Sacha looked at the pale silver Kiddush cup glinting in the wintry sunlight. He felt his grandfather’s eyes on him, but he was strangely reluctant to meet the old man’s gaze. “Has that ever worked?” he asked. “I mean, has anyone ever . . . repaired a dybbuk?”
“Not that I know of,” Rabbi Kessler said in something like his normal cheerful tones. “But don’t let that discourage you!”
“Wolf wants me to learn magic. To protect myself.”
“I’m sure he thinks it’s a good idea.”
“But you won’t teach me.”
“Of course I will. When you’re married and over forty!”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t look like that, Sacha. Worse things have happened to people. Not often, but still . . . and anyway, I’ll talk to Mo and see what he thinks. There are things that we can teach even to one as young as you are. I don’t know that they’re what your Inquisitor Wolf would call magic, exactly. But understanding the true nature of souls may be of more real help to you than any practical magic.” Grandpa Kessler shook himself and struggled to his feet. “Enough of that, anyway. You look green. Go outside and get some fresh air, will you?”
But Sacha had just gotten to the front door when his grandfather’s voice called him back again.
“Hey, wait a minute! Come back and get me another drink of water! I’m still thirsty!”
Instead of going outside when he finally left his grandfather, Sacha trudged upstairs to look for Moishe Schlosky.
He found Moishe and Bekah sitting out on the fire escape together, oblivious to the cold and so deep in some profound political discussion that their heads were practically touching. Sacha stared at Moishe until the older boy’s face flushed almost as red as his hair.
“Mind if I borrow your boyfriend?” he asked Bekah.
“Don’t!” Bekah warned him. “Don’t even think about calling him that!”
“Whatever you say. But I still need to talk to him. Not about you,” he said when he saw Bekah’s glare. “About work stuff. Secret work stuff.”
A look passed between Bekah and Moishe that made Sacha suspect his secret might be less than safe in Moishe’s hands. But that wasn’t his problem.
“Where’s your brother?” he asked as soon as Bekah was out of earshot.
“Are you asking? Or is Inquisitor Wolf asking?”
“He’s asking. And if you want to keep Sam safe, you’ll tell him.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
Sacha wasn’t entirely sure that he didn’t agree with Moishe. Still, he did his best to pass along Wolf’s message.
“I’ll tell . . . anyone who might know where he is,” Moishe said. “That’s all I can promise.”
“Okay.” Sacha started to turn away.
“You know,” Moishe said, “you could have threatened to tell your parents that you caught Bekah out on the fire escape with me unless I told you where Sam was.”
Sacha didn’t know what to say to that. The idea hadn’t even crossed his mind.
“But you’re too nice to do that, aren’t you, Sacha?”
“Or maybe just too dumb to think of it. And anyway, you weren’t even doing anything.”
“You think your mother would have cared about that?” Moishe asked with a lopsided grin. “Nope. You are nice. And I might as well warn you now that I plan to take shameless advantage of it. Your sister—”
“Don’t push your luck!” Sacha said, putting out a hand to silence Moishe. “I’m not that nice!”
CHAPTER SIX
Naftali Asher’s Last Words
ON MONDAY MORNING, Sacha arrived at Inquisitors Division headquarters just in time to hear Wolf get a blistering tongue-lashing from Commissioner Keegan.
Lily was in the front office with Philip Payton, a boy only a few years older than Sacha who was something in between Wolf’s office clerk and a sort of unofficial inquisitor. But neither Lily nor Philip was working this morning. Keegan had walked into Wolf’s room as some sort of gesture toward privacy but he was so mad he’d forgotten to shut the door. So now Payton and Lily were hovering beside the half-open door listening to every word, and they could hear everything.
