The Inquisitor's Apprentice (28 page)

Lily gasped. "That's really ... really ... uh..."

"I know," Rosie breathed, licking fried dough off her fingers. She sighed ecstatically. "Isn't it just
gorgeous?
"

The door to the chapel was no exception to the general wedding cake theme. It might have started out life as a regular basement door, but it had since moved up in the world. When they first spotted it, tucked away neatly at street level in the shadow of the marble-veneered main entrance, Sacha thought it was made of hammered silver.

In fact, it was made of something much stranger. It was entirely covered with shiny little tin plaques, which were nailed onto the wood in a crazy-quilt pattern that reminded Sacha of the way pigeons ruffed their feathers up when they fought over a scrap of food in the gutter. The tin plaques had bumpy hammered-out pictures on them that turned out to be images of legs, feet, hands, elbows, hearts, kidneys, and livers—basically, every body part that Sacha knew the name of and a few whose names he couldn't even guess at.

"People put them up to thank the Madonna for healing them," Rosie explained. "See, this one is from a guy with a heart condition, and this one is thanks for saving a baby from the croup, and this one ... hey, check it out, she must have healed a bald guy. A whole lotta bald guys, from the look of it. Maybe I oughta look into this place from an inventing perspective. Curing baldness is a real growth industry—did you ever think about that?"

Lily choked on her last bite of fried dough.

"Can we go in now?" Sacha asked.

The first thing he noticed when they stepped through the door was that it was dark—so dark he couldn't see anything at all for a moment. Then he saw the Madonna herself, and that swept every other thought out of his head.

She sat at the far end of the room, in a little alcove whose walls, floor, and ceiling were completely carpeted with more of the silvery talismans. They flickered in the light of the votive candles so that it looked like the Madonna was flying—but flying on human hands and legs and hearts instead of on angel wings.

Still, the thing Sacha really noticed was the statue's face. When Rosie had told them about the Black Madonna, Sacha had expected it to look like black people he had seen around New York. It didn't. It looked like someone had taken an ordinary Italian lady and her baby and painted their skin with black paint from the hardware store. It should have been ridiculous. But it wasn't. In fact, there was something about it that made you want to speak in whispers.

That was how Sacha felt, anyway. But no one else seemed to share his feeling of silent awe. Everyone else in the chapel was screaming. As Sacha's vision adjusted to the darkness, he could see why. Cramming forty people plus all their worldly possesssions into an underground grotto designed to hold maybe twelve at the outside was going to be a noisy proposition no matter how you did it. And when two-thirds of those people were under the age of ten, you might as well try asking crashing freight trains to be quiet.

"Well," Rosie asked, "are these your stonemasons?"

Sacha peered around, searching for Antonio and his mother. He didn't see them. But he did catch sight of a familiar face here, a familiar shawl or skirt or head scarf there. Enough to know that these were indeed the same women and children they'd seen that morning.

"It's them," he whispered. "Can you talk to them for us?"

"Ha! Only if we can find one of them who speaks Italian. Otherwise, good luck."

At first Sacha assumed Rosie was exaggerating. After watching her conduct pantomimed, half-shouted, half-sign-language conversations with several of the children, he realized it was no joke. Finally, however, the children produced a young woman in a plain black dress.

"Great," Rosie said, after speaking to her for a moment. "She used to be the village schoolteacher.
Her
I can talk to."

Unfortunately, she never got to. Because that was when Antonio showed up.

With a gun in his hand.

"This is for killing my father, you black-hearted bastard!" he screamed.

Sacha saw the wicked eye of the muzzle staring him in the face as Antonio pointed the gun at him. "No!" he cried, putting up his hands uselessly. "This is cra—"

Suddenly there was a screaming commotion behind Antonio, and his mother bolted out of the crowd and threw herself on him.

The gun went off with a tearing crash. Sacha heard the ping and whine of the bullet ricocheting off a pipe somewhere overhead.

Antonio had dropped the gun when it went off, and his mother was now hanging on to his knees and screaming at him while he scrabbled on the floor for it. Sacha didn't need to speak Sicilian to guess that she was screaming the same things his own mother would have been screaming at
him
if
he
were about to shoot a total stranger and land himself in jail for the rest of his life.

