Wolf looked from her to Goldfaden. “Is that what you’ve all been hiding from me? Why?”
Goldfaden looked sheepish but still defiant. But Pearl clasped her hands together with a pleading look on her face and almost seemed about to drop to her knees before Wolf.
“Because of Sam!” she cried.
“What about Sam?” Wolf seemed genuinely mystified.
“We were all terrified of getting him in trouble.” Pearl grasped at Wolf’s coat sleeve. “He’s a good boy. He never hurt anyone. Whatever Asher was mixed up in, Sam couldn’t possibly have been part of it! Can’t you just . . . just forget we ever mentioned him?”
“Do you really think I can do that?” Wolf asked sadly.
Pearl dropped her head into her hands and sobbed. “Then it’s all over! As soon as the newspapers get word of this, it’ll all be ‘Anarcho-Wiccanists’ and ‘subversive magical elements.’ And that’ll be the end of any justice for poor Sam.”
Wolf frowned. “What on earth does this have to do with politics?”
“But—but don’t you understand who Sam Schlosky is?” Pearl stammered. “He’s Moishe Schlosky’s little brother!”
Sacha’s heart sank. Pearl was right, no matter how much he hated to admit it. Moishe Schlosky had spent the last year trying to organize the workers at J. P. Morgaunt’s Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory. If any reporter sniffed out the faintest hint that Moishe’s own brother was mixed up in a magical crime, every paper in town would declare it an Anarcho- Wiccanist conspiracy. Sacha knew that as surely as he knew the sun would rise tomorrow. And he knew something else too—something that made the sinking feeling in his stomach even worse. Moishe was in love with Sacha’s sister. And—though he couldn’t fathom how his plump, pretty sister could possibly even look twice at a redheaded klutz who was skinnier than a starving chicken—Sacha was starting to have a sneaking suspicion that Bekah was sweet on Moishe, too.
At that moment, the door at the back of the theater burst open. Light footsteps tripped down the aisle, and a voice Sacha would have known anywhere called out, “Good golly, who canceled the second matinee? And what’s all this about Inquisiduhs?”
He turned to look up the aisle—and sure enough, there was Rosie DiMaggio, a.k.a. Rosalind Darling, in all her gorgeous, auburn-haired glory.
Halfway down the aisle, she caught sight of Wolf and his apprentices. “Hey, whaddaya know!” she cried. “Sawshah! Lily! Inquisiduh Wolf!”
“Sounds like the elocution lessons are coming along swimmingly,” Lily whispered in Sacha’s ear.
Sacha tried not to laugh, but he had to agree. The purpose of Rosie’s mother’s life was to backstage-mother her dazzlingly beautiful daughter into fame, fortune, and a high-society marriage. But honestly, Sacha thought she ought to just give up and let Rosie follow her dream of becoming a famous inventor. Rosie had as good a head for business as any Wall Street Wizard. And Lily had a point about the elocution lessons too. Rosie might be a thousand times prettier than any of the society beauties who flocked to Maleficia Astral’s dinner parties . . . but Sacha still doubted there was a speech coach or elocution spell in the world strong enough to conquer Rosie’s New York accent.
“Well, well,” Inquisitor Wolf said with the friendly smile that he always had for Rosie. “If it isn’t Miss Little Cairo!”
“Nah, I got a new act this year. My mother decided I needed something more artistic if I was gonna break into high society. Now I’m doing ‘Miss Rosalind Darling’s Living Statue Exhibition.’ A one-girl museum, complete with depictions of illuminated miniatures from Mr. Morgaunt’s world-famous magical manuscript collection. Very classy. But the white paint’s hard to get out of my hair. And I get the cramp somethin’ awful havin’ to stand still so long. Honestly, I preferred the belly-dancing.”
Lily made a sound that Sacha would have called a snort if anyone but the heir to the Astral family millions had made it.
“Anyway,” Rosie said, oblivious as always, “what are you guys doing here?”
Wolf stepped aside so she could see the chalk outline on the stage.
“Oh, no!” Rosie gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. “Who was it?”
“Naftali Asher.”
Was it Sacha’s imagination, or did Rosie suddenly look a lot less sorry? But all she said was “Ooh. Nasty. How’d it happen?”
“The electric tuxedo.”
