The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (39 page)

“Mr. Kavalier has money, Mr. Hoffman,” Rosa said. “He can afford to underwrite his brother’s passage himself.”

“I’m happy for you, Mr. Kavalier, but tell me. We have space on
Miriam
for three hundred and twenty-four. Our agents in Europe have already arranged for the transit of three hundred and twenty-four German, French, Czech, and Austrian children, with a waiting list that is considerably longer than that. Should one of them be left behind to make room for your brother?”

“No, sir.”

“Is that what you propose we do?”

“No, sir.” Joe shifted in his chair miserably. Couldn’t he think of anything
better to say to this man than
No, sir
, over and over again like a child being shown the error of his ways? His brother’s fate might well be settled in this room. And it all depended on him. If he was, to Hoffman, in any way insufficiently … something, the
Ark of Miriam
would sail from Portsmouth without Thomas Kavalier. He stole another look at Rosa. It’s all right, her face told him. Just tell him. Talk to him.

“I understand there may be room in the sick bay,” Joe said.

Now Hoffman shot a look at Rosa. “Well, ye-es. In the best of circumstances, perhaps. But suppose there is an outbreak of measles, or some kind of accident?”

“He is a very small boy,” Joe said. “For his age. He would not occupy very much space.”

“They are
all
small, Mr. Kavalier,” Hoffman said. “If I could safely pack in three hundred more of them, I would.”

“Yes, but who would
pay
for them?” Rosa burst out. She was getting impatient. She pointed her finger at Hoffman. Joe noticed a streak of aubergine paint on the palm of her hand. “You say that three hundred and twenty-four have been cleared for passage, but you know that right now we can’t pay for more than two hundred and fifty.”

Hoffman sat back in his chair and stared at her in what Joe hoped was only mock horror.

Rosa covered her mouth. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll be quiet.”

Hoffman turned to Joe. “Watch out when she points that finger at you, Mr. Kavalier.”

“Yes, sir.”

“She’s right. We are short of funds around here. The right adverb, I believe, is ‘chronically.’ ”

“This is what I was thinking,” Joe said. “What if I paid for another child
beside
to my brother?”

Hoffman sat forward, chin in palm. “I’m listening,” he said.

“It’s possible that I most likely can arrange to pay the fare for two or perhaps three others.”

“Indeed?” Hoffman said. “And just what is it you do, Mr. Kavalier? Some kind of artist, is that it?”

“Yes, sir,” Joe said. “I work in comic books.”

“He’s very talented,” Rosa said, though last night she had admitted to
Joe that she had never looked between the covers of a comic book in her life. “And very well paid.”

Hoffman smiled. He had been concerned for some time at the apparent lack in his young secretary’s life of a suitable male companion.

“Comic books,” he said. “That’s all I hear about, Superman, Batman. My son, Maurice, is a regular reader.” Hoffman reached for a picture frame on his desk and turned it around, revealing the face of a smaller version of himself, bags under the eyes and all. “He’s having his bar mitzvah in a month.”

“Congratulations,” Joe said.

“Which comic book do you draw? Do you draw
Superman
?”

“No, but I know a guy, a young man, who does. I work at Empire Comics, sir. We do the Escapist. Also, maybe your son knows them, the Monitor, Mr. Machine Gun. I draw a lot of it. I make about two hundred dollars a week.” He wondered if he ought to have brought along his pay stubs or some other kind of financial documentation. “I usually manage to save all of this but perhaps twenty-five.”

“My goodness,” Hoffman said. He looked over at Rosa, whose face also betrayed a fair amount of surprise. “We’re in the wrong line of work, dear.”

“It seems that way, boss,” she said.

“The Escapist,” Hoffman continued. “I think maybe I’ve seen that, but I’m not sure—”

“He is an escape artist. A performing magician.”

“A performing magician?”

“That’s correct.”

“Do you know anything about magic?”

