The Watcher in the Shadows

by Chris Moriarty

  “No, Nebbs,” Minsky said, “I am a funny guy. You’ve just got no sense of ’umor.”

  Suddenly Sacha realized who the little man was, and he stared in open fascination. Nebbs was short for nebbish: nobody. And this wasn’t just a nebbish sitting in the chair across the table from Sacha. It was the Nebbish, the legendary mastermind of the formidable Magic, Inc., intelligence-gathering arm. The man who was famous all over town for not being famous, who was known far and wide for being unknowable, who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd of one, and who made a room feel emptier just by walking into it.

  Sacha peered at him, racking his brain to remember whether he’d ever seen the man before. But he just couldn’t be sure.

  And, really, wasn’t that the point?

  “So I was over near Astral Place a few weeks ago,” the Nebbish said, “not too far from Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory, and I saw something that made me stop and look twice. And what do you think it was?”

  “I don’t know,” Sacha said when it became clear that the Nebbish was waiting for him to say something.

  “The Klezmer King, that’s what. But he was skulking along like he didn’t want anyone to know he was the Klezmer King, if you get the picture. So, ‘Nebbish,’ I sez to myself, ‘that’s a man who’d pay good money not to be noticed right now. And when you see a guy who’d pay good money not to be noticed, you know he’s about to do something some other guy’d pay good money to know about.’ So what do I do? I follow him. And where does he go? Straight to the Astral Place subway station. And what does he do?”

  The Nebbish pantomimed a man walking down a flight of stairs.

  “So he went into the subway?” Sacha asked.

  “Yeah,” the Nebbish said. “And then some. He walks out onto the platform, looks around like he wants to make extra sure no one’s watching him—which no one but me is—and walks straight to the end of the platform and jumps down onto the tracks and keeps walking.”

  He looked at Sacha expectantly.

  “So what did you do?” Sacha prompted.

  “What do you think I did? I followed him!”

  “And?”

  “Well, once I get off the platform, I can see that he hasn’t gone far. Just to the edge of the light, so no one who’s up on the platform can see him. And he’s just standing there waiting, like he’s got an appointment or something. And after a minute, sure enough, someone shows up.”

  “Get a load of this,” Meyer said. “You’re gonna love it.”

  Sacha didn’t think he was going to love it at all, but he waited as calmly as he could while the Nebbish cleared his throat and went on with his tale.

  “This other individual, I never saw his face, you understand? He came out of the tunnel, but he stayed in the shadows so I couldn’t get a look at him. I bet even Asher couldn’t see his face. It was like he set the meet-up that way on purpose. But I’ll tell you what—I heard his voice. And that was enough for me. I’d know that voice anywhere. It was the watcher in the shadows.”

  The four of them stared at each other.

  “What did it say to Asher?” Sacha asked at last.

  “I couldn’t tell. But I heard what Asher said to it. And it wasn’t nice.”

  “We know about that already,” Sacha said. “He was doing some job for them, and he was trying to quit it.”

  The Nebbish shrugged, tilting his balding head to one side. “Maybe you know more than I do, but that’s not what I heard him talking about. From what I heard, he wasn’t talking about quitting. He was talking about killing. He was telling them that Sam Schlosky was onto them, and he didn’t have the nerve to keep the secret, and they’d better kill Sam fast before he squealed to the Inquisitors.”

  Sacha’s head spun, and his stomach clenched in fear. He felt as if the entire case had suddenly shifted underfoot, with victim becoming killer and suspect becoming victim. Suddenly Rosie’s film of Naftali Asher’s death took on a whole new meaning. The answer had been in front of them all along. They just hadn’t seen it. Or rather they hadn’t heard it.

  They’d all assumed that Asher had shouted “No! Sam!” at the very end because he’d thought Sam had caused the accident—or because he hoped Sam would save him. But what if those final words meant something completely different? What if Asher had called out Sam’s name not as a cry for help, but as a cry of protest? What if he’d thought that Sam was supposed to die instead of him—and had realized only with his dying breath that he’d been double-crossed?

