By the time they turned off of a quiet country road above Oyster Bay and rolled up a curving drive to a sprawling shingle-clad house shaded by vast oaks and copper beeches, Sacha had a pretty strong suspicion who Wolf's last honest man was.
Any remaining doubt vanished when the cabby reined in his horse to make way for a flock of peacocks, two Irish wolfhounds, a tame black bear, and a thundering cavalcade of boys, girls, and Shetland ponies playing the wildest game of Cowboys and Indians Sacha had ever seen in his life.
The children, the dogs, and one of the Shetland ponies escorted the visitors up the front steps of the house and onto the gracious porch that shaded the door. Wolf started to ring the bell, only to be stopped by a chorus of protests from the children.
"No, wait!"
"Let Bill do it!"
"Bill's better than a doorbell!"
Bill turned out to be the pony—and with a little nifty trick-riding and a lot of raucous laughter, the kids got Bill maneuvered into place in front of the door and coaxed him into delivering a sharp rat-a-tat-tat to the door with one iron-shod forefoot.
The door slammed open to reveal the unmistakable figure of Teddy Roosevelt.
"Good trick!" he cried. Reaching into his trouser pocket, he brought out a handful of sugar cubes and fed them to the delighted pony. "But your mother would never forgive me if I let you bring a horse into the house ... so don't tell her!"
TR was just about the most famous New Yorker in America and certainly the most popular. He came from an aristocratic family impeccable enough to earn him an automatic place at Maleficia Astral's dinner parties. Worse still, he'd been born so rich that he'd never had to work for a dime. But somehow, in spite of it all, he was a real New Yorker.
People said it went back to his childhood, when he'd had such severe asthma that his father had driven him through the streets of New York all night, night after night, in order to coax enough fresh air into his lungs to keep him from suffocating. Whatever the reason, TR loved New York—and he loved ordinary New Yorkers of every color, creed, and nationality with a feeling so frank and genuine that they couldn't help loving him right back.
When he'd been police commissioner, TR had been famous for his unnerving habit of disguising himself as a regular beat cop and wandering the streets of New York at all hours of the day and night in order to catch corrupt policemen in the act of taking bribes or collecting protection money.
"If you want to take out the garbage," TR had pointed out with his usual bluntness, "you have to be willing to get your hands dirty!"
At the moment his hands were very dirty indeed—but only because he was holding a partially dismantled worm farm.
"Come on in!" he told them after the gang of kids, dogs, and pony had trooped noisily through the hall and out the back door.
He shook Lily's hand first. "The youngest Astral, I believe. Isn't the name Lily?"
Then he gave Wolf a hearty slap on the back. "How'd you know I was back from Africa? It's supposed to be a secret, you rascal."
Wolf smiled. "Let's call it Inquisitor's intuition, shall we?"
Roosevelt harrumphed and then turned to Sacha. "They say you can see magic, young man. What do you say? Can you? Have you got a damned clue what you're seeing, or are you just taking everyone else's word for it that it's magic?"
Sacha blinked. In all the excitement over his supposed gift—from the awful moment in Mrs. Lassky's bakery through his hurried induction into the ranks of Inquisitor's apprentices, no one had actually bothered to ask him what he thought he was seeing.
"I don't know," he admitted.
"I'll bet you've got some ideas, though." TR grinned. "You look like the kind of chap who's got more things happening inside his skull than he tells the world about. Good thing too, if you ask me. Any boy worth his salt knows grown-ups aren't big enough to handle the truth. Have you met Morgaunt yet?"
Sacha nodded.
"And? What did you think of him?"
Beside TR, Wolf stirred restlessly. "Perhaps this isn't the time for—"
"Nonsense, Max! I thought the whole point of having apprentices was to avoid rotten apples by going straight to the tree. If you can't trust twelve-year-olds—"
"Thirteen!" Sacha and Lily both objected at once.
"If you can't trust thirteen-year-olds," Roosevelt continued, with a solemn nod to acknowledge the correction, "then who the dickens are you going to trust?"
