The Inquisitor's Apprentice

by Chris Moriarty

  Sacha waited for Wolf to pull out his chewed pencil stub and start questioning Houdini. But instead Wolf produced Mrs. Kessler's locket and handed it to Houdini as calmly as if he thought nothing at all of giving key evidence to a suspect capable of making elephants disappear in broad daylight.

  "What do you make of that, Harry?"

  "Pretty ordinary item," Houdini replied. "Kind of thing you could pick up in any pawnshop. Sorry, Max. If you're trying to hang a case on this, I think it's going to be a slog."

  "Me too," Wolf said. "Unfortunately. We found it in Thomas Edison's lab in Luna Park. Someone seems to be trying to assassinate him."

  "What, someone finally got ticked off enough at that old windbag to do him in?"

  "A lot of people are going to think it was you."

  At this news Houdini burst into ringing peals of laughter so genuine that Sacha couldn't help grinning himself. "If I wanted to kill Tom Edison," he said when he finally stopped laughing, "I sure wouldn't pick this week to do it. If he kicks the bucket before the month's up, I'm out ten thousand dollars."

  He plucked a sheet of paper off of his desk and handed it to Wolf. "That's to be printed in tomorrow's papers."

  Sacha and Lily craned over Wolf's shoulders and read the following:

  $10,000 CHALLENGE!

  The Great Houdini hereby and herewith agrees to wager the sum of $10,000 against an equal amount, the money to be donated to charity, if Mr. Thomas Alva Edison (a.k.a. the Wizard of Luna Park) can scientifically prove that any of Houdini's world-famous escapes and illusions are accomplished by means of magic.

  The Challenge, should Mr. Edison choose to accept it, shall be held in one month's time in the Starlite Ballroom of the Elephant Hotel, Surf Avenue, Coney Island.

  Upon Mr. Edison's request, Houdini shall engage to perform magical feats including but not limited to escapes from straitjackets, handcuffs, and manacles, and the Chinese Water Torture Cell (patent pending), as well as the Disappearing Elephant Trick (elephant to be provided by management).

  Signed,

  Houdini

  "Well, what do you think?" Houdini asked.

  "I don't know what to think," Wolf confessed. "Is the whole fight between you and Edison just a publicity stunt?"

  "A man would have to want publicity pretty bad to get himself dragged in front of ACCUSE on charges of working illegal magic."

  "Don't people in show business say all publicity is good publicity?"

  "If they do, they're idiots."

  While they talked, Houdini was toying with Mrs. Kessler's locket, spinning it between his nimble fingers and making it disappear and reappear at will. It wasn't real magic. Sacha could see that quite clearly. It was just a stage magician's illusion. But Houdini was so supremely skilled that Sacha couldn't begin to guess how the illusion worked.

  "The fact is," Houdini confessed, "this ACCUSE nonsense has put me in a pickle. Whoever gave my name to the Committee on Un-American Sorcery must have known that from the moment I was accused of using real magic in my escapes, I had only three options. One, I can confess that I have used magic—and go to jail for defrauding people by magical means. Two, I can claim that I haven't used magic—but I can only prove it by giving away all my secrets and ruining the illusion. Or three, I can challenge Edison's etherograph."

  "And you don't think it was Edison who gave your name to ACCUSE in the first place?" Wolf asked.

  "No. He's a dreadful publicity hound—though some people might think it was the pot calling the kettle black for me to say so. And he doesn't have much use for Jews or magicians—"

  "I know. He showed us his etherograph ads."

  "Appalling, aren't they?"

  "Quite. Have you seen the etherograph in action?"

  "I rather had the impression Edison hadn't gotten it to work yet."

  "He must have. Morgaunt played us one of the recordings."

  "Morgaunt!" Houdini slammed a fist into his palm. "I should have known he'd be at the bottom of this!"

  Wolf sighed the same reasonable, put-upon sigh that Sacha's father always sighed when the more volatile members of the Kessler family started ranting about religion or politics. "Keep your hair on," he told Houdini. "I know it's hard to believe, but there are a few bad things in New York that aren't Morgaunt's fault."

  "Not this one," Houdini snapped.

