The Inquisitor's Apprentice

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE. The Lone Gunman

WOLF WAS WAITING for them when they got back to the library, and he was furious.

Not that you could tell that easily. It turned out that Wolf got angry just like Sacha’s father did: no yelling, just a deafening silence that made you feel like getting boxed on the ear would be a welcome relief.

“Go back to the office,” he interrupted when they tried to tell him about Antonio and the stonemasons’ children. “Maybe a day of filing papers for Payton will remind you that this is a real job, not a game.”

Sacha caught the undercurrent of anger in Wolf’s voice immediately and knew they were on seriously thin ice. But Lily just forged right ahead.

“But—”

“Forgive me, Miss Astral,” Wolf murmured in a tone that made the hair on the back of Sacha’s neck stand up. “I must have failed to make myself clear—”

“But—”

Wolf leveled a stare at Lily that froze the words on her lips and had her backing toward the door before he even spoke again. “Just go!”

“So,” Lily asked as soon as they had passed through Morgaunt’s monumental front gate and were out on the sidewalk. “How are we going to find Antonio?”

“We’re not. Didn’t you hear Wolf? We’re going back to file papers for Payton.”

“But he didn’t give us a chance to tell him about Antonio. He doesn’t know there’s an eyewitness.”

“Lily,” Sacha said warningly.

“Look at it this way,” she told him in her most reasonable voice. “We’re only doing what Wolf would want us to do if he knew what we know.”

“Lily!”

“Besides.” She was warming to her argument. “Wolf’s hands are tied. You heard Morgaunt threatening Shen, didn’t you?”

“Lily!”

“Listen, Sacha, you ever read Boys Weekly?”

“Sometimes,” Sacha said grudgingly. He knew that this wasn’t a real change of subject and that she was probably going to use the admission to trap him into something.

“So, you know the Westerns?” Her blue eyes flashed with enthusiasm. “They always start out with some poor bunch of bean farmers. You know the type I’m talking about. They’re good men. Principled men. But they’re tied down. They’ve got wives and children and mortgages. So when the cattle barons try to run them off their land, what can they do? Nothing. But then”—her voice sank to an excited whisper—“then there’s always the lone gunman who rides in over the horizon. no name, no woman, no strings attached. Just a hero and his horse and his gun. A hero who can take on the bad guys with no holds barred and no punches pulled.” She nodded decisively and tapped Sacha on the chest. “That’s us, Sach. The lone gunman on the horizon riding in to save the day.”

“But there’s two of us,” Sacha protested. “Unless you’re saying I’m the horse. And what does that make Wolf, anyway? A bean farmer?”

Still, even as he said it, his feet were following Lily of their own accord.

“So how are you going to find Antonio?” he asked after half a block. “We don’t even know anyone in Little Italy.”

“Oh, yes we do! Think carrots!”

“If you’re talking about Rosie DiMaggio, then I think you’re just being jealous. Most people would call her hair auburn. I understand the color is quite fashionable.”

He glanced sideways at Lily to gauge her reaction — and almost laughed out loud when he saw how annoyed she looked.

“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” she snapped. “In the English language I speak, the name of that color is plain old orange. And you know what else? I bet I’ve got just the right stick to make Little Miss Carrot-top help us!”

Rosie DiMaggio’s home turned out to be a shabby but surprisingly large wood-frame house. It was in a working-class neighborhood — but still a lot better than anywhere Sacha’s family could ever have afforded to live. Obviously the DiMaggios weren’t doing too badly for themselves.

“I can’t understand why they let the outdoor paint go like that,” Lily said with a judgmental shake of her head. “Somebody ought to tell them that keeping up with maintenance is always cheaper in the long run.”

“If you say so,” Sacha said. “Let’s just hope Rosie hasn’t left for Coney Island already.”

But they were in luck. She was — as Mrs. DiMaggio explained—“between engagements.”

“I guess that means they fired her after the newspapers got hold of the Morgaunt story,” Lily whispered. If Sacha suspected that there was a hint of satisfaction in her voice, he knew enough not to say anything about it.

