“Nathan’s made such a success of it that he’s styled himself Prince Nachmaninov, rented a spectacular apartment on Central Park West, and has spent the last month working on an exclusive contract with a society matron who employs him to pose as an eligible bachelor. She’s got a daughter coming out this year, and genuine eligible bachelors are in such short supply that she considers it prudent to whip up the appearance of some competition in order to appeal to their sporting instincts. Now tell me, wouldn’t I make a bang-up eligible bachelor? Doesn’t that sound like just the ticket for me?”
Mrs. Kessler snorted. “It sounds like just the ticket for getting your head kicked in by a jealous boyfriend.”
“Not to mention outraged fathers,” Mr. Kessler added in a tone that suggested he thought the outraged fathers had the right of it.
“Not at all!” Mordechai assured them blithely. “No jealous boyfriends involved. Let alone outraged fathers. In fact, quite the reverse. You see, that’s the genius of Nathan’s concept. It’s the parents who actually hire us. And for me, Nathan has something truly brilliant in mind. You see, rich people don’t think of marriage the way we do. For them it’s a business proposition. A uniting of bank accounts, not individuals. But young girls have such romantic notions. And Nathan offers parents a safe way to disabuse their daughters of such notions. The crux of Nathan’s brilliant plan is this: I am to pose as Count Vogelonsky, a wealthy Russian nobleman. I shall woo these girls—discreetly, you understand, not in any way that might compromise their reputations. And then, when they declare their tender feelings for me, I shall confess to them that I am not Count Vogelonsky, but merely an impoverished Anarcho-Wiccanist revolutionary posing as Vogelonsky.”
“Basically,” Mr. Kessler translated, “you’re going to lie to them.”
“Where’s the lie?” Mordechai asked virtuously. “I am an Anarcho-Wiccanist—though of course I abhor violence on aesthetic grounds and thus consider myself more of a visionary progressive than an outright revolutionary. And I’m most certainly impoverished.”
“I know you’re not going to listen to me,” Mr. Kessler said in a resigned tone. “But really, Mordechai, as your older brother and someone who feels obligated to protect you from your own lunacy—can I say what an absolutely terrible idea I think this is?”
Mordechai gave his older brother an affectionate look. “Why, Danny. I’m touched. I really am.”
“Then you’ll take my advice and call this crazy scheme off?”
“No,” Mordechai said cheerfully. “But it’s nice to know you care.”
“But what about these girls?” Bekah asked incredulously. “What are they supposed to do after you tell them you’re a penniless revolutionary?”
“Why, they’ll throw me over, become disillusioned with love and romance, and settle for the eligible bachelors their parents have already chosen for them.”
Mrs. Kessler just rolled her eyes and threw up her hands, but Bekah wasn’t about to be put off so easily. “And what if one of the poor girls really does fall in love with you?” she asked. “What if she still wants to marry you after she finds out you’re a penniless revolutionary?”
Mordechai looked thunderstruck by this idea, as if the possibility had never even crossed his mind. “Why, then,” he said at last, “I suppose I’d have to marry her.”
Soon Mrs. Kessler bustled off with a bowl of soup for a sick neighbor, and Sacha’s father settled in with the evening papers. Sacha would have liked to read the papers too, but he couldn’t keep his mind on anything. So instead he just sank into the dull, brooding, worrying state that was fast becoming normal for him.
He was startled out of his brown study by a heavy knock at the door.
“I’ll get it!” he said quickly, and slunk off through the Lehrers’ room, certain that Wolf would be waiting on the other side of it with an official pink slip from the Inquisitors Division.
But when he finally screwed up his courage to open the door, it wasn’t Wolf who waited in the hallway. It was Dopey Benny Fein.
Benny cast a furtive look around the stairwell, as if he was worried that his mother was going to come downstairs and catch him. Then he ducked inside, slammed the door behind him . . . and just stood there, wringing his hat in his huge hands and looking like a bull in a china shop.
“Can I help you?” Sacha asked.
