The Watcher in the Shadows

by Chris Moriarty

  “No. But if you really want to find her, the best person to ask is Meyer Minsky. At least since you two are such—er—whatever.”

  “That’s probably as good a name for it as any other,” Wolf said with a sly grin.

  “So ask him. He could round up every goose in Manhattan before we could even figure out where Sam’s parents live now.”

  Wolf looked blank.

  “Uh . . . kosher poultry?” Sacha prompted. “Litvaks?”

  Now Wolf and Lily were both staring at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

  “Okay, all the big Jewish gangsters either come from Latvia or Galitzia. Ever since anyone can remember, the Galitzians ran the numbers rackets, and the Litvaks—that’s Minsky and Magic, Inc.—ran the kosher poultry business.”

  “I take it there’s big money in kosher poultry?” Wolf asked, with a bemused look on his face.

  “Well, I don’t know about that. But right around the time Minsky took over Magic, Inc., the Litvaks took over the numbers runners too.”

  “And what happened to the Galitzians?” Lily asked.

  Sacha grinned wickedly. “We don’t talk about that.”

  Wolf laughed, but his narrow face soon grew solemn again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll ask Meyer. And in the meantime someone should go talk to Moishe Schlosky, too. But if I go down to the IWW offices and the papers get hold of it, Moishe’s going to be declared the main suspect and Commissioner Keegan’s going to be howling for me to arrest him.”

  Sacha cleared his throat. It seemed like there was an obvious solution to Wolf’s problem, even if it wasn’t one he particularly wanted to mention in front of Lily Astral. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “I could always go talk to Moishe.”

  Lily and Wolf both stared at him—but with very different expressions on their faces. Lily looked astounded. Wolf looked—well, Sacha couldn’t exactly read his expression, except to say that it wasn’t comfortable.

  “No one would notice me walking through that neighborhood. So I could just go over and tell him—well, what should I tell him?”

  “I don’t want to put you in the position of—” Wolf broke off and chewed his lip for a moment. “Well, just tell him to keep his head down and not make trouble at Pentacle until this blows over. And tell him that Sam will be much better off if he comes in on his own. Especially now that it’s been splashed all over the papers. Just don’t promise Moishe anything stupid, okay?”

  “Like what?”

  Wolf frowned at Sacha over the top of his spectacles. “Like that I can protect him.”

  “Is it really that bad?” Lily asked, her eyes wide and horrified.

  “Yes.”

  “But we’ve only just begun to investigate! We don’t even know that Asher was actually murdered!”

  “Yes, we do,” Wolf said quietly. “Naftali Asher died just after three o’clock. And the Sun’s evening edition goes to press at two thirty. Of course they can always hold the presses when they know there’s a big headline coming in that they’ll want to cover. But they still have to know it’s coming. And there was a lot of research behind that article—photos, life stories. Someone must have had time to find all that.”

  “But how could anyone in his right mind take such a risk?” Lily protested. “Wouldn’t they know we’d see the story and go straight to the paper to find out who gave them the information? And then that person would look as guilty as anything!”

  “So one would imagine,” Wolf said mildly.

  “You’re telling us the whole case is rotten,” Sacha said. “You think Asher was murdered by someone who isn’t afraid enough of the police to even care if he looks guilty.”

  He didn’t have to say the name; he was sure Wolf had been thinking of Morgaunt ever since the moment they’d heard that Asher and Sam had met at Pentacle. No magical crime was just a crime to Wolf. No case was just a case. They were all part of the One Big Case: the case against Wall Street Wizard J. P. Morgaunt. Wolf’s quixotic struggle against Morgaunt was the guiding light of his life—as far as Sacha could tell, it was his life. And it was a struggle that could only end in one of two ways: with Morgaunt in prison or Wolf in the morgue.

  Wolf shrugged and began buttoning up his coat. “Oh, well. That’s as it may be. But whatever mess we’re going to be landed in tomorrow morning, right now I need to get you two safely home before your mothers come looking for me.”

  “Oh, I’ll walk,” Sacha said quickly.

  “Is that safe?” Wolf asked.

  “Why not? It’s only a few blocks.”

