Rosie herself rescued them, sticking her head out of a doorway at the end of the hall and greeting them as though they were all the best of friends. She still seemed pretty friendly even when they got inside her room and out of her mother’s earshot.
“So how’s the Inquisiting going?” she asked around her usual gob of chewing gum. This gob was at least as big as the one she’d been chewing back on Coney Island, but instead of being lime green, it was electric blue.
“Inquisiting is very interesting,” Lily answered primly. “But we’re here to ask for your assistance in locating some lost persons.”
“Some what?”
“Lost persons. People who are—”
“Yeah, I heard you,” Rosie interrupted. “I just don’t know why you need my help.”
“Well, you see,” Lily began — and launched into the most convoluted and unconvincing lie Sacha had ever heard anyone try to tell. It featured truancy officers and lost orphans and princely rewards, and it sounded like she’d lifted it straight out of a bad Boys Weekly story — which, for all Sacha knew, she had. Uncle Mordechai at his wiliest couldn’t have pulled off such a ridiculous story. And Lily was no Uncle Mordechai.
Finally Sacha stepped in to rescue her.
“Okay, so here’s the truth,” he told Rosie. “The dybbuk killed an Italian stonemason at Morgaunt’s mansion this morning, and we met his son—”
“Sacha!”
“Just be quiet, Lily. You should never, ever lie. You’re really bad at it. Anyway, like I was saying, we met the dead stonemason’s son and a bunch of other kids who were living up on the roof. But they ran away before we could get any information out of them. So we need to find them.”
“So where were they from?”
“Who?”
“The stonemasons.”
“I told you, Italy.”
“Come on! Gimme a little help here!” Rosie held up her hand with her thumb and fingers pressed together and shook it in front of Sacha’s nose as if she were trying to shake the information out of thin air. “I mean, tell me he’s from Napoli. Or Palermo. Or Abruzzo. Then I could find him for you in half an hour flat. But Italy? Do you know how many Italians there are on this island?”
“Oh,” Sacha said disappointedly. “But how would we even know where he was from?”
“I dunno. What language were they speaking?”
“Uh… Italian?”
Rosie sighed and rolled her eyes. It made her look surprisingly like Bekah. “What kind of Italian?”
“Is there more than one?” Lily asked, completely mystified.
“Wait a minute,” Sacha said. “He did say something that I thought was really strange. Not that I know anything about … well…” He flailed around for a minute trying to find a polite word for goyim, but then gave up. “Anyway, he said the dybbuk’s eyes were blacker than Gesù Bambino. I always thought that meant ‘Baby Jesus.’ But that’s definitely the first time I ever heard anyone call Jesus bl—”
Suddenly Rosie was jumping up and down and hugging him. “Sacha,” she cried, “you’re a genius!”
“Really?”
“They’re not just stonemasons — they’re Sicilian stonemasons. From Tindari. Betcha dollars to dybbuks! And not just that, but I know exactly where they’d go if they were looking for a safe place to get away from the cops!”
By the time they got to Twelfth Street, Rosie had explained her reasoning — though her whirlwind explanation left Sacha’s head spinning.
“It’s like this, see. The only person who’d say someone was nero come il bambino Gesù, is a person who’s seen a Black Madonna. And the only Black Madonna I ever heard of is the Madonna of Tindari. Which I happen to know about because of the Saint’s Feast they have every year up on Twelfth Street. Hey, look! They’ve got fresh pizza at Vesuvio’s. Wanna slice?”
“That’s pizza?” Lily asked. “Wow. Well, if you’re getting a slice anyway…”
“What about you, Sacha? Don’t worry, it’s kosher!”
“It is?” Sacha asked eagerly.
“Sure,” Rosie said with a laugh. “Just like wonton soup.”
“Wonton soup? Who told you that? Your cousin’s boyfriend?” Sacha was starting to have some serious doubts about the fellow.
“It’s a joke,” Rosie said, laughing. “You know: Why is wonton soup kosher? What, you never heard that one? Come on, ask me!”
“Uh … okay … why is wonton soup kosher?”
“’Cause it’s Chinese, stupid!”
“Oh,” Sacha said, feeling disappointed. the pizza really had looked good.
“So anyway,” Rosie continued when she’d finished her pizza, “they used to have this street fair every year up on Twelfth Street. You know, get out the Madonna, dress her up in fancy clothes, parade her around, play with snakes. All good fun. I used to go every year ’cause they had the best fried squid in town.”
“Fried squid?” Lily said in tones of intense interest. “When is this fair again?”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately the health inspectors shut them down for sanitary reasons—someone complained about the squid, probably.”
“People are so stupid,” Lily sighed.
“Tell me about it,” Rosie agreed. “That was some really good squid!”
Sacha rolled his eyes. All he needed to do now was get them in a room with his mother, and every city health inspector would be run out of town on a rail.
“So anyway,” Rosie went on, “after the street festival was shut down, the Sicilian Stonemasons Fraternal Association volunteered to build a chapel for the Black Madonna if someone would donate the space for it. So who steps up to the plate? Mr. Rotella of Rotella’s Funeral Home on Twelfth Street. He donates his whole basement — well, except for the part where they keep the corpsicles. So the Order of the Santissima Madonna di Tindari builds their chapel there. Which my Uncle Louie just happened to be the guy who did the electrical wiring on it. Which I just happen to have overheard him telling my mother that those Tindari Sicilians were practically moving into the place, and Mr. Rotella was going to get shut down by the city if he started letting people sleep in his basement. Well, live people, I mean. I guess you don’t need a health inspection for dead people. Hey, look, fried dough! Want some, Sacha? No? Well, maybe later.”
By the time they reached Twelfth Street, Sacha’s stomach was growling — and he was starting to wonder how two reasonably normal-size girls could possibly cram this much food down their gullets without exploding.
“Well, here we are,” Rosie said. “Rotella’s Funeral Home! Now we just have to figure out how to talk our way into the basement!”
Rotella’s Funeral Home presided over a forty-foot stretch of Twelfth Street, transforming an ordinary workaday section of sidewalk into something resembling a wedding cake for giants with very questionable taste in pastries. Its awning was a meringue-like confection of pink and silver satin. Its stained-glass windows twinkled in rainbow colors that would have looked right at home in any Coney Island fun house. Its facade dripped with so many gleaming terra cotta sculptures that it was hard to imagine there was an ordinary brick tenement house somewhere under it all.
Lily gasped. “That’s really … really … uh…”
“I know,” Rosie breathed, licking fried dough off her fingers. She sighed ecstatically. “Isn’t it just gorgeous?”
The door to the chapel was no exception to the general wedding cake theme. It might have started out life as a regular basement door, but it had since moved up in the world. When they first spotted it, tucked away neatly at street level in the shadow of the marble-veneered main entrance, Sacha thought it was made of hammered silver.