he began to describe how he had magnified sunlight through a filched headlamp in order to melt the original ice in the casket’s interior. Then the rabbi might have thawed out like a mackerel on a slab had he not refilled the casket, even as he drained it, with ground water pumped through a rubber hose. After that he’d caused the fresh water to freeze again. “Which is the part that to me it ain’t clear yet,” interrupted Max. But when Shmerl began his exegesis, using phrases for which there was no Yiddish equivalent—“volatile gas,” “pressurized ether refrigerant,” “homunculus” (since he regarded the rabbi himself as a stage in an alchemical process)—Max interrupted again to ask him, please, to demonstrate the operation once more. Then again his guest was transfixed by Shmerl’s performance, which he re-created in a tinned strainer pail. Such a presentation, he thought, could captivate the crowds on the Bowery; it could command a respectable billing at the Barnum Museum farther uptown. But then Max’s mind took a more expedient turn, which was possibly due to the influence of Jocheved, with whom he seemed to have entered into a period of detente.
Snapping out of his role of passive observer, he stood up from his seat on the floating bed. “Karp,” he said, “do you ever think you will like to make a gesheft?”
“A beezness?” Shmerl enjoyed showing off his expanding vocabulary, though the word tasted sour on his tongue. Of course, he seldom thought beyond his dreams, which, though they were lately more earthbound, had never God forbid included any commercial ventures. But so taken was he with his new companion that he felt himself inclined to go along with any scheme he might suggest, if only to maintain their close association. Still, he wondered exactly what it was about Max that so beguiled him and inspired his loyalty. True, he was physically quite prepossessing and unquestionably intelligent, and his connection with the deep-frozen tzaddik elevated him all the more in Shmerl’s eyes. There was also the possibility that his coattails might carry the inventor toward a prosperity he’d never sought, though for his friend’s sake he supposed he wouldn’t refuse it. But beyond all that, Max remained for the dung carter the embodiment of a nameless mystery, and Shmerl felt that he couldn’t part from him until he’d discovered its origin. So while there was much to be said in favor of solitude and bare subsistence, there was more reason to hang on to the yungerman’s company at any cost.
LESS THAN THREE weeks later, they were standing in the presence of the financier August Belmont II, who had risen from behind his desk as if to shoo away a pair of stray alley cats. “Get out of here!” He was wearing on his anointed head a plum fez with a tassle that looked to Shmerl like the roots of an upturned flower pot, though he was in every other respect a striking gentleman. The tall window at his back, which gave on to the verdant park across Fifth Avenue, outlined his trim figure in a coronalike glow as he pulled tight the cords at the waist of his dressing gown.
“A moment of your time, Your Excellent,” pleaded Max Feinshmeker, potato-shaped in the overalls and machinist’s apron he’d adopted for their artifice. Next to him, similarly clad, stood Shmerl, holding the handle of a device on wheels that resembled a dwarf pachyderm with a dangling snout. Unable to transport the ungainly thing by omnibus, they had hauled it all the way uptown in a rattling dogcart, marveling at how the city altered its character from block to block. The old-law tenements, waist factories, and warehouses gave way to the cast-iron fronts of offices and department stores, which were deposed further on by brownstone terrace houses. The brownstones ebbed at the hotel towers with their striped awnings and liveried doormen, the hotels shading into a rialto of Moorish theaters ringed by touring cars and flocked about by billboards proclaiming the virtues of Doan’s Pills and Russian Caravan Tea. Then, at Fifty-ninth Street, the commercial farrago halted in deference to the grandeur along the eastern border of Central Park. For adjacent the budding foliage of a spring afternoon in full spate stood a row of châteaux, palazzi, and fortresslike mansions, the architecture ranging the spectrum from ancient Egypt to Versailles. Amid this grand parade was the showy arabesque of Temple Emanuel, where, it being Shabbos, well-to-do yekkes removed their