  Wolf gave Sacha a pointed look, but all he said was, “I’d like to talk to you a bit anyway. Why don’t you ride up to Lily’s house and then we can have a chat while I take you home?”

  Lily was obviously consumed with curiosity, and Sacha was going to have to come up with something to tell her by Monday. But after all, it wasn’t nearly as bad as having Wolf expose his secret right then and there. So he supposed he ought to be grateful.

  “Shen’s told me about this ridiculous masquerade,” Wolf said as soon as the door had closed behind Lily and the cab had driven on. “I really would have thought that woman had better sense than to play along with such foolishness.”

  “It’s not foolishness! I couldn’t go to work with Lily every day knowing that she knew how poor I was! I couldn’t bear it. I’d quit first.”

  “I don’t think you’re fair to her, Sacha. She’s not the kind of girl to despise a man for being poor. She wouldn’t look down on you.”

  “No, she’d feel sorry for me.”

  Wolf’s eyes widened in surprise, and he stared at Sacha for a moment. “I see,” he said finally. “Well, I won’t give your secret away. But I do think Shen ought to have tried a little harder to talk some sense into you.” He snorted. “I hope you know the Inquisitors Division just ran up a whopping cab bill to keep your little secret.”

  “I’m sorry!” Sacha said earnestly. “I—I could pay it back.”

  “With what?” Wolf asked. And he was right, of course; that cab ride had probably swallowed up a week of Sacha’s wages.

  “Don’t look so horrified,” Wolf said. “And you can make it up to me by running upstairs as soon as you get home and trying to talk to Moishe Schlosky tonight instead of tomorrow morning.”

  Sacha thought of the watcher in the shadows and shuddered slightly. “I was already planning to do that.”

  “Good boy,” Wolf said approvingly. And then he rapped smartly on the door of the cab until the driver pulled to the curb, jumped down, paid the fare all the way to Hester Street, and stalked off in a swirl of muddy coattails.

  Sacha looked around curiously as the cab drove on, wondering where Wolf was going. But they were just south of Grand Central Station, in a nondescript region of shops and offices that formed a sort of crossroads between the Upper East Side, the Hotel District, and the Tenderloin. Most likely Wolf didn’t live anywhere near here and had just gotten out in the hopes of finding Meyer Minsky at one of the semi-legal high-roller clubs in the Tenderloin. And yet it suddenly struck Sacha as odd that he had worked with Wolf for months without having the faintest idea where he lived. Other than the fact that he was in love with Shen Yunying—which was a mystery in itself—Wolf seemed to have a total blank where most people had a personal life.

  When Sacha finally reached Hester Street, he ran past his own apartment, taking the stairs two at a time, and straight up to the sixth-floor headquarters of the Industrial Witches of the World. But a quick look around told him Moishe wasn’t there, so he sighed and trudged back down the stairs, thinking he would talk to Moishe tomorrow.

  It was very late indeed by now—so late that the Shabbes candles had burned low and the meal was long over. The two families who shared the apartment were still mostly gathered in the front room, which doubled as the Kesslers’ kitchen and parlor. Their tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Lehrer, always shared the Sabbath meal—and of course the little family sweatshop that the L
ehrers ran out of the apartment’s back room would lie still and silent until after sunset on Saturday. But tonight Sacha’s father and grandfather had retreated to the relative quiet of the back room and were sitting together on a pile of half-finished suits reading tomorrow’s Torah portion.

  Friday nights were the only time Sacha ever saw his father acting like a rabbi’s son. The rest of the time, Mr. Kessler worked twelve hours a day at the East Side docks and came home far too exhausted to do anything but glance at the evening papers and stumble into bed. But on Friday nights, he made an effort. Everyone made an effort on Fridays—even Uncle Mordechai, who came home on time for dinner and stayed until the last possible moment before he had to be off to the theater. That said, there were strict limits to Mordechai’s sense of family duty; the one time Mr. Kessler had tried to convince his younger brother to humor their father by reading Torah on Friday nights, Mordechai had declared that he would rather paint his face like a savage and dance around a bonfire—much rather!

