The Watcher in the Shadows

by Chris Moriarty

  From every corner of the room, requests flew at her—faster than Sacha could imagine anyone, even the super-efficient Bekah, fielding them:

  “Oy, veh! And where were the Italian speakers yesterday when we needed them?”

  “Today we need Russian!”

  “Russian? Who needs Russian? I need Litvaks! Are there any Litvaks in here? Anyone here even know what the heck a Litvak is?”

  “And I need—excuse me, dearie, what language is that you’re speakin’?—Well, gracious me, I don’t even know what I need! A mind reader, maybe!”

  Sacha was still gawping around open-mouthed when a police messenger dashed up the stairs from his own apartment.

  “Is Sacha Kessler up here?” the boy shouted. “I need Sacha Kessler, and I need him now! All Inquisitors are to report to duty immediately!”

  Forty minutes later, Sacha slammed into the lobby of the Inquisitors Division, sweaty and out of breath after a mad sprint from the nearest subway station. He caught sight of Lily and Payton first, since they stood out in their street clothes surrounded by a milling throng of navy blue uniforms. A moment later he saw a sight as intimidating as any he ever wanted to see in life: Inquisitor Wolf in full uniform. He looked like he had grown six inches. And his spectacles flashed menacingly from beneath the shadow of his peaked Inquisitor’s cap.

  “I need to talk to you!” Sacha gasped as soon as he managed to push through the crowd to Wolf’s side.

  “Not here.”

  “But I have tell you about Sam—”

  “Not here.”

  Sacha started to argue, but before he could speak, Commissioner Keegan climbed onto the booking desk and called for silence.

  “Men!” he cried. “The moment has come! This is our hour of trial! The strike starts tomorrow morning, and we will be ready for it. Expect hard work in the days ahead. We are at the front lines of the fight for Freedom, Prosperity, and the American Way. There is a conspiracy of foreign magical elements afoot. These people hate us for one reason and one reason alone: because we are free. And it is your great task and mine to defend America’s freedom!”

  He glanced around the room and raised a warning finger. “Of course, this does not mean that we take sides in the coming conflict. No, we are on the side of all those who share our great American values and are willing to cooperate with the forces of law and order. Remember that, men, for there will be those who seek to discredit and malign us. Be disciplined, be courteous—but above all, be firm! We are the last bulwark against a flood of foreign magic that threatens to engulf this great nation. We must stand firm—and yet we must stand also for the rule of law. Remember that, men, and you will not dishonor your uniform!”

  And that was it. Commissioner Keegan jumped down from the booking desk. The navy-and-silver-uniformed throng began to move. And the next thing Sacha knew, they were all loading into the paddy wagons.

  “Are we going to the strike?” Sacha asked Lily when he managed to squirm and elbow his way over to her.

  “I don’t think so. Or not yet, anyway. I think we’re going to guard Penn Station.”

  Twenty minutes later, they were indeed at Penn Station, milling about with a horde of other confused and agitated Inquisitors and searching all the incoming night trains for IWW reinforcements. This duty lasted for the rest of the night, until Sacha was yawning and stumbling with exhaustion. But at seven thirty the next morning, something suddenly changed. A messenger arrived from headquarters, and a wave of excited whispers swept through the ranks. The first morning train from Philadelphia was bringing in a carful of private detectives from the Pinkerton agency fresh off a mining strike in West Virginia. At first the rumors said there would be twenty of them. Then the number rose to forty, fifty, seventy. But one fact stood firm amidst the swirling tide of rumors: the Inquisitors were going to provide the Pinkertons with a protective escort to the strike site.

  Sacha gasped at the unfairness of this, but Lily just shrugged and asked him what he’d expected. And when Wolf overheard him, he gave Sacha a look that all but froze the words in his mouth.

  Fair or unfair, at seven twenty sharp, they were on platform eight waiting for the Pinkertons. Sacha wasn’t quite sure what he expected to see when the train finally pulled into the station and the doors slid open. But whatever he’d imagined, the actual reality of the Pinkertons was beyond his wildest dreams.

