The Inquisitor's Apprentice

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It started out as a perfectly ordinary Friday afternoon — if you could ever call Friday afternoons on Hester Street ordinary.

People said there were more human beings per square mile on New York’s Lower east Side than in the Black Hole of Calcutta, and Sacha thought it must be true. the roar of all those people was like the surf of a mighty ocean. You could hear them working and eating, talking and praying, running the sewing machines that clattered away from dawn to dusk in the windows of every tenement building. You could feel their dreams crackling along the cobblestones like the electricity in the big transformers down at Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street power station. And you could feel the shivery static charge of their magic — both the legal and the illegal kind.

Not that anyone was worried about illegal magic at half past four on a Friday afternoon. Fridays on Hester Street were only about one thing: shopping.

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