The Inquisitor's Apprentice

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. Up the River

WOLF’S INQUIRIES at the Patent Office must have paid off, because a few days later he received a thick envelope by special courier from Washington, vanished into his office to read it — and then abruptly announced that they were off to see a Mr. Worley in Ossining.

“Ossining?” Lily said with a predatory gleam in her eye. “You mean he’s been sent up the river? We’re going to visit him in the slammer?”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Wolf said mildly. “But he only lives there. Believe it or not, lots of perfectly innocent people do.”

“How vexing of them!”

“Quite.” Wolf checked his watch. “We can just make the one twenty train if we leave now.”

As he hurried along behind Wolf, Sacha couldn’t help marveling at his new life. Who would have imagined a boy from Hester Street would be climbing onto a real train with a ticket in his hand that cost more than all the clothes he owned put together, in the company of an NYPD Inquisitor and a high-society debutante? He glanced at Lily, but she seemed to think that taking a real honest-to-goodness train was nothing at all out of the ordinary. He imitated her blasé expression and told himself he’d better not stare too much.

But of course that was impossible. From the minute they stepped into the lofty waiting room of Grand Central Station, Sacha was confronted with one wonder after another. Grand Central’s magnificent glass-roofed train shed rivaled the Eiffel Tower as one of the engineering marvels of the age. But in New York the pace of progress was so frenetic that it was already considered out of date — and a public safety hazard to boot. It had been slated for demolition for years, in fact, and the only reason it was still standing was that Cornelius Vanderbilk and Tammany Hall were fighting over who would get the lion’s share of the bribes that needed to be paid before construction could begin.

Sacha had read that Vanderbilk planned to fund the construction (and the bribes) by burying the train tracks and building an entirely new street on top of them. It was supposed to be called Park Avenue — probably in the hopes that people would forget it was sitting on top of a train yard — and the boosters and speculators were hard at work convincing people to buy, buy, buy. But looking out the window at the blighted wasteland of slaughterhouses and shantytowns that was the Upper East Side, Sacha couldn’t believe any decent person would ever want to live here.

Soon there were better things to look at, though. they passed the polo grounds, where the Yankees played. Morning practice had already begun, and Lily glued her nose to the window next to Sacha while they tried to spot their favorite players.

“I guess you go to games all the time,” he said wistfully.

“Only stupid, boring polo,” she sighed disgustedly. “My mother disapproves of letting young ladies watch baseball.”

Then the polo grounds were behind them and the train was launching itself off Manhattan’s northern summit and rattling across the soaring trestles to the mainland. Sacha had thought they were going fast before, but now they were fairly flying. They shot along the rails mere feet above the glittering sweep of the Hudson River. They were now farther north than Sacha had ever been. He thought about how the Hester Street housewives called the Bowery “America,” even though it was only a few blocks from home. But this really was America. and it seemed to go on forever. Sacha had never seen so much water. Or such cliffs. Or a sky so vast that the flocking seagulls seemed lost in its blue infinity.

Wolf tapped him on the shoulder. “Have a look at this.”

He was pulling a thick sheaf of papers out of his pocket. They were freshly pulled blueprints; Sacha could see the cyanotype-blue ink staining Wolf’s fingertips as he handled them. Wolf spread the pages out on the train seat so Sacha and Lily could see them.

They were from the Patent Office — stamped reproductions of the technical drawings that Thomas Worley had originally submitted to obtain the patent on his Soul Catcher. And the device shown in page after page of detailed drawings was identical in almost every point to Edison’s etherograph.

“So Edison stole the etherograph from Worley?” Lily asked.

“Not stole, bought.”

“But shouldn’t he give him credit, then? And why would he do that anyway? Just so he could say it was his idea and people would think he was a great inventor?”

Wolf shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe there really is some difference between the two machines that we don’t understand yet. That’s why I need to talk to Worley.”

Wolf put the drawings away, looking thoughtful, and they passed the rest of the train ride in silence. Wolf had bought a whole collection of morning papers — in between his usual contributions to New York’s panhandling population — and he was reading them with the occasional raised eyebrow or snort of amusement. Lily had curled up in one corner of their compartment and gone to sleep. And Sacha was free to stare out the window to his heart’s content.

