The Inquisitor's Apprentice

ON 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.

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 that his watcher and Edison’s dybbuk were one and the same. And Sacha could still see 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.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Rushing the Growler

THE NEXT MORNING Sacha nodded off on the subway and would have missed his stop completely if a large