damp wool, and something sweet and somehow nostalgic that Sammy presently identified as the smell, on

his cousin's breath, of prunes from the leftover ingot of his mother's "special" meatloaf—prunes were only a small part of what made it so

very special—which he had seen her wrap like a parcel in a sheet of wax paper and set on a plate in the Frigidaire. So she had known that her

nephew would be arriving tonight, had even been expecting him for supper, and had said nothing about it to Sammy.

Josef Kavalier settled back against the mattress, cleared his throat once, tucked his arms under his head, and then, as if he had been

unplugged, stopped moving. He neither tossed nor fidgeted nor even so much as flexed a toe. The Big Ben on the nightstand ticked loudly.

Josef's breathing thickened and slowed. Sammy was just wondering if anyone could possibly fall asleep with such abandon when his cousin

spoke.

"As soon as I can fetch some money, I will find a lodging, and leave the bed," he said. His accent was vaguely German, furrowed with an odd

Scots pleat.

"That would be nice," Sammy said. "You speak good English."

"Thank you."

"Where'd you learn it?"

"I prefer not to say."

"It's a secret?"

"It is a personal matter."

"Can you tell me what you were doing in California?" said Sammy. "Or is that confidential information too?"

"I was crossing over from Japan."

"Japan!" Sammy was sick with envy. He had never gone farther on his soda-straw legs than Buffalo, never undertaken any crossing more

treacherous than that of the flatulent poison-green ribbon that separated Brooklyn from Manhattan Island. In that narrow bed, in that

bedroom hardly wider than the bed itself, at the back of an apartment in a solidly lower-middle-class building on Ocean Avenue, with his

grandmother's snoring shaking the walls like a passing trolley, Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and

escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton

Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a

preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men. In his desk drawer lay - and had lain for some time—the first eleven pages of a

massive autobiographical novel to be entitled either (in the Perelmanian mode) Through Abe Glass, Darkly or (in the Dreiserian) American

Disillusionment (a subject of which he was still by and large ignorant). He had devoted an embarrassing number of hours of mute

concentration—brow furrowed, breath held—to the development of his brain's latent powers of telepathy and mind control. And he had

thrilled to that Iliad of medical heroics, The Microbe Hunters, ten times at least. But like most natives of Brooklyn, Sammy considered himself a

realist, and in general his escape plans centered around the attainment of fabulous sums of money.

From the age of six, he had sold seeds, candy bars, houseplants, cleaning fluids, metal polish, magazine subscriptions, unbreakable combs,

and shoelaces door-to-door. In a Zharkov's laboratory on the kitchen table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers, tandem

bottle openers, and heatless clothes irons. In more recent years, Sammy's commercial attention had been arrested by the field of professional

illustration. The great commercial illustrators and cartoonists— Rockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniff—were at their zenith, and there

was a general impression abroad that, at the drawing board, a man could not only make a good living but alter the very texture and tone of

the national mood. In Sammy's closet were stacked dozens of pads of coarse newsprint, filled with horses, Indians, football heroes, sentient

apes, Fokkers, nymphs, moon rockets, buckaroos, Saracens, tropic jungles, grizzlies, studies of the folds in women's clothing, the dents in

men's hats, the lights in human irises, clouds in the western sky. His grasp of perspective was tenuous, his knowledge of human anatomy

dubious, his line often sketchy—but he was an enterprising thief. He clipped favorite pages and panels out of newspapers and comic books

and pasted them into a fat notebook: a thousand different exemplary poses and styles. He had made extensive use of his bible of clip-Pings

in concocting a counterfeit Terry and the Pirates strip called South China Sea, drawn in faithful imitation of the great Caniff. He had knocked off

Raymond in something he called Pimpernel of the Planets and Chester Gould in a lockjawed G-man strip called Knuckle Duster Doyle. He had tried

swiping from Hogarth and Lee Falk, from George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Elzie Segar. He kept his sample strips in a fat cardboard

portfolio under his bed, waiting for an opportunity, for his main chance, to present itself.

"Japan!" he said again, reeling at the exotic Caniffian perfume that hung over the name. "What were you doing there?"

"Mostly I was suffering from the intestinal complaint," Josef Kavalier said. "And I suffer still. Particular in the night."

Sammy pondered this information for a moment, then moved a little nearer to the wall.

"Tell me, Samuel," Josef Kavalier said. "How many examples must I have in my portfolio?"

"Not Samuel. Sammy. No, call me Sam."

"Sam."

"What portfolio is that?"

"My portfolio of drawings. To show your employer. Sadly, I am obligated to leave behind all of my work in Prague, but I can very quickly do

much more that will be frightfully good."

"To show my boss?" Sammy said, sensing in his own confusion the persistent trace of his mother's handiwork. "What are you talking about?"

"Your mother suggested that you might to help me get a job in the company where you work. I am an artist, like you."

"An artist." Again Sammy envied his cousin. This was a statement he himself would never have been able to utter without lowering his

fraudulent gaze to his shoe tops. "My mother told you I was an artist?"

"A commercial artist, yes. For the Empire Novelties Incorporated Company."

For an instant Sammy cupped the tiny flame this secondhand compliment lit within him. Then he blew it out.

"She was talking through her hat," he said.

"Sorry?"

"She was full of it."

"Full of...?"

"I'm an inventory clerk. Sometimes they let me do pasteup for an ad. Or when they add a new item to the line, I get to do the illustration.

For that, they pay me two dollars per."

"Ah." Josef Kavalier let out another long breath. He still had not moved a muscle. Sammy couldn't decide if this apparent utter

motionlessness was the product of unbearable tension or a marvelous calm. "She wrote a letter to my father," Josef tried. "I remember she

said you create designs of superb new inventions and devices."

"Guess what?"

"She talked into her hat."

Sammy sighed, as if to suggest that this was unfortunately the case; a regretful sigh, long-suffering—and false. No doubt his mother, writing

to her brother in Prague, had believed that she was making an accurate report; it was Sammy who had been talking through his hat for the last

year, embroidering, not only for her benefit but to anyone who would listen, the menial nature of his position at Empire Novelties. Sammy

was briefly embarrassed, not so much at being caught out and having to confess his lowly status to his cousin, as at this evidence of a flaw in

the omniveillant maternal loupe. Then he wondered if his mother, far from being hoodwinked by his boasting, had not in fact been counting

on his having grossly exaggerated the degree of his influence over Sheldon Anapol, the owner of Empire Novelties. If he were to keep up

the pretense to which he had devoted so much wind and invention, then he was all but obliged to come home from work tomorrow night

clutching a job for Josef Kavalier in his grubby little stock clerk's fingers.

"I'll try," he said, and it was then that he felt the first spark, the tickling linger of possibility along his spine. For another long while, neither

of them spoke. This time, Sammy could feel that Josef was still awake, could almost hear the capillary trickle of doubt seeping in, weighing

the kid down. Sammy felt sorry for him. "Can I ask you a question?" he said.

"Ask me what?"

"What was with all the newspapers?"

"They are your New York newspapers. I bought them at the Capitol Greyhound Terminal."

"How many?"

For the first time, he noticed, Josef Kavalier twitched. "Eleven." Sammy quickly calculated on his fingers: there were eight metropolitan

dailies. Ten if you counted the Eagle and the Home News. "I'm missing one."

"Missing ... ?"

" Times, Herald-Tribune"—he touched two fingertips—" World-Telegram, Journal-American, Sun." He switched hands. "News, Post. Uh, Wall Street

Journal. And the Brooklyn Eagle. And the Home News in the Bronx." He dropped his hands to the mattress. "What's eleven?"

"The Woman's Daily Wearing."

" Women's Wear Daily?"

"I didn't know it was like that. For the garments." He laughed at himself, a series of brief, throat-clearing rasps. "I was looking for something

about Prague."

"Did you find anything? They must have had something in the Times."

"Something. A little. Nothing about the Jews."