“And what do you children want to speak to Rosalind about?” Mrs. DiMaggio asked. She looked back and forth between them as if she couldn’t decide whether to chase Sacha away or invite Lily Astral in.

“Oh,” Lily answered with an appalling giggle, “I just came over to ask her to my birthday party. Do you think that would be all right?”

Mrs. DiMaggio blinked at Lily. “And what did you say your name was, dear?”

“Lily As—” Sacha jabbed her in the side with his elbow. “Ow! Ah, I mean, Lily Asbury.”

Mrs. DiMaggio hesitated. She had taken Sacha’s measure in the first glance, but Lily’s uptown accent and expensive clothes were clearly puzzling her.

“Oh, do let her come,” Lily simpered, actually managing to bat her eyelashes at the woman. “It’ll be such fun! We’re going to have pony rides! And — and tea!”

Sacha thought he was going to throw up. Mrs. DiMaggio, on the other hand, was entranced.

“Oh, you dear, dear child!” the immense woman cooed. Then she waved them up the stairs. “Why don’t you just run up and give her the invitation in person?”

“Thank you, Mrs. DiMaggio!” Lily cried, with a sticky-sweet smile pasted on her lips. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou! You’re such a darling!”

“You’re frighteningly good at that,” Sacha teased, as soon as they were safely out of Mrs. DiMaggio’s earshot. “I’m starting to think you could pass for a normal girl if you put a little effort into it.”

“Perish the thought! Now, how the heck do we find her room without stumbling around until darling Mrs. D. comes up to see if we’re stealing her bath towels?”

Now that they were inside the DiMaggios’ house, Sacha understood why it was so big: It was a rooming house. One of the doors in the long hallway would lead to Rosie’s room, but the rest belonged to lodgers. Not that Lily would balk at barging in on perfect strangers unannounced and uninvited. And if she surprised some poor fellow in his undershirt, she’d probably just give him advice about how to launder his linen better.

Rosie herself rescued them, sticking her head out of a doorway at the end of the hall and greeting them as though they were all the best of friends. She still seemed pretty friendly even when they got inside her room and out of her mother’s earshot.

“So how’s the Inquisiting going?” she asked around her usual gob of chewing gum. This gob was at least as big as the one she’d been chewing back on Coney Island, but instead of being lime green, it was electric blue.

“Inquisiting is very interesting,” Lily answered primly. “But we’re here to ask for your assistance in locating some lost persons.”

“Some what?”

“Lost persons. People who are—”

“Yeah, I heard you,” Rosie interrupted. “I just don’t know why you need my help.”

“Well, you see,” Lily began — and launched into the most convoluted and unconvincing lie Sacha had ever heard anyone try to tell. It featured truancy officers and lost orphans and princely rewards, and it sounded like she’d lifted it straight out of a bad Boys Weekly story — which, for all Sacha knew, she had. Uncle Mordechai at his wiliest couldn’t have pulled off such a ridiculous story. And Lily was no Uncle Mordechai.

Finally Sacha stepped in to rescue her.

“Okay, so here’s the truth,” he told Rosie. “The dybbuk killed an Italian stonemason at Morgaunt’s mansion this morning, and we met his son—”

“Sacha!”

“Just be quiet, Lily. You should never, ever lie. You’re really bad at it. Anyway, like I was saying, we met the dead stonemason’s son and a bunch of other kids who were living up on the roof. But they ran away before we could get any information out of them. So we need to find them.”

“So where were they from?”

“Who?”

“The stonemasons.”

“I told you, Italy.”

“Come on! Gimme a little help here!” Rosie held up her hand with her thumb and fingers pressed together and shook it in front of Sacha’s nose as if she were trying to shake the information out of thin air. “I mean, tell me he’s from Napoli. Or Palermo. Or Abruzzo. Then I could find him for you in half an hour flat. But Italy? Do you know how many Italians there are on this island?”

“Oh,” Sacha said disappointedly. “But how would we even know where he was from?”

“I dunno. What language were they speaking?”

“Uh… Italian?”

Rosie sighed and rolled her eyes. It made her look surprisingly like Bekah. “What kind of Italian?”