Sacha knew it was Keegan in there without even asking; every beat cop in the NYPD prided himself on imitating Tommy Keegan’s rollicking Irish brogue. Keegan had made his career—and, some whispered, a private fortune as well—by ensuring that poor New Yorkers didn’t interfere with the business or pleasures of their richer neighbors. His first act as police commissioner had been to draw what he called a “dead line” around the Wall Street business district. All pickpockets, street peddlers, and conjure men had been warned that they could do what they pleased in the poorer neighborhoods of the city, but if they crossed the dead line, they would be made examples of. A few criminals crossed the line despite the warning; examples were made—or, more precisely, found floating in the East River—and no one ever crossed the line again.
Keegan’s supporters boasted that he had made New York a great place to do business. Keegan’s enemies—well, Keegan’s enemies usually disappeared into the police lockups in the Tombs before they had a chance to say much of anything. Even Meyer Minsky had once confessed that he’d rather brave a gun battle with his worst enemy than risk a night in the Tombs with Tommy Keegan.
“Mark my words, Wolf!” Keegan blared from the other side of the door. “Ye’ll solve this Klosky case, and ye’ll solve it fast!”
“I think you mean Klezmer, sir,” Wolf suggested.
“Klosky, Klusmer, do ye think I care what they call their infernal caterwauling? The main point is—when are ye goin’ to arrest someone?”
“Well, I generally wait to start beating confessions out of people until I actually have a crime for them to confess to—”
Keegan stomped hard enough to rattle the door in its frame. “It’s no joking matter, Wolf! People have their eye on this case! People who matter!”
“People whose money matters,” Philip Payton muttered under his breath, just low enough that Keegan couldn’t hear him. Sacha knew exactly who Payton meant: J. P. Morgaunt, owner of just about everything in New York that was worth more than a wooden nickel. Morgaunt was the only man in the city who could have Keegan in the office hollering at Wolf instead of relaxing with his betters in the oak-paneled gentlemen’s lounge of the Union Club. But why on earth would J. P. Morgaunt “have his eye” on this case? Why would he even care one fig about some ridiculous vaudeville scandal?
“How long has this been going on?” Sacha whispered.
The older boy just rolled his eyes.
“They were already going at it when I got here,” Lily said, “and that was at least ten minutes ago.”
“And what about that Schlosky boy?” Keegan snapped in the next room. “When are you going to bring him in?”
“Whenever I find him,” Wolf answered mildly. “I’m trying to track down anyone who knew him and Asher when they worked at Pentacle.”
“Pentacle? Pentacle’s not the problem, man! The problem is that immigrant trash down on Hester Street!”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Don’t play the meek little innocent with me, Wolf! You know who I’m talking about. Those godless Wiccanists won’t rest till they’ve brought every factory owner in New York to his knees. Mr. Morgaunt says they’ve plans afoot for a general strike. Every magicworker in New York is going to walk off the job and shut down Manhattan from one end to t’other!” Keegan snorted. “But that’s what we get for lettin’ these damned foreigners into the country!”
“Quite so, sir. I can’t think why we let any foreigners in at all.”
“Aren’t we clever today? I’ll tell ye what, Wolf—why don’t you go arrest Moishe Schlosky before I decide to let you laugh all the way to a job in Yonkers?”
“What for?”
“For being an arrogant dev—”
“No, I mean what am I supposed to arrest Moishe Schlosky for”—Wolf paused
infinitesimally—“sir?”
“Look, man, you’ve got a point. But don’t push it too far. Sometimes a man has to face reality.”
“Unless he wants to end up working in Yonkers?”
“Just so. Mr. Morgaunt has made it clear how he wants this case handled. I know what you think of him. And I admit he’s a hard man. But he’s also a man who’s done a lot for the city, and when he takes it in mind to speak, he has a right to be listened to. And frankly, Wolf, I think he’s right about this case. When he asked me what the hell you’d been doing all weekend, I didn’t have a word to say to him. So why don’t you go down to Hester Street and roust out those IWW rascals? Even if they’ve nothing to do with this case, it’ll be a public service to put the fear of God and the NYPD into them. And while ye’re at it, change clothes, will you? You look like you’ve been sleepin’ in the subway for a month of Sundays!”
“Well,” Payton said dryly as soon as Keegan was gone, “I guess Mr. Morgaunt is a little more worried about the strike at Pentacle than he’s letting on in public.”
