The Inquisitor's Apprentice Read Free Page A

jail?
    He still felt awful about Mrs. Lassky. He'd had no idea she'd get into so much trouble. After all, lots of people used magic—at least when the cops weren't looking. New spells traveled up and down Hester Street as fast as gossip. There were spells to make bread rise and spells to make matzo not rise. Spells to catch husbands and spells to get rid of them. Spells to make your kids listen to your good advice and stay home and study instead of loitering on street corners like gangsters. Even Sacha's mother used magic whenever she was sure her father-in-law wasn't looking. So what had Mrs. Lassky done that was so terrible?
    "Sacha?" his father asked. "Are you all right?"
    He realized everyone was staring at him. "I ... I feel kind of bad about Mrs. Lassky."
    "Don't worry," his mother said airily. "She just paid a fine."
    "And she should have paid a bigger one!" Grandpa Kessler said. "This back-alley witchery is a public disgrace—a
shande far di goyim!
And it's against religion too. As the learned Rabbi Ovadia of Bertinoro said, 'God weeps when women work magic.'"
    "Well, maybe God wouldn't have to weep if the men would let women into
shul
to study real Kabbalah," Bekah said tartly.
    "Don't talk back to your grandfather, young lady!" Mrs. Kessler snapped.
    "What? I'm only saying what you've said a hundred times before—"
    "And don't talk back to me either!"
    Bekah waited until their mother had turned back to her soup and then looked at Sacha and rolled her eyes again.
    "I see you rolling your eyes," their mother told Bekah without even bothering to turn around. "I guess that means you don't want any blintzes this Sunday morning?"
    "No! No!" Bekah cried. "I take it back! I unroll my eyes!"
    Everyone laughed. Whatever else people said about Ruthie Kessler—and they said plenty—no one could deny that she made the best blintzes west of Bialystok.
    "That's funny," Mrs. Kessler said while everyone else was still laughing. "I thought I had enough water, but I don't. Now where's that bucket got to?"
    Sacha sighed and got up to look for the water bucket. But his mother found it first. "I'll go," she told him. "You rest up. You have a big day tomorrow."
    "You shouldn't be out alone after dark," Mr. Kessler objected. "If you don't want Sacha to go, then I will."
    "You most certainly won't! You've got no business being outside in the rain with that cough of yours!"
    "What cough?" Sacha's father snapped as if the mere suggestion that he was sick were a mortal insult. But then he promptly proved her point by coughing.
    Mrs. Kessler snorted and stalked out the door, muttering that she'd made it all the way from Russia to the Lower East Side and wasn't about to start being afraid of the dark now.
    "Be careful, Ruthie!" Mrs. Lehrer called after her. "I
saw
someone down there the other night!"
    No one listened. Mrs. Lehrer was nice—but crazy. Not that anyone ever actually came out and said she was crazy. They just shook their heads sadly and said things like "She came out of the pogroms, poor woman. What can you expect after what she's been through?"
    Sacha had worried about this when he was younger. After all, his own parents had survived the pogroms. Did that mean they might go crazy too? But finally he'd decided that Mrs. Lehrer's craziness didn't seem to be catching. Mostly it just amounted to pinching pennies so she could buy her sisters tickets to America and sewing all her savings into an old coat that she never took off because—as she told Sacha and Bekah at every possible opportunity—
you never knew.
    Mrs. Lehrer's habit of seeing thieves in every shadow was understandable given the amount of cash she had sewn into her money coat. But everyone knew better than to pay any attention to it. So before the door had even closed behind Sacha's mother, they'd all gone back to arguing about his apprenticeship.
    "Don't pay any attention to your Uncle Mordechai," Mo told Sacha. "Being an Inquisitor is a