  They looked like an exhibit from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. And they sounded like—well, the few genuine commuters on the train cringed onto the platform looking as if their ears were about to explode. The Pinkertons seemed to have a running competition to see who could swear the loudest and grow the most exotically styled facial hair. Sideburns battled for elbowroom with waxed handlebar mustaches as sharp and shining as Hessian bayonets, beards and goatees of every length and profile, and even bushy, drooping Pancho Villa mustachios.

  And that wasn’t the only running competition between the Pinkertons. As they thrust the porters aside and marched off the train, even the most casual observer couldn’t have failed to note the alarming collection of weaponry they had brought with them. The contingent of Inquisitors awaiting them on the platform had been sent to provide a police escort to the strike zone. But one sight of the arriving Pinkertons left Sacha thinking that it was the police who needed protection from them.

  Still, they got the Pinkertons loaded into the paddy wagons and trundled down to Pentacle just in time to see the first skirmishes break out between the strikers and the factory guards. As they climbed out and began lining up across the street from the factory, Sacha looked around, trying to make sense of the scene. The wide street in front of Pentacle’s gates looked like a military encampment on the night before a great battle. The morning sun glinted off streetcar tracks and soldiers’ bayonets. The cobblestones stretched away toward the factory gates like waves rippling on a black lake. And on the opposite sidewalk, between the police and militia lines and the silent factory gates, he could see a roiling mob of Pinkertons and thugs—the strikebreakers.

  Sacha felt torn between eagerness to see the strike for himself and terror that his sister or Moishe would see him with the police and think he was helping the strikebreakers.

  “What’s going on?” he asked nervously. “What are we supposed to do here?”

  “Whatever we’re told to do,” Wolf answered shortly.

  “But this isn’t our job,” Sacha protested. “We’re Inquisitors, not strikebreakers!”

  “Tell that to Commissioner Keegan.”

  Word passed along the lines that Morgaunt had decided to lock down the factory at noon and kick the strikers out before they could call their strike. And then another rumor swept along the lines: the strikers would walk out themselves at ten.

  As the hour drew nearer, the streets around Pentacle got quieter and quieter. Passersby seemed to be steering away from the area with the same instinct that makes horses run away from an approaching storm. Even the streetcars and omnibuses stopped coming by on their scheduled rounds; Commissioner Keegan had shut them down, Sacha found out later, as part of his security cordon around the strike.

  When two o’clock finally arrived, the streets were so silent that they could hear the church bells at Trinity striking the hour a full mile away.

  A minute passed. And then another, and another.

  Nothing happened. No one came out of Pentacle or any of the other factories and office buildings in the surrounding streets.

  “Cowards!” a trooper scoffed a few feet to Sacha’s left. “It was all just wild talk. They don’t dare strike with us here.”

  “Well, boys,” said the squad captain, “I’ll bet a silver dollar we’ll all be home for dinner!”

  And then it happened.

  The first sign was a low murmur, like the distant rumble of a passing freight train. It began faintly, but it soon grew louder. It rose and swelled until it seemed to Sacha that a mighty river was rushing toward them between the steel buildings and wo
uld sweep them all away like a flash flood ripping through a desert canyon.

  Suddenly, every door up and down the street was filled with workers. Tailors with their mending kits. Office girls in crisp skirts and shirtwaists. Brawny young pressers. They were all walking off the job together. They were doing it in an orderly, quiet, serious, peaceful manner. But they were walking off the job just the same.

  And suddenly Sacha understood what it was that Commissioner Keegan had sent his men here to do:

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  As the first rank of striking workers appeared, the strikebreakers set on them like a pack of wild dogs, ripping hats off girls’ heads, tearing at their hair and clothes, knocking people down and dragging them along the cobblestones.

  The strikers fled into the street, but the militia was waiting for them with bayonets at the ready, forcing them to stumble back onto the sidewalk. Some of the girls tried to fight back—and were promptly arrested for disturbing the peace. But most of them were too young and small to stand up to the grown men attacking them. Soon the shrieks of girls were rising above the crowd, and the gutter was flowing with blood, and the dark cobblestones were littered with a white confetti of torn hats and scarves and ribbons.