Wolf shrugged fatalistically as if to say that he was perfectly prepared to face a life of trusting no one. But Roosevelt just took Wolf's silence for agreement and forged ahead. It was the same annoying trick Lily had used on Sacha more than once. And of course the most annoying thing about it was how well it worked. At least when Lily and TR did it. It must have something to do with being rich, Sacha decided.
"You were telling me about Morgaunt," TR prompted, bringing Sacha back to the present with a thump. "Did you see him work magic?"
"I ... don't know," Sacha confessed. "It didn't look like any magic I ever saw. It didn't feel right."
"What did it feel like?"
He remembered Morgaunt sitting in his dark library, swirling the bright golden tumbler of Scotch. He remembered how it had felt like all the magic in New York was being sucked into that single golden point of light.
"I—I can't describe it exactly. But I've felt it before. Sometimes when I'm on the subway, or just walking down the street..."
Sacha struggled for words. He remembered the larger-than-human quality of the magic he had sensed hovering around Morgaunt's library and Shen's orphanage. He thought of the strange ripple that had coursed through the air when the Rag and Bone Man showed up to rescue him from the dybbuk. He remembered all those times when he had passed a construction site or the big pits where they were digging the new subway lines, and felt ... what? A power far greater than any of Edison's dynamos. A power that was usually buried under the accumulated weight of dirt and mortar and cobblestones, but that could spring up in unexpected places like a volcano erupting from deep underground. Sometimes he felt that the everyday city was just a curtain hung before a darkened stage. Behind it, invisible but ever present, hovered all the lives, all the deaths and loves and sufferings of the millions of souls who had lived in the great city. And they were becoming something. Something that had never existed anywhere under the sun before.
"It's New York," TR told him. "It's the city itself you're feeling. Every city has its own peculiar magic. Its own soul, you might say. And the soul of a city like New York has a power beyond imagining. That's Morgaunt's insanity. He doesn't just want to control the people who work magic. He wants to harness magic itself. He wants to turn New York into a machine that does nothing but make money for him. He's a fool! And he'll destroy us all if we don't put a stop to his foolishness!"
"Teddy," Wolf warned.
"No, Max, they need to know about this!" He turned to the children and went on, speaking with burning intensity.
"Inquisitors don't just protect ordinary people from magicians. They protect magicians from themselves, too. That's the job you two took on when you became Wolf's apprentices. Protecting people like Morgaunt and—"
Wolf cleared his throat and gave TR a warning look.
"Max has a point this time," TR said after a moment. "Why don't you two go play while we talk things over privately?"
Sacha could have screamed with frustration. He and Lily both cast a look of silent protest in Wolf's direction. But Wolf might have been made of stone for all the attention he paid them.
"Run along and play," TR repeated. "You won't, of course. If you've got an ounce of spirit in you, you'll be listening at the keyhole for all you're worth. But I warn you: I can jerk a door open as fast as the dickens, so you'd better look lively!"
Despite TR's jokes about listening at the keyhole, the heavy oak door turned out to be thick enough to muffle all sounds of conversation except for a vague and tantalizing murmur. When the two men finally reemerged, Sacha
and Lily were slumped on a red velvet canapé, looking as discouraged and frustrated as they felt.
"You're hunting big game," Roosevelt told Wolf as he flung the door open. "You'd better be ready to shoot when you catch up to it."
"It's not the catching that worries me," Wolf said. "It's what happens after that."
"So you came all the way out to Long Island to find out if I'd stick by you? I've got a lot of faults, Max, but deserting my friends isn't one of them." TR turned to Sacha and Lily. "What about you two? Will you stick? Can we count on you? What sort of stuff are you made of?"
"I'll do the best I can," Sacha said, torn between admiration for Roosevelt and guilt over the secrets he was keeping.
"That's the spirit!" TR cried. "When people ask you if you can do a job, tell 'em yes! Then get busy and find out how to do it! Each of you, quick, before you have time to think about it: Who's the man you admire most in the world?"
Sacha had never asked himself this question in his life, but he didn't have to think for a heartbeat before answering it: "My father."
"Why?" TR grilled him.
"I guess ... because he's always put his family first? And he's honest. And he works harder than anyone I've ever met."
TR flashed his infectious grin at Sacha. "Bully for you! Grow up like your father, and you'll be a man I'd be proud to call my friend."