But Benny was too busy peering over his shoulder into the apartment to answer. When he’d inspected every corner of the Lehrers’ room, the gangster began inching his way toward the kitchen, still looking around and over the Lehrers’ piles of piecework as if he expected someone to jump out from behind the clothes at any minute.
“Are you looking for someone?” asked Sacha. But he might as well have asked the wall, for all the attention Benny paid him.
Danny and Mordechai Kessler looked up in surprise when Benny lumbered in.
“Hello, Benny,” Sacha’s father said. He was one of the few people in the neighborhood who still talked to Benny like a normal person and hadn’t gradually become more and more frightened of him as he changed from Mrs. Fein’s overgrown but slightly slow-witted son into Meyer Minsky’s most fearsome starker.
“Uh . . . hello, Mr. Kessler,” Benny said politely. And then he nodded to Mordechai—who nodded back somewhat stiffly and suddenly became extremely interested in his newspaper.
“Pull up a chair,” Mr. Kessler said. “And have a slice of cake while you’re at it. You always used to love Ruthie’s bundt cakes.”
But Benny had other things besides cake on his mind. He was craning his neck again to peer into every corner. Pretty soon he was going to either have to give up hunting for whatever he was hunting for or start opening cupboards and pawing through canned goods to find it.
“Are you looking for someone?” Mr. Kessler asked.
“No, sir! I—uh—erm.” Benny turned desperately to Sacha. “Can I talk to youze for a minute?”
“Uh . . . sure, Benny.”
“In private!” Benny said in a whisper loud enough to carry to the next block.
Sacha followed Benny into the other room and listened with growing confusion while Benny launched into a long, rambling explanation of his personal finances and job prospects with Magic, Inc. At first it sounded like Benny was applying for membership in some elite country club that he was sure would never accept him. But gradually he realized that Benny was applying for membership in the Kessler family—as his brother-in-law!
“Wait a minute. You want to marry Bekah?” Sacha felt as if he’d set off to cross the street, after carefully looking both ways for traffic—and run smack into the side of an omnibus.
“Yeah,” Benny said, his adenoidal voice sinking to a worshipful whisper. “I came down here to talk to your father aboud it but, well . . . to tell ya the truth, I always was kinda scared of him.”
Sacha glanced toward the kitchen to see if his father had heard any of this. Mr. Kessler was still sitting at the kitchen table reading the business pages—or at least pretending to read them. But behind the newspaper, he was shaking with laughter. Mordechai, meanwhile, was practically in tears—and as soon as he caught Sacha’s eye, he began to perform an elaborate pantomime of eating his section of the newspaper.
Sacha didn’t think either of them was taking the situation nearly seriously enough.
“Dat’s why I want you to talk to him,” Benny explained.
“Now?”
“Well, soon. And in the meantime, maybe you could walk out with me and Bekah. You know, to keep tings respectable. ’Cause she’s a respectable goil. And I respect that.”
Behind their newspapers, Sacha’s father and uncle collapsed in simultaneous coughing fits.
“Whaddaya say we just walk around the block a couple times when she gets home? Dat okay wid you?”
Thankfully, Sacha was saved from having to say what he thought of this plan by Bekah herself.
“I really do think we’re making progress,” she said as she br
eezed through the door, already unwinding her scarf and unpinning her hat from her short curls. “Today I actually got one of the Pinkertons to accept a pamphlet from me. Just like Moishe says, it’s all a matter of appealing to the best side of people. After all, the Pinkertons aren’t capitalists or propertarians. They’re just people. Who knows? Maybe the Pinkerton I talked to today has a mother who works magic—”
“My mother does magic,” Benny said. “Her matzo ball soup”—he flicked a kiss off his fingers into midair—“supernatural!”
“Oh,” Bekah said. “Hello, Mr. Fein. What are you doing here?”
Benny twisted his hat in his thick fingers as if it were one of Mrs. Mogulesko’s kosher geese. “I—uh—fine weather we’re having, ain’t it?”
“Not really.” Bekah said. She frowned at him for a moment, then walked to the stove and stood before it, rubbing the warmth back into her hands.