There was a whetted edge to the question. It was more than a friendly inquiry, though Joe could not imagine why.

“I have studied it,” Joe said. “In Prague. I studied with Bernard Kornblum.”

“Bernard Kornblum!” Hoffman said. “Kornblum!” His expression softened. “I saw him once.”

“You saw Kornblum?” Joe turned to Rosa. “That’s astonishing.”

“I’m completely astonished,” Rosa said. “Was it in Königsberg, sir?”

“It was in Königsberg.”

“When you were a boy.”

He nodded. “When I was a boy. I was quite an amateur magician myself at one time. Still dabble from time to time. Now let me see.” He waggled his fingers, then wiped his hands on an invisible napkin. His cigarette was gone. “Voilà.” He rolled his heavy-lidded eyes to the ceiling and plucked the cigarette from thin air. “Et voilà.” The cigarette slipped from his fingers and fell onto his jacket, left a streak of ash on his lapel, then dropped to the floor. Hoffman cursed. He pushed his chair back, clapped a hand onto his head, and, with a grunt, bent over to pick up the cigarette. When he sat up again, the warp of his wig seemed to have come free of the weft. Coarse black hairs stood up all over his head, wavering like a pile of iron filings drawn toward a distant but powerful magnet. “I’m terribly out of practice, I’m afraid.” He patted down his hairpiece. “Are you any good?”

Kornblum had disdained patter as unworthy of the true master, and now Joe rose, wordlessly, and took off his jacket. He shot his cuffs and casually presented his empty hands for Hermann Hoffman’s inspection. He was aware that he was taking a certain risk. Close work had never been his forte. He hoped that his index finger was all right.

“How is your finger?” Rosa whispered.

“Fine,” said Joe. “May I trouble you for your cigarette lighter?” he asked Hoffman. “I’ll only need it for a moment.”

“But of course,” said Hoffman. He handed his gold lighter to Joe.

“And another cigarette, I’m afraid.”

Hoffman complied, watching Joe carefully. Joe stepped back from the desk, fit the cigarette to his lips, lit it, and inhaled deeply. Then he held up the lighter between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and blew out a long blue jet of smoke. The lighter vanished. Joe took another deep drag and held it, and pinched his nose, and comically bugged out his eyes. The brown Thoth-Amon vanished. He opened his mouth and breathed out slowly. The smoke had vanished, too.

“Sorry,” said Joe. “Clumsy of me.”

“Very nice. Where is the lighter?”

“Here is the smoke.”

Joe raised his left hand in a fist, drew it across his face, and then opened his hand like a flower. A teased knot of smoke floated out. Joe
smiled. Then he picked up his jacket, hanging from the back of his chair, and took out his own cigarette case. He opened the case and revealed the Egyptian cigarette snug inside it, like a brown egg in a carton full of whites. It was still burning. He leaned forward and rolled the burning end in the ashtray on Hoffman’s desk until it went out. As he straightened, he put the cigarette back into his mouth and snapped his fingers in front of the extinguished coal. The lighter reappeared. He scratched up a new flame and relit the cigarette. “Ah,” he said, as if settling into a warm bath, exhaling.

Rosa applauded. “How did you do it?” she said.

“Maybe I’ll tell you one day,” Joe said.

“Oh, no, don’t do that,” Hoffman said. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Kavalier. If you will agree to underwrite, let us say
two
children, in addition to your brother, then we will start working on your brother’s case, and do what we can to find room on
Miriam
for him.”

“Thank you, sir.” Joe turned to Rosa. Once again she looked all business. She nodded. He had done well. “That’s very—”

“But first I have a favor to ask of you.”

“What’s that? Anything.”

Hoffman nodded toward the picture of Maurice.

“If I were a wealthy man, Mr. Kavalier, I would finance this entire venture out of my own pocket. As it is, nearly every spare penny I have goes to the agency. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, or what it was like in Prague, but here in New York, bar mitzvahs are not cheap. In the circle my wife and I move in, they can be quite lavish. It’s deplorable, but there it is. A photographer, caterers, the ballroom at the Hotel Trevi. It’s costing me an arm and a leg.”

