The Inquisitor's Apprentice (14 page)

"I hate to admit it but ... it makes sense. More sense than any other explanation I can think of."

"So where does that leave us?"

Houdini rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He and Wolf gazed at each other. Each one seemed to be searching the other's face for a clue to his thoughts, but neither seemed willing to speak first. Looking at them, Sacha couldn't help noticing the contrast between the two men. Houdini short, muscular, and matinee-idol handsome. Wolf long, lanky, and disheveled—and, with his remarkable eyes hidden behind his glasses, completely nondescript. Yet something clearly bound them together.

"If really it is a dybbuk," Houdini said at last, "then there's nothing you
can
do to protect Edison. Sooner or later it will devour him. He'll become a
kelippah,
a mere container for the dybbuk. And once that happens, he'll be the creature of whoever summoned the dybbuk."

"Then the real killer is the man who summoned the dybbuk," Wolf concluded. "And that's who we have to find."

But Houdini still hesitated.

"What are you afraid of, Harry? That it'll be a rabbi?"

"It can't be! No rabbi would do such a thing! And besides, you can't possibly arrest a rabbi for this crime!"

"
Can't?
" Wolf said in a dangerously quiet voice that Sacha had never heard him use before. It sent a chill down Sacha's spine. It made him remember that Wolf was a cop. A fancy cop who didn't usually have to get his hands dirty the way regular policemen did. But a cop all the same.

"You know what I'm saying," Houdini protested. "If you put a rabbi on trial for assassination by means of magic, this city will go up like a powder keg! The streets will run with blood!"

Houdini was practically shouting by now, but Wolf still answered him in that dead calm policeman's voice. "Keeping the streets clean is someone else's job. My job is catching criminals."

Houdini slammed a fist down on his desk in fury. "Then why don't you go arrest James Goddamn Pierpont Morgaunt? You know he's behind this! You know he's behind every wicked thing that goes on in this city! And yet you wait and wait and wait. You're no better than Roosevelt!"

"At least I'm still here."

"For all the good that does anyone!"

"If you get me enough evidence to bring charges against Morgaunt and make them stick, I
will
arrest him."

"That's what Roosevelt said—and look what happened to
him.
"

Wolf shrugged, unimpressed. "I don't have as much to lose as Roosevelt."

"You've got your life, don't you? Even a poor man can lose that."

"You'll be glad to know that Mr. Morgaunt agrees with you," Wolf said wryly. "He's already warned me about it. I thought it was quite considerate of him."

Wolf got to his feet. Sacha followed him to the door, feeling frightened and bewildered. Judging by the look on her face, Lily felt the same.

Houdini crossed his arms over his chest and heaved a sigh of frustration as he watched them go. "I want to help, Max. I really do."

"I know."

"But you don't make it easy."

That earned a very small smile from Wolf. "I know that too."

"So what can I do?"

"Just keep doing what you're already doing. Send out your challenge to Edison. Give Morgaunt what he wants: a public face-off between you and the etherograph. But, Harry? You be careful too."

"I always am." Houdini flashed his most mischievous grin. "As careful as a man in my line of work can afford to be!"

O
N THE LONG
cab ride downtown, Sacha's head spun with questions he couldn't ask. Every question led back to the locket—and he didn't even want to think about that while Wolf could see him.

He glanced at Wolf, slouched in the opposite corner of the cab. Wolf had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them on his tie. He must have felt Sacha staring, because he looked up and smiled at him. In the evening light his eyes were as luminously gray as dawn over the open ocean. Suddenly Sacha couldn't bear the thought of how those eyes would look at him if Wolf found out he'd been lying to him.

How had he gotten himself into this awful mess anyway? He wasn't a liar! There had to be a way to climb back out of this hole he'd dug himself into.

He was just opening his mouth to tell Wolf about the locket when he remembered Edison's awful etherograph ads, and the cold eyes that followed him when he ran the gauntlet through the lobby of the Inquisitors Division every morning. He snapped his mouth shut and turned away to stare out the window. Wolf might believe the Kesslers weren't criminals, but nobody else would. It would be easier for everyone to believe that Rabbi Kessler—a known Kabbalist—had summoned the dybbuk. And once they believed that, nothing Sacha could do or say would ever change their minds.

