The Inquisitor's Apprentice (23 page)

Yet Wolf's faith in Sacha never seemed to waver. Wolf would even make odd, disconnected comments from time to time that suggested he assumed Sacha would become a far better Inquisitor than he was. It should have made Sacha proud, but it just made him feel like a fraud. Especially when he knew he was lying to the man.

Even worse, Sacha was no closer to figuring out what to do about the dybbuk. In fact, he could barely bring himself to think about it. Every now and then he would see the hazy halo around a street lamp or smell the dank river air wafting up from the docks—and he would flash back to that terrifying moment when he stood in the dark street face-to-face with the dybbuk and thought ... almost thought.... But whenever he tried to face the memory, a wave of shame, terror, and confusion swept over him.

As if that weren't enough, Hester Street had been struck by a perplexing wave of petty crime. First Mrs. Lassky's cat went missing. It came back a day later, but Mrs. Lassky couldn't stop wondering how it could have gotten out of a locked room when the only key was in her pocket.

Then someone started stealing food: from Lassky's Bakery and the dry goods store next door; from the Lehrers' room; from the IWW headquarters upstairs; even from Mrs. Kessler's own bread box. And the weirdest thing was that whoever was stealing the food wasn't eating it. People kept finding crumbs dribbled down the stairs and scattered in dark corners.

And last—but far from least scary—was the curious case of Sacha's missing socks.

Mrs. Kessler had been knitting a new pair of socks for Sacha. It had taken forever, since Grandpa Kessler always seemed to be around when she had time to work on them, which meant she couldn't use magic and had to do it the slow way. When she finally cast off the last stitch, she rushed them into the wash so Sacha could wear them to work the next morning. Naturally, she washed his old socks too; Mrs. Kessler was not a woman to waste hot water. Then she hung both pairs out to dry on the fire escape.

In the morning the new socks were still there, but the old ones were gone.

"What kind of
meshuggener
steals an old pair of socks when there's a brand-new pair hanging right next to them?" Mrs. Kessler asked.

"Maybe it was a pigeon," Uncle Mordechai hazarded. "Feathering its nest with the stolen fruits of other people's labor like the Wall Street Wizards and Robber Barons!"

"You're thinking of magpies," Sacha's father said from behind the business pages. "And anyway, birds don't wear socks. Their feet are the wrong shape."

"Hah!" Grandpa Kessler cried. "That's where you're both wrong! Sure, you never saw a pigeon in socks. But it's got nothing to do with their feet. I know that for a fact, because demons have bird feet—and there are numerous well-documented cases of socks in the rabbinical literature."

"What about dybbuks?" Sacha asked. It was easier to think about the dybbuk amidst the warmth and laughter of his family—but not much easier. "Do dybbuks have bird feet too?"

For once Grandpa Kessler was stumped. It seemed that no rabbis in all the countless tomes of Haggadah had ever argued about what dybbuks' feet looked like. "Not even the
Hasidim,
" Grandpa Kessler admitted. "And those guys really know their dybbuks. Though, come to think of it, I did hear a tale in Breslov about a wonderworking rebbe whose wife realized he'd been possessed because his claws kept wearing holes in his socks."

"That explains a lot!" Sacha's mother said, poking her husband in the ribs.

"What am I supposed to do, walk on my head?" his father asked good-naturedly. "Listen, when Sacha gets rich, I'll stop walking. I'll hire a klezmer band to play wedding marches and carry me around in a chair all day long, and then you'll have to find something else to complain about."

"Really?" Mrs. Kessler said, deadpan, staring her husband in the eye. "A klezmer band? Is that the best you can do?"

Mr. Kessler smiled one of his rare smiles. "Well, I can think of other ways to pass the time without socks on, but I didn't want to mention them in front of the children."

"Dad!" Sacha and Bekah yelped in identical tones of outrage.

"What are you two so embarrassed about?" Mrs. Kessler snapped, which was pretty funny, considering how flushed her cheeks were. "We're old—we're not dead!"

"So was it a dybbuk in that story?" Sacha asked his grandfather, trying to make the question sound casual. "Or was it just a regular demon?"

"Good question!" Rabbi Kessler agreed and shuffled happily off to check his books for the answer.

But try as he might, he couldn't find it. "Oh, well," he admitted. "Maybe I didn't remember it. Maybe I just imagined it. The older I get, the harder it is to tell the difference."

"Don't worry," Sacha said—though he was already frantically searching his memory and trying to think if he'd noticed bird footprints lately in any places they weren't supposed to be.

But Grandpa Kessler
was
worrying. "Your Inquisitor Wolf isn't trying to take on that dybbuk on his own, is he?"

"Uh ... no," Sacha said. He wasn't exactly lying, he told himself. It just felt like he was.

"Tell him he mustn't! I'm sure he's a very clever young man, but he's really not qualified. He hasn't tried to drag you into anything like
that,
has he, Sachele?"

"Of course not," Sacha said, feeling like a worm.

"If he does, you just walk straight out of that office and come home and tell me about it. Promise?"

Was there anything lower than a worm? If there was, Sacha decided, that must be what he felt like now.

"Of course, Grandpa. Of course I'd tell you."

 

In fact, between the lies he was telling Wolf and the lies he was telling his family, the only time Sacha really felt like himself was at his kung fu lessons with Shen.

To Lily's disappointment, they didn't take the magical route to Shen's practice hall for their first lesson. Instead, Payton escorted them downtown, grumbling under his breath all the while about wasting his time playing nursemaid. He didn't even walk them through the door once they got there; he just stalked away, leaving them wavering in the tree-lined courtyard wondering whether to go inside or not.

There was a class already in session in the stone-floored practice hall. They could hear the sounds of feet slapping on the scrubbed stones and bodies slamming into woven rush mats.