  And all the while, the police just stood by with their hands in their pockets as if none of it had anything to do with them.

  Sacha started forward, with no thought in his mind other than coming to the aid of these poor defenseless girls. But a hard hand on his chest stopped him short.

  He turned, outraged—and found himself face-to-face with Inquisitor Wolf.

  “You want to get yourself arrested too?” Wolf asked him in a low, urgent voice. “Just what do you think that’s going to accomplish?”

  “I don’t care!” Sacha shouted. “This is wrong!”

  “And you think a useless symbolic gesture is going to make things right?”

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right!” Sacha retorted. But even as he said the words, he knew they sounded childish.

  He was just about to give up and step back into the line next to Wolf when he saw something that stopped his heart cold: Bekah, standing in the door of the factory, looking out at the struggling mob on the sidewalk.

  For an instant, her eyes lifted to the line of police on the opposite pavement, and Sacha could have sworn she recognized him. Then she calmly took off her new hat and hung it up on one of the iron spikes of the factory gate, as if she figured it would have a better chance of staying in one piece there than it would on her head. Sacha saw that she had cut her hair short, like the other IWW girls, so that her boyish curls would give the Pinkertons less to grab hold of. And then he saw her take one deep, determined breath and step into the crowd.

  After that, it was hard for Sacha to remember quite what he’d done—other than yell “I quit!” and call Wolf a lying hypocrite.

  The police and militia weren’t expecting anyone to break through their cordon from the police side. They mostly moved aside for Sacha, probably figuring he was carrying a message for the Pinkertons. Before he himself quite knew what he was planning, he had crossed the street and was elbowing toward the line of strikers.

  He caught sight of Bekah a few yards away. She was arm in arm with several other girls, and they were all trying to make a united front and push past the Pinkertons to safety. For a moment, it seemed they would make it. But then a huge Pinkerton agent stepped in front of them, fists raised and brass knuckles flashing.

  Sacha gave a bloodcurdling yell, raised his hands in front of him just as he’d done in Shen’s practice hall, and sprang forward in his best version of Golden Leopard Speeds Through Jungle. The Pinkerton must have just seen Sacha out of the corner of his eye; he froze in the very act of bashing the brass knuckles down on Bekah’s head and spun to face Sacha. When he saw who his assailant was, he laughed.

  “Shows what you know!” Sacha growled, and slid in under the man’s right hook with a Green Dragon Shoots Pearl that even Shen would have declared satisfactory.

  The Pinkerton punched thin air, stumbled, and almost went to his knees.

  Emboldened, Sacha drew an attack with the Dragon’s Chi Spreads Across the Water.

  The man’s eyes widened—perhaps because Sacha appeared to be leaving himself wide open to attack, or perhaps just at the sight of a skinny thirteen-year-old swaying back and forth in front of him while howling and gesturing like a deranged banshee.

  His brawny arm reared back, the brass knuckles flashing like rings, and swept down in a vicious arc toward Sacha’s head.

  And then everything went black.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Mordechai Gets a Job . . . and Bekah Gets a Proposition

  WHEN SACHA CAME to, he was lying in the family’s single big feather bed at home with his mother bending over him. He raised himself up on his elbows with some difficulty and looked around. Bekah was there—and she seemed to be in one piece, though her hat was missing and her hair disheveled. But the house was in chaos.

  “Who did this to you?” Mrs. Kessler cried as soon as she saw that Sacha was conscious.

  “The Pinkertons.”

  “But I thought you were working for the police!”

  “Not anymore, he’s not,” Bekah said ominously. but Sacha threw her a pleading look that made her stop before she said anything else.

  “And where was the great Inquisitor Wolf while you were getting beat up by grown men?” Mrs. Kessler demanded angrily. “I have half a mind to tell him what I think of a man who leaves his own apprentice to be rescued by a mere girl!”

  “Listen,” Sacha said. “Can we just not talk about it until I feel better? Please?”

