The Watcher in the Shadows

by Chris Moriarty

  “Half Chinese,” Lily corrected.

  “Oh, right. How could I have forgotten? Maybe the police department would just half fire Wolf if he explained that to them.”

  “Poor Wolf,” Lily sighed. “Horrible things do seem to happen around him. Did I tell you what my mother said the other night? She thinks he’s cursed. She says he was born under the sign of fire, and death and disaster follow him.” Lily glanced at Wolf and lowered her voice. “She thinks the fire at the Elephant Hotel was his fault.”

  “But, Lily! You know better! That’s a malicious lie!”

  “We-ell,” she said hesitantly, “of course I know Morgaunt was the one who burned down the hotel. But it doesn’t change the fact that bad things do seem to happen to anyone who gets too close to Wolf. Besides, my father believes it. And he’s usually very skeptical about that sort of thing.”

  “So then why would they apprentice their precious daughter to such a dangerous character?”

  She bit her lip, and if the idea of Lily Astral crying hadn’t been completely unthinkable, Sacha could almost have thought there was a tear in her eye. “My father wants me to quit,” she whispered. “I don’t think my mother meant it to go that far. She was just spreading malicious gossip about Wolf because”—she hesitated—“because he doesn’t fall over her like most men do, and she hates him for it.”

  “Lily!”

  “Don’t sound so shocked. I can’t help the way she is. And you’ve met her, so you know what I’m talking about.”

  Sacha couldn’t help blushing. He had an uncomfortable memory of his only meeting with Maleficia Astral; unlike Wolf, he had fallen all over her. And he had a sneaking suspicion that Lily had neither forgotten nor forgiven his behavior.

  “But that’s not the point,” Lily went on. “The point is, once my father heard it, he asked some of the men at his club about it. And—and he won’t say what he heard, but he said last night at dinner that he thought I ought to quit.”

  “So what happens now?” Sacha asked with a miserable feeling in the pit of his stomach that he didn’t want to think too hard about.

  “Nothing right away. For some reason I can’t fathom, my mother doesn’t want me to quit. I can tell she wishes she’d never mentioned the whole business in front of my father.”

  “So . . . they argue about it?”

  “They never argue. They’ll just give each other the silent treatment for a few weeks. And whichever one of them is willing to be silent longer will end up winning.”

  This seemed like a very odd way of resolving disagreements to Sacha, but he thought he’d better not comment on it. Lily could say the most appalling things about her own family, but Sacha had learned long ago that she could be as touchy on that subject as a pit bull with a sore tooth.

  “Anything the matter?” Wolf asked, turning back to see why they’d lagged behind.

  “No!” they both practically yelped.

  “Good,” he said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Let’s go, then.”

  They reached Greene Street and dodged the traffic in order to cross into Washington Square. Sacha could see a little cluster of newsboys picking up their papers beneath the white marble arch at the northern end of the park. Wolf veered toward them; he never missed a chance to buy a paper, and the Klezmer murder had been front page news all weekend.

  “Who’s this thing named after anyway?” Lily asked Sacha as they scurried under the arch behind Wolf’s flapping coattails. “I never studied anyone named Washington in school.”

  Before Sacha could do more than stare quizzically at her, a newsboy jumped into their path, shaking a paper in their face and shouting, “Extra, extra! Read all about it! Manhunt on for the Klezmer killer!”

  “GANGSTERS AND ANARCHISTS!” the headlines screamed up at them. “Police Track Klezmer Killer from the Bright Lights to the Tenement Back Streets!”

  Beneath the headlines, the front page article was all about poor little Sam Schlosky. Except that it wasn’t Sam at all, but an imaginary villain who seemed to be half Magic, Inc., gangster and half Anarcho-Wiccanist terrorist. To hear the papers tell it, it was a wonder that anyone on the Lower East Side had survived living next door to Sam Schlosky with lungs and liver intact. And right smack in the middle of page one was a picture of Sam Schlosky—a smaller, skinnier version of his big brother Moishe—with the words WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE! stamped across it.

