The Inquisitor's Apprentice

The Rag and Bone Man gave a single nod of his grizzled head, but he kept just as silent as ever.

Sacha glanced sideways at him. Who was he really? Why was there a file on him in Inquisitor Wolf’s office? And what would Sacha see if he ever worked up the nerve to sneak a peek inside it?

The Rag and Bone Man pulled up to Sacha’s building, and Sacha scrambled down and took the cast-iron steps two at a time, desperate to get inside before his rescuer left. He raced up the tenement stairs toward the warmth and light and life of home.

He slipped through the Lehrers’ room, trying not to wake them. He bolted down the dinner his mother had left out for him, reassured her that he was safe and sound and hadn’t caught pneumonia, and got into bed, exhausted.

He was fine, he told himself, hoping to stave off the nightmares. The Rag and Bone Man had saved him. Again.

But he knew that the Rag and Bone Man hadn’t really saved him. He had only delayed the inevitable.

CHAPTER TWENTY. The Path of No Action

FOR THE NEXT few weeks, the Edison investigation seemed to go completely cold. If Wolf was still working on the case — and Sacha caught just enough snatches of eavesdropped conversation between Wolf and Payton to be pretty sure that Wolf was still working on it — he didn’t tell his apprentices about it.

Instead, he let them tag along on his other cases. And he had lots of them. Sacha and Lily watched Wolf solve cases of magical insurance fraud, magical embezzlement, magical blackmail … and one unnerving murder where a respectable businessman apparently died of a heart attack but turned out to have been done in by means of a nasty little spell that made its victims’ blood boil in their veins.

Gradually Sacha began to see the method behind Wolf’s famously eccentric inquisitorial technique. He learned to respect Wolf’s silences and to wait for the astonishing leaps of logic that would often follow them. He came to recognize the vague, unfocused gaze that meant Wolf was scouring a crime scene for the one thing that didn’t fit, the one loose thread that he could tug on to unravel the most subtly woven conspiracy.

Sacha began to despair of ever becoming the kind of Inquisitor that Wolf was. He just didn’t have the talent, he told himself. And the one talent he did have was starting to seem completely useless. After all, what good was being able to see magic when the Inquisitors were never called to the scene of a crime until the magic was played out and the criminals long gone? Even Lily’s bulldog tenacity seemed more useful for a real life Inquisitor than Sacha’s strange second sight.

Yet Wolf’s faith in Sacha never seemed to waver. Wolf would even make odd, disconnected comments from time to time that suggested he assumed Sacha would become a far better Inquisitor than he was. It should have made Sacha proud, but it just made him feel like a fraud. Especially when he knew he was lying to the man.

Even worse, Sacha was no closer to figuring out what to do about the dybbuk. In fact, he could barely bring himself to think about it. Every now and then he would see the hazy halo around a street lamp or smell the dank river air wafting up from the docks — and he would flash back to that terrifying moment when he stood in the dark street face-to-face with the dybbuk and thought … almost thought… But whenever he tried to face the memory a wave of shame, terror, and confusion swept over him.

As if that weren’t enough, Hester Street had been struck by a perplexing wave of petty crime. First Mrs. Lassky’s cat went missing. It came back a day later, but Mrs. Lassky couldn’t stop wondering how it could have gotten out of a locked room when the only key was in her pocket.

Then someone started stealing food: from Lassky’s Bakery and the dry goods store next door; from the Lehrers’ room. From the IWW headquarters upstairs; even from Mrs. Kessler’s own bread box. And the weirdest thing was that whoever was stealing the food wasn’t eating it. People kept finding crumbs dribbled down the stairs and scattered in dark corners.

And last — but far from least scary — was the curious case of Sacha’s missing socks.

Mrs. Kessler had been knitting a new pair of socks for Sacha. It had taken forever, since Grandpa Kessler always seemed to be around when she had time to work on them, which meant she couldn’t use magic and had to do it the slow way. When she finally cast off the last stitch, she rushed them into the wash so Sacha could wear them to work the next morning. Naturally, she washed his old socks too; Mrs. Kessler was not a woman to waste hot water. Then she hung both pairs out to dry on the fire escape.

In the morning the new socks were still there, but the old ones were gone.

“What kind of meshuggener steals an old pair of socks when there’s a brand-new pair hanging right next to them?” Mrs. Kessler asked.

“Maybe it was a pigeon,” Uncle Mordechai hazarded. “Feathering its nest with the stolen fruits of other people’s labor like the Wall Street Wizards and Robber Barons!”

“You’re thinking of magpies,” Sacha’s father said from behind the business pages. “And anyway, birds don’t wear socks. Their feet are the wrong shape.”

“Hah!” Grandpa Kessler cried. “That’s where you’re both wrong! Sure, you never saw a pigeon in socks. But it’s got nothing to do with their feet. I know that for a fact, because demons have bird feet — and there are numerous well-documented cases of socks in the rabbinical literature.”

“What about dybbuks?” Sacha asked. It was easier to think about the dybbuk amidst the warmth and laughter of his family — but not much easier. “Do dybbuks have bird feet too?”

For once Grandpa Kessler was stumped. It seemed that no rabbis in all the countless tomes of Haggadah had ever argued about what dybbuks’ feet looked like. “Not even the Hasidim,” Grandpa Kessler admitted. “And those guys’ll argue about anything. Though, come to think of it, there was the case of the wonderworking rebbe whose wife realized he’d been possessed because she kept having to darn his sock heels where his claws were wearing holes in them—”

“That explains a lot!” Sacha’s mother said, poking her husband in the ribs.

“What am I supposed to do, walk on my head?” his father asked good-naturedly. “Listen, when Sacha gets rich, I’ll stop walking. I’ll hire a klezmer band to play wedding marches and carry me around in a chair all day long, and then you’ll have to find something else to complain about.”

“Really?” Mrs. Kessler said, deadpan, staring her husband in the eye. “A klezmer band? Is that the best you can do?”

Mr. Kessler smiled one of his rare smiles. “Well, I can think of other ways to pass the time without socks on, but I didn’t want to mention them in front of the children.”

“Dad!” Sacha and Bekah yelped in identical tones of outrage.

“What are you two so embarrassed about?” Mrs. Kessler snapped, which was pretty funny, considering how flushed her cheeks were. “We’re old — we’re not dead!”

“So was it a dybbuk in that story?” Sacha asked his grandfather, trying to make the question sound casual. “Or was it just a regular demon?”

“Good question!” Rabbi Kessler agreed and shuffled happily off to check his books for the answer.

But try as he might, he couldn’t find it. “Oh, well,” he admitted. “Maybe I didn’t remember it. Maybe I just imagined it. The older I get, the harder it is to tell the difference.”

“Don’t worry,” Sacha said — though he was already frantically searching his memory and trying to think if he’d noticed bird footprints lately in any places they weren’t supposed to be.

But Grandpa Kessler was worrying. “Your Inquisitor Wolf isn’t trying to take on that dybbuk on his own, is he?” “Uh … no,” Sacha said. He wasn’t exactly lying, he told himself. It just felt like he was.

“Tell him he mustn’t! I’m sure he’s a very clever young man, but he’s really not qualified. He hasn’t tried to drag you into anything like that, has he, Sachele?”

“Of course not,” Sacha said, feeling like a worm.

“If he does, you just walk straight out of that office and come home and tell me about it. Promise?”

Was there anything lower than a worm? If there was, Sacha decided, that must be what he felt like