  If that was true, then Sam Schlosky was in even worse danger than Wolf feared he was.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Night Doings

  SACHA WAS HALFWAY to Hell’s Kitchen before he realized that Inquisitor Wolf would be long gone by this time of night.

  No matter, he told himself. Someone at the Inquisitors Division would be able to find Wolf for him. For something this important, they’d tell him where Wolf lived. This was an emergency, after all.

  But when he asked the booking sergeant for Wolf’s address, the man just laughed in his face. Sacha couldn’t tell whether he was afraid of waking up Wolf or just wanted to cause trouble, but it hardly mattered. Sacha wandered around the Inquisitors Division for a few more minutes, hoping he’d stumble on someone who could help him and trying to work up the nerve to imagine going down to Chinatown to roust Shen out of bed in the middle of the night and ask her if she knew where to find Maximillian Wolf. He could think of about five different ways that conversation might go—and he didn’t have the nerve to face any of them.

  Finally he set out in search of the only other person he could think of who might know where Wolf lived.

  It was long past closing time at the Witch’s Brew, but there were still a few late-night drinkers hunched around the bar and lounging at the tables. And to Sacha’s immense relief, Sullivan was still there too. The big man was in his shirtsleeves, clearing glasses, turning up the chairs on the tables, and getting ready to mop the floor with a steaming bucket of vinegar and scalding hot water.

  Sacha tugged at the door, but it was locked already. He pounded until Sullivan lumbered over to peer through the glass into the darkness.

  “What in the name of Pete are you doin’ out so late?” Sullivan asked when he saw who was standing on the sidewalk.

  “Wolf!” Sacha gasped. “I have to—find—emergency—”

  “Slow down a minute,” Sullivan told him. “Catch yer breath, and let’s make sense of this, shall we?”

  “I need to find Inquisitor Wolf!” Sacha said when he had caught his breath.

  Sullivan’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Sorry, lad, I’d like to help you, but I don’t think I can,” he said.

  “But—don’t you know where he lives?”

  “Used to. But that was a long time ago.”

  Sacha could have cried in frustration. “Can’t anyone help me? It’s an emergency!”

  “Ah. Well, that puts a different face on the problem. Can’t Payton roust him out for ya?”

  “But I don’t know where he lives either!” Sacha cried.

  “I think I’d better go with you,” Sullivan said. “I hardly like the thought of you wandering around Hell’s Kitchen alone at this hour of the night. Or better yet, I’ll send someone.”

  He turned to the drinkers at the back table and hollered, “Hey, Paddy! I need a favor!”

  Sacha glanced toward the table just in time to see Paddy Doyle’s sleek blond head turn to look at them. “What can I do for you?” Paddy asked with his usual happy-go-lucky charm.

  “Take Sacha here over to fetch Philip Payton.”

  Paddy’s brow darkened, and his voice turned sullen. “Ask someone else.”

  “It’s you I’m askin’, Paddy.” Sullivan’s voice suddenly had a dangerous edge to it, and Paddy must have heard it just as clearly as Sacha did. The next instant, Paddy was standing at Sacha’s side looking nervous and chastened and quite a bit younger than usual.

  “The boy’s got an impor
tant message,” Sullivan said simply. “I’m thinkin’ it’s a matter of life and death, or his own mother wouldn’t let her little chick be strayin’ from the nest so late. So you’ll get him to Payton’s house safely. Or is that too much trouble for you, my boy?”

  “No trouble at all, Sullivan. I’ll take care of it.”

  And then they were off.

  Paddy Doyle led Sacha through a maze of back streets and alleyways that made his head spin. He practically had to run to keep up. And by the time they began climbing Pepper Hill just to the north of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, Sacha’s legs were shaking and his breath was rasping in his throat.

  Finally they popped out of a mews full of livery stables and onto a quiet residential street lined with low brick houses. Most of the houses were neat and well-kept behind their wrought-iron low garden walls, but Sacha noticed that the front windows of a few of them had been hastily boarded up, and glittering shards of broken glass littered their garden walkways.