Rosie shook her head, tossing her auburn curls. “I never thought that claptrap thing was safe.”
“See?” Goldfaden insisted. “Of course it was an accident!”
“Oh, sure, sure,” Rosie replied absent-mindedly. “Wouldn’t want to speak ill of the dead. Still . . . if there was one guy in vaudeville I wouldn’t be surprised to see turn up murdered, it’d have to be Naftali Asher.”
“Why’s that?” Wolf asked quietly.
Rosie gave him a meaningful look. “I guess you never met the guy. Still, Mr. Goldfaden’s probably right. Sam’s a good kid, but he’s no genius. I tried to tell Asher they needed to ground the thing properly, but he practically bit my head off. He shoulda listened to me, huh? After all, I got exploded and set fire to enough times back when I worked for Mr. Edison to know a thing or two about electricity.”
“You’re not working for Edison anymore?” Lily asked.
“Nah. After the fire at the Elephant Hotel, my picture got in the paper, and Mrs. Edison saw it and decided to take Mr. Edison on a long trip to California to promote ‘his’ motion-picture camera. As if! He can barely run the thing without my help! But two can play at that game. And the way I see it, since I already invented one motion-picture camera for Mr. Edison, there’s nothing to stop me from inventing another one for myself!” She gasped again. “Oh, golly! If the camera was working right today, the whole thing must be on film!”
Suddenly Rosie was off and running. She dashed back up the aisle toward the exit. Wolf followed close at her heels, with Goldfaden waddling behind him and the two apprentices bringing up the rear. They made it into the lobby just in time to see the muddy tails of Wolf’s overcoat vanishing through a green baize door that led to a steep flight of stairs.
As soon as Sacha stepped into the stairwell, he was surrounded by the soft whirring and clicking of some piece of machinery running overhead. It was a familiar sound—and not in a good way. It reminded him of Edison’s etherograph. Morgaunt had used that machine to steal Sacha’s soul and make a dybbuk of it. And then Sacha had played into Morgaunt’s hands by recklessly summoning the dybbuk—a blasphemy that still made him cringe with guilt every time he thought of it.
He’d never seen the dybbuk again after that night; it had vanished into the flames of the Elephant Hotel, and he fervently hoped it was gone forever. But he still knew he wasn’t finished with J. P. Morgaunt. Morgaunt had told Sacha that he had the makings of a Mage. He’d said that Maximillian Wolf had caused him so much trouble that he wouldn’t tolerate another Mage-Inquisitor in the city. Then he’d offered Sacha a job—and laughed in his face when he refused it.
Ever since that night, Sacha had tried to forget Morgaunt’s mocking laughter. And he’d tried almost as hard to avoid Wolf’s efforts to get him to learn magic. He couldn’t give up his apprenticeship, because his family needed the money too badly, but he was still determined not to become a magician. The one time he had worked magic—to summon his dybbuk—he had felt with every fiber of his being that he was doing wrong. And the magic that Wolf had used to defeat Morgaunt in the burning hotel had been even more terrifying than the summoning of the dybbuk. If that was magic, then Sacha wanted nothing to do with it.
Sacha had stopped on the stairs as the memories came to him, overwhelmed by the weak, sick feeling that always overtook him when he thought about that night. But now he realized that the others had gone on before him, and he forced himself to follow. At the top of the stairs hung a heavy red velvet curtain. Sacha pushed it aside—and stepped out into what felt, in that first instant, like midair.
/> They were in a private box: a little balcony that hung just to the side of the Hippodrome’s stage, close enough that the actors could have stood onstage and struck up a conversation with the uptown ladies and gentlemen who could afford these seats.
But there were no audience members in the box now. Instead, a spindly-legged steel spider crouched over the plush-upholstered seats—it was cobbled together from about five regular camera tripods. On top of the thicket of spindly legs, like a clockwork daddy longlegs, was the strangest camera Sacha had ever seen.
Or at least he thought it was a camera. It seemed to have all the parts and pieces cameras had. But it also had other parts: an extra-long adjustable lens, a speaker trumpet just like the one on Edison’s etherograph, and a strange figure-eight contraption on one side that seemed to be doing nothing at all except rolling a long strand of shiny tape from one bobbin to another bobbin.
