The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Read Online Free PDF Page A

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"