“Who?”
“Oh, I forgot,” Lily said brightly. “I haven’t seen you since then! Remember that nice man we ran into when Wolf took us to talk to Meyer Minsky?”
Sacha ground his teeth but somehow managed to nod more or less calmly.
“Well, I met him again just the other night, because he came to a fancy dress ball at my mother’s house. And I was right about him after all; he is a Russian nobleman. His name is Count Vogelonsky, and he’s best friends with Prince Nachmaninov.”
“Nach-what?”
“Nachmaninov. N-A-C-H—well, anyway, that’s not the point. The point is he knows everyone and goes to all the best parties and lives in the Dakota. So when I ran into his friend again at the Café Metropole, I knew I could trust him to help me.”
“You have got to be kidding me!”
“Sacha, you’re shouting. And I really can’t explain anything to you if you insist on interrupting me like this. Anyway, Count Vogelonsky escorted me to Essex Street—he’s such a perfect gentleman, Sacha, you really could learn a thing or two from him—and Meyer told me where you live, and here I am!”
“And what happened to Count Vogelonsky?” Sacha asked sarcastically.
“He thought it would be indelicate to intrude upon a conversation between friends.”
“I bet he did!”
“You don’t have to look so jealous,” Lily said tartly. “My mother does have her heart set on marrying me to a title, but I think she’d prefer an English lord. Those Russian exiles can be a little flighty. And besides, father says they make very unsound investments. Land is really the only safe place to put your money these days, what with all the investment bubbles and penny stock hexes.”
“Look, Lily. This is really . . . really . . . well, I appreciate your trying to help, that’s all. But it’s no use. Wolf will never give me my job back after what I did.”
“I don’t know about that,” Lily said stoutly. “But I do know he won’t give it back to you if you don’t ask for it!”
“It’s not that simple!” Sacha protested. Suddenly he was angry at her. “What do you know about my life? My family is full of Kabbalists and magicworkers—including the magicworkers those Pinkertons were beating up the other day! I’d be a worm if I didn’t stand up for my own sister when grown men are ganging up on her—and a liar if I told Wolf I’d never disobey him again!”
“I understand how you feel, Sacha.”
“You don’t understand a thing about me!” Sacha snapped. “You’re a stuck-up little rich girl who’s never had to worry for a second about money or magic or—or—anything!”
“I thought we were friends—”
“Well, think again! I don’t need your pity!”
“It’s not pity!” she retorted. “And you’re the one who doesn’t understand anything!”
Suddenly Sacha heard a suspicious quiver in her voice. Had it just begun, or had it been there all along?
“It’s being friends. Or at least I thought that’s what we were.”
Suddenly Sacha looked—really looked—at Lily. What he saw surprised him. When they first met, he had thought she was just a spoiled little rich girl, paper thin, with no personality beyond the blond hair and blue eyes and prissy dresses. But over time, they’d become almost friends. Now a guilty little voice whispered to him that he had been the one holding back from real friendship all along. He had kept secrets from her because he hadn’t trusted her—even though she had long ago earned that trust. And he had been held back not by her pride, but by his own . . . well, what else could he call it but snobbery?
The girl staring at him now had nothing to do with the Lily Astral he’d been so sure would despise him if she knew how poor he was. Her eyes weren’t even blue. They were green—and not the bright, brilliant, bewitching green of Mrs. Astral’s eyes, but a changeable ocean color that moved from green to blue to gray with every shift of her mercurial moods.
And right now, they were a soft, sad, hurt-looking rain gray.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be nasty.”
“Yes, you did.” She sniffled slightly. “But I forgive you. I’m noble that way. Plus, we don’t have any time to waste if you want to go back uptown and apologize to Wolf before he hires another apprentice.”
“Oh, Lily! Even you can’t be naive enough to think I still have a job to go back to!”
“Of course you do. You just have to—”
“And anyway, I quit. I said I quit, and I meant it.”
“Quitting is yellow!” Lily said vehemently.
“Quitting is—oh, never mind, Lily. Look, I just can’t go back, all right? I’ll be happy if Wolf just leaves it at that instead of, well, I don’t know, arresting me, or making me give back all the money they’ve paid me.”
But Lily wasn’t having any of it. “If you quit,” she said, assuming a posture that reminded Sacha eerily of Teddy Roosevelt, “you’ll be letting the J. P. Morgaunts of the world win. You’ll be giving up on the chance to make things better, to make your life better, to make the world better. You’ll be yellow. And you won’t be my friend anymore. So get up, get dressed, and get your job back. I’ll be waiting for you outside. You have five minutes.”
She marched past Sacha’s astonished mother, opened the door, and turned around for a parting shot:
“And don’t make me come back!”
After that, there was really nothing to do but shrug and follow orders.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Is There Room in New York for an Honest Inquisitor?
WHEN SACHA and Lily walked into the office, Wolf was talking to Payton—and the two of them clammed up as if they’d been talking about something they didn’t want Sacha to hear.
