The Watcher in the Shadows

by Chris Moriarty

  Wolf stopped short and turned to stare at the newsie, his gray eyes so piercing that Sacha wondered the boy didn’t feel the force of his stare across fifteen feet of sidewalk.

  “Murder at the Hippodrome!” he repeated. “A Vaudeville Love Triangle Gone Deadly! Read all about it!”

  Wolf strode over to the boy and bought a copy of the paper, and the three of them retreated to the relative quiet of a side street to scan the headlines and see how bad the damage was. What they read was enough to make Sacha’s stomach churn and Wolf’s face grow pale with fury.

  “A BLOODY TRAIL OF LUST AND REVENGE,” blared the headline. And if the headline was bad, the article was worse:

  Inquisitors reported to the scene of a magical murder this afternoon, only to discover a bloody trail of lust and revenge leading from the bright lights of the Bowery to the muddy shtetls of Russia.

  Sacha supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised that the papers had already gotten hold of photographs of Kid Klezmer and the Klezmer King. They’d caught the Kid in a nightclub sharing a table with Meyer Minsky and Dopey Benny, and the caption under his photo read “The Jilted Lover Who Pals Around with Gangsters.” That was bad enough, but the caption under the Klezmer King’s photo was even worse:

  Did Naftali Asher Make a Deal with the Devil?

  But worst of all was the third photo—not a publicity shot but a blurry picture of an old-fashioned Jewish wedding party. This photo was so blurry, and the bride so far away from the camera, that all Sacha could have said about her was that she was young and shy-looking. But the groom standing next to her was a younger and even skinnier version of the Klezmer King. And the caption below the photo read “The Shtetl Enchantress Who Bewitched Two Klezmer Stars.”

  The article told the same story Kid Klezmer had told them. But somehow it managed to make it all sound completely different. Instead of a young man in love who lost his temper and got over it, Kid Klezmer came across as a depraved libertine who consorted with gypsies and Satan-worshippers and had spent the last ten years plotting and scheming to destroy his rival. And instead of a great musician with rotten luck, the Klezmer King came across as a man so desperate for fame and money that he’d bragged about selling his soul for a song. In fact, the whole article made it seem as if the reason they’d all acted so crazy was simply because they were Jewish. It sounded like Jews in Russia lived in some kind of alternate reality where people were cutting deals with the devil every chance they got and flinging killing spells around like confetti at a ticker-tape parade. And it made it sound as if they’d brought all their Jewish black magic with them through Ellis Island and were just waiting for the Inquisitors to look the other way before breaking out in a wild magical crime spree.

  The funny thing was, Sacha could almost swear he’d seen this story before. In fact, it was the same exact story the papers ran every time anyone got stabbed in Little Italy, where every bump on the head turned out to be a “desperate crime of passion” committed over a “black-eyed Madonna” who “drove men to insanity with her hot Sicilian love spells.” Sacha had read those stories without thinking much about them, but suddenly it all sounded very different. And he couldn’t help wondering how ordinary law-abiding Italians felt when they opened up their morning paper to read about yet another violent vendetta.

  “Why do they tell such horrible stories?” Sacha asked.

  “Because they sell newspapers,” Wolf said wearily. “But what I’d like to know is how they got hold of this story so quickly.”

  “Hmph!” Lily snorted. “And I’d like to know who owns the New York Sun these days.”

  “Morgaunt owns it,” Wolf said flatly. “He bought the Sun right after they broke that story about him and Rosie DiMaggio. They broke the only unbreakable rule in this town: Don’t print a blessed word about J. P. Morgaunt without having his lawyers sign off on it before you go to press.”

  They got to the Ashers’ apartment, only to find it dark and empty. They were about to turn away when they heard slow, shuffling footsteps coming up the stairs behind them. One look at Rivka Asher’s face told Sacha that she already knew about her husband’s death.

  Wolf introduced himself, speaking in the gentle murmur that he always used when people were in real trouble.

