The Inquisitor's Apprentice (3 page)

"Well, maybe God wouldn't have to weep if the men would let women into
shul
to study real Kabbalah," Bekah said tartly.

"Don't talk back to your grandfather, young lady!" Mrs. Kessler snapped.

"What? I'm only saying what you've said a hundred times before—"

"And don't talk back to me either!"

Bekah waited until their mother had turned back to her soup and then looked at Sacha and rolled her eyes again.

"I see you rolling your eyes," their mother told Bekah without even bothering to turn around. "I guess that means you don't want any blintzes this Sunday morning?"

"No! No!" Bekah cried. "I take it back! I unroll my eyes!"

Everyone laughed. Whatever else people said about Ruthie Kessler—and they said plenty—no one could deny that she made the best blintzes west of Bialystok.

"That's funny," Mrs. Kessler said while everyone else was still laughing. "I thought I had enough water, but I don't. Now where's that bucket got to?"

Sacha sighed and got up to look for the water bucket. But his mother found it first. "I'll go," she told him. "You rest up. You have a big day tomorrow."

"You shouldn't be out alone after dark," Mr. Kessler objected. "If you don't want Sacha to go, then I will."

"You most certainly won't! You've got no business being outside in the rain with that cough of yours!"

"What cough?" Sacha's father snapped as if the mere suggestion that he was sick were a mortal insult. But then he promptly proved her point by coughing.

Mrs. Kessler snorted and stalked out the door, muttering that she'd made it all the way from Russia to the Lower East Side and wasn't about to start being afraid of the dark now.

"Be careful, Ruthie!" Mrs. Lehrer called after her. "I
saw
someone down there the other night!"

No one listened. Mrs. Lehrer was nice—but crazy. Not that anyone ever actually came out and said she was crazy. They just shook their heads sadly and said things like "She came out of the pogroms, poor woman. What can you expect after what she's been through?"

Sacha had worried about this when he was younger. After all, his own parents had survived the pogroms. Did that mean they might go crazy too? But finally he'd decided that Mrs. Lehrer's craziness didn't seem to be catching. Mostly it just amounted to pinching pennies so she could buy her sisters tickets to America and sewing all her savings into an old coat that she never took off because—as she told Sacha and Bekah at every possible opportunity—
you never knew.

Mrs. Lehrer's habit of seeing thieves in every shadow was understandable given the amount of cash she had sewn into her money coat. But everyone knew better than to pay any attention to it. So before the door had even closed behind Sacha's mother, they'd all gone back to arguing about his apprenticeship.

"Don't pay any attention to your Uncle Mordechai," Mo told Sacha. "Being an Inquisitor is a good, honest profession. Why, Inquisitors have become mayors, senators ... even president!"

"Right," Bekah snorted. "And everyone knows how honest politicians are."

Now it was Mr. Kessler's turn to roll his eyes. "And you think Mordechai's Wiccanist friends wouldn't be just as bad the minute they got into power?"

"Well, they certainly couldn't be any worse, could they?" Bekah crossed her arms defiantly. "Benjamin Franklin founded the Inquisitors to protect ordinary people from magical crime, and what do they do instead? Run around giving tickets to poor Mrs. Lassky while J. P. Morgaunt and the rest of those Wall Street Wizards get away with murder!"

"Bilking widows out of their life savings in the stock market might not be nice," Mr. Kessler pointed out, "but it's not exactly murder."

"Besides," Mo added, "the Inquisitors
do
catch rich men. They caught Meyer Minsky—"

"And he was out on parole six months later and running Magic, Inc., just like always. Besides, he's a gangster. A
Jewish
gangster. When was the last time you saw an Astral or a Morgaunt or a Vanderbilk in prison?"

"Fine," Sacha's father teased. "Run upstairs and join the Wobblies. I've seen you talking to that skinny redhead up there. In my day if a boy and a girl liked each other, they did something about it, end of story. But if you'd rather run all over town making speeches about magic-workers' rights, be my guest."