  Paddy turned up one of the garden walks, trotted up the short flight of steps to the front door, and pounded on it until a light went on in an upstairs window.

  “Who is it?” a man’s voice called down from the second story.

  “Paddy Doyle.”

  There was a long silence, and then footsteps inside the house, and then another silence. Finally the door opened.

  The minute Sacha saw the man in the doorway, he knew he must be Philip Payton’s father. He was an older, heavier, more solid-looking version of Payton. But the firm-set mouth and chin were the same. And so was the cool, measuring gaze coming through his round-rimmed spectacles.

  “Hello, Paddy. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to you.”

  Paddy shifted uncomfortably on the doorstep.

  “Can I do anything for you?” Mr. Payton asked.

  “I just brought someone to see Philip, that’s all. He says it’s an emergency.”

  “Are you from the Inquisitors Division?” Mr. Payton asked Sacha.

  Sacha was still trying to catch his breath, but he managed to nod.

  “Well, come in, then, both of you. I’ll go wake Philip up.”

  “Not me,” Paddy said hastily, then slipped away into the darkness.

  Mr. Payton looked after Paddy for a moment without commenting. Then he led Sacha into the house. Sacha peered around curiously, trying to see as much of the place as he could in the dim moonlight filtering through the lace curtains. They were in a tidy front hall, with a dining room on one side and a sitting room on the other. He could see a spinet piano in the front room, with sheet music open on it, and a child-sized violin and bow crossed atop the piano’s lid as if some children of the house had been practicing before bedtime. A flurry of movement drew his eyes to the top of the stairs just in time to see two little girls in bare feet and white nightgowns being shooed back into the shadows by an older girl.

  And then Payton was coming down the stairs two steps at a time, pulling on his coat. Payton listened to Sacha’s story in silence. Then he grabbed his hat and set off into the night with Sacha behind him.

  Sacha hadn’t thought much about where Wolf lived. But even if he had, the nondescript boarding house Payton eventually led him to would have been about the last place he would have imagined. Payton had to pound on the front door for a full five minutes before the landlady limped down the creaking stairs to let them in.

  She knew Payton—or at least she knew him well enough to bring them upstairs to knock on the door of Wolf’s room. But she wouldn’t let them in, no matter how they pleaded. And when they asked where Wolf might have gone, all she could do was shrug and say she didn’t know.

  Back on the sidewalk, Payton hesitated for a moment—and then he turned his steps downtown toward the Tombs.

  They got there just as the first faint light of dawn was starting to color the sky over the East River. Payton stopped across the street from the grim building and looked at Sacha, his handsome face torn between frustration and anger.

  “You’d better go in alone,” he said.

  Sacha started to argue, but the look on Payton’s face stopped him short.

  “Just go,” Payton said. “Tell them Wolf sent you down to get Sam Schlosky out.”

  “But they wouldn’t release him for Wolf this morning! They’ll never do it for me!”

  “Maybe not. But it’s still better than doing nothing.”

  Sacha took a last long look at the Tombs. And then he squared his shoulders and marched up the trash-littered steps and went inside.

  Wolf was already there waiting for him.

  But when Sacha ran to him and began to spill out everything that had happened, Wolf just put a hand out to silence him.

  “Never mind that,” he said gently. And from the sound of his voice, Sacha knew suddenly that something terrible had happened.

  “Aren’t they going to let Sam out?” he whispered with a terrible sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “It’s too late for that,” Wolf said. “He died last night.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Where All True Magic Comes From

  SACHA BARELY remembered stumbling out onto the sidewalk, or shaking off Payton when he tried to ask what was wrong. He fled down Mulberry Street and lost himself in the ramshackle alleyways of Little Italy with no thought in mind but to get as far away from the Tombs as he could. By the time he began to come to his senses again, he was deep in the heart of Chinatown. And almost without realizing where he was going, he found his steps turning toward the little apothecary’s shop and the secret courtyard that led to Shen’s door.

