The Inquisitor's Apprentice

CHAPTER NINE. The Wizard of Luna Park

NEW YORKERS disagreed about everything else under the sun, but the one thing they all loved was Coney Island. On Coney Island, New Yorkers of every race, religion, and nationality banged elbows with one another in raucous harmony. a Jewish boy from Hester Street couldn’t venture into Hell’s Kitchen or Little Italy without risking injury to life and limb — not to mention pride. But on Coney Island he could mingle with Irish, Italian, German, and Greek boys, all of them bent on nothing more sinister than riding the rides and ogling the peep shows. Everyday jobs and responsibilities and loyalties were forgotten. Coney Island’s philosophy was live and let live. Or rather, play and let play.

Sacha had been there before, of course. Several times a year for as long as he could remember, he and Bekah had piled onto the nickel ferry with their father for the long ride to the famous amusement park. Mrs. Kessler never went; she insisted she had better things to do with her day off than walk up and down the boardwalk wearing out her shoes and gawping like a carp. But Mr. Kessler loved Coney Island. It was the one place in New York where he seemed to be able to forget his worries and just enjoy life. It was the one place in New York where Sacha could imagine that his father and Uncle Mordechai were actually brothers. If anyone had asked him, Sacha would have said he loved Coney Island — but, really, it wasn’t the rides he loved, or the boardwalk, or the hucksters and peep shows and shucked peanuts. It was the person his father turned into when they went there.

Going to Coney Island with Inquisitor Wolf, on the other hand, was a somewhat different experience.

Wolf whisked Sacha and Lily into a waiting cab and straight downtown to the Brooklyn Bridge. then he counted over the unimaginable sum of three dollars at the ticket window and ushered them into the quiet, middle-class luxury of the Prospect Park and Coney Island Railroad Company Special Express: nonstop to Coney Island in a blistering thirty-two minutes.

Wolf settled into one corner, put his long legs up on the seat, and frowned over a copy of the New York Tribune that he had bought from a newsboy, in between handing out money to three or four panhandlers. then he did the crossword puzzle. In ink. In ten minutes flat.

And then they were pulling into the station and Sacha was chasing Wolf’s flapping coattails off the train, down the platform, and under the echoing glass domes of the Coney Island Railway Terminal.

The first thing Sacha saw when he followed Inquisitor Wolf outside of the station was an elephant — or, rather, the Elephant. The Elephant Hotel was the single most famous thing on Coney Island. It was more famous than Luna Park. It was more famous than the Amazing Revolving Wheel of George W. G. Ferris. Indeed, the Elephant so dominated the amusement park’s exotic skyline that “seeing the Elephant” had become New York slang for every kind of forbidden pleasure.

The Elephant stood in the middle of a vast courtyard whose ornate balconies made it look like the product of a head-on train wreck between the Taj Mahal and the Flatiron Building. Its massive front legs housed a cigar store and diorama. Its back legs enclosed twin spiral staircases (one for going up, one for going down). The balloon-shaped body boasted a shopping concourse and guest rooms, all suspended over six giddy stories of open air by massive steel girders hidden in its wrinkled gray belly. The head contained an astronomical observatory (though critics scoffed that the only “stars” anyone was ever likely to see from this observatory were the electric lights on Luna Park’s Loop the Loop). And high above the rest of Coney Island, at the very summit of the Elephant's great humped spine, perched the World-Famous Starlite Ballroom, Playground to Celebrities and Royalty.

Between the Elephant Hotel and Luna Park ran Surf Avenue. Surf Avenue was sheer pandemonium. Persian palaces jostled Chinese pagodas. Lapland reindeer rubbed shoulders with camels and snake charmers. Sudanese sheiks mingled with South Sea Island mermaids to the wild strains of fiddling Gypsies and Sioux medicine drummers. And that wasn’t even mentioning the rides and the freak shows.

Everywhere Sacha turned, he saw signs advertising Coney Island’s famous (or in some cases, infamous) amusements:

ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH

to Ride the

Shoot-the-Chutes?

Do You DARE

Witness the World Debut of the

TASMANIAN DEVIL BOY?

SEE JOLLY TRIXIE!

It Takes Seven Men to HUG HER!

“Holy Smoke! She’s fat,

she’s awful fat!”

Every sign promised newer, wilder, faster, freakier thrills. And if the signs were blunt, the hucksters calling out from every doorway were even blunter:

“See Little Cairo dance the hootchy-kootchy! Hottest show on earth! If it weren’t for Coney Island’s cool ocean breezes, she’d burn up in her own fire!”

“Step right up, folks! Don’t be shy! See the Mighty Atom in action! Feel his muscles! Hear his story! Watch his mind-boggling feats of strength! Ev-er-y ticket comes complete with a free copy of Bodybuilding for the Millions!”

