by Steve Stern
Having inspected one whole wing of the mansion without encountering either master or servants, they were less disappointed than relieved. Still, duty-bound to press on, they reversed direction and, after another quarter-hour’s exploration, found themselves in front of a door at the end of a passage framed by columns with gilded capitals. The door was slightly ajar and, peeking in, they saw bookshelves climbing the walls to a cambered ceiling, a fireplace above which hung the portrait of a mutton-chopped ancestor, and a desk as broad as a catafalque. Behind the desk, unsealing letters with an ormolu file, sat a well-kempt gentleman Max was able to identify from newspaper photos as the lord of the manor himself. Bestowing an incautious wink on his friend, Max nudged the door wide open, and the two companions stepped over the threshold dragging their camouflaged apparatus behind them. The banker rose from his chair in a show of vexed agitation, demanding “What are you?” while enfolding himself in the skirts of his moiré dressing gown. Then even as he shouted for them to be gone, Max gave Shmerl a nod, upon which the inventor removed the accordion nozzle from his contraption and, like a waiter unveiling an entrée, snatched off the paper canopy to reveal his perpetual winter machine.
“Your Eminent,” said Max, assuming the role of impresario, “if you please.”
The financier fixed them with a baleful stare. “Wexelman!” he called, and the servant arrived, huffing. “Did you let these persons in?” Dabbing at the folds of his brow with a hankie, Wexelman tried to mutter an excuse—the housekeeper had mentioned having the carpets cleaned—but his master cut him off, directing him to notify the authorities at once.
As Wexelman withdrew, Shmerl turned a crank that sparked a flame, the flame igniting a pilot the feathery length of a dragon’s tongue. Almost instantly wheels began revolving, a cylinder to rise and fall, the inventor explaining that his was an ethyl ammonia compression system: “The piston compresses in the vessel to a pintele from its normal volume the ordinary air,” then releases the pressure which allows the air to expand. The chilling effect of the expansion pulls the heat from the brine surrounding the vessel, which in turn draws the warmth from the water inside the receptacle. This method was opposed to the absorption system favored by his predecessors. Of course, you could also use sulfur dioxide or methyl chloride, though these were toxic compounds and might result in the ultimate death of the operator.…
“What’s he talking about?” the irate financier demanded to know.
Over Shmerl’s giddy discourse Max submitted matter-of-factly, “Making ice, Your Honor; he’s talking how by this machine we can manufacture industrial ice. My colleague Mr. Karp—”
“This is not a patent office,” protested Belmont, aghast at the sight of this troll-like individual fiddling with an infernal mechanism that might for all he knew explode. It might in fact be an elaborate anarchist’s bomb. These ostjuden were mostly anarchists, weren’t they? who targeted the wealthy with their insane ideological program. It was at this point that Wexelman returned, preceded by the medicine ball of his paunch and a pair of liverish-looking policemen whom he was shepherding with imperious gestures into the study.
“Gentlemen,” said Belmont, “these men are trespassing. Apprehend them.”
The cops, in mackintosh capes and cupola helmets, chin straps hooked beneath pursed lower lips, exchanged an arch glance between them. Then they at once commenced to lay hands on Max (still petitioning the millionaire’s patience) and Shmerl (still explaining the dynamics of mechanical refrigeration). Seeing, however, that his friend was in the grip of an arm of the law whose opposite arm brandished a nightstick—and despite being in identical straits himself—Shmerl managed to wriggle free of his captor and fling himself upon the other officer, grabbing his upraised club. Taking advantage of that cop’s distraction, Max broke free of the head-hold to make a dash as if for protection behind the financier’s desk, where he was presently joined by Shmerl who now wielded the billy club. Spitting curses despite Wexelman’s admonishments that they should watch their language in the presence of Mr. Belmont, the cops approached them from either side of the desk, while the banker stood as a hostage between the pair of imposters who flanked him. Meanwhile a steady chugging issued from Shmerl’s device, its hoarse combustion counterpointed by a silvery aria (from Tosca?) that rang throughout the mansion. It was here that August Belmont II, clapping hands to elegant temples streaked with gray like the wings on Mercury’s helmet, cried out, “This is most irregular!” Then, because he knew a good thing when he saw it, he called an immediate halt to the pandemonium—because Shmerl’s machine, coughing and sputtering, had begun to regurgitate transparent ingots, one of which cracked apart from an impossibly high note struck from somewhere beyond the study walls.
