The Inquisitor's Apprentice (9 page)

"Well, what are you waiting for?" Morgaunt taunted. "Isn't it time to trot off and arrest someone like a good little policeman?"

"I haven't seen the crime scene. I haven't interviewed witnesses. I haven't even spoken to Edison. And you want me to arrest someone? You don't need an Inquisitor on this case, Mr. Morgaunt. You need an errand boy."

Morgaunt grinned. "You wound me. I would never turn you into an errand boy. By all means, conduct your little investigation. But the end will be the same no matter what you do. It's all just a game of chess, Wolf. Ordinary players take the board as they find it. I set the board up before the game ever starts so that no matter what moves you make, I still win."

"And what opening moves did you have in mind for me?" Wolf asked sullenly.

"You have a bad attitude, Wolf. I like that in a man. I think I'm going to enjoy breaking you even more than I enjoyed breaking Roosevelt. That reminds me, I have a clue for you." Morgaunt leaned over to pluck a letter off his desk. "It arrived in this morning's mail. I've been enjoying our little chat so much that I completely forgot about it."

Wolf scanned the scrawled handwriting that slanted across the page. "A note from the Industrial Witches of the World claiming responsibility for the attack. That's awfully convenient for you. Aren't they trying to organize a strike at the Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory?"

"Oh, yes," Morgaunt murmured. "You're going to be much more fun than Roosevelt."

"I suppose you expect me to go down to IWW Headquarters now and arrest some poor slob for attempted murder?"

"Would I tell you how to do your job?"

"I guess I'll have to talk to them one way or another." Wolf looked at the letter again and sighed. "Why is it that people who confess to crimes by mail never seem to remember to put a return address on their letters?"

"I don't think you'll have any trouble finding them," Morgaunt said with a laugh like ball bearings rolling across an iron floor.

And then Sacha's heart clenched in terror, because he knew exactly what Morgaunt would say next.

"IWW Headquarters is at number eighteen Hester Street. Your new apprentice can show you the way."

T
HE TRIP TO
Hester Street took a year off Sacha's life.

First, Lily had to ask him what Morgaunt had meant with his last wisecrack. And Sacha had to say he had no idea. And then there was a traffic jam. And then, as if things weren't already bad enough, Wolf decided that what with all the traffic, they might as well walk the last few blocks.

It was one of those golden fall afternoons when all of New York pours onto the sidewalks—and every out-of-work Yiddish actor and revolutionary on the Lower East Side was basking in the sun at the Café Metropole's outdoor tables.

Sacha skulked past, doing his best to hide in Wolf's long, skinny shadow. Even so, he could hear Uncle Mordechai waxing eloquent about the vital distinction between Hamiltonian Wicco-Federalism and Jeffersonian Popular Wiccanism. He shrank into his coat collar and prayed that his uncle was having too much fun planning the revolution to notice that his favorite nephew was aiding and abetting Big Magic right under his nose.

Wolf took forever to get there—mainly because he didn't seem to be able to pass any beggar by without stopping to talk while he fished around in his pockets for coins to give him. But finally they made it down Hester Street and into Sacha's building without anyone recognizing him.

Their tenement was a good one—anyway, a lot better than some of the places Sacha could remember living in. The Kesslers had a third-floor front apartment, with two windows opening onto Hester Street and a fire escape big enough to sleep the whole family on stifling summer nights. But seeing the building now, with Wolf and Lily beside him, Sacha realized it was desperately shabby. Maybe even worse than shabby.

For the first time in his life, he was glad there were no lights in the stairwell. It was so dark that his own mother could have tripped over him without recognizing him. As long as he kept his mouth shut and the neighbors kept their doors closed, he was safe. All he needed now was for his luck to hold until they made it past the third floor.

Meanwhile, Lily was peering around the windowless entryway. "Does anyone see a light switch?"

"I ... uh ... don't think there
are
any—"

"Nonsense!" Lily interrupted. "I know for a fact that Commissioner Roosevelt passed a law requiring landlords to install lights at least two years ago!"

"Well, bully for him!" Sacha muttered.

"You needn't laugh," Lily huffed. "Some of us actually
care
about poor people!"

