The Inquisitor's Apprentice

CHAPTER EIGHT. Industrial Witches of the World Unite!

THE TRIP TO Hester Street took a year off Sacha’s life.

First, Lily had to ask him what Morgaunt had meant with his last wisecrack. And Sacha had to say he had no idea. And then there was a traffic jam. And then, as if things weren’t already bad enough, Wolf decided that what with all the traffic they might as well walk the last few blocks.

It was one of those golden fall afternoons when all of New York pours onto the sidewalks — and every out-of-work Yiddish actor and revolutionary on the Lower East Side was basking in the sun at the Café Metropole’s outdoor tables.

Sacha skulked past, doing his best to hide in Wolf’s long, skinny shadow. Even so, he could hear Uncle Mordechai waxing eloquent about the vital distinction between Hamiltonian Wicco-Federalism and Jeffersonian Popular Wiccanism. He shrank into his coat collar and prayed that his uncle was having too much fun planning the revolution to notice that his favorite nephew was aiding and abetting Big Magic right under his nose.

Wolf took forever to get there — mainly because he didn’t seem to be able to pass any beggar by without stopping to talk while he fished around in his pockets for coins to give him. But finally they made it down Hester Street and into Sacha’s building without anyone recognizing him.

Their tenement was a good one — anyway, a lot better than some of the places Sacha could remember living in. The Kesslers had a third-floor front apartment, with two windows opening onto Hester Street and a fire escape big enough to sleep the whole family on stifling summer nights. But seeing the building now, with Wolf and Lily beside him, Sacha realized it was desperately shabby. Maybe even worse than shabby.

For the first time in his life, he was glad there were no lights in the stairwell. It was so dark that his own mother could have tripped over him without recognizing him. As long as he kept his mouth shut and the neighbors kept their doors closed, he was safe. All he needed now was for his luck to hold until they made it past the third floor.

Meanwhile, Lily was peering around the windowless entryway. “Does anyone see a light switch?”

“I … uh … don’t think there are any—”

“Nonsense!” Lily interrupted. “I know for a fact that Commissioner Roosevelt passed a law requiring landlords to install lights at least two years ago!”

“Well, bully for him!” Sacha muttered.

“You needn’t laugh,” Lily huffed. “Some of us actually care about poor people!”

By the time they made it to the top floor, Wolf had knocked over two ash bins and narrowly missed stepping in a full chamber pot, while Lily had “rescued” a “lost” baby she found playing on the stairs and returned it to its parents — only to be told to mind her own business in language not suitable for a young lady’s ears. Finally, they gathered at the top of the stairs. Someone had propped open the door to the roof, so there was a dingy trickle of daylight. While Wolf took off his glasses and wiped his face on his sleeve, Sacha glanced at Lily to see how she was taking her first encounter with the tenements.

There was a large, sooty smear down the front of her white dress, and she was still catching her breath. But she seemed pretty calm, he thought.

Until she opened her mouth.

“How can people live like this?” she gasped. “They’re no better than animals! And those poor children! It’s enough to make you think the missionaries are right and they’d be better off in an orphanage!”

Sacha bit his tongue and turned away, thankful that the corridor was too dim for her to see the angry flush spreading across his face. “Let’s get this over with and get out of here,” he said. “Where are the stupid Wobblies anyway?”

“If you can’t figure that out,” Wolf drawled, “you might want to consider another line of work.”

And indeed, there was a huge banner strung over the last door on the left. The banner had been designed to be carried down the broad avenues of New York by a phalanx of demonstrating workers, not hung in a hallway barely wide enough for two people to squeeze past each other sideways. Bold purple letters marched across its face, spelling out one of Uncle Mordechai’s favorite rallying cries:

WITCHES OF THE

WORLD UNITE!

YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE

BUT YOUR CHAINS!

On the bright side, Sacha told himself as he trailed down the hallway after Wolf and Lily, things couldn’t possibly get any more ridiculous than this.

But of course things can always get more ridiculous — and usually do.

The boy who answered Wolf’s knock had carrot-colored hair that corkscrewed from his head like rusty springs popping out of a broken mattress. His bony wrists stuck out of his sleeves halfway up to the elbow, and his neck was so skinny that his tie looked like a hangman’s noose.

But worst of all was the expression on his face. It was eager, sweet, pathetically earnest. You knew as soon as you laid eyes on him that he was the kind of fellow who could be counted on to finish last every time, like the nice guy he was. Basically, he was the walking definition of a shlimazel. Or a shnook or a shmendrick or … well … there were a thousand pitying words in Yiddish to describe this kind of boy. And Sacha’s family could happily have spent a thousand years arguing over which word fit him best. But one thing they all would have agreed on the moment they laid eyes on him: this was one nice Jewish boy who should never, ever, ever be allowed out in public when there were goyim around.

