The Watcher in the Shadows

by Chris Moriarty

  Lily regarded Shen with a kind of schoolgirl version of hero worship. Sacha made fun of her about it—but if he was honest with himself, he had to admit he had a pretty bad case of hero worship too. Plus, the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of learning kung fu instead of magic. Not just because it would have been nice to be able to wipe the mocking grin off Morgaunt’s face yesterday, but also because it was obvious that Meyer Minsky and Magic, Inc., used guns and fists and brass knuckles alongside magic. And if Morgaunt was going to hire them to put down the Pentacle strike once it started, then someone was going to have to be ready to stand up and protect Bekah and all the other defenseless girls who were going to be on the picket line.

  Sacha didn’t know when that would be or what exactly the Inquisitors would be called upon to do. But he’d been hearing people muttering about the strike around Inquisitors Division for weeks. Mayor Mobbs had already announced that he was going to bring in the Inquisitors to “keep the peace” if Morgaunt and the IWW couldn’t come to an agreement soon. Bekah and Uncle Mordechai insisted cynically that “keeping the peace” meant the police would turn a blind eye to the hexes of Minsky’s starkers—while promptly arresting any striker who so much as muttered a protection spell. Still, for better or for worse, Sacha was going to be there when the strike broke out. And when it did, he was looking forward to using some of Shen’s moves on the first starker who tried to go anywhere near his sister.

  Today, however, Sacha had more than the strike on his mind. So, long before their lesson time, Sacha walked to the dusty apothecary’s shop in Chinatown, stamping his feet and rubbing his hands against the cold that gripped the city.

  Shen was washing the floor when he arrived, and he took up a brush and started to help her. For a while they just cleaned companionably together. Then Shen sat up, tossed her brush into the bucket of soapy water, and gave Sacha a look that made him flush to the roots of his hair.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Isn’t that supposed to be my question?”

  “Can’t I come talk to you without you assuming I’m in some kind of trouble?”

  “Based on past experience?” Shen grinned. “No.”

  “Maybe I just wanted to talk to you about baseball.”

  “Oh, yeah? Have you heard anything about that new pitcher the Yankees just picked up?”

  “Who, the Italian guy? I don’t think he was worth the money.”

  “Well, neither do I . . . as a pitcher.” Shen leaned forward as if she were passing along a hot stock tip. “But you know what? I saw him at batting practice the other day. And he’s a southpaw. I’m telling you, that short right-field wall at the Polo Grounds was made for this guy.”

  “That’s not baseball,” Sacha scoffed. “That’s just a gimmick. Trust me, Shen, trying to turn that Bambino guy into a slugger is going to go down in history as the dumbest thing the Yankees ever did. And anyway, how were you at batting practice?”

  “Oh.” She waved her hand. “Old Shaolin trick. There’s a way of making people you don’t want to notice you just, well . . . not notice you. It’s no big deal. I can teach it to you sometime. But only if you promise to use it selflessly for the betterment of baseball fandom.”

  She stood up, lifted the heavy bucket of water, and began walking toward the back of the practice hall. Sacha followed her. But when he started to say something else about the Yankees, she interrupted him.

  “It’s almost time for class, and Lily will be here in a minute. So why don’t you tell me what you really came down here to talk about?”

  Sacha bit his lip. He wanted to ask Shen about Wolf. But now that he was standing face-to-face with her, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Except for Wolf’s confession that he’d gotten Shen’s husband killed, neither Wolf nor Shen had ever said a word to Sacha about their history together. He knew that Wolf was in love with Shen; anyone could see that much. But though Lily was full of romantic fantasies about ill-starred lovers, Sacha wasn’t so sure. He’d watched Shen very carefully, and he couldn’t point to one word, one glance, one shade of a smile that had ever hinted Wolf meant more to her than any other student. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  Haltingly and with many hesitations, he told her about his strange encounter with Morgaunt and his suspicion that Wolf had let him be cornered by the Wall Street Wizard.