  “Ah,” Rivka Asher said in strongly accented but clearly fluent English. “They said at the Hippodrome that you would need to speak to me.”

  “I’m afraid I have many questions,” Wolf admitted, “none of them very pleasant. But there’s no help for it.”

  “No, I suppose not.” She sighed.

  Her apartment key hung from a little silver chatelaine pinned to her shirtwaist—the sort of thing observant women wore on Shabbes to avoid carrying their keys when they went out. She unlocked the door and went in, gesturing to them to follow her. The front door opened directly into a cluttered little dining room, and Rivka sank into a chair and propped her head on her hands, leaving them to stand or sit wherever they chose. A pale glow of gaslight spilled in through the windows of the front room beyond, and Sacha could see the Shabbes candles and candlesticks lying on the table before her. There was a polishing cloth too, which looked like it had been cast down hastily before she’d last stood up from the table. She must have been preparing for Shabbes when the news of Asher’s death came, he realized.

  After a moment, she looked up and seemed to remember their presence. “Are you by any chance Jewish?” she asked Wolf in her softly accented voice.

  “No.”

  “Then would you be so kind as to turn on the lights for me?”

  Wolf looked a bit confused, but he found the switch and turned on the lights without comment.

  Wolf and Lily sat down at the table then, but Sacha slipped into the kitchen and scrounged around in the cupboards until he’d found bread and cheese and a half-empty bottle of wine. He began to take the food out to Mrs. Asher—but then on second thought, he checked the cookstove and found that, though it had gone out, there was a full water kettle and a big pot of half-stewed cholent on the cooktop. So he rekindled the fire and stoked it back into a respectable blaze before he went back into the dining room.

  Rivka was now telling Wolf her version of the same sad story Kid Klezmer had told them. Sacha handed her the bread and cheese, and she gulped it down in a way that made him sure she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He gave her the wine when she seemed ready for it.

  “Gut Shabbes.”

  She looked up sharply. “But—are you?—you shouldn’t have—not for me—”

  “I’m already working,” he told her. “And anyway, you need to eat, or you’ll be ill.”

  She stared at him for a moment, but her brain seemed too overwhelmed to hang on to any single idea, and after a moment, she looked away and went on with her rambling story.

  Rivka Asher was hardly the kind of woman Sacha would have pictured at the center of a celebrity love triangle. She must once have been pretty, though she was so worn and thin now that it was hard to tell. And she was so shy and mousy that he couldn’t imagine any man really working himself up into a full-blooded passion for her.

  Still, the tale she told was full of passion, and of magic too. And as Sacha listened to it, he began to feel as if the world outside the tenement were giving way to another world: one where dybbuks stalked the crooked shtetl streets, and Great Magic hung in the air, and God and the devil played dice for men’s immortal souls.

  As she talked, Sacha began to understand her tale in a way that he never would have been able to a year ago. Then he would have thought that Rivka Asher was mad or superstitious. But now he had seen enough of the ways that unscrupulous people could abuse magic to suspect that she had been the victim of an insidious but devastating crime. Her life had been torn out of its intended track. Her heart and mind had been twisted until there was little hope of setting them straight again. And, worst of all, the criminal who had violated her was her own husband.

  “Do you really think he was murdered?
” she asked Wolf, with a doglike devotion in her voice.

  “I don’t know yet. I would like to talk to Sam Schlosky, though. Do you know where he lives?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t. I don’t know that Naftali ever went to his apartment to see him. You could always ask Sam’s brother, of course.”

  “Moishe,” Wolf said in a flat tone of voice.

  “Yes. Moishe is easy to find.”

  “Too easy,” Wolf sighed. “If I go to the IWW headquarters, every newspaper in town will know it by tomorrow morning, and Sam will be suspect number one by lunchtime.”

  “Well, I don’t know what else I can say to help you,” Mrs. Asher said. “Ah, wait. There is one thing I remember: Sam’s aunt keeps geese.”

