The other students had also realized it was a contest, and they seemed determined to make the most of it. Their laughter began to be sprinkled with bets on who would collapse first. Most wagered on Sacha to win, but Lily had her fans—especially among the girls in the crowd.
As the minutes dragged on, Sacha felt his face redden with exertion. Lily, on the other hand, had turned white as fish bellies. With every breath, Sacha told himself he only had to hold out a second longer because Lily was about to crack. But then the next breath would come and go, and Lily would still be there.
She was in deadly earnest, he realized. She might be a girl, but she wanted to beat him just as badly as any boy would have. He would have shaken his head in admiration of her chutzpah—if he hadn't been worried that he'd fall over.
Sacha never got a chance to find out which one of them could hold out longer. Just as he was certain he was about to collapse, Shen reappeared. "That's enough for today," she said, despite the students' boisterous protests that she was ruining their betting. "Well done, both of you!"
Sacha and Lily hit the floor before the words were even out of her mouth. They lay there gasping for breath while Shen herded the others back to their practice mats. Finally Sacha recovered enough to sit up and ask Lily how she felt.
"Sick to my stomach!"
"Me too."
"I guess now you're going to tell me that you would have won if Shen hadn't come along," she said with a challenging toss of her head.
"Actually, I doubt I would have lasted another five seconds."
Lily gave him a surprised look. Then she grinned. "Me neither! That was awful!"
Sacha grinned back at her—and then felt his grin fade as he came to an astounding realization. He actually liked Lily. Really liked her. It was too bad she was an Astral. And rich. And blond. And ... well, he had to admit Paddy Doyle was right; she really was pretty. What a shame. If Lily were any ordinary girl, he really thought they could have been friends.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sacha Goes House Hunting
NEXT SUNDAY, in a cold, driving October rain, Sacha went house hunting.
He was looking for a house that was nice but not too nice, a house that he could pretend was his when Lily's chauffeur drove him home every afternoon. He'd been making excuses every day since the fateful tea with Mrs. Astral, but he could tell Lily was starting to get suspicious. And Lily being Lily, he wouldn't put it above her to follow him home out of sheer cussedness.
He started his search near Gramercy Park. But one look at the luxurious row houses and the shady green park cloistered behind its wrought-iron railings convinced him that Lily would never believe he lived in such a place. So he circled around in search of more modest lodgings. The Tenderloin was no good—what respectable people would live there? Lower Fifth Avenue was out too—all those fancy apartment buildings with snooty doormen who would run him off before the Astrals' car was out of sight. In theory at least, Astral Place would work, but no amount of cold and rain would have made Sacha desperate enough to tell Lily he lived on a street named after her own great-grandfather.
As he hurried through the flooding streets, Sacha noticed ads for Edison's etherograph going up all over the city. On building after building, workmen were taking down ads for headache remedies, patent medicines, corsets, and cigarillos, and putting up the now-familiar image of the heroic Inquisitor and cringing Kabbalist. It looked like Morgaunt and Edison were expecting the upcoming Houdini-Edison showdown to spark off a big boom in the witch-detection sector—and Sacha found this prospect even bleaker than the foul weather.
He had just turned onto a sedate block of respectable row houses when he noticed a ghostlike figure slipping along behind him. His blood chilled at the thought that it might be the dybbuk. But no, it was a grownup. A small grownup, true. But that was only because he was Chinese.
Sacha hurried on, pretending not to have seen the man, and trying to play for time while he decided what to do about him. When he reached the end of the block, he had a plan in mind. He looked back toward his pursuer, glaring fiercely as if to demand what the fellow thought he was up to, following him like that. When the man turned away, Sacha bolted around the corner and ran like hell.
Except that instead of running away, he ducked into the mews behind the comfortable residential block and jumped the gate of the first stable yard he passed in order to cut through the alley and come back around behind the man.
Or at least that's what he'd intended to do. But when he skidded back out onto the street, there was no Chinese man there at all.
There was only Shen, standing with her hands in her trouser pockets and laughing at him.
He could have kicked himself.
"You really didn't know it was me, did you?" she asked when her laughter had finally subsided into intermittent chuckles. "What are you doing, anyway? You've been wandering around all afternoon like a lost dog."
"Just getting some exercise."
"Isn't it a bit wet for that?"
"I, uh, well..."
"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were casing out houses to rob."
"Shen!"
"You don't have to take my word for it. Look down at the end of the block."
Sacha peered around Shen—and was alarmed to see a burly patrolman loitering at the corner, making no secret of the fact that he was keeping an eye on the two suspicious characters who had ventured onto his beat.
"Why don't you tell me what's going on," Shen suggested. "After all, wouldn't you rather tell me than him?"
Haltingly, Sacha told her about going to tea at Lily's house, and Lily's mother, and the situation with the Astral chauffeur. "So," he concluded, "I need a house."
"I don't quite follow. Don't you have a house?"
"Yes, but..."
"But you're ashamed of it."
He glared at her, but his angry answer died in his throat when he saw the gentle, understanding way she was looking at him.
I—yes.
"Of what? I mean, what would be so bad about having him drop you at your actual home?"
