The Inquisitor's Apprentice

by Chris Moriarty

  it. Above the gate, emblazoned on a fluttering silk banner, stretched four immense golden Chinese characters.

  "What does that sign say?" Sacha asked.

  Wolf smiled ever so slightly. "It says 'White Lotus Young Ladies' Dancing and Deportment Academy.' But don't worry. There are boys here too. It's an orphanage. And it wasn't a dancing academy even before it was an orphanage. They just call it that to stay out of trouble with the police because it's illegal to teach ... well, you'll see."

  Wolf pulled at the bell rope beside the heavy oak door, and a deep bell tolled somewhere far off inside the building. A moment later they heard the patter of bare feet on stone, and a child opened the door for them. The child was wearing a pigtail and the same white cotton pajamas that Sacha had seen Chinese men wearing. Sacha thought it was a boy, since he was wearing pants, but he wasn't really sure. And after another look, he wasn't even sure if he was Chinese or not. The hair and eyes looked right. But whoever heard of a Chinese person with freckles?

  The boy knew Wolf, though. He let them in with a friendly smile before vanishing into the shadows and leaving them to find their own way to wherever they were going.

  Wolf led them down a dim hallway and into a cavernous space that smelled pleasantly of wet stones and soapy water. Balconies rose above them on all sides, supported by columns hewn from whole tree trunks and polished smooth by the touch of many hands. Heavy beams supported the high ceiling, and the floor was paved with massive flagstones even larger than the ones that lined New York's sidewalks. The place felt as solemn as a church, yet it was alive with the faint sounds of children's movement and laughter that drifted in from the surrounding rooms.

  And it was alive with magic too: a magic as vast as oceans that seemed to belong to a far older city than the New York Sacha knew.

  At the moment, the only person in the great room was a thin Chinese woman on her hands and knees next to a bucket of soapy water, scrubbing at the stone floor with a hard-bristled cleaning brush. Wolf glanced briefly at her. Then he walked around the edge of the room, carefully avoiding the freshly scrubbed stones, sat down on a sack of rice, and took out his newspaper as if he knew they were in for a long wait.

  Sacha sat down beside Wolf, wishing he had a newspaper too.

  Meanwhile the cleaning lady kept scrubbing. This was a woman who took her cleaning seriously, even by Hester Street standards. She scrubbed with intent, like a master baker rolling out his dough or an artist preparing a canvas. Or, Sacha realized, like a shammes cleaning the synagogue before a High Holy Day. What was this place?

  Sacha turned to Wolf, meaning to ask him. But Wolf was watching the woman too. His newspaper had dropped to his lap, forgotten, and he was staring at her with a look of longing that even at thirteen-year-old boy couldn't mistake for anything but unrequited love. Sacha glanced sideways at Lily to see if she'd noticed—and sure enough she had that gushy, dewy-eyed look on her face that girls always got when they smelled romance in the air. Sacha wanted to shake her for mooning around like a silly girl instead of asking the obvious question: How on earth could the most famous Inquisitor in New York possibly have fallen in love with a Chinese cleaning woman?

  Finally the cleaning woman gathered up her brush and bucket and slipped out of the room, leaving them alone.

  "Is she going to get her master?" Sacha asked, unable to contain himself any longer.

  Wolf smiled very faintly. "Not exactly."

  She came back a few minutes later—this time bearing a heavy lacquered tray piled high with tea things. She poured tea and handed around warm sweet rolls. Then she sat down opposite Wolf in a way that left Sacha quite certain she was no mere servant, even before Wolf introduced her as Shen Yunying, the proprietress of the White Lotus Young Ladies' Dancing and Deportment Academy.

  "So," Shen said when the introductions were over, "the student returns to the master. And he comes bearing ... children? You don't think I have enough children in my life already, Max?"

  Wolf muttered something that sounded like the beginning of an apology, but broke off to run a finger around the inside of his shirt collar as if it had suddenly gotten too tight. "I was hoping you could ... teach them."

  Her dark eyes widened in amazement. "You want me to train a pair of Inquisitor's apprentices? What on earth makes you think I would do that? Unless you think I owe you a favor."