  “You mean, on the roof, in coops?” Wolf asked. He didn’t seem to think this was much of a clue—and Sacha had to agree with him. So many poor people in New York kept poultry that practically every tenement rooftop on the Lower East Side hosted a village-worth of homemade coops.

  “No, no,” Mrs. Asher said. “Hundreds of geese. It’s a huge business. She sells the feathers and I don’t know what else all over town. Everybody knows her.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sacha interrupted. “Are you talking about Mrs. Mogulesko?”

  “Yes, that’s her name!”

  “The goose lady? Moishe Schlosky is the goose lady’s nephew?” Sacha couldn’t seem to get his mind around the idea.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Asher said. “Sam used to work for her during the day and then come work for Naftali at night. And he would miss work every now and then because he had to help move the geese to keep them hidden from the health inspectors. So . . . well . . .” She trailed off as if she had forgotten what she planned to say.

  “Do you know where this Mrs. Mogulesko lives?” Wolf

  asked Sacha.

  “No. No one does. She’s—she’s a wanted criminal. The police spend more time chasing her than they spend chasing Meyer Minsky. Everyone still buys her feathers, of course. What else are they going to do if they want real goose down? But it’s like the gypsies rolling into town when she shows up. There she is at the door, and the next thing you know, the feathers are flying and the feather beds are stuffed and then—pfft!—she’s gone! They say she travels on the rooftops and has keys to every subbasement between the Bowery and the East River, and that Colonel Waring practically foams at the mouth every time anyone mentions her name around him.” Colonel Waring was a notorious martinet and the top man in the sanitation department.

  “And Moishe Schlosky’s her nephew?”

  “What do you care whose nephew Moishe Schlosky is?” Lily asked.

  “Never mind about that,” Sacha snapped, glad that the lights were too dim to show the embarrassed flush on his cheeks. “The point is, you’re never going to find Mrs. Mogulesko. And if she’s hiding Sam, then you’re never going to find him either. That woman has been publicly flouting the New York City Public Health Department for twenty years, and I don’t think she’s ever going to be caught!”

  Wolf cleared his throat. “What about old friends from Pentacle?” he asked. “Didn’t Sam and Asher meet when they were both working at Pentacle?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Was Asher involved with the IWW when he worked there?”

  “Oh, no, I’m sure not. Naftali never cared about politics. Only his music mattered to him.”

  Suddenly Sacha felt desperate to get out of the dingy apartment. The way Rivka Asher talked about her husband had made his skin crawl from the beginning. But now . . . was that magic he saw playing faintly about her features when she spoke the name? Was this just the normal grief of a newly widowed wife? Or had Asher laid a hex on the poor woman that would shackle her to him even after death and condemn her to a hellish half life for the rest of her days?

  “Was he involved with anyone else that you were worried about? Anyone . . . dangerous?”

  “Of course not! Naftali would never have had anything to do with such people!” Yet even as she spoke, her voice wavered and doubt swept across her face like a shadow on the sun.

  “Sam said something to him before he died that suggested he feared he was . . . entangled.”

  “With whom? I don’t understand you.”

  “Sam mentioned a—a watcher in the shadows.”

  “Ah!” Rivka cried out. “Then I did not dream it!” Her face grew deathly pale, and she wavered in her chair so that Wolf leaped up to catch her in case she fainted entirely.

  “Tell me!” Wolf demanded. “Who did Asher meet every night? Where did he go? What magic bound him?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know anything! I only suspect and fear!”

  “Then tell me your fears,” Wolf whispered.

  “People said he sold his soul to the devil. And God help me, as his wife, I should not even listen to such evil rumors. But . . .”

  “But you believed them.”

  “I did, God forgive me! We were poor when he was working at Pentacle, very poor. But I would give anything to go back to that time! The moment he told me about his new job, I knew—oh, how can I explain to you what a wife knows, what she hears in the silences between the words a husband speaks to her? He said he was going to be a great musician, that all our dreams were going to come true and we would never be hungry again. And when I asked him what he had given to gain such riches, he told me not to worry. ‘They don’t want my soul,’ he told me. ‘All they want is for me to sew a few shirts for them. And what could be the harm in that?’