From any other adult, the question would have been infuriating, but somehow Shen managed to ask it as if she really wanted to know the answer.
"What would be so bad about it?" He imagined Lily's incredulous face, the chauffeur's haughty stare, the hoots and hollers of the kids on Hester Street, who treated the arrival of any motorcar—l et alone a motorcar with someone they knew in it—as if it were Passover, Hanukkah, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. And then the awful, pitying look on Lily's face when she saw the way the Kesslers lived. "Everything!" he wailed. "I'd rather die!"
For a moment Shen seemed about to ask him something else, but then she shrugged. "Well, we can't have you dying," she said. "Follow me. I've got an idea."
Ten minutes later they were standing on the front stoop of the perfect house. Nice but not too nice. Comfortably middle class, yet still modest enough to be believable. Best of all, it stood in the middle of a long row of identical brick-fronted town houses, so that it would be difficult for even a girl as sharp-eyed as Lily to be quite sure of remembering the right house if she tried to find it again.
When Shen strolled up to the neat red door and rang the bell, Sacha almost jumped out of his skin. "Are we, um—I mean, are we going to get in trouble with the, uh—you know."
"Oh, I don't think so. Most of the people who'd call the police on us aren't likely to be home this time of day."
That wasn't very reassuring. And the haughty stare of the tall housemaid who answered the door was even less reassuring. "What on earth do you want?" she huffed, staring down her nose at them.
"I'm here to see James," Shen announced calmly.
The housemaid sniffed. "The idea of a respectable house letting the butler receive personal callers at the front door! I've half a mind to tell the missus what sort of persons are tromping through her good rooms!"
The maid marched them through an airy
hall and down a long corridor toward the back of the house. Here the paintings and wallpaper gave way to glass-fronted cupboards containing towering stacks of dinner plates and sherbet cups and soup tureens and an endless array of china whose names and uses Sacha couldn't begin to imagine. Just as they passed the last of the china cupboards and started to hear the clatter and bustle of a working kitchen, the housemaid stopped short and rapped smartly on a neat little oak-paneled door in the wall.
"Mr. James!" she cried. "Persons to see you!"
Behind the door was a neat, comfortable, serviceably furnished sitting room. And in an armchair, reading a book in front of a roaring fire, sat a well-dressed Chinese man.
He put down his book and greeted Shen with obvious affection. "To what do I owe this pleasure?"
Shen cleared her throat and glanced toward the housemaid.
"Thank you, Bessie," Mr. James said. "That will be all."
Bessie beat a reluctant retreat—though Sacha suspected she wasn't going to go farther than the other side of the keyhole. She couldn't have gotten much satisfaction from her eavesdropping, however, since Shen and James immediately broke into rapid-fire Chinese.
At the end of their exchange, James turned to Sacha and gave a dignified little bow. "Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Kessler. Shall I expect you on weekday evenings, then?"
Sacha nodded.
"Very good, sir. I shall look forward to seeing you."
As they walked back out to the street, Shen explained that James had agreed to have Sacha visit him every evening on the pretext that he was looking out for a friend's son who'd come to the city to find work. "Just spend a few minutes talking to him, and then you can be on your way with no one the wiser."
"But won't he get in trouble?" Sacha asked, thinking of the haughty housemaid.
"Not likely. If I know James, he'll probably have the master and mistress of the house inviting you to dinner before the month's up."
"How do you know him?" Sacha asked.
"He used to be one of my orphans."
"But he's ... so, well, old!" Suddenly Sacha felt quite uncomfortable.
"What's wrong?" Shen asked after a moment. "You look like you've got a rock stuck in your shoe."
"How old are you?" Sacha finally blurted out.
Shen grinned broadly. "Don't you know it's rude to ask a woman her age?"
"I didn't—I just—I mean, are you an Immortal?"
"Being an Immortal isn't like having a liquor license, Sacha. You don't just get your piece of paper and stick it in the window and forget about it. You have to live it. And you have to keep living it, every minute of every day."
"But are you ... you know ... going to live forever?"
"I really couldn't tell you." Shen flashed her most mischievous grin, the one that made her look both childish and ancient at the same time. "I haven't lived long enough yet to know."
Suddenly Sacha thought of the dybbuk. Shen would know what to do about it. But on the other hand, she might tell Wolf. And then all Sacha's lies would unravel—right back to the incriminating moment when he had hidden the truth about his mother's locket.
"You have a worse problem than just being embarrassed in front of Lily Astral, don't you?"
Sacha nodded, a lump rising in his throat.
"Have you told Inquisitor Wolf about it?"
"No! I can't!"
"And you're not going to tell me either, are you? If I tried to make you tell me, you'd just come up with some lie that would only make things worse."
Sacha felt a flush of shame wash across his face.
They were turning onto lower Broadway now. As they mingled with the Sunday-afternoon crowd, Shen bowed her head, hiding her face beneath her broad-brimmed hat. And she put just enough distance between her and Sacha that passersby wouldn't notice they were together. They walked along like strangers for a block or two, something in her bearing telling him that it would be a bad idea to speak to her.