  "No!" Wolf lowered his voice, struggling visibly to control himself. But when he spoke again, he still sounded angry. "You don't owe me anything. I just thought ... well, you taught Payton."

  "Payton's different. He's not going to be an Inquisitor."

  "He's an Inquisitor in all but name," Wolf said impatiently. "And if it weren't for the color of his skin, you know damn well it would be official."

  "You make it sound like the color of a person's skin is just an insignificant detail. Try walking around in my skin for a day."

  "Come on, Shen!" Wolf protested. "What do you want from me?"

  "What do I want? You're the one sitting in my house asking me for favors."

  "Oh, for God's sake! You're the most infuriating—"

  Suddenly Wolf seemed to remember Sacha and Lily. To their bitter disappointment, he clammed up and refused to say anything more. Then the two grownups just sat staring at each other, Wolf with a hangdog look on his face and Shen with an amused smile that seemed to suggest that it would take a lot more than one angry Inquisitor to rattle her.

  To Sacha's amazement, however, it was Shen who gave in first.

  "All right. I'll teach them. You knew I would."

  "Wait a minute!" Lily broke in. "I'm not learning any magic! I won't have anything to do with that!"

  "Who said I was going to teach you magic?" Shen asked calmly. "Why should I, when I can teach you how to beat a grown man in a fight without using any magic at all?" She shrugged philosophically. "Though if you don't want to learn magic, then you probably don't want to learn kung fu either."

  "Oh, don't I?" Lily exclaimed with a dangerous glint in her eye. "Just try me!" But then her face fell. "Except, well ... I don't have the proper clothes for it."

  "I have a number of young lady students. I can lend you a set of clothes that you can leave here and change into when you arrive for your lessons."

  "Oh." Lily grinned. "Good idea!"

  Throughout this exchange, Sacha had been trying not to stare at Shen too obviously. But he must have been doing a pretty bad job of it because suddenly she looked him square in the eye and smiled. He'd never seen such a smile before. It cut straight through him, sweet and sharp and bracing as the wind off the ocean.

  "So tell me," Shen asked, still smiling that astounding smile, "how did you get that beautiful shiner?"

  "Uh ... baseball?"

  "Really? The rules must have changed quite a bit since I last played. And it must hurt like the devil. Come along and let's get something on it to take the swelling down. You too, Lily. Let's see what we can do for your scraped knuckles... which I suppose you're also going to claim you got playing baseball?"

  She led the two of them around the edge of the stone-floored room to a curtained alcove whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling with the same exotic ingredients Sacha had seen in the cluttered herbalists' windows on their ride through Chinatown. Before they quite knew what was happening, Shen had massaged Sacha's bruises with some sort of pungent concoction, dressed Lily's hand, and talked enough baseball to establish that all three of them were die-hard Yankees fans.

  "They should be ready for their first lesson in a week," she told Wolf when she brought them back. She appeared to hesitate, although the hesitation was so brief that Sacha wondered if he'd imagined it. "You needn't bring them. They can come by themselves."

  "But how will we find you?" Lily asked.

  "Don't worry," Shen told her with a little smile. "People can always find me when they need me. And when they can't, it usually turns out that they didn't really need me in the first place."

 
Lily didn't look at all satisfied by this explanation, but before she could ask another question, Wolf was herding them back down the long corridor—while he lingered behind to say a frustratingly private goodbye to Shen.

  "Wow!" Sacha whispered to Lily while they waited. "She's something, isn't she?"

  "I'll say!" Lily's eyes were shining. "I'll bet she's a kung fu master. She's probably even a Shaolin Monk, just like the ones in Sword for Hire and Exotic Adventures."

  Sacha was about to ask Lily if she did anything at all in her spare time but read pulp magazines when Wolf caught up with them.

  "That went well," he said. "I think you two made a good impression."

  Lily started to ask a question, but Wolf waved it away. "Come on. You two have had a rough day; I'm going to send you home early."

  He marched them across the courtyard to the little blue door through which they'd first entered Shen's domain.

