“Raise your arms!” Mrs. Lehrer was saying to him. “See? Do you hear a jingle?”
“No.”
“That’s craft, not magic, I’ll have you know! It takes thirty years of sewing seams to learn to do work like that. Go on, turn around! Dance!”
Over in the Kesslers’ kitchen, Sacha’s father had realized what was happening in the back room. He was staring through the tenement window at them, looking just as uncomfortable as Sacha felt. But his mother gave him another of her little nods, as if to say, Go ahead. What’s the harm if it makes her happy?
Reluctantly, awkwardly, Sacha began to dance. Then Mrs. Lehrer laughed. On a sudden whim, Sacha grabbed her up in his arms and waltzed her around the cluttered room, bumping into chairs and ironing boards and piles of unfinished shirtwaists. He waltzed her into the front room, and they whirled back and forth in front of the windows while everyone laughed and clapped and pushed the chairs aside to make space for them.
“Oh!” Mrs. Lehrer cried when she finally collapsed into a chair, flushed and smiling. “I haven’t danced like that since Mo and I were young!”
She and Sacha grinned at each other. Then Mrs. Lehrer leaned close to him as if she had a momentous secret to tell him. “This is a great day for me,” she confided. “When I said I was finished, I meant it! Just before you came in, I sewed the very last coin into that coat. I have the fares now. Every penny of them. I can walk right down to the steamship office and buy my sisters their tickets tomorrow!”
Sacha felt the smile freeze on his face. Mrs. Lehrer’s sisters hadn’t written to her in years. No one knew where they were, or even if they were still alive. He looked around for help, but his mother had already turned back to her mending, and his father and Mordechai were talking politics. No one else had heard Mrs. Lehrer’s words.
“That’s great,” he told her, hoping to God that he was saying the right thing. “I’m — I’m really happy for you.”
Mrs. Lehrer looked deep into Sacha’s eyes. Suddenly she wasn’t smiling anymore. And she didn’t look even a little bit crazy. It was as if another woman were looking out of her eyes at him — a woman who knew perfectly well that she was never going to see her sisters again.
“You’re a nice boy,” she told him, reaching up to pat his cheek. “You’ve always been so kind to me. Just like your father. I know you’re going to grow up to be just as good a man as he is.”
When Mrs. Lehrer had taken back her money coat, Sacha stood by the window looking out into the night and leaning his forehead against the cool glass — the closest he could get to being alone in the crowded apartment.
By the time he realized that his watcher was down in the street looking up at him, they were already staring into each other’s eyes.
Sacha jumped back, chest tight and heart pounding.
The watcher’s face looked blurred and vague in the gaslight, like an old photograph. But that his watcher and Edison’s dybbuk were one and the same. And Sacha could still see Rosie DiMaggio was right. The dybbuk did look like a nice Jewish boy. It looked like half the nice Jewish boys on the Lower east Side.
Sacha shuddered as he thought of what would happen if the dybbuk actually succeeded in killing Edison. The police wouldn’t have to look far to find someone to blame. Neither would the mobs. And then the bad times would be back again. Not in Russia, but right here on Hester Street.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Rushing the Growler
THE NEXT MORNING Sacha nodded off on the subway and would have missed his stop completely if a large lady in a hat decorated with several pounds of passenger pigeon feathers hadn’t tripped over his foot and poked him with her parasol.
He’d been up half the night. When everyone else was asleep, he’d snuck out onto the fire escape with an armload of Grandpa Kessler’s Kabbalah books and shivered under the dim light of the street lamps while he read everything he could find about dybbuks.
It wasn’t pleasant reading. No one knew how to kill a dybbuk, short of killing its victim along with it. A dybbuk was part of you — like your arm or your leg or your heart. Once someone summoned it here, it was only a matter of time until it stepped into your skin and stole your life — and sent you back to spend all eternity in whatever hell dybbuks came from.
Some men had managed to survive having a dybbuk. But only great and pious rabbis. And even they hadn’t defeated their dybbuks. They’d only learned to live with them, like a man sharing his house with a half-tamed lion that would devour him the moment he let down his guard. As he read one terrible story after another, Sacha began to feel honestly sorry for Thomas Edison. If a dybbuk really was after him, he was worse than a dead man. And there wasn’t a thing anyone could do to save him.
Which meant that the only way for Sacha to protect his family was to find out who had really summoned the dybbuk.
Sacha was still racking his brain over how to do that when he got to work — which was how he managed to offend Philip Payton yet again.
The trouble started when he reached the Inquisitors Division headquarters just as Maximillian Wolf hopped out of a hansom cab.
“And how are you settling in to the job?” Wolf asked. “Any questions? Anything you need?”
Sacha thought Wolf was probably just being polite, but he supposed he had to say something. “Well… I guess a desk would be good. Or at least a chair?”
“That seems reasonable.” Wolf waved airily. “Just have a word with Payton. He’ll sort you out.”
But when they reached his office, Wolf blew through the anteroom without saying anything about it, and Sacha was left to muddle along on his own.
Lily Astral was already there, laughing with Payton as if the two of them were old friends. Sacha cleared his throat a few times, but no one noticed him.
“Uh … excuse me. I need someone to clean up a desk for me to work at?”
Payton turned to face him, one eyebrow raised in polite disbelief. “Do I look like a janitor?”
“Uh. no. But Inquisitor Wolf said—”
“I really think you must have failed to understand him correctly.”
“But—”
“Listen, Sandy—”
“Sacha.”
“Whatever. Let me explain how things work here. I’ll use short, simple words so you can understand me. I am the valued employee who keeps this office running like a well-oiled machine so that Inquisitor Wolf can solve crimes and catch criminals. You are a useless child whose only function is to gum up the works, get underfoot, and waste time that Inquisitor Wolf and I could be using to get real work done. So if you want a desk, go down to the basement and find one. On your own time. And meanwhile, you can make yourself slightly less useless by rushing the growler to the Witch’s Brew.”
And then Payton fished a dented old tin bucket from under his desk and tossed it casually (but very accurately) at Sacha’s head.
Sacha reached up a hand just in time to catch the bucket before it hit him. Then he stared at it in shock and disbelief until Lily snatched it from his hand and marched smartly out the door.
She looked as if she knew where she was going. But of course she couldn’t, or she would have been just as shocked as Sacha was.
Sacha had seen plenty of growlers in his day. He’d seen plenty of children rushing the growler, too — carrying it down to the local saloon to buy beer for their parents. It happened every day in every neighborhood of New York, despite all the laws that high-society do-gooders kept passing about selling liquor to minors. But Sacha had certainly never done it. Sacha’s father disapproved of anything stronger than seltzer water. And Sacha’s mother … well, to hear her tell it, rushing the growler was a one-way ticket up the river to Sing Sing prison’s fancy new electric chair. First came the childhood trips to fill it up for parents and aunts and uncles. Then came the scrounging of pennies to fill it for yourself. Then you were sliding down the slippery slope of mugging drunks, marrying a gun moll (or worse, a shiksa!), and signing on with Magic, Inc., as one of Meyer Minsky’s hired thugs.