“Greetings, comrades!” the young man cried before any of them had a chance to speak. “Long live the Revolution!”

“Umm … yes,” Wolf said. “Who’s in charge here?”

“I am.” He reached out to shake Wolf’s hand, and his coat sleeve rode up so far that Sacha could have sworn he saw an elbow. “Moishe Schlosky at your service!”

Sacha squinted at Moishe, trying to remember if he’d seen him before. Could this be the skinny redhead his father had been teasing Bekah about? But no, that was impossible. the very idea of plump, pretty, vivacious Bekah with this fellow was ridiculous. There were thousands of skinny redheads on the Lower East Side, and if Bekah was seeing one of them, it definitely wasn’t this one!

“Aren’t you a little … er … young?” Wolf asked.

“What’s young? I’ve been a presser at Pentacle since I was eleven. and most of the seamstresses are younger than me.” Moishe assumed a heroic stance — or, rather, a stance that would have been heroic if anyone else had assumed it. “The youth is our future!”

“Do you mind if we come in? This might take a while.”

“Say,” Moishe exclaimed as Sacha followed Wolf into the apartment, “aren’t you Bekah’s little bro—”

“No!”

“But—”

“I live uptown! Never been here in my life! You must be thinking of someone else!”

“Wha—?” Moishe said, his face frozen into a comical look of surprise. “Oh! right! Definitely!”

Moishe was a pathetically bad liar. Not that that was a surprise, Sacha thought sourly. He hoped the Pentacle workers weren’t depending on Moishe’s bargaining skills to end the strike. With that kind of talent on their side, they’d end up paying Morgaunt to let them go back to work.

Luckily, Wolf and Lily were too busy staring at the chaos inside the tenement to notice Moishe’s bad acting.

It was a regular Babel. people — girls, mostly — were running around yammering at each other in Yiddish and Italian and English. One gaggle of girls was setting up rickety card tables. Another group was magically unpacking boxes of pamphlets and broadsheets — so enthusiastically that Sacha was sure one of those pieces of paper zinging around the room was going to give someone a nasty paper cut. A third group was huddled around the stove poring over the hot-off-the-presses evening edition of the Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker, which one of the girls seemed to be translating into Italian for the others.

“These are your strikers?” Wolf asked Moishe. “Aren’t there any grownups working at Pentacle?”

“The grownups are all bourgeois reactionaries,” Moishe said with a dismissive shrug. “They have to ‘make a living’ and ‘feed their families.’”

Wolf scrubbed a hand through his hair as if he thought the friction would help his brain work better. “Is there somewhere we can talk that’s a little more private?”

“Sure,” Moishe said. And stepped straight out of the open window.

Lily gasped.

“Well?” Moishe said, looking back in at them from the fire escape. “Are you coming or not?”

“Phew!” Lily whispered to Sacha as they stepped out the window behind Wolf. “I didn’t know there was a fire escape. I thought he was going to fly or something.”

Sacha gave her an incredulous look.

“Well, they are the Industrial Witches of the World, after all.”

“Witches don’t fly,” Sacha said scathingly. “You’ve been reading too many penny dreadfuls.”

“That’s ridiculous! And what do you know about witches anyway?”

Sacha decided he’d had it with Lily Astral’s know-it-all attitude. “A lot more than some Fifth Avenue debutante who’s using her daddy’s pull to make Wolf let her play at being an Inquisitor.”

Lily spluttered in fury, but Sacha was already stepping through the window onto the fire escape.

Outside, Sacha relished the fresh air and quiet — or rather the relative quiet, since Moishe was already talking Wolf’s ear off about how the Pentacle strike was going to blow the lid off Big Magic’s corporate conspiracy to keep down the working witch.

But eventually Wolf brought the conversation back around to Morgaunt’s accusation.

“You’re kidding me!” Moishe cried when he finally figured out what Wolf was getting at. “J. P. Morgaunt is accusing me of trying to assassinate Thomas Edison? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard! What are you going to do now, drag me off to jail and throw away the key until Morgaunt tells you to find it again?”

“Actually, no.”

“Why not?” Moishe sounded insulted, as if he actually wanted to be arrested.

“Because I don’t arrest children.”

Moishe put his hands on his hips and glared ferociously at Wolf. Sacha could tell that he was trying to look dangerous enough to be worth arresting. It wasn’t working.

Wolf managed to keep a straight face, though he did succumb to a suspicious fit of coughing. When he had recovered, he started explaining about the dybbuk.

“Dybbuk, shmybbuk,” Moishe scoffed. “There probably is no dybbuk.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s a red herring Morgaunt’s throwing out to distract people from the real crime.”