THE GRUMBLING OF Officers Golightly and McCool was soon assuaged by the banker’s generosity in compensating them for their troubles. Then, after Shmerl had returned the billy club with all the pomp of a surrendered saber, the bank was contacted and an attorney brought in to draw up the terms of the loan. Five thousand was the figure that was proposed, but as Shmerl looked to his partner to join him in nodding agreement, he was astounded to hear Max counterrecommend a cool ten. Without missing a beat the banker altered the sum to seventy-five hundred as sufficient to cover the cost of venue, equipment, and preliminary labor; it would also provide the proprietors (insolvent at present) with an adequate salary they might draw from the surplus capital. The language of the promissory note was intimidating (“For value received, the undersigned jointly and severally promise to pay to the order of the lender the sum of———, together with interest of twenty-five percent per annum on the unpaid balance, etc.”), but the new corporation of Feinshmeker & Karp was assured that the contract was pro forma; and at least one of the partners understood that the sum was a drop in the bucket for the banker, who stood to benefit disproportionately from the transaction. While business was negotiated, the two friends, their work clothes in disarray from their recent dustup, were served brandy and offered Cuban cigars by the same retainer who had set the authorities upon them earlier. Moted sunlight poured in through the high windows, making the room and its contents—the brass cartouches and crystal decanter, the nickeled pince-nez perched on the financier’s regal nose—appear as if viewed through a jar of golden honey; and it seemed to the immigrants that they had passed, in a single day, from civilization’s wild outer reaches to its very core.
The attorney, there to notarize the document and issue the check, seemed unfazed by the incongruous appearance of the partners. If he perceived any impropriety in the proceedings, as he handed the friends a gold-nibbed fountain pen, he never showed it, and his ease in officiating the affair inspired the companions to sign with unreserved zeal on the dotted line. They exchanged handshakes all around, first with lender and witness, then with each other, both tacitly acknowledging that notwithstanding the glacier of ice cakes heaped in the tray of Shmerl’s machine, a miracle had occurred, both supposing they would now live in a world where they would have to accustom themselves to miracles.
Invited to use Mr. Belmont’s own venerable institution, the young men politely declined, preferring to deposit the cashier’s check closer to home, in an account in Jarmolovsky’s Immigrant Bank on Canal Street. It was to be a joint account, nor did they feel the need to formalize the pact between them; the terms were understood, that Max, a fast learner in the area of finance, would handle the fiscal end of the business while Shmerl saw to technical matters. They placed the loan document in a safe deposit box and straightaway began their search for a property they might convert into a plant for manufacturing ice. They hadn’t far to look, since as it turned out the Gebirtig & Son’s facility, just a few doors down the road from the bank, was for sale. Owing to an anonymous tip, the police had raided the thriving East Side business, where they’d uncovered a large cache of illegal goods. The owners were promptly arrested and charged with several counts of receiving black-market merchandise and evading tariffs, the cost
of their bail and ongoing legal fees (and the bribes to underworld parties who reneged on their promises) having forced them into bankruptcy. As a result, their business was placed on the auction block and the partnership of Feinshmeker & Karp, handily outbidding the competition with their newly acquired funds, purchased the Ice Castle at a virtual steal. Then they proceeded with all due haste to hire contractors to revamp the several cavernous floors of the old warehouse into a factory for the large-scale production of ice.
Neither of the immigrants could have anticipated the speed with which things progressed. Drawing on a business sense he owed in large part to Jocheved’s prior experience, Max set about purchasing equipment according to Shmerl’s detailed itemizations and then turned to the more complex issue of labor. Since the modified Ice Castle would continue the cold storage operations of its previous owners, it would be possible to keep on much of the staff laid off in the wake of the police shutdown. A number of employees would naturally have to be trained to operate the ice-making machinery; they would have to acquire the skills necessary to regulate a steam generator, adjust levels of absorption and compression according to the effects of temperature on the solubility of gases, and so forth. But the workers, once educated by the journeyman Shmerl Karp, could then expect a rise in salary, and their promotion would mean the promise of upward mobility to those menials aspiring to be “apreyters” and engineers. It was a situation sure to increase the level of performance at every stage of the operation—or so Max theorized, surprising himself with his newborn interest in commercial productivity, an enthusiasm he also attributed to the Frostbissen girl. Meanwhile Shmerl made his calculations and supervised the assembly of machinery on a scale that for once nearly matched his imagination. Of course, due to practical considerations, he was forced to eliminate some of the aesthetic features of his original ice-making contrivance in favor of the more strictly functional. He had to admit that his elaborate new machine, impressive as it was, had no real value beyond the utilitarian, but as he oversaw the mounting of the turbine with its floating vertical shaft fashioned according to his own specifications, or watched the metallic bellows fill like a bullfrog’s throat with gas as it expanded to rev the motor, Shmerl was as elated as if he were present at the Creation. He was, however, uncomfortable in his role as foreman, awkward at delegating authority to others, a problem he eventually confided to his friend.
Too busy to think about changing their current address, the companions still resided in Levine’s rank stableyard. In his unfailing gratitude to the old man, Shmerl had continued to fulfill his nightwalking duties, giving up much needed sleep and exhausting himself in the process. Worried about his friend, Max decided it was time he was emancipated from the shit patrol and, also well disposed toward their spry old benefactor, proposed this solution: Offer Levine the foreman’s position at the ice plant. Which was how Elihu Levine, after personally escorting Akivah and Bar Kochbah, his beloved bags-of-bones, to the glue factory, took up the management of New York’s premier facility for the high-volume production of economical and sanitary block ice. Shmerl was amazed at how readily the veteran stableman, when presented with so speculative an opportunity, had been prepared to scrap a decades-long livelihood. But released from circumstances defined by animal waste, the old drek shlepper was fairly rejuvenated; he threw himself into his new role with a passion, assiduously adjusting prices and filing invoices, inspecting meat lockers and equipment, hiring laborers with the shrewdness of a captain interviewing a crew for a dangerous voyage. He also appointed himself shop steward of the IMU, the Ice Man’s Union, a collective of his own formation for which he obtained a national charter, making him both an essential liaison between management and labor and a thorn in the side of his employers ever after.