  “Maybe,” Shen said calmly.

  “But why?”

  “You’d have to ask Wolf about that.”

  “Shen!”

  “I’m not ducking your question. I don’t understand Wolf. Sometimes I wonder if he understands himself. And he does have a perverse compulsion to, well, test people, for want of a better word. I sometimes think he’s secretly convinced that everyone is going to betray him sooner or later, and he’d rather make them do it sooner and just get it over with. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, so there’s no point in taking it personally. He’s only reckless for himself, never for other people. He’d lay down his life to save yours if it came to that.” She made a wry face. “And then pick a silly fight with you and go off in a huff so he wouldn’t have to endure your gratitude.”

  This sounded so much like Wolf that Sacha had to laugh.

  “He’s already trying to protect me,” he told Shen. “Or help me protect myself. He wants me to learn magic.”

  “I know. He’s been pestering me about it for months now. But I’m not so sure you’re ready.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Sacha asked, feeling a little stung by Shen’s words. After all, it was one thing for him to refuse to learn magic—and another thing entirely for Shen to say he wasn’t up to it!

  Shen just shrugged instead of answering. She picked up her bucket and staggered out the back door to the water pump. She dumped the slop water into the drain, opened the squeaky spigot, and scrubbed out the bucket. Then she set it against the pump to dry, upended at a precise angle. When she stood up, she was a bit red in the face from the exertion. Or at least Sacha hoped that was what it was, and not annoyance.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude,” he apologized. “But—why not?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to learn magic,” Shen said with the ghost of a smile on her lips.

  “I don’t, but—”

  “But you still want me to tell you that you’re ready to learn it.”

  Sacha flushed.

  “I don’t mean to make fun of you,” Shen said. “The fact is, I don’t know if you’re ready or not. You are the only person who can answer that question. And if you’re not sure, then you probably know what the answer is.”

  “How did Wolf know when he was ready?”

  Suddenly Shen looked surprised and troubled. “What did he tell you about it?”

  “Only that your husband was his first teacher. So I thought you’d know . . .”

  Shen didn’t speak for several moments. And when she did, her voice was carefully neutral and devoid of emotion. “Wolf didn’t come to my husband to learn how to work magic,” she said. “He came to learn how to not work magic.”

  “But why would he want to—”

  “He burned a building down. And he wanted to make absolutely sure that he would never do such a thing again.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  “Yes,” she said without looking at him. “A very terrible accident.”

  “Did anyone die?” Sacha asked. But he knew the answer— indeed, he had known it from the moment Shen began speaking in that careful, quiet voice. “Is that why he became an Inquisitor? To stop things like that from happening again? Or—or because he felt guilty?”

  “You really should talk to Wolf, Sacha. It’s his story. He hasn’t spoken to me about it for years, and he may think very differently now than he did back then. It wouldn’t be right for me to put words into his mouth.”

  “So why are you telling me about it at all?”

  “Because he should have told you. You need to understand how dangerous power is�
��all the ways it can turn on you, the foolish vanity of ever thinking you can control what a spell does once you’ve loosed it on the world.”

  “You think I don’t know all that after what happened at Coney Island?”

  “I’m not sure you know it enough, Sacha. And I’m sure Wolf doesn’t. He’s a good man. A very good man. Sometimes I think he’s the best man I’ve ever known. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.”

  “Is that why you won’t work for him? Why you told him you wouldn’t teach me and Lily the first time he brought us here? But then why did you change your mind, Shen? You looked at me so strangely that day. What did you see then? Were you—were you afraid I would be dangerous if you didn’t teach me?”

  Shen began to speak. Sacha hung on her words, hoping she would finally illuminate the landscape of darkness and confusion that he had struggled through ever since he’d begun his apprenticeship. But just then Lily’s voice rang out in the chilly air.

