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himself to speak.
    "Promise me you'll look out for number one and forget about the rest," said the man who'd been looking out for Sacha all his life.
    Sacha hesitated.
    "
Promise!
"
    "Okay, okay! I promise."
    But in his mind he was promising something very different.
    I'll do whatever it takes to keep this job,
he swore.
I'll be the best apprentice anyone's ever seen and the fastest to make Inquisitor. I won't rest until you've quit the docks and Bekah's gone to college and Mama's sewn her last shirtwaist.

CHAPTER FIVE
Lily Astral
    S ACHA DASHED through the turnstile of the Astral Place subway station just as the uptown express arrived in a shriek of steel wheels and a cloud of old newspapers.
    Astral Place was named after the oldest of the old New York families. The Astrals didn't live on Astral Place anymore, of course. They'd moved uptown to Millionaire's Mile, along with all the other high-society families. But the subway stop still bore their name, and terra cotta beavers adorned its walls in memory of the fur trade that had made the Astrals rich when shamans and medicine men still roamed Manhattan Island.
    Someday Sacha would be able to catch the subway right near his house on Canal Street. But for now everything south of Astral Place was a mud-choked construction site. Sacha wondered idly which rich family their station would be named after when it was finally finished. Well, as long as it wasn't J. P. Morgaunt. Normally Sacha didn't mind politics, but he really was going to scream if he had to hear one more stupid joke about Pentacle's Tentacles.
    Sacha elbowed his way through the rush-hour crowd and just managed to claim the last open seat. It was a good seat, too: a smartly dressed banker was reading the morning paper right next to him, which meant that Sacha got to catch up on the latest headlines for free.
    Mostly it was the usual bad news. Congress was considering banning all immigration from Russia because of "undesirable magical elements." Another bribery scandal was rocking City Hall. The contractor on the new Harlem subway line had been caught using illegal magical workers to cut costs. Harry Houdini had been called before ACCUSE (the Advisory Committee to Congress on Un-American Sorcery) to prove that he pulled off his miraculous escapes without aid of magic. And Thomas Edison had invented a mechanical witch detector.
    Great, Sacha told himself. His first day of work, and Thomas Edison had already invented a machine that made him obsolete. If that wasn't Yiddish luck, he didn't know what was!
    He was craning his neck to read about the witch detector when the banker noticed him reading over his shoulder. The man gave an outraged gasp and glared at Sacha as if he'd just caught him trying to pick his pocket. Sacha straightened his neck and stared innocently out the window—straight at an ad for Edison's Portable Home Phonographs.
    He'd seen the ad before. Who hadn't? It was plastered on buildings and billboards all over the city. It showed two little girls gathered around a shiny new Edison Portable Home Phonograph. They were listening to music—some kind of uplifting patriotic hymn judging by the expressions on their faces. They both had blue eyes and blond curls and pert little button noses. And the advertising slogan painted in flowing script under the picture read "Edison Portable Home Phonographs—Real
American
Entertainment."
    It was a popular ad. Even Sacha had been impressed when he first saw it. But somehow he'd never noticed before now how very blond those two little girls were. Or how the word American was painted in ever-so-slightly bolder and brighter letters than all the other words—as if to hint that other kinds of entertainment and the people who enjoyed them weren't quite as American as the people who bought Edison Portable Home Phonographs.
    It gave Sacha the creeps. Worse, it reminded him of Bekah's mocking question: Who ever heard of a Jewish Inquisitor?
    Â 
    Sacha was