The Inquisitor's Apprentice

CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Rushing the Growler

THE NEXT MORNING Sacha nodded off on the subway and would have missed his stop completely if a large lady in a hat decorated with several pounds of passenger pigeon feathers hadn’t tripped over his foot and poked him with her parasol.

He’d been up half the night. When everyone else was asleep, he’d snuck out onto the fire escape with an armload of Grandpa Kessler’s Kabbalah books and shivered under the dim light of the street lamps while he read everything he could find about dybbuks.

It wasn’t pleasant reading. No one knew how to kill a dybbuk, short of killing its victim along with it. A dybbuk was part of you — like your arm or your leg or your heart. Once someone summoned it here, it was only a matter of time until it stepped into your skin and stole your life — and sent you back to spend all eternity in whatever hell dybbuks came from.

Some men had managed to survive having a dybbuk. But only great and pious rabbis. And even they hadn’t defeated their dybbuks. They’d only learned to live with them, like a man sharing his house with a half-tamed lion that would devour him the moment he let down his guard. As he read one terrible story after another, Sacha began to feel honestly sorry for Thomas Edison. If a dybbuk really was after him, he was worse than a dead man. And there wasn’t a thing anyone could do to save him.

Which meant that the only way for Sacha to protect his family was to find out who had really summoned the dybbuk.

Sacha was still racking his brain over how to do that when he got to work — which was how he managed to offend Philip Payton yet again.

The trouble started when he reached the Inquisitors Division headquarters just as Maximillian Wolf hopped out of a hansom cab.

“And how are you settling in to the job?” Wolf asked. “Any questions? Anything you need?”

Sacha thought Wolf was probably just being polite, but he supposed he had to say something. “Well… I guess a desk would be good. Or at least a chair?”

“That seems reasonable.” Wolf waved airily. “Just have a word with Payton. He’ll sort you out.”

But when they reached his office, Wolf blew through the anteroom without saying anything about it, and Sacha was left to muddle along on his own.

Lily Astral was already there, laughing with Payton as if the two of them were old friends. Sacha cleared his throat a few times, but no one noticed him.

“Uh … excuse me. I need someone to clean up a desk for me to work at?”

Payton turned to face him, one eyebrow raised in polite disbelief. “Do I look like a janitor?”

“Uh. no. But Inquisitor Wolf said—”

“I really think you must have failed to understand him correctly.”

“But—”

“Listen, Sandy—”

“Sacha.”

“Whatever. Let me explain how things work here. I’ll use short, simple words so you can understand me. I am the valued employee who keeps this office running like a well-oiled machine so that Inquisitor Wolf can solve crimes and catch criminals. You are a useless child whose only function is to gum up the works, get underfoot, and waste time that Inquisitor Wolf and I could be using to get real work done. So if you want a desk, go down to the basement and find one. On your own time. And meanwhile, you can make yourself slightly less useless by rushing the growler to the Witch’s Brew.”

And then Payton fished a dented old tin bucket from under his desk and tossed it casually (but very accurately) at Sacha’s head.

Sacha reached up a hand just in time to catch the bucket before it hit him. Then he stared at it in shock and disbelief until Lily snatched it from his hand and marched smartly out the door.

She looked as if she knew where she was going. But of course she couldn’t, or she would have been just as shocked as Sacha was.

Sacha had seen plenty of growlers in his day. He’d seen plenty of children rushing the growler, too — carrying it down to the local saloon to buy beer for their parents. It happened every day in every neighborhood of New York, despite all the laws that high-society do-gooders kept passing about selling liquor to minors. But Sacha had certainly never done it. Sacha’s father disapproved of anything stronger than seltzer water. And Sacha’s mother … well, to hear her tell it, rushing the growler was a one-way ticket up the river to Sing Sing prison’s fancy new electric chair. First came the childhood trips to fill it up for parents and aunts and uncles. Then came the scrounging of pennies to fill it for yourself. Then you were sliding down the slippery slope of mugging drunks, marrying a gun moll (or worse, a shiksa!), and signing on with Magic, Inc., as one of Meyer Minsky’s hired thugs.