“Don’t dawdle!” Wolf called out from far up the boardwalk.

Sacha tore his eyes away from Bodybuilding for the Millions. “Sorry! Just coming, sir!”

When he caught up, Sacha found Lily happily sampling a very different kind of Coney Island attraction. Somehow she’d found time to buy a huge ring of fried dough.

“Want some?” she asked him through a cloud of powdered sugar.

It smelled awfully good. But he didn’t want her to think they didn’t feed him at home. And anyway, God only knew what they fried those things in.

“No thanks.”

They were at the gates of Luna Park now, and even Lily couldn’t help staring in amazement. It looked like the entrance to a Turkish seraglio, complete with crescent moons and minarets. Every square inch of the building was encrusted with twinkling electric lights. Sacha had never seen anything like it, even on the Bowery. It was like looking at a building made of stars. And the inside of Luna Park was even more dazzling than the outside. Rides, amusements, exhibition halls: everything blazed with that clear, sharp, starlike electric light. It was brilliant even in the middle of the day. Sacha couldn’t imagine how spectacular it must be after nightfall.

When they finally reached Edison’s laboratory, they found the Wizard of Luna Park doing what he did every morning from precisely 8:13 a.m. to 10:09 a.m., excepting Sundays: sitting in his Inventing Chair, inventing.

Before Edison, inventors had been quaint, gentlemanly eccentrics who dabbled in science for the pure pleasure of it. But Edison had done for inventing what Henry Ford had done for motorcars and Cornelius Vanderbilk had done for railroads and J. P. Morgaunt had done for steel mills and shirtwaist factories and practically every other modern American necessity. Edison had turned inventing into big business.

Every minute of Edison’s time was scheduled down to the last second. Every experiment, every idea, every stray thought was recorded in his famous notebooks just in case it turned out to contain the seed of a valuable invention. Plus, Edison didn’t just wait around for inspiration to strike. He went out and hunted it down.

That was where the Inventing Chair came in. It was a straight-backed wooden chair with paddle-shaped arms. The right-hand arm broadened into a writing desk like the ones children used at school. Two objects rested on it: a sharpened pencil and a black-bound laboratory notebook.

When Wolf and his apprentices arrived, Edison was just sitting there with his hands hanging over the fronts of the chair arms and his head nodding drowsily. In each hand he held a steel ball bearing. Beneath his hands — carefully positioned to catch the ball bearings when they dropped — were two tin pie plates.

“What’s he doing?” Lily whispered.

“Inventing.”

“If you ask me, it looks more like sleeping.”

“Well … it is, sort of. He has his best ideas just as he’s falling asleep, and he used to forget them overnight. Now he falls asleep under scientifically controlled conditions so he can record his ideas before he forgets them.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Lily used that word a lot, Sacha had noticed. Usually about people who didn’t agree with her.

A moment later, Edison’s eyes closed. His head nodded onto his chest. His hands relaxed. The pair of ball bearings dropped from his fingers and clattered into the waiting pie plates … and Edison started upright, snatched up his pencil, and began writing furiously.

He scribbled down several pages’ worth of notes, and then reread them with a puzzled look on his face. “Hmm. Moving pictures people can watch in their own homes? It’s a nice idea, but I don’t see how anyone’s ever going to make money off it.”

Then he shrugged, turned the page, laid the notebook and pencil back on the arm of his chair, and bent down to pick up the ball bearings again.

“Excuse me, Mr. Edison,” his assistant interrupted. “Inquisitor Wolf is here to see you.”

“Oh — of course!” He hurried over to shake Wolf’s hand. “Welcome, Inquisitor! And let me say what an honor it is to meet you. The great Maximillian Wolf, bane of witches, bulwark of freedom, defender of the American way! In short, a real American hero!”

“Er … quite,” Wolf answered coolly.

Edison didn’t appear to notice Wolf’s lack of enthusiasm. “I’ve arranged a little demonstration for you. Nothing formal, you understand. the etherograph is still in its early stages. We’ve got our work cut out for us before the grand opening. Oh, yes, we’ll certainly be burning the midnight oil — or rather the midnight electricity.”

“Actually,” Wolf said, “I was hoping to ask you about last night’s attack.”

“A triviality,” Edison said with an airy wave. “Never mind that, the etherograph’s the thing!”

He led them over to the back corner of the lab. Sacha realized that this must have been where the fire was: a faint smell of smoke hung in the air, and the floor showed signs of hasty cleaning. Edison pointed to a cluttered lab table. But there was no etherograph on it. There were only advertisements for one.

