The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) by Michael Chabon Read Free Book Online Page A

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 shiningwhite 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 hisropes 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. 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