The Inquisitor's Apprentice (18 page)

But when he opened the door, Sacha and Lily both gasped. Instead of the courtyard with the mulberry tree and the white mice, they were looking at an uptown street—Seventy-second Street, to be precise, just at the corner of Fifth Avenue, next to the Astral mansion.

"But—but—that's
magic!
" Lily protested.

"Inquisitors are law enforcement officers, Lily. Our job is to prevent people with magical abilities from misusing them. Don't you think that would be rather difficult to do if we couldn't use magic ourselves?"

Lily looked horrified. Clearly she had never thought of this before.

"Do you have a problem with magic, Lily? Some kind of phobia? If so, you won't make a very good Inquisitor."

"I—no—I mean—" Lily's face was practically scarlet, though Sacha couldn't tell if it was with embarrassment or anger. "But if Inquisitors are allowed to use magic, then who prevents
them
from abusing magic?"

"That is an excellent question," Wolf replied, "and I wish I knew the answer to it. Now, go home. And apologize to your charming mother for the scraped knuckles or she'll be calling up Commissioner Keegan to complain about me."

Lily opened her mouth to ask another question. Then she gave a little shrug and turned to go. But just as she was about to step through the door, she turned back and walked over to Sacha and held out a hand for him to shake.

He took her hand, feeling silly and awkward. She didn't seem to notice his awkwardness, though; her grip was as firm and no-nonsense as her clear-eyed gaze.

"Good job back there with the Hexers," she told him. "You ought to stand up for yourself more often. You're too quiet. It makes people think they can walk all over you."

"So you think I should go around insulting street gangs instead?"

She grinned. "Life's too short to walk away from a good fight."

Sacha started to grin back, but he stopped when he noticed Wolf watching them. He cleared his throat awkwardly. "Anyway," he said, "sorry about your hand."

"Hah! You should see the other guy!"

Lily strode through the door, and a moment later he saw her dashing up the marble steps of the Astral mansion.

"Your turn, Mr. Kessler," Wolf said cheerfully. "Where to?"

Sacha panicked. "I—uh—that is—"

"Don't tell me you're afraid of a little magic."

"Actually, yes." As much as he hated letting Wolf think he was afraid, Sacha knew this was the perfect excuse. "Can't you just drop me at the nearest subway station? If it wouldn't be too much of a bother."

Wolf gave Sacha a smile that tied his insides in knots. It made Sacha feel as if Wolf actually liked him—and suddenly he felt horribly guilty for lying to him.

"No, Sacha," Wolf said gently. "It's not too much bother. And anyway, grownups like to be bothered. It makes us feel useful. But you're not the sort who bothers grownups with your problems, are you? Pity. You should try it sometime."

Silence stretched between them until Sacha thought he was going to burst into hysterics if someone didn't say something.

"A man solves his own problems!" he blurted out. It sounded like the sort of thing his father would say.

"I see. And are a man's friends allowed to help?"

"I—"

"Never mind. We don't know each other very well. I don't suppose you have much reason to trust me. What subway stop did you have in mind?"

"I—uh—Astral Place?"

"Astral Place it is."

T
HAT SATURDAY MORNING
Sacha slipped into the Hester Street synagogue late and settled into the last row. You could never hear anything back here, because the old men in the congregation were always wandering in and out and gossiping to each other. But this morning it was the gossiping old men he wanted to see—and most especially his grandfather.

He waited patiently until prayers were finally over and the only people still hanging around were Rabbi Kessler's little gaggle of would-be Kabbalists. Then he tagged along while they meandered over to the storefront
shul
on Canal Street and settled in to do the three things Kabbalists did best—or at least the only three things Sacha had ever seen any Hester Street Kabbalist do. One: shaking their heads over the latest bad news from Russia. Two: complaining about how all the young people were too busy chasing girls and baseballs to remember their religion. And three: discussing the possibility on a purely theoretical level of maybe perhaps coming up with a tentative plan for coaxing an obviously reluctant Messiah into coming back sometime in the next few millennia to do something about the sorry state of the world.

Finally Sacha managed to get his grandfather alone for a minute and ask him about Edison's dybbuk. After a lot of thought, he'd decided to tell a mostly true version of the story, but without mentioning his mother's locket or the alarming fact that the dybbuk had followed him home the other night.