“Your resignation is on Payton’s desk,” Wolf said with a vague wave of his hand. “You can just sign it and get started packing your things. No need for formalities.”
Sacha felt completely crushed. He wasn’t sure he wanted the job back, but it was humiliating to feel that Wolf didn’t even care enough to ask. If Lily hadn’t been blocking the way out, he would have left right then and there. But she cleared her throat meaningfully and gave him a shove in the ribs, propelling him into Wolf’s office.
“What is it?” Wolf asked, sounding annoyed by the interruption.
“I—uh—I—can I talk to you?”
“Certainly. Have a seat.”
And then, as if it had all been choreographed in advance, Payton slipped out of the office, closing the door behind him, and Wolf and Sacha were alone.
“Well?” Wolf said. “What is it?”
And that was the moment when Sacha realized what he should have realized sometime during the long trip uptown: that he had absolutely nothing to say to Wolf.
He began to stumble through a halfhearted apology, but Wolf cut him off.
“Forget about it,” he said. “Water under the bridge, as Shen would say.”
Sacha waited for a moment, but Wolf didn’t go on. Apparently this was all he intended to say on the subject.
“So . . . can I come back?”
“Do you want to?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s honest, at least. Though I’m not sure honesty bodes well for your career in the New York City Police Department.”
“You don’t think there’s room in New York for an honest Inquisitor?”
“Not much,” Wolf confessed. Then he grinned. “But you’re just a skinny little thing. Maybe if you keep really quiet, no one will notice you.”
“Thanks,” Sacha drawled. “That’s encouraging.”
And that was it: he had his job back. Not that there was much time for celebrating.
Wolf’s smile faded. “So what did you want to tell me about Sam Schlosky?”
Sacha told Wolf about the Nebbish and his awful story. When he was done, Wolf called Payton and Lily into the office and made him repeat the whole thing.
“What do you think
, Payton?” Wolf asked when Sacha finally fell silent again.
“I think we ought to get a warrant to search Pentacle.”
“That would mean rousting out one of the two honest judges in New York in the middle of his dinner. And calling in every favor I have coming to me,” Wolf pointed out.
“I know. But whoever the new scabbalist is, he’s in just as much danger as Naftali Asher ever was.”
Three hours later, they were at the Pentacle factory with a search warrant. The Pinkerton at the front door began to protest that he’d have to call management before he let them in, but Wolf just looked mildly at him—and he retreated into his little office, murmuring confusedly.
“We’d better not waste any time,” Wolf said. “I don’t know how long that will hold him for.”
For the next hour, they searched Pentacle from top to bottom. The more Sacha saw of the place, the less he liked the idea of his mother and sister working there. Whenever he’d heard Bekah or his mother talk about going off to “the factory,” he’d imagined an efficient, scientific, industrial kind of place. He’d thought it would be planned and orderly and full of large, impressive machines. Instead it was like a gigantic version of the Lehrers’ room, with more sewing machines and more steam irons and more teetering, slithering piles of unfinished clothes blocking off what little light came through the dirty windows. It was bad enough to think of his mother slaving away at those sewing machines from dawn to dark six days a week. But the idea of Bekah, seventeen years old and facing a lifetime in this place?
They searched between the rows of abandoned sewing machines. With every new workroom they moved through, Sacha felt a strange uneasiness settle over him. There was something creepy about walking through a shut-down factory. He could feel the absence of the noise and bustle that should be going on all around him. He could feel that they were alone in a place meant to contain hundreds of people. He could almost see the dust settling on the stacked bolts of cloth and the rust eating away at the idle machinery.
Meanwhile, they found nothing. The place was as echoingly empty as a mausoleum. Then, finally, Payton opened an unmarked door that led to a steep, narrow flight of wooden stairs—and they heard the distant but unmistakable hum of a sewing machine.
As they crept up the stairs, the sound of the sewing machine grew so much louder that they stopped worrying about the noise of their own footfalls; no one could hear footsteps over that racket. They reached the top of the stairs and stepped onto the landing. Warm yellow light spilled out of an open doorway. The rattle and hum of the sewing machine was almost deafening now—but over it Sacha could just make out the sound of a woman’s voice. Whoever the lone seamstress was, she was singing while she worked.
Wolf and Payton slipped across the landing, with Sacha and Lily close behind them. Then Sacha watched as Wolf cautiously opened the door into the attic beyond. The look on Wolf’s face told him immediately that their search was over. And when he peered around the edge of the half-open door himself, he knew that they had found the scabbalist—and that his life would never be the same again.
This attic was just as large and cavernous as the workrooms they had seen on the floors below. But its windows had all been carefully painted over to keep anyone from being able to see that there was another workshop up here. The floor of the room was covered with a thick layer of dust, as if no one had walked across it in a very long time. A single trail of footprints led through the dust to a modern steam- powered sewing machine at which a lone seamstress sat sewing.