  "Well ... maybe not."

  "The man's a Black Mage, I tell you! A Necromancer! The blackest of the black!"

  "He's not a Necromancer."

  "Get your head out of the sand, Max! Morgaunt has more power than any Mage can come by honestly. I feel him. I feel the ratchets and gears of his spells burrowing under the streets like his damn subway. He's killing New York. He's sucking the magic out of it, and if we don't stop him there'll be nothing left but an empty shell."

  "He's not a Necromancer," Wolf repeated patiently. "Not yet, anyway." When Houdini would have protested again, he held up a hand to silence him. "Morgaunt preys on the living, Harry, not the dead. And if he's a Mage at all, then he's a new kind of Mage." He smiled grimly. "One for the age of the machine."

  Houdini seemed to shrink in on himself. "You're frightened of him too," he whispered.

  "I'd be a fool not to be."

  "So what do you want from me?"

  Wolf nodded at the locket that Houdini still held in his hands.

  Houdini flashed a nervous sideways glance at Sacha. "In front of him?" he asked. Then he shrugged. "Sure, why not? Nobody can nail me for working magic on official police business, right? And anyway, I'd like to know what the kid can see. Call it professional curiosity."

  Houdini looked straight at Sacha and held up the locket so that it spun in the air between them, winking and flashing like sunlight on water. "So, Sacha Kessler. What do you see now? Spells or illusion? Real magic or stage magic?" As Houdini asked the question, he turned the locket in his hands and made it disappear.

  "Illusion," Sacha said. He felt breathless and strangely lightheaded. But he was quite sure of his answer. Houdini stood there before him in the clear light of day. No magic flared and flickered around him. No spells flashed from his clever fingers.

  "And now?" Houdini reached over and pulled the locket out of Lily's ear.

  "Illusion."

  "And now?" It vanished again, then reappeared in Houdini's left hand.

  "Illusion."

  "And now?"

  This time, instead of doing another trick, he held the locket up and ... just looked at it.

  "I ... what are you doing?"

  "I don't know," Houdini confessed. "But I've been able to do it ever since I turned thirteen. Just like you can see magic. When I hold something in my hand, I see the memories of the other people who've held it before me. Perhaps it's Edison's etheric emanations. Or perhaps it's something else entirely. But people leave a trace of themselves on everything they touch. And if they touch something often, or care deeply about it, then they leave a great deal of themselves."

  Sacha watched, breathless with terror, while Houdini weighed the locket in the palm of his hand. Magic pulsed and streaked around him like the aurora borealis. The hand that held the locket was blazing with it.

  "I see a woman who has lived through terrors most of us can barely imagine," Houdini murmured. "Fire and death, and people fleeing for their lives with only the clothes upon their backs. She's reached a safe harbor now, and she's not the sort to dwell on past sorrows. But the grief is still there. I can feel it because she felt it, every time she touched this locket."

  "And the assassin?"

  Houdini balanced the locket on his palm for another moment, looking down at it. Then he shuddered and thrust the locket back into Wolf's hands as if it burned him.

  Wolf refused to take it. "Try again. Please, Harry!"

  Houdini passed a hand over his brow and leaned against his desk. "I can't, Max. I can't bear it. Something touched that locket after her, something not human. All I can sense is cold and hunger
and a terrible emptiness."

  "A dybbuk?"

  Houdini's head snapped up in surprise. "Why would you think that?" he asked in a tone that suggested he was just as unhappy about the idea as Sacha had been.

  "One of the eyewitnesses thought it was."

  "Oh come on. Don't tell me Edison is hiring Jewish lab assistants!"

  "No," Wolf admitted, grinning in spite of himself. "Just an Italian girl who happens to have a cousin who happens to have a Jewish boyfriend."

  Houdini snorted. "Only in New York!"

  "She seemed to know her stuff, though. Could it be a dybbuk?"

  "I hate to admit it but ... it makes sense. More sense than any other explanation I can think of."

  "So where does that leave us?"