Joe nodded slowly and glanced at Rosa. Was Hoffman really asking him to help pay for his son’s reception?

“Do you have any idea,” Hoffman said, “what it’s going to cost me to hire a magician?” A cigarette appeared between the fingers of his right hand. It was, Joe noticed, still burning—it was the one he had dropped on the floor a few minutes before. Joe was certain he had seen Hoffman pick it up and snuff it in the ashtray. On further consideration, he was somewhat less certain. “I wonder if you might consider working something up?”

“I—I will be happy to.”

“Excellent,” Hoffman said.

They went out of his office. Rosa closed the door and grinned at him, her eyes wide. “How about that?”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much, Rosa.”

“I’m going to start a file for him right now.” She went over to her desk, sat down, and took a printed form from a tray on the desk. “Tell me how to spell his name. Kavalier.”

“With a K.”

“Kavalier with a K. Thomas. Is that with an h, or—?”

“With an h. I want to see you,” he said. “I want to take you to dinner.”

“I’d like that,” she said without looking up. “Middle name?”

W
HEN HE WALKED OUTSIDE
again, the sky was shining like a nickel and the air was filled with the smell of sugared nuts. He bought a bag, and it was hot in the hip pocket of his twelve-dollar suit. He walked across the street to the square. Thomas was coming to America! He had a date for dinner!

Crossing the park, he found himself puzzling over the secret of Hoffman’s cigarette trick. Where had he concealed the holder from which he stole the burning cigarette? What kind of holder could keep a cigarette burning for so long? He was halfway across the square before he had the answer—the toupee.

Just as he passed the statue of George Washington, he noticed a small group of people up ahead, gathered around one of the long green benches to his right. Joe, supposing that someone on the park bench must be handing out slices of the latest grim confection from the battlefields and capitals of Europe, plucked a cashew from the bag, tossed it into the air, threw back his head and caught the nut, and kept on walking. As he passed the little knot of murmuring people, however, he saw that they all seemed to be looking not at the bench but at the tall slim maple rising up just behind it, in a lacy iron cage. Some of the people, he saw, were smiling. An older woman in a checked wool coat took a dancing little backward step away, hand pressed to her chest, laughing in embarrassment at her alarm. There must, Joe thought, be some kind of animal on the tree, a mouse or a monkey or a monitor lizard escaped from the Central Park Zoo. He went over to the bench and, when no one would make room for him, pushed up on the tips of his toes to see.

A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe remembered, was that he believed in magic. Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings. Not in the kitchen enchantments of Slavic grandmothers with their herbiaries and parings from the little toe of a blind virgin tied up in a goatskin bag. Not in astrology, theosophy, chiromancy, dowsing rods, séances, weeping statues, werewolves, wonders, or miracles. All these Kornblum had regarded as fakery far different—far more destructive—than the brand of illusion he practiced, whose success, after all, increased in direct proportion to his audiences’ constant, keen awareness that, in spite of all the vigilance they could bring to bear, they were being deceived. What bewitched Bernard Kornblum, on the contrary, was the impersonal magic of life, when he read in a magazine about a fish that could disguise itself as any one of seven different varieties of sea bottom, or when he learned from a newsreel that scientists had discovered a dying star that emitted radiation on a wavelength whose value in megacycles approximated π. In the realm of human affairs, this type of enchantment was often, though not always, a sadder business—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel. Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.

There was, on the slender bole of the youthful maple tree in its cage on the west side of Union Square, an enormous moth. It rested, papillating its wings with a certain languor like a lady fanning herself, iridescent green with a yellowish undershimmer, as big as that languid lady’s silk clutch. Its wings lay spread flat and when, every so often, they pulsed, the woman in the checked coat would squeal, to the amusement of the others gathered around, and jump back.