The Watcher in the Shadows

by Chris Moriarty

  The only thing about Goldfaden that wasn’t bigger than life were his eyes. They were small and black and very bright, and they nestled in his jowly face like the poppy-seed filling in hamantaschen. Looking at those eyes, Sacha had a feeling that very little happened at the Hippodrome that Maurice Goldfaden didn’t know about.

  “Nothing to see!” Goldfaden repeated to the world at large. And then he turned to Maximillian Wolf and added in a quieter voice, “And certainly nothing that need concern you, Inquisitor!”

  Frankly, Sacha was inclined to agree with Goldfaden. The cause of death was certainly clear enough. The Klezmer King lay sprawled across the stage of the Hippodrome with one long-fingered hand still clutching his clarinet. He had died onstage during the Friday afternoon matinee. He’d been in full song, right in the middle of a dazzling high E-flat solo riff, when his electric tuxedo had sputtered, flickered, and flared up in a blinding flash. He was still wearing the tuxedo that was billed on the marquee outside as his “world-famous electric tuxedo.”No one had mustered up the nerve to turn it off. So now the Klezmer King lay at Wolf’s feet, flashing and twinkling like a flurry of falling stars.

  Wolf looked down at the dead klezmer player for a long moment without speaking. Then he walked backstage, following the wires that snaked away from the body into the shadows, and kicked the plug out of the wall.

  “Oh,” Goldfaden said sheepishly. “I guess I should have thought of that.”

  They walked back to the body and stared down at it. Wolf wore his usual bland and disheveled expression, but Goldfaden looked completely undone by the presence of a corpse on his stage.

  “Pathetic,” Goldfaden said. “Asher was a genius, an absolute musical genius, one of the all-time klezmer greats—even if his box office wasn’t exactly to die for. And now look at him! Fried to death by a couple of strings of cheap Christmas tree lights!” Goldfaden shook his head mournfully. “That’s not just tragic. It’s worse than tragic. It’s bad showmanship.”

  Lily giggled, and Wolf let out a strangled sort of cough. But Goldfaden wasn’t laughing.

  “And to have it happen at the Hippodrome,” he went on. “Terrible, just terrible! The poor old girl doesn’t deserve this indignity. Why, the Death-Defying Dershowitzes defied death right here on this very stage! And that rascal Harry Heller practically invented smoke and mirrors here. I even had Houdini headline his disappearing elephant act—no illegal magic, mind you, just honest fakery, all totally kosher. But in all these years, I never imagined the Hippodrome would come to this!” He frowned at the spot where Asher had died, his mouth tightening in a way that confirmed Sacha’s suspicion that Goldfaden—and maybe a lot of other people too—hadn’t much liked Asher. “But isn’t that Naftali Asher for you? Electrocuted by his own tuxedo because of some stupid publicity stunt that—mind you, I saw the nightly take, and I know for certain—didn’t do a thing at the box office. What a shlimazel! If he ever makes it into heaven, everything will go wrong from the minute he gets there. The neighborhood will start going to pot, and the angels will move to hell to get away from Asher’s Yiddish luck.”

  “Sounds like he wasn’t the sort of fellow who ought to have been messing about with electricity,” Wolf hazarded.

  “Yeah, well, thank God he had Sam to do that for him, or he probably would have fried himself months ago.”

  “Sam?” Wolf echoed, scrounging in his baggy pants pockets for his ever-elusive pencil stub.

  Suddenly Goldfaden looked like he could have bitten his tongue off for having mentioned the name. “Asher’s dresser. A good kid. The best.”

  “And what’s Sam’s last name?” Wolf had finally scared up a disgracefully chewed pencil stub. Another search produced a dog-eared scrap of paper that looked like it might once have been a laundry ticket.

  Goldfaden’s eyes shifted around nervously. “I’m sure Sam’ll turn up sometime. He’s probably just too upset about the whole thing to—er—and anyway, Sam wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Goldfaden glared fiercely at Wolf, as if daring the Inquisitor to contradict him.

