The Inquisitor's Apprentice (10 page)

"Hah! If you believe everything you read on a subway map, I've got a bridge to sell you!"

Sacha was still shaking his head when he followed Wolf and Lily downstairs. Wolf pushed through the front door, muttering something about a cab, and Sacha rolled his eyes. There hadn't been a cab sighted on Hester Street in living memory!

Still, Wolf raised his hand and forged into the crowd like a swimmer wading into rough surf. And, sure enough, an energetic little horse came trotting around the corner just in time for its driver to jump down and usher Wolf inside.

"I'll give you both a ride back to the office," Wolf said while Sacha was still staring. "Otherwise you'll never get home for dinner."

Sacha hesitated. It was late afternoon by now, and it really didn't make any sense for him to ride all the way back to Hell's Kitchen just to take the subway home again. But he couldn't think of any excuse for staying behind. So he climbed in, re-signing himself to a long, pointless, expensive round trip.

 

By the time Sacha finally climbed out of the subway at Astral Place, night was falling.

He hurried nervously down the Bowery. It was that deserted time between rush hour and the after-dinner theater crowd. The only people on the sidewalks were tourists going slumming in Chinatown—and all the petty and not-so-petty criminals who preyed on them. The Elevated roared overhead every few minutes, spitting steam and coal dust. Every time it passed, Sacha looked around warily.

He sped up, trying to look tougher than he felt and telling himself he was only a few short blocks from home.

He had just passed the reassuring lights of the Metropole when he realized someone was following him. Within the space of a few ragged breaths, he went from wondering where that odd echo of his footfalls was coming from to knowing for dead certain that there was someone behind him.

He cursed himself for not having gone into the Metropole. Uncle Mordechai might have been there. Or at least someone he knew well enough to ask them to walk him home. But it was too late now. There was nothing for it but to keep going.

He turned the corner onto Hester Street, hoping to see a friendly face or two smiling at him from the front stoops of the tenements. But there was no one. The shoppers and pushcart peddlers were long gone. The cobblestones were littered with old food and bits of tailors' clippings and sooty drifts of crumpled newspapers. Misshapen piles of crates and boxes loomed outside the shop fronts. Laundry dangled from the fire escapes like hanged men. Sacha had never seen Hester Street so silent and lifeless. Even the mannequins in the shop windows seemed to stare out at him with blank, uncaring expressions.

It was dark too. The Bowery was one of New York's famous White Ways, lit up night and day with Edison's new electric lights. But back in the narrow tenement streets, people still made do with gaslight. And not much of it either. The flickering halos around the occasional lampposts were only faint islands of light in an ocean of shadows.

Now he was a block from his building. Now half a block. Now three storefronts away. And still the footsteps sounded behind him. Not gaining on him, not falling back. Just following. Sacha felt like he was caught in one of those awful dreams where you run and run until you finally realize that the only way to wake up is to stop and let the monster catch you.

Finally, the urge to look back became unbearable. He glanced over his shoulder, trying not to be too obvious about it.

And there it was. A moving shadow just beyond the glow of the nearest streetlight. It was vague and indefinite and yet unmistakably
there.
He couldn't see its face. But there was something unnervingly familiar about the set of its slim shoulders.

Sacha looked away, gauging the distance that still separated him from the front stoop of his own building. His legs trembled. His entire body tensed like a coiled spring. What if he made a mad dash for it? Would he make it? And what would happen if he didn't?

It was only the briefest of glances, a flick of his eyes toward the stoop. No natural creature could have vanished into the shadows that quickly. Nonetheless, when he looked back, the watcher was gone.

Sacha cast his eyes frantically around the silent street, but there was no sign of the shadowy figure. If it weren't for the icy chill still upon him, he could almost have convinced himself he'd imagined it.

 

As he reached the third floor, he could hear his mother and father bickering affectionately with each other, and Bekah setting the table for dinner, and Uncle Mordechai chuckling over something in the
Daily Magic-Worker.
Sacha was just pausing outside the door for a final moment to enjoy the comfortable sounds of home when a skeletal hand reached out of the shadows to grip his shoulder.

He gasped and spun around, heart pounding—only to see Moishe Schlosky, of all people.

"Shhh!" Moishe whispered. "Stop shrieking like a girl!"

"I was not shrieking like a girl," Sacha protested, torn between anger at Moishe and embarrassment about the admittedly somewhat high-pitched sound that had escaped him when he felt Moishe's bony fingers on his shoulder.

"You were too. Anyway, never mind. I have to talk to you."