They came in all shapes and sizes. There were ads for billboards, ads for subway stations, ads for omnibuses and trolley cars and railway sidings. The etherograph in the ads looked a lot like the Edison Portable Home Phonograph Sacha had seen in ads all over the city for the last few months. It had the same fluted speaker horn and the same lunchbox-shaped metal body, the same hinged top that you flipped up to insert a fresh cylinder. But the etherograph’s top was emblazoned with a screaming eagle that looked just like the eagle on an Inquisitor’s badge, and beneath the eagle was stamped

Instead of the two blond girls from the home phonograph ads, the etherograph ads featured a dark-skinned wizard cowering in front of a heroic blond Inquisitor. This Inquisitor was too handsome to look much like Inquisitor Wolf — or, for that matter, any other real person Sacha had ever met. But the artist had made the wizard very realistic in a mean-spirited, nasty kind of way.

That long, pointed nose that arched like an eagle’s beak. Those unhealthily thin cheeks with their sharply carved worry lines. The dark eyes, with even darker circles of exhaustion under them. They all looked terribly familiar to Sacha. In fact, the wizard looked like Sacha’s father. Or like his father would have looked if he were in the habit of going around with a five-day beard and dressing up in ridiculous penny-opera Kabbalist’s robes embroidered with satanic symbols.

It was a brilliant ad. There wasn’t a thing that Sacha could have improved upon.

He hated it.

“Thrilling,” Wolf said, though he couldn’t have sounded less thrilled if he’d actually slipped into a coma right in front of their eyes. “And is there an actual etherograph to go with the advertisements?”

“But you saw it yourself at Morgaunt’s libra—”

Wolf silenced Sacha with a flick of his wrist.

“Of course there’s an etherograph … or rather, that is to say, there will be.” Edison gave a nervous little laugh. “Mr. Morgaunt has placed a great deal of operating capital in my hands, and I don’t intend to disappoint him!”

Edison turned away from Wolf to fix the two apprentices with the piercing blue gaze for which he was famous. “What can you tell me about etheric force?” he asked them.

Sacha thought this was a pathetically obvious attempt to change the subject, so he hesitated and glanced at Wolf instead of answering.

Lily, on the other hand, was way too much of a know-it-all to keep her mouth shut. “It’s what witches use to do magic. Everyone knows that.” She pointed at Sacha. “And he can see it!”

Suddenly everyone was staring at Sacha.

“I don’t do it on purpose,” he said, feeling like he had to apologize to Edison for beating his prototype into production. “It just … happens.”

“Humph!” Edison snorted. “Well, never mind that. I haven’t got all day. I’m already three minutes and twelve seconds behind schedule.”

He strode into the darkest corner of the lab where Sacha could just make out a hulking, misshapen something crouching in the shadows under an oil-stained dustcloth. Edison whisked the cloth away with a flourish that reminded Sacha of his Uncle Mordechai. Come to think of it, there were a lot of things about Edison that reminded Sacha of Uncle Mordechai. He wondered suddenly how much of Edison’s inventing was science and how much was showmanship.

“Behold the Edison Portable Etheric Emanation Detector!” Edison cried.

It was as big as a cookstove. Mismatched gear casings and switch boxes were soldered and bolted onto every visible surface of the machine and connected to one another by a tangled bird’s nest of rubber tubes and copper electrical wires. And on the floor beneath the etherograph, a motley collection of pie tins and cracked tea saucers collected the oily fluid that leaked from every joint and valve of the machine.

“Ahem,” Edison said with a rather silly look on his face. “The, er, prototype.”

Sacha stared at the thing in astonishment. It looked nothing like the etherograph in the ads — or like the machine they’d seen in Morgaunt’s library. Had that one simply been for playing the cylinders, not recording them? Or was there more than one etherograph — more than one design, even? Wolf seemed to be wondering the same thing.

“It doesn’t look much like the advertisement,” he pointed out.

“Yes, well, we have several weeks before the grand opening. And anyway, packaging is ninety-nine percent of the battle when it comes to selling a new product to the public. And this product will sell. Oh, yes! Mark my words, in five years there’ll be one in every police station in the country! And after that … well, Inquisitor, the rest is up to you!”

Wolf just gazed stolidly at Edison. He didn’t voice an opinion. He didn’t even seem to have an opinion. It was amazing what a chameleon the man was. Sometimes he looked so subtle and clever and humorous that Sacha could imagine him lounging around the Café Metropole with Uncle Mordechai. But back at Morgaunt’s house he’d looked like a butler. And now he looked like a dumb Irish cop who didn’t have a thought in his head except where the next beer was coming from.

Wolf’s dumb-cop look had an amazing effect on Thomas Edison. The inventor seemed to feel that Wolf was accusing him of something, and the silent accusation cut deeper than fine words and flowery speeches ever could. Edison drew himself up to his full height with an outraged look on his face. He was clearly getting ready to put Wolf in his place. But then all the air seemed to go out of him.