  “Ah,” Wolf said in a soft voice that made Sacha’s ears prick up. He looked sideways at Lily and saw that she had caught it too. Wherever Sam was—and whatever his name was— Sacha wouldn’t have changed places with him for all the tea in China.

  “Well, this certainly is an unpleasant business,” Goldfaden said, as if eager to change the subject. “Pathetic, really. It’s enough to make you wonder if all that crazy talk people made about him was true.”

  “What kind of crazy talk?” Wolf asked in a very quiet voice.

  Sacha held his breath. Next to him he could feel Lily practically buzzing with anticipation. Something was definitely up. There might not be any magical crime involved in Naftali Asher’s death. But there was a secret. And if Sacha had learned anything so far in his apprenticeship, it was that one way or another, Wolf would know what it was by the time they walked out of the Hippodrome.

  “Oh, well, you know,” Goldfaden said. “People always talk. Especially theater people. Can’t believe everything you hear, can you?”

  Wolf seemed willing to go along with Goldfaden’s changes of subject—for now anyway, though Sacha had watched him at work long enough to know that he would eventually meander back to every dangling hint and unanswered question. “I understand that it was a lady who called in the Inquisitors?” he said.

  “A lady!” Goldfaden cried, as if in all her storied history, the Hippodrome had never seen such a creature. “Oh, you mean Pearl! Well, I don’t see why you need to talk to her.”

  Wolf fished out his pencil stub again. “Pearl—?”

  “Pearl Schneiderman, a.k.a. Madame Eelinda the Electrifying Eel Maiden.”

  “What?” Wolf sounded perplexed. “Did she dress up in light bulbs too?”

  “Nah, she’s a contortionist.” Goldfaden twisted his arms up like pudgy pretzels. “But not the usual contortion shtick. Veeeery artistic is our Madame Eelinda! Anyway, the point is you don’t need to know. This isn’t a magical crime. It’s barely a crime at all. More of a—a—an unfortunate happenstance. No need whatsoever for the Inquisitors to involve themselves.”

  Sacha looked at Wolf to see what he thought of this, but it was impossible to tell. Wolf stood stock-still, his handsome bony face impassive, and his dishwater gray eyes blinking mildly at Goldfaden through spectacles still fogged with cold. The only moving thing anywhere on Wolf’s person was the icy rainwater dripping from his coat and pooling around his sodden shoes.

  Sacha glanced at Lily Astral, who stood beside him. But his fellow apprentice just widened her bright blue eyes at him as if to say, Don’t ask me. I have no more idea than you do what goes on inside Wolf’s head! Then she reached into the pocket of her heavy winter cloak, fished out a delicate little lace handkerchief, and blew her aristocratic nose with a resounding honk.

  It was February, in the middle of the worst New York winter anyone could remember, and if there was one small satisfaction that made up for Sacha’s raw fingers and frozen toes, it was the sight of prim and perfect Lily Astral with her nose running all over the place.

  Not that he wanted her to be too miserable. He liked her. And if she were just a little less rich and a little less of a know-it-all—and if she weren’t a girl, obviously—she would have been the best friend a fellow could ever have. But still, it was nice to know that even Lily Astral was human enough to catch a cold.

  “Seriously,” Goldfaden insisted. “The guy was hopping around onstage strung up like a Christmas tree, sweating like a hog, and spitting into his clarinet. You think he needed help killing himself?”

  “I do see your point, of course,” Wolf said mildly. “But all the same, Miss Schneiderman did report a magical crime.”

  “Well, she was upset. People say all sorts of things when they’re upset.”

  “And people say all sorts of things when they aren’t upset too. But I’ve generally found that the things people say when they’re upset turn
out to be a good deal closer to the truth.”

  Goldfaden pursed his lips and narrowed his prune- colored eyes. “I could kill Pearl for making that phone call,” he muttered. “I really could!”

  “I hope you won’t,” Wolf said earnestly.

  Suddenly Goldfaden seemed to remember the body lying at his feet. He turned a little green and tugged at his shirt collar as if he felt in need of air. “Pearl overreacted a little, that’s all. Because Asher was involved . . . and . . . well . . . you know.”