"The Jews," said Sammy, beginning to understand. It wasn't the latest diplomatic maneuverings in London and Berlin, or the most recent bit

of brutal posturing by Adolf Hitler, that Josef was hoping to get news of. He was looking for an item detailing the condition of the Kavalier

family. "You know Jewish? Yiddish. You know it?"

"No."

"That's too bad. We got four Jewish newspapers in New York. They'd probably have something."

"What about German newspapers?"

"I don't know, but I'd imagine so. We certainly have a lot of Germans. They've been marching and having rallies all over town."

"I see."

"You're worried about your family?"

There was no reply.

"They couldn't get out?"

"No. Not yet." Sammy felt Josef give his head a sharp shake, as if to end the discussion. "I find I have smoked all my cigarettes," he went on,

in a neutral, phrase-book tone. "Perhaps you could—"

"You know, I smoked my last one before bed," said Sammy. "Hey, how'd you know I smoke? Do I smell?"

"Sammy," his mother called, "sleep."

Sammy sniffed himself. "Huh. I wonder if Ethel can smell it. She doesn't like it. I want to smoke, I've got to go out the window, there, onto

the fire escape."

"No smoking in bed," Josef said. "The more reason then for me to leave it."

"You don't have to tell me," Sammy said. "I'm dying to have a place of my own."

They lay there for a few minutes, longing for cigarettes and for all the things that this longing, in its perfect frustration, seemed to condense

and embody.

"Your ash holder," Josef said finally. "Ashtray."

"On the fire escape. It's a plant."

"It might be filled with the ... spacek? ... kippe? ... the stubbles?"

"The butts, you mean?"

"The butts."

"Yeah, I guess. Don't tell me you'd smoke—"

Without warning, in a kind of kinetic discharge of activity that seemed to be both the counterpart and the product of the state of perfect

indolence that had immediately preceded it, Josef rolled over and out of the bed. Sammy's eyes had by now adjusted to the darkness of his

room, which was always, at any rate, incomplete. A selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and

mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of trolleys and cars, the

fires of the borough's three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom across the river, which came slanting in through a

parting in the curtains. In this faint glow that was, to Sammy, the sickly steady light of insomnia itself, he could see his cousin going

methodically through the pockets of the clothes he had earlier hung so carefully from the back of the chair.

"The lamp?" Josef whispered.

Sammy shook his head. "The mother," he said.

Josef came back to the bed and sat down. "Then we must to work in the darkness."

He held between the first fingers of his left hand a pleated leaf of cigarette paper. Sammy understood. He sat up on one arm, and with the

other tugged the curtains apart, slowly so as not to produce the telltale creak. Then, gritting his teeth, he raised the sash of the window

beside his bed, letting in a chilly hum of traffic and a murmuring blast of cold October midnight. Sammy's "ashtray" was an oblong

terra-cotta pot, vaguely Mexican, filled with a sterile compound of potting soil and soot and the semipetrified skeleton, appropriately

enough, of a cineraria that had gone unsold during Sammy's houseplant days and thus predated his smoking habit, still a fairly recent

acquisition, by about three years. A dozen stubbed-out ends of Old Golds squirmed around the base of the withered plant, and Sammy

distastefully plucked a handful of them—they were slightly damp—as if gathering night crawlers, then handed them in to his cousin, who

traded him for a box of matches that evocatively encouraged him to eat at joe's crab on fisherman's wharf, in which only one match

remained.

Quickly, but not without a certain showiness, Josef split open seven butts, one-handed, and tipped the resultant mass of pulpy threads into

the wrinkled scrap of Zig Zag. After half a minute's work, he had manufactured them a smoke.

"Come," he said. He walked on his knees across the bed to the window, where Sammy joined him, and they wriggled through the sash and

thrust their heads and upper bodies out of the building. He handed the cigarette to Sammy and, in the precious flare of the match, as Sammy

nervously sheltered it from the wind, he saw that Josef had prestidigitated a perfect cylinder, as thick and straight and nearly as smooth as if

rolled by machine. Sammy took a long drag of True Virginia Flavor and then passed the magic cigarette back to its crafter, and they smoked it

in silence, until only a hot quarter inch remained. Then they climbed back inside, lowered the sash and the blinds, and lay back, bedmates,

reeking of smoke.

"You know," Sammy said, "we're, uh, we've all been really worried ... about Hitler ... and the way he's treating the Jews and ... and all that.

When they, when you were ... invaded.... My mom was ... we all..." He shook his own head, not sure what he was trying to say. "Here." He sat

up a little, and tugged one of the pillows out from under the back of his head.

Josef Kavalier lifted his own head from the mattress and stuffed the pillow beneath it. "Thank you," he said, then lay still once more.

Presently, his breathing grew steady and slowed to a congested rattle, leaving Sammy to ponder alone, as he did every night, the usual

caterpillar schemes. But in his imaginings, Sammy found that, for the first time in years, he was able to avail himself of the help of a

confederate.

2

IT was A caterpillar scheme—a dream of fabulous escape— that had ultimately carried Josef Kavalier across Asia and the Pacific to his

cousin's narrow bed on Ocean Avenue.

As soon as the German army occupied Prague, talk began, in certain quarters, of sending the city's famous Golem, Rabbi Loew's miraculous

automaton, into the safety of exile. The coming of the Nazis was attended by rumors of confiscation, expropriation, and plunder, in

particular of Jewish artifacts and sacred objects. The great fear of its secret keepers was that the Golem would be packed up and shipped off

to ornament some institut or private collection in Berlin or Munich. Already a pair of soft-spoken, keen-eyed young Germans carrying

notebooks had spent the better part of two days nosing around the Old-New Synagogue, in whose eaves legend had secreted the

long-slumbering champion of the ghetto. The two young Germans had claimed to be merely interested scholars without official ties to the

Reichsprotektorat, but this was disbelieved. Rumor had it that certain high-ranking party members in Berlin were avid students of theosophy

and the so-called occult. It seemed only a matter of time before the Golem was discovered, in its giant pine casket, in its dreamless sleep, and

seized.

There was, in the circle of its keepers, a certain amount of resistance to the idea of sending the Golem abroad, even for its own protection.

Some argued that since it had originally been formed of the mud of the River Moldau, it might suffer physical degradation if removed from

its native climate. Those of a historical bent—who, like historians everywhere, prided themselves on a levelheaded sense of

perspective—reasoned that the Golem had already survived many centuries of invasion, calamity, war, and pogrom without being exposed or

dislodged, and they counseled against rash reaction to another momentary downturn in the fortunes of Bohemia's Jews. There were even a

few in the circle who, when pressed, admitted that they did not want to send the Golem away because in their hearts they had not

surrendered the childish hope that the great enemy of Jew-haters and blood libelers might one day, in a moment of dire need, be revived to

fight again. In the end, however, the vote went in favor of removing the Golem to a safe place, preferably in a neutral nation that was out of

the way and not entirely devoid of Jews.

It was at this point that a member of the secret circle who had ties to Prague's stage-magic milieu put forward the name of Bernard

Kornblum as a man who might be relied upon to effect the Golem's escape.

Bernard Kornblum was an Ausbrecher, a performing illusionist who specialized in tricks with straitjackets and handcuffs—the sort of act made

famous by Harry Houdini. He had recently retired from the stage (he was seventy, at least) to settle in Prague, his adopted home, and await

the inescapable. But he came originally, his proponent said, from Vilna, the holy city of Jewish Europe, a place known, in spite of its

reputation for hardheadedness, to harbor men who took a cordial and sympathetic view of golems. Also, Lithuania was officially neutral, and

any ambitions Hitler might have had in its direction had reportedly been forsworn by Germany, in a secret protocol to the

Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Thus Kornblum was duly summoned, fetched from his inveterate seat at a poker table in the card room of the

Hofzinser Club to the secret location where the circle met—at Faleder Monuments, in a shed behind the headstone showroom. The nature

of the job was explained to Kornblum: the Golem must be spirited from its hiding place, suitably prepared for transit, and then conveyed

out of the country, without attracting notice, to sympathetic contacts in Vilna. Necessary official documents—bills of lading, customs

certificates—would be provided by influential members of the circle, or by their highly placed friends.

