The Inquisitor's Apprentice

CHAPTER TWO. Whose Pig Are You?

THE DISASTER AT Mrs. Lassky’s bakery turned Sacha’s life completely upside down. Before the month was up, he was yanked out of school, dragged away from all his friends, and subjected to every standardized aptitude test the New York Police Department could throw at him.

Most of the tests were strange. And some of them were downright pointless — like the one where they had him just sit in a dark room and read spells out loud while some machine whirred away in the background, doubtless recording for posterity his total inability to do magic of any kind.

But the worst was the Inquisitorial Quotient (IQ) test: a five-hour multiple-choice ordeal held in an unheated basement and proctored by a bored-looking Irish girl who made it quite clear that this wasn’t her idea of a fun way to spend the weekend. Sacha filled out his answer sheet in a fog of confusion, mostly guessing. In fact, the only thing he really remembered about the test was the pig.

It was a large pig — a Gloucestershire Old Spot, according to the student sitting next to Sacha. And someone turned it loose in the exam room with a sign tied to its back that read

I’m Paddy Doyle's Pig

Whose Pig are You?

The sign didn’t seem to be strictly necessary, since someone had put a hex on the pig that made it squeal, “Wh-wh-whose pig are you? Wh-wh-whose pig are you?”

The poor animal looked completely bewildered by the situation. Sacha couldn’t help laughing along with everyone else, but he was secretly relieved when the bored Irish girl grabbed the sign off its back and broke it in two over one knee. After that the pig just ran around squealing and farting like a normal pig until she chased it out. When she came back, she announced that no extra time would be given — and anyone who failed could go right ahead and blame Paddy Doyle.

Sacha was pretty sure he had failed, though he doubted it was the pig’s fault. But just when it looked like life on Hester Street was finally getting back to normal, an alarmingly official letter arrived in the mail. It announced that Sacha had been accepted as an Apprentice Inquisitor to the New York Police Department — and ordered him to report for duty by eight a.m. next Monday morning at the offices of Inquisitor Maximillian Wolf.

“What an honor to have an Inquisitor in the family!” Mo Lehrer told Sacha’s mother when she’d read the letter to him for the fortieth time or so. “It’s almost as good as a doctor!”

“It’s a mazel,” Mrs. Kessler agreed from her place at one end of the rickety table that filled up half of the Kesslers’ kitchen. “A real blessing.”

“That’s the great thing about America, right? Anything can happen here!” Mo was leaning through the tenement window between the kitchen and the back room. It wasn’t a real window, of course — just a hole in the wall. But when the city had passed a law saying that every room in the tenements had to have a window, the landlord had come around and knocked a bunch of holes in the walls and called them windows. Just like the Kesslers called their home a two-room apartment, even though they could only afford to live there by renting out the back room to the Lehrers.

Sacha’s mother, who believed in making the best of things, liked to say the Lehrers were just like family. In a way they were, since Mo Lehrer was the shammes who swept Grandpa Kessler’s little storefront synagogue on Canal Street. Actually, in some ways they were even closer than family. The tenement window between the two rooms had to stay open all the time for the Lehrers to get any fresh air at all, and the Lehrers needed a lot of fresh air because they ran a sweatshop. Day and night Mrs. Lehrer bent over her sewing machine and Mo Lehrer wielded his twenty-pound flatirons as they worked frantically to transform piles of cloth into finished clothing for the uptown department stores. But they always had time to talk to Bekah and Sacha — and to slip them enough candy to set their father muttering about how the Lehrers were spoiling them rotten.

“Isn’t that right, Rabbi?” Mo asked Sacha’s grandfather. But Grandpa Kessler was snoring happily in the big feather bed that filled up the rest of the Kesslers’ kitchen. So Mo turned to Sacha’s father instead. “Isn’t that right, Danny?”

“Sure,” Mr. Kessler agreed without looking up from his copy of Andrew Carbuncle’s best-selling memoir, Wealth Without Magic. “Only in America.”

