“It’s the truth, Sergeant! I just needed a couple bucks to take a flutter on the ponies.”
“I’ll give you a flutter!” the fat woman bellowed. “He stole a lock of my hair, officer. Yanked it right out while he was pretending to bump into me. But I’m on to him. I grew up in Chicago, an’ I know a conjure man when I see one. One minute it’s ‘pardon me, missus,’ and the next minute you’ve been hexed into signing away your life’s savings!”
“Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll get to the bottom of this. Bob, are you willing to submit to a lie detector test?”
Bob puffed out his scrawny chest and tried to look virtuous and indignant — not so easy when you’re being poked in the ribs by an umbrella. “I got nothing to hide.”
The sergeant sighed and turned around to scan the desks behind him. “Margie! Lie detector!”
One of the typing pool girls looked up from her machine, squinted at the accused with her hands still poised over the keys, and drawled, “he’s lying.”
“Aw, come on, Margie!” Bob cried, the picture of outraged innocence. “How can you tell from all the way over there? The least you could do is look a guy in the eye before you call him a liar!”
Margie came over to the booking desk and looked Bob in the eye. Sacha recognized her now as the bored girl who had administered his Inquisitorial Quotient test. He could see magic drifting lazily around her head like smoke rings. He would never have thought that magic could look bored, but there was no mistaking it: This was bored magic.
“Yep,” Margie said. “You’re lying.”
“Margie! I thought we were friends! How can you do me this way?”
But Margie just yawned and walked back to her typewriter.
Sacha was still shaking his head over this when a mountainous Inquisitor in full uniform appeared in front of him. The name on the giant’s gleaming Inquisitor’s badge was Mahoney.
“And why aren’t you in school on this fine Monday morning?” Mahoney asked him.
“I’m not supposed to be in school,” Sacha protested. “I work here.”
“Are we hiring children now?”
“I’m not a child, I’m thirteen!”
“Well, excuse me,” Mahoney said with a good-natured grin. “And who might you be coming here to apprentice for?”
“Inquisitor Wolf.”
Mahoney’s friendly grin vanished. “You’re the boy who can see witches.”
“I–I guess so,” Sacha stuttered.
“And what might your name be, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“K-Kessler?”
“K-Kessler.” a smile spread across Mahoney’s face. But this time there was nothing good natured about it. “What kind of name is that?”
“Uh … Russian?”
“It don’t sound Russian to me.”
Sacha was almost whispering now. “Jewish?”
“Well, well.” Mahoney called out to the Inquisitors gathered around the booking desk. “Lookee here, fellows! It’s Wolf’s new apprentice. The freak. and that’s not the half of it. Turns out he’s one of the Chosen people!”
Someone snickered. Cold, unfriendly eyes turned toward Sacha from every corner of the room. even the criminals seemed to be looking down their noses at him.
Later, Sacha thought of all sorts of things he could have said to Mahoney. Like that he was as good an American as anyone else. Or that Mahoney could go back to Ireland and eat potatoes if he was smart enough to find any. Or … well, none of it was exactly brilliant. But it was all better than what he actually said. Which was nothing at all.
“Run along, then,” Mahoney said when he saw that Sacha wasn’t going to stand up for himself. “And don’t worry. You and Wolf ought to suit each other fine. He’s the most un-Christian soul that ever walked the halls of the Inquisitors Division.”
Inquisitor Wolf’s office was the last door at the end of the hall. It was a small, dusty room shaped like a shoe box, and its only window looked out on a blank brick wall covered with a painted advertisement for Mazik’s Corsets and Ladies’ Foundation Garments:
Every inch of wall in the office was stacked to the ceiling with case files. Someone had tried to impose order on the mess by stuffing the files into cardboard boxes, but most of the boxes were so full they were practically exploding. Dog-eared mug shots jockeyed for space with grimy newspaper clippings, unidentifiable objects taped to index cards, and handwritten notes scribbled on everything from train tickets to Chinese laundry receipts.
Amidst the avalanche of paper stood a desk so clean that it was hard to believe its owner worked in this disaster zone of an office. Behind the desk sat a young black man wearing a blue and white striped seersucker suit, a silk tie in a fashionable shade of mauve, and a haughty expression.
At first Sacha mistook him for a grownup, but in fact he was only sixteen or seventeen. Yet he was so self- assured — and so impeccably dressed — that he made Sacha feel like a grubby little boy. What on earth was he doing here? Surely he couldn’t be an Inquisitor? He must be some kind of clerk, Sacha decided.
“Sit,” the clerk told him, without even looking up from the file he was scribbling in.
Sacha looked around for a chair, but the only one he could see was buried under case files, just like everything else in the office. Sacha took the files from the chair and tried to decide where to put them. The top one on the stack was labeled CHINATOWN (IMMORTALS OF). Sacha hesitated, wanting to peek inside. But he couldn’t be quite sure the clerk wasn’t watching him, so he set the files carefully on the floor and sat down to wait.
It was a long wait. as the minutes ticked by, Sacha began to fidget. Did Inquisitor Wolf know he was here? Was he going to be blamed for being late? Was he even in the right office?
He cleared his throat.
“Yes?”
“Um … nothing.”
“Suit yourself.”
Since there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, Sacha began looking at the bewildering mass of case files lining the walls.
It was easy to see the magical significance of labels like SHAMANS, BANSHEES and MAGICAL SUPPLIES (ILLEGAL TRAFFICKING IN). But what did COAT CHECKS and WALKING STICKS have to do with magical crime? Who were TATTERED TOM and THE WOMAN IN WHITE? And what on earth would anyone file under CROSSROADS, ITEMS SOLD AT?
Sacha ran a finger along the spines of the stacked files until he came to a name he knew, a name everyone knew: HOUDINI.
“Why do you have a file on Harry Houdini?” he asked, affecting what he hoped was a casual tone of being in on the big secret. “He’s not even a real magician. I went to a performance once. It was all flimflam. No real magic at all.”
“And that’s your expert opinion, is it?” the clerk sounded amused.
“Sure.”
“I suppose all the
“Well … um…”
“Real illusionists never use real magic in their shows. It’s a point of honor. after all, any two-bit backstreet conjure man can
“Uh … yeah … naturally,” Sacha said, retreating back to his corner.
Eventually he got up enough courage to try again. “Excuse me,” he said. “I just realized that … well … we haven’t been introduced.”
“No, we haven’t.”
“I’m Sacha Kessler.”
“I’m Philip Payton.” Payton smiled — a rather nice smile, actually — and Sacha told himself he’d been silly to