Sacha looked around to see what Inquisitor Wolf made of that comment—but Wolf was still staring after Keegan. The fake dumb cop look that he always put on to annoy the police commissioner was gone now, and he just looked tired and defeated. He glanced Sacha’s way, caught him staring—and blinked at him for a moment as if trying to remember who he was and where he’d seen him before.
“Come into my office, Sacha,” Wolf said after a moment, sounding brusque and unusually serious. “I need to talk to you.”
Sacha goggled at him. So did Lily. And while Philip Payton would never have stooped to goggling, it was pretty clear that he was just as curious.
Sacha stepped into the office nervously and pulled the door closed behind him. Then he told himself that Wolf probably just wanted to know if he’d spoken to Moishe over the weekend, and his heart lightened. “If it’s about Moishe—” he began.
“It’s not about Moishe. Sit down.”
Sacha started toward Wolf’s desk with a feeling of doom in his heart, but before he got there, the door to the outside corridor slammed open again and Rosie DiMaggio’s voice rang in the air.
Wolf ducked back out into the front room, and Sacha followed just in time to see Rosie at the door with her arms full of heavy boxes. He leaped to help her. So did Philip Payton—and they collided in mid-leap. Lily rolled her eyes, stepped over them, and took one of the packages herself.
“Thanks!” Rosie said. “Boy, that lobby’s really something! It boggles the mind the things people think of doing with magic in this city! And what’s with the guy I just met coming down the stairs? That fella’s got a serious liver problem. I worked with a girl who worked at Ziegfeld’s, and she said Mr. Ziegfeld’s brother-in-law’s youngest sister knew a big director out in Hollywood who got red in the face like that every time he got mad, and his doctor told him to meditate twice a day and eat only non-bile-promoting, non-liver-aggravating food. And he didn’t listen. So one day—pow!—dead as doorknocker! See? Somebody really oughta tell that fella about it!”
Sacha’s head was spinning—a state of mind that Rosie usually produced in males between the ages of fifteen and eighty-five. “What’s non—whatever you just said—food?” he asked.
“They make it in Battle Creek, Michigan, and it comes in a cardboard box—which is about what it tastes like, if you ask me. Anyway, here’s the film. I brought it straight over as soon as it was developed, just like I said I would. And I brought the projector too, because I figured you might not have one. So now all we need is a nice, clean, empty piece of white wall to . . .”
She trailed off and glanced around the impossibly cluttered office, whose walls were stacked with files straight up to the cobweb-festooned ceiling.
“How ’bout if I just move these?” Rosie asked. She poked at one of the piles. For a moment nothing happened. Then the pile trembled and tottered and came slithering down in an avalanche that buried them all to the ankles.
“Oops!” Rosie said.
Wolf muttered something hopeful about taking advantage of the chance to reorganize—but Payton just groaned. And really, Sacha couldn’t blame him. Wolf shed notes, letters, and random scraps of paper so quickly that Sacha still couldn’t figure out how the paperwork hadn’t smothered them all at their desks long ago. In fact, Sacha was starting to think that either Payton was one of the most powerful magicians working for the Inquisitors Division or he was secretly throwing old case files out the window into the alley to get rid of them.
As Sacha helped scoop up the files on the floor and clear the space Rosie needed for her projector, he couldn’t stop himself from glancing constantly at Inquisitor Wolf, feeling vaguely sick to his stomach, and wondering what on earth the man wanted to talk to him about—and how long he was going to have to wait now to find out about it. But finally the projector was set up and a little square of space was cleared on the wall. Wolf climbed onto the windowsill and pulled down the rolling blind, releasing a collection of mummified bugs that looked like they ought to be donated to the Natural History Museum. They sat down to watch the final performance of the Klezmer King. And Sacha forgot all about Wolf wanting to see him, and Keegan wanting to arrest Moishe Schlosky, and Rosie and her non-bilious anti-aggravating cardboard breakfast food—and in fact everything else in the world except Naftali Asher and his strange, haunting, impossible music.