“Is there more than one?” Lily asked, completely mystified.

“Wait a minute,” Sacha said. “He did say something that I thought was really strange. Not that I know anything about … well…” He flailed around for a minute trying to find a polite word for goyim, but then gave up. “Anyway, he said the dybbuk’s eyes were blacker than Gesù Bambino. I always thought that meant ‘Baby Jesus.’ But that’s definitely the first time I ever heard anyone call Jesus bl—”

Suddenly Rosie was jumping up and down and hugging him. “Sacha,” she cried, “you’re a genius!”

“Really?”

“They’re not just stonemasons — they’re Sicilian stonemasons. From Tindari. Betcha dollars to dybbuks! And not just that, but I know exactly where they’d go if they were looking for a safe place to get away from the cops!”

By the time they got to Twelfth Street, Rosie had explained her reasoning — though her whirlwind explanation left Sacha’s head spinning.

“It’s like this, see. The only person who’d say someone was nero come il bambino Gesù, is a person who’s seen a Black Madonna. And the only Black Madonna I ever heard of is the Madonna of Tindari. Which I happen to know about because of the Saint’s Feast they have every year up on Twelfth Street. Hey, look! They’ve got fresh pizza at Vesuvio’s. Wanna slice?”

“That’s pizza?” Lily asked. “Wow. Well, if you’re getting a slice anyway…”

“What about you, Sacha? Don’t worry, it’s kosher!”

“It is?” Sacha asked eagerly.

“Sure,” Rosie said with a laugh. “Just like wonton soup.”

“Wonton soup? Who told you that? Your cousin’s boyfriend?” Sacha was starting to have some serious doubts about the fellow.

“It’s a joke,” Rosie said, laughing. “You know: Why is wonton soup kosher? What, you never heard that one? Come on, ask me!”

“Uh … okay … why is wonton soup kosher?”

“’Cause it’s Chinese, stupid!”

“Oh,” Sacha said, feeling disappointed. the pizza really had looked good.

“So anyway,” Rosie continued when she’d finished her pizza, “they used to have this street fair every year up on Twelfth Street. You know, get out the Madonna, dress her up in fancy clothes, parade her around, play with snakes. All good fun. I used to go every year ’cause they had the best fried squid in town.”

“Fried squid?” Lily said in tones of intense interest. “When is this fair again?”

“Yeah, well, unfortunately the health inspectors shut them down for sanitary reasons—someone complained about the squid, probably.”

“People are so stupid,” Lily sighed.

“Tell me about it,” Rosie agreed. “That was some really good squid!”

Sacha rolled his eyes. All he needed to do now was get them in a room with his mother, and every city health inspector would be run out of town on a rail.

“So anyway,” Rosie went on, “after the street festival was shut down, the Sicilian Stonemasons Fraternal Association volunteered to build a chapel for the Black Madonna if someone would donate the space for it. So who steps up to the plate? Mr. Rotella of Rotella’s Funeral Home on Twelfth Street. He donates his whole basement — well, except for the part where they keep the corpsicles. So the Order of the Santissima Madonna di Tindari builds their chapel there. Which my Uncle Louie just happened to be the guy who did the electrical wiring on it. Which I just happen to have overheard him telling my mother that those Tindari Sicilians were practically moving into the place, and Mr. Rotella was going to get shut down by the city if he started letting people sleep in his basement. Well, live people, I mean. I guess you don’t need a health inspection for dead people. Hey, look, fried dough! Want some, Sacha? No? Well, maybe later.”

By the time they reached Twelfth Street, Sacha’s stomach was growling — and he was starting to wonder how two reasonably normal-size girls could possibly cram this much food down their gullets without exploding.

“Well, here we are,” Rosie said. “Rotella’s Funeral Home! Now we just have to figure out how to talk our way into the basement!”

Rotella’s Funeral Home presided over a forty-foot stretch of Twelfth Street, transforming an ordinary workaday section of sidewalk into something resembling a wedding cake for giants with very questionable taste in pastries. Its awning was a meringue-like confection of pink and silver satin. Its stained-glass windows twinkled in rainbow colors that would have looked right at home in any Coney Island fun house. Its facade dripped with so many gleaming terra cotta sculptures that it was hard to imagine there was an ordinary brick tenement house somewhere under it all.