“I would like to go for a walk with you, Miss Kessler,” Benny said, blushing furiously. “Also, I would like to take you home to meet my mother.”
“But I already know your mother,” Bekah said reasonably. “She lives right upstairs. Are you all right, Mordechai? You sound like you’re coming down with a cough.”
“No, no, carry on!” Mordechai said in a strangled voice. Sacha could see him kicking his older brother under the table.
“What on earth is going on here?” Bekah asked the room at large. When nobody answered, she turned to Benny and said, “Listen, Benny, I don’t have time to visit your mother tonight. I need to go upstairs and help out at the IWW. But if you’d like to help too, that would be lovely.”
“Oh—er—well, I don’t know if Meyer would—”
Bekah put her hands on her hips and leaned back to stare the gangster in the face. “Does Meyer Minsky run your life, Benny? You’re a grown man! Don’t you do anything without his permission? If you want my opinion, you starkers ought to go on strike too one of these days!”
And with that, Bekah marched out of the apartment and up the stairs toward the IWW headquarters. Benny stood staring after her for a moment with a slightly dizzy expression on his face. Then he gave a fatalistic shrug and followed her.
When she came back downstairs, though, Bekah was alone.
“I have to talk to you,” she told Sacha.
“Don’t look at me! I have nothing whatsoever to say about your love life!”
“Forget that,” Bekah said. “This is serious.”
The look on her face was enough to wipe the grin off Sacha’s lips. He followed her out onto the landing and eased the door closed behind them so they could be sure Mrs. Lehrer wouldn’t hear them.
“What?” he asked.
But Bekah wasn’t ready to tell him. She paced in a tight circle on the landing, and then fidgeted with her dress. Then finally, she came out with it.
“What do you know about Mama’s other job?”
“The night job?”
“Yeah. The one she got when she left Pentacle.”
“Nothing. It’s just a sewing job, right? Same thing she always does.”
“But not at the same place. In fact, we still don’t even know where she’s working, do we?”
“I thought you knew,” Sacha said uncomfortably.
But Bekah shook her head.
“So what? Why are you suddenly all worked up about it?”
“Because,” Bekah said, lowering her voice, “one of the girls upstairs has been working on the night cleanup crew at Pentacle. As a spy, see? We’ve got girls going in on the cleaning crews to make sure they’re not bringing in scabs at night. And she just told me she saw our mother there last night.”
“That’s impossible!”
“She seemed pretty sure about it.”
“So . . . what are you saying?”
Bekah glanced over her shoulder as if she were afraid that someone might have come down from the IWW headquarters to spy on them. “I’m not saying anything,” she whispered urgently. “I’m just . . . scared.”
“Of what?” Sacha asked impatiently.
“Think about it, Sacha! Connect the dots! The strikers have Pentacle locked down tighter than a bank vault, but Morgaunt still keeps shipping shirtwaists to all the uptown department stores. Everyone’s convinced Morgaunt has a scabbalist working for him. The only question is who.”
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me you think our mother is the scabbalist? That’s the craziest thing I ever heard!”
“Hello! Wake up, Sacha! Her father was only the most famous wonderworker in all of Russia! Don’t you think she could have inherited a little of his talent?”
“She’s not the scabbalist!”
“Why not?”
“Because—well, she’s just not.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because her family’s the most important thing in the world to her,” he blurted out. “And if you found out she was doing that, it would rip our family apart!”
But Bekah just shook her head.
“That’s crazy,” he insisted. “You know it is. Mama would do anything for us!”
He stared at Bekah, horrified by what he had just said—and horrified by the look on Bekah’s face.
“That’s exactly my point,” Bekah said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lily Rides the Subway
THE NEXT MORNING, Sacha heard the sound he’d been fearing all along: the firm rat-a-tat-tat of a stranger knocking at the door.
By sheer good luck, it was Saturday morning. His father and grandfather were at temple. Mordechai was at the People’s Theater, and Bekah was off God knew where. Only Sacha and his mother were at home.