Bekah tried to look outraged, but her face was so red that Sacha had to smother a laugh. He glanced at his father in amazement. Mr. Kessler worked such long hours that he was barely ever home except to eat and sleep—but judging by Bekah's blushes, he'd spotted something that even their mother's sharp eyes had missed. Sacha knew who the Wobblies were, of course: the Industrial Witches of the World, whose makeshift headquarters were located in a cheap rear flat on the top floor of the Kesslers' own building. But obviously he was going to have to take a closer look at the idealistic young Wobblies who traipsed up and down the stairs past their apartment every day. Especially the redheads.

"I don't even think about boys that way," Bekah protested, still blushing furiously. "Especially not—I mean, I have no idea who you're talking about!"

"Good," their father said mildly. "Then I guess I don't need to meet him."

Bekah bit her lip. "And—and Mama doesn't need to hear about him?"

"I'm sorry. Are you saying you
do
know who I'm talking about?"

"Gee, Daddy, maybe you ought to join the Inquisitors instead of Sacha."

Meanwhile, Uncle Mordechai had finished with the
Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker
and picked up the
Alphabet City Alchemist.
The main headline screamed "The Robber Barons Are Stealing Our Magic!" in letters Sacha could read all the way across the table.

"Of course Bekah's completely right about the Inquisitors," Mordechai announced, as if the conversation had never strayed from politics in the first place. "Asking them to catch magical criminals is like setting a fox to guard the hen-house. Which just goes to prove my original point: America is a myth founded on a fable founded on a—"

But instead of finishing his speech Mordechai grabbed his pocket watch, read the time, and clapped a hand to his handsome head. "My God!" he cried. "I'm late for rehearsal! Again!"

He leaped from his chair, knocking over a pile of IWW newsletters, which knocked over Grandpa Kessler's
Collected Works of Maimonides
in fourteen volumes, which toppled Bekah's teetering stack of schoolbooks—and sent her civics essay slithering into the soup.

"Farewell and adieu!" Mordechai cried, ducking out on a fresh family debate—this one about how to get the soup stains out of Bekah's homework and the taste of civics homework out of the soup. "I'd love to stay and help clean up, but we're opening Sunday, and the show must go on!"

The rest of them spent the next several minutes blotting soup off of Bekah's essay and hanging the damp pages out on the fire escape to dry. Then they listened to Mo Lehrer and Grandpa Kessler argue about whether Pentacle Stationery Supplies Indelible Ink was kosher or not—a thorny question because of the appalling rumors about what really went into it.

It was only when the soup boiled over that Sacha's father looked up with a worried frown and asked, "Where's your mother?"

M
R. KESSLER SLAMMED
his book down, jumped to his feet, and was gone before Sacha even knew he was leaving.

Cough or no cough, Sacha's father took the steep stairs two at a time. Sacha stumbled headlong behind him, keeping one hand on the wall to steady himself in case he tripped over something in the pitch-black stairwell. He could hear Mo behind him, wheezing like a steam locomotive but still keeping up with them all the way down the stairs and across the garb age-strewn back lot.

By the time they made it past the privies and caught a glimpse of the water pump, Mr. Kessler was already walking back toward them. One look at his face told Sacha that something was very wrong.

"What is it?" he asked.

His father pointed to a splintered board leaning against the wall beside the pump. Two words had been chalked onto it in crooked capital letters that were already beginning to wash away in the rain:

PUMP BROKE

"She must have gone to get water somewhere else," Mr. Kessler said disgustedly. "Without taking us with her like any sensible woman would. We'd better split up or we'll never find her." He frowned at Sacha. "And you'd better go home."

"I'm not a child!" Sacha protested. "I'm coming with you!"

His father gave him a put-upon look. But then he shrugged his shoulders. "Fine. But stick with Mo. I don't want
you
getting lost too. You can check the Canal Street pump. I'll cover the rest of the neighborhood."

Canal Street glistened black and silver under the moonlight. The rain was falling in earnest now, and a rich, loamy smell wafted up from the sidewalks—a reminder that there was still living earth somewhere deep beneath the city.

Half the streetlights were broken, as usual, so the only-in-New-York mishmash of Jewish, Chinese, and Italian storefronts seemed to belong to a world of ghosts and shadows. Bloomingdale Brothers was closed. The Napoli Café and the perpetually busy Lucky Laundry (
CHANGE YOUR SOCKS, CHANGE YOUR FORTUNE!
) were both locked and shuttered. Even Rabbi Kessler's little storefront synagogue was deserted, though his students often lingered on the front stoop talking Kabbalah long after Mo Lehrer had locked up for the night.

