Invited to use Mr. Belmont’s own venerable institution, the young men politely declined, preferring to deposit the cashier’s check closer to home, in an account in Jarmolovsky’s Immigrant Bank on Canal Street. It was to be a joint account, nor did they feel the need to formalize the pact between them; the terms were understood, that Max, a fast learner in the area of finance, would handle the fiscal end of the business while Shmerl saw to technical matters. They placed the loan document in a safe deposit box and straightaway began their search for a property they might convert into a plant for manufacturing ice. They hadn’t far to look, since as it turned out the Gebirtig & Son’s facility, just a few doors down the road from the bank, was for sale. Owing to an anonymous tip, the police had raided the thriving East Side business, where they’d uncovered a large cache of illegal goods. The owners were promptly arrested and charged with several counts of receiving black-market merchandise and evading tariffs, the cost of their bail and ongoing legal fees (and the bribes to underworld parties who reneged on their promises) having forced them into bankruptcy. As a result, their business was placed on the auction block and the partnership of Feinshmeker & Karp, handily outbidding the competition with their newly acquired funds, purchased the Ice Castle at a virtual steal. Then they proceeded with all due haste to hire contractors to revamp the several cavernous floors of the old warehouse into a factory for the large-scale production of ice.
Neither of the immigrants could have anticipated the speed with which things progressed. Drawing on a business sense he owed in large part to Jocheved’s prior experience, Max set about purchasing equipment according to Shmerl’s detailed itemizations and then turned to the more complex issue of labor. Since the modified Ice Castle would continue the cold storage operations of its previous owners, it would be possible to keep on much of the staff laid off in the wake of the police shutdown. A number of employees would naturally have to be trained to operate the ice-making machinery; they would have to acquire the skills necessary to regulate a steam generator, adjust levels of absorption and compression according to the effects of temperature on the solubility of gases, and so forth. But the workers, once educated by the journeyman Shmerl Karp, could then expect a rise in salary, and their promotion would mean the promise of upward mobility to those menials aspiring to be “apreyters” and engineers. It was a situation sure to increase the level of performance at every stage of the operation—or so Max theorized, surprising himself with his newborn interest in commercial productivity, an enthusiasm he also attributed to the Frostbissen girl. Meanwhile Shmerl made his calculations and supervised the assembly of machinery on a scale that for once nearly matched his imagination. Of course, due to practical considerations, he was forced to eliminate some of the aesthetic features of his original ice-making contrivance in favor of the more strictly functional. He had to admit that his elaborate new machine, impressive as it was, had no real value beyond the utilitarian, but as he oversaw the mounting of the turbine with its floating vertical shaft fashioned according to his own specifications, or watched the metallic bellows fill like a bullfrog’s throat with gas as it expanded to rev the motor, Shmerl was as elated as if he were present at the Creation. He was, however, uncomfortable in his role as foreman, awkward at delegating authority to others, a problem he eventually confided to his friend.
Too busy to think about changing their current address, the companions still resided in Levine’s rank stableyard. In his unfailing gratitude to the old man, Shmerl had continued to fulfill his nightwalking duties, giving up much needed sleep and exhausting himself in the process. Worried about his friend, Max decided it was time he was emancipated from the shit patrol and, also well disposed toward their spry old benefactor, proposed this solution: Offer Levine the foreman’s position at the ice plant. Which was how Elihu Levine, after personally escorting Akivah and Bar Kochbah, his beloved bags-of-bones, to the glue factory, took up the management of New York’s premier facility for the high-volume production of economical and sanitary block ice. Shmerl was amazed at how readily the veteran stableman, when presented with so speculative an opportunity, had been prepared to scrap a decades-long