Lily gasped. “That’s really … really … uh…”

“I know,” Rosie breathed, licking fried dough off her fingers. She sighed ecstatically. “Isn’t it just gorgeous?”

The door to the chapel was no exception to the general wedding cake theme. It might have started out life as a regular basement door, but it had since moved up in the world. When they first spotted it, tucked away neatly at street level in the shadow of the marble-veneered main entrance, Sacha thought it was made of hammered silver.

In fact, it was made of something much stranger. It was entirely covered with shiny little tin plaques, which were nailed onto the wood in a crazy-quilt pattern that reminded Sacha of the way pigeons ruffed their feathers up when they fought over a scrap of food in the gutter. The tin plaques had bumpy hammered-out pictures on them that turned out to be images of legs, feet, hands, elbows, hearts, kidneys, and livers — basically, every body part that Sacha knew the name of and a few whose names he couldn’t even guess at.

“People put them up to thank the Madonna for healing them,” Rosie explained. “See, this one is from a guy with a heart condition, and this one is thanks for saving a baby from the croup, and this one … hey, check it out, she must have healed a bald guy. A whole lotta bald guys, from the look of it. Maybe I oughta look into this place from an inventing perspective. Curing baldness is a real growth industry — did you ever think about that?”

Lily choked on her last bite of fried dough.

“Can we go in now?” Sacha asked.

The first thing he noticed when they stepped through the door was that it was dark — so dark he couldn’t see anything at all for a moment. Then he saw the Madonna herself, and that swept every other thought out of his head.

She sat at the far end of the room, in a little alcove whose walls, floor, and ceiling were completely carpeted with more of the silvery talismans. They flickered in the light of the votive candles so that it looked like the Madonna was flying — but flying on human hands and legs and hearts instead of on angel wings.

Still, the thing Sacha really noticed was the statue’s face. When Rosie had told them about the Black Madonna, Sacha had expected it to look like black people he had seen around New York. It didn’t. It looked like someone had taken an ordinary Italian lady and her baby and painted their skin with black paint from the hardware store. It should have been ridiculous. But it wasn’t. In fact, there was something about it that made you want to speak in whispers.

That was how Sacha felt, anyway. But no one else seemed to share his feeling of silent awe. Everyone else in the chapel was screaming. As Sacha’s vision adjusted to the darkness, he could see why. Cramming forty people plus all their worldly possessions into an underground grotto designed to hold maybe twelve at the outside was going to be a noisy proposition no matter how you did it. And when two-thirds of those people were under the age of ten, you might as well try asking crashing freight trains to be quiet.

“Well,” Rosie asked, “are these your stonemasons?”

Sacha peered around, searching for Antonio and his mother. He didn’t see them. But he did catch sight of a familiar face here, a familiar shawl or skirt or head scarf there. Enough to know that these were indeed the same women and children they’d seen that morning.

“It’s them,” he whispered. “Can you talk to them for us?”

“Ha! Only if we can find one of them who speaks Italian. Otherwise, good luck.”

At first Sacha assumed Rosie was exaggerating. After watching her conduct pantomimed, half-shouted, half-sign-language conversations with several of the children, he realized it was no joke. Finally, however, the children produced a young woman in a plain black dress.

“Great,” Rosie said, after speaking to her for a moment. “She used to be the village schoolteacher. Her I can talk to.” Unfortunately, she never got to. Because that was when Antonio showed up.

With a gun in his hand.

“This is for killing my father, you black-hearted bastard!” he screamed.

Sacha saw the wicked eye of the muzzle staring him in the face as Antonio pointed the gun at him. “No!” he cried, putting up his hands uselessly. “This is cra—”

Suddenly there was a screaming commotion behind Antonio, and his mother bolted out of the crowd and threw herself on him.

The gun went off with a tearing crash. Sacha heard the ping and whine of the bullet ricocheting off a pipe somewhere overhead.