As the projector started up, the makeshift screen flickered and went black. Then a little circle of light appeared at its center—and Sacha realized that someone had just lit a spotlight, and they were looking down at the stage of the Hippodrome. The picture jiggled, and he heard a thump, rustle, and scrape—and then Maurice Goldfaden’s voice muttering, “Testing, testing! Where is the damn thing anyway? Oh, there it is.”
Then Naftali Asher appeared onstage, clutching his clarinet and walking in that hurried, jerky way that people in moving pictures always seemed to do. The clarinet glistened in his hand. The lights of the electric tuxedo flashed and winked. He stopped in the middle of the stage and gave the audience a long, baleful look—as if he already knew that his music was going to be completely wasted on them. Then he turned his back on the audience, put his clarinet to his lips, and began to play.
For the rest of his life, Sacha would struggle to describe that music. Indeed, years later, he would wander the record stores on Broadway, listening to the klezmer greats of the day and trying in vain to find anything to match the music he remembered Naftali Asher playing.
Asher had been a fine klezmer player. He coaxed from his clarinet all the quavering tones, heartbreaking sobs, and sweeping glissandos that made people call klezmer music the voice of the Jewish soul. But it was Asher’s songs that really made him extraordinary. They seemed to meld the ancient traditions of four thousand years with the new joys and sorrows of life in America. And suddenly Sacha knew exactly where the Klezmer King had gotten his mysterious melodies. These were the same ones he had heard played on Mr. Worley’s Soul Catcher and Thomas Edison’s etherograph. They were the souls of real, living, breathing people, carved into the little wax cylinders that Morgaunt kept locked up in his library. Sacha had forced those songs out of his mind ever since that horrible night in the flaming ruins of the Elephant Hotel.
But now, as the cold tinkle of the etherograph was replaced by the rich warmth of a fine clarinet in the hands of a great musician, Sacha remembered the strange beauty of that music. He remembered the almost painful rush of pity and tenderness he had felt when he’d heard the lonely, wistful, waiting sound of Lily’s song. And when Inquisitor Wolf had submitted himself to the machine? Well, Sacha had no words for that. A man would have to live a lifetime—and a very extraordinary lifetime at that—before he grasped the wellsprings of Maximillian Wolf’s very private and complicated being.
Wolf stood up abruptly and stopped the film.
It took Sacha a moment to come out of the spell of the music. He looked around, still
a bit surprised to find himself at Inquisitors headquarters instead of at the Hippodrome. The others were looking around in the same way, shaking themselves as if they’d just been diving in dark waters and were trying to remember what air and sunlight were. But while Payton and Rosie seemed to come back to themselves without any trouble, Lily and Wolf both wore the same confused and troubled look that Sacha could feel on his own face.
“Wasn’t that—” Sacha began.
“Did that remind you of anything?” Lily asked at the same moment.
“Yeah, I know,” Rosie said. “That’s what I always thought. But why would Mr. Edison have let Asher listen to his etherograph recordings? I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. Where would they even have met each other?”
“Was Edison still working on the etherograph when he left for California?” Wolf asked.
“Oh, no! That was always Mr. Morgaunt’s project. Mr. Edison mighta had some of his own money in it, but honestly, he was pretty broke even before the Houdini Challenge. And after that . . . well, I think he must have had some idea what really happened that night. He sold out to Mr. Morgaunt so fast it was like he was too scared of the guy to even haggle about it.”
“I think,” Wolf said, “that we need to have another of our little talks with Mr. Morgaunt.”
Wolf started the film again, and soon Sacha was so enthralled by the haunting music that he almost didn’t notice the faint flicker of motion at the edge of the screen. It was Sam Schlosky, Sacha realized, watching Asher in the final moments before his death.
Then the electric tuxedo flared and surged. Sparks flitted across Naftali Asher’s chest. And as he flailed and clawed at the suit, Asher let out one final howl: the last words that everyone had admitted he had spoken but no one had been willing to admit to having understood.
The Watcher in the Shadows Page 9