  Wolf threw down the paper and stalked off up Fifth Avenue. Every time he passed a newsboy, he bought a paper. And with every paper, he looked more furious.

  Sacha hurried along behind Wolf, thankful he’d never given his boss reason to be angry at him. He didn’t know if Keegan had actually ordered the manhunt for Sam Schlosky or if the papers had just made it up out of thin air. But whoever was responsible for those stories, Sacha did know he wouldn’t want to be in that person’s shoes when Wolf caught up to him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Payton’s Luck

  BACK AT THE Inquisitors Division, Wolf stalked through the antechamber of Keegan’s office without even stopping to acknowledge the nervous flutters of the secretary, flung open the Commissioner’s office door, and caught Keegan talking on his private telephone with his feet up on his desk.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Wolf demanded, flinging the papers onto Keegan’s desk.

  “Well, Wolf, it’s been a week since the man died, and you haven’t even located the main eyewitness,” Keegan pointed out, showing a hint of the guile and quick-footedness he was famous for. “How long did you expect me to wait?”

  A faint flush crept across Wolf’s normally pale cheekbones. “So you decided to hurry me up by setting off a citywide manhunt for a child who’s more likely to be the next victim than the killer?”

  “Schlosky may not be much of a suspect,” Keegan said airily, “but he’s the only one we’ve got, so we’d better make the most of him.”

  Wolf looked as if he was about to argue with Keegan. But then the look of anger vanished, as he seemed almost visibly to will his face back into its usual bland and nondescript expression. He thrust his hands into his coat pockets and stared down at the floor for a moment. When he looked up, he looked as unflappable as ever.

  “Quite so,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll get back to work again. Excuse the interruption.”

  “Er—right,” Keegan said, caught off-guard by Wolf’s sudden change of tone. “File a report as soon as you find anything.”

  “Of course,” Wolf answered with his blandest smile. “Though you’re so well-informed about this case that there hardly seems to be any point in filing reports at all.” Then he turned on his heel and walked out of Keegan’s office, giving the apprentices so little warning that they barely managed to scramble through the door behind him.

  Back at his office, Wolf swept through the front room without more than a brief nod to Philip Payton and vanished into his inner sanctum. The door closed behind him with a decided snick. Sacha had never seen Wolf slam a door in all the time he’d worked for him, but Wolf seemed to be able to put more expression into a quietly closed door than most people put into slamming and stomping. They heard Wolf’s coat hit the floor in a heap. Then they heard him settling into his chair. A moment later, they heard Rosie’s walking, talking picture projector starting up. And the only sound after that was the soul-searing wail of the Klezmer King’s swan song.

  Payton broke the silence first. “Well, he’s madder than a wet hen,” he said, then thought for a minute. “Tell me again what Moishe said about Sam’s secret?”

  “That it would cause a scandal,” Sacha said.

  “And expose Morgaunt as a scheming criminal,” Lily added.

  “Mmmm,” Payton murmured. And then he clammed up and stopped talking to them entirely.

  Lily stamped impatiently. “Come on, Payton! You can’t just say ‘mmmm’ like that and then make like grass growing!”

  “Can’t I?” Payton drawled. And then he
sauntered across the office, pulling old case files out of the towering mounds of paperwork here and there. Despite the eternal chaos of Wolf’s office, Payton was always able to lay his hands on exactly the piece of paper he wanted at a moment’s notice. He took his gleanings back to his desk, sat flipping through them for a few minutes, and then scooped the files up in his arms and knocked on Wolf’s office door.

  A chair creaked. The eerie music stopped.

  “Who is it?” Wolf called.

  “Me,” Payton answered.

  “Oh. Come in, then.”

  Payton went into the office, hooking the door closed behind him with one ankle and giving the apprentices a final sharp look as if to say he’d better not catch them cramming their ears against the keyhole the minute the door was closed.

  Which, naturally, was exactly what they both did.

  Inside Wolf’s office, they heard only the shuffling of papers for a few moments, as Payton showed Wolf the contents of the files he’d collected.