Antonio had dropped the gun when it went off, and his mother was now hanging onto his knees and screaming at him while he scrabbled on the floor for it. Sacha didn’t need to speak Sicilian to guess that she was screaming the same things his own mother would have been screaming at him if he were about to shoot a total stranger and land himself in jail for the rest of his life.

“Come on!” Lily yelled, grabbing his wrist and dragging him toward the door.

The three of them ran flat out until they were absolutely sure Antonio wasn’t chasing them. By the time they stopped, they were somewhere on the wrong side of Houston Street in a neighborhood Sacha barely knew.

“Phew,” Rosie gasped. “That was just about the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me!”

“Do you think the police are going to come?” Sacha asked apprehensively.

“I doubt it,” Rosie said. “If the police came down to Twelfth Street every time someone heard gunshots, they’d wear out the soles of their shoes in a week. So why do you think that kid thought you killed his father?”

“How can he possibly think we killed his father?” Sacha asked.

“Not we, Sacha. You.”

“Don’t be silly. He meant Lily and me, obviously.”

“But you were the one he was looking at,” Lily argued. “You were the one he was shooting at, too.”

“That’s crazy!”

“Is it?” She started ticking points off on her fingers. “You show up for your first day of work as an Inquisitor and, presto bango, suddenly there’s a dybbuk running around town. Rosie here is the first one to see the dybbuk, and what did she tell Wolf right on that very first day? That she knew it was a dybbuk and not just an ordinary demon because it reminded her of you.”

“She said it reminded her of a nice Jewish boy,” Sacha protested. “Last time I checked there were a few million of those in New York City.”

“Well, actually,” Rosie offered, “it did kind of look like—”

“Oh, shut up, Rosie!”

“Well, you don’t have to be rude!” she huffed.

But Sacha didn’t need to apologize because Lily was already ticking off more points on her fingers. “Then Mrs. Worley can’t find your soul—”

“That’s ridiculous! She said herself that the Soul Catcher was just a parlor toy!”

“Then Antonio’s father was killed when you were at Morgaunt’s house — probably because the dybbuk followed you there!”

“I’m leaving!” he shouted. “I’m not going to listen to another word of this!”

“Because you don’t believe me?” Lily challenged him. “Or because you don’t want to admit it to yourself?”

Sacha stared at her, trembling with anger — anger that he told himself was completely, entirely, one hundred percent justified.

“All right, Little Miss Know-It-All,” he snapped, forcing the thought of his mother’s stolen locket down into the darkest recesses of his mind, right next to that awful glimpse of the dybbuk’s face that he had been so resolutely not thinking about for the last few days. “Tell me this. If it’s my dybbuk, then why does it keep attacking Thomas Edison?”

Lily’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “I don’t know. But Mrs. Worley said—”

“She said that Morgaunt couldn’t have used the etherograph to make a dybbuk. And even if he did, how could it be my dybbuk when no one’s ever made a recording of me?”

“Are you so sure about that?” Lily asked in a decidedly odd tone of voice.

“Of course I am!” Sacha snapped. But then suddenly he wasn’t sure at all. “Wait a minute. remember all those tests they gave us before they made us apprentices? Remember the one where they had us sit in a dark room and try to do magic? They could have done a recording then.” He stopped. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because they didn’t give me any tests except the normal IQ test everyone always gets.” She dropped her eyes and flushed slightly. “Sacha, that cylinder Morgaunt played for us? It was you, wasn’t it?”

And then she did look at him. A look that slipped through his ribs like a knife blade and cut him to the heart. He hated the very idea of having Lily Astral look at him like that.

Don’t think you know me just because you listened to some stupid song, he wanted to tell her. And then he realized that he wouldn’t want to tell her that if he didn’t secretly suspect she was right. Which made him even more furious.

“You’re wrong,” he told her between gritted teeth. “You’re dead wrong, and I’m going to prove it.”

“How?”

It sounded like a challenge. Or maybe Sacha just wanted it to sound that way. A small part of him knew how unreasonable he was being. But it was easier to be angry than to be reasonable. Anything was easier than admitting that Lily might be right.

“By summoning the dybbuk myself!”