  “But I knew it was a devil’s bargain. I knew it the first time I heard that terrible, beautiful, cursed music!” She was weeping openly now, and it took her a moment to gather her breath and keep speaking. “After he became famous, he turned into a different man. He was obsessed with his reviews, his fans, his critics, with everything and anything but the music itself. And it used to be only about the music for him. He loved his music. He loved it humbly and truly. And he loved me too. With all his faults, he loved me.

  “But then came the new job that he would not tell me about, the one he went to at night, sneaking off like a thief who was ashamed to be seen by honest people. And then suddenly he was a success, a star, a celebrity. But still, he would go to this other job at night, in secret, after his concerts were over. I asked where he went, but he wouldn’t tell me. I asked him to stop, but he grew furious. He told me it was none of my business—me, his own wife, can you imagine?—and I’d better keep out of it or I’d be sorry. And I did keep out of it . . . well, mostly. One night I waited outside the theater and followed him to see where he was going. He met someone underneath the Elevated tracks on the Bowery. I never got a good look at the other person, if it even was a person. It stood in the shadows. It seemed to be a creature made of shadows. But I heard its voice. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  Rivka Asher looked over her shoulder, as if she imagined that the creature might be hidden in the shadows of the little room that the faint lamplight didn’t penetrate.

  “They were fighting,” she whispered. “Naftali sounded angry and terrified. I’ve never heard him speak so. He was saying that he was finished, that he wouldn’t do it anymore and they must find a replacement—”

  “A replacement for what?” Wolf asked, leaning forward tensely. “Can you remember his exact words?”

  “I remember them all,” Rivka said. “If I lived a thousand years I would still be hearing those words and wondering what I could have done to save him. He said, ‘Tell your boss I won’t do it anymore. I have to live here—it’s not just about money to me. And I can’t trust you to keep the secret forever, can I? So find someone else to do your dirty work!’”

  “And then what?” Wolf asked.

  “Then the shadow spoke. If you can call it speaking. It was just a whisper, so quiet that I couldn’t make the words out. But it was still horrible. It made your head hurt just to hear it.”

  “And you heard what it s
aid?”

  “No. But Naftali did. And whatever the answer was, he didn’t like it.”

  “And then?”

  “Then he said, ‘I don’t care what he does to me.’ And then—then he laughed. A horrible laugh. ‘Some things are worse than death,’ he told the watcher. ‘You ought to know that better than anyone!’ And that was that all. Naftali walked off, and I had to leave to make sure I got home before he did.”

  “But you never got a look at the man in the shadows.”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me anything else about him? Anything at all? Even what his voice sounded like?”

  Rivka shuddered and passed a hand over her brow as if it were a physical pain to remember the sound. “It sounded like the Baal Zaabeb.”

  Sacha gasped.

  “Beelzebub,” Wolf said. “The devil.”

  “That’s just a name,” Rivka said with a wave of her frail hand. “Do you know what Baal Zaabeb means? I mean, what those words mean in Hebrew?”

  Wolf shook his head.

  “It means ‘the Lord of the Flies.’ And that is exactly what I heard: a voice that sounded like the buzzing of a thousand flies.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Trouble on Hester Street

  BY THE TIME they left Rivka Asher’s apartment, dusk had deepened into night and it was long past time that both the apprentices should have been home. Still, Wolf hesitated in the building’s dingy lobby. “I don’t like to put the two of you in a cab this late, but I really think I ought to try to find Sam Schlosky before—before anyone else does.”

  Lily and Sacha glanced at each other. Wolf had just managed to keep himself from saying that he needed to find Sam before Rivka’s Lord of the Flies found him, but they were all thinking of the whispering figure she had seen under the elevated tracks—and of the uncanny similarity between it and Meyer Minsky’s watcher in the shadows.

  “You really don’t know where that goose woman lives?” Wolf asked Sacha.