"Well," she said finally, "I guess I'll have to let you keep your secret. But do take care of yourself, Sacha. You're a boy of unusual talents. And unusual talents attract unusual trouble."
Then she angled off through the crowd without even giving him a chance to say goodbye. Only when he was climbing the stairs to his apartment did it finally occur to Sacha to wonder why Shen had been following him in the first place.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Gone, All Gone
THE MINUTE SACHA stepped into his apartment, he knew something was terribly wrong.
Mrs. Lehrer was sitting in a chair with her head bowed to her knees. Mrs. Kessler was gently stroking her hair and whispering "shush, shush," as if she were soothing a baby. Everyone else was hovering over the two of them as if Mrs. Lehrer were an unexploded bomb that no one could figure out how to defuse safely.
"Someone stole her coat," Bekah whispered to Sacha.
"The coat? What about the money?"
"Gone, all gone."
Sacha stared, horrified. In his mind's eye, he saw himself wearing the money coat, dancing with Mrs. Lehrer in front of the lighted window. Anyone standing in the street looking up at them would have thought it was his coat. And someone had been standing in the street watching them. Or something.
Sacha felt sick. What had he done? How could he ever forgive himself for bringing this trouble on his family? He knew he had to do something ... but every time he tried to think about it a dull fog of despair and confusion settled over his brain.
"Shush," Mrs. Kessler murmured, still stroking Mrs. Lehrer's hair. "Shush!"
But Mrs. Lehrer pushed her hand away and stood up. "It's all right," she said in a dull, hollow voice that sounded like it was coming from somewhere deep underground. "I never would have been able to spend that money anyway. I've known for years there was no one left to send it to."
Then she walked across the room and sat down at her sewing machine and picked up the next shirtwaist from the towering pile of piecework that was always there waiting for her.
The rest of them stared at one another with stunned, frightened expressions on their faces. Sacha could almost see the unasked questions hanging in the air. What was the woman going to do now that someone had stolen the very purpose of her life? And should they try to make her talk about it? Or was this one of those things in life that just got worse from talking?
Mrs. Lehrer was still at the sewing machine when they all crept miserably off to bed.
Sacha didn't know how long he slept, but he woke up with a terrible fear twisting the pit of his stomach. It was dark. Outside the windows, Hester Street lay so still and silent that he knew it must be three or four in the morning.
What a nightmare he'd had! He'd been lost in a bleak and terrible darkness that stretched out hopelessly for all eternity. What horror to be trapped in such a place, never to laugh or love or feel the warmth of friends and family! The worst thing of all had been the knowledge—though he couldn't say how he knew it—that he hadn't lost his life. It had been stolen from him. And the thief was walking free in the sunlight, wearing Sacha's clothes and body, tricking Sacha's family into loving him.
But it was only a dream, after all! Bekah lay sleeping beside him; he could hear her breathing and make out the shape of her cheek in the faint light from the street lamp. His mother and father lay just beyond her. On his other side Grandpa Kessler was snoring away like a kettle at the boil.
Sacha sighed with relief and nestled into the thick feather bed. He was already half asleep when he saw a flash of movement in the shadows and heard the unmistakable sound of a footfall.
It must be Mordechai coming home late again, he told himself.
But Mordechai was already home. Sacha could hear him snoring over on his mattress by the door, a sprightly tenor accompanying Grandpa Kessler's thundering basso. Besides, this shadow was smaller than Mordechai. And it had come in not through the door, but through the open window from the fire escape.
Sacha watched, paralyzed by fear, as the f
igure padded around the room. It seemed to be looking for something. It searched among the hooks along the wall that held the family's scant clothing. It seemed to search by smell, not sight; it snuffled among the hanging clothes like a dog hunting for a scent. It pulled something out. A shirt, maybe. Sacha couldn't see clearly and was too terrified to raise his head. Then it started back toward the window.
Halfway there it stopped and wavered in the middle of the room as if it couldn't decide what to do next. Then it turned toward the bed.
It was staring straight at Sacha now. He closed his eyes and tried to slow his breathing so that it matched the rhythm of the rest of the family sleeping on either side of him.
Silence.
Then stealthy, halting footsteps that came toward the bed and paused as the dybbuk leaned over him.
Its breath was cold enough to stop clocks. But its touch was colder still, as cold and soft and heartbreaking as the first winter snow on a newborn's grave. Gently, gently, it ran a finger along his cheek. It touched his hair. It touched the hand that lay outside the blanket.
Then it was gone.
Sacha lay awake, silent and terrified, until the dawn broke through the windows and his mother rose to stoke the cookstove. He washed and dressed with fingers more clumsy from fear than from cold. He watched tensely as the rest of his family got up and dressed and took their hats and coats and mufflers off the hook ... until he was quite sure that the only missing piece of clothing was his own second-best shirt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Bull Moose
WE'RE GOING WHERE?" Lily asked the next morning when Wolf gave the address to the taxicab. "What on earth are we going to investigate on Long Island?"
"You don't think there are magical criminals on Long Island?" Wolf asked, sounding amused. "Well, we're not after criminals today, just advice. From the last honest man in New York ... or at least the last honest man I know about."
The Inquisitor's Apprentice Page 18