He couldn’t get over how green everything was, or the way the endless forest seemed to roll to the horizon in every direction. People must live here, but he couldn’t see any sign of them beyond the occasional distant road or church steeple. How could there be so much empty space in the world? And this was just one small corner of New York State, which was just one small corner of the United States! It was hard to understand why people got so upset about immigrants. It looked to Sacha like you could move all of Italy, Ireland, and Russia put together into the Hudson River valley and no one would even notice the difference.

But of course it wasn’t lack of space that made so many Americans hate immigrants the way they did. And even the beautiful scenery couldn’t keep Sacha from brooding over the dybbuk. What would Inquisitor Wolf do if Sacha told him about it? Would he help? Could he help? Or would the Inquisitors just arrest every Kessler in sight and let a jury of “real” Americans sort the guilty from the innocent?

Lily woke up just as they passed Sing Sing prison and started asking Wolf a bunch of ridiculous questions: Could his Inquisitor’s badge get him in there? (It could.) How many criminals had he personally sent there? (Too many.) And had any of them been put to death in Thomas Edison’s electric chair? (If they had, he wasn’t saying.)

Sacha looked up at the grim gray walls with their jagged crowns of barbed wire and shuddered. If Wolf’s investigation took an unlucky turn, it was all too possible that his grandfather could end up in this awful place. A wave of breathless panic swept over him. His chest felt like it was being squeezed by iron bands. He prayed Wolf wouldn’t look at him.

Luckily Wolf was too busy answering Lily’s endless questions to even notice Sacha. And by the time they passed beyond the prison and chugged into Ossining’s regular commuter station, Sacha had more or less recovered.

The three of them climbed off the train, stretching stiff legs and backs, and set off up the steep hill that rose from the river to the town. From what Sacha could see, Ossining was more like a park than a place for people to live. Spreading trees shaded acre after acre of soft green grass. And the gingerbread-swathed houses dotted here and there upon the greensward looked barely substantial enough to keep the weather out.

The Worley house was as elegant and gracious as any of the other homes on its quiet street — or at least it would have been if the lawn hadn’t been littered with furniture, books, cooking implements, piles of bedding, and pretty much everything else that ought to have been inside the house.

At first Sacha thought the Worleys must have failed to pay their rent and been kicked to the curb by their landlords. He’d certainly seen that happen enough times on Hester Street to know what it looked like. But he couldn’t believe that sort of thing went on in this neighborhood. And even if it had, he would have expected to see the children of the family sitting on top of the piles of furniture to protect them from petty thieves while their parents ran around frantically trying to find a new and cheaper place to rent.

Instead of children, the Worleys’ yard was full of hard-eyed men who were all stalking around inspecting the furniture as if they were trying to decide how much to pay for it. And sure enough, Wolf had no sooner set foot on the front walkway than a sweaty little man with piggy eyes thrust a price sheet into his hands and told him to look sharp because the auction was going to start in eight minutes.

“What auction?” Wolf asked.

“The creditors’ sale!”

“So Mr. Worley has declared bankruptcy?”

“Mr. Worley hasn’t declared anything. He jumped off a bridge last week. It’s his widow who’s bankrupt.”

“And … er … where is she now?”

“Gone to the devil, for all I care!”

“Did she leave a forwarding address?”

“Nope, and I don’t need one either.” The man spat in disgust. “This auction won’t cover all Worley’s standing debts, let alone leave something to send along to the missus.”

“Do you happen to know how we could contact her?”

“No,” the auctioneer said churlishly. “And I don’t have time to find out for you, either.” But then he relented — perhaps because he felt bad, or perhaps because he hoped there might be a reward involved. “You could ask Mrs. Worley’s maid. She’s still hanging around for some reason, though I don’t know who she thinks is ever gonna pay her.”

They found the maid in the kitchen, blowing her nose into a handkerchief that had already seen plenty of use that day. Wolf sat down across the kitchen table from the girl, smiling far more charmingly than Sacha would ever have thought he could. Within moments, he was drinking a cup of tea and patiently listening to Mary Mulvaney’s entire life story (starting in Ballyseede Castle parish, Tralee, County Kerry), followed by Mrs. Worley’s entire life story (starting on Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia), followed by the sad saga of Mr. Worley’s bankruptcy and suicide.

