The Inquisitor's Apprentice

Bekah bit her lip. “And — and Mama doesn’t need to hear about him?”

“I’m sorry. are you saying you do know who I’m talking about?”

“Gee, Daddy, maybe you ought to join the Inquisitors instead of Sacha.”

Meanwhile Uncle Mordechai had finished with the Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker and picked up the Alphabet City Alchemist. The main headline screamed “The Robber Barons Are Stealing Our Magic!” in letters Sacha could read all the way across the table.

“Of course Bekah’s completely right about the Inquisitors,” Mordechai announced, as if the conversation had never strayed from politics in the first place. “Asking them to catch magical criminals is like setting a fox to guard the hen-house. Which just goes to prove my original point: America is a myth founded on a fable founded on a —”

But instead of finishing his speech Mordechai grabbed his pocket watch, read the time, and clapped a hand to his handsome head. “My God!” he cried. “I’m late for rehearsal! Again!”

He leapt from his chair, knocking over a pile of IWW newsletters, which knocked over Grandpa Kessler’s Collected Works of Maimonides in fourteen volumes, which toppled Bekah’s teetering stack of schoolbooks — and sent her civics essay slithering into the soup.

“Farewell and adieu!” Mordechai cried, ducking out on a fresh family debate — this one about how to get the soup stains out of Bekah’s homework and the taste of civics homework out of the soup. “I’d love to stay and help clean up, but we’re opening Sunday, and the show must go on!”

The rest of them spent the next several minutes blotting soup off of Bekah’s essay and hanging the damp pages out on the fire escape to dry. Then they listened to Mo Lehrer and Grandpa Kessler argue about whether Pentacle Stationery Supplies Indelible Ink was kosher or not — a thorny question because of the appalling rumors about what really went into it.

It was only when the soup boiled over that Sacha’s father looked up with a worried frown and asked, “Where’s your mother?”

CHAPTER THREE. Watcher in the Shadows

MR. KESSLER SLAMMED his book down, jumped to his feet, and was gone before Sacha even knew he was leaving.

Cough or no cough, Sacha’s father took the steep stairs two at a time. Sacha stumbled headlong behind him, keeping one hand on the wall to steady himself in case he tripped over something in the pitch-black stairwell. He could hear Mo behind him, wheezing like a steam locomotive but still keeping up with them all the way down the stairs and across the garbage-strewn back lot.

By the time they made it past the privies and caught a glimpse of the water pump, Mr. Kessler was already walking back toward them. One look at his face told Sacha that something was very wrong.

“What is it?” he asked.

His father pointed to a splintered board leaning against the wall beside the pump. Two words had been chalked onto it in crooked capital letters that were already beginning to wash away in the rain:

PUMP BROKE

“She must have gone to get water somewhere else,” Mr. Kessler said disgustedly. “Without taking us with her like any sensible woman would. We’d better split up or we’ll never find her.” He frowned at Sacha. “And you’d better go home.”

“I’m not a child!” Sacha protested. “I’m coming with you!”

His father gave him a put-upon look. But then he shrugged his shoulders. “Fine. But stick with Mo. I don’t want you getting lost too. You can check the Canal Street pump. I’ll cover the rest of the neighborhood.”

Canal Street glistened black and silver under the moonlight. The rain was falling in earnest now, and a rich, loamy smell wafted up from the sidewalks — a reminder that there was still living earth somewhere deep beneath the city.

Half the streetlights were broken, as usual, so the only-in-New-York mishmash of Jewish, Chinese, and Italian storefronts seemed to belong to a world of ghosts and shadows. Bloomingdale Brothers was closed. The Napoli Cafe and the perpetually busy Lucky Laundry (CHANGE YOUR SOCKS, CHANGE YOUR FORTUNE!) were both locked and shuttered. Even Rabbi Kessler’s little storefront synagogue was deserted, though his students often lingered on the front stoop talking Kabbalah long after Mo Lehrer had locked up for the night.

Sacha honestly tried to wait for Mo like his father told him to. But after about half a block, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He veered into the middle of the empty street — always the safest route at night, since you never knew who was hiding behind the heaps of garbage on the sidewalks — and took off running.

As he stepped off the curb, he heard glass shatter under his feet and saw the shards of a broken spell bottle skittering away across the cobblestones. He could just make out the five-cornered symbol of Pentacle Industries on the label. And he could practically hear his mother kvetching about J. P. Morgaunt’s monopolies and asking why people thought they could find happiness at the bottom of a spell bottle — and was it her imagination, or was the neighborhood getting worse lately?

Oh God, what if something had happened to her?

He pushed the thought out of his mind and kept running.

Soon Canal Street opened out into the Bowery. Rain-slicked cobblestones rolled away like waves on a storm- tossed ocean. Open construction pits gaped like scars. Arc lamps buzzed and flickered high overhead, casting a sickly glow that only made the shadows under the elevated railway tracks look blacker and more dangerous. The pump was under those tracks — and Sacha didn’t even want to think about what else might be lurking under there at this time of night.

Sacha had never seen the Bowery so deserted. There was no one on the street at all, not even the usual collection of drunks and spellfiends. The only sign of humanity was the demonic grin on the twenty-foot-high billboard of Harry Houdini that soared above the marquee of the Thalia Theatre.

Sacha crossed the street, squared his shoulders, and stepped into the darkness under the tracks.

As soon as his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he saw what he hadn’t been able to see from the street: the bucket, lying beside the pump where his mother must have dropped it. And a few feet beyond it, his mother lay senseless on the cobblestones. He was at her side in an instant. When he touched her face and spoke to her, she moaned softly. Sacha felt a sharp spike of relief. Maybe she’d just fainted, he told himself. But he knew she’d never fainted in her life.

“Mama,” he asked when her eyes finally opened, “what happened?”

She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. Then she passed a hand over her forehead and shuddered. “I… I don’t know.”

He helped her to her feet and turned back to get the bucket.

“Leave it!” she gasped. And then, in a quieter, more controlled voice: “Your father and Mordechai can come back for it later.”

Sacha obeyed. Or at least he started to. But when he looked toward the street, he saw a dark figure standing between them and the light, blocking their escape. At first he thought it was Uncle Mordechai. But then he realized it was too short to be Mordechai. He told himself it was just one of the bums who slept under the tracks on rainy nights. Still, there was something about the shadowy figure that made the hair on the back of Sacha’s neck stand up like a dog’s hackles.

“Who’s there!” he called, trying to make it sound like a challenge and not a question.

The shadow didn’t answer, but a ripple shivered through the air around them. And not just the air. Sacha could have sworn the ground moved too. It felt as if the whole city had just shuddered underfoot like a horse twitching off a fly.

Then Sacha heard the silvery tinkle of bells.