  “What’s your point?” Wolf asked. “And even if you are right, what can we do about it? Keegan would give me a warrant to search City Hall sooner than he’d give me a warrant to search Pentacle.”

  Payton cleared his throat. “You know,” he said in a musing tone of voice, as if he were just thinking aloud to himself, “I haven’t had a vacation in a long time.”

  “Payton—”

  “I think I’d like to take some time off, if you don’t mind.”

  “What? Now?”

  “I have some personal business I’d really like to take care of—”

  “I’m not having you running off and putting yourself in danger just to—”

  “And I haven’t called in sick or taken one day of vacation in almost three years of working for you.”

  “Payton!”

  “And actually, I’m feeling rather ill, come to think of it. Don’t you think I look a little pale?”

  “Ha ha, very funny. Do you know what they’ll do to you if they catch you? They’ll throw you in the Tombs!”

  “And you’ll get me out,” Payton said coolly.

  “I’ll try. That’s a hell of a gamble, Payton.”

  “I’m feeling lucky,” Payton said blithely.

  “You and Paddy Doyle really are two birds of a feather, aren’t you?” Wolf grumbled.

  But a moment later, Payton came out of Wolf’s office, pulled on his coat, tucked a few more files under his arm, and walked down the hall whistling a jaunty tune. Sacha and Lily waited until his footsteps had faded away down the corridor outside. Then they crept back to the door of Wolf’s office. Payton had left it ajar on his way out, so they could see Wolf sitting at his desk, brooding and watching Rosie’s film.

  They watched the Klezmer King flash and sparkle. They heard the haunting music. They saw Sam Schlosky’s white face peeping out from backstage. And as Wolf played and replayed and played the tape again, they heard Naftali Asher shout, “No! Sam!” over and over.

  Suddenly Wolf sprang out of his chair and scooped his coat off the floor.

  “Come on,” he said, turning to the apprentices. “I’m going to pay a social call I ought to have paid the minute that first article hit the papers on Friday evening. Mr. Morgaunt’s probably at home dressing for dinner now, and if he wants to tell me how to do my job, I might as well go over there and let him do it face-to-face instead of waiting for tomorrow’s newspapers.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Bookcase with a Bad Attitude

  THEY WERE HALFWAY across Central Park when they heard the explosion. There was a sharp thud that reminded Sacha of the crump of someone stomping on a cardboard box to squash it flat. And then a wall of sound rippled through the falling dusk like floodwater rushing downstream below a broken dam.

  Wolf glanced briefly up from his paper and then went back to the crossword.

  “What on earth was that?” Sacha whispered to Lily.

  Lily shrugged. “They’ve been blasting all week for the Harlem subway line. Or it might be some work they’re doing at Morgaunt’s house.”

  “It’s still not finished? What’s he doing now?”

  The last time Sacha had been to J. P. Morgaunt’s Fifth Avenue mansion, there had been an automated parking garage in the works and an entire village of Italian stonemasons living on the roof. “Is it true he has his own private subway stop?”

  “Yeah. He took my parents down to see it last time we went to dinner. But my mother wouldn’t let me go.” Lily made a rude face. “She thought the sculptures in the fountain were unsuitable for young ladies.”

  “There’s a fountain?”

  “Well, of course there is! What else would they do with the water?”

  Sacha shook his head, trying to dispel the dizzy feeling he got whenever Lily started trying to “explain” to him how “regular people” lived.

  “What on earth are you talking about?” he managed to ask as they climbed the monumental granite steps that led up to Morgaunt’s front door.

  But Lily just gave him one of her best know-it-all looks. “We’re on an island, Sacha. Think about it. And don’t you ride the subway to work every morning? Honestly, how unobservant can a person be?”

  Sacha opened his mouth to argue with her—but then he gave up because he didn’t even know where to start. And anyway, they were pulling up at Morgaunt’s front door already.