By the time they made it to the top floor, Wolf had knocked over two ash bins and narrowly missed stepping in a full chamber pot, while Lily had "rescued" a "lost" baby she found playing on the stairs and returned it to its parents—only to be told to mind her own business in language not suitable for a young lady's ears. Finally, they gathered at the top of the stairs. Someone had propped open the door to the roof, so there was a dingy trickle of daylight. While Wolf took off his glasses and wiped his face on his sleeve, Sacha glanced at Lily to see how she was taking her first encounter with the tenements.

There was a large, sooty smear down the front of her white dress, and she was still catching her breath. But she seemed pretty calm, he thought.

Until she opened her mouth.

"How can people
live
like this?" she gasped. "They're no better than animals! And those
poor
children! It's enough to make you think the missionaries are right and they'd be better off in an orphanage!"

Sacha bit his tongue and turned away, thankful that the corridor was too dim for her to see the angry flush spreading across his face. "Let's get this over with and get out of here," he said. "Where are the stupid Wobblies anyway?"

"If you can't figure that out," Wolf drawled, "you might want to consider another line of work."

And indeed, there was a huge banner strung over the last door on the left. The banner had been designed to be carried down the broad avenues of New York by a phalanx of demonstrating workers, not hung in a hallway barely wide enough for two people to squeeze past each other sideways. Bold purple letters marched across its face, spelling out one of Uncle Mordechai's favorite rallying cries:

WITCHES OF THE
WORLD UNITE!
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE
BUT YOUR CHAINS!

On the bright side, Sacha told himself as he trailed down the hallway after Wolf and Lily, things couldn't possibly get any more ridiculous than this.

But of course things can always get more ridiculous—and usually do.

The boy who answered Wolf's knock had carrot-colored hair that corkscrewed from his head like rusty springs popping out of a broken mattress. His bony wrists stuck out of his sleeves halfway up to the elbow, and his neck was so skinny that his tie looked like a hangman's noose.

But worst of all was the expression on his face. It was eager, sweet, pathetically earnest. You knew as soon as you laid eyes on him that he was the kind of fellow who could be counted on to finish last every time, like the nice guy he was. Basically, he was the walking definition of a
shlimazel.
Or a
shnook
or a
shmendrick
or ... well ... there were a thousand pitying words in Yiddish to describe this kind of boy. And Sacha's family could happily have spent a thousand years arguing over which word fit him best. But all Sacha cared about right now was getting out of here before this ridiculous boy or any of his crazy Wobbly friends recognized him.

"Greetings, comrades!" the young man cried before any of them had a chance to speak. "Long live the Revolution!"

"Umm ... yes," Wolf said. "Who's in charge here?"

"I am." He reached out to shake Wolf's hand, and his coat sleeve rode up so far that Sacha could have sworn he saw an elbow. "Moishe Schlosky at your service!"

Sacha squinted at Moishe, trying to remember if he'd seen him before. Could this be the skinny redhead his father had been teasing Bekah about? But no, that was impossible. The very idea of plump, pretty, vivacious Bekah with
this
fellow was ridiculous. There were thousands of skinny redheads on the Lower East Side, and if Bekah was seeing one of them, it definitely wasn't this one!

"Aren't you a little ... er ... young?" Wolf asked.

"What's young? I've been a presser at Pentacle since I was eleven. And most of the seamstresses are younger than me." Moishe assumed a heroic stance—or, rather, a stance that would have been heroic if anyone else had assumed it. "The youth is our future!"

"Do you mind if we come in? This might take a while."

"Say," Moishe exclaimed as Sacha followed Wolf into the apartment, "aren't you Bekah's little bro—"

"No!"

"But—"

"I live uptown! Never been here in my life! You must be thinking of someone else!"

"Wha—?" Moishe said, his face frozen into a comical look of surprise. "Oh! Right! Definitely!"

Moishe was a pathetically bad liar. Not that that was a surprise, Sacha thought sourly. He hoped the Pentacle workers weren't depending on Moishe's bargaining skills to end the strike. With that kind of talent on their side, they'd end up paying Morgaunt to let them go back to work.