She was finishing a shirtwaist in a perfectly normal, nonmagical way, holding the basted seams taut as she carefully sewed over them with good strong stitches. But there was nothing nonmagical about the glowing, pulsating aura around her—or about what was going on behind her. Hundreds of shirts hung in midair, squeezed into the workshop shoulder to shoulder, like rush-hour subway passengers. Bolts of cloth shuttled back and forth overhead. Bobbins scuttled around like nimble white spiders. Meanwhile, the shirts echoed every gesture the lone seamstress made, sewing themselves together out of thin air as obediently as if they were pupils in a magical sewing class.
Extraordinary as all this was, Sacha barely noticed it.
He was too busy noticing that the woman sitting at the sewing machine was his mother.
Mrs. Kessler looked up and stopped sewing as they came in. The shirts stopped too, looking like surprised ghosts.
“Oh, dear,” she said, looking like schmaltz wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “I hope this won’t be a problem for you at work, Sacha.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Scabbalist Unmasked
“MOTHER!” Sacha shouted.
“What?”
“Mother!”
“So what?” She shrugged, and spoke in Yiddish. “Everyone has to make a living.”
“But—but—”
Wolf cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind—”
But by this time, neither Sacha nor his mother were paying any attention to him.
“I only did it for you and Bekah,” Mrs. Kessler pleaded. “I wanted to give you a chance in life! I wanted to give you the things I never had!”
“Does Father know about this? Or have you been lying to him just like you lied to me and Bekah?”
“It’s not lying. I just didn’t want to embarrass the menfolk. They take magic so seriously. And anyway, this isn’t real magic.” She waved her hand vaguely in the air above the sewing machine as if to suggest that all this—the vast room, the towering bolts of cloth, the shirtwaists now draped all over the place in limp attitudes like puppets whose strings had been cut—were just some strange delusion that had nothing to do with magic at all. “It’s just—doing what a mother has to do.”
“If you don’t mind—” Wolf said again.
“Excuse me!” Sacha snapped. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m talking to my mother!”
“And you’ll be talking to her boss, too, if we don’t get out of here pretty soon!” Payton pointed out.
Sacha’s eyes followed his pointing finger to the mirror hanging above the door. It was small and dusty and far too high on the wall for any human being to see his reflection in it. But it commanded an excellent view of the whole room from corner to corner. It didn’t take magic to see that there was only one reason for it to be there.
“We need to go now!” Payton said.
Sacha reached over to grab his mother’s arm and help her up—and suddenly she was awash in magic.
Bright fire played across her familiar features, making her face seem as if it belonged to a stranger. Sacha had sensed the aura that hung about her before this. But as she had been working strong spells when they came in, he had assumed it was her own magic. Now that he really looked at it, he knew no spell of hers could have had that cold, steel-sharp flame inside it.
Only one person he’d ever met worked magic that looked like that.
“What spell did he put you under?” Wolf asked, thrusting Sacha aside and shaking Mrs. Kessler roughly, as if he were afraid her mind would slip away from them. “There’s no time to waste! I can’t save you if you don’t tell me what spell he used!”
She started to speak, but the words died before they reached her lips. She opened her mouth again—and again no words emerged. Now Sacha could see the magic flickering around her like fire.
She swallowed painfully, as if something sharp were stuck in her throat. The magic was stronger now, hotter. It rippled and writhed around her like the heat waves that twisted the air over the fires that hoboes lit in open oil drums on cold winter nights. Suddenly she seemed to find a flaw in the terrible spell that bound her—not enough to get free of it, but a crack just wide enough to squeeze a few words through before it slammed shut.
“I did it for you, Sacha!” Her throat sounded like it was on fire, and she was coughing now—a terrible, racking cough that sounded like the death rattle of a consumption victim.
Then, somehow, she gathered the stren
gth to keep speaking. “He took my memory away. But he came back in dreams, whispering, whispering about the wicked things he’d do to you and Bekah if I didn’t do his bidding.”
His mother clutched at her throat as if hot coals were burning her. The magic rippled in the air like an open flame. Sacha could actually feel the heat pulsing from his mother. And he could smell a thick burning smell, too—but surely he had to be imagining that?
“I can’t break the spell,” Wolf said roughly. “He still has a hold over you. He’s using your own strength to fight me. What hold does he have over you?”
“Save my Sacha!” his mother shrieked. “He has his soul! Ah, that poor child in the pit, how can I abandon him?”
And suddenly, with a dizzying double sight, Sacha knew what she was telling them. He heard the voice of cold iron mocking and tormenting him.
His mother had seen the dybbuk. That was the hold Morgaunt had over her. And with a mother’s heart, she had seen what Sacha hadn’t been willing to hear when his grandfather explained it to him: that he and the dybbuk were one, and that he could no more live without his shadow than his shadow could live without him.
Then she seized her throat with both hands and her eyes rolled into the back of her head as she crumpled to the floor, insensible.
Sacha leaped forward to catch her as she fell—her skin was so hot that touching it felt like putting his hand to a stove. He screamed and almost