"Come on!" Lily yelled, grabbing his wrist and dragging him toward the door.

The three of them ran flat out until they were absolutely sure Antonio wasn't chasing them. By the time they stopped, they were somewhere on the wrong side of Houston Street in a neighborhood Sacha barely knew.

"Phew," Rosie gasped. "That was just about the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me!"

"Do you think the police are going to come?" Sacha asked apprehensively.

"I doubt it," Rosie said. "If the police came down to Twelfth Street every time someone heard gunshots, they'd wear out the soles of their shoes in a week. So why do you think that kid thought you killed his father?"

"How can he possibly think
we
killed his father?" Sacha asked.

"Not we, Sacha.
You.
"

"Don't be silly. He meant Lily and me, obviously."

"But
you
were the one he was looking at," Lily argued. "You were the one he was shooting at, too."

"That's crazy!"

"Is it?" She started ticking points off on her fingers. "You show up for your first day of work as an Inquisitor and, presto bango, suddenly there's a dybbuk running around town. Rosie here is the first one to see the dybbuk, and what did she tell Wolf right on that very first day? That she knew it was a dybbuk and not just an ordinary demon because it reminded her of you."

"She said it reminded her of a nice Jewish boy," Sacha protested. "Last time I checked there were a few million of those in New York City."

"Well, actually," Rosie offered, "it did kind of look like—"

"Oh, shut up, Rosie!"

"Well, you don't have to be rude!" she huffed.

But Sacha didn't need to apologize because Lily was already ticking off more points on her fingers. "Then Mrs. Worley can't find your soul—"

"That's ridiculous! She said herself that the Soul Catcher was just a parlor toy!"

"Then Antonio's father was killed when you were at Morgaunt's house—probably because the dybbuk followed you there!"

"I'm leaving!" he shouted. "I'm not going to listen to another word of this!"

"Because you don't believe me?" Lily challenged him. "Or because you don't want to admit it to yourself?"

Sacha stared at her, trembling with anger—anger that he told himself was completely, entirely, one hundred percent justified.

"All right, Little Miss Know-It-All," he snapped, forcing the thought of his mother's stolen locket down into the darkest recesses of his mind, right next to that awful glimpse of the dybbuk's face that he been so resolutely not thinking about for the last few days. "Tell me this. If it's my dybbuk, then why does it keep attacking Thomas Edison?"

Lily's shoulders slumped in defeat. "I don't know. But Mrs. Worley said—"

"She
said
that Morgaunt couldn't have used the etherograph to make a dybbuk. And even if he did, how could it be
my
dybbuk when no one's ever made a recording of me?"

"Are you so sure about that?" Lily asked in a decidedly odd tone of voice.

"Of course I am!" Sacha snapped. But then suddenly he wasn't sure at all. "Wait a minute. Remember all those tests they gave us before they made us apprentices? Remember the one where they had us sit in a dark room and try to do magic? They could have done a recording then." He stopped. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Because they didn't give
me
any tests except the normal IQ test everyone always gets." She dropped her eyes and flushed slightly. "Sacha, that cylinder Morgaunt played for us? It was
you,
wasn't it?"

And then she did look at him. A look that slipped through his ribs like a knife blade and cut him to the heart. He hated the very idea of having Lily Astral look at him like that.

Don't think you know me just because you listened to some stupid song,
he wanted to tell her. Then he realized that he wouldn't want to tell her that if he didn't secretly suspect she was right. Which made him even more furious.

"You're wrong," he told her between gritted teeth. "You're dead wrong, and I'm going to prove it."

"How?"

It sounded like a challenge. Or maybe Sacha just wanted it to sound that way. A small part of him knew how unreasonable he was being. But it was easier to be angry than to be reasonable. And anything was easier than admitting that Lily might be right.

"By summoning the dybbuk myself!"

T
WILIGHT CAME EARLY
on that gray fall evening. And it found Sacha shivering in the shadows across the street from his grandfather's
shut.

