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 palmings, 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” doctors and musicians from large cities who spoke French and German. Kornblum, whose German was awkward and Czech nonexistent, had been born in a shtetl outside of Vilna and had spent most of his life wandering the provinces of imperial Russia, playing the odeons, barns, and market squares of a thousand small towns and villages. He wore suits of an outdated, pigeon-breasted, Valentino cut. Because his diet consisted in large part of tinned fish—anchovies, smelts, sardines, tunny—his breath often carried a rank marine tang. Although a staunch atheist, he nonetheless kept kosher, avoided work on Saturday, and kept a steel engraving of the Temple Mount on the east wall of his room. Until recently, Josef, then fourteen, had given very little thought to the question of his own Jewishness. He believed—it was enshrined in the Czech constitution—that Jews were merely one of the numerous ethnic minorities making up the young nation of which Josef was proud to be a son. The coming of Kornblum, with his Baltic smell, his shopworn good manners, his Yiddish, made a strong impression on Josef.
Twice a week that spring and summer and well into the autumn, Josef went to Kornblum’s room on the top floor of a sagging house on Maisel Street, in the Josefov, to be chained to the radiator or tied hand and foot with long coils of thick hempen rope. Kornblum did not at first give him the slightest guidance on how to escape from these constraints.
“You will pay attention,” he said, on the afternoon of Josef’s first lesson, as he shackled Josef to a bentwood chair. “I assure you of this. Also you will get used to the feeling of the chain. The chain is your silk pajamas now. It is your mother’s loving arms.”
Apart from this chair, an iron bedstead, a wardrobe, and the picture of Jerusalem on the east wall, next to the lone window, the room was almost bare. The only beautiful object was a Chinese trunk carved from some kind of tropical wood, as red as raw liver, with thick brass hinges, and a pair of fanciful brass locks in the form of stylized peacocks. The locks opened by a system of tiny levers and springs concealed in the jade eyespots of each peacock’s seven tail feathers. The magician pushed the fourteen jade buttons in a certain order that seemed to change each time he went to open the chest.
For the first few sessions, Kornblum merely showed Josef different kinds of locks that he took out, one by one, from the chest; locks used to secure manacles, mailboxes, and ladies’ diaries; warded and pin-tumbler door locks; sturdy padlocks; and combination locks taken from strongboxes and safes. Wordlessly, he would take each of the locks apart, using a screwdriver, then reassemble them. Toward the end of the hour, still without freeing Josef, he talked about the rudiments of breath control. At last, in the final minutes of the lesson, he would unchain the boy, only to stuff him into a plain pine box. He would sit on the closed lid, drinking tea and glancing at his pocket watch, until the lesson was over.
“If you are a claustrophobe,” Kornblum explained, “we must detect this now, and not when you lie in chains at the bottom of the Moldau, strapped inside a postman’s bag, with all your family and neighbors waiting for you to swim out.”
At the start of the second month, he introduced the pick and the torque wrench, and set about applying these wonderful tools to each of the various sample locks he kept in the chest. His touch was deft and, though he was well past sixty, his hands steady. He would pick the locks, and then, for Josef’s further edification, take them apart and pick them again with the works exposed. The locks, whether new or antique, English, German, Chinese, or American, did not resist his tinkerings for more than a few seconds. He had, in addition, amassed a small library of thick, dusty volumes, many illegal or banned, some of them imprinted with the seal of the Bolsheviks’ dreaded Cheka, in which were listed, in infinite columns of minuscule type, the combination formulae, by lot number, for thousands of the combination locks manufactured in Europe since 1900.
For weeks, Josef pleaded with Kornblum to be allowed to handle a pick himself. Contrary to instructions, he had been working over the locks at home with a hat pin and a spoke from a bicycle wheel, with occasional success.
“Very well,” said Kornblum at last. Handing Josef his pick and a torque wrench, he led him to the door of his room, in which he had himself installed a fine new Rätsel seven-pin lock. Then he unknotted his necktie and used it to blindfold Josef. “To see inside the lock, you don’t use your eyes.”
Josef knelt down in darkness and felt for the brass-plated knob. The door was cold against his cheek. When at last Kornblum removed the blindfold and motioned for Josef to climb into the coffin, Josef had picked the Rätsel three times, the last in under ten minutes.
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