"Isn't that just like the
goyim?
" Grandpa Kessler asked when Sacha finished his story. "Here's Thomas Edison, rich as the czar, with everything a man could want in life, but he runs into a two-week stretch of bad luck and suddenly he's looking around for a Jew to blame. Us Jews, our luck goes down the crapper for two thousand years and we call it being the Chosen People."

"Yeah, well, that's New York for you," Mo Lehrer said, ambling over to join the conversation. "The whole city's coming apart at the seams, and the Inquisitors are running around investigating how some rich
goy
got Yiddish luck."

Sacha laughed at the joke and caught himself thinking he'd like to share it with Lily. But of course he could never do that. He was quite sure that no one in Lily Astral's family ever complained about having Yiddish luck.

"But ... well ... do you think a rabbi could have summoned the dybbuk?" he asked tentatively.

"Of course a rabbi
could
have," Grandpa Kessler snapped. "Any rabbi worth his salt can summon a dybbuk—well, except those hoity-toity uptown rabbis who don't study Kabbalah anymore and spend all their time pretending to be Episcopalians. But the point is, no rabbi
would
have."

"Why? Because dybbuks are evil?"

"No,
dummkopf
! Because they're magic!" Rabbi Kessler yanked at his beard in frustration. "Do you have anything between your ears but baseball scores? Don't you remember
anything
you learned for your
bar mitzvah?
The last thing any real Kabbalist would ever do is work magic. As it is written,
They may not save so much as a hair on their heads by magic.
"

Sacha had been hearing that proverb about not saving so much as a hair by magic ever since he could remember—while at the same time watching housewives all up and down Hester Street use magic for just about everything
except
saving a hair on anyone's head. And come to think of it, one of Mrs. Lassky's most popular recipes was her Hair-Be-Here Hamantaschen.

"But
why
can't Kabbalists use magic?" Sacha asked. "Everyone else does."

"Because Kabbalah isn't mere charms and trickery. It's the manipulation of the letters of the names of God! If you use God's name as a spellbook, you've turned Him into a mere device. Is that an occupation worthy of a pious Jew?"

"So the more magic you know, the less you can use it?" Sacha asked disgustedly. "What's the point of that?"

Rabbi Kessler rubbed at his head until his wispy hair stood on end with static electricity. "Mo, help me out!"

"Look at it this way," Mo said in his usual levelheaded, reasonable tone. "Say you've got two friends. One of them spends time with you every week. You know, just hanging out, having a sandwich, taking in a matinee, playing cards ... being together for the sake of being together. But the other friend only shows up when he needs to borrow money. Pretty soon you'd start to get a feeling about these two guys. Like that one of them's your real friend, and the other one's just a mooch. So that's why Kabbalists don't work magic. We're God's
real
friends."

Sacha shook his head in bewilderment at the image of God playing cards with Mo Lehrer—just two paunchy middle-aged Jewish guys kicking back around the kitchen table with their undershirts untucked and their suspenders hanging around their knees.

"But can't God tell the difference between someone who's just using Him and, well, I don't know, let's say ... a faithful Jew who happens to need a really big favor for a really good reason?"

"Easy for you to say," Grandpa Kessler pointed out. "But who decides what's a good reason? And how do you know who else God has to stick it to in order grant
your
prayer? Working miracles is like letting out a pair of pants: You can only stretch the fabric of the universe so far before you run out of cloth. After that, you're stuck deciding whether you want cold ankles or a cold tushie."

Mo cleared his throat and nodded toward the other side of the room where the rest of the class was staring curiously at them.

"So!" Grandpa Kessler said in a voice so loud that even the few students who hadn't been eavesdropping jumped guiltily. "I take it you fellows are masters of Kabbalah now? You've set all the Worlds aright, and defeated the Other Side, and we can expect the Messiah any minute?" He glared sternly at them—or at least sternly for him. "No? Then stop gawping and get back to your books!"

"But I don't get it," Sacha said when the class had bent over their books again. "Kabbalists can't use magic because it interferes with God's plan for the universe, but—"

"Oh, God has a 'plan' now, does He? What do you think He is, a building inspector?"

