Free The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) by Michael Chabon Page A

the ancient, abused hinges of Kornblum’s battered frame seemed to have regained an elastic hum in the embrace of his own partner, Madame Willi—the wielder of the gun.
    “Good morning,” Kornblum muttered.
    Josef blushed deeply. He opened his mouth to speak, but a spasm ofcoughing seemed to seize him, and his reply was broken and scattered on the air. They had wasted a night on pleasure at a time when so much seemed to depend on haste and self-sacrifice.
    Moral discomfort notwithstanding, it was from Trudi that Josef derived a valuable piece of information.
    “She heard some kids talking,” he told Kornblum after the girl, leaning down to plant a brief, coffee-scented kiss on Josef’s cheek, had padded out of the kitchen and down the hall, to regain her disorderly bed. “There is a window in which no one ever sees a face.”
    “The
children
,” Kornblum said, with a curt shake of his head. “Of course.” He looked disgusted with himself for having neglected this obvious source of surprising information. “On what floor is this mysterious window?”
    “She didn’t know.”
    “On which side of the building?”
    “Again, she didn’t know. I thought we could find a child and ask it.”
    Kornblum gave his head a shake. He took another puff on his Letka, tapped it, turned it over, studied the tiny airplane symbol that was printed on the paper. Abruptly, he stood up and started to go through the kitchen drawers, working his way around the cabinets until he came up with a pair of scissors. He carried the scissors into the gilded parlor, where he began opening and closing cabinets. With gentle, precise movements, he went through the drawers of an ornate sideboard in the dining room. At last, in a table in the front hall, he found a box of notepaper, heavy sheets of rag tinted a soft robin’s-egg blue. He returned to the kitchen with paper and scissors and sat down again.
    “We tell the people we forgot something,” he said, folding a sheet of the stationery in half and cutting it, without hesitation, his hand steady and sure. With a half-dozen strokes, he had snipped the three-pointed outline of a paper boat, the sort that children fold from pieces of newspaper. “We say they have to put one of these in every window. To show they have been counted.”
    “A boat,” Josef said. “A boat?”
    “Not a boat,” Kornblum said. He put the scissors down, opened the cropped piece of paper at the center pleat, and held up a small blue Star of David.
    Josef shivered at the sight of it, chilled by the plausibility of this imaginary directive. “They won’t do it,” he said, watching as Kornblum pressed the little star against the kitchen windowpane. “They won’t comply.”
    “I would like to hope that you’re right, young man,” Kornblum said. “But we very much need you to be wrong.”
    Within two hours, every household in the building had spangled its windows in blue. By means of this base stratagem, the room that contained the Golem of Prague was rediscovered. It was on the top floor of Nicholasgasse 26, at the back; its lone window overlooked the rear courtyard. A generation of children at play had, like sky-gazing shepherds in ancient fields, perfected a natural history of the windows that looked down like stars upon them; in its perpetual vacancy, this window, like a retrograde planetoid, had attracted attention and fired imaginations. It also turned out to be the only simple means of ingress for the old escape artist and his protégé. There was, or rather there had once been, a doorway, but it had been plastered and papered over, no doubt at the time of the Golem’s installment in the room. Since the roof was easily accessible via the main stair, Kornblum felt that it would attract less notice if they lowered themselves, under the cover of darkness, on ropes and came in through the window than if they tried to cut their way in through the door.
    Once again they returned to the building after