And it all began with that first fateful trip to rush the growler. A trip Sacha was now being ordered to take as part of his official duties for the NYPD Inquisitors Division. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“Well,” Payton snapped, “what are you waiting for?” Without another word, Sacha turned and dashed out the door after Lily. He found her waiting for him about a third of the way down the long corridor. “So where is this Witch’s Brew?” she asked as soon as he caught up with her.

“How should I know? I’m not in the habit of frequenting gin joints.”

The door opened and Payton’s head emerged into the hallway. “Fifty-second between Eighth and Ninth,” he said, and vanished back into the office.

Sacha’s stomach sank. Lily might be oblivious to the meaning of that address, but that was only because she’d grown up on Millionaire’s Mile. Sacha, on the other hand, came from the real New York. And in his city, neighborhoods were rigidly divided by ethnic group — and each neighborhood was fiercely defended by its own magical street gangs. The Lower East Side was Jewish: you didn’t set foot there without Magic, Inc. knowing your business. Chinatown was controlled by Confucian spellbinders and Immortals. Little Italy was the realm of the Italian folk witches called streganonnas. and Hell’s Kitchen belonged to the toughest Irish gang in town: the Hell’s Kitchen Hexers.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Lily tossed her blond hair and marched off down the stairs without so much as a glance at Sacha. Did she just expect him to trot along behind her like a lapdog? Obviously she did! He muttered something rude under his breath about bossy women. But he didn’t really have a choice, so in the end he followed her.

Within a few blocks, however, Sacha’s outrage melted into bewildered amusement. Either Lily Astral didn’t know the meaning of the word fear or she’d never walked down a New York City sidewalk before. She’d seemed reasonably normal when they were just following in the wide wake of Inquisitor Wolf’s flapping coattails. But on her own she was a public menace.

She marched straight down the middle of the sidewalk like it was her personal property and she expected everyone else to step aside and make way for her. And the weirdest part of it was that most people did step aside. As soon as they saw her coming, they just sort of slid out of her way like tugboats clearing the harbor for a luxury ocean liner.

The only catch was that not everyone could see Lily coming. Sacha cringed as she sailed from one near disaster to the next. Bicyclists. Delivery boys. A dry grocer’s clerk staggering along under stacked bolts of muslin and cotton. A handcart operator pushing a leaning tower of metal filing cabinets.

Lily was cheerfully oblivious to it all. In fact, the only thing Lily was not oblivious to was food. She kept making lightning-quick detours to investigate edible items in storefronts and on passing pushcarts. Most of them met with her immediate approval, and she seemed to possess an inexhaustible supply of pocket change. This made it really hard to get anywhere. And really frustrating for Sacha, who had to say no again and again because he was pretty sure that half the stuff she was eating wasn’t even within spitting distance of being kosher.

“Don’t they feed you at home?” he asked after he’d watched her devour a pretzel, a chicken potpie, two oranges, and more candy than he and Bekah saw in a month.

“Sure, but my mother’s from New England.”

“So?”

“So have you been there?” she asked in a decidedly odd tone of voice.

Sacha hesitated, not sure what she was getting at and not wanting to sound foolish. If it had been anyone but Lily Astral, he would have suspected a joke. “No,” he said finally.

“Well, if you ever do go — take food.”

He glanced sharply at her. Was that a glint of laughter in the cool blue depths of her eyes? Did Lily Astral actually have a sense of humor? It looked like she did. And now she was even smiling at him.

He’d barely started to smile back when she stepped in front of an omnibus.

Sacha jerked her back from the rails just as the frothing draft horses were about to trample her flat.

“There’s no need to panic,” she said loftily. “Horses don’t step on people. They would have gone around me. I’ve seen it happen all the time at the polo grounds.”

“But they can’t go around you. The omnibus is on rails!”

“Really?” She peered down at the steel streetcar rails as if she’d never seen such a thing. “How remarkable! When did they put those in?”

Finally he managed to shepherd her safely over to West Fifty-second — only to discover a new danger looming between them and their goal.

“Look!” Lily exclaimed as they turned the corner onto Fifty-second Street. “There’s the Witch’s Brew. And finally some peace and quiet too! What a relief!”