Bernard Kornblum agreed at once to take on the circle's commission. Although like many magicians a professional unbeliever who

reverenced only Nature, the Great Illusionist, Kornblum was at the same time a dutiful Jew. More important, he was bored and unhappy in

retirement and had in fact been considering a perhaps ill-advised return to the stage when the summons had come. Though he lived in

relative penury, he refused the generous fee the circle offered him, setting only two conditions: that he would divulge nothing of his plans

to anyone, and accept no unsolicited help or advice. Across the entire trick he would draw a curtain, as it were, lifting the veil only when the

feat had been pulled off.

This proviso struck the circle as not only charming, in a certain way, but sensible as well. The less any of them knew about the particulars,

the more easily they would be able, in the event of exposure, to disavow knowledge of the Golem's escape.

Kornblum left Faleder Monuments, which was not far from his own lodgings on Maisel Street, and started home, his mind already

beginning to bend and crimp the armature of a sturdy and elegant plan. For a brief period in Warsaw in the 1890s, Kornblum had been

forced into a life of crime, as a second-story man, and the prospect of prizing the Golem out of its current home, unsuspected, awoke

wicked old memories of gaslight and stolen gems. But when he stepped into the vestibule of his building, all of his plans changed. The

gardienne poked her head out and told him that a young man was waiting to see him in his room. A good-looking boy, she said, well spoken

and nicely dressed. Ordinarily, of course, she would have made the visitor wait on the stair, but she thought she had recognized him as a

former student of Herr Professor. Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of

anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance. Kornblum knew at once that his unexpected visitor must be

Josef Kavalier, and his heart sank. He had heard months ago that the boy was withdrawing from art school and emigrating to America;

something must have gone wrong.

Josef stood when his old teacher came in, clutching his hat to his chest. He was wearing a new-looking suit of fragrant Scottish tweed.

Kornblum could see from the flush in his cheeks and the excess of care he took to avoid knocking his head against the low sloping ceiling

that the boy was quite drunk. And he was hardly a boy anymore; he must be nearly nineteen.

"What is it, son?" said Kornblum. "Why are you here?"

"I'm not here," Josef replied. He was a pale, freckled boy, black-haired, with a nose at once large and squashed-looking, and wide-set blue eyes

half a candle too animated by sarcasm to pass for dreamy. "I'm on a train for Ostend." With an outsize gesture, Josef pretended to consult his

watch. Kornblum decided that he was not pretending at all. "I'm passing Frankfurt right about now, you see."

"I see."

"Yes. My family's entire fortune has been spent. Everyone who must be bribed has been bribed. Our bank accounts have been emptied. My

father's insurance policy has been sold. My mother's jewelry, her silver. The pictures. Most of the good furniture. Medical equipment.

Stocks. Bonds. All to ensure that I, the lucky one, can be sitting on this train, you see? In the smoking car." He blew a puff of imaginary

smoke. "Hurtling through Germany on my way to the good old U.S.A." He finished in twanging American. To Kornblum's ear, his accent

sounded quite good.

"My boy—"

"With all of my papers in order, you betcha."

Kornblum sighed. "Your exit visa?" he guessed. He had heard stories of many such last-minute denials in recent weeks.

"They said I was missing a stamp. One stamp. I told them this couldn't be possible. Everything was in order. I had a checklist, prepared for

me by the Underassistant Secretary for Exit Visas himself. I showed this checklist to them."

"But?"

"They said the requirements were changed this morning. They had a directive, a telegram from Eichmann himself. I was put off the train at

Eger. Ten kilometers from the border."

"Ah." Kornblum eased himself down onto the bed—he suffered from hemorrhoids—and patted the coverlet beside him. Josef sat down.

He buried his face in his hands. He let out a shuddering breath, his shoulders grew taut, cords stood out on the back of his neck. He was

struggling with the desire to cry.

"Look," the old magician said, hoping to forestall tears, "look now. I am quite certain you will be able to correct the predicament." The

Words of consolation came out more stiffly than Kornblum would have liked, but he was starting to feel a little apprehensive. It was well

past midnight, and the boy had an air of desperation, of impending explosion, that could not fail to move Kornblum, but also made him

nervous. Five years earlier, he had been involved in a misadventure with this reckless and unlucky boy, to his undiminished regret.

"Come," Kornblum said. He gave the boy a clumsy little pat on the shoulder. "Your parents are sure to be worrying. I'll walk you home."

This did it; with a sharp intake of breath, like a man leaping in terror from a burning deck into a frozen sea, Josef began to cry.

"I already left them once," he said, shaking his head. "I just can't do it to them again."

All morning, in the train carrying him west toward Ostend and America, Josef had been tormented by the bitter memory of his farewell. He

had neither wept, nor tolerated especially well, the weeping of his mother and grandfather, who had sung the role of Vitek in the 1926

premiere of Janacek's Vec Makropulos at Brno and tended, as is not uncommon among tenors, to wear his heart on his sleeve. But Josef, like

many boys of nineteen, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the

imagined toughness of that organ. His habit of youthful stoicism kept him cool in the lachrymose embrace of his grandfather that morning

at the Bahnhof. He had also felt disgracefully glad to be going. He was not happy to be leaving Prague so much as he was thrilled to be

headed for America, for the home of his father's sister and an American cousin named Sam, in unimaginable Brooklyn, with its nightspots

and tough guys and Warner Bros. verve. The same buoyant Cagneyesque callousness that kept him from marking the pain of leaving his

entire family, and the only home he knew, also allowed him to tell himself that it would be only a matter of time before they all joined him

in New York. Besides, the situation in Prague was undoubtedly as bad now as it was ever going to get. And so, at the station, Josef had kept

his head erect and his cheeks dry and puffed on a cigarette, resolutely affecting greater notice of the other travelers on the train platform, the

steam-shrouded locomotives, the German soldiers in their elegant coats, than of the members of his own family. He kissed his grandfather's

scratchy cheek, withstood his mother's long embrace, shook hands with his father and with his younger brother, Thomas, who handed Josef

an envelope. Josef stuck it in a coat pocket with a studied absentmindedness, ignoring the trembling of Thomas's lower lip as the envelope

vanished. Then, as Josef was climbing into the train, his father had taken hold of his son's coattails and pulled him back down to the

platform. He reached around from behind Josef to accost him with a sloppy hug. The shock of his father's tear-damp mustache against

Josef's cheek was mortifying. Josef had pulled away.

"See you in the funny papers," he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope of salvation.

As soon as the train pulled away from the platform, however, and Josef had settled back in the second-class compartment seat, he felt, like a

blow to the stomach, how beastly his conduct had been. He seemed at once to swell, to pulse and burn with shame, as if his entire body

were in rebellion against his behavior, as if shame could induce the same catastrophic reaction in him as a bee's sting. This very seat had cost,

with the addition of departure imposts and the recent "transfer excise," precisely what Josef's mother had been able to raise from the

pawning of an emerald brooch, her husband's gift to her on their tenth anniversary. Shortly before that triste anniversary, Frau Dr. Kavalier

had miscarried in her fourth month of pregnancy, and abruptly the image of this unborn sibling—it would have been a sister—arose in

Josef's mind, a curl of glinting vapor, and fixed him with a reproachful emerald gaze. When the emigration officers came on at Eger to take

him off the train—his name was one of several on their list—they found him between two cars, snot-nosed, bawling into the crook of his

elbow.

