And now Sacha knew just who the thief was.
The dybbuk didn’t know it was a dybbuk. It thought Sacha was the dybbuk and it was the real boy. It thought Sacha had stolen its life from it. And the longer they fought each other, the harder it was to say which of them was right.
It was Rosie who finally ended the fight. She stepped into the circle and flung a book straight at the dybbuk’s head as hard as she could.
It passed through the dybbuk like a knife cutting through butter — and it whacked Sacha so hard on the forehead that he fell over in a dead faint.
When he came to, the dybbuk was nowhere in sight and Rosie and Lily were both bending over him.
“Why did you do that?” he asked angrily. “I was winning!”
“No, you weren’t.” Lily shuddered so violently that her teeth chattered. “You were … fading. every time you touched him,
“Where did it go?”
“Out through the keyhole,” Rosie said. “Like a vampire.”
“Do you think it’s really gone?” Sacha asked, even though he knew it wasn’t.
“No,” Lily said bleakly. “And it wasn’t anything we did that made it leave.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what it sounds like. You didn’t beat it. And it sure wasn’t afraid of Rosie and her book. It just kind of … lost interest.”
“Yeah,” Rosie said unhappily. “Like it suddenly realized it had something more important to do somewhere else.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. What could be more important to the dybbuk than this?”
Instead of answering him, Lily bent down and picked up the smushed cannoli in its newspaper wrapping.
“Lily!” Sacha cried in exasperation. “Can’t you think about anything but food?”
She gave him a put-upon look. “I’m picking up the newspaper so you can read it, you idiot, not so I can lick it. You want to know what your dybbuk has to do tonight that’s more important than killing you? How about this?”
He took it from her and read the headline that shrieked up from the page at him: “EDISON-HOUDINI GRAND CHALLENGE TONIGHT. New York High Society Flocks to the Elephant Hotel to Watch Wizard of Luna Park Face Off Against Master of Manacles.”
“Oh, my God!” Rosie gasped. “I’m so late. I should have left for Coney Island an hour ago!” She grabbed her coat and dashed for the door.“Sorry, Sacha. I really hope everything works out for you and you don’t die or anything, but I have to go
Sacha and Lily looked at each other.
“Uh, hang on a minute, Rosie,” Sacha said. “I think we’d better come with you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN. No Ticket, No Show
THE THREE of them tumbled off the train and sprinted to the Elephant Hotel just in time to see the last guests arrive.
The cream of New York society filed up the monumental staircase between the elephant’s massive front legs, presented their engraved, gilt-edged invitations to the doormen, and vanished into the belly of the beast. But when Sacha, Lily, and Rosie tried to follow, they found the door guarded by a phalanx of uniformed New York City police officers.
“I’m Edison’s assistant!” Rosie panted to the nearest officer as soon as they were within speaking distance.
He looked her up and down, taking in her disheveled hair and dust-smudged face. “Sure you are, miss. and I’m the Statue of Liberty.”
“But I have to get in!” Rosie pleaded. “Mr. Edison’ll fire me if I don’t show up!”
“I’m sorry, miss.” The policeman was younger than Sacha had at first thought. And he really did look sorry. “No one gets in without a ticket, miss and they’re all sold out. Those’re my orders. And it’s not worth
“Please!” Rosie flashed her most dazzling smile at him. “I’d be so grateful!”
The patrolman blinked and shook his head slightly. He looked as if he’d just been hit over the head with his own nightstick. But he hadn’t completely lost his senses, because he managed to smile back at Rosie and say, “Grateful enough to go out with me next Saturday?”
Lily snorted disgustedly, squared her skinny shoulders, and elbowed Rosie aside. “I assure you, Officer, that we do have tickets,” she told him in her most insufferably patrician voice. “Unfortunately we seem to have misplaced them. I’m sure if you’d simply send someone inside to ask—”
“What’s going on here?” the patrolman asked Rosie in a wounded tone. “I guess now you’re going to try to tell me they work for Mr. Edison too?”
“Look,” Sacha interrupted, ignoring Lily’s furious glare, “we need to speak to Inquisitor Wolf on a matter of extreme urgency!”
“Do you, now?” the policeman asked with elaborate courtesy. He turned to his colleagues. “You hear that, fellows? They need to speak to Inquisitor Wolf on a matter of extreme urgency. Of course I suppose a big important Police Inquisitor like Maximillian Wolf only deals with matters of extreme urgency. He wouldn’t be wearin’ out the soles of his shoes walkin’ the beat. Or get stuck outside taking tickets.” He leaned into Sacha’s face, shaking a big finger menacingly at him. “No ticket, no entry. that’s the way it is. And dropping names will only earn you a kick in the seat of your pants to send you along your way.”
“Well done,” Lily muttered as they turned away and trudged back toward the street.
“You’re one to talk,” Rosie snapped.
“What do we do now?” Sacha asked Rosie.
“Go to the backstage door. It’ll be locked by now. But if we’re lucky, there won’t be a police guard there, and we can bang on it until someone hears us and lets us in. You two! I don’t know which one of you is worse. I would have talked my way in for sure if you’d both just kept your mouths shut!”
They picked their way down a blind alley lined with teetering piles of empty packing crates. There was no guard at the door and it was standing ajar — almost, Sacha thought uncomfortably, as if it had been left open for someone. As he slipped through the open door behind Rosie and Lily, Sacha thought of the way the patrolman at the door had reacted to Wolf’s mere name and the sycophantic way the police commissioner had laughed at Morgaunt’s cruel jokes. He had a sinking feeling that he knew just who — or what — the police had left that door open
Rosie led them down a long passage and up a spiral staircase that Sacha guessed must be inside one of the elephant’s legs. It emptied into a hallway whose walls were lined with untidy piles of stage props and theater equipment. And then they were standing in the wings looking into the vast, opulent, velvet-swathed theater that filled all four stories of the elephant’s massive belly.
The show hadn’t yet started, but the audience was a show all by itself. It was the kind of scene Sacha could only imagine in New York. Everyone who was anyone was there, and they were rubbing elbows with a whole lot of people who weren’t anyone at all. Bankers in formal dress looked down their noses at rough-clad workingmen. Housemaids gawped at society women dripping with rubies and diamonds. And over the whole spectacle, rich and poor alike, hung crystal chandeliers tipped with brilliant electric lights — Edison Everlast Electric Bulbs, naturally.
But it wasn’t the lights and diamonds that blazed so brightly in Sacha’s eyes. The audience itself was on fire. It burned with the flame that Roosevelt had called the soul of the city. Not the strength of mere spells and charms, but the strength of people who had left everything they knew behind in order to build new lives in a new world where anything could happen. Some of them had failed miserably, and some had succeeded beyond their wildest