  Houdini rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He and Wolf gazed at each other. Each one seemed to be searching the other's face for a clue to his thoughts, but neither seemed willing to speak first. Looking at them, Sacha couldn't help noticing the contrast between the two men. Houdini short, muscular, and matinee-idol handsome. Wolf long, lanky, and disheveled—and, with his remarkable eyes hidden behind his glasses, completely nondescript. Yet something clearly bound them together.

  "If really it is a dybbuk," Houdini said at last, "then there's nothing you can do to protect Edison. Sooner or later it will devour him. He'll become a kelippah, a mere container for the dybbuk. And once that happens, he'll be the creature of whoever summoned the dybbuk."

  "Then the real killer is the man who summoned the dybbuk," Wolf concluded. "And that's who we have to find."

  But Houdini still hesitated.

  "What are you afraid of, Harry? That it'll be a rabbi?"

  "It can't be! No rabbi would do such a thing! And besides, you can't possibly arrest a rabbi for this crime!"

  "Can't?" Wolf said in a dangerously quiet voice that Sacha had never heard him use before. It sent a chill down Sacha's spine. It made him remember that Wolf was a cop. A fancy cop who didn't usually have to get his hands dirty the way regular policemen did. But a cop all the same.

  "You know what I'm saying," Houdini protested. "If you put a rabbi on trial for assassination by means of magic, this city will go up like a powder keg! The streets will run with blood!"

  Houdini was practically shouting by now, but Wolf still answered him in that dead calm policeman's voice. "Keeping the streets clean is someone else's job. My job is catching criminals."

  Houdini slammed a fist down on his desk in fury. "Then why don't you go arrest James Goddamn Pierpont Morgaunt? You know he's behind this! You know he's behind every wicked thing that goes on in this city! And yet you wait and wait and wait. You're no better than Roosevelt!"

  "At least I'm still here."

  "For all the good that does anyone!"

  "If you get me enough evidence to bring charges against Morgaunt and make them stick, I will arrest him."

  "That's what Roosevelt said—and look what happened to him."

  Wolf shrugged, unimpressed. "I don't have as much to lose as Roosevelt."

  "You've got your life, don't you? Even a poor man can lose that."

  "You'll be glad to know that Mr. Morgaunt agrees with you," Wolf said wryly. "He's already warned me about it. I thought it was quite considerate of him."

  Wolf got to his feet. Sacha followed him to the door, feeling frightened and bewildered. Judging by the look on her face, Lily felt the same.

  Houdini crossed his arms over his chest and heaved a sigh of frustration as he watched them go. "I want to help, Max. I really do."

  "I know."

  "But you don't make it easy."

  That earned a very small smile from Wolf. "I know that too."

  "So what can I do?"

  "Just keep doing what you're already doing. Send out your challenge to Edison. Give Morgaunt what he wants: a public face-off between you and the etherograph. But, Harry? You be careful too."

  "I always am." Houdini flashed his most mischievous grin. "As careful as a man in my line of work can afford to be!"

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Money Coat

  ON THE LONG cab ride downtown, Sacha's head spun with questions he couldn't ask. Every question led back to the locket—and he didn't even want to think about that while Wolf could see him.

  He glanced at Wolf, slouched in the opposite corner of the cab. Wolf had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them on his tie. He must have felt Sacha staring, because he looked up and smiled at him. In the evening light his eyes were as luminously gray as dawn over the open ocean. Suddenly Sacha couldn't bear the thought of how those eyes would look at him if Wolf found out he'd been lying to him.

  How had he gotten himself into this awful mess anyway? He wasn't a liar! There had to be a way to climb back out of this hole he'd dug himself into.

  He was just opening his mouth to tell Wolf about the locket when he remembered Edison's awful etherograph ads, and the cold eyes that followed him when he ran the gauntlet through the lobby of the Inquisitors Division every morning. He snapped his mouth shut and turned away to stare out the window. Wolf might believe the Kesslers weren't criminals, but nobody else would. It would be easier for everyone to believe that Rabbi Kessler—a known Kabbalist—had summoned the dybbuk. And once they believed that, nothing Sacha could do or say would ever change their minds.

  No, Sacha decided, the only way out of this mess was to keep his mouth shut and help Wolf catch the real killer. And then he'd tell Wolf everything. Even if it meant knowing that he would gaze at him out of those clear gray eyes someday and say, "Sacha? You lied to me?"

