The Inquisitor's Apprentice (2 page)

"Well," Mrs. Lassky said, "I don't know anything about bourgeois convection. But I
do
know about son-in-laws. Come here, girls! And bring the latkes so I can make one up special for Mrs. Kessler!"

Sacha's mother squinted at the tray of steaming hot latkes. "Hmm. I could do with a little less handsome. Handsome is as handsome does—and it doesn't do much after the wedding night. And while you're at it, why don't you add a dash of frugality and another shake or two of work ethic?"

"Your mother," Mrs. Lassky told Sacha, "is a wise woman."

And then she did it.

Whatever
it
was.

Something flimmered over her head, like the hazy halo that blossomed around street lamps on foggy nights. Sacha guessed it must be what people called an aura. Except that the word
aura
sounded all mysterious and scientific. And the flimmery light around Mrs. Lassky and her latkes just looked grandmotherly and frazzled, and a little silly and, well ... a lot like Mrs. Lassky herself.

"What did you just do?" he asked her.

"Nothing, sweetie. Don't worry your curly head about it."

"But you
did
something. Something magi—
ow!
"

Sacha's mother had just kicked him hard in the shin.

"Why'd you kick me?" he yelped, hopping up and down on one foot.

"Don't fib," his mother snapped. "Nobody likes a liar!"

Later Sacha would wonder how he could have been so stupid. But at the time, he was too outraged to hear the bell tinkling over the bakery's front door. Or to see Mrs. Lassky's mouth falling open in horror. Or to notice the crowd behind him parting like the Red Sea for Moses.

"I am not a liar!" he insisted. "I
saw
it!"

But just as he was about to say what he'd seen, a heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder and spun him around—and he was face-to-face with a New York City Police Department Inquisitor in full uniform.

Sacha's head was about level with the man's belt buckle, so it took what seemed like an eternity for his eyes to travel up the vast expanse of navy blue uniform to the silver badge with the dread word
INQUISITOR
stamped boldly across it. Above the badge the man's eyes were the crisp blue of a cloudless sky.

"Well now, boyo," the Inquisitor said, taking out his black leather ticket book and checking off the box for
MAGIC, ILLEGAL USE OF
. "Why don't you tell me just exactly what you saw. And make sure you get it right, 'cause you're going to have to repeat it all to the judge come Monday morning."

T
HE 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 City 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 City 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 City 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 learned his Torah lines as easily as he learned 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.'"