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.As it is, nearly every spare penny I have goes to the agency.I'm not sure if you're aware of this, or what it was like in Prague, but here in New York, bar mitzvahs are not cheap.In the circle my wife and I move in, they can be quite lavish.It's deplorable, but there it is.A photographer, caterers, the ballroom at the Hotel Trevi.It's costing me an arm and a leg."Joe nodded slowly and glanced at Rosa.Was Hoffman really asking him to help pay for his son's reception?"Do you have any idea," Hoffman said, "what it's going to cost me to hire a magician?" A cigarette appeared between the fingers of his right hand.It was, Joe noticed, still burning—it was the one he had dropped on the floor a few minutes before.Joe was certain he had seen Hoffman pick it up and snuff it in the ashtray.On further consideration, he was somewhat less certain."I wonder if you might consider working something up?”"I—I will be happy to.""Excellent," Hoffman said.They went out of his office.Rosa closed the door and grinned at him, her eyes wide."How about that?""Thank you," he said."Thank you very much, Rosa.""I'm going to start a file for him right now." She went over to her desk, sat down, and took a printed form from a tray on the desk."Tell me how to spell his name.Kavalier." "With a K.""Kavalier with a R.Thomas.Is that with an h, or—?" "With an h.I want to see you," he said."I want to take you to dinner." "I'd like that," she said without looking up."Middle name?"12WHEN HE WALKED OUTSIDE again, the sky was shining like a nickel and the air was filled with the smell of sugared nuts.He bought a bag, and it was hot in the hip pocket of his twelve-dollar suit.He walked across the street to the square.Thomas was coming to America! He had a date for dinner!Crossing the park, he found himself puzzling over the secret of Hoffman's cigarette trick.Where had he concealed the holder from which he stole the burning cigarette? What kind of holder could keep a cigarette burning for so long? He was halfway across the square before he had the answer—the toupee.Just as he passed the statue of George Washington, he noticed a small group of people up ahead, gathered around one of the long green benches to his right.Joe, supposing that someone on the park bench must be handing out slices of the latest grim confection from the battlefields and capitals of Europe, plucked a cashew from the bag, tossed it into the air, threw back his head and caught the nut, and kept on walking.As he passed the little knot of murmuring people, however, he saw that they all seemed to be looking not at the bench but at the tall slim maple rising up just behind it, in a lacy iron cage.Some of the people, he saw, were smiling.An older woman in a checked wool coat took a dancing little backward step away, hand pressed to her chest, laughing in embarrassment at her alarm.There must, Joe thought, be some kind of animal on the tree, a mouse or a monkey or a monitor lizard escaped from the Central Park Zoo.He went over to the bench and, when no one would make room for him, pushed up on the tips of his toes to see.A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe remembered, was that he believed in magic.Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings.Not in the kitchen enchantments of Slavic grandmothers with their herbiaries and parings from the little toe of a blind virgin tied up in a goatskin bag.Not in astrology, theosophy, chiromancy, dowsing rods, seances, weeping statues, werewolves, wonders, or miracles.All these Kornblum had regarded as fakery far different—far more destructive—than the brand of illusion he practiced, whose success, after all, increased in direct proportion to his audiences' constant, keen awareness that, in spite of all the vigilance they could bring to bear, they were being deceived.What bewitched Bernard Kornblum, on the contrary, was the impersonal magic of life, when he read in a magazine about a fish that could disguise itself as any one of seven different varieties of sea bottom, or when he learned from a newsreel that scientists had discovered a dying star that emitted radiation on a wavelength whose value in megacycles approximated π.In the realm of human affairs, this type of enchantment was often, though not always, a sadder business—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel.Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.There was, on the slender bole of the youthful maple tree in its cage on the west side of Union Square, an enormous moth.It rested, papillating its wings with a certain languor like a lady fanning herself, iridescent green with a yellowish undershimmer, as big as that languid lady's silk clutch
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