The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (36 page)

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 R. 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?"

12

when 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, seances, 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.

"What is this moth?" Joe asked the man beside him.

"Guy here says it's called a luna." The man nodded toward a stout, bankerish-looking fellow in a tyrolean hat with a moth-green feather, standing nearer to the tree and the moth than any of them.

"That's right," the portly man said in an oddly wistful voice. "A luna moth. We used to see them from time to time when I was a kid. In Mount Morris Park." He reached out his pudgy hand, in its yellow pigskin glove, toward the beating blue heart of his childhood memory.

"Rosa," Joe said, under his breath. Then, like an ambiguous trope of hopefulness, the luna moth took wing with an audible rustle, tumbled upward into the open sky, and staggered off in the general direction of the Flatiron Building.

13

So much has been written and sung about the bright lights and ballrooms of Empire City—that dazzling town!—about her nightclubs and jazz joints, her avenues of neon and chrome, and her swank hotels, their rooftop tea gardens strung in the summertime with paper lanterns. On this steely autumn afternoon, however, our destination is a place a long way from the horns and the hoohah. Tonight we are going down, under the ground, to a room that lies far beneath the high heels and the jackhammers, lower than the rats and the legendary alligators, lower even than the bones of Algonquins and dire wolves—to Office 99, a small, neat cubicle, airless and white, at the end of a corridor in the third subbasement of the Empire City Public Library. Here, at a desk that lies deeper in the earth than even the subway tracks, sits young Miss Judy Dark, Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes. The nameplate on her desk so identifies her. She is a thin, pale thing, in a plain gray suit, and life is clearly passing her by. Twice a week a man with skin the color of boiled newspaper comes by her office to cart away the books that she has officially pronounced dead. Every ten minutes or so her walls are shaken by the thunder of the uptown local racing overhead.

On this particular autumn night, only the prospect of another solitary evening lies before her. She will fry her chop and read herself to sleep, no doubt with a tale of wizardry and romance. Then, in dreams that strike even her as trite, Miss Dark will go adventuring in chain mail and silk. Tomorrow morning she will wake up alone, and do it all again. Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!

Judy packs her satchel and turns out her light, not forgetting to take her umbrella from its hook. She is a kind of human umbrella, folded, with her strap snapped tight. She walks down the long corridor and accidentally steps into a huge puddle; whenever it rains, Subbasement 3 begins to leak. Her feet are soaked to the ankles. Shoes squeaking, she gets into the elevator. Like a diver, she rises slowly to the surface of the city. Turning up her collar, she heads for the front door of the library. Tonight, as every night, she is the last to leave.

There is a policeman by the front doors. He is there to help guard the book.

"Good night, Miss," the policeman says as he unlocks the heavy bronze door for her. He is a big-shouldered, knuckle-chinned fellow with a twinkle in his eye because her shoes are squeaking.

"Good night." Miss Dark is mortified by the sound of her feet.

"The name's O'Hara." He has thick, shining hair, glossy as a squirt of black paint.

"Judy Dark."

"Well, Miss Dark, I have just one question."

"Yes, Officer O'Hara?"

"What's it take to get a smile out of you?"

A dozen smart retorts spring to her lips but she says nothing. She tries fervently to fix a frown on her lips but to her dismay cannot prevent herself from smiling. O'Hara takes advantage of her confusion to keep her there talking for a moment longer.

"Did you have a chance to see the book in all the confusion today, Miss Dark? Would you like me to show it to you?"

"I saw it," she says.

"And what did you think?"

"It's lovely."

"Lovely,"
he tries. "Is it, now?"

She nods, not meeting his gaze, and steps out into the evening. It is raining, of course. The umbrella now does what its owner has never been able to manage, and Miss Dark goes home. She fries her veal chop and turns on the radio. She eats her dinner and wonders why she lied to the policeman. She has not, in fact, been to see the Book of Lo, though she is dying to see it. She meant to go on her lunch break, but the crowd around its case was too big. She wonders what the book
is,
if not lovely.

The Book of Lo was the sacred book of the ancient and mysterious Cimmerians. Last year—as was widely reported at the time—this legendary text, long since given up for lost, turned up in the back room of an old wine cellar downtown. It is the oldest book in the world, three hundred ancient pages, in a leather case encrusted with rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, devoted to the strange particulars of the worship of the great Cimmerian moth goddess, Lo. Today it went on display in the grand exhibition hail of the Public Library, behind bulletproof glass. Half the city, it seemed, came to get a look. Miss Dark, driven away by the pushing crowds, returned to Office 99 without having gotten so much as a glimpse of it and ate her lunch at her desk. Now, looking up from her empty plate, at the walls of her empty apartment, she feels a sharp inward bite of regret. She ought to have taken the policeman up on his offer. Maybe, she thinks, it isn't too late. She puts on her hat and coat and a pair of dry shoes and heads back out into the night. She will tell Officer O'Hara, when she gets there, that there is work she has forgotten to do.

But when she gets there, Officer O'Hara seems to have abandoned his post, and what's more, he has left the front door unlocked. Curious, and vaguely annoyed—suppose someone really should try to steal the Book of Lo?—she wanders into the exhibit hall. There, on the black marble expanse of the floor, men in black masks stand around the fallen body of Officer O'Hara. Miss Dark ducks behind a convenient arras. She thrills with horror as the men—an apelike trio in stevedore sweaters and newsdealer caps—use a diamond-tipped can opener to slice the lid from the glass case and so relieve Empire City of its book. Hastily they stuff the book into a sack. Now: what about O'Hara? One of the thieves knows for sure, he says, that the copper made him; he and O'Hara grew up on the same block, way back when. Maybe they had better just do the poor sap in.