  “Actually, I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’m not one to repeat malicious rumors. And Asher was a—well, okay, not exactly a friend of mine. Asher wasn’t the kind of guy who had friends. But I felt sorry for him. He was tormented. Even for a genius. Which he certainly was, whatever people might say about how he got his talent.”

  “All the same,” Wolf said, circling back to their earlier disagreement, “I would like to talk to Madame Eelinda— er—Miss Schneiderman. And of course Asher’s dresser, Sam—what did you say his name was?”

  “Oh—er—I didn’t,” Goldfaden blurted out. “I mean, I sent Pearl home. The strain of it all, you know.”

  “Shall I send an officer to her house to assist her?” Wolf asked solicitously.

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary. I’ll just ring her up.”

  “And what about Sam?”

  “I . . . um . . . don’t know where he lives, actually.”

  Wolf gave Goldfaden a blank stare that Sacha wouldn’t have wanted to be on the sharp end of for love or money.

  “No, I swear, really I don’t! He was living with his family on Henry Street last I knew, right over the kosher butcher. But those Schloskys move around like gypsies. You know how it is in the tenements. Every month come rent day, there’s kids whose home address is a pile of furniture on the sidewalk. That’s the Schlosky boys for you: sent unshod into this sorry world with nothing to their name but red hair and empty bellies. So how’s a man supposed to keep track of a family like that? I paid Sam in cash under the table, and we were both happier that way. And if you want to report me for that, go suck on an egg!”

  But Wolf just laughed and told Goldfaden to call Pearl Schneiderman.

  “For you, anything,” Goldfaden proclaimed with a wink. “And in the meantime, you can always talk to the other eyewitnesses—all three hundred of them!”

  For the next hour, while a Black Maria trundled Asher’s body down to the Tombs, they heard from a parade of eyewitnesses. They talked to matinee-goers from every walk of life: Hester Street shopkeepers and Orthodox cantors, Wiccanist revolutionaries and sweatshop seamstresses. They talked to the sellers of seltzer water and candy and roasted chestnuts. And finally they talked to the vaudeville performers themselves—the contortionists and chorus girls and song-and-dance men who had watched from the wings in what turned out to have been the best seats in the house for the Klezmer King’s final, fatal performance. But they all said the same thing—so much so that Sacha started to wonder if they’d all rehearsed it together before the Inquisitors showed up.

  The Klezmer King had just embarked on his most famous solo—the great Terkish, with all the high notes—when the electric tuxedo sputtered and flared, sending out a shower of blue sparks. Asher staggered and cried out. And then he collapsed, stone dead before he hit the ground.

  Or that was the story, anyway. And everybody who worked at the Hippodrome seemed pretty determined to stick to it.

  Wolf was a subtle and delicate questioner. So subtle and so delicate, in fact, that he could usually interview witnesses—or even suspects—without them ever noticing when he moved from casual questions to the really important stuff. But Sacha had watched Wolf at work many times by now, and he could see that there were two burning questions on his mind: Where was Sam Schlosky? And what were Naftali Asher’s dying words?

  Sooner or later, more or less discreetly, Wolf asked every single witness those two questions. And one after another, from the fat lady to the midget boy, every single witness lied to him.

  No one had heard Asher’s last words. No one was even willing to guess what they had been. No one had seen Sam Schlosky after Asher died. And no one had the faintest, foggiest clue as to his whereabouts.

  “This is absurd,” Wolf said at last, sounding as close to annoyed as he ever got. “How can a man shout his dying words onstage in front of three hundred eyewitnesses without a single one of them hearing him?”

  “Acoustics,” Goldfaden intoned with a lugubrious shake of his jowls. “I always say acoustics is more art than science. Why, I worked at a theater in Moscow once where— But whaddaya know! Here’s Pearl! Pearl can tell you everything!”

  Despite Goldfaden’s obvious doubts about her status as a lady, Pearl Schneiderman looked nothing like the “painted women” Sacha’s mother was always accusing Uncle Mordechai of consorting with at the Yiddish People’s Theater. She wore no makeup, and her prim shirtwaist and heavy wool skirt covered her from neck to ankle. In fact, Sacha couldn’t see the slightest difference between her and any other nice Jewish girl on the Lower East Side—except for an odd nervous tic she had of cracking her knuckles by bending the fingers so far backward that they all but touched the backs of her alarmingly flexible hands.