Sacha wasn’t so sure about that. Peace and quiet might be a good thing on the calm, tree-lined streets where Lily lived. But in the New York Sacha knew, a quiet street was a dangerous one. And this street was far too quiet. Between them and the Witch’s Brew stretched a wasteland of blank walls and boarded-up storefronts. Half the block was nothing but a weedy abandoned lot. A huge hand-lettered sign on the jagged fence enclosing the lot read

ALL BOYS CAUT

IN THIS YARD

WILL BE DEALT WITH

ACCORDEN TO LAW

Sacha was just about to say that they might want to take the long way around to the Witch’s Brew when he heard the unmistakable crack! of a bat connecting with a baseball. The ball streaked out of the abandoned lot, bounced off a boarded-up window, and rolled down the sidewalk toward them. An instant later, a dozen raggedly dressed teenagers swarmed after it. The smallest stood a head taller than Sacha, and their bold swaggers and outlandish costumes — one of them even wore a stolen policeman’s hat — marked them as Hell’s Kitchen Hexers.

“Hey, look!” one of them jeered. “It’s Dopey Benny Schleptowitz and his gun moll Irma!”

That set off a chorus among his ragtag little pack of hangers-on:

“Hey, Dopey!”

“Hey, Schleptowitz!”

“Hey, Irma!”

“Coochie coochie coochie coochie!”

“Other way!” Sacha told Lily, grabbing hold of her wrist and giving her a sharp tug backward as the Hexers came toward them.

“Why? they’re just a bunch of harmless kids—”

“Just go!” Sacha yelled.

Maybe it was the look of terror on his face, or maybe it was the fact that the “harmless” kids had already started to come after them. But for once Lily didn’t try to argue.

Five minutes later they had made it around the block from the other direction and were pushing through the front door of the Witch’s Brew.

The first thing Sacha noticed was the smell of beer. It wasn’t even ten in the morning, but the rich, yeasty perfume of triple stout already hung in the air like fog. Cigar smoke curled lazily around the cast-iron Corinthian columns and lent an underwater pall to the beveled mirrors and stamped tin ceiling. Electric ceiling fans whined and creaked overhead like propellers churning their way through a beery sea.

One side of the cavernous room housed a forlorn-looking coffee bar where a waiter was reading the newspaper behind a gold-plated coffee boiler. On the other side of the room — the side all the customers were on — was a brass-railed bar stocked with every kind of hard liquor Sacha had ever seen in his life and many he hadn’t. Earlier shifts of drinkers had scuffed the bar rail and strewn the floor with broken shot glasses and abandoned lottery tickets. Several of the faces that turned to stare at the two children as the doors swung closed behind them were flushed and bleary-eyed.

The Witch’s Brew was clearly a serious drinking establishment — and serious drinking had already been under way for many hours today.

“Well, well!” said the mountainous Irishman behind the bar. “If it isn’t Little Miss Muffet and Little Lord Fauntleroy!” He leered alarmingly at the children. His teeth were the size of coat pegs. They looked like coat pegs too: long and widely spaced and oddly rounded. It was quite unsettling.

Before he could lose his nerve, Sacha stepped up to the bar and held up the growler. “I want this filled up,” he said, trying to sound like a busy grownup with better things to do than waste time trading insults with bartenders.

“Do you, now? Well, come back in about eight years, and I’ll be happy to oblige.”

Before Sacha could argue, the man pointed to the hand-lettered sign that hung on the mirror behind him. Judging by the spelling, it must have been penned by the same person who’d painted the sign in the abandoned lot down the street:

WE SURVE NO MINERS!

“I’m sure,” said the bartender with elaborate and completely insincere courtesy, “that such fine young ladies and gentlemen as yourselves can read a simple sign without my help. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be getting me in trouble with the police. No, I imagine that’d be the furthest thing from your innocent young minds. I think you’d best be on your way now. Send my kind regards to Commissioner Keegan. And remind him I’ve already paid this month. Nice and regular, like always. So if he’s going to sacrifice some poor bugger to the temperance ladies, it better not be me!”

Sacha turned away, his shoulders slumping in defeat. But Lily grabbed the growler from him and stepped up to the bar as if walking into a Hell’s Kitchen whiskey dive were all part of an ordinary day for her.

“But we’re not from Commissioner Keegan,” she said with a winning smile. “We’re Inquisitor Wolf’s apprentices. And he said you’d fill up his — grumbler — snarler — whatever you call it.”