Then he turned to Lily, who was watching this exchange with a curious expression on her face. Suddenly he looked serious and forbidding. "And you, Lily? Do you feel the same way about Your father?"
The angry flush that flooded Lily's face was all the answer he needed.
"You're a good girl, Lily. And you'll make a good job of your life if you've got the guts to live up to your own ideals. It won't be easy. But I don't pity you. And I guess you wouldn't thank me if I did. You and I are a lot alike." He grinned the big gap-toothed grin that cartoonists loved to caricature. "That wasn't a compliment, by the way, so you don't have to thank me for it!"
"I—I—oh," Lily stammered.
TR turned back to Wolf. "You've got two good ones here," he told him. "Hang on to them."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A Long Way Down
IS THIS WHAT ye call keeping Mr. Morgaunt's name out of the papers?" Commissioner Keegan raged, waving a crumpled copy of the New York Sun in Wolf's face.
They were standing in Morgaunt's library again, Lily and Sacha flanking Wolf while the police commissioner stood before them and Morgaunt lounged in his chair. He didn't have a glass of Scotch in his hand this morning—but other than that, Morgaunt looked as if he hadn't moved a muscle since the last time he'd had Wolf dragged onto his astronomically expensive oriental carpet.
"Er ... may I?" Wolf asked, reaching for the newspaper.
"Is this discretion?" Keegan shook the paper in Wolf's face again. "Is this efficiency? Is this privacy?"
Wolf made another unsuccessful grab for the paper, but Keegan jerked it away.
"Do ye think this is all a bloody game?" he growled. "Don't ye remember what happened to Roosevelt? Or are ye looking for a rematch? If so, I'll thank ye to warn me. I'll get out of town till the fight's over, and so will every other cop with a brain in his head!"
Finally Wolf managed to coax the newspaper from Keegan's hand. As he uncrumpled it, Sacha glimpsed the headline blazoned across the front page: "J. P. Morgaunt Caught in Love Tryst with Coney Island Cutie!"
"Oh, dear," Wolf said.
"Is that all ye have to say for yourself?"
"Well, I should probably read the article before I say anything else," Wolf pointed out—and proceeded, in a remarkably leisurely fashion, to do just that.
Then he handed it to his apprentices and waited for them to read it. The article was written in the signature New York Sun style, full of breezy slang and wink-and-nudge gossip:
A little birdie told us that Inquisitor Wolf of the NYPD Inquisitors Division was sighted on the boardwalk at Coney Island last week questioning eyewitnesses to an unsolved crime.
But was it a crime of magic ... or a crime of passion? Can it be a coincidence that the main witness the Inquisitor questioned was the luscious Rosalind Darling, a.k.a. Little Cairo? Or that the crack NYPD Inquisitor was also recently seen coming out of J. P. Morgaunt's Fifth Avenue mansion?
When we caught up with Miss Darling at home, her mother had this to say:
"I have no comment at all! I don't wish to speak to you! My daughter lives only for her art, and if Mr. Morgaunt has been paying her some kind attentions, then he is inspired only by his pure appreciation of her artistic accomplishments. Which extend to tap-dancing, singing, photographic modeling, living statue exhibitions, and exotic interpretations. Available for theatrical bookings care of Darling Incorporated, Apartment 3D, 240 Mulberry Street. Did you get the apartment number, dear, or do I need to repeat it for you?"
Your Editors burn to shed the Sun's blazing light on this Coney Island mystery! Will Mr. Morgaunt succumb to the delightful Miss Darling? Will she be the next theatrical temptress to join the ranks of high society? Will Mrs. Astral be forced to receive One Who Has Trod the Boardwalk? Only time—and your intrepid Sun—will tell!
"Poor Rosie!" Lily whispered to Sacha behind her hand. "And I thought my mother was a handful!"
"Well," Inquisitor Wolf said mildly, "Mrs. DiMaggio—er, I mean, Darling—certainly knows how to make the most of her opportunities."
"And what am I supposed to tell Mr. Morgaunt?" Keegan asked, as if Morgaunt weren't sitting right there next to him staring at Wolf with a look of cold amusement on his patrician face.