  “So,” Wolf said when he had worked his way around to the subject at hand. “You are the young lady who called the Inquisitors. And Mr. Goldfaden here seems to think that you did so because of some rumors you’d heard about Naftali Asher.”

  “All nonsense!” Goldfaden interrupted. “What good can come of passing on such crazy talk?”

  Wolf turned his dishwater gray eyes on Goldfaden. There was nothing threatening or intimidating about Wolf’s stare. In fact, it was so absent-minded that you couldn’t really call it a stare at all. But Sacha had been on the receiving end of that absent-minded gaze often enough to know just how uncomfortable it could make a person.

  Goldfaden squirmed and swallowed nervously, but he was made of tougher stuff than most people. He clamped his jaws shut and glared at Wolf like a dog defending a bone.

  It was Pearl who cracked first. “They said he’d sold his soul to the devil,” she whispered. “They said he met the devil at the crossroads and sold his soul for a bunch of klezmer songs.”

  “See?” Goldfaden said. “Utter nonsense! People have been saying things like that about great musicians ever since there was music. How many klezmer players were supposed to have traveled with gypsies and played with the devil in the Old Country? And how many times have we all heard about some blues man down south who met the devil at the crossroads and sold his soul for the magic in his fingers? But the very idea of such a thing happening in New York is ridiculous. I mean, honestly, how many crossroads are there in Manhattan?”

  “Two thousand four hundred and sixty-seven,” Wolf answered promptly. “If you count Five Points and Mulberry Bend.”

  Goldfaden shuddered—though whether it was at the idea of all those hitherto unsuspected crossroads or at the mere mention of the two foulest slums in Manhattan, Sacha couldn’t guess.

  “I still don’t believe it!” he said stoutly.

  Wolf turned to Pearl. “But you believed it,” he said softly. “At least enough to call in the Inquisitors. And don’t think I’m unaware of how very reluctant anyone who works here would have been to do that. So why did you?”

  Pearl seemed to collapse into herself. She glanced desperately toward Goldfaden. But he was looking resolutely the other way, as if now that he’d failed to keep Pearl away from the Inquisitors, he was determined to show Wolf that he wasn’t going to interfere with her telling her story.

  “I—I heard Sam and Asher fighting,” she whispered at last. “While Sam was dressing Asher for the show last night.”

  “What were they fighting about?” Wolf asked.

  “I couldn’t tell, really. I couldn’t hear them all that well. And what I did hear didn’t make any sense. Sam said something about Pentacle, which see
med strange, since Asher stopped working there years ago. Asher tried to laugh it off, and Sam said, ‘Don’t lie to me, Asher. I know where you go. I followed you.’ And then Asher got really angry, but I couldn’t hear anything much of what he said. He wasn’t a shouter—he always got bitter and quiet when he was angry. He could say terrible things, things people never got over, in the quietest whisper.” She put her hands to her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry! It’s horrible to talk that way about him when he’s—”

  “Never mind,” Wolf said gently. “You can’t help it if that’s the way he was. And people don’t become angels when they’re murdered. What else did they say? You’ll feel better once you’ve told me.”

  “Not if it gets Sam in trouble,” Pearl said darkly. “Anyway, the next thing I heard, Asher was telling Sam it was none of his business, and besides, he’d already quit. ‘It’s all settled,’ Asher said. ‘Tomorrow’s my last day. They’ve found my replacement.’”

  “And then?” Wolf prompted.

  “And then—Sam laughed. You can’t imagine that laugh. It was so old and world-weary. And he said, ‘Don’t tell me pretty stories, Asher. I saw that creature. I saw the watcher in the shadows. Do you think that thing will go quietly back to wherever it came from? Do you think you can sell your soul to the devil and not pay the bill when it comes due?’ And then . . . and then it was time to go onstage. They didn’t say another word to each other. But I saw Sam’s face when Asher died. And one thing I can tell you for certain: Sam didn’t think it was an accident.”