The bartender’s face cracked into a grin that displayed both rows of coat pegs right down to their massive roots. “Inquisitor Wolf!” he exclaimed. “Well, and why didn’t you say so in the first place? Hey, Sean! Fire up Big Bertha! Wolf’s sent down for his morning coffee!”

Across the room, the apron-clad man leapt into action at the massive coffee machine. Minutes later, Lily and Sacha were trudging back toward the Inquisitors headquarters, their growler brimming with the strongest, blackest coffee Sacha had ever seen. Sacha was so busy feeling relieved and embarrassed that he only realized they’d turned the wrong way when a baseball whizzed out of the abandoned lot and hit him smack in the side of the head.

Lily caught the ball in midair as it bounced off his head, but before he had time to be amazed by this, they were surrounded by a jeering circle of boys.

They weren’t real Hexers, Sacha realized, just aspiring gangsters. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t beat up two skinny kids. One of them — a potato-nosed teenager who looked like he was about five pounds short of being able to sign onto the fireman’s local ladder company — jabbed Sacha in the chest, sending him stumbling backward. Another one was there to catch him, and for a while the two of them entertained themselves by batting Sacha back and forth like a tetherball. But they soon got bored with that and began casting around for something better to do.

“Let’s sell him a raffle ticket!” one of them cried.

“Yeah! a raffle ticket!”

“Who’s got a ticket?”

“Who’s got a hat fer him to pull it out of?”

“Whew! Your hat stinks, Riley! Don’t you never take a bath?”

“Bathin’s fer girls!”

Soon the hat was proffered and the tickets — grubby scraps of newspaper — were tipped into it for Sacha to draw. Sacha had been shaken down by street kids many times before, so he sighed in resignation and prepared to do his part. Lily, on the other hand, didn’t seem to know the script at all.

“Aren’t you going to tell us how much it costs?” she demanded. “And what’s the prize? And why should we buy anything from you in the first place?”

“’Cause we’re the Hexers.”

“So?”

The boy’s eyes narrowed in anger. “Hey, Ratter,” he called without taking his eyes off Lily. “Why don’t you show her what you can do.”

A scrawny boy stepped out from the little cluster of Hexers, grinning nervously. “What d’you want, Joe? Hives or Boils?”

Joe hesitated. But before he could answer, a third boy chimed in. “Aw, can’t you do any better’n that, Ratter? It’s been nothin’ but hives an’ boils all month long. We’re gonna be the laughingstock of the neighborhood if you don’t come up with some new hexes soon!”

“Did I ask for your opinion?” Joe said scathingly. He turned back to the scrawny hex caster. “Give ’er the hives, Ratter!”

“Now, look,” Sacha interrupted, putting his hands up. “I’m sure we can work this ou—”

But it was too late. even as Sacha spoke, angry red welts were spreading across Lily’s perfect peaches and cream complexion.

“Oh!” she cried, putting her hands to her face as if she was desperately trying not to scratch at them.

“Now, now, boys,” said a voice from over Sacha’s shoulder. “Is that any way to treat a lady?”

Their rescuer turned out to be a handsome boy a few years older than Lily and Sacha, with an open, friendly face and impossibly blue eyes that sparkled with barely contained laughter. He looked like the kind of nice Irish boy even Sacha’s mother would approve of.

When Sacha looked back over at Lily, her hives had vanished and she was practically swooning in gratitude. He would never have imagined she could act so silly.

“Thank you!” she fluttered. “Thank you so much, Mr. … well, I don’t even know your name, do I?”

The young man sketched a humorous bow. “Paddy Doyle at your service, miss.”

Sacha frowned. he was sure he’d heard that name before. But he didn’t have time to remember where, because the Hexers were exploding into wails of outrage and frustration.

“Paddy!” Joe yelped. “You ain’t gonna let ’er off buyin’ a ticket just ’cause she’s a girl, are you?”

“For sure I’m not.” Paddy turned his bright blue gaze on Sacha, and though he was still smiling, he didn’t look nearly as friendly as he had just a moment ago. “I believe the tickets are a nickel apiece. Or ten cents, if you’d prefer to pay for the young lady.”

“What?” Lily spluttered. “You’re not going to stop these — these—hooligans?”

