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stormy arias, sung in a complicated gibberish Italian. During a family holiday at Lugano, when he was eight, he was discovered to have picked up enough actual Italian from his perusal of favorite libretti to be able to converse with hotel waiters. Constantly called upon to perform in his brother’s productions, pose for his sketches, and vouch for his lies, he had developed a theatrical flair. In a ruled notebook, he had recently written the first lines of the libretto for an opera,
Houdini
, set in fabulous Chicago. He was hampered in this project by the fact that he had never seen an escape artist perform. In his imagination, Houdini’s deeds were far grander than anything even the former Mr. Erich Weiss himself could have conceived: leaps in suits of armor from flaming airplanes over Africa, and escapes from hollow balls launched into sharks’ dens by undersea cannons. The sudden entrance of Josef, at breakfast that morning, into territory once actually occupied by the great Houdini, marked a great day in Thomas’s childhood.
    After their parents had left—the mother for her office on Narodny; the father to catch a train for Brno, where he had been called in to consult on the mayor’s giantess daughter—Thomas would not leave Josef alone about Houdini and his cheeks.
    “Could he have fit a two-koruna piece?” he wanted to know. He lay on his bed, on his belly, watching as Josef returned the torque wrench to its special wallet.
    “Yes, but it’s hard to imagine why he might have wanted to.”
    “What about a box of matches?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “How would they have stayed dry?”
    “Perhaps he could have wrapped them in oilcloth.”
    Thomas probed his cheek with the tip of his tongue. He shuddered. “What other things does Herr Kornblum want you to put in there?”
    “I’m learning to be an escape artist, not a valise,” Josef said irritably.
    “Are you going to get to do a real escape now?”
    “I’m closer today than I was yesterday.”
    “And then you’ll be able to join the Hofzinser Club?”
    “We’ll see.”
    “What are the requirements?”
    “You just have to be invited.”
    “Do you have to have cheated death?”
    Josef rolled his eyes, sorry he had ever told Thomas about the Hofzinser. It was a private men’s club, housed in a former inn on one of the Stare Mesto’s most crooked and crepuscular streets, which combined the functions of canteen, benevolent society, craft guild, and rehearsal hall for the performing magicians of Bohemia. Herr Kornblum took his supper there nearly every night. It was apparent to Josef that the club was not only the sole source of companionship and talk for his taciturn teacher but also a veritable Hall of Wonders, a living repository for the accumulated lore of centuries of sleight and illusion in a city that had produced some of history’s greatest charlatans, conjurors, and fakirs. Josef badly wanted to be invited to join. This desire had, in fact, become the secret focus of every spare thought (a role soon afterward to be usurped by the governess, Miss Dorothea Horne). Part of the reason he was so irritated by Thomas’s persistent questioning was that his little brother had guessed at the constant preeminence of the Hofzinser Club in Josef’s thoughts. Thomas’s own mind was filled with Byzantine, houris-and-candied-figs visions of men in cutaway coats and pasha pants walking around inside the beetle-browed, half-timbered hotel on Stupartskà with their upper torsos separated from their lower, summoning leopards and lyrebirds out of the air.
    “I’m sure when the time comes, I will receive my invitation.”
    “When you’re twenty-one?”
    “Perhaps.”
    “But if you did something to show them …”
    This echoed the secret trend of Josef’s own thoughts. He swung himself around on his bed, leaned forward, and looked at Thomas. “Such as?”
    “If you showed them how you can get out of chains, and open locks, and hold your breath, and