No, Sacha decided, the only way out of this mess was to keep his mouth shut and help Wolf catch the real killer. And then he'd tell Wolf everything. Even if it meant knowing that he would gaze at him out of those clear gray eyes someday and say, "Sacha? You
lied
to me?"

Telling Wolf now would be crazy.

And telling his own family would be worse. They wouldn't—couldn't—understand the choices he had to make. They'd try to protect him, because parents were supposed to protect their children. But they couldn't see what Sacha had known the first time he went into a shop with his mother and the shopkeeper talked to
him
as if
he
were the grownup because her English wasn't good enough. They couldn't see that Sacha had become an American, while they remained foreigners—and now it was
his
job to take care of
them.

 

By the time Sacha finally trudged up the stairs of the Astral Place subway station, it was long past rush hour and even the Bowery saloons had emptied out as the after-work drinkers straggled home to dinner.

He glanced into the Metropole as he passed by, hoping that Uncle Mordechai might be there. But he wasn't. There was nothing for it but to walk home alone again.

It was that hushed twilight hour when most people were safe inside, gathered around the dinner table, and the streets were left to the rats and the cats and the various human scavengers that foraged for scraps in the gutters when everyone who could afford to buy anything had gone home.

Sacha turned down Hester Street and hurried along it, trying not to think about his mother's locket and Houdini's terrifying visions of hunger and darkness. He could see people going about their normal evening routines in the brightly lit windows overhead. He wished he were one of them. This was the time of night when you wanted to be in a warm, noisy, lamp-lit kitchen—not out here where shadows seemed to reach out of every alley.

He was almost home when he thought he heard a step behind him. He spun around, ready to fight, his mind filled with terrifying images of bitter cold and devouring hunger. But there was nothing there—just the dark of the coming night, welling into the narrow streets like the deep Atlantic tide sweeping up the Hudson River.

When he finally got home, Mrs. Lehrer waylaid him before he could make it through the back room. She was holding her money coat—the one she'd been sewing her savings into all these years to get her sisters out of Russia.

"It's finished!" she cried, thrusting the coat toward him. "Go ahead, try it on!"

Sacha didn't want to try it on. It was creepy, and it didn't smell very good. But Mrs. Lehrer was always so nice to him. And his mother was nodding at him from the kitchen, telling him to humor her.

The coat felt amazingly heavy as she settled it on his shoulders. He wondered how many years of savings Mrs. Lehrer had sewn into it. Why was Mrs. Lehrer so crazy, while Sacha's mother was so sane? She'd lived through the pogroms too. She'd even lost a child, which had to be at least as bad as losing your sisters. Was Sacha's mother really so much stronger than Mrs. Lehrer? Or could she crack too if enough new troubles were piled on top of the old ones? But Sacha could never ask these questions. It felt wrong even to think them when all the grownups worked so hard to protect the children from even the faintest memory of Russia and the bad times.

"Raise your arms!" Mrs. Lehrer was saying to him. "See? Do you hear a jingle?"

"No."

"That's craft, not magic, I'll have you know! It takes thirty years of sewing seams to learn to do work like that. Go on, turn around! Dance!"

Over in the Kesslers' kitchen, Sacha's father had realized what was happening in the back room. He was staring through the tenement window at them, looking just as uncomfortable as Sacha felt. But his mother gave him another of her little nods, as if to say,
Go ahead. What's the harm if it makes her happy?

Reluctantly, awkwardly, Sacha began to dance. Then Mrs. Lehrer laughed. On a sudden whim, Sacha grabbed her up in his arms and waltzed her around the cluttered room, bumping into chairs and ironing boards and piles of unfinished shirtwaists. He waltzed her into the front room, and they whirled back and forth in front of the windows while everyone laughed and clapped and pushed the chairs aside to make space for them.

"Oh!" Mrs. Lehrer cried when she finally collapsed into a chair, flushed and smiling. "I haven't danced like that since Mo and I were young!"