  Shen was scrubbing the stone floor in the practice hall. By now Sacha was familiar enough with this ritual that he went over to the sink without a word, picked up a rag, got down on his knees, and began scrubbing shoulder to shoulder with her.

  For perhaps a quarter of an hour, they scrubbed side by side in silence. Then Shen finished cleaning the last great stone square, stood up, and wrung her scrub rag out over the bucket. The water dropped into the pail as clean and clear as water trickling from a mountain spring. Obviously the floor was now clean enough even for Shen.

  “Now, tell me,” she said pleasantly. “What is it that brings you here so early?”

  Sacha wrung his own scrub rag out over the bucket, struggling to put words to the questions seething in his mind. Haltingly, he told her everything that had happened since he had followed Moishe to Sam Schlosky’s secret hiding place.

  “If only I hadn’t gone to meet him!” Guilt twisted his stomach. “The Inquisitors would never have found him if I hadn’t led them there!”

  “That’s possible,” Shen admitted.

  “And then I just stood there like a lump while Moishe tried to fight them off!” The memory of it made him so hot with shame he could barely stand thinking about it. “None of this would have happened if I knew how to use magic! Wolf told me to learn! But I wouldn’t listen. And now look!”

  “You couldn’t have done anything against police weapons, even if you’d started learning magic the first day you came to work for Wolf,” Shen said gently. “It takes years to develop that kind of power.”

  “So then why can every housewife on Hester Street do magic? And every Hell’s Kitchen Hexer over the age of twelve? I mean, come on, Benny Fein can work magic! And he hasn’t got the brains God gave a turnip!”

  “Memorizing spells isn’t the same as mastering the deep wellsprings of magic,” Shen pointed out. “The more power a magician has, the more dangerous it is for him to use it.”

  Sacha jumped to his feet and flung his rag into the bucket, sending a great gout of water splattering across the stone floor. “I hate magic!” he spat. “I hate everything about it! What has it ever brought anyone but misery?”

  “You don’t mean that,” Shen said gently. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really eating at you?”

  And slowly, stumblingly, Sacha began to confess the fear
that was growing inside him: the fear that his dybbuk was back and that Morgaunt still held some secret power over it. And the deeper fear—that he would be swallowed by his own shadow and would become nothing more than Morgaunt’s creature.

  “If all this is true,” Shen said at last, “then your grand-father is right. No mere spellmongering will help you.”

  “Then what will?”

  “There are many kinds of magic, Sacha. There’s back-alley spellmongering—what the everyday people of the world do—and then there is true Magery. True Mages can be people with formidable powers but no formal training to teach them the right way to use their power. Or they can be people like the great Warrior-Mages of China—men and women who understand that every act of true magic changes the balance of the universe. A knowledgeable Mage is a great power for good. But the other kind leave a tangled wake of chaos behind them . . . even when they don’t go seriously wrong.”

  “You sound like my grandfather,” Sacha said. “He says the mark of a true Kabbalist is that he doesn’t use his power at all.”

  “Your grandfather’s a wise man,” Shen said. “The more powerful the Mage, the greater the danger that his magic could disrupt the natural harmony of the world. That is why all great Mages in every corner of the world face the one great choice sooner or later: either to stray into Necromancy or to follow the Path of No Action.”

  “But I’m not a great magician,” Sacha said dispiritedly. “All I can do is see other people do magic. And what does that amount to but a silly parlor trick?”

  Shen smiled her quiet smile—and a fragrant white flurry of jasmine petals drifted down from the rafters, blanketing the courtyard in the silent out-of-time peacefulness of winter’s first snowfall.

  Sacha looked at the fragrant drifts. Then he looked at Shen. Magic glimmered around her like starlight. Shen’s magic looked just like her smile: kind, gentle, a little sad . . . and very wise. And the oddest thing about it was that, though it was clearly magic—and powerful magic at that—it wasn’t doing anything. It was just there. Calm and self-contained, and with a deeply rooted serenity that had more than a little of the hard-won wisdom of experience in it.