"What do you think we should do?" Lily whispered.

"I don't know," Sacha whispered back. "Wait, maybe."

Finally curiosity won out over politeness. They slipped through the door and hid in the shadow of the balcony to watch.

They spotted Shen immediately; you couldn't mistake the spotless white cotton pajamas or the shining black braid that flowed down her back like a waterfall. But it was the orphans who really caught their attention. Most of them looked Chinese, at least to Sacha. But he did see a few heads of brown or red hair scattered among the black. And some of the orphans would have looked right at home with Paddy Doyle and his Hexers.

The class was scattered through the great hall, boxing at punching bags stuffed with rice and cotton wadding, tumbling and throwing each other on padded practice mats, stretching like ballet dancers. And half the students were lined up in an almost military formation on the central practice floor, going through the most remarkable set of movements Sacha had ever seen.

They moved in unison, their coordination so perfect that they seemed to be a single body, with a single mind and spirit. Each member of the group remained precisely the same distance from his neighbors throughout every turn and leap and backflip. And they ended the routine with a single thundering
STOMP!

Now Sacha realized what had worn the divots into the flagstones: the stamping of thousands of bare feet moving in perfect formation hour after hour, day after day, year after year—and for all he knew of this strange and magical building, for century upon century, since long before the rest of New York even existed.

It was unbelievable. Look at that kid doing splits over there! Or the other one in the corner turning backward handsprings as easily as normal people walked down the sidewalk! Not to mention the kids who were sparring with one another on the practice mats—he couldn't even figure out what their lightning-fast feet and hands were doing, much less imagine imitating them. Maybe he should just sneak back out before Shen noticed him, he told himself. After all, it was pretty obvious what the outcome of staying would be: total, absolute humiliation.

He glanced at Lily, who looked like she was having the same second thoughts he was. But before he could open his mouth to suggest that they sneak away, Shen saw them.

"Are you ready?" she asked, sauntering over to them.

"Not to do that!"

"Don't let my orphans intimidate you. They've studied for years, and they enjoy showing off for visitors. Besides, no one expects
dabizi
to be able to do kung fu at all, so they'll be impressed if you manage to survive your first lesson."

"What's a
dabizi?
" Sacha asked.

"It's a rude word for Westerners. It means 'big nose.'"

Sacha blinked. He hadn't thought of Chinese people as having particularly small noses. Lily's nose, for example, was hardly any bigger than Shen's. Or was it? He tried to check out Shen's nose without staring too obviously.

"Yes, I know," she said. "But I'm half
dabizi
myself. My mother was Irish."

"What?" Lily exclaimed. "But you look so—so—"

"So Chinese?" Shen's face took on an ironical cast that made her look unnervingly like Inquisitor Wolf. "Not to the Chinese, I assure you."

Sacha stared at Shen in frank amazement. He remembered hearing that no Chinese women were allowed into America, and since there were always plenty of children playing in the streets of Chinatown, he guessed he ought to have wondered who their mothers were. But he was still astounded by Shen's revelation. He had grown up in a New York where every aspect of life—from what you wore to where you worked to which streets you could walk down safely—depended on which ethnic group you belonged to. And he had seen enough of the world to know that being half Chinese and half Irish didn't mean you belonged to both groups. It meant you belonged nowhere. He wondered what Shen's life was like and how she managed to protect her orphanage in a city that had no place for people like her.

He was still wondering about it when Shen took them over to one of the woven practice mats and introduced them to a whip-thin boy whom Sacha guessed was about ten years old.

"Joe will get you started," Shen said. "I'll be back in ... shall we say ten minutes?"

Joe bowed, straightened up, and shook both their hands. Sacha peered curiously at him, trying to decide whether he was half Irish too. But he couldn't tell.

"So," Joe asked them, "are you guys ready to work, or did you just come here to stare?"

Then he stretched, flexing his wiry legs and arms like rubber bands, took a deep breath ... and demonstrated a move that looked so simple Sacha wasn't even sure it ought to be called kung fu. It began with a smooth flourish of both hands that looked impressively exotic. But it ended in a kind of knees-bent, low-to-the-ground, straddling position that didn't look any different from the squat of a catcher waiting for a pitch behind the plate.

"That's the advanced version, of course," Joe pointed out. "You don't wanna bend your knees that much, trust me." He straightened up and dusted off his hands—though as far as Sacha could see, he hadn't done anything that could get dust on them in the first place. "It's not a contest. Just do as much as you can, all right? And I'll coach your form."

Sacha could have laughed out loud. Ten minutes of doing squats? To a boy who'd grown up on Hester Street pushing foot-powered sewing machines and dragging slopping buckets of water up tenement house stairs, ten minutes of deep knee bends didn't even qualify as effort. His father was right, after all, he decided; Jews were the only people on the planet who knew what real work was.

He shrugged and settled in to practice. But as he straightened his legs to begin his second squat, Joe stopped him. "You call that ten minutes? That's more like ten seconds!"

Several other orphans had drifted over to watch, and now they were laughing and elbowing one another in the ribs.

"The
dabizi
don't get it!" someone laughed. "They think they're doing jumping jacks!"

That was when Sacha realized that they weren't supposed to be practicing the move over and over again for ten minutes. They were supposed to crouch down once—and stay there.

At first it didn't seem so hard. But after about a minute, it began to seem somewhat uncomfortable. In another minute, Sacha's legs started to burn. Then his knees started to shake. Then his whole leg started to spasm with the sheer effort of staying there.

Then he looked at the clock and realized that he still had seven minutes to go.

His only consolation was that Lily looked at least as bad as he felt. Good thing too, he told himself. At least he could avoid total humiliation as long as he held out longer than she did. The alternative—being beaten by a girl—was unthinkable.

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!"