Luckily, Wolf and Lily were too busy staring at the chaos inside the tenement to notice Moishe's bad acting.

It was a regular Babel. People—girls, mostly—were running around yammering at each other in Yiddish and Italian and English. One gaggle of girls was setting up rickety card tables. Another group was magically unpacking boxes of pamphlets and broadsheets—so enthusiastically that Sacha was sure one of those pieces of paper zinging around the room was going to give someone a nasty paper cut. A third group was huddled around the stove poring over the hot-off-the-presses evening edition of the
Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker,
which one of the girls seemed to be translating into Italian for the others.

"These are your strikers?" Wolf asked Moishe. "Aren't there any grownups working at Pentacle?"

"The grownups are all bourgeois reactionaries," Moishe said with a dismissive shrug. "They have to 'make a living' and 'feed their families.'"

Wolf scrubbed a hand through his hair as if he thought the friction would help his brain work better. "Is there somewhere we can talk that's a little more private?"

"Sure," Moishe said. And stepped straight out of the open window.

Lily gasped.

"Well?" Moishe said, looking back in at them from the fire escape. "Are you coming or not?"

"Phew!" Lily whispered to Sacha as they stepped out the window behind Wolf. "I didn't know there was a fire escape. I thought he was going to fly or something."

Sacha gave her an incredulous look.

"Well, they
are
the Industrial
Witches
of the World, after all."

"Witches don't fly," Sacha said scathingly. "You've been reading too many penny dreadfuls."

"That's ridiculous! And what do
you
know about witches anyway?"

Sacha decided he'd had it with Lily Astral's know-it-all attitude. "A lot more than some Fifth Avenue debutante who's using her daddy's pull to make Wolf let her play at being an Inquisitor."

Lily spluttered in fury, but Sacha was already stepping through the window onto the fire escape.

Outside, Sacha relished the fresh air and quiet—or rather the relative quiet, since Moishe was already talking Wolf's ear off about how the Pentacle strike was going to blow the lid off Big Magic's corporate conspiracy to keep down the working witch.

But eventually Wolf brought the conversation back around to Morgaunt's accusation.

"You're kidding me!" Moishe cried when he finally figured out what Wolf was getting at. "J. P. Morgaunt is accusing me of trying to assassinate Thomas Edison? That's the dumbest thing I ever heard! What are you going to do now, drag me off to jail and throw away the key until Morgaunt tells you to find it again?"

"Actually, no."

"Why not?" Moishe sounded insulted, as if he actually
wanted
to be arrested.

"Because I don't arrest children."

Moishe put his hands on his hips and glared ferociously at Wolf. Sacha could tell that he was trying to look dangerous enough to be worth arresting. It wasn't working.

Wolf managed to keep a straight face, though he did succumb to a suspicious fit of coughing. When he had recovered, he started explaining about the dybbuk.

"Dybbuk, shmybbuk," Moishe scoffed. "There probably
is
no dybbuk."

"Why would you think that?"

"Isn't it obvious? It's a red herring Morgaunt's throwing out to distract people from the real crime."

"What crime?" Wolf asked hopefully.

"Why, Morgaunt's crime, of course. Running a magical sweatshop!"

"Oh, right." Wolf sighed. "That."

"Everyone knows he pays off the Inquisitors to turn a blind eye to it. And then they go around shutting down mom and pop operations and hounding his competition out of business. And if he gets his way with that Etherograph of his, it's only going to get worse. Magic-workers will become fugitives. They'll have no choice but to take whatever rotten deal he gives them or the Inquisitors will deport them. I'm telling you, someone in this city has to stand up to him or—"

"Right ... well ... getting back to the dybbuk..." Wolf interrupted.

Moishe shrugged. "What do I know from dybbuks? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. The only people in the Lower East Side who know from dybbuks are rabbis. And they're all just gutless bourgeois reactionaries who want us to let the Morgaunts of the world stomp all over us so we can reap our reward in heaven or Brooklyn—
neither
of which, allow me to point out, has ever been scientifically proven to exist."

"But—but—" Sacha stammered, "Brooklyn—I mean, come on, Moishe! The subway stops there!"