“Actually,” Paddy explained in his charming Irish brogue, “I’m with the hooligans.”

He flashed Sacha and Lily a conspiratorial wink, as if to say they were all good friends and there was nothing to worry about. Sacha didn’t have any illusions, though. he shrugged in resignation and reached into his pocket for his subway money. But before he could fish out the coins, Lily opened her mouth again.

“How can you be such a cad?” she demanded, squaring off against Paddy with her hands on her hips.

“That’s the way of the wicked world, darlin’.”

Lily’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment she looked almost as formidable as Paddy Doyle. “Maybe so,” she snapped. “But I’m still not buying any stupid lottery ticket.”

Paddy’s smile broadened into an outright grin. “You got a better idea?”

“Actually, I do.”

Lily was still holding the Hexers’ baseball, and now she slapped it into the grimy hand of the closest Hexer and grabbed the bat from his slack-jawed neighbor. “One pitch. If I miss, we each owe you a nickel. If I hit a homer, you owe us a nickel. Every one of you.” She counted heads. “That makes sixty cents total.”

“But — you can’t!” Sacha said.

“Why not?” Lily asked curiously.

Sacha stared at the shiny blond hair, the immaculate white stockings, the frothy lace petticoats peeping out from under her dress. “Because you’re a girl!”

“I’ll have you know that Smith and Vassar have both fielded baseball teams for at least the last twenty years,” she declared as if that settled the matter beyond all question.

“And which professional league do Smith and Vassar play in?” Sacha asked sarcastically.

Lily rolled her eyes. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, what hole did you crawl out of? Haven’t you ever heard of Lizzie Arlington? Or the Bloomer Girls? Or — oh, never mind!” She broke off in disgust at the depths of his ignorance and stalked off across the vacant lot toward the upturned tin can that served the Hexers for home base.

Meanwhile, the Hexers had clearly accepted Lily’s bet. They were running out to take up their fielding positions — or maybe, Sacha thought cynically, just to cut off the escape routes.

Lily limbered up at the plate, spitting on her palms and kicking at the packed dirt of the empty lot like some tobacco-chewing slugger from the heart of the Yankees lineup. Sacha groaned inwardly at the thought of what the Hexers would do to them if Lily actually won. But then he told himself not to worry. She’d just swing and miss. And even if she didn’t miss, how hard could a girl really hit the ball?

Pretty hard, it turned out.

In fact, hard enough to send a blistering line drive shrieking across the abandoned lot to shatter a window in the neighboring tenement building.

After the glass shattered, there was a moment of stunned silence that seemed to stretch into eternity. Then three things happened all at once. A woman in curling papers leaned out the window and started screaming at them in language that would have shocked a dockworker. The Hexers scattered across the abandoned lot to hunt for their ball. And Lily rested the bat triumphantly on one toe and crowed, “that’ll be sixty cents please!”

Sacha couldn’t decide who was being more wildly optimistic: Lily or the Hexers. Sure, most of the time a ball bounced back off a window after cracking it. But Lily had hit that one harder than he’d ever seen a kid hit a ball. And if she thought the Hexers were going to pay up on their bet after she’d lost their baseball for them, she was crazy.

“Uh … maybe we should go now,” he said, tugging on her elbow.

Throughout all this, Paddy Doyle hadn’t moved a muscle. But now he laughed and said, “I wouldn’t wait around to collect if I were you. In fact, I’d get lost before they realize you put their ball straight through that nice lady’s window and they’re never gonna get it back again. Nice hit, by the way.” He grinned wickedly. “If you field as well as you bat, I might just have to fall in love with you.”

Sacha opened his mouth to demand that Doyle apologize for insulting Lily, but then he looked over at Lily and noticed to his annoyance that she didn’t look insulted at all. “Let’s get out of here,” he grumbled. “You’re never going to get your sixty cents. They probably don’t even have sixty cents. And if you stick around to ask for it, they’ll just wallop us.”

“Are you saying they made a bet they couldn’t deliver on?” Lily demanded, her eyes flashing with indignation. “That’s … why … why … that’s unsportsmanlike!”

“I happen to agree with you,” Paddy said, flashing his wicked smile again. “But I’ve a reputation to maintain, and I can’t afford to ruin it. Not even for pretty girls who play baseball.”

