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

equipping this upper third with a latch, so that it could, like the top half of a Dutch door, be opened separately from the lower. This would afford a good view of the dead Golem’s face and chest, but not of the portion of the coffin in which Josef would crouch. After that, they would label the casket, following all the complicated regulations and procedures and affixing the elaborate forms necessary for the transshipment of human remains. Forged death certificates and other required papers would have been left for them, properly concealed, in the mortuary’s workroom. After the coffin was prepared and documented, they would load it into a hearse and drive it to the train station. While riding in the back of the hearse, Josef was to climb into the coffin alongside the Golem, pulling shut the gaffed panel after him. At the station, Kornblum would check to see that the coffin appeared sealed and would consign it to the care of the porters, who would load it onto the train. When the coffin arrived in Lithuania, Josef, at his earliest opportunity, would kick aside the gaffed panel, roll free, and discover what fate awaited him on the Baltic shore.
    Now that they were confronted with the actual materials of the trick, however—as was so often the case—Kornblum encountered two problems.
    “It’s a giant,” Kornblum said, with a shake of his head, speaking in a tense whisper. With his miniature crowbar, he had pried loose the nails along one side of the coffin’s top and lifted the lid on its creaking, galvanized-tin hinges. He stood peering at the pitiable slab of lifeless and innocent clay. “And it’s naked.”
    “It is very big.”
    “We’ll never get it through the window. And if we do, we’ll never get it dressed.”
    “Why do we have to dress it? It has those cloths, the Jewish scarves,” Josef said, pointing to the tallises in which the Golem had been wrapped. They were tattered and stained, and yet gave off no odor of corruption. The only smell Josef could detect arising from the swarthy flesh of the Golem was one too faint to name, acrid and green, that he was only later to identify as the sweet stench, on a summer afternoon in the dog days, of the Moldau. “Aren’t Jews supposed to be buried naked?”
    “That is precisely the point,” Kornblum said. He explained that, according to a recent promulgation, it was illegal to transport even a dead Jew out of the country without direct authority of Reichsprotektor von Neurath. “We must practice the tricks of our trade.” He smiled thinly, nodding to the black mortician’s bags. “Rouge his cheeks and lips. Fit that dome of his with a convincing wig. Someone will look inside the coffin, and when he does, we want him to see a dead
goyische
giant.” He closed his eyes as if envisioning what he wanted the authorities to see, should they order the coffin to be opened. “Preferably in a very nice suit.”
    “The most beautiful suits I ever saw,” said Josef, “belonged to a dead giant.”
    Kornblum studied him, sensing an implication in the words that he was unable to catch.
    “Alois Hora. He was over two meters tall.”
    “From the Circus Zeletny?” Kornblum said. “ ‘The Mountain’?”
    “He wore suits made in England, on Savile Row. Enormous things.”
    “Yes, yes, I remember,” Kornblum said, nodding. “I used to see him quite often at the Café Continental. Beautiful suits,” he agreed.
    “I think—” Josef began. He hesitated. He said, “I know where I can find one.”
    It was not at all uncommon in this era for a doctor who treated glandular cases to maintain a wardrobe of wonders, stocked with under-linens the size of horse blankets, homburgs no bigger than berry bowls, and all manner of varied prodigies of haberdashery and the shoemaker’s last. These items, which Josef’s father had acquired or beengiven over the years, were kept in a cabinet in his office at the hospital, with the laudable but self-defeating intention of