Suddenly he wasn’t the Wizard of Luna Park anymore. Suddenly he was just plain Tom Edison. It looked as if some tiny puppet master inside of him had packed up his props and gone home, leaving behind only the bare bones of the empty theater.

“You think I like this?” he asked forlornly. “I didn’t get into inventing to deport people. If I had my way, I’d be working on moving pictures. Funny ones! Romantic ones! Movies that would make people forget their troubles and have fun for a few hours! That’s what I’d rather be doing. But I only invent things. I can’t make people go out and buy ’em. And laughter and romance don’t sell. Fear sells. Witch hunts sell.”

Wolf raised his eyebrows slightly at this — which for Wolf was a big reaction.

“Could we see a demonstration of the etherograph, if it’s not too much trouble?” he asked after a moment.

“Is that really necessary? I’m a very busy man, Inquisitor.”

“Someone’s trying to kill you, Mr. Edison. Don’t you want to catch him?”

“Well, of course! It’s just that, er, actually, you see — the prototype doesn’t exactly work yet.”

Wolf blinked. “But we saw the recorded cylinders in Mr. Morgaunt’s library. He played one for us.”

“Oh! Well, that’s different.”

“How?”

“It’s quite technical. I’m sure you wouldn’t understand.”

Wolf gazed at Edison for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then he gave a little shrug and changed the subject. “Tell me about the dybbuk. Did it attack you this time? Or just try to set fire to the etherograph?”

“Er … both, sort of … or, rather, it’s hard to say.” Edison looked a little embarrassed. “You see, I crawled under the etherograph to get away from it. In the heat of the moment, you understand. And then it tried to drag me out, and then Rosie — ahem — well, that is to say, my laboratory assistant — chased it away.”

Wolf frowned. “What did you say this assistant’s name was?”

Edison cleared his throat and ran a hand around the inside of his collar as if he’d suddenly developed a rash. “I … well … Mrs. Edison, you understand. It would be most disruptive of my domestic felicity if word of this, er, person got out to the newspapers.”

Wolf raised his eyebrows. “And how did your … assistant chase the dybbuk away?”

“With a screwdriver. And, er, bubblegum.”

Wolf smiled. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone fighting off a dybbuk with bubblegum. It sounds like your lab assistant could give the police a lesson or two.”

“Oh! Yes! She’s a most remarkable girl. But, er, very respectable, you understand. It would be quite improper to involve her in a criminal investigation. I could never forgive myself if…”

Wolf gave Edison another of his bland looks, and some silent message seemed to pass between the two men. Sacha smothered a grin. He had a feeling Edison was going to be much more cooperative from now on.

After that, they searched the lab. Sacha had been looking forward to this part. After all, Maximillian Wolf was the best Inquisitor in the NYPD, and searching magical crime scenes was what Inquisitors did best. Sacha figured he’d learn a lot from watching Wolf in action.

He didn’t.

As far as he could see, the only evidence Wolf collected from the lab was a dried-up wad of lime green chewing gum and a long, red, curly strand of hair. He seemed to stumble on them largely by accident, since he spent most of his time staring into space as if he were a thousand miles away. And Sacha wasn’t even sure Wolf thought they were evidence, since all he did was stick them in his pocket. Maybe he was just helping Edison clean up after the fire.

In the end, it was Sacha himself who found the big clue. In the dusty shadows under the etherograph something small and silver glinted. Without thinking, Sacha dropped to his stomach, stretched his arm under the machine, and grabbed for it.

The thing came loose with the little ping of a delicate chain breaking. It was a silver locket. The front was engraved with filigreed leaves and flowers. The back read “to Ruthie from Danny” in Yiddish. And inside the locket were three silken locks of baby hair.

Sacha stared at them, still too bewildered to be afraid.

He barely heard Lily when she came up behind him and said, “Hey, look what Sacha found!”

“Sharp eyes,” Wolf said. “Good job there.”

Sacha mumbled a reply, but his head was spinning and he barely knew what he was saying. Then Wolf reached for the locket — and before he could even think about what he was doing, Sacha closed his hand around it.

For a moment no one moved. There was a strange, subterranean roar in Sacha’s ears, like the rumble of an approaching subway car. He could hear Wolf and Lily speaking to him, but they seemed very far away.

Then something compelled him to look up into Wolf’s face. They locked gazes. Wolf’s eyes were so pale that they looked almost transparent. Sacha felt like a rabbit cowering between the paws of some arctic predator.

Then the moment passed, and Wolf was his normal self again. “Sacha? I need to look at that. Please?”

Sacha opened his hand and let Wolf take the locket. Wolf looked at the locket’s contents and then turned it over to inspect the inscription. “It’s Yiddish. Can you read it?”

“No!” Sacha gasped in a cold sweat of panic.

And that was Sacha’s second lie.