  Rabbi Kessler and Sacha’s father both glanced up when Sacha came in—and they both looked so glad to see him that it only made him feel more guilty for being late. “I’ll just grab a quick bite and come back in here,” he muttered as he headed toward the kitchen.

  “Nonsense!” Grandpa Kessler said. “You’re a growing boy. You need your food. You can sit with me tomorrow afternoon after synagogue instead. I’ve been wanting to have a serious talk with you about something, and that Inquisitor of yours has been running you so ragged lately that I’ve started to wonder if you even live here anymore.”

  Sacha tried to act cheerful about the prospect of a serious talk with his grandfather, but he must not have done a very good job of it, because his grandfather burst out laughing at the look on his face.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to scold you for missing Shabbes again. Your mother, on the other hand, seems to think that the electric chair is too good for young men who let her Friday-night chicken get cold!”

  Sacha groaned and went into the kitchen, where his mother was still sitting around the table with Mrs. Lehrer, Uncle Mordechai, and Bekah. Mordechai was picking the last scrap of meat off a chicken wing and casting hungry looks at one of Mrs. Kessler’s majestic honey cakes. And Sacha’s mother and sister were doing what all Kesslers did best: arguing.

  Mrs. Kessler had gone to the stove and started serving out a heaping plate for Sacha as soon as she’d heard him come in. She set it at his place before the seat of his pants even hit the chair and then passed the challah—all while stalwartly holding her ground in the raging battle.

  “Strike, shmike!” she said as she poured Sacha’s tea. “You forget this political nonsense and stick to your studies, young lady! Go ahead and eat, Sachele. I saved you the back fat!”

  “Well, actually, Mama,” Bekah replied, in a reasonable tone that Sacha knew from long experience was perfectly calculated to drive their mother up the wall, “the strike will give me a lot more time to study.”

  “Allow me to point out that sarcasm is not a quality nice men consider attractive in a wife!”

  “Oh, Mama,” Bekah said. “We’re not in Russia anymore! American boys expect girls to have brains!”

  “And what did your father think I had in my head when he married me? Matzo meal?”

  “He wasn’t thinking about your head,” Uncle Mordechai teased. “His mind was entirely occupied with your other charms!”

  Sacha’s mother crossed her arms over her chest and smirked at her brother-in-law. “I’m not one of those theater floozies you have to flatter into cooking for you, Mordechai. You’re family, remember? I have to feed you.”

  “And far be it from me to deprive you of the satisfaction of doing your duty!” Mordechai proclaimed. “In the words of the immortal bard, ‘They also serve who only sit and eat!’”

  “Stop flirting with my wife!” Sacha’s father called from the next room. “What’ll happen when you abandon her and she only has me to cook for? Oh, and by the way, that’s Milton you’re mangling, not Shakespeare.”

  “Don’t grow up to be a know-it-all like my brother,” Mordechai told Sacha in a piercing stage whisper.

  “And don’t grow up to be a mooch like my brother!” Mr. Kessler retorted.

  As soon as the laughter had died down, Sacha’s mother circled back to her original argument with Bekah. “All I’m saying,” she insisted, “is that respectable girls shouldn’t flaunt themselves on the streets, giving speeches and getting arrested. It’s a shande far di goyim, it is!”

  “I don’t see how it’s a shande to stand up for my rights,” Bekah said. “When the strike starts, I intend to be there. Grown women with home responsibilities might have an excuse for staying on the sidelines. But any single girl who won’t stand up to those bullies is a yellow-bellied dog—and I’d tell her so to her face, even if she weighed two hundred pounds and had eight big brothers!”

  “Oh, great,” Sacha muttered. “Then I’d get to fight the brothers. And in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t weigh two hundred pounds!”

  “So eat something already!” his mother cried, piling yet more food onto his plate. More food was Ruthie Kessler’s answer to every one of life’s little emergencies. Her daughter’s pleasingly plump figure and her husband’s five foot ten of solid workingman’s muscle were her two proudest accomplishments in life, while Sacha’s ability to swallow acres of potato kugel without putting any fat on his slender frame was a never-ending source of maternal humiliation.

