The Inquisitor's Apprentice

“Sure,” Rosie said with a laugh. “Just like wonton soup.”

“Wonton soup? Who told you that? Your cousin’s boyfriend?” Sacha was starting to have some serious doubts about the fellow.

“It’s a joke,” Rosie said, laughing. “You know: Why is wonton soup kosher? What, you never heard that one? Come on, ask me!”

“Uh … okay … why is wonton soup kosher?”

“’Cause it’s Chinese, stupid!”

“Oh,” Sacha said, feeling disappointed. the pizza really had looked good.

“So anyway,” Rosie continued when she’d finished her pizza, “they used to have this street fair every year up on Twelfth Street. You know, get out the Madonna, dress her up in fancy clothes, parade her around, play with snakes. All good fun. I used to go every year ’cause they had the best fried squid in town.”

“Fried squid?” Lily said in tones of intense interest. “When is this fair again?”

“Yeah, well, unfortunately the health inspectors shut them down for sanitary reasons—someone complained about the squid, probably.”

“People are so stupid,” Lily sighed.

“Tell me about it,” Rosie agreed. “That was some really good squid!”

Sacha rolled his eyes. All he needed to do now was get them in a room with his mother, and every city health inspector would be run out of town on a rail.

“So anyway,” Rosie went on, “after the street festival was shut down, the Sicilian Stonemasons Fraternal Association volunteered to build a chapel for the Black Madonna if someone would donate the space for it. So who steps up to the plate? Mr. Rotella of Rotella’s Funeral Home on Twelfth Street. He donates his whole basement — well, except for the part where they keep the corpsicles. So the Order of the Santissima Madonna di Tindari builds their chapel there. Which my Uncle Louie just happened to be the guy who did the electrical wiring on it. Which I just happen to have overheard him telling my mother that those Tindari Sicilians were practically moving into the place, and Mr. Rotella was going to get shut down by the city if he started letting people sleep in his basement. Well, live people, I mean. I guess you don’t need a health inspection for dead people. Hey, look, fried dough! Want some, Sacha? No? Well, maybe later.”

By the time they reached Twelfth Street, Sacha’s stomach was growling — and he was starting to wonder how two reasonably normal-size girls could possibly cram this much food down their gullets without exploding.

“Well, here we are,” Rosie said. “Rotella’s Funeral Home! Now we just have to figure out how to talk our way into the basement!”

Rotella’s Funeral Home presided over a forty-foot stretch of Twelfth Street, transforming an ordinary workaday section of sidewalk into something resembling a wedding cake for giants with very questionable taste in pastries. Its awning was a meringue-like confection of pink and silver satin. Its stained-glass windows twinkled in rainbow colors that would have looked right at home in any Coney Island fun house. Its facade dripped with so many gleaming terra cotta sculptures that it was hard to imagine there was an ordinary brick tenement house somewhere under it all.

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 possessions 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 onto 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.