  “What are you two doing skulking around back here?” she cried, marching into the courtyard. “And when are we going to get started, anyway? We have to be uptown by eleven, remember?”

  Shen seemed relieved by the interruption. She shrugged, smiled, and slipped past Sacha and back into the school. For the rest of their lesson, it seemed to Sacha that she avoided being alone with him, that she avoided his eyes, that she gave him no chance to ask again the questions that she had been so tantalizingly close to answering.

  So that was it. Whatever Shen had been about to tell him would have to wait. And knowing Shen, by the time their next lesson rolled around, she’d probably have decided against telling him in the first place. Wolf had said Shen was a woman who didn’t deal in easy answers—or any answers at all if she could help it. Sacha was starting to see his point.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Just Keep Your Mouth Shut and Look Magical

  AFTER THEIR LESSON with Shen, Sacha and Lily spent the rest of the day following Wolf back to the same places they’d gone the first time they combed New York for a sign of Sam Schlosky—only this time Wolf had added the morgues to his list. Sacha had seen Wolf investigate serious crimes before, even magical murders. And he’d seen a hunger for justice in the man that verged on a lust for ven-geance—and sometimes looked dangerously close to the destructiveness that Bella da Serpa had accused him of. But never had he seen Wolf so obviously frightened for a witness’s safety. And as Wolf searched for Sam through the slums and shadows, Sacha couldn’t help thinking that no other policeman in New York would spend this much time trying to protect a poor Jewish boy whose family couldn’t even afford to pay tenement rent.

  By the time Sacha finally stumbled back to Hester Street that Friday night, the narrow streets of the tenement district were already engulfed in shadows. He knew he must be late for dinner. But he didn’t know how late he was—or even remember what day of the week it was—until he stepped through the door of his apartment.

  The quiet washed over him like water, and he realized that he had been hearing it all the way up the stairs, as if the whole building had stilled. No one was running a single sewing machine. Not in the Lehrers’ backroom sweatshop, where tottering piles of half-finished piecework towered like black cloth haystacks. Not in the Goldsteins’ sweatshop next door. Not upstairs at the Kusiks’ or the Meyersons’ or across the street or down the block. Not anywhere.

  All the machines had stopped. And that could only mean one thing. Just like the vinegar-and-lemons smell of freshly scrubbed floors and the honey-wax smell of newly lit candles.

  It was Friday night, Shabbes. The whole Lower East Side— or at least as much of the Lower East Side as still held to the old traditions—had laid down their weekday work, stepped out of the everyday world, and readied themselves to welcome the Sabbath into their homes as Jews had been doing since before the beginning of history.

  Sacha walked through the Lehrers’ back room into the kitchen. He couldn’t be too late, he realized; his mother and sister weren’t even home from work yet. But the Sabbath candles were already lit, twinkling in the window like two golden stars. And Grandpa Kessler was propped up in the feather bed as usual. And Mr. and Mrs. Lehrer had brought their chairs into the kitchen and were sitting around the table with Sacha’s father and Uncle Mordechai.

  The table was set, the soup was simmering on the stove, and the two loaves of challah lay on the table beneath their embroidered cloth. Mrs. Lehrer had seen to all that, making sure everything that could be done before Sacha’s mother got home was done.

  Uncle Mordechai was reading the Alphabet City Alchemist, as if to remind everyone that though he wasn’t about to miss the best dinner of the week, he was still a stalwart atheist. But Mo and Mrs. Lehrer were bent over a prayer book, and Rabbi Kessler was reading a dusty tome of theoretical Kabbalah. Even Sacha’s father had set aside his usual newspaper for something more serious.