Mrs. Kessler went to the door, looking apprehensive and mystified. After all, no one who lived in the Hester Street tenements bothered to knock before coming in to visit, and no one who didn’t live there wanted to visit at all.
While his mother opened the door, Sacha burrowed into the pillows and pulled the blankets up around his neck. He felt like a coward, but he couldn’t help it. He knew exactly what he would see when the door opened: Maximillian Wolf in all his Inquisitorial glory, come—at best—to make Sacha’s sacking official, or—at worst—to cart him off to jail for public disorderliness and disobeying orders. But when the door swung open, it wasn’t Wolf who was standing in the hall. It was Lily Astral.
“Close your mouth,” Lily told him smugly. “You look like a carp in a Chinatown fish shop!”
She stepped through the door, sidled carefully around the edge of the room between the cookstove and the kitchen table, and sat down in the chair that Sacha’s mother hurried to pull out for her.
Mordechai had long ago broken the chair by leaning back on two legs and putting his feet on the table, so it squeaked and wobbled ominously even under Lily’s skinny frame. But Mrs. Kessler just flapped her dish towel nonchalantly and said, “Never mind that, dear, the chair’ll be fine. You can’t weigh more than a plucked chicken!”
“How did you get here?” Sacha asked. It wasn’t the most brilliant question, but there were so many jostling around in his brain that he didn’t seem to have much control over which one got to his mouth first.
“By subway!” Lily sounded utterly delighted with herself. “Marvelous things! I had no idea! Have you ever ridden on one? Why didn’t you tell me about them? Anyway, that’s not the point. You gave me a real runaround, Sacha Kessler! When I realized that the house near Gramercy Park was all a put-on, I thought you really had me. By the way, you might want to avoid that neighborhood for a while—that housemaid’s a regular Tartar! Anyway, Wolf was about as much help as a dime-store Indian. And Shen . . . well, have you ever noticed how hard it is to find the Young Ladies’ Dancing and Deportment Academy when Shen doesn’t want to talk to you? But then I thought, hey, why not go straight to the top?”
“Oh, my God,” Sacha muttered weakly. “You asked Teddy Roosevelt to find me?”
“Nope. Though now that you mention it, I think m
aybe I ought to write to him about you. I asked Meyer Minsky. Why are you looking like that? As soon as I realized you’d tricked me, I put two and two together and realized that you must live in the tenements. So I—”
“Tell your friend to have some cheesecake!” Sacha’s mother urged, sliding a glowing golden wedge of her famous cake across the table toward Lily.
“Mama!” Sacha protested. “That slice is the size of Alaska! And hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s polite to ask before you shove food in people’s faces?”
“Ask, shmask! Who needs to ask? Just look at her, poor thing. She’s obviously starving!”
“I’m sure she’s not starving,” Sacha said in what he hoped was a squelching voice.
“Well, I’m sure she is. I can practically see her ribs through her coat! Ask her if she wants sour cream on top of it. Sour cream really puts the fat on a girl’s hips! And boys like to see a little wobble in a girl’s walk—”
“Mother!”
But Lily was happily oblivious. “What did you call this?” she asked around a huge mouthful of cake. “I could eat it forever! It must have about nine hundred eggs in it!”
“Only twelve,” Mrs. Kessler confessed, somewhat regretfully. “Another slice you vant? Mit sour cream you vant?”
“I’ve never had sour cream on a cake before,” Lily said, as if Mrs. Kessler had just revealed a whole wonderful new universe of culinary possibilities to her.
“Anyway,” Lily told Sacha while Mrs. Kessler was fetching the sour cream. “Like I was saying, I figured out for myself that the secret you were hiding from me was that you lived down in the tenements. It was the only thing that made sense of all the little details that didn’t quite add up now that I thought about them. And who runs the tenements? Meyer Minsky! I wasn’t exactly sure where that candy store was, of course. But I could find my way back to the Café Metropole. And luckily, once I was there, I ran into that nice Count Vogelonsky—”
The Watcher in the Shadows Page 20