The Inquisitor's Apprentice Read Free

Mordechai got from his favorite Chinatown wizard. But it hadn't helped. Whatever Uncle Mordechai had, you couldn't buy it in a spell bottle.
    "At least being an Inquisitor is a job," Sacha's father pointed out, still without looking up from
Wealth Without Magic.
"That's more than some people in this family have. And stop tipping your chair back, Mordechai. We only own three chairs, and you've already broken two of them."
    Uncle Mordechai tipped his chair back even farther and crossed his pointy-toed shoes on the kitchen table in a flamboyant manner calculated to convey his unconcern with such mundane matters as chairs. "I have two careers," he proclaimed, tottering on the brink of disaster. "The pen and the stage. And if neither of them is financially remunerative at the moment, I regard this as the fault of an insufficiently artistic world!"
    "Never mind that, Mordechai." Sacha's mother leaned over to stir the fragrant pot of matzo ball soup simmering on the stove top and to adjust Grandpa Kessler's cane, which was holding the oven door closed while her bread baked. "The point is, our Sacha's going to be an Inquisitor."
    Mrs. Kessler's opinion of Inquisitors had changed completely in the last month. When the Inquisitors had simply been the division of the New York City Police Department responsible for solving magical crimes, she'd thought they were drunken Irish hooligans just like the regular cops. But now that
her
son was going to be an Inquisitor, she wouldn't hear a bad word about them.
    "I still don't get it, though," Bekah said skeptically. "Who ever heard of a Jew being an Inquisitor? And why Sacha?"
    "Because he's
special!
They said so with their fancy test."
    Bekah rolled her eyes. Bekah was sixteen and rolled her eyes often. At the moment she was wedged between Sacha and their grandfather on the feather bed, trying to do her night school homework. As far as Sacha could see, she wasn't making much progress. She'd written out
America is founded upon the principle of the right of the common man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without interference by magical powers
three times—only to rip it up and start over when their grandfather jostled her elbow and ruined her careful penmanship.
    "I'll say he's special!" Grandpa Kessler snorted. The sound of arguing voices had woken him up, and he wasn't about to miss out on an argument, even if it was one the family had already had many times in the last few weeks. "He's the grandson and great-grandson of famous Kabbalists, and what do his magical talents amount to?
Bubkes!
"
    "Unless being able to memorize the batting averages of the entire Yankees starting lineup counts as a magical talent," Bekah quipped.
    Sacha sighed. He would have liked to argue with Bekah, but she was completely right. If only he could have learned his Torah lines as easily as he learned baseball statistics, his
bar mitzvah
wouldn't have been a public humiliation.
    Â 
    "Never mind that." Mrs. Kessler checked the bread and loaded a little more coal into the stove. As she bent over the stove, her little silver locket swung toward the fire, and she absentmindedly tucked it back into the collar of her worn-out dress. "The main point is that this apprenticeship is a great opportunity for Sacha. Isn't it, Sacha?"
    "Uh ... yeah ... sure," Sacha mumbled.
    But actually he wasn't sure at all. On the one hand, there was the money. It was exciting to imagine himself all grown up and making enough money to move his family out of the tenements and into the wide-open green spaces of Brooklyn. It was nice to picture his mother and sister quitting their jobs at the Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory. Or his father studying all day like the learned man he was instead of wrecking his back hauling slimy barrels of fish at the East River Docks. But on the other hand ... well ... did Sacha really want to spend his life writing out Illegal Use of Magic citations and dragging people like Mrs. Lassky off to