Читать книгу The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon, Michael Chabon - Страница 9

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 Grundsätzen 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 für 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 palmings, 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 Rätsel 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 Rätsel 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 Stupartskà 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 idée 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 Rätsel 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.