Keegan was doing all the talking again while Morgaunt sat silent in the background. But this time there was an unnerving quality to his silence that hadn't been there on the first visit. Despite the commissioner's fulminations, Morgaunt seemed pleased about Wolf's slip-up.
Morgaunt's eyes slid sideways, and he caught Sacha watching him. "Hello, Mr. Kessler. Are we still enjoying playing at cops and robbers, or is the fun starting to wear a little thin?"
"Leave him alone," Wolf snapped. "He's not up to your cat and mouse games."
"Ah. So you've taken him under your wing, have you?" Morgaunt chuckled. "You're softhearted, Wolf. That's always been your downfall. Still, he's a bit more interesting than the last stray you brought in off the street. How is your little Chinese friend, by the way? Are you still playing Romeo to her faded Juliet, or have you gotten tired of her yet?"
Wolf and Morgaunt stared at each other. Wolf's face was as bland and expressionless as ever, but a faint flush crept up from his collar and spread over his cheeks.
"Oh, right," Morgaunt said. "She got tired of you. Or maybe she just decided she'd rather be a prosperous spellbinder's widow than the wife of an insubordinate policeman with uncertain prospects. How poignant." Morgaunt reached across the mahogany wasteland of his desk to thumb through a thick stack of papers that looked suspiciously like official police reports. "Really, Wolf, I ought to pay you. Reading Keegan's surveillance reports on you is as good as going to the opera."
Wolf flashed Morgaunt a nonplussed look. He recovered quickly, however. "Are we just gossiping now?" he asked. "Or do you have something useful to tell me?"
"I have a job for you," Morgaunt said. "The job you should have done in the first place. Keep Edison alive. And keep my name out of the damn papers. If you do that, then I might forget about Shen and her little orphans. If you don't, I'll dig up half of Chinatown and build a subway stop right in the middle of the Ladies' Dancing and Deportment School!"
Whatever Wolf would have said in answer to this threat, Sacha and Lily never heard it. Just as he opened his mouth to reply, a great outcry went up in the courtyard of the Morgaunt mansion. A moment later, the butler appeared at the door, looking harried and disheveled.
"What's happened, man?" Morgaunt snapped. "Out with it!"
"It's the dybbuk! And this time it's killed a man!"
Wolf and Morgaunt sprang toward the door li
ke sprinters bursting forward at the sound of the starter's pistol. Sacha and Lily followed, but Wolf waved them back.
"Wait here," he warned. "No, don't argue! We're not playing games anymore. Stay in the library until I tell you it's safe."
The two children gazed forlornly at the closed door.
"Do you think it followed us here?" Lily asked in a small, frightened voice.
"Why would it?" Sacha asked, even though he was afraid he knew the answer.
"Sacha," Lily whispered. "Have you ever wondered if ... I mean, haven't you noticed that..."
But Sacha turned his back on her, not wanting to hear the next words. He put his hand on the door, desperate to know what was happening outside but not daring to disobey Wolf's orders. "I wish we could see what they're doing out there," he fretted.
"Hang on," Lily said. "I've got an idea about that."
And before Sacha could stop her, she was off. She sprinted down the length of the library, climbed the spiral staircase two steps at a time, clattered along the wrought-iron balcony, and leaped onto the rolling ladder so energetically that it whirled down its tracks with a sound like cloth ripping.
By the time Sacha reached the foot of the ladder, Lily was already far above his head.
"Wolf didn't say we couldn't look out the window," she called down to him. "Did he?"
Sacha began to climb. The ladder was steep and narrow, and it quivered alarmingly on its metal wheels with every move he made. Morgaunt probably had some sub-under-butler specifically assigned to oil those wheels every morning. Sacha imagined him arriving tomorrow morning with his rags and oilcan, only to find two nosy children splattered all over the marble floor far below.
"Can you see anything?" he called up to Lily.
"No, it's all stupid stained glass. On the other hand, I guess no one will notice if I just break a little bit."
"Are you sure you should—"
"Cripes, Sacha! Since when did you turn into an old lady? Pass me your handkerchief."
The Inquisitor's Apprentice Page 19