“What crime?” Wolf asked hopefully.

“Why, Morgaunt’s crime, of course. running a magical sweatshop!”

“Oh, right.” Wolf sighed. “That.”

“Everyone knows he pays off the Inquisitors to turn a blind eye to it. And then they go around shutting down mom and pop operations and hounding his competition out of business. and if he gets his way with that Etherograph of his, it’s only going to get worse. Magic-workers will become fugitives. They’ll have no choice but to take whatever rotten deal he gives them or the Inquisitors will deport them. I’m telling you, someone in this city has to stand up to him or—”

“Right … well … getting back to the dybbuk…” Wolf interrupted.

Moishe shrugged. “What do I know from dybbuks? I’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. The only people in the Lower East Side who know from dybbuks are rabbis. And they’re all just gutless bourgeois reactionaries who want us to let the Morgaunts of the world stomp all over us so we can reap our reward in heaven or Brooklyn—neither of which, allow me to point out, has ever been scientifically proven to exist.”

“But — but—” Sacha stammered, “Brooklyn — I mean, come on, Moishe! The subway stops there!”

“Hah! If you believe everything you read on a subway map, I’ve got a bridge to sell you!”

Sacha was still shaking his head when he followed Wolf and Lily downstairs. Wolf pushed through the front door, muttering something about a cab, and Sacha rolled his eyes. There hadn’t been a cab sighted on Hester Street in living memory!

Still, Wolf raised his hand and forged into the crowd like a swimmer wading into rough surf. And, sure enough, an energetic little horse came trotting around the corner just in time for its driver to jump down and usher Wolf inside.

“I’ll give you both a ride back to the office,” Wolf said while Sacha was still staring. “Otherwise you’ll never get home for dinner.”

Sacha hesitated. It was late afternoon by now, and it really didn’t make any sense for him to ride all the way back to Hell’s Kitchen just to take the subway home again. But he couldn’t think of any excuse for staying behind. So he climbed in, resigning himself to a long, pointless, expensive round trip.

By the time Sacha finally climbed out of the subway at Astral Place, night was falling.

He hurried nervously down the Bowery. It was that deserted time between rush hour and the after-dinner theater crowd. The only people on the sidewalks were tourists going slumming in Chinatown — and all the petty and not-so-petty criminals who preyed on them. The Elevated roared overhead every few minutes, spitting steam and coal dust. Every time it passed, Sacha looked around warily.

He sped up, trying to look tougher than he felt and telling himself he was only a few short blocks from home.

He had just passed the reassuring lights of the Metropole when he realized someone was following him. Within the space of a few ragged breaths, he went from wondering where that odd echo of his footfalls was coming from to knowing for dead certain that there was someone behind him.

He cursed himself for not having gone into the Metropole. Uncle Mordechai might have been there. Or at least someone he knew well enough to ask them to walk him home. But it was too late now. There was nothing for it but to keep going.

He turned the corner onto Hester Street, hoping to see a friendly face or two smiling at him from the front stoops of the tenements. But there was no one. The shoppers and pushcart peddlers were long gone. The cobblestones were littered with old food and bits of tailors’ clippings and sooty drifts of crumpled newspapers. Misshapen piles of crates and boxes loomed outside the shop fronts. Laundry dangled from the fire escapes like hanged men. Sacha had never seen Hester Street so silent and lifeless. Even the mannequins in the shop windows seemed to stare out at him with blank, uncaring expressions.

It was dark too. The Bowery was one of New York’s famous White Ways, lit up night and day with Edison’s new electric lights. But back in the narrow tenement streets, people still made do with gaslight. And not much of it either. The flickering halos around the occasional lampposts were only faint islands of light in an ocean of shadows.

Now he was a block from his building. Now half a block. Now three storefronts away. And still the footsteps sounded behind him. Not gaining on him, not falling back. Just following. Sacha felt like he was caught in one of those awful dreams where you run and run until you finally realize that the only way to wake up is to stop and let the monster catch you.

Finally, the urge to look back became unbearable. He glanced over his shoulder, trying not to be too obvious about it.

And there it was. A moving shadow just beyond the glow of the nearest streetlight. It was vague and indefinite and yet unmistakably there. He couldn’t see its face. But there was something unnervingly familiar about the set of its slim shoulders.

Sacha looked away, gauging the distance that still separated him from the front stoop of his own building. His legs trembled. His entire body tensed like a coiled spring. What if he made a mad dash for it? Would he make it? And what would happen if he didn’t?

It was only the briefest of glances, a flick of his eyes toward the stoop. No natural creature could have vanished into the shadows that quickly. Nonetheless, when he looked back the watcher was gone.