She and Sacha grinned at each other. Then Mrs. Lehrer leaned close to him as if she had a momentous secret to tell him. "This is a great day for me," she confided. "When I said I was finished, I meant it!Just before you came in, I sewed the very last coin into that coat. I have the fares now. Every penny of them. I can walk right down to the steamship office and buy my sisters their tickets tomorrow!"

Sacha felt the smile freeze on his face. Mrs. Lehrer's sisters hadn't written to her in years. No one knew where they were, or even if they were still alive. He looked around for help, but his mother had already turned back to her mending, and his father and Mordechai were talking politics. No one else had heard Mrs. Lehrer's words.

"That's great," he told her, hoping to God that he was saying the right thing. "I'm—I'm really happy for you."

Mrs. Lehrer looked deep into Sacha's eyes. Suddenly she wasn't smiling anymore. And she didn't look even a little bit crazy. It was as if another woman were looking out of her eyes at him—a woman who knew perfectly well that she was never going to see her sisters again.

"You're a nice boy," she told him, reaching up to pat his cheek. "You've always been so kind to me. Just like your father. I know you're going to grow up to be just as good a man as he is."

When Mrs. Lehrer had taken back her money coat, Sacha stood by the window looking out into the night and leaning his forehead against the cool glass—the closest he could get to being alone in the crowded apartment.

By the time he realized that his watcher was down in the street looking up at him, they were already staring into each other's eyes.

Sacha jumped back, chest tight and heart pounding.

The watcher's face looked blurred and vague in the gaslight, like an old photograph. But Sacha could still see that his watcher and Edison's dybbuk were one and the same. And Rosie DiMaggio was right. The dybbuk
did
look like a nice Jewish boy. It looked like half the nice Jewish boys on the Lower East Side.

Sacha shuddered as he thought of what would happen if the dybbuk actually succeeded in killing Edison. The police wouldn't have to look far to find someone to blame. Neither would the mobs. And then the bad times would be back again. Not in Russia, but right here on Hester Street.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Sacha nodded off on the subway and would have missed his stop completely if a large lady in a hat decorated with several pounds of passenger pigeon feathers hadn't tripped over his foot and poked him with her parasol.

He'd been up half the night. When everyone else was asleep, he'd snuck out onto the fire escape with an armload of Grandpa Kessler's Kabbalah books and shivered under the dim light of the street lamps while he read everything he could find about dybbuks.

It wasn't pleasant reading. No one knew how to kill a dybbuk, short of killing its victim along with it. A dybbuk was part of you—like your arm or your leg or your heart. Once someone summoned it here, it was only a matter of time until it stepped into your skin and stole your life—and sent you back to spend all eternity in whatever hell dybbuks came from.

Some men had managed to survive having a dybbuk. But only great and pious rabbis. And even they hadn't defeated their dybbuks. They'd only learned to live with them, like a man sharing his house with a half-tamed lion that would devour him the moment he let down his guard. As he read one terrible story after another, Sacha began to feel honestly sorry for Thomas Edison. If a dybbuk really was after him, he was worse than a dead man. And there wasn't a thing anyone could do to save him.

Which meant that the only way for Sacha to protect his family was to find out who had really summoned the dybbuk.

Sacha was still racking his brain over how to do that when he got to work—which was how he managed to offend Philip Payton yet again.

The trouble started when he reached the Inquisitors Division headquarters just as Maximillian Wolf hopped out of a hansom cab.

"And how are you settling in to the job?" Wolf asked. "Any questions? Anything you need?"

Sacha thought Wolf was probably just being polite, but he supposed he had to say something. "Well ... I guess a desk would be good. Or at least a chair?"

"That seems reasonable." Wolf waved airily. "Just have a word with Payton. He'll sort you out."

But when they reached his office, Wolf blew through the anteroom without saying anything about it, and Sacha was left to muddle along on his own.

Lily Astral was already there, laughing with Payton as if the two of them were old friends. Sacha cleared his throat a few times, but no one noticed him.

"Uh ... excuse me. I need someone to clean up a desk for me to work at?"