  But when he opened the door, Sacha and Lily both gasped. Instead of the courtyard with the mulberry tree and the white mice, they were looking at an uptown street—Seventy-second Street, to be precise, just at the corner of Fifth Avenue, next to the Astral mansion.

  "But—but—that's magic!" Lily protested.

  "Inquisitors are law enforcement officers, Lily. Our job is to prevent people with magical abilities from misusing them. Don't you think that would be rather difficult to do if we couldn't use magic ourselves?"

  Lily looked horrified. Clearly she had never thought of this before.

  "Do you have a problem with magic, Lily? Some kind of phobia? If so, you won't make a very good Inquisitor."

  "I—no—I mean—" Lily's face was practically scarlet, though Sacha couldn't tell if it was with embarrassment or anger. "But if Inquisitors are allowed to use magic, then who prevents them from abusing magic?"

  "That is an excellent question," Wolf replied, "and I wish I knew the answer to it. Now, go home. And apologize to your charming mother for the scraped knuckles or she'll be calling up Commissioner Keegan to complain about me."

  Lily opened her mouth to ask another question. Then she gave a little shrug and turned to go. But just as she was about to step through the door, she turned back and walked over to Sacha and held out a hand for him to shake.

  He took her hand, feeling silly and awkward. She didn't seem to notice his awkwardness, though; her grip was as firm and no-nonsense as her clear-eyed gaze.

  "Good job back there with the Hexers," she told him. "You ought to stand up for yourself more often. You're too quiet. It makes people think they can walk all over you."

  "So you think I should go around insulting street gangs instead?"

  She grinned. "Life's too short to walk away from a good fight."

  Sacha started to grin back, but he stopped when he noticed Wolf watching them. He cleared his throat awkwardly. "Anyway," he said, "sorry about your hand."

  "Hah! You should see the other guy!"

  Lily strode through the door, and a moment later he saw her dashing up the marble steps of the Astral mansion.

  "Your turn, Mr. Kessler," Wolf said cheerfully. "Where to?"

  Sacha panicked. "I—uh—that is—"

  "Don't tell me you're afraid of a little magic."

  "Actually, yes." As much as he hated letting Wolf think he was afraid, Sacha knew this was the perfect excuse. "Can't you just drop me at the nearest subway station? If it wouldn't be too much of a bother."

  Wolf gave Sacha a smile that tied his insides in knots. It made Sacha feel as if Wolf actually liked him—and suddenly he felt horribly guilty for lying to him.

  "No, Sacha," Wolf said gently. "It's not too much bother. And anyway, grownups like to be bothered. It makes us feel useful. But you're not the sort who bothers grownups with your problems, are you? Pity. You should try it sometime."

  Silence stretched between them until Sacha thought he was going to burst into hysterics if someone didn't say something.

  "A man solves his own problems!" he blurted out. It sounded like the sort of thing his father would say.

  "I see. And are a man's friends allowed to help?"

  "I—"

  "Never mind. We don't know each other very well. I don't suppose you have much reason to trust me. What subway stop did you have in mind?"

  "I—uh—Astral Place?"

  "Astral Place it is."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A Shande far di Goyim

  THAT SATURDAY MORNING Sacha slipped into the Hester Street synagogue late and settled into the last row. You could never hear anything back here, because the old men in the congregation were always wandering in and out and gossiping to each other. But this morning it was the gossiping old men he wanted to see—and most especially his grandfather.

  He waited patiently until prayers were finally over and the only people still hanging around were Rabbi Kessler's little gaggle of would-be Kabbalists. Then he tagged along while they meandered over to the storefront shul on Canal Street and settled in to do the three things Kabbalists did best—or at least the only three things Sacha had ever seen any Hester Street Kabbalist do. One: shaking their heads over the latest bad news from Russia. Two: complaining about how all the young people were too busy chasing girls and baseballs to remember their religion. And three: discussing the possibility on a purely theoretical level of maybe perhaps coming up with a tentative plan for coaxing an obviously reluctant Messiah into coming back sometime in the next few millennia to do something about the sorry state of the world.