Sacha honestly
tried
to wait for Mo like his father told him to. But after about half a block, he couldn't stand it anymore. He veered into the middle of the empty street—always the safest route at night, since you never knew who was hiding behind the heaps of garbage on the sidewalks—and took off running.

As he stepped off the curb, he heard glass shatter under his feet and saw the shards of a broken spell bottle skittering away across the cobblestones. He could just make out the five-cornered symbol of Pentacle Industries on the label. And he could practically hear his mother kvetching about J. P. Morgaunt's monopolies and asking why people thought they could find happiness at the bottom of a spell bottle—and was it her imagination, or was the neighborhood getting worse lately?

Oh God, what if something had happened to her?

He pushed the thought out of his mind and kept running.

Soon Canal Street opened out into the Bowery. Rain-slicked cobblestones rolled away like waves on a storm-tossed ocean. Open construction pits gaped like scars. Arc lamps buzzed and flickered high overhead, casting a sickly glow that only made the shadows under the Elevated Railway tracks look blacker and more dangerous. The pump was under those tracks—and Sacha didn't even want to think about what else might be lurking under there at this time of night.

Sacha had never seen the Bowery so deserted. There was no one on the street at all, not even the usual collection of drunks and spellfiends. The only sign of humanity was the demonic grin on the twenty-foot-high billboard of Harry Houdini that soared above the marquee of the Thalia Theatre.

Sacha crossed the street, squared his shoulders, and stepped into the darkness under the tracks.

As soon as his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he saw the bucket, right by the pump where his mother must have dropped it. And a few feet beyond, his mother lay senseless on the cobblestones. He knelt and touched her face.

"Mama," he asked when her eyes finally opened, "what happened?"

She looked at him as if she'd never seen him before. Then she passed a hand over her forehead and shuddered. "I ... I don't know."

He helped her to her feet and turned back to get the bucket.

"Leave it!" she gasped. And then, in a quieter, more controlled voice: "Your father and Mordechai can come back for it later."

Sacha obeyed. Or at least he started to. But when he looked toward the street, he saw a dark figure standing between them and the light, blocking their escape. At first he thought it was Uncle Mordechai. But it was too short to be Mordechai. And there was something about the shadowy figure that made the hair on the back of Sacha's neck stand up like a dog's hackles.

"Who's there!" he called, trying to make it sound like a challenge and not a question.

The shadow didn't answer, but a ripple shivered through the air around them. And not just the air. Sacha could have sworn the ground moved too. It felt as if the whole city had just shuddered underfoot like a horse twitching off a fly.

Then Sacha heard the silvery tinkle of bells.

He knew right away that they were
streganonna
bells: the little silver chimes the Italians sewed onto their horses' bridles to ward off the evil eye. A moment later a rickety cart turned onto the Bowery from the direction of Mulberry Street and Little Italy. Sacha's knees went weak with relief. It was an Italian greengrocer, heading out to the East River Docks for an early morning pickup. And since he'd be running empty in this direction, they could catch a ride home with him—far safer than walking.

But when the cart rumbled into sight, Sacha caught his breath in fear. It was a wreck, held together with rusty nails and baling twine. The ancient nag in the traces seemed barely strong enough to walk, let alone haul a full load. Yet the cart was heaped almost to overflowing with bones and rags and all the dusty odds and ends of people's lives that get put to the curb when no one can figure out how to fix them or remember why they were worth keeping in the first place. This was no simple greengrocer. It was the Rag and Bone Man.

The Rag and Bone Man was a legendary figure that mothers all over New York used to scare naughty children into behaving. He had a different name in every neighborhood, but he was feared everywhere. He collected scrap metal and worn-out clothes and gnawed bones for the ragpickers and the glue factories. But people said he traded in dreams too. They said he bought nightmares and lifted curses. And some people claimed he wasn't above selling them on for future use by third parties. The rabbis scoffed at such old wives' tales, but every woman on Hester Street still made the sign of the evil eye when the Rag and Bone Man passed by. Even Sacha's normally sensible mother had sent him running downstairs with a bone last week, saying, "Quick, Sacha! Throw it on the cart! I dreamed someone died last night!"