And then it really was too late. The Hexers descended on Sacha, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and dragged him behind a broken-down beer wagon. They didn’t bother with fancy footwork or pugilist’s rules; they just knocked him down and jumped on him. Lily hovered over the writhing pile, brandishing the bat, torn between the desire to help and the fear of seriously hurting someone. Finally she threw the bat away and waded in, armed only with her fists. Not that it did any good. Valiant though Lily might be, she was no taller than Sacha and even skinnier.

Which was why he was so surprised when one of the Hexers was suddenly jerked backward by a strong hand, just as he was about to land a crushing blow on Sacha’s nose.

He was even more surprised when he realized that the hand was attached to a crisply ironed shirt cuff and a seer-sucker suit sleeve.

“Payton!” he gasped. “What—”

“If you don’t mind,” Payton replied coolly, “I’d rather leave the explanations for later. I’m rather busy at the moment.”

The next few seconds went by so fast that Sacha only got a confused impression of flying limbs and scrabbling feet. When the dust cleared, the Hexers were on the run and Payton was calmly brushing off his trousers and inspecting his suit for damage.

Lily sat on the ground a few feet away from Sacha, sucking at a nasty cut on the back of her hand and staring at Payton with an expression that bordered on outright hero worship. “Wow!” she said. “That was better than a Boys Weekly story! What is it, judo?”

“Kung fu.”

“Can I learn it?”

“You’d better if you plan to go around insulting the Hell’s Kitchen Hexers on a regular basis.”

Meanwhile the Hexers were busy vanishing down the nearest alley — all except for Paddy Doyle, who was glaring at Payton with open hostility.

“Hello, Philip,” he said. He made it sound like a girl’s name. Or worse.

“Hello, Paddy. You might as well come back to the station with us. You really want the Inquisitors coming ’round to talk to your mother?”

“You leave my mum out of this! She’s got enough worries!”

“Shouldn’t you have thought of that before you added to them?”

“We can’t all be model citizens like you, Philip.”

“Come on, Paddy! You’re smarter than this. How’s it going to help your mom if you end up in jail like your brothers did?”

But Paddy wasn’t having it. “Wolf knows where to find me,” he said with a careless shrug of his shoulders. “Tell him that he can come talk to me at the Witch’s Brew anytime he likes. But he’d better leave you behind. Sullivan don’t allow no pets on the premises!”

Payton opened his mouth, looking like he was about to let loose some blistering reply to Paddy’s insult. But then he turned away and stalked off in stormy silence.

“Is that the same Paddy Doyle whose pig got loose in the Inquisitorial Quotient exam?” Sacha asked when he finally managed to catch up with Payton.

“It wasn’t his pig,” Payton spat furiously. “He’s too piss-poor shanty Irish to afford a pig. Or anything else he hasn’t stolen from someone who actually works for a living.”

“You know him?” Lily asked.

“I used to,” Payton said through clenched teeth. “We used to be best friends.”

“I suppose this means there’s no coffee?” Wolf asked forlornly when he saw their dirty clothes and battered faces.

“What?” Lily snapped. “You send this poor child out into the streets to get beaten up by hooligans, and you have the nerve to ask about your coffee?”

“I’m not a child!” Sacha protested. “I’m the same age you are. And why are you all talking about me as if I’m not here?”

Lily brushed Sacha’s protests aside. “Look what they did to him! Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”

“I’m going to do several things, as a matter of fact. First, I’m going to have Payton find the woman whose window you broke and offer to fix it. I must say, it’s a pity you didn’t get her name and apartment number. It would have saved a lot of trouble. But never mind. I’m sure we’ll get it all sorted out eventually. And meanwhile, I think it’s time you two paid a visit to the White Lotus Young Ladies’ Dancing and Deportment Academy.”

“The what?” Sacha protested.

But Wolf wasn’t listening. he was already hustling them down to the street and into yet another of the cabs that seemed to pop out of thin air whenever he wanted them. He called an address up to the driver and then turned back to Sacha and Lily with an air of suppressed excitement and a slight flush of color in his normally pale cheeks.

“We’re going to Chinatown,” he told them. “And when we get there, try to behave yourselves. You’re about to meet royalty.”