The shame of Josef's departure, however, was nothing compared to the unbearable ignominy of his return. On the journey back to Prague,

crowded now into a third-class car of an airless local, with a group of strapping, loud Sudeten farm families headed to the capital for some

kind of religious rally, he spent the first hour relishing a sense of just Punishment for his hard-heartedness, his ingratitude, for having

abandoned his family at all. But as the train passed through Kladno, the inevitable homecoming began to loom. Far from offering him the

opportunity to make up for his unpardonable behavior, it seemed to him, his surprise return would be an occasion only to bring his family

further sorrow. For the six months since the start of occupation, the focus of the Kavaliers' efforts, of their collective existence, had been

the work of sending Josef to America. This effort had, in fact, come to represent a necessary counterbalance to the daily trial of mere

coping, a hopeful inoculation, against its wasting effects. Once the Kavaliers had determined that Josef, having been born during a brief

family sojourn in the Ukraine in 1920, was, by a quirk of politics, eligible to emigrate to the United States, the elaborate and costly process of

getting him there had restored a measure of order and meaning to their lives. How it would crush them to see him turn up on their

doorstep not eleven hours after he had left! No, he thought, he could not possibly disappoint them by coming home. When the train at last

crawled back into the Prague station early that evening, Josef remained in his seat, unable to move, until a passing conductor suggested, not

unkindly, that the young gentleman had better get off.

Josef wandered into the station bar, swallowed a liter and a half of beer, and promptly fell asleep in a booth at the back. Alter an indefinite

period, a waiter came over to shake him, and Josef woke up, drunk. He wrestled his valise out into the streets of the city that he had, only

that morning, seriously imagined he might never see again. He drifted along Jerusalem Street, into the Josefov, and somehow, almost

inevitably, his steps led him to Maisel Street, to the flat of his old teacher. He could not dash the hopes of his family by letting them see his

face again; not, at any rate, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. If Bernard Kornblum could not assist him in escaping, at least he would be able

to help him to hide. Kornblum handed Josef a cigarette and lit it for him. Then he went over to his armchair, settled carefully into it, and lit

another for himself. Neither Josef Kavalier nor the Golem's keepers were the first to have approached Kornblum in the desperate

expectation that his expertise with jail cells, straitjackets, and iron chests might somehow be extended to unlocking the borders of sovereign

nations. Until this night, he had turned all such inquiries aside as not merely impractical, or beyond his expertise, but extreme and

premature. Now, however, sitting in his chair, watching his former student shuffle helplessly through the flimsy scraps of triplicate paper,

train tickets, and stamped immigration cards in his travel wallet, Kornblum's keen ears detected the sound, unmistakable to him, of the

tumblers of a great iron lock clicking into place. The Emigration Office, under the directorship of Adolf Eichmann, had passed from mere

cynical extortion to outright theft, taking applicants for everything they had in return for nothing at all. Britain and America had all but

closed their doors—it was only through the persistence of an American aunt and the geographic fluke of his birth in the Soviet Union that

Josef had been able to obtain a U.S. entry visa. Meanwhile, here in Prague, not even a useless old lump of river mud was safe from the

predatory snout of the invader.

"I can get you to Vilna, in Lithuania," Kornblum said at last. "From there you will have to find your own way. Memel is in German hands

now, but perhaps you can find passage from Priekule."

"Lithuania?"

"I am afraid so."

After a moment the boy nodded, and shrugged, and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray marked with the kreuzer-and-spade symbol of the

Hofzinser Club.

" 'Forget about what you are escaping from,' " he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum's. " 'Reserve your anxiety for what you are

escaping to.'"

3

Josef Kavalier's determination to storm the exclusive Hofzinser Club had reached its height one day back in 1935, over breakfast,

when he choked on a mouthful of omelette with apricot preserves. It was one of those rare mornings at the sprawling Kavalier flat, in a lacy

secession-style building off the Graben, when everyone sat down to eat breakfast together. The Doctors Kavalier maintained exacting

professional schedules and, like many busy parents, were inclined at once to neglect and indulge their children. Herr Dr. Emil Kavalier was

the author of Grundsatzen der Endikronologie, a standard text, and the identifier of Kavalier's acromegaly. Frau Dr. Anna Kavalier was a

neurologist by training who had been analyzed by Alfred Adler and had since gone on to treat, on her paisley divan, the cream of cathected

young Prague. That morning, when Josef suddenly hunched forward, gagging, eyes watering, scrabbling for his napkin, the father reached

out from behind his Tageblatt and idly pounded Josef on the back. His mother, without looking up from the latest number of Monatsschrift fur

Neurologie und Psychiatrie, reminded Josef, for the ten thousandth time, not to bolt his food. Only little Thomas noticed, in the instant before

Josef brought the napkin to his lips, the glint of something foreign in his brother's mouth. He got up from the table and went around to

Josef's chair. He stared at his brother's jaws as they slowly worked over the offending bit of omelette. Josef ignored him and tipped another

forkful into his mouth. "What is it?" Thomas said. "What is what?" said Josef. He chewed with care, as if bothered by a sore tooth. "Go away."

Presently Miss Horne, Thomas's governess, looked up from her day-old copy of the Times of London and studied the situation of the

brothers.

"Have you lost a filling, Josef?"

"He has something in his mouth," said Thomas. "It's shiny."

"What do you have in your mouth, young man?" said the boys' mother, marking her place with a butter knife.

Josef stuck two fingers between his right cheek and upper right gum and pulled out a flat strip of metal, notched at one end: a tiny fork, no

longer than Thomas's pinkie.

"What is that?" his mother asked him, looking as if she was going to be ill.

Josef shrugged. "A torque wrench," he said.

"What else?" said his father to his mother, with the unsubtle sarcasm that was itself a kind of subtlety, ensuring that he never appeared caught

out by the frequently surprising behavior of his children. "Of course it's a torque wrench."

"Herr Kornblum said I should get used to it," Josef explained. "He said that when Houdini died, he was found to have worn away two

sizable pockets in his cheeks."

Herr Dr. Kavalier returned to his Tageblatt. "An admirable aspiration," he said.

Josef had become interested in stage magic right around the time his hands had grown large enough to handle a deck of playing cards.

Prague had a rich tradition of illusionists and sleight-of-hand artists, and it was not difficult for a boy with preoccupied and indulgent

parents to find competent instruction. He had studied for a year with a Czech named Bozic who called himself Rango and specialized in

card and coin manipulation, mentalism, and the picking of pockets. He could also cut a fly in half with a thrown three of diamonds. Soon

Josef had learned the Rain of Silver, the Dissolving Kreutzer, the Count Erno pass, and rudiments of the Dead Grandfather, but when it was

brought to the attention of Josef's parents that Rango had once been jailed for replacing the jewelry and money of his audiences with paste

and blank Paper, the boy was duly removed from his tutelage.

The phantom aces and queens, showers of silver korunas, and purloined wristwatches that had been Rango's stock in trade were fine for

mere amusement. And for Josef, the long hours spent standing in front of the lavatory mirror, practicing the paintings, passes, slips, and

sleights that made it possible to seem to hurl a coin into the right ear, through the brainpan, and out the left ear of a chum or relative, or to

pop the knave of hearts into the handkerchief of a pretty girl, required a masturbatory intensity of concentration that became almost more

pleasurable for him than the trick itself. But then a patient had referred his father to Bernard Kornblum, and everything changed. Under

Kornblum's tutelage, Josef began to learn the rigorous trade of the Ausbrecher from the lips of one of its masters. At the age of fourteen, he

had decided to consecrate himself to a life of timely escape.

Kornblum was an "eastern" Jew, bone-thin, with a bushy red beard he tied up in a black silk net before every performance. "It distracts

them," he said, meaning his audiences, whom he viewed with the veteran performer's admixture of wonder and disdain. Since he worked

with a minimum of patter, finding other means of distracting spectators was always an important consideration. "If I could work without the

pants on," he said, "I would go naked." His forehead was immense, his fingers long and dexterous but inelegant with knobby joints; his

cheeks, even on May mornings, looked rubbed and peeling, as though chafed by polar winds. Kornblum was among the few eastern Jews

whom Josef had ever encountered. There were Jewish refugees from Poland and Russia in his parents' circle, but these were polished,

"Europeanized" doctors and musicians from large cities who spoke French and German. Kornblum, whose German was awkward and

Czech nonexistent, had been born in a shtetl outside of Vilna and had spent most of his life wandering the provinces of imperial Russia,

playing the odeons, barns, and market squares of a thousand small towns and villages. He wore suits of an outdated, pigeon-breasted,

Valentino cut. Because his diet consisted in large part of tinned fish—anchovies, smelts, sardines, tunny—his breath often carried a rank

marine tang. Although a staunch atheist, he nonetheless kept kosher, avoided work on Saturday, and kept a steel engraving of the Temple

Mount on the east wall of his room. Until recently, Josef, then fourteen, had given very little thought to the question of his own Jewishness.