"Fine, so talk to me like a normal person! Don't sneak up on me in a dark hallway!"

"Do I look like the landlord?" Moishe asked comically. "Now it's my fault there's no lights in here?"

"Oh, for God's sake, Moishe! What do you want already?"

"A favor, just a favor. You're working for that Inquisitor, right?

"So?"

"So you know what he's up to and how his investigation is going."

"I guess," Sacha said reluctantly, not liking where this conversation was headed.

"Well, then couldn't you just ... you know ... kind of keep me posted on it?"

"I could get fired for that!"

"Class solidarity demands it of you!"

Sacha guffawed. "You've
got
to be kidding me. I dare you to say that again with a straight face."

Inside the apartment the friendly voices were drowned out suddenly by the rapid-fire clatter of Mrs. Lehrer's foot-powered sewing machine. It was probably Mo at the sewing machine, knocking off another dozen shirts while his wife fixed dinner before doing her nightly quota. It seemed a hard life suddenly—miles away from Lily Astral's world of mansions and limousines.

"Is that all you want in life?" Moishe asked, as if reading Sacha's thoughts. "To be an errand boy for the Carbuncles and Vanderbilks and Morgaunts? Don't you believe in anything?"

"I believe in taking care of my family," Sacha said stubbornly.

"Of course you do. We all do. That's what your sister is working for, and a lot of other girls like her. We're just asking you to help."

"Well, ask someone else."

"Look," Moishe said, "couldn't you just think about it?"

"Moishe, I'm not going to do it no matter how long I think about it."

"Oh!" Moishe cried in a voice worthy of the mourners at the Wailing Wall. "Oh, that a nephew of Mordechai Kessler should have come to this!" He was still shaking his head when the door to Sacha's apartment popped open and Bekah stuck her head out.

"Sacha!" she said. "What are you doing lurking in the stairwell! Dinner's already on the ta—"

She caught sight of Moishe and stopped abruptly.

Sacha looked at Bekah. Then he looked at Moishe. Then he looked back at Bekah again. "Are you
blushing?
" he asked her.

"Don't!" Bekah warned. "Don't you dare say one more word!"

"Bekah—" Moishe began.

"And you!" she snapped, sounding uncannily like their mother. "Haven't you caused enough trouble? Get out of here already!"

Moishe started to protest, but then he took one look at Bekah's furious face, tucked his tail between his legs, and slunk away like a man who knew when he was beaten. Sacha couldn't help grinning at the sight; obviously Bekah already had Moishe's training well in hand.

Bekah held the door to their apartment open, but Sacha wasn't ready to go inside yet.

"No way!" he said, just quietly enough to make sure their mother wouldn't hear him. "Moishe Schlosky?"

"Oh, and I suppose you're dating Mary Pickford? I'd bet good money you've never even kissed a girl!"

"Yeah, but ... Moishe? He's so ... so ... so
skinny!
"

"You are the most shallow, superficial, trivial—"

"Are you two waiting for the Messiah out there?" their mother shouted from inside the apartment. "Come in and sit down already! Dinner's getting cold!"

Sacha was still shaking his head in amazement when he sat down to dinner. Indeed, he was so busy being amazed at the idea of Bekah being sweet on Moishe that he almost forgot Moishe's outrageous idea that he ought to spy on Wolf for the strikers. As if he didn't have enough problems already!

When the rest of his family was settling down for coffee and after-dinner chatter around the kitchen table, Sacha went to the window and cautiously lifted the curtain.

There was nothing there. No watcher in the shadows. No dark figure standing at the edge of the streetlights.

For some unfathomable reason, that made him feel worse instead of better. Who or what had been following him? And could it possibly be a coincidence that this silent watcher had first appeared on the very same night that Edison and Sacha's mother had both been attacked?

He was still wondering about it when he got to work the next morning to find out that the dybbuk had tried to burn down Edison's Luna Park Laboratory.

N
EW 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. If anyone had asked Sacha, he would have said he loved Coney Island too—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 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 Hotel looked like the product of a head-on train wreck between the Flatiron Building and a woolly mammoth. Its massive front legs housed a cigar store and diorama. Its back legs enclosed twin spiral staircases (one going up, one going down). Its head contained an astronomical observatory (though critics scoffed that the only "stars" anyone ever saw from it were the electric lights on Luna Park's Loop the Loop). And its four-story-high body housed the World-Famous Starlite Theater, 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
TASHANIAN DEVIL BOY?

SEE JOLLY TRIXIE!
It Takes Seven Men to
HUGHER
!
"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!"