As far as Sacha could make out — the maid kept bursting into tears in the middle of sentences, which made it hard to keep track of things — Mr. and Mrs. Worley had enjoyed a nice normal life right up until two weeks after he filed the patent application for his Soul Catcher. But then a smooth-talking lawyer had shown up in a long black motorcar and paid him an unspeakable amount of money for all the rights to his invention. And from the moment he took the money, he was cursed to misery and misfortune.

Every investment he made crashed as soon as he bought into it. Crops failed. Bridges collapsed. Ships sank. Respectable businesses floundered under the weight of unspeakable scandals. Soon he had lost not only the money from the lawyer but his entire life savings as well.

“It’s them Wall Street Wizards what done him in!” Mary Mulvaney wailed. “It oughtn’t to be legal, what they do! The stock market’s just a cheat and a scandal, and it’ll ruin any honest man who puts his faith in it!”

“So why did Mr. Worley put his faith in it?”

“Because of them! Before they got their claws into him, he was as sensible a man as you could ever ask to work for. Well, except for the inventing. But he only did that in his spare time, and he always provided for his family decentlike. And such a loving husband. In the end, I don’t think he killed hisself over the money at all. I think he just couldn’t live with what he’d done to Ms. Worley.”

“It must have been a terrible shock to her,” Wolf sympathized.

“I can hardly stand to think of it. She’s always been that nice to me. I would’ve given anything I had to help her, but what could I do?”

“Well, I’m sure your being here is a great help to her,” Wolf said kindly.

The girl sighed. “She couldn’t bear to see the auctioneers going through her things, so I stayed behind to close up the house and, and—” Sobs threatened to overcome her again.

“I understand Mrs. Worley isn’t here right now?”

“She left for the city last week.” More sobs. “She wouldn’t let me go with her ’cause she can’t afford to pay me no more, but … but I can’t bear to think of her alone in that awful place!” Mary buried her head in her sodden handkerchief.

Sacha felt a sharp stab of sympathy. It was obvious that she was a nice girl who’d had a hard life, even by Hester Street standards. And it was just as obvious that there had been real affection between her and the Worleys, the kind of attachment that went far beyond doing a job and collecting her wages. They must have been genuinely kind people to have earned such loyalty.

He felt an odd rush of heat that flushed his cheeks and set his heart thumping. It took him a moment to recognize the feeling as anger. He couldn’t imagine why he would be so angry about something that had happened to people he didn’t even know. But he was. And even though it wouldn’t bring back Mrs. Worley’s husband, Sacha suddenly wanted very much to punish the men who had driven him to kill himself.

When had he become so vindictive? Was he starting to think like an Inquisitor instead of a normal person? Uncle Mordechai would probably say it was the first step in his transformation into an anti-Wiccanist tool.

“And what are you going to do now?” Wolf was asking when Sacha forced his attention back to the conversation.

“I hadn’t even thought yet,” Mary sniffled. “Go back and stay with my sister in the tenements while I look for work, I guess.”

“I meant what are you going to do about punishing the men who ruined Mr. and Mrs. Worley?”

She shook her head bitterly. “Men like that, they’re too rich to be punished.”

“Maybe. But if I can’t find them, I can’t even try. And I can’t try to get Mrs. Worley’s money back, either.”

“You could do that?” she asked, as if he’d just promised a miracle.

“Probably not,” Wolf admitted. “But like I said, I can’t even try until I find them.”

Mary stared down at her handkerchief, biting her lip. Then she went to the breakfront cabinet and flipped through a tin box of recipe cards until she’d found the one she was looking for.

“You understand I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone,” she warned Wolf. “She’ll be that upset with me, she will! She might not even speak to you.”

“Don’t worry,” Wolf said, flashing that surprisingly charming smile again. “It won’t be the first time I’ve had a door slammed in my face.”

She stood in front of him, clutching the recipe card close to her body as if she still hadn’t quite made up her mind to give it to him. Then she thrust it into his hands as if it burned her.

Sacha craned his neck to peer at the card over Wolf’s shoulder. It was a recipe for Sally Lunn cake, whatever that was. Wolf turned it over to reveal the hastily scribbled address on its back — and looked up in astonishment.

“Mrs. Worley is living on the Bowery?”