  He must have looked even worse than he felt, because Mrs. Kessler gave a silent nod and began gently removing his bloody clothes. Within a very few minutes, she had poured him into a hot bath, wrapped him with warm towels, pressed cold compresses to his nose, and funneled several cups of steaming chicken soup into him. And then—at long last—he managed to crawl into bed. He was asleep before she had finished tucking him in.

  Sacha did his best to think about all his problems over the next few days. But every time he thought of poor Sam Schlosky and his own grandfather’s insistence that no one else could help him stop the dybbuk, the only solution Sacha could come up with was to stay in bed for the rest of his life. As it was, he could barely lift himself off the pillow without his head spinning and his ears ringing. His mother wouldn’t hear of his getting up—and for once, he didn’t have the energy to argue with her.

  Meanwhile, the strike was going like gangbusters. The front gate of the Pentacle Shirtwaist Factory became the site of a daily running brawl between the Pinkertons and the shirtwaist girls. Most of the girls, like Bekah, had cut their hair short to keep the Pinkertons from grabbing it, and when a contingent of girls from Vassar came down by train to join the picket line, they all bobbed their hair too. Soon the new “Pentacle bob” was sweeping the nation. No one was quite sure how it had happened, but the undeniable fact of the matter was that the strike had become fashionable. Mayor Mobbs announced that the police would maintain public order at any cost, and called up the state militia—whose members gave a boost to the local economy by immediately getting fleeced in every establishment up and down the Bowery. The staircase of the Kesslers’ apartment building turned into a public thoroughfare, with crowds of strikers trooping up and down at all hours as the IWW headquarters expanded into two neighboring apartments and soon threatened to overflow even its new larger quarters. And still, the strike wore on.

  All too soon, Sacha’s parents began to worry about money. They tried not to mention it in front of the children, but Sacha and Bekah had both been poor long enough to know what those whispered late-night conversations meant.

  There were only two bright spots in the general gloom. First, Sacha’s mother really did seem to have found a fallback job at the “other” shirtwaist factory, even if it was on the night shift. S
econd—and this was the truly amazing development—Uncle Mordechai finally got a job.

  He came home early from the Metropole one night specifically to announce that he was determined to sell the labor of his arm to the capitalist machine if that was what it took to keep the family together.

  “I’m perfectly happy to mooch when the mooching’s good,” he said, “but a man has to know when to bow to reality and stop standing on principle. The time has come for me to put family ahead of morality and sacrifice my youthful ideals to the wicked world!”

  Having delivered this thrilling speech, he threw himself into his chair in an elegant attitude and began combing through the want ads—a task that turned out to be so exhausting that he retreated to the Metropole half an hour later “just for a little refreshment of the spirit.”

  He came back so refreshed that he could barely contain himself.

  “You’ll never believe what happened to me just now!” he cried. “The goyim say God helps those who help themselves, and they must be right, because I think I just landed a peach of a job. No, no, never fear! It’s not a real job. Nothing so shocking! No, this is something where I could make good money and still be able to hold my head up as a respectable revolutionary. I’m going to be a lady’s escort.”

  “A what?” Mrs. Kessler squawked. “Mordechai! You wouldn’t! And even if you would, don’t you dare talk about it in front of the children!”

  “No, no, it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s really quite innocent and aboveboard. You see, I ran into Nathan Feldman down at the Metropole—”

  “Nathan Feldman!” Mrs. Kessler cried. “His mother told me he was an usher in a Broadway theater!”

  “He just told his mother that because he had to explain why he bought a brand-new top hat and tails last month from Bloomingdale Brothers. According to Nathan, it turns out that there are all sorts of occasions upon which ladies wish to be able to produce a well-turned-out young man whom they can claim is their beau or fiancé. So Nathan—and I can assure you with perfect modesty that he isn’t half as handsome or charming as I am—rents himself out by the hour for soirées, balls, weddings, and so forth. There’s nothing immoral going on, unless you think there’s something wrong with dancing the foxtrot at a debutante’s ball under the gimlet eyes of a squadron of matronly chaperones. It’s not that these young ladies want to actually be his inamoratas. They just want to be able to point to him and claim that they are.