  Sacha hung his coat on the peg and started to go sit beside his grandfather on the feather bed. But then something drew him to the window and the darkening street below. He stood beside the candles, leaned his forehead against the cold glass, and cupped his hands around his eyes so that he could see beyond the reflection of the bright kitchen behind him. Outside, the city lay in darkness, but the horizon was still faintly flushed with the light of the day gone by. The sky shaded from the pink of sunset to a deep midnight blue, and a thin scattering of stars already glimmered in the heavens. The tenement rooftops lay black and jagged below them like the waves of a dark ocean. Yet here and there, glimmering out of the shadows, he could see the faint sparks of Shabbes candles in other windows. As he watched, another flame flickered into life, and another, and another, until all of Hester Street seemed to be reflecting back the stars of heaven.

  The sight of those candles made his heart hurt. There was something indescribably sad in the thought of all those exhausted women staggering home from work, far too late to cook the Sabbath dinner, far too late to light the candles, and lighting them anyway. What kind of a gesture was that? What difference could a few lit candles make in all the inky darkness of the vast cruel city around them?

  “When God’s light first flowed forth into the cosmos,” his grandfather said, coming up behind him so quietly that Sacha couldn’t help starting guiltily, “it was so abundant that it filled the primordial universe to overflowing and shattered the vessels meant to contain it. And the divine sparks scattered, some of them remaining in Heaven and some of them falling deep into the shadows until they cooled and darkened and mingled with the husks of created things. And this is our task: to see the spark within the husk, to gather the light from the shattered vessels and raise it back up to God so that the world can be repaired again.”

  They stood side by side, staring out the window in silence.

  “Do you have to work tomorrow?” his grandfather asked in a casual kind of voice that didn’t fool either of them.

  “No—well, not in the morning anyway.”

  “Good. You work too hard. And you should come to shul sometime. I talked to Mo about . . . what we talked about last week. And he thinks that would be the best thing for you.”

  Sacha sighed. He didn’t want to go sit in shul for hours every weekend—let alone drag his exhausted body over there every night when he got home from work the way some of the rabbi’s students did. And he didn’t see how it could help him, either. Hadn’t his grandfather as much as said that he and Mo didn’t have any practical magic to teach him?

  But before he could say any of this, Bekah and Mrs. Kessler got home.

  “We need to talk to you,” Bekah whispered when Sacha plopped into his usual place on the sagging feather bed between her and Grandpa Kessler.

  “Who’s we?” Sacha whispered.

  “Shhh!” Bekah glanced nervously at their mother again. “Not here!” And then she jerked her head toward the ceiling.

  Sacha would have liked to pretend he didn’t understand the gesture, but of course he did. She was
telling him to meet up with her at the Industrial Witches of the World headquarters on the seventh floor on Saturday night after Shabbes was over. He’d been avoiding Moishe all week in order to avoid getting roped into whatever ridiculous scheme the IWW leader had in mind. But if Bekah was determined to drag him into it too, then there was no hope of escaping.

  Late Saturday evening, when Shabbes was good and over and he had used up his last excuse for staying away, Sacha reluctantly trudged upstairs. As he climbed the four flights of stairs that separated the Kesslers’ apartment from the IWW headquarters, Sacha could hear the sounds of laughter and singing. When he got closer, he realized someone was playing a guitar, too. But even that didn’t prepare him for the spectacle that greeted him when he got there.

  The main room was taken up by what seemed like an ocean of strikers. They were all gathered around a scruffy-looking young man with a guitar who was leading them in a rousing rendition of “Pie in the Sky.” At first Sacha couldn’t find Bekah in the crowd, but finally he caught sight of her perched next to Moishe on the windowsill.

  Moishe had his arm around her—but one look at Bekah’s face told Sacha that it would be worth his life to say anything about it.

  “Come on outside where we can talk,” Bekah shouted over the singing voices. And then she heaved the window open and stepped out onto the fire escape.

  Sacha followed her, and Moishe followed him and closed the window behind them.

  Moishe cleared his throat, sounding like a goose that was being strangled. “We need you to do us a favor, Sacha.”

  “I’m not spying on Wolf for you,” Sacha snapped, remembering the last time Moishe had asked him for a favor, “so you can just forget about that!”