He believed—it was enshrined in the Czech constitution—that Jews were merely one of the numerous ethnic minorities making up the

young nation of which Josef was proud to be a son. The coming of Kornblum, with his Baltic smell, his shopworn good manners, his

Yiddish, made a strong impression on Josef.

Twice a week that spring and summer and well into the autumn, Josef went to Kornblum's room on the top floor of a sagging house on

Maisel Street, in the Josefov, to be chained to the radiator or tied hand and foot with long coils of thick hempen rope. Kornblum did not at

first give him the slightest guidance on how to escape from these constraints.

"You will pay attention," he said, on the afternoon of Josef's first lesson, as he shackled Josef to a bentwood chair. "I assure you of this. Also

you will get used to the feeling of the chain. The chain is your silk pajamas now. It is your mother's loving arms."

Apart from this chair, an iron bedstead, a wardrobe, and the picture of Jerusalem on the east wall, next to the lone window, the room was

almost bare. The only beautiful object was a Chinese trunk carved from some kind of tropical wood, as red as raw liver, with thick brass

hinges, and a pair of fanciful brass locks in the form of stylized peacocks. The locks opened by a system of tiny levers and springs concealed

in the jade eyespots of each peacock's seven tail feathers. The magician pushed the fourteen jade buttons in a certain order that seemed to

change each time he went to open the chest.

For the first few sessions, Kornblum merely showed Josef different kinds of locks that he took out, one by one, from the chest; locks used

to secure manacles, mailboxes, and ladies' diaries; warded and pin-tumbler door locks; sturdy padlocks; and combination locks taken from

strongboxes and safes. Wordlessly, he would take each of the locks apart, using a screwdriver, then reassemble them. Toward the end of the

hour, still without freeing Josef, he talked about the rudiments of breath control. At last, in the final minutes of the lesson, he would

unchain the boy, only to stuff him into a plain pine box. He would sit on the closed lid, drinking tea and glancing at his pocket watch, until

the lesson was over.

"If you are a claustrophobe," Kornblum explained, "we must detect this now, and not when you lie in chains at the bottom of the Moldau,

strapped inside a postman's bag, with all your family and neighbors waiting for you to swim out."

At the start of the second month, he introduced the pick and the torque wrench, and set about applying these wonderful tools to each of the

various sample locks he kept in the chest. His touch was deft and, though he was well past sixty, his hands steady. He would pick the locks,

and then, for Josef's further edification, take them apart and pick them again with the works exposed. The locks, whether new or antique,

English, German, Chinese, or American, did not resist his tinkerings for more than a few seconds. He had, in addition, amassed a small

library of thick, dusty volumes, many illegal or banned, some of them imprinted with the seal of the Bolsheviks' dreaded Cheka, in which

were listed, in infinite columns of minuscule type, the combination formulae, by lot number, for thousands of the combination locks

manufactured in Europe since 1900.

For weeks, Josef pleaded with Kornblum to be allowed to handle a pick himself. Contrary to instructions, he had been working over the

locks at home with a hat pin and a spoke from a bicycle wheel, with occasional success.

"Very well," said Kornblum at last. Handing Josef his pick and a torque wrench, he led him to the door of his room, in which he had

himself installed a fine new Ratsel seven-pin lock. Then he unknotted his necktie and used it to blindfold Josef. "To see inside the lock, you

don't use your eyes."

Josef knelt down in darkness and felt for the brass-plated knob. The door was cold against his cheek. When at last Kornblum removed the

blindfold and motioned for Josef to climb into the coffin, Josef had picked the Ratsel three times, the last in under ten minutes.

On the day before Josef caused a disturbance at the breakfast table, after months of nauseous breathing drills that made his head tingle and

of practice that left the joints of his fingers aching, he had walked into Kornblum's room and held out his wrists, as usual, to be cuffed and

bound. Kornblum startled him with a rare smile. He handed Josef a small black leather pouch. Unrolling it, Josef found the tiny torque

wrench and a set of steel picks, some no longer than the wrench, some twice as long with smooth wooden handles. None was thicker than a

broom straw. Their tips had been cut and bent into all manner of cunning moons, diamonds, and tildes.

"I made these," said Kornblum. "They will be reliable."

"For me? You made these for me?"

"This is what we will now determine," Kornblum said. He pointed to the bed, where he had laid out a pair of brand-new German handcuffs

and his best American Yale locks. "Chain me to the chair."

Kornblum allowed himself to be bound to the legs of his chair with a length of heavy chain; other chains secured the chair to the radiator,

and the radiator to his neck. His hands were also cuffed—in front of his body, so that he could smoke. Without a word of advice or

complaint from Kornblum, Josef got the handcuffs and all but one of the locks off in the first hour. But the last lock, a one-pound 1927

Yale Dreadnought, with sixteen pins and drivers, frustrated his efforts. Josef sweated and cursed under his breath, in Czech, so as not to

offend his master. Kornblum lit another Sobranie.

"The pins have voices," he reminded Josef at last. "The pick is a tiny telephone wire. The tips of your fingers have ears."

Josef took a deep breath, slid the pick that was tipped with a small squiggle into the plug of the lock, and again applied the wrench. Quickly,

he stroked the tip of the pick back and forth across the pins, feeling each one give in its turn, gauging the resistance of the drivers and

springs. Each lock had its own point of equilibrium between torque and friction; if you turned too hard, the plug would jam; too softly, and

the pins wouldn't catch properly. With sixteen-pin columns, finding the point of equilibrium was entirely a matter of intuition and style.

Josef closed his eyes. He heard the wire of the pick humming in his fingertips.

With a satisfying metallic gurgle, the lock sprang open. Kornblum nodded, stood up, stretched.

"You may keep the tools," he said.

However slow the progress of the lessons with Herr Kornblum had seemed to Josef, it had come ten times slower for Thomas Kavalier.

The endless tinkering with locks and knots that Thomas had covertly witnessed, night after night, in the faint lamplight of the bedroom the

boys shared, was far less interesting to him than Josef's interest in coin tricks and card magic had been.

Thomas Masaryk Kavalier was an animated gnome of a boy with a thick black thatch of hair. When he was a very young boy, the musical

chromosome of his mother's family had made itself plain in him. At three, he regaled dinner guests with long, stormy arias, sung in a

complicated gibberish Italian. During a family holiday at Lugano, when he was eight, he was discovered to have picked up enough actual

Italian from his perusal of favorite libretti to be able to converse with hotel waiters. Constantly called upon to perform in his brother's

productions, pose for his sketches, and vouch for his lies, he had developed a theatrical flair. In a ruled notebook, he had recently written

the first lines of the libretto for an opera, Houdini, set in fabulous Chicago. He was hampered in this project by the fact that he had never

seen an escape artist perform. In his imagination, Houdini's deeds were far grander than anything even the former Mr. Erich Weiss himself

could have conceived: leaps in suits of armor from flaming airplanes over Africa, and escapes from hollow balls launched into sharks' dens

by undersea cannons. The sudden entrance of Josef, at breakfast that morning, into territory once actually occupied by the great Houdini,

marked a great day in Thomas's childhood.

After their parents had left—the mother for her office on Narodny; the father to catch a train for Brno, where he had been called in to

consult on the mayor's giantess daughter—Thomas would not leave Josef alone about Houdini and his cheeks.

