from the sunken eatery, reaching the sidewalk in time to see his friend cornered between a waffle wagon and a haberdasher’s stall. Surrounded by a pack of assailants with kerchiefs pulled over their faces, among whom the caddy cap and his sidekick were still recognizable, Max remained standing, though the blood coursed in a muddy torrent from his head. Then letting loose another heart-stopping shriek that alerted the whole street to his extremity, he sank out of sight in the midst of his attackers. Alarmed by the attention they’d drawn, the attackers lowered their cudgels and, exchanging quizzical looks, beat a hasty retreat in unison from the scene. No sooner had they departed, however, than a crowd of pedestrians closed ranks around the mauled victim, while in the near distance the skirl of a siren could already be heard.
Jolted out of his shock the moment that Max vanished from view, Shmerl gave forth an animal yawp of his own. He lunged into the street, leaping onto the backs of the gathered spectators as he tried to claw his way toward his friend. He was struggling frantically to part the crowd, ignoring the forceful tugging at his sleeve, until its urgency compelled him to turn toward the nuisance in anger. And there stood Max caked in blood but firmly on his feet, signaling Shmerl to hurry up already, let’s skidoo. Together they made tracks through the backstreets, ducking into a doorway only when they’d distanced themselves by several blocks from the site of the attack. During that interlude, while Shmerl tried blotting his tears with a sleeve, Max licked the clotted blood from his lips.
“Red currant,” he pronounced discerningly. “Geshmakh.”
FROM BEHIND THE tarp in the stableyard shack where he was wiping the gory mess from his face and neck, Max explained that, despite his gesture of appeasement toward Zalman Pisgat, he’d thought it best to stay prepared for the worst. Recalling his skill in creating cosmetic effects, he’d kept about his person at all times a packet or two of the jellies used for stage blood. That way he might deceive any would-be assassins into believing they had inflicted the damage they intended. If in the confusion of an assault their victim appeared to have been mortally wounded, each assailant might assume that the other had delivered the coup de grâce. That was his plan, “which it worked!” declared Max, prompting Shmerl to snuffle skeptically through the tears he was still trying to stanch, while his heart continued to outrun itself. Having described his bluff in boastful detail, his partner then stated that, to further corroborate the demise of Max Feinshmeker, he would take immediate possession of his uptown residence on Riverside Drive. This was the legendary uptown avenue of grand apartment houses called Alrightnik’s Row by the ghetto Jews, far from the Tenth Ward with its plagues of consumption and suicide. He realized, of course, that the move might be viewed as inconvenient, given the distance it put between himself and Canal Street, but now that the plant was poised to begin full operation, Max surmised that his discretionary services no longer required him to show up on site.
Then it was true that, once launched, the ice factory seemed fairly to run itself. This isn’t to say there weren’t daily concerns, though nothing that Shmerl, wielding a monkey wrench in place of his retired animal prod, couldn’t handle. In fact, he welcomed the odd mechanical snafu as an opportunity to demonstrate to his apprentices how an oiled piston or a tightened crank pin, an increase or decrease in atmospheric pressure, could facilitate production several fold. Meanwhile Mr. Levine also had his hands full—the same horny hands he’d washed of his former medium in order to embrace a new one that was odorless and free of flies. Reinvigo-rated, the bandy-legged old stableman was everywhere at once, shmoozing potential clients, reviewing delivery routes, taking inventory, and dressing down machinists who failed to pay their union dues. But the plant was finally larger than the sum of its constituent parts, and once it was recognized by the public as more than a novelty, it began with breathtaking swiftness to establish its supremacy in the field of ice merchandising.
In a matter of months Karp’s New Ice Castle, as it came to be known, had surpassed its competitors still yoked to the costly process of harvesting, hauling, and warehousing what they continued to insist on calling God’s ice. Artificial ice (though unimpeachably real) could be