"But how is evil ever supposed to be defeated if the bad people use magic all the time and the good people aren't even allowed to use it to fight them?"

Rabbi Kessler's only answer was a fatalistic shrug. "What do you want from me? We're in
goles,
exile. Life is
supposed
to stink. If you want to reform the world, go down to the Café Metropole and talk politics with your no-goodnik Uncle Mordechai!"

Sacha still thought this sounded crazy, but he knew it was pointless to argue. "So then what's going to happen to Edison?"

"He's a goner," Grandpa Kessler announced cheerfully. "And, frankly, it sounds like it couldn't happen to a nicer guy."

Mo clarified. "Every time Edison has an impious thought or does an immoral deed, he'll get weaker and his dybbuk will get stronger. Soon the dybbuk will be as solid as you and me. Then it will start to ooze its way into Edison's life like a fungus. He might come home one night and find the dybbuk sitting down at his dinner table with his family. His friends and family will start mixing them up. Pretty soon they'll start thinking he's the fake and the dybbuk's the real man. Day by day, the dybbuk will suck the life out of him, just like you'd suck an egg cream up through a straw. Soon he'll be nothing but a
kelippah:
a dry scrap of skin with no soul left inside of it. Until one day ... pfft! Gone!"

Finally Sacha put his finger on what had been bothering him about all of this. "But ... how can the dybbuk fool everyone into thinking it's Thomas Edison when it doesn't even look like him?"

Mo and Grandpa Kessler were suddenly both very still. And they were both staring hard at Sacha with a look in their eyes he'd never seen before. Sacha remembered what his father had said about how no cheap hexer would mess with a Kessler. Now he could see why.

He cleared his throat and tried to speak in a normal voice. "You're talking about Edison's dybbuk as if it's some kind of twin or double. But it isn't. It doesn't look anything like him."

"Then it's not his dybbuk," Rabbi Kessler said.

"Are you sure about that?"

"What do you mean, am I sure? Your dybbuk is part of you—all your fear and anger and weakness. A dybbuk is the dark half of your soul, ripped out of your body and set against you. So how can your own soul not look like you?"

Sacha's stomach turned over. "But then ... whose dybbuk is it?"

"How should I know? You're the one who's seen it! Who does it look like?"

"It's hard to tell," Sacha began. "It's all fuzzy. You know, like an old—"

He had been about to say
like an old photograph.
But then he stopped short as he realized which old photograph the dybbuk's face reminded him of: the one of Rabbi Kessler as a beardless young man that hung over the mantlepiece in the Kesslers' kitchen.

"What's wrong, Sachele?"

But Sacha didn't answer. He was too busy staring at his grandfather's familiar face and seeing his features in a new light—the hazy halo of gaslight. And suddenly he realized that who the dybbuk looked like was the last thing on earth he wanted to discuss with his grandfather.

T
O SACHA'S RELIEF
, Wolf began his hunt for a Kabbalist not on Hester Street but on the Upper East Side—a neighborhood where Sacha was blessedly certain they wouldn't run into anyone who'd ever heard of Rabbi Kessler.

First they visited a Jungian Kabbalist—a wild-eyed fellow with alarming eyebrows who kept insisting that the dybbuk was an instantiation of Edison's "Shadow Self " and Edison's only hope of salvation was to immerse himself in the "Collective Unconscious" and embrace his "Anima." Then came the Freudian Kabbalist, whose ideas about dybbuks practically set Sacha's ears on fire. And then came the Analytical Kabbalist, who inflicted page after page of alchemical calculus on them. Sacha didn't have to imagine what Rabbi Kessler would say about alchemical calculus, because he'd already heard the speech too many times to count: "God created the Universe in plain Hebrew, and any fool who thinks he knows enough to check God's math deserves whatever he gets."

By the time they staggered up to the last address on Wolf's list, Sacha had sore feet and a splitting headache.

"Wow!" Lily said when they first walked in. "It's like a cathedral!"

She was right. If Sacha hadn't looked closely enough to notice the discreet Stars of David carved into the gothic arches, he would never have known it was a synagogue at all.