  Telling Wolf now would be crazy.

  And telling his own family would be worse. They wouldn't—couldn't—understand the choices he had to make. They'd try to protect him, because parents were supposed to protect their children. But they couldn't see what Sacha had known the first time he went into a shop with his mother and the shopkeeper talked to him as if he were the grownup because her English wasn't good enough. They couldn't see that Sacha had become an American, while they remained foreigners—and now it was his job to take care of them.

  By the time Sacha finally trudged up the stairs of the Astral Place subway station, it was long past rush hour and even the Bowery saloons had emptied out as the after-work drinkers straggled home to dinner.

  He glanced into the Metropole as he passed by, hoping that Uncle Mordechai might be there. But he wasn't. There was nothing for it but to walk home alone again.

  It was that hushed twilight hour when most people were safe inside, gathered around the dinner table, and the streets were left to the rats and the cats and the various human scavengers that foraged for scraps in the gutters when everyone who could afford to buy anything had gone home.

  Sacha turned down Hester Street and hurried along it, trying not to think about his mother's locket and Houdini's terrifying visions of hunger and darkness. He could see people going about their normal evening routines in the brightly lit windows overhead. He wished he were one of them. This was the time of night when you wanted to be in a warm, noisy, lamp-lit kitchen—not out here where shadows seemed to reach out of every alley.

  He was almost home when he thought he heard a step behind him. He spun around, ready to fight, his mind filled with terrifying images of bitter cold and devouring hunger. But there was nothing there—just the dark of the coming night, welling into the narrow streets like the deep Atlantic tide sweeping up the Hudson River.

  When he finally got home, Mrs. Lehrer waylaid him before he could make it through the back room. She was holding her money coat—the one she'd been sewing her savings into all these years to get her sisters out of Russia.

  "It's finished!" she cried, thrusting the coat toward him. "Go ahead, try it on!"

  Sacha didn't want to try it on. It was creepy, and it didn't smell very good. But Mrs. Lehrer was always so nice to him. And his mother was nodding at him from the kitchen, telling him to humor her.

  The coat felt amazi
ngly heavy as she settled it on his shoulders. He wondered how many years of savings Mrs. Lehrer had sewn into it. Why was Mrs. Lehrer so crazy, while Sacha's mother was so sane? She'd lived through the pogroms too. She'd even lost a child, which had to be at least as bad as losing your sisters. Was Sacha's mother really so much stronger than Mrs. Lehrer? Or could she crack too if enough new troubles were piled on top of the old ones? But Sacha could never ask these questions. It felt wrong even to think them when all the grownups worked so hard to protect the children from even the faintest memory of Russia and the bad times.

  "Raise your arms!" Mrs. Lehrer was saying to him. "See? Do you hear a jingle?"

  "No."

  "That's craft, not magic, I'll have you know! It takes thirty years of sewing seams to learn to do work like that. Go on, turn around! Dance!"

  Over in the Kesslers' kitchen, Sacha's father had realized what was happening in the back room. He was staring through the tenement window at them, looking just as uncomfortable as Sacha felt. But his mother gave him another of her little nods, as if to say, Go ahead. What's the harm if it makes her happy?

  Reluctantly, awkwardly, Sacha began to dance. Then Mrs. Lehrer laughed. On a sudden whim, Sacha grabbed her up in his arms and waltzed her around the cluttered room, bumping into chairs and ironing boards and piles of unfinished shirtwaists. He waltzed her into the front room, and they whirled back and forth in front of the windows while everyone laughed and clapped and pushed the chairs aside to make space for them.

  "Oh!" Mrs. Lehrer cried when she finally collapsed into a chair, flushed and smiling. "I haven't danced like that since Mo and I were young!"

  She and Sacha grinned at each other. Then Mrs. Lehrer leaned close to him as if she had a momentous secret to tell him. "This is a great day for me," she confided. "When I said I was finished, I meant it!Just before you came in, I sewed the very last coin into that coat. I have the fares now. Every penny of them. I can walk right down to the steamship office and buy my sisters their tickets tomorrow!"