  “Mama,” Sacha asked, suddenly struck by an awful thought, “what are you going to do when the strike starts?”

  “Mind my own business and keep going to work as usual. Tell your father his tea’s ready.”

  “Pops,” Sacha called without getting up, “tea’s ready.”

  “You can’t go to work during a strike,” Bekah told their mother in a long-suffering voice. “That’s what a strike is, Mama. No one goes to work.”

  “That shows how much you know, little miss too- intellectual-to-listen-to-her-mother-and-marry-a-dentist!”

  “Who’s marrying a dentist?” Sacha’s father asked as he came in from the back room with Grandpa Kessler leaning on his arm and got the old man settled back at his normal place in the big feather bed.

  “No one, more’s the pity!” Sacha’s mother snapped. “How many times do I have to ask you to talk some sense into that girl?”

  “What kind of sense?” Sacha’s father asked slyly. “The kind you showed when you married a penniless student who couldn’t even put a roof over your head?”

  “That was different,” she said primly. “We were in love. And you can take your hand off my waist and stop making cow eyes at me, Danny Kessler. As if love hasn’t gotten me into enough trouble already!”

  But she wasn’t fooling anyone—even before she ruffled her husband’s hair and shoveled three normal slices’ worth of cake onto his plate.

  “So,” Sacha’s father said, tucking into his cake, “what desperate crimes were you so busy fighting today that you couldn’t make it home for Shabbes?”

  Sacha cringed. “I know, I know—” he began, only to have his father interrupt him with a gentle smile.

  “Then you know that I have to give you a hard time about it, even though we both know it wasn’t your fault. And I know that you’ll try harder to be on time next week. There! The lecture’s over. Was that so painful?”

  “No,” Sacha admitted sheepishly. And then he told them about the death of the Klezmer King and the crazy scene at the Hippodrome.

  To his surprise, Mo Lehrer turned out to be an unexpected fount of klezmer knowledge—and a die-hard fan of the Klezmer King. “Can you imagine?” he asked the room at large. “The greatest klezmer genius of our age lighting himself up like a Christmas tree in order to sell tickets?”

  “Genius, my big toe!” Mrs. Kessler scoffed. “You know what his playing always sounded like to me? A cat who fell in a rain barrel and was howling to get haul
ed out again! And the man’s pride was beyond ridiculous! Refusing to play weddings and insulting people on the street as if anyone who didn’t buy a ticket to see him was some kind of beetle-browed philistine! If you ask me, Kid Klezmer’s five times better than cranky old Asher ever was!”

  “Now, Ruthie, you know that’s not fair!” Mo protested. “I won’t say a word against Kid Klezmer’s playing—though the company he keeps is another matter. But Naftali Asher was more than an ordinary klezmer player. His music expressed the existential tragedy of exile. It came from the depths of the Jewish soul; it was the highest expression of central tenets of our faith. He was a genius, a visionary! Those divine songs—”

  “Nonsense!” Mrs. Kessler replied. “Who do you think he was, Gustav Mahler? He was a run-of-the-mill klezmer player who decided to put on airs and act like he was too good to play weddings. Kid Klezmer on the other hand—”

  “Should definitely not be playing any weddings! At least not unless the girl’s safely married before they let him in the building!”

  “Well, if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black!”

  And meanwhile, Bekah and Uncle Mordechai were going at it over the Pentacle strike like poker and tongs.

  “But that’s exactly my point!” Mordechai was saying with the passionate enthusiasm that his older brother was always saying would have stood him in good stead in the world if he’d ever applied it to anything useful. “The Industrial Witches of the World just can’t understand that they’ll never solve anything by negotiating with the anti-Wiccanist oligarchy. It’s revolution we need, I tell you! A true Wiccanist utopia is the only hope of freedom for the huddled magical masses yearning to be free—”

  “And in the meantime we should do nothing?” Bekah asked with mock incredulity. “Why? Because if your huddled magical masses aren’t actually starving, they’ll be less likely to go along with whatever harebrained schemes you and your friends dream up next at the Café Metropole? Honestly, Uncle Mordechai, just because you can’t think about more than one thing at a time doesn’t mean no one else can!”