The Watcher in the Shadows

by Chris Moriarty

  “Well, wherever he is, you can’t wait for him here.” She swept across the room in a rustle of dove gray silk and sank gracefully into the chair behind Morgaunt’s desk. “This is my library, and I prefer that it not be turned into a public waiting room.”

  Her voice was as soft and feminine as ever—but there was an edge of steel behind the words that Sacha didn’t think even Wolf would dare to test.

  “Then tell me where he is,” Wolf retorted.

  “That’s just what I was about to do. There’s no need to be rude about it.”

  Wolf’s mouth compressed to a thin line.

  “And no, actually, I wasn’t going to call you a guttersnipe,” Bella da Serpa said, as if she were plucking the thoughts out of Wolf’s head and answering a question he hadn’t even asked out loud. “But I do think it’s interesting that that’s how you see yourself. I suppose it must be quite difficult to be an orphan. One must be called upon very early to rely on one’s own resources.”

  “I’m not impressed by your parlor tricks.”

  “And I’m not impressed by your manners, so that makes two of us.”

  She got up from the desk, pulled a key chain out of a hidden pocket in her perfectly tailored gown, and chose a tiny golden key from among the rest. She walked over to a tall mahogany cabinet against one wall and opened it to reveal row upon row of glimmering white and gold etherograph cylinders, all neatly catalogued with labels made out in a graceful feminine hand that Sacha was quite sure must be hers.

  Sacha gasped at the sight of so many etherograph cylinders in one place. He wondered if his own recording was among them or if Morgaunt kept it somewhere else. Bella pulled a pasteboard box off the bottom shelf of the cabinet, brought it back to the desk, and unceremoniously dumped its contents out on the blotter.

  There were some twenty or thirty cylinders there, all unlabeled and uncatalogued. And as Wolf watched, Bella began labeling the cylinders with little white tags that hung from loops of pale green string.

  “There’s been a cave-in on the new Harlem line of the subway,” she said after she’d written out the first few labels. “There was an explosion that you must have heard as you were coming across the park. If you go to Lexington and Ninety-Second Street, you’ll find Morgaunt there supervising the cleanup and trying to get the work back on track before they fall hopelessly behind schedule.”

  Wolf didn’t acknowledge the information. Like Sacha, he was too busy staring at the etherograph recordings.

  “The name Naftali Asher wouldn’t happen to mean anything to you, would it?” he asked.

  She wrote out another label and looked critically at her handiwork, tilting her beautiful dark head as if she were authenticating a questionable manuscript.

  “Why do you let him use you like this, Bella?”

  A sly smile curved her lips, but she didn’t look up from the work. “Because he lets me use him right back.”

  Wolf made a rude sound.

  “I don’t trust you, Maximillian Wolf. I knew you weren’t a man to be trusted the moment I first laid eyes on you. And when you think of what’s happened to the people who have trusted you, can you really say I was wrong? Morgaunt has his faults, and Lord knows I’ve seen more of them than anyone else on God’s green earth. But he’s a builder, not a wrecker. He’s built factories and businesses that employ thousands. And he’s building something here, in this library, something of a scope and power you can’t begin to appreciate.” She gazed at Wolf across the desk as if he were an interesting taxonomical specimen. “You, on the other hand, are the kind of dangerous idealist who’d tear down the whole house because you don’t happen to like the wallpaper in the dining room.”

  “I make mistakes, Bella, but I mean well.”

  “You mean well.” Bella repeated Wolf’s phrase as if it belonged to a foreign language. “Men always do the most terrible things after they say those words.”

  “And what is Morgaunt doing?” Wolf asked in a fierce and urgent voice. “For years I’ve watched the two of you travel from one end of the globe to the next, gathering the greatest library of black magic ever assembled in one place. Am I wrong to fear such power? Am I wrong to think that a man like Morgaunt poses a threat to the very idea of democracy?”

  “Democracy!” Bella said, and her voice thrilled with a disdain that Sacha felt all the way to his toes. “Do you know what ‘democracy’ means to me? It means the power of the lynch mob, nothing more and nothing less!”