  Finally Sacha managed to get his grandfather alone for a minute and ask him about Edison's dybbuk. After a lot of thought, he'd decided to tell a mostly true version of the story, but without mentioning his mother's locket or the alarming fact that the dybbuk had followed him home the other night.

  "Isn't that just like the goyim?" Grandpa Kessler asked when Sacha finished his story. "Here's Thomas Edison, rich as the czar, with everything a man could want in life, but he runs into a two-week stretch of bad luck and suddenly he's looking around for a Jew to blame. Us Jews, our luck goes down the crapper for two thousand years and we call it being the Chosen People."

  "Yeah, well, that's New York for you," Mo Lehrer said, ambling over to join the conversation. "The whole city's coming apart at the seams, and the Inquisitors are running around investigating how some rich goy got Yiddish luck."

  Sacha laughed at the joke and caught himself thinking he'd like to share it with Lily. But of course he could never do that. He was quite sure that no one in Lily Astral's family ever complained about having Yiddish luck.

  "But ... well ... do you think a rabbi could have summoned the dybbuk?" he asked tentatively.

  "Of course a rabbi could have," Grandpa Kessler snapped. "Any rabbi worth his salt can summon a dybbuk—well, except those hoity-toity uptown rabbis who don't study Kabbalah anymore and spend all their time pretending to be Episcopalians. But the point is, no rabbi would have."

  "Why? Because dybbuks are evil?"

  "No, dummkopf! Because they're magic!" Rabbi Kessler yanked at his beard in frustration. "Do you have anything between your ears but baseball scores? Don't you remember anything you learned for your bar mitzvah? The last thing any real Kabbalist would ever do is work magic. As it is written, They may not save so much as a hair on their heads by magic."

  Sacha had been hearing that proverb about not saving so much as a hair by magic ever since he could remember—while at the same time watching housewives all up and down Hester Street use magic for just about everything except saving a hair on anyone's head. And come to think of it, one of Mrs. Lassky's most popular recipes was her Hair-Be-Here Hamantaschen.

  "But why can't Kabbalists use magic?" Sacha asked. "Everyone else does."

  "Because Kabbalah isn't mere charms and trickery. It's the manipulation of the letters of the names of God! If you use God's name as a spellbook, you've turned Him into a mere device. Is that an occupation worthy of a pious Jew?"

  "So the more magic you
know, the less you can use it?" Sacha asked disgustedly. "What's the point of that?"

  Rabbi Kessler rubbed at his head until his wispy hair stood on end with static electricity. "Mo, help me out!"

  "Look at it this way," Mo said in his usual levelheaded, reasonable tone. "Say you've got two friends. One of them spends time with you every week. You know, just hanging out, having a sandwich, taking in a matinee, playing cards ... being together for the sake of being together. But the other friend only shows up when he needs to borrow money. Pretty soon you'd start to get a feeling about these two guys. Like that one of them's your real friend, and the other one's just a mooch. So that's why Kabbalists don't work magic. We're God's real friends."

  Sacha shook his head in bewilderment at the image of God playing cards with Mo Lehrer—just two paunchy middle-aged Jewish guys kicking back around the kitchen table with their undershirts untucked and their suspenders hanging around their knees.

  "But can't God tell the difference between someone who's just using Him and, well, I don't know, let's say ... a faithful Jew who happens to need a really big favor for a really good reason?"

  "Easy for you to say," Grandpa Kessler pointed out. "But who decides what's a good reason? And how do you know who else God has to stick it to in order grant your prayer? Working miracles is like letting out a pair of pants: You can only stretch the fabric of the universe so far before you run out of cloth. After that, you're stuck deciding whether you want cold ankles or a cold tushie."

  Mo cleared his throat and nodded toward the other side of the room where the rest of the class was staring curiously at them.

  "So!" Grandpa Kessler said in a voice so loud that even the few students who hadn't been eavesdropping jumped guiltily. "I take it you fellows are masters of Kabbalah now? You've set all the Worlds aright, and defeated the Other Side, and we can expect the Messiah any minute?" He glared sternly at them—or at least sternly for him. "No? Then stop gawping and get back to your books!"