The Inquisitor's Apprentice

Sacha’s head was about level with the man’s belt buckle, so it took what seemed like an eternity for his eyes to travel up the vast expanse of navy blue uniform to the silver badge with the dread word INQUISITOR stamped boldly across it. Above the badge the man’s eyes were the crisp blue of a cloudless sky.

“Well now, boyo,” the Inquisitor said, taking out his black leather ticket book and checking off the box for MAGIC, ILLEGAL USE OF. “Why don’t you tell me just exactly what you saw. And make sure you get it right, ’cause you’re going to have to repeat it all to the judge come Monday morning.”

CHAPTER TWO. Whose Pig Are You?

THE DISASTER AT Mrs. Lassky’s bakery turned Sacha’s life completely upside down. Before the month was up, he was yanked out of school, dragged away from all his friends, and subjected to every standardized aptitude test the New York Police Department could throw at him.

Most of the tests were strange. And some of them were downright pointless — like the one where they had him just sit in a dark room and read spells out loud while some machine whirred away in the background, doubtless recording for posterity his total inability to do magic of any kind.

But the worst was the Inquisitorial Quotient (IQ) test: a five-hour multiple-choice ordeal held in an unheated basement and proctored by a bored-looking Irish girl who made it quite clear that this wasn’t her idea of a fun way to spend the weekend. Sacha filled out his answer sheet in a fog of confusion, mostly guessing. In fact, the only thing he really remembered about the test was the pig.

It was a large pig — a Gloucestershire Old Spot, according to the student sitting next to Sacha. And someone turned it loose in the exam room with a sign tied to its back that read

I’m Paddy Doyle's Pig

Whose Pig are You?

The sign didn’t seem to be strictly necessary, since someone had put a hex on the pig that made it squeal, “Wh-wh-whose pig are you? Wh-wh-whose pig are you?”

The poor animal looked completely bewildered by the situation. Sacha couldn’t help laughing along with everyone else, but he was secretly relieved when the bored Irish girl grabbed the sign off its back and broke it in two over one knee. After that the pig just ran around squealing and farting like a normal pig until she chased it out. When she came back, she announced that no extra time would be given — and anyone who failed could go right ahead and blame Paddy Doyle.

Sacha was pretty sure he had failed, though he doubted it was the pig’s fault. But just when it looked like life on Hester Street was finally getting back to normal, an alarmingly official letter arrived in the mail. It announced that Sacha had been accepted as an Apprentice Inquisitor to the New York Police Department — and ordered him to report for duty by eight a.m. next Monday morning at the offices of Inquisitor Maximillian Wolf.

“What an honor to have an Inquisitor in the family!” Mo Lehrer told Sacha’s mother when she’d read the letter to him for the fortieth time or so. “It’s almost as good as a doctor!”

“It’s a mazel,” Mrs. Kessler agreed from her place at one end of the rickety table that filled up half of the Kesslers’ kitchen. “A real blessing.”

“That’s the great thing about America, right? Anything can happen here!” Mo was leaning through the tenement window between the kitchen and the back room. It wasn’t a real window, of course — just a hole in the wall. But when the city had passed a law saying that every room in the tenements had to have a window, the landlord had come around and knocked a bunch of holes in the walls and called them windows. Just like the Kesslers called their home a two-room apartment, even though they could only afford to live there by renting out the back room to the Lehrers.

Sacha’s mother, who believed in making the best of things, liked to say the Lehrers were just like family. In a way they were, since Mo Lehrer was the shammes who swept Grandpa Kessler’s little storefront synagogue on Canal Street. Actually, in some ways they were even closer than family. The tenement window between the two rooms had to stay open all the time for the Lehrers to get any fresh air at all, and the Lehrers needed a lot of fresh air because they ran a sweatshop. Day and night Mrs. Lehrer bent over her sewing machine and Mo Lehrer wielded his twenty-pound flatirons as they worked frantically to transform piles of cloth into finished clothing for the uptown department stores. But they always had time to talk to Bekah and Sacha — and to slip them enough candy to set their father muttering about how the Lehrers were spoiling them rotten.

“Isn’t that right, Rabbi?” Mo asked Sacha’s grandfather. But Grandpa Kessler was snoring happily in the big feather bed that filled up the rest of the Kesslers’ kitchen. So Mo turned to Sacha’s father instead. “Isn’t that right, Danny?”

“Sure,” Mr. Kessler agreed without looking up from his copy of Andrew Carbuncle’s best-selling memoir, Wealth Without Magic. “Only in America.”

“You got that right,” Sacha’s Uncle Mordechai mocked from behind the ink-splotched pages of the Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker. “Only in America can Jewish boys grow up to become cogs in the anti-Wiccan machine just like gentiles!”

Uncle Mordechai had been kicked out of Russia for being a Blavatskyan Occulto-Syndicalist — which he considered to be piling insult on top of injury, since he was actually a Trotskyite Anarcho-Wiccanist. Still, the change of continent hadn’t altered Mordechai’s politics. He devoted his days in New York to writing for a series of bankrupt revolutionary newspapers, acting in the Yiddish People’s Theater, and planning the revolution over endless tiny glasses of Russian tea at the Cafe Metropole.

Mordechai looked like a revolutionary hero too — or at least like the kind of actor who would play one in a Sunday matinee. He was what Sacha’s mother called “dashingly handsome.” He had long legs and an aristocratic profile and glossy black curls that flopped into his eyes all the time just like Sacha’s did. But while Mordechai’s curls looked debonair and sophisticated, Sacha’s curls just looked messy. Sacha had tried to figure out what the difference was. He’d even secretly borrowed a little of the Thousand Tigers Pungent Hair Potion that Mordechai got from his favorite Chinatown wizard. But it hadn’t helped. Whatever Uncle Mordechai had, you couldn’t buy it in a spell bottle.

“At least being an Inquisitor is a job,” Sacha’s father pointed out, still without looking up from Wealth Without Magic. “That’s more than some people in this family have. and stop tipping your chair back, Mordechai. We only own three chairs, and you’ve already broken two of them.”

Uncle Mordechai tipped his chair back even farther and crossed his pointy-toed shoes on the kitchen table in a flamboyant manner calculated to convey his unconcern with such mundane matters as chairs. “I have two careers,” he proclaimed, tottering on the brink of disaster. “The pen and the stage. And if neither of them is financially remunerative at the moment, I regard this as the fault of an insufficiently artistic world!”

“Never mind that, Mordechai.” Sacha’s mother leaned over to stir the fragrant pot of matzo ball soup simmering on the stove top and to adjust Grandpa Kessler’s cane, which was holding the oven door closed while her bread baked. “The point is, our Sacha’s going to be an Inquisitor.”

Mrs. Kessler’s opinion of Inquisitors had changed completely in the last month. When the Inquisitors had simply been the division of the New York Police Department responsible for solving magical crimes, she’d thought they were drunken Irish hooligans just like the regular cops. But now that her son was going to be an Inquisitor, she wouldn’t hear a bad word about them.

“I still don’t get it, though,” Bekah said skeptically. “Who ever heard of a Jew being an Inquisitor? And why Sacha?”

“Because he’s special! They said so with their fancy test.”

Bekah rolled her eyes. Bekah was sixteen and rolled her eyes often. At the moment she was wedged between Sacha and their grandfather on the feather bed, trying to do her night school homework. As far as Sacha could see, she wasn’t making much progress. She’d written out America is founded upon the principle of the right of the common man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without interference by magical