Sacha cast his eyes frantically around the silent street, but there was no sign of the shadowy figure. If it weren’t for the icy chill still upon him, he could almost have convinced himself he’d imagined it.

As he reached the third floor, he could hear his mother and father bickering affectionately with each other, and Bekah setting the table for dinner, and Uncle Mordechai chuckling over something in the Daily Magic-Worker. Sacha was just pausing outside the door for a final moment to enjoy the comfortable sounds of home when a skeletal hand reached out of the shadows to grip his shoulder.

He gasped and spun around, heart pounding — only to see Moishe Schlosky, of all people.

“Shhh!” Moishe whispered. “Stop shrieking like a girl!”

“I was not shrieking like a girl,” Sacha protested, torn between anger at Moishe and embarrassment about the admittedly somewhat high-pitched sound that had escaped him when he felt Moishe’s bony fingers on his shoulder.

“You were too. Anyway, never mind. I have to talk to you.”

“Fine, so talk to me like a normal person! Don’t sneak up on me in a dark hallway!”

“Do I look like the landlord?” Moishe asked comically. “Now it’s my fault there’s no lights in here?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Moishe! What do you want already?”

“A favor, just a favor. You’re working for that Inquisitor, right?

“So?”

“So you know what he’s up to and how his investigation is going.”

“I guess,” Sacha said reluctantly, not liking where this conversation was headed.

“Well, then couldn’t you just … you know … kind of keep me posted on it?”

“I could get fired for that!”

“Class solidarity demands it of you!”

Sacha guffawed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I dare you to say that again with a straight face.”

Inside the apartment the friendly voices were drowned out suddenly by the rapid-fire clatter of Mrs. Lehrer’s foot-powered sewing machine. It was probably Mo at the sewing machine, knocking off another dozen shirts while his wife fixed dinner before doing her nightly quota. It seemed a hard life suddenly — miles away from Lily Astral’s world of mansions and limousines.

“Is that all you want in life?” Moishe asked, as if reading Sacha’s thoughts. “To be an errand boy for the Carbuncles and Vanderbilks and Morgaunts? Don’t you believe in anything?”

“I believe in taking care of my family,” Sacha said stubbornly.

“Of course you do. We all do. That’s what your sister is working for, and a lot of other girls like her. We’re just asking you to help.”

“Well, ask someone else.”

“Look,” Moishe said, “couldn’t you just think about it?”

“Moishe, I’m not going to do it no matter how long I think about it.”

“Oh!” Moishe cried in a voice worthy of the mourners at the Wailing Wall. “Oh, that a nephew of Mordechai Kessler should have come to this!” He was still shaking his head when the door to Sacha’s apartment popped open and Bekah stuck her head out.

“Sacha!” she said. “What are you doing lurking in the stairwell! Dinner’s already on the ta—”

She caught sight of Moishe and stopped abruptly.

Sacha looked at Bekah. Then he looked at Moishe. Then he looked back at Bekah again. “Are you blushing?” he asked her.

“Don’t!” Bekah warned. “Don’t you dare say one more word!”

“Bekah—” Moishe began.

“And you!” she snapped, sounding uncannily like their mother. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble? Get out of here already!”

Moishe started to protest, but then he took one look at Bekah’s furious face, tucked his tail between his legs, and slunk away like a man who knew when he was beaten. Sacha couldn’t help grinning at the sight; obviously Bekah already had Moishe’s training well in hand.

Bekah held the door to their apartment open, but Sacha wasn’t ready to go inside yet.

“No way!” he said, just quietly enough to make sure their mother wouldn’t hear him. “Moishe Schlosky?”

“Oh, and I suppose you’re dating Mary Pickford? I’d bet good money you’ve never even kissed a girl!”

“Yeah, but … Moishe? He’s so … so … so skinny!”

“You are the most shallow, superficial, trivial—”

“Are you two waiting for the Messiah out there?” their mother shouted from inside the apartment. “Come in and sit down already! Dinner’s getting cold!”

Sacha was still shaking his head in amazement when he sat down to dinner. Indeed, he was so busy being amazed at the idea of Bekah being sweet on Moishe that he almost forgot Moishe’s outrageous idea that he ought to spy on Wolf for the strikers. As if he didn’t have enough problems already!

When the rest of his family was settling down for coffee and after-dinner chatter around the kitchen table, Sacha went to the window and cautiously lifted the curtain.

There was nothing there. No watcher in the shadows. No dark figure standing at the edge of the streetlights.

For some unfathomable reason, that made him feel worse instead of better. Who or what had been following him? And could it possibly be a coincidence that this silent watcher had first appeared on the very same night that Edison and Sacha’s mother had both been attacked?

He was still wondering about it when he got to work the next morning to find out that the dybbuk had tried to burn down Edison’s Luna Park Laboratory.