It was this part of the machine that was making the whirring and clicking noise. And now that Sacha stood beside it, he could hear a sort of scritchety sound as well: the sound of the shiny strand of tape catching in the little cogs and gears that sent it snaking through the belly of the machine.
Rosie flicked a hidden switch, and the machine sighed and wheezed and shuddered to a stop.
“What is it?” Lily asked in the soft silence that followed.
“It’s my walking, talking motion-picture camera,” Rosie said proudly. “The only one in existence—but not for long! This invention’s gonna make me the toast of Hollywood!”
“Why I let her talk me into allowing the thing in my theater, I really couldn’t tell you,” Goldfaden kvetched. “It’s unfair competition, the worst threat to real theater since the phonograph! The actors’ union would kill me if they knew I was aiding and abetting the enemy this way. But that girl could charm a stone into getting up and walking!”
“And you think you filmed Naftali Asher’s death with it?” Wolf asked Rosie. “Sound included?”
“Hopefully. I’m still having a heck of a time making the sound match up to the pictures—there’s a trick I used for Edison, but he’s got the patent on it now, so it’s back to square one on that little problem. Still, you can usually hear everything pretty good, even if it looks a little funny.”
“Can we see it?”
“Well, not yet. You gotta develop the film just like with a regular camera, you know? I could do it for you. Let’s see now . . . if I rushed it a bit, I could probably have it ready for you day after tomorrow.” Then her face fell. “But wouldn’t that be a conflict of something or other? I mean, I work at the Hippodrome. Ain’t I a suspect?”
Wolf’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. Then he smiled, a little ruefully. “You forget, Rosie. I know you. And out of all the millions of people in New York, you’re about the last one I’d ever suspect of killing anybody.”
“Oh!” Rosie seemed flattered and even a little flustered by the compliment, though Sacha couldn’t figure out why. “Uh . . . I’ll bring it to the Inquisitors Division on Monday. I always wanted to see where Sacha and Lily work. I heard so much about it, I got a real curiosity for the place.”
“Anyone else I should talk to?” Wolf asked Goldfaden. “Besides Sam Schlosky, I mean.”
“Well, you’ll need to talk to Asher’s wife, of course. And Ki—erm—” Goldfaden fidgeted for a moment, once again unable to meet Wolf’s eyes. “Ahem, that is to say—no. Nobody who comes to mind, strictly speaking.”
Wolf gave Goldfaden one of his blandest looks. “Everyone has enemies, Mr. Goldfaden, or at least people who don’t like them very much. If you’re worried that I’ll jump to unwarranted conclusions just because you mention, say, a rival or a professional competitor—”
“Oh, heck!” Goldfaden erupted. “I guess you’ll hear it sooner or later, so it might as well be from me and not the rumor mill. Asher had it in for the Kid. Thought he was trying to put him out of business. You know who I mean, don’t you? Hottest klezmer clarinet in New York.”
Wolf looked blank.
“That guy was the Klezmer King,” Goldfaden said, pointing at the wavering chalk outline where Asher had lain. “And in my humble opinion, he was the greatest klezmer player who ever lived. But genius or not, he was finished. No one wanted to hear him anymore. They were all too hot for the new sensation that’s sweeping the nation: Kid Klezmer.”
“Oh!” Sacha gasped before he could stop himself. “Him!”
“You know about this person?” Lily asked, as if the mere idea were too absurd to be believed.
“Sure—um—my mother sort of has a thing for him.”
Goldfaden snorted. “Your mother and every other live female on the Lower East Side between the ages of nine and ninety. If you ask me, he doesn’t have a tenth of the talent poor Asher had. But the women are almost as crazy for him as they are for that talentless hack, Mordechai Kessler. I should be so handsome. I woulda been a millionaire!”
Sacha started guiltily at the sound of his uncle’s name, but Wolf was too busy asking where he could find Kid Klezmer to even notice.
“We-ell,” Goldfaden said doubtfully, “he spends a lot of time at the Essex Street Candy Shop.”
“Oh,” Wolf said, in a very different tone of voice. “I see.”
Lily looked mystified, but Sacha knew exactly what Goldfaden meant—and why Wolf suddenly sounded as wary as a mouse who’d just caught wind of a new cat in the neighborhood.