“You got that right,” Sacha’s Uncle Mordechai mocked from behind the ink-splotched pages of the Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker. “Only in America can Jewish boys grow up to become cogs in the anti-Wiccan machine just like gentiles!”

Uncle Mordechai had been kicked out of Russia for being a Blavatskyan Occulto-Syndicalist — which he considered to be piling insult on top of injury, since he was actually a Trotskyite Anarcho-Wiccanist. Still, the change of continent hadn’t altered Mordechai’s politics. He devoted his days in New York to writing for a series of bankrupt revolutionary newspapers, acting in the Yiddish People’s Theater, and planning the revolution over endless tiny glasses of Russian tea at the Café Metropole.

Mordechai looked like a revolutionary hero too — or at least like the kind of actor who would play one in a Sunday matinee. He was what Sacha’s mother called “dashingly handsome.” He had long legs and an aristocratic profile and glossy black curls that flopped into his eyes all the time just like Sacha’s did. But while Mordechai’s curls looked debonair and sophisticated, Sacha’s curls just looked messy. Sacha had tried to figure out what the difference was. He’d even secretly borrowed a little of the Thousand Tigers Pungent Hair Potion that Mordechai got from his favorite Chinatown wizard. But it hadn’t helped. Whatever Uncle Mordechai had, you couldn’t buy it in a spell bottle.

“At least being an Inquisitor is a job,” Sacha’s father pointed out, still without looking up from Wealth Without Magic. “That’s more than some people in this family have. and stop tipping your chair back, Mordechai. We only own three chairs, and you’ve already broken two of them.”

Uncle Mordechai tipped his chair back even farther and crossed his pointy-toed shoes on the kitchen table in a flamboyant manner calculated to convey his unconcern with such mundane matters as chairs. “I have two careers,” he proclaimed, tottering on the brink of disaster. “The pen and the stage. And if neither of them is financially remunerative at the moment, I regard this as the fault of an insufficiently artistic world!”

“Never mind that, Mordechai.” Sacha’s mother leaned over to stir the fragrant pot of matzo ball soup simmering on the stove top and to adjust Grandpa Kessler’s cane, which was holding the oven door closed while her bread baked. “The point is, our Sacha’s going to be an Inquisitor.”

Mrs. Kessler’s opinion of Inquisitors had changed completely in the last month. When the Inquisitors had simply been the division of the New York Police Department responsible for solving magical crimes, she’d thought they were drunken Irish hooligans just like the regular cops. But now that her son was going to be an Inquisitor, she wouldn’t hear a bad word about them.

“I still don’t get it, though,” Bekah said skeptically. “Who ever heard of a Jew being an Inquisitor? And why Sacha?”

“Because he’s special! They said so with their fancy test.”

Bekah rolled her eyes. Bekah was sixteen and rolled her eyes often. At the moment she was wedged between Sacha and their grandfather on the feather bed, trying to do her night school homework. As far as Sacha could see, she wasn’t making much progress. She’d written out America is founded upon the principle of the right of the common man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without interference by magical powers three times — only to rip it up and start over when their grandfather jostled her elbow and ruined her careful penmanship.

“I’ll say he’s special!” Grandpa Kessler snorted. the sound of arguing voices had woken him up, and he wasn’t about to miss out on an argument, even if it was one the family had already had many times in the last few weeks. “He’s the grandson and great-grandson of famous Kabbalists, and what do his magical talents amount to? Bubkes!”

“Unless being able to memorize the batting averages of the entire Yankees starting lineup counts as a magical talent,” Bekah quipped.

Sacha sighed. He would have liked to argue with Bekah, but she was completely right. If only he could have remembered his Torah lines as easily as he remembered baseball statistics, his bar Mitzvah wouldn’t have been a public humiliation.

“Never mind that.” Mrs. Kessler checked the bread and loaded a little more coal into the stove. As she bent over the stove, her little silver locket swung toward the fire, and she absentmindedly tucked it back into the collar of her worn-out dress. “The main point is that this apprenticeship is a great opportunity for Sacha. Isn’t it, Sacha?”

“Uh … yeah … sure,” Sacha mumbled.

