Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

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?"