  “Perhaps, Bella,” Wolf said quietly. “But Morgaunt’s not the answer. He’s not your friend. He’s not anyone’s friend.”

  “He’s as good a friend as a woman like me can expect to have.” Bella looked seriously at Wolf, as if she were revisiting some old judgment she’d made about him and confirming that she’d been right all along. “Goodbye, Max. It’s been nice seeing you. Don’t come again.”

  Suddenly Sacha found himself being propelled toward the door. Lily went with him, looking just as helpless and bewildered as Sacha felt. Wolf stayed behind just long enough to make it clear that he was leaving under his own steam, but he still looked harried and irritated when he joined them in the lobby.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Death in the Pit

  IT WAS ONLY a short walk from Morgaunt’s mansion to the upper end of the still-unfinished Harlem subway line, and once they got there, it didn’t take them long to find the site of the cave-in. All they had to do was follow the bright blare of the arc lights. The line ran a few blocks east of the Hudson River Line’s train sheds and switching yards, through a neighborhood where slaughterhouses and tanneries were giving way to cheap apartments built on speculation.

  When they reached the construction site, Sacha could only stare in amazement. It looked like a bomb had gone off. The entire block was clogged with fire wagons and rescue crews. A pall of dust hung thick in the air: the rubble of a dreadful explosion, still settling to earth long after the damage had been done and shading the white glare of the arc lights to a sooty gray. At the north end of the diggings gaped the black maw of the subway. And between them stretched the vast expanse of the open pit.

  Sacha had seen subway construction sites sprouting all over the city in the past few years, but he was still shocked every time he realized just how deep they were. This pit went down and down and down, through cobblestones and gravel and dirt and bedrock. Water seeped from the walls and trickled down the cut face to fill stagnant sump ponds. Massive tree roots clawed out of the wounded earth, torn off in midair like severed fingers. Boulders the size of carthorses protruded from the walls as well—and some of them lay tumbled at the bottom. Sacha thought of what it would be like to be working in the pit when one of those behemoths calved from the wall and thundered down upon you, and he shuddered.

  Between the putrid ponds and the fallen boulders, the ground was littered with piles of rock and bags of mortar. The pit diggers moving through this underworld were so covered in dust and grime that they seemed almost to be subterranean creatures themselves. Seeing them struggling through the muck so far below him made Sacha think for a moment of his grandfather’s stories of the golem, a man made from river mud.

  Wolf watched the ditch diggers intently for a few moments, but his face looked so impassive that Sacha thought his mind must be a thousand miles away. A half dozen engineers and foremen were gathered at one end of the platform talking over a set of blueprints, and after a moment, one of them broke away from the conference and walked over to ask Wolf if he needed help.

  Wolf showed the man his badge and said he needed to speak to Morgaunt. The man’s jaw hardened, and his eyes became wary at the sight of an Inquisitor’s badge, but he bowed politely and pointed toward a jumble of hastily constructed wood-framed buildings halfway around the rim of the pit.

  “Wait here,” Wolf told the apprentices. “And don’t wander around. It’s not safe.”

  Lily waited until Wolf was out of sight and then started down the rickety wooden stairs int
o the pit.

  “What are you doing?” Sacha asked, even though he knew already.

  “Snooping!” Lily said cheerfully.

  “Don’t you remember what happened the last time you ignored Wolf like this?”

  “Yep! We solved the mystery!”

  “We did not—oh, I give up!” He made a face and stomped away from the edge of the pit so he wouldn’t have to see Lily flouncing down the stairs. It would serve her right if Wolf came back and caught her disobeying him!

  He couldn’t resist for long, though. After fuming for half a minute, he stomped back to the stairs intending to follow her. He’d barely set foot on the top step, however, when half a dozen diggers surged up from the pit bottom carrying something long and heavy and wrapped in a dirty blanket. They pushed past Lily, huffing and panting, staggered up onto the sidewalk, and laid their burden down with a soft, heavy thud that gave Sacha a queer feeling in his stomach.

  Sacha started for the stairs again, only to be stopped again by a voice he would have known instantly anywhere in the world.

