Houdini rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He and Wolf gazed at each other. Each one seemed to be searching the other’s face for a clue to his thoughts, but neither seemed willing to speak first. Looking at them, Sacha couldn’t help noticing the contrast between the two men. Houdini short, muscular, and matinee-idol handsome. Wolf long, lanky, and disheveled — and, with his remarkable eyes hidden behind his glasses, completely nondescript. Yet something clearly bound them together.
“If really it is a dybbuk,” Houdini said at last, “then there’s nothing you can do to protect Edison. Sooner or later it will devour him. He’ll become a kelippah, a mere container for the dybbuk. And once that happens, he’ll be the creature of whoever summoned the dybbuk.” “Then the real killer is the man who summoned the dybbuk,” Wolf concluded. “And that’s who we have to find.” But Houdini still hesitated.
“What are you afraid of, Harry? That it’ll be a rabbi?”
“It can’t be! No rabbi would do such a thing! and besides, you can’t possibly arrest a rabbi for this crime!” “Can’t?” Wolf said in a dangerously quiet voice that Sacha had never heard him use before. It sent a chill down Sacha’s spine. It made him remember that Wolf was a cop. A fancy cop who didn’t usually have to get his hands dirty the way regular policemen did. But a cop all the same.
“You know what I’m saying,” Houdini protested. “If you put a rabbi on trial for assassination by means of magic, this city will go up like a powder keg! The streets will run with blood!” Houdini was practically shouting by now, but Wolf still answered him in that dead calm policeman’s voice. “Keeping the streets clean is someone else’s job. My job is catching criminals.” Houdini slammed a fist down on his desk in fury. “Then why don’t you go arrest James Goddamn Pierpont Morgaunt? You know he’s behind this! You know he’s behind every wicked thing that goes on in this city! And yet you wait and wait and wait. You’re no better than Roosevelt!” “At least I’m still here.”
“For all the good that does anyone!”
“If you get me enough evidence to bring charges against Morgaunt and make them stick, I will arrest him.” “That’s what Roosevelt said — and look what happened to him.” Wolf shrugged, unimpressed. “I don’t have as much to lose as Roosevelt.” “You’ve got your life, don’t you? Even a poor man can lose that.”
“You’ll be glad to know that Mr. Morgaunt agrees with you,” Wolf said wryly. “He’s already warned me about it. I thought it was quite considerate of him.” Wolf got to his feet. Sacha followed him to the door, feeling frightened and bewildered. Judging by the look on her face, Lily felt the same.
Houdini crossed his arms over his chest and heaved a sigh of frustration as he watched them go. “I want to help, Max. I really do.” “I know.”
“But you don’t make it easy.”
That earned a very small smile from Wolf. “I know that too.”
“So what can I do?”
“Just keep doing what you’re already doing. Send out your challenge to Edison. Give Morgaunt what he wants: a public face-off between you and the etherograph. But, Harry? You be careful too.” “I always am,” Houdini flashed his most mischievous grin. “As careful as a man in my line of work can afford to be!”
CHAPTER TWELVE. The Money Coat
ON THE LONG cab ride downtown, Sacha’s head spun with questions he couldn’t ask. Every question led back to the locket — and he didn’t even want to think about that while Wolf could see him.
He glanced at Wolf, slouched in the opposite corner of the cab. Wolf had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them on his tie. He must have felt Sacha staring, because he looked up and smiled at him. In the evening light his eyes were as luminously gray as dawn over the open ocean. Suddenly Sacha couldn’t bear the thought of how those eyes would look at him if Wolf found out he’d been lying to him.
How had he gotten himself into this awful mess anyway? He wasn’t a liar! There had to be a way to climb back out of this hole he’d dug himself into.
He was just opening his mouth to tell Wolf about the locket when he remembered Edison's awful etherograph ads, and the cold eyes that followed him when he ran the gauntlet through the lobby of the Inquisitors Division every morning. He snapped his mouth shut and turned away to stare out the window. Wolf might believe the Kesslers weren’t criminals, but nobody else would. It would be easier for everyone to believe that rabbi Kessler — a known Kabbalist — had summoned the dybbuk. And once they believed that, nothing Sacha could do or say would ever change their minds.
No, Sacha decided, the only way out of this mess was to keep his mouth shut and help Wolf catch the real killer. And then he’d tell Wolf everything. even if it meant knowing that he would gaze at him out of those clear gray eyes someday and say, “Sacha? You lied to me?”
Telling Wolf now would be crazy.
And telling his own family would be worse. They wouldn’t — couldn’t — understand the choices he had to make. They’d try to protect him, because parents were supposed to protect their children. But they couldn’t see what Sacha had known the first time he went into a shop with his mother and the shopkeeper talked to him as if he were the grownup because her English wasn’t good enough. They couldn’t see that Sacha had become an American while they remained foreigners — and now it was his job to take care of them.
By the time Sacha finally trudged up the stairs of the Astral Place subway station, it was long past rush hour and even the Bowery saloons had emptied out as the after-work drinkers straggled home to dinner.
He glanced into the Metropole as he passed by, hoping that Uncle Mordechai might be there. But he wasn’t. There was nothing for it but to walk home alone again.
It was that hushed twilight hour when most people were safe inside, gathered around the dinner table, and the streets were left to the rats and the cats and the various human scavengers that foraged for scraps in the gutters when everyone who could afford to buy anything had gone home.
Sacha turned down Hester Street and hurried along it, trying not to think about his mother’s locket and Houdini’s terrifying visions of hunger and darkness. He could see people going about their normal evening routines in the brightly lit windows overhead. He wished he were one of them. This was the time of night when you wanted to be in a warm, noisy, lamp-lit kitchen — not out here where shadows seemed to reach out of every alley.
He was almost home when he thought he heard a step behind him. He spun around, ready to fight, his mind filled with terrifying images of bitter cold and devouring hunger. But there was nothing there — just the dark of the coming night, welling into the narrow streets like the deep Atlantic tide sweeping up the Hudson River.
When he finally got home, Mrs. Lehrer waylaid him before he could make it through the back room. She was holding her money coat — the one she’d been sewing her savings into all these years to get her sisters out of Russia.
“It’s finished!” she cried, thrusting the coat toward him. “Go ahead! try it on!”
Sacha didn’t want to try it on. It was creepy, and it didn’t smell very good. But Mrs. Lehrer was always so nice to him.
The coat felt amazingly heavy as she settled it on his shoulders. He wondered how many years of savings Mrs. Lehrer had sewn into it. Why was Mrs. Lehrer so crazy, while Sacha’s mother was so sane? She’d lived through the pogroms too. She’d even lost a child, which had to be at least as bad as losing your sisters. Was Sacha’s mother really so much stronger than Mrs. Lehrer? Or could she crack too if enough new troubles were piled on top of the old ones? But Sacha could never ask these questions. It felt wrong even to think them when all the grownups worked so hard to protect the children from even the faintest memory of Russia and the bad times.