But actually he wasn’t sure at all. On the one hand, there was the money. It was exciting to imagine himself all grown up and making enough money to move his family out of the tenements and into the wide-open green spaces of Brooklyn. It was nice to picture his mother and sister quitting their jobs at the Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory. Or his father studying all day like the learned man he was instead of wrecking his back hauling slimy barrels of fish at the East River Docks. But on the other hand … well … did Sacha really want to spend his life writing out Illegal Use of Magic citations and dragging people like Mrs. Lassky off to jail?

He still felt awful about Mrs. Lassky. He’d had no idea she’d get into so much trouble. After all, lots of people used magic — at least when the cops weren’t looking. New spells traveled up and down Hester Street as fast as gossip. There were spells to make bread rise and spells to make matzo not rise. Spells to catch husbands and spells to get rid of them. Spells to make your kids listen to your good advice and stay home and study instead of loitering on street corners like gangsters. Even Sacha’s mother used magic whenever she was sure her father-in-law wasn’t looking. So what had Mrs. Lassky done that was so terrible?

“Sacha?” his father asked. “Are you all right?”

He realized everyone was staring at him. “I… I feel kind of bad about Mrs. Lassky.”

“Don’t worry,” his mother said airily. “She just paid a fine.”

“And she should have paid a bigger one!” Grandpa Kessler said. “This back-alley witchery is a public disgrace — a shande far di goyim! And it’s against religion too. As the learned Rabbi Ovadia of Bertinoro said, ‘God weeps when women work magic.’”

“Well, maybe God wouldn’t have to weep if the men would let women into shul to study real Kabbalah,” Bekah said tartly.

“Don’t talk back to your grandfather, young lady!” Mrs. Kessler snapped.

“What? I’m only saying what you’ve said a hundred times before—”

“And don’t talk back to me either!”

Bekah waited until their mother had turned back to her soup and then looked at Sacha and rolled her eyes again.

“I see you rolling your eyes,” their mother told Bekah without even bothering to turn around. “I guess that means you don’t want any blintzes this Sunday morning?”

“No! no!” Bekah cried. “I take it back! I unroll my eyes!”

Everyone laughed. Whatever else people said about Ruthie Kessler — and they said plenty — no one could deny that she made the best blintzes west of Bialystok.

“That’s funny,” Mrs. Kessler said while everyone else was still laughing. “I thought I had enough water, but I don’t. Now where’s that bucket got to?”

Sacha sighed and got up to look for the water bucket. But his mother found it first. “I’ll go,” she told him. “You rest up. You have a big day tomorrow.”

“You shouldn’t be out alone after dark,” Mr. Kessler objected. “If you don’t want Sacha to go, then I will.”

“You most certainly won’t! You’ve got no business being outside in the rain with that cough of yours!”

“What cough?” Sacha’s father snapped as if the mere suggestion that he was sick were a mortal insult. But then he promptly proved her point by coughing.

Mrs. Kessler snorted and stalked out the door, muttering that she’d made it all the way from Russia to the Lower East Side and wasn’t about to start being afraid of the dark now.

“Be careful, Ruthie!” Mrs. Lehrer called after her. “I saw someone down there the other night!”

No one listened. Mrs. Lehrer was nice — but crazy. Not that anyone ever actually came out and said she was crazy. They just shook their heads sadly and said things like “She came out of the pogroms, poor woman. What can you expect after what she’s been through?”

Sacha had worried about this when he was younger. After all, his own parents had survived the pogroms. Did that mean they might go crazy too? But finally he’d decided that Mrs. Lehrer’s craziness didn’t seem to be catching. Mostly it just amounted to pinching pennies so she could buy her sisters tickets to America and sewing all her savings into an old coat that she never took off because — as she told Sacha and Bekah at every possible opportunity—you never knew.

Mrs. Lehrer’s habit of seeing thieves in every shadow was understandable given the amount of cash she had sewn into her money coat. But everyone knew better than to pay any attention to it. So before the door had even closed behind Sacha’s mother, they’d all gone back to arguing about his apprenticeship.