In private moments, of which there were lately precious few, Shmerl asked himself if this was really the life he desired; was he a hypocrite for his headlong entry into the world of free trade? But such questions, he had to admit, came more from force of habit than any genuine consternation on his part, since for better or worse his total immersion in temporal affairs kept him in a state of mild intoxication. He was gratified as well by the way his partnership with Max seemed to consolidate the friendship that had preceded their business arrangement. While he remained puzzled at times by the yungerman’s periodic aloofness and inordinate modesty—Max still refused, for instance, to attend the public baths despite Shmerl’s example, opting instead to reduce his gaminess by the occasional sitz-bod behind a canvas tarp in the shack—these were trivial imperfections that in no way impeded the inventor’s ever increasing admiration for his friend.
Their division of labor, however, left them less inseparable than they’d been before commencing their entrepreneurial relationship, which made Shmerl cherish the time they spent together all the more. Sometimes they might take a meal at a Grand Street cafeteria (they could afford it now), then repair to an East Broadway tearoom where the intelligents gathered and the companions, feeling a little like capitalist spies, kibbitzed conversations about rallies, strikes, and the impending revolution. Once in a while they took in a Yiddish play on Second Avenue, where they saw Mrs. Krantsfeld and a pop-eyed Ludwig Satz sink into deepest depravity in Zolatarevsky’s Money, Love, and Shame, and hailed Boris Tomashevsky wearing tights that made sausage links of his legs as he strutted the boards in Alexander, Crown Prince of Jerusalem. Once, taking a rare holiday, they rode the New York & Sea Beach Line out to Coney Island to see the Elephant; they had their weight guessed and their fortunes read by a gypsy (who seemed diverted by Max’s soft palm, troubled by something she saw in Shmerl’s); they tested their strength, ate chazzerai, and threw baseballs at the head of a Negro, then strolled the boardwalk past couples spooning along the Iron Pier.
Max teased Shmerl because he was leering at the girls gamboling in the surf in their revealing costumes. “Perhaps they are numbered your bachelor days.” But no sooner had he poked fun at his friend and seen his subsequent chagrin than Max flushed a deep crimson himself.
On the eve of the grand reopening of the Ice Castle, the partners celebrated over dinner at Virág’s Hungarian Noodle Shop in a cellar on Forsyth Street. For all intents and purposes, their business was already under way. Ads had been placed in both Yiddish and mainstream papers, sparking a small controversy, some of the natural ice houses having complained in the press that “artificial” ice was ungodly. To counter the attacks, Max had managed a deft feat of public relations, engaging local clergy, both Jewish and gentile, to endorse their product. In the end, having focused attention on the Ice Castle’s innovation, the discord proved a useful marketing ploy, and already there were orders from several breweries and meat-packing companies; in addition, the Gebirtigs’ legitimate cold storage clients had renewed their contracts with the novice owners. The lockers and vaults of perishables were stocked to near capacity, making the official launching of the plant somewhat after the fact. Nevertheless, decked out in sporty new threads for the occasion (dress worsteds with pencil stripes) the two friends dined on hot shtshav and goulash and, characterizing themselves as “two corpses gone dancing,” toasted each other with sweet Muscat wine.
“To the Ice Castle…,” proposed Max. “
…that ice folly it don’t turn out to be,” said Shmerl, clinking his partner’s glass.
“L’chayim.”
Beneath a hat rack in the corner a fiddle and bass played an apathetic schottische as the partners discussed their joint venture, waxing nostalgic over the distance they’d traveled together in so short a time. Whatever misgivings Shmerl may have had about abandoning his autonomy were dispelled by his attachment to his capable friend; while for his part, Max, basking in the inventor’s fond regard, felt at ease enough to bring up a touchy subject.
“I lied to you, Karp,” he confessed, eyes inclined toward his small hands folded almost prayerfully before him on the table. “I lied that was a chance occurrence the attack in the alley.” He admitted that, w
hile he’d never felt so safe as when in his partner’s company, he was in effect still a marked man, targeted for an untimely end by the agents of a party who believed Max had cheated him.
Appalled by the information, Shmerl snapped at his friend for the first time in their mutual history, “Why you didn’t tell me before!” All these weeks Max had spent in harm’s way could have been avoided. Shmerl knew where the culprits hung out; he would go there and challenge them to their face, he would blow them all farplotzn with a chemical cocktail, he would… But Max calmed him down with the assurance that he’d taken the liberty of sending a small portion of their capital to Pisgat, the offended party, as an installment on his lost money, promising the balance in due course; so it was possible that by now the ice mensch had called off his dogs. In the meantime, however, just to stay on the safe side, Max Feinshmeker would remain “by the Ice Castle a silent partner.”