  Wolf skipped up the steps, opened the heavy front door as if it weighed nothing at all, and sauntered into Morgaunt’s entrance hall as confidently as if he were walking into his own office. Lily leaped up the steps behind him, grabbed the door just before it swung to—and pointed at the lock with a look of wonder on her face. It dangled from the door at an odd angle, and the wood around it was as twisted and splintered as if Wolf had just shot the lock out with a police revolver.

  A black-clad butler flung himself in Wolf’s path before he’d made it halfway to the library.

  “Sir! You can’t just—”

  Wolf didn’t even break stride. “I’m sure Mr. Morgaunt will be happy to see me.”

  “But Mr. Morgaunt isn’t at home at the moment, so—”

  “That’s all right,” Wolf said, pushing open the great bronze doors of J. P. Morgaunt’s famous library. “I’ll just wait in here for him.”

  Sacha had been here before, but he still felt the same sense of uneasy awe at the soaring height of the gothic vaults and dizzying spider’s web of wrought-iron balconies. Wolf settled into one of the two armchairs before the great marble hearth, while Sacha and Lily stood around awkwardly, wondering what to do with themselves. Sacha scanned the bookshelves. Who knew what secrets were locked inside them? Perhaps the answers to many of the mysteries that Rabbi Kessler and his students debated at the little shul on Canal Street. Perhaps even the answer to the mystery that Sacha had lain awake so many nights wondering about. Morgaunt must have learned the spells that had created Sacha’s dybbuk from one of the books in this very room. And if Sacha could get into this library alone—just for one precious half-hour—then maybe he could find that book and learn how to banish the creature back into the outer darkness, no matter what his grandfather said.

  Almost without being aware of what he was doing, he began to drift toward the nearest bookshelf. The panes in its leaded-glass windows seemed to wink and beckon to him. As he drew nearer, he could see that the glass itself rippled and flowed like dripping amber.

  There were spells worked into the glass, but they were like no spells he’d ever seen before. They had a sort of quelling force that damped the magic of the books inside the case like a candle snuffer. He peered through the glass, squinting, and realized that he could still catch a bit of the magic of the books themselves even through the smothering spells. Some of the books in there were just books, meek and silent. But others had a life of their own. They seemed to call to him, almost to beg him to take them down and read them and give their words life in his own brain, his own hands.

  He reached out
and took hold of the clasp to open the door—

  “Gar!” shrieked the bookshelf. “Whaderyer think yer doin’? Quit pokin’ me!”

  “You want to watch out for that bookshelf,” said a cool, amused, sultry voice from the doorway. “It’s got an inflated ego and a bad attitude.”

  Sacha whirled around, his face flaming, and saw Morgaunt’s librarian standing in the doorway laughing at him.

  Bella da Serpa was one of the most talked-about women in New York. Rumors flocked around her like art collectors around a priceless Renaissance Madonna. Rumors about her complicated relationship with J. P. Morgaunt. Rumors about her friendships with the famous sons of Europe’s great magical dynasties. Rumors about her father, the mysterious Count da Serpa, a Portuguese enchanter whom everyone had heard of for years, but no one could quite remember having seen in person.

  None of the rumors were even remotely as interesting as Bella da Serpa herself. She was a tall, elegant woman with a rich olive complexion and dark hair that was always pulled severely back from her face in a style that would have made any ordinary woman look pinched and plain. Her fashion sense was legendary—along with her dry sense of humor and her ruthless business smarts.

  “My mother won’t invite her to our house because she’s not respectable,” Lily had once told Sacha, “but she says that if Bella de Serpa had been born a man, she’d be the biggest Wall Street Wizard of them all.”

  Instead Bella da Serpa had chosen to work behind the scenes. She was the artistic genius behind Morgaunt’s world-famous collection of magical manuscripts. Looking at her now, Sacha couldn’t help wondering how many dark secrets she could have revealed to Wolf about Morgaunt’s plans for New York.

  If she’d wanted to, that is. But nothing in her dark eyes or her beautiful face suggested that she had any interest at all in helping Wolf.

  “Where’s Morgaunt?” Wolf asked her in a tone that made Sacha think they must know each other better than he’d realized.