"Could he have fit a two-koruna piece?" he wanted to know. He lay on his bed, on his belly, watching as Josef returned the torque wrench to

its special wallet.

"Yes, but it's hard to imagine why he might have wanted to." "What about a box of matches?" "I suppose so."

"How would they have stayed dry?" "Perhaps he could have wrapped them in oilcloth." Thomas probed his cheek with the tip of his tongue.

He shuddered. "What other things does Herr Kornblum want you to put in there?" "I'm learning to be an escape artist, not a valise," Josef

said irritably.

"Are you going to get to do a real escape now?"

"I'm closer today than I was yesterday."

"And then you'll be able to join the Hofzinser Club?"

"We'll see."

"What are the requirements?"

"You just have to be invited."

"Do you have to have cheated death?"

Josef rolled his eyes, sorry he had ever told Thomas about the Hofzinser. It was a private men's club, housed in a former inn on one of the

Stare Mesto's most crooked and crepuscular streets, which combined the functions of canteen, benevolent society, craft guild, and rehearsal

hall for the performing magicians of Bohemia. Herr Kornblum took his supper there nearly every night. It was apparent to Josef that the

club was not only the sole source of companionship and talk for his taciturn teacher but also a veritable Hall of Wonders, a living repository

for the accumulated lore of centuries of sleight and illusion in a city that had produced some of history's greatest charlatans, conjurors, and

fakirs. Josef badly wanted to be invited to join. This desire had, in fact, become the secret focus of every spare thought (a role soon

afterward to be usurped by the governess, Miss Dorothea Horne). Part of the reason he was so irritated by Thomas's persistent questioning

was that his little brother had guessed at the constant preeminence of the Hofzinser Club in Josef's thoughts. Thomas's own mind was filled

with Byzantine, houris-and-candied-figs visions of men in cutaway coats and pasha pants walking around inside the beetle-browed,

half-timbered hotel on Stupartska with their upper torsos separated from their lower, summoning leopards and lyrebirds out of the air.

"I'm sure when the time comes, I will receive my invitation."

"When you're twenty-one?"

"Perhaps."

"But if you did something to show them ..."

This echoed the secret trend of Josef's own thoughts. He swung himself around on his bed, leaned forward, and looked at Thomas. "Such

as?"

"If you showed them how you can get out of chains, and open locks, and hold your breath, and untie ropes...."

"All that's easy stuff. A fellow can learn such tricks in prison."

"Well, if you did something really grand, then ... something to amaze them."

"An escape."

"We could throw you out of an airplane tied to a chair, with the parachute tied to another chair, falling through the air. Like this." Thomas

scrambled up from his bed and went over to his small desk, took out the blue notebook in which he was composing Houdini, and opened it

to a back page, where he had sketched the scene. Here was Houdini in a dinner jacket, hurtling from a crooked airplane in company with a

parachute, two chairs, a table, and a tea set, all trailing scrawls of velocity. The magician had a smile on his face as he poured tea for the

parachute. He seemed to think he had all the time in the world.

"This is idiotic," Josef said. "What do I know about parachutes? Who's going to let me jump out of an airplane?"

Thomas blushed. "How childish of me," he said.

"Never mind," said Josef. He stood up. "Weren't you playing with Papa's old things just now, his medical-school things?"

"Right here," Thomas said. He threw himself on the floor and rolled under the bed. A moment later, a small wooden crate emerged, covered

in dust-furred spider silk, its lid hinged on crooked loops of wire.

Josef knelt and lifted the lid, revealing odd bits of apparatus and scientific supplies that had survived their father's medical education. Adrift

in a surf of ancient excelsior were a broken Erlenmeyer flask, a glass pear-shaped tube with a penny-head stopper, a pair of crucible tongs,

the leather-clad box that contained the remains of a portable Zeiss microscope (long since rendered inoperable by Josef, who had once

attempted to use it to get a better look at Pola Negri's loins in a blurry bathing photo torn from a newspaper), and a few odd items.

"Thomas?"

"It's nice under here. I'm not a claustrophobe. I could stay under here for weeks."

"Wasn't there ..." Josef dug deep into the rustling pile of shavings. "Didn't we used to have—"

"What?" Thomas slid out from under the bed.

Josef held up a long, glinting glass wand and brandished it as Kornblum himself might have done. "A thermometer," he said.

"What for? Whose temperature are you going to take?"

"The river's," Josef said.

At four o'clock on the morning of Friday, September 27, 1935, the temperature of the water of the River Moldau, black as a church bell and

ringing against the stone embankment at the north end of Kampa Island, stood at 22.2° on the Celsius scale. The night was moonless, and a

fog lay over the river like an arras drawn across by a conjuror's hand. A sharp wind rattled the seedpods in the bare limbs of the island's

acacias. The Kavalier brothers had come prepared for cold weather. Josef had dressed them in wool from head to toe, with two pairs of

socks each. In the pack he wore on his back, he carried a piece of rope, a strand of chain, the thermometer, half a veal sausage, a padlock, and

a change of clothes with two extra pairs of socks for himself. He also carried a portable oil brazier, borrowed from a school friend whose

family went in for alpinism. Although he did not plan to spend much time in the water—no longer, he calculated, than a minute and

twenty-seven seconds—he had been practicing in a bathtub filled with cold water, and he knew that, even in the steam-heated comfort of

the bathroom at home, it took several minutes to rid oneself of the chill.

In all his life, Thomas Kavalier had never been up so early. He had never seen the streets of Prague so empty, the housefronts so sunken in

gloom, like a row of lanterns with the wicks snuffed. The corners he knew, the shops, the carved lions on a balustrade he passed daily on his

way to school, looked strange and momentous. Light spread in a feeble vapor from the streetlamps, and the corners were flooded in

shadow. He kept imagining that he would turn around and see their father chasing after them in his dressing gown and slippers. Josef walked

quickly, and Thomas had to hurry to keep up with him. Cold air burned his cheeks. They stopped several times, for reasons that were never

clear to Thomas, to lurk in a doorway, or shelter behind the swelling fender of a parked Skoda. They passed the open side door of a bakery,

and Thomas was briefly overwhelmed by whiteness: a tiled white wall, a pale man dressed all in white, a cloud of flour roiling over a

shining white mountain of dough. To Thomas's astonishment, there were all manner of people about at this hour, tradesmen, cabdrivers,

two drunken men singing, even a woman crossing the Charles Bridge in a long black coat, smoking and muttering to herself. And

policemen. They were obliged to sneak past two en route to Kampa. Thomas was a contentedly law-abiding child, with fond feelings toward

policemen. He was also afraid of them. His notion of prisons and jails had been keenly influenced by reading Dumas, and he had not the

slightest doubt that little boys would, without compunction, be interred in them.

He began to be sorry to have come along. He wished he had never come up with the idea of having Josef prove his mettle to the members

of the Hofzinser Club. It was not that he doubted his brother's ability. This never would have occurred to him. He was just afraid: of the

night, the shadows, and the darkness, of policemen, his father's temper, spiders, robbers, drunks, ladies in overcoats, and especially, this

morning, of the river, darker than anything else in Prague.

Josef, for his part, was afraid only of being stopped. Not caught; there could be nothing illegal, he reasoned, about tying yourself up and

then trying to swim out of a laundry bag. He didn't imagine the police or his parents would look favorably on the idea—he supposed he

might even be prosecuted for swimming in the river out of season—but he was not afraid of punishment. He just did not want anything to

prevent him from practicing his escape. He was on a tight schedule. Yesterday he had mailed an invitation to the president of the Hofzinser

Club:

The honored members of the Hofzinser Club

are cordially invited

to witness another astounding feat of autoliberation

by that prodigy of escapistry

CAVALIERI

at Charles Bridge

Sunday, 29 September 1935

at half past four in the morning.