Everyone on the Lower East Side knew that the Kid was Meyer Minsky’s favorite klezmer player. He was practically the official clarinetist for Magic, Inc. And he hung out with all of New York’s most notorious Jewish gangsters in the back room of the Essex Street Candy Shop. Mrs. Kessler wouldn’t let Sacha or Bekah set foot in that store, even though it had the best candy in town and was only a mouthwatering block and a half from their apartment on Hester Street. But Meyer Minsky had once visited Benny Fein’s mother in the apartment upstairs from theirs, arriving in his canary yellow limousine with his pockets full of candy for all the neighborhood kids—and the taste of that candy was one of the sweetest memories of Sacha’s life.
“But I guess you wouldn’t want to be seen walking into the candy store,” Goldfaden said hesitantly. “It’d give people the wrong idea.”
“Quite,” Wolf agreed.
“But . . . uh . . . Meyer likes to have lunch at the Café Metropole. And it is almost twelve. And that might be . . . ah . . . neutral territory, so to speak.”
“A very astute suggestion,” Wolf agreed in his blandest voice. “And now we really should be going. Rosie? We’ll see you Monday?”
“You betcha!” she called from the bowels of her walking, talking motion-picture camera.
A minute later, Goldfaden was hustling Wolf and the apprentices out onto the street under the blinking, flashing Greco-Roman awning of the Hippodrome. The weather was still appalling, and they hurried to button coats, twine mufflers around chilly necks, turn up their collars, and prepare for the freezing slush of the New York sidewalks in February.
But before stepping into the icy rain, Wolf turned back to Goldfaden for one last question. “You mentioned Harry Houdini earlier,” he asked the theater manager. “Just out of curiosity, would you still hire him now?”
Sacha and Lily both knew what Wolf was asking: Would the Hippodrome still hire a magician who’d been unofficially blacklisted by ACCUSE, the Advisory Committee to Congress on Un-American Sorcery? Maurice Goldfaden knew what Wolf meant too. And from the look of things, he didn’t like it much. His eyes narrowed, and his already flushed face turned a purpler shade of red.
“What kinda question is that? This is the Hippodrome, not just some garden-variety vaudeville joint. We started out in Yiddish theater way back when. We’ve had all the greats here: Adler, Thomashefsky, Kessler. I mean David Kessler, of course, not Mordechai the Meatball!”
Sacha jumped again at the sound of his Uncle Mordechai’s name—and Goldfaden’s poppy-seed eyes flicked his way with a tw
inkle in them that made Sacha suddenly suspect Goldfaden knew exactly who he was and was taking active pleasure in insulting Mordechai to his face. Sacha had seen his uncle Mordechai in several Yiddish People’s Theater musicals—you had to catch them fast, since almost every show that opened at the Yiddish People’s Theater folded before the actors even got their first paycheck. Still, he couldn’t help feeling that Goldfaden was being a little unfair. But he wasn’t going to argue the point, so he tried to copy Wolf’s blandest expression, forcing out of his mind the very idea that he even knew anyone named Mordechai Kessler.
Wolf knew about Sacha’s family, of course—though Sacha hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to tell him more than was strictly necessary about his scapegrace Uncle Mordechai. But Lily still thought Sacha was a respectable middle-class boy who lived in the sedate row house near Gramercy Park, where the Astral family limousine dropped him off every day after work. And she’d go on thinking that as long as Sacha had anything to say about it. He’d die of shame if she ever found out that he lived in the tenements.
“Anyway,” Goldfaden went on, “the point is the Hippodrome’s got history. She’s got soul. And the Hippodrome is not gonna stiff Harry Houdini just because a bunch of congressmen from states with square corners think being a rabbi’s son makes him un-American!”
Goldfaden was shaking a finger in Wolf’s face now, his big potbelly pushing the taller man backward step by step. Soon both were standing in the rain, Goldfaden in nothing but his suit jacket and waistcoat. But he was too angry to notice—and the finger that had been waving in Wolf’s face was now jabbing at his chest.
“And you know what else, Mr. Fancypants Inquisitor? If you think you’re going to lean on me to report my friends and neighbors for Wiccanist activities—”
“Actually,” Wolf said mildly, “I’m quite a fan of Mr. Houdini myself. And he seems to be having a little trouble finding work lately. So I thought I might mention that if he did appear at the Hippodrome, I’d be happy to buy a ticket.”
The Watcher in the Shadows Page 3