He'd spent the last two hours hunched in the darkest booth of the Café Metropole drinking coffee he couldn't afford and feverishly poring over the armful of practical Kabbalah books he'd managed to smuggle out of the house under his coat. Rabbi Kessler disapproved of practical Kabbalah so strongly that he wouldn't even keep those books at the
shut.
Instead they lurked on a high shelf at the back of the Kesslers' only closet, safely hidden from impious eyes and rash young aspiring Kabbalists.

That had been a lucky break for Sacha tonight. Or maybe not so lucky. Summoning a dybbuk had seemed like a good idea (sort of) in broad daylight. But as the street lamps flickered on and night settled over the city, it was starting to seem like a very, very bad one.

He huddled into his coat and tried not to think about what else might be hiding in the shadows with him. It felt odd to be watching Grandpa Kessler's
shul
from across the street instead of sitting inside with the rest of the students. He was seeing it from the outside now, like a stranger would. It looked shabbier than he remembered, and yet somehow more exotic and otherworldly too.

Mostly, though, it looked small. It was just one shop in one street in one neighborhood of a city with a million streets and a thousand neighborhoods. You could walk away from it and turn a corner or two and never find your way back again. And in New York you could do the same thing with everything else in your life, even being a Jew. People did it every day. Now, looking at his grandfather's little
shul
while he waited for Rosie and Lily to join him, Sacha realized for the first time in his life that he could be one of those people. He didn't know whether to be excited by the idea or frightened of it.

Lily arrived first, sneaking up so quietly that he practically jumped out of his skin when she touched his elbow.

"Whose school is this again?" she asked.

"Look—just never mind, okay?"

"Oh, a little nervous, are we?"

"Yes. And you're not helping."

"Are you sure you want to go through with this, Sacha? I mean, don't feel like you have to impress me or anything. Just say the word, and we can go tell Inquisitor Wolf everything."

"I'm fine!" Sacha snapped.

"Okey-dokey. Now where
is
that Rosie! If she's finked out on us—"

But there she was, bustling along the pavement toward them.

"Sorry!" Rosie cried. "Shhhh!"

"
Sorry!
My mother just
would
not go to sleep. I was at my wits' end trying to figure out how to get out of the house without her hearing me. How'd you two manage it, anyway?"

"My sister's covering for me," Sacha said guiltily. "My parents think I'm at
shut.
" Which he was ... sort of. "I've got a couple of hours until they'll figure out I'm not."

"Two hours?" Lily asked incredulously. "Is that the best you could do?"

"Oh, and pray tell how you managed!"

"Easy. My mother's throwing a fancy dress ball tonight. She always sends me to bed early when she's entertaining."

"But won't she come in to check on you before she goes to sleep?"

Lily made a face. "She's not exactly that kind of mother, Sacha."

Grandpa Kessler's students were filtering out of the
shul
by this time, straggling onto the sidewalk in twos and threes and shuffling down Canal Street with the flatfooted walk of exhausted men who'd been on their feet since before dawn.

When the last student came out and the lights dimmed, Rosie started forward—but Sacha grabbed her by the elbow.

"Wait!" he whispered.

A moment later, Grandpa Kessler joined the last of his students on the way home.

And that left Mo.

It seemed like he'd never be done cleaning up, but at last the
shammes
came out, shut the door behind him, and began to bolt the heavy locks. It took forever. Actually, it took three times forever, because he had to check everything twice after he'd locked it. But at last the wait was over.

"Come on," Sacha whispered, pulling the stolen—no, he corrected himself, just
borrowed—keys
out of his pocket.

Grandpa Kessler probably hadn't unlocked his
shul
himself since the day Mo arrived from Poland, and it showed. The old iron keys stuck in the locks so badly that at first Sacha was convinced he'd taken the wrong ones by mistake. But finally he coaxed open the last lock, and the three of them slipped inside.

He stumbled through the dark room to the cupboard where Mo always kept the candles. He took as many as he could carry, lit them, and set them all around the rickety deal table where his grandfather's students studied. The candlelight flared up and chased the shadows back into the corners. But it didn't help. It just made them look thicker and more sinister and dybbuk-filled than ever.