  “Why, Mr. Kessler! Don’t tell me you’re leaving already when I’ve gone to so much trouble to arrange a private chat with you.”

  Sacha turned around to see J. P. Morgaunt grinning at him.

  “Wolf’s looking for you,” he told the Wall Street Wizard.

  “No doubt he is. But that doesn’t mean I’m looking for him.” Morgaunt chuckled in a way that would have seemed good-natured and friendly in another man. “Frankly, Wolf and I have said all we have to say to each other. Those nuns ruined him for life. The meek shall inherit the earth, indeed! Does anyone ever stop to think what an unmitigated disaster that would be? The trains would never run on time again, and we’d all starve to death inside of a year. But I don’t have to tell you that, Mr. Kessler. You may act meek and mild, but you’re a lion where it matters.” He rapped Sacha on the chest with a hand that, despite its elegant manicure and golden cufflinks, was as strong as any workman’s. “And that pretty black-eyed sister of yours is a regular tiger!”

  Sacha felt the blood draining from his face.

  “Oh, yes, I know all about her,” Morgaunt laughed. “And if you’ll take my advice, you’ll make sure she gets out of this strike nonsense before it’s too late.”

  “Why can’t you just give them what they want?” Sacha asked hopelessly.

  Morgaunt’s look was almost as pitying as the look Bekah had given Sacha when he asked her the same question. “Because it’s cheaper to pay large young men of limited intelligence to beat them up until they go back to work. As an esteemed colleague of mine on Wall Street once pointed out, we can pay half the working class to shoot the other half.” He winked cheerfully at Sacha. “And human nature being what it is, sometimes we don’t even have to pay them.”

  Sacha would have liked to disagree, but, really, how could he? Morgaunt was right as usual. A lot more right—or so it seemed to Sacha—than all the people who pronounced pompous platitudes about the power of love, the nobility of humanity, and so forth.

  Morgaunt started to speak again, but suddenly a soul-rending noise filled the air around them.

  Someone had unwrapped the blanketed bundle, and it wasn’t a bunch of wire or tools they’d carried up out of the bowels of the earth. It was a body—the body of a boy only a few years older than Sacha.

  A woman came up the street at a run, outpacing the man who must have been sent to fetch her. Sacha guessed it was the boy’s mother from the look of blank terror on her face. And he knew it for certain when she threw herself across the corpse and screamed again as if her very soul were being torn again from her.

  The sound tore at Sacha like the shriek of a dying animal. And then, to his horror, she raised her tear-streaked face and began to claw at her cheeks. Sacha backed away instinctively, more terrified by the woman’s wrenching grief than by the body itself.

  Some of the bystanders grabbed the woman, pulling her off her son’s body and tying rags on her hands to stop her from tearing at herself. But seeing her this way was almost worse. Only a moment ago, Sacha had seen her run up the street, a young mother in the prime of her life. But she stood up from her son’s body an old woman, so bent and broken that anyone just coming upon the scene would have thought she was his grandmother.

  “Look at her,” Morgaunt said, shocking Sacha, who had almost forgotten his presence. “She’s a creature out of prehistory, a ghost of the Stone Age. Do you know that when the English conquered western Ireland, there were tribes there who carried stone knives and barely knew how to make fire? What hope can there be of turning such savages into Americans?”

  “They’re still human beings,” Sacha whispered raggedly.

  “You spend too much time with that sentimentalist Wolf,” Morgaunt scoffed. “He loves the Irish because they took him in when he was abandoned by a mother who was probably no better than she should have been. But a fox doesn’t become a hound just because he moves into the kennel. The other cops know Wolf isn’t really one of them. And they hate him for it . . . just as surely as they hate you for being a Jew.”

  “Are you trying to hire this half of the working class to shoot the other half?” Sacha snapped.

  But Morgaunt just threw back his head and laughed. Sacha realized that Morgaunt hadn’t really been trying to argue with him. He’d just been amusing himself by winding Sacha up. Sacha shook his head and turned away, determined not to give the man the satisfaction of knowing his taunts had struck home.