He was pleased with the wording, but it left him only two more days to get ready. For the past two weeks, he had been picking locks with

his hands immersed in a sinkful of cold water, and wriggling free of his ropes and loosing his chains in the bathtub. Tonight he would try

the "feat of autoliberation" from the shore of Kampa. Then, two days later, if all went well, he would have Thomas push him over the railing

of the Charles Bridge. He had absolutely no doubt that he would be able to pull off the trick. Holding his breath for a minute and a half

posed no difficulty for him. Thanks to Kornblum's training, he could go for nearly twice that time without drawing a breath. Twenty-two

degrees Celsius was colder than the water in the pipes at home, but again, he was not planning to stay in it for long. A razor blade, for cutting

the laundry sack, was safely concealed between layers of the sole of his left shoe, and Kornblum's tension wrench and a miniature pick Josef

had made from the wire bristle of a street sweeper's push broom were housed so comfortably in his cheeks that he was barely conscious of

their presence. Such considerations as the impact of his head on the water or on one of the stone piers of the bridge, his paralyzing stage

fright in front of that eminent audience, or helplessly sinking did not intrude upon his idee fixe.

"I'm ready," he said, handing the thermometer to his little brother. It was an icicle in Thomas's hand. "Let's get me into the bag."

He picked up the laundry sack they had pilfered from their housekeeper's closet, held it open, and stepped into the wide mouth of the bag

as though into a pair of trousers. Then he took the length of chain Thomas offered him and wrapped it between and around his ankles

several times before linking the ends with a heavy Ratsel he had bought from an ironmonger. Next he held out his wrists to Thomas, who, as

he had been instructed, bound them together with the rope and tied it tightly in a hitch and a pair of square knots. Josef crouched, and

Thomas cinched the sack over his head. "On Sunday we'll have you put chains and locks on the cord," Josef said, his voice muffled in a way

that disturbed his brother.

"But then how will you get out?" The boy's hands trembled. He pulled his woolen gloves back on.

"They'll be just for effect. I'm not coming out that way." The bag suddenly ballooned, and Thomas took a step backward. Inside the sack,

Josef was bent forward, reaching out with both arms extended, seeking the ground. The bag toppled over. "Oh!"

"What happened?" "I'm fine. Roll me into the water."

Thomas looked at the misshapen bundle at his feet. It looked too small to contain his brother. "No," he said, to his surprise. "Thomas, please.

You're my assistant." "No, I'm not. I'm not even in the invitation."

"I'm sorry about that," said Josef. "I forgot." He waited. "Thomas, I sincerely and wholeheartedly apologize for my thoughtlessness." "All

right." "Now roll me."

"I'm afraid." Thomas knelt down and started to uncinch the sack. He knew he was betraying his brother's trust and the spirit of the mission,

and it pained him to do so, but it couldn't be helped. "You have to come out of there this minute."

"I'll be fine," said Josef. "Thomas." Lying on his back, peering out through the suddenly reopened mouth of the sack, Josef shook his head.

"You're being ridiculous. Come on, tie it back up. What about the Hofzinser Club, eh? Don't you want me to take you to dinner there?"

"But..." "But what?" "The sack is too small." "What?"

"It's so dark out... it's too dark out, Josef?'

"Thomas, what are you talking about? Come on, Tommy Boy," he added in English. This was the name Miss Horne called him. "Dinner at the

Hofzinser Club. Belly dancers. Turkish delight. All alone, without Mother and Father." "Yes, but—" "Do it."

"Josef! Is your mouth bleeding?" "God damn it, Thomas, tie up the goddamned sack!" Thomas recoiled. Quickly, he bent and cinched the

sack, and rolled his brother into the river. The splash startled him, and he burst into tears. A wide oval of ripples spread across the surface of

the water. For

a frantic instant, Thomas paced back and forth on the embankment, still hearing the explosion of water. The cuffs of his trousers were

drenched and cold water seeped in around the tongues of his shoes. He had thrown his own brother into the river, drowned him like a

litter of kittens.

The next thing Thomas knew, he was on the Charles Bridge, running past the bridge's statues, headed for home, for the police station, for

the jail cell into which he would now gladly have thrown himself. But as he was passing Saint Christopher, he thought he heard something.

He darted to the bridge parapet and peered over. He could just make out the alpinist's rucksack on the embankment, the faint glow of the

brazier. The surface of the river was unbroken.

Thomas ran back to the stairway that led back down to the island. As he passed the round bollard at the stair head, the slap of hard marble

against his palm seemed to exhort him to brave the black water. He scrambled down the stone stairs two at a time, tore across the empty

square, slid down the embankment, and fell headlong into the Moldau.

"Josef!" he called, just before his mouth filled with water.

All this while Josef, blind, trussed, and stupid with cold, was madly holding his breath as, one by one, the elements of his trick went awry.

When he had held out his hands to Thomas, he had crossed his wrists at the bony knobs, flattening their soft inner sides against each other

after he was tied, but the rope seemed to have contracted in the water, consuming this half inch of wriggling room, and in a panic that he

had never thought possible, he felt almost a full minute slip away before he could free his hands. This triumph calmed him somewhat. He

fished the wrench and pick from his mouth and, holding them carefully, reached down through the darkness for the chain around his legs.

Kornblum had warned him against the tight grip of the amateur picklock, but he was shocked when the tension wrench twisted like the

stem of a top and spun out of his fingers. He wasted fifteen seconds groping after it and then required another twenty or thirty to slip the

pick into the lock. His fingertips were deafened by the cold, and it was only by some random vibration in the wire that he managed to hit

the pins, set the drivers, and twist the plug of the lock. This same numbness served him much better when, reaching for the razor in his

shoe, he sliced open the tip of his right index finger. Though he could see nothing, he could taste a thread of blood in that dark humming

stuff around him.

Three and a half minutes after he had tumbled into the river, kicking his feet in their heavy shoes and two pairs of socks, he burst to the

surface. Only Kornblum's breathing exercises and a miracle of habit had kept him from exhaling every last atom of oxygen in his lungs in

the instant that he hit the water. Gasping now, he clambered up the embankment and crawled on his hands and knees toward the hissing

brazier. The smell of coal oil was like the odor of hot bread, of warm summer pavement. He sucked up deep barrelfuls of air. The world

seemed to pour in through his lungs: spidery trees, fog, the flickering lamps strung along the bridge, a light burning in Kepler's old tower in

the Klementinum. Abruptly, he was sick, and spat up something bitter and shameful and hot. He wiped his lips with the sleeve of his wet

wool shirt, and felt a little better. Then he realized that his brother had disappeared. Shivering, he stood up, his clothes hanging heavy as

chain mail, and saw Thomas in the shadow of the bridge, beneath the carved figure of Bruncvik, chopping clumsily at the water, paddling,

gasping, drowning.

Josef went back in. The water was as cold as before, but he did not seem to feel it. As he swam, he felt something fingering him, plucking at

his legs, trying to snatch him under. It was only the earth's gravity, or the swift Moldau current, but at the time, Josef imagined that he was

being pawed at by the same foul stuff he had spat onto the sand.

When Thomas saw Josef splashing toward him, he promptly burst into tears.

"Keep crying," Josef said, reasoning that breathing was the essential thing and that weeping was in part a kind of respiration. "That's good."

Josef got an arm around his brother's waist, then tried to drag them, Thomas and his ponderous self, back toward the Kampa embankment.

As they splashed and wrestled in the middle of the river, they kept talking, though neither could remember later what the subject of the

discussion had been. Whatever it was, it struck them both afterward as having been something calm and leisurely, like the murmurs between

them that sometimes preceded sleep. At a certain point, Josef realized that his limbs felt warm now, even hot, and that he was drowning. His

last conscious perception was of Bernard Kornblum cutting through the water toward them, his bushy beard tied up in a hair net Josef came

to an hour later in his bed at home. It took two more days for Thomas to revive; for most of that time, no one, least of all his doctor parents,

expected that he would. He was never quite the same afterward. He could not bear cold weather, and he suffered from a lifelong snuffle.

Also, perhaps because of damage to his ears, he lost his taste for music; the libretto for Houdini was abandoned.