“Don’t pay any attention to your Uncle Mordechai,” Mo told Sacha. “Being an Inquisitor is a good, honest profession. Why, Inquisitors have become mayors, senators … even president!”

“Right,” Bekah snorted. “And everyone knows how honest politicians are.”

Now it was Mr. Kessler’s turn to roll his eyes. “And you think Mordechai’s Wiccanist friends wouldn’t be just as bad the minute they got into power?”

“Well, they certainly couldn’t be any worse, could they?” Bekah crossed her arms defiantly. “Benjamin Franklin founded the Inquisitors to protect ordinary people from magical crime, and what do they do instead? Run around giving tickets to poor Mrs. Lassky while J. P. Morgaunt and the rest of those Wall Street Wizards get away with murder!”

“Bilking widows out of their life savings in the stock market might not be nice,” Mr. Kessler pointed out, “but it’s not exactly murder.”

“Besides,” Mo added, “the Inquisitors do catch rich men. They caught Meyer Minsky—”

“And he was out on parole six months later and running Magic, Inc., just like always. Besides, he’s a gangster. A Jewish gangster. When was the last time you saw an Astral or a Morgaunt or a Vanderbilk in prison?”

“Fine,” Sacha’s father teased. “Run upstairs and join the Wobblies. I’ve seen you talking to that skinny redhead up there. In my day if a boy and a girl liked each other, they did something about it, end of story. But if you’d rather run all over town making speeches about magic-workers’ rights, be my guest.”

Bekah tried to look outraged, but her face was so red that Sacha had to smother a laugh. He glanced at his father in amazement. Mr. Kessler worked such long hours that he was barely ever home except to eat and sleep — but judging by Bekah’s blushes, he’d spotted something that even their mother’s sharp eyes had missed. Sacha knew who the Wobblies were, of course: the Industrial Witches of the World, whose makeshift headquarters were located in a cheap rear flat on the top floor of the Kesslers’ own building. But obviously he was going to have to take a closer look at the idealistic young Wobblies who traipsed up and down the stairs past their apartment every day. Especially the redheads.

“I don’t even think about boys that way,” Bekah protested, still blushing furiously. “Especially not — I mean, I have no idea who you’re talking about!”

“Good,” their father said mildly. “Then I guess I don’t need to meet him.”

Bekah bit her lip. “And — and Mama doesn’t need to hear about him?”

“I’m sorry. are you saying you do know who I’m talking about?”

“Gee, Daddy, maybe you ought to join the Inquisitors instead of Sacha.”

Meanwhile Uncle Mordechai had finished with the Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker and picked up the Alphabet City Alchemist. The main headline screamed “The Robber Barons Are Stealing Our Magic!” in letters Sacha could read all the way across the table.

“Of course Bekah’s completely right about the Inquisitors,” Mordechai announced, as if the conversation had never strayed from politics in the first place. “Asking them to catch magical criminals is like setting a fox to guard the hen-house. Which just goes to prove my original point: America is a myth founded on a fable founded on a—”

But instead of finishing his speech Mordechai grabbed his pocket watch, read the time, and clapped a hand to his handsome head. “My God!” he cried. “I’m late for rehearsal! Again!”

He leapt from his chair, knocking over a pile of IWW newsletters, which knocked over Grandpa Kessler’s Collected Works of Maimonides in fourteen volumes, which toppled Bekah’s teetering stack of schoolbooks — and sent her civics essay slithering into the soup.

“Farewell and adieu!” Mordechai cried, ducking out on a fresh family debate — this one about how to get the soup stains out of Bekah’s homework and the taste of civics homework out of the soup. “I’d love to stay and help clean up, but we’re opening Sunday, and the show must go on!”

The rest of them spent the next several minutes blotting soup off of Bekah’s essay and hanging the damp pages out on the fire escape to dry. Then they listened to Mo Lehrer and Grandpa Kessler argue about whether Pentacle Stationery Supplies Indelible Ink was kosher or not — a thorny question because of the appalling rumors about what really went into it.

It was only when the soup boiled over that Sacha’s father looked up with a worried frown and asked, “Where’s your mother?”