  “Ah, but you shouldn’t turn away from me,” Morgaunt said. “And you shouldn’t trust Wolf as you do. Men who think they’re on the side of the angels are always dangerous. That’s the difference between me and Wolf. I’m a businessman, a practical fellow who wants to see the world organized along sensible, orderly, profitable lines. And a good businessman knows the value of loyalty and the importance of rewarding it properly. Whereas Wolf is willing to sacrifice anything and betray anyone for his ideals, including you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Sacha said stubbornly, even though he did . . . just a little.

  Morgaunt’s smile grew sad and understanding and almost gentle. “Of course you don’t,” he said. “They never do until it’s too late.”

  And that was when Wolf and Lily found them.

  Wolf gave Morgaunt a look that made Sacha suddenly suspect he’d purposely gone off and let the Wall Street Wizard corner him alone. He felt a hot rush of anger. Was Wolf testing him? Was he trying to throw Sacha in the way of temptation to see if he would agree to work for Morgaunt? Or could he just not be bothered to protect him from Morgaunt’s jeers and mockery?

  But Sacha’s glare rolled off Wolf like water off a waxed coat.

  As the two men moved away together down the platform, Sacha leaned on the railing and buried his aching head in his hands.

  “What did Morgaunt say to you?” Lily asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She frowned. “You don’t look like it was nothing.”

  Sacha just closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “Are you all right?” Lily asked. And when he didn’t answer, she stood awkwardly beside him for a few moments before reaching out to pat him on the shoulder. It was a stiff gesture, as if it was something she’d never tried doing before and couldn’t quite get the hang of. But oddly, it made him feel better.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Dangerous Man

  THE NEXT MORNING was Friday, the day of Sacha and Lily’s lesson with Shen. Shen’s lessons were the high point of their week. By now they’d been studying with her for the best part of a year. Lily was completely infatuated with their teacher, and truth to tell, Sacha had been bitten almost as badly with the kung fu bug.

  During the first few months, Sacha had pulled muscles and tendons and ligaments that he didn’t even know he had. And then the pulled muscles felt as if they’d developed pulled muscles of their own. He and Lily had shuffled around on legs they could barely raise off the ground with
arms so sore they seemed to have stopped being regular parts of their bodies and turned into objects of the most refined torture.

  But it had been worth it. Slowly, Shen had initiated them into the mysteries of something that Sacha was beginning to see as both a way of fighting and a kind of moving art. One by one, she had taught them the incredible movements—she called them forms—that they’d watched her students do that first day.

  Sacha loved everything about the forms. He loved their names: Dragon, Snake, Tiger, Leopard, and Crane. He loved the way the different moves took on the spirit and character of each animal: the majestic, flowing power of the dragon; the slippery elusiveness of the snake; the power and agility of the tiger; the speed of the leopard; the perfect balance of the crane. They conjured up images of a beautiful land of tall mountains and pearl rivers and cedar trees—one that seemed to belong to an entirely different universe from dull and ordinary Hester Street.

  And it wasn’t just the forms of Shaolin kung fu that Shen taught them. She also told them stories of how the Shaolin monks had created kung fu in order to defend themselves against armed men without killing their opponents, and how they had traveled throughout China using their courage and their kung fu to protect the weak and prevent injustice. But the greatest masters, she told them, had gone beyond merely fighting—even in a noble cause—and had begun to seek spiritual wisdom as well as physical mastery. They had learned that kung fu was a means of preparing oneself to follow Wu Wei, the Path of No Action. And by following the Path of No Action, the greatest of them had gained such wisdom that they became Immortals.

  Lily was convinced that Shen was an Immortal and longed to ask her about it. And when Sacha pointed out that Shen always called herself a student too, Lily just scoffed at his objection.

  “Shen a student? That’s ridiculous! And anyway, I read about it in The Seven Secret Sages of Shaolin—or was it Shaolin Sheriff? Or—well, never mind where it was. One of those magazines. The point is, Immortals always say that kind of thing. Shen’s just acting like a textbook kung fu master, with all this nonsense of being as ignorant as the beginningest student. I’m telling you, she’s one of them!”