The magic lessons were broken off—at the request of Bernard Kornblum. Throughout the difficult weeks that followed the escapade,

Kornblum was a model of correctness and concern, bringing toys and games for Thomas, interceding on Josef's behalf with the Kavaliers,

shouldering all the blame himself. The Doctors Kavalier believed their sons when they said that Kornblum had had nothing to do with the

incident, and since he had saved the boys from drowning, they were more than willing to forgive. Josef was so penitent and chastened that

they even would have been willing to allow his continued studies with the impoverished old magician, who could certainly not afford to

lose a pupil. But Kornblum told them that his time with Josef had come to an end. He had never had so naturally gifted a student, but his

own discipline— which was really an escape artist's sole possession—had not been passed along. He didn't tell them what he now privately

believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies

against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible

chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.

Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. "Never worry

about what you are escaping from," he said. "Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to."

Two weeks after Josef's disaster, with Thomas recovered, Kornblum called at the flat off the Graben to escort the Kavalier brothers to

dinner at the Hofzinser Club. It proved to be a quite ordinary place, with a cramped, dimly lit dining room that smelled of liver and onions.

There was a small library filled with moldering volumes on deception and forgery. In the lounge, an electric fire cast a negligible glow over

scattered armchairs covered in worn velour and a few potted palms and dusty rubber trees. An old waiter named Max made some ancient

hard candies fall out of his handkerchief into Thomas's lap. They tasted of burned coffee. The magicians, for their part, barely glanced up

from their chessboards and silent hands of bridge. Where the knights and rooks were missing, they used spent rifle cartridges and stacks of

prewar kreuzers; their playing cards were devastated by years of crimps, breaks, and palmings at the hands of bygone cardsharps. Since

neither Kornblum nor Josef possessed any conversational skills, it fell upon Thomas to carry the burden of talk at the table, which he

dutifully did until one of the members, an old necromancer dining alone at the next table, told him to shut up. At nine o'clock, as promised,

Kornblum brought the boys home.

4

The pair of young German professors spelunking with their electric torches in the rafters of the Old-New Synagogue, or Altneuschul, had,

as it happened, gone away disappointed; for the attic under the stair-stepped gables of the old Gothic synagogue was a cenotaph. Around the

turn of the last century, Prague's city fathers had determined to "sanitize" the ancient ghetto. During a moment when the fate of the

Altneuschul had appeared uncertain, the members of the secret circle had arranged for their charge to be moved from its ancient berth,

under a cairn of decommissioned prayer books in the synagogue's attic, to a room in a nearby apartment block, newly constructed by a

member of the circle who, in public life, was a successful speculator in real estate. After this burst of uncommon activity, however, the

ghetto-bred inertia and disorganization of the circle reasserted itself. The move, supposed to have been only temporary, somehow was never

undone, even after it became clear that the Altneuschul would be spared. A few years later, the old yeshiva in whose library a record of the

transfer was stored fell under the wrecking ball, and the log containing the record was lost As a result, the circle was able to provide

Kornblum with only a partial address for the Golem, the actual number of the apartment in which it was concealed having been forgotten

or come into dispute. The embarrassing fact was that none of the current members of the circle could remember having laid eyes on the

Golem since early 1917.

"Then why move it again?" Josef asked his old teacher, as they stood outside the art nouveau building, long since faded and smudged with

thumbprints of soot, to which they had been referred. Josef gave a nervous tug at his false beard, which was making his chin itch. He was

also wearing a mustache and a wig, all ginger in color and of good quality, and a pair of heavy round tortoiseshell spectacles. Consulting his

image in Kornblum's glass that morning, he had struck himself, in the Harris tweeds purchased for his trip to America, as looking quite

convincingly Scottish. It was less clear to him why passing as a Scotsman in the streets of Prague was likely to divert people's attention from

his and Kornblum's quest. As with many novices at the art of disguise, he could not have felt more conspicuous if he were naked or wearing

a sandwich board printed with his name and intentions.

He looked up and down Nicholasgasse, his heart smacking against his ribs like a bumblebee at a window. In the ten minutes it had taken

them to walk here from Kornblum's room, Josef had passed his mother three times, or rather had passed three unknown women whose

momentary resemblance to his mother had taken his breath away. He was reminded of the previous summer (following one of the episodes

he imagined to have broken his young heart) when, every time he set out for school, for the German Lawn Tennis Club under Charles

Bridge, for swimming at the Militar- und Civilschwimmschule, the constant possibility of encountering a certain Fraulein Felix had rendered

every street corner and doorway a potential theater of shame and humiliation. Only now he was the betrayer of the hopes of another. He had

no doubt that his mother, when he passed her, would be able to see right through the false whiskers. "If even they can't find it, who could?"

"I am sure they could find it," Kornblum said. He had trimmed his own beard, rinsing out the crackle of coppery red which, Josef had been

shocked to discover, he had been using for years. He wore rimless glasses and a wide-brimmed black hat that shadowed his face, and he

leaned realistically on a malacca cane. Kornblum had produced the disguises from the depths of his marvelous Chinese trunk, but said that

they had come originally from the estate of Harry Houdini, who made frequent, expert use of disguise in his lifelong crusade to gull and

expose false mediums. "I suppose the fear is that they will be soon be"— he flourished his handkerchief and then coughed into it—"obliged

to try."

Kornblum explained to the building superintendent, giving a pair of false names and brandishing credentials and bona fides whose source

Josef was never able to determine, that they had been sent by the Jewish Council (a public organization unrelated to, though in some cases

co-constituent with, the secret Golem circle) to survey the building, as part of a program to keep track of the movements of Jews into and

within Prague. There was, in fact, such a program, undertaken sem-voluntarily and with the earnest dread that characterized all of the Jewish

Council's dealings with the Reichsprotektorat. The Jews of Bohemia, Moravia, and the Sudeten were being concentrated in the city, while

Prague's own Jews were being forced out of their old homes and into segregated neighborhoods, with two and three families often

crowding into a single flat. The resulting turmoil made it difficult for the Jewish Council to supply the protectorate with the accurate

information it constantly demanded; hence the need for a census. The superintendent of the building in which the Golem slept, which had

been designated by the protectorate for habitation by Jews, found nothing to question in their story or documents, and let them in without

hesitation.

Starting at the top and working their way down all five floors to the ground, Josef and Kornblum knocked on every door in the building

and flashed their credentials, then carefully took down names and relationships. With so many people packed into each flat, and so many

lately thrown out of work, it was the rare door that went unanswered in the middle of the day. In some of the flats, strict concords had been

worked out among the disparate occupants, or else there was a happy mesh of temperament that maintained order, civility, and cleanliness.

But for the most part, the families seemed not to have moved in together so much as to have collided, with an impact that hurled

schoolbooks, magazines, hosiery, pipes, shoes, journals, candlesticks, knickknacks, mufflers, dressmaker's dummies, crockery, and framed

photographs in all directions, scattering them across rooms that had the provisional air of an auctioneer's warehouse. In many apartments,

there was a wild duplication and reduplication of furnishings: sofas ranked like church pews, enough jumbled dining chairs to stock a large

cafe, a jungle growth of chandeliers dangling from ceilings, groves of torcheres, clocks that sat side by side by side on a mantel, disputing

the hour. Conflicts, in the nature of border wars, had inevitably broken out. Laundry was hung to demarcate lines of conflict and truce.

Dueling wireless sets were tuned to different stations, the volumes turned up in hostile increments. In such circumstances, the scalding of a

pan of milk, the frying of a kipper, the neglect of a fouled nappy, could possess incalculable strategic value. There were tales of families

reduced to angry silence, communicating by means of hostile notes; three times, Kornblum's simple request for the relationships among

occupants resulted in bitter shouting over degrees of cousinage or testamentary disputes that in one case nearly led to a punch being

thrown. Circumspect questioning of husbands, wives, great-uncles, and grandmothers brought forth no mention of a mysterious lodger, or

of a door that was permanently shut.

Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay

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