He heard someone calling his name. It was Mo Lehrer, hurrying across the Bowery toward them, waving frantically. The Rag and Bone Man looked at Mo, nodded to Sacha, and then flipped the reins on his horse’s skeletal back and shambled off into the night.
“Did you see that?” Sacha asked when Mo reached them.
“See what?”
“Nothing. Let’s go.”
As they turned the corner onto Hester Street, Mr. Kessler caught sight of them and came running from halfway down the block.
“Danken Got you’re safe!” he cried. Then he got close enough to see his wife’s face. “What happened? Were you attacked?”
“I don’t know.” Mrs. Kessler still sounded dazed and weak. “I think there was someone there, but I…”
“Did they hurt you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did they rob you?”
Sacha’s mother looked momentarily confused. She dug around in her pockets and extracted a pitiful handful of coins that could only have tempted the most desperate thief. “Maybe Sacha interrupted them.”
“Oh, well,” Mo said comfortingly. “All’s well that ends well.”
Only when they reached their apartment did they realize that something had indeed been stolen. After a few cups of strong tea, Mrs. Kessler began to seem more like herself again. She rubbed at the back of her neck as if it hurt — and then she let out a moan of grief and horror.
“My locket!”
It was gone. Above the collar of her dress where the locket’s silver chain usually rested, there was only a bright red welt where the thief had torn it from her neck.
She wanted to go straight out and look for it, but Sacha’s father wouldn’t let her. Instead he and Sacha went. By the time they came back an hour later, covered in soot and grime, they had crawled over every inch of ground under the elevated tracks. But it wouldn’t have mattered how long they searched. There was nothing to find. The locket was gone.
“There there, Ruthie,” Mr. Kessler said, patting her shoulder awkwardly.
Sacha didn’t know what to say. That locket was his mother’s most treasured possession. It held three silky curls of baby hair: one from Bekah, one from Sacha, and one from their baby brother who had died on the boat from Russia. His mother never talked about that baby. No one on Hester Street talked about the past much — not unless they wanted to end up as crazy as poor Mrs. Lehrer. But once Sacha had come home early from school and found his mother sitting alone at the kitchen table looking at the locket and weeping as if the baby had died yesterday instead of years ago.
“I’m sorry,” he told her now. It wasn’t enough, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“It’s nothing.” His mother wiped her eyes on her apron and tried to smile. “Just a silly piece of jewelry.”
Then she started fussing over Sacha and his father, scolding them to take off their wet shoes and socks, and forcing hot tea down their throats as if the worst thing that had ever threatened her family was a head cold.
Sacha relaxed under her fussing — once she started fussing over you, there wasn’t much you could do except sit back and enjoy it. But his mind kept turning to that dark shadow under the elevated tracks.
Had the watcher been a mere bystander, or the thief himself? And what kind of thief would walk past all the jewelry stores and rich tourists and drunken sailors on the Bowery only to steal a cheap locket from a woman who was far too poor for any self-respecting criminal to bother with?
CHAPTER FOUR. Sacha Makes a Promise
WHEN SACHA WOKE the next morning, his mother and father were already up and dressed.
He slipped out of bed, steeling himself for the long, cold trip to the water pump. Then he saw that his mother had put out a fresh towel and was filling a brimming basin with hot water for him. And that wasn’t alclass="underline" She’d set a second plate at the table next to his father’s and loaded it with a thick wedge of noodle kugel and a towering portion of chopped herring with eggs and onions.
“Sit!” she said, carving a massive slice of black bread off the loaf for him. “Eat! You need your strength today!”
Sacha stared, overwhelmed. Yesterday he’d been a kid. Today his mother was taking care of him just like she took care of his father — as if he were a grown man going off to work.
And she was right, crazy as it sounded. Even a lowly apprentice Inquisitor made more money than Sacha’s father earned working twelve-hour shifts at the docks. Sacha hadn’t been able to look his father in the eye for days after he’d found that out. But what could you do about it? America was a new world, where none of the old rules applied.
Only when he was already at the table eating did he realize the other amazing thing: That his mother was doing any of this at all a few short hours after she’d been knocked unconscious and robbed in the street.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her.
“How should I be feeling?”
“Well — I mean — after last night—”
His mother made a disdainful spitting sound that seemed to dismiss the violent theft of her most treasured possession as a mere triviality. “Be quiet and eat your breakfast!”
Sacha obeyed — as if he had any choice in the matter. But he couldn’t help shaking his head in wonder. He’d read enough adventure stories in Boys Weekly to be pretty sure that any normal American mother would still be lying around fainting and crying into her handkerchief after such a shock. Sacha wasn’t sure how to feel about this. Because the truth was that he often wished his family would act more normal and less … well … foreign. But on the other hand, normal parents would probably have never managed to get him and Bekah to America in the first place.
Either way, he could see that his mother had put the loss behind her and didn’t intend to talk about it again. And he knew she’d only get angry with anyone who tried to offer sympathy — almost as angry as Mr. Kessler would get if Sacha ever dared to suggest that his cough was getting worse every winter and he might want to think about taking it a little easier now that Sacha was old enough to earn a paycheck.
The early morning symphony of ash bins and trash cans had just begun when the three of them left for work together. Uncle Mordechai had come in late again and was sleeping against the door on a pile of Mrs. Lehrer’s unfinished sewing. They clambered over him, Sacha’s father muttering all the while that any grown man who slept this late deserved to get stepped on. They crept through the back room, trying not to wake the Lehrers. Then they slipped out the door and felt their way down the unlit stairs into the pale gray light of a New York dawn.
They stood on the front stoop to say their goodbyes. From here Sacha’s father would go east to the docks while his mother went west to the Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory. and Sacha would head north to Astral Place to catch the subway.
But Sacha’s mother didn’t seem ready to leave quite yet. She glanced at him as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the right words. then she turned away to watch the garbage men, as if they were the most interesting thing she’d seen in weeks. Then she sniffled and dug through her purse to find a nickel for his subway fare.
She pushed the coin into his hand.
“Thanks,” Sacha mumbled.
“I don’t want them to think I sent you to work with dirty shoes your first day,” she said. then she pulled out a handkerchief, blew her nose — and surreptitiously dabbed at her eyes a few times.
Sacha gave her a hug. He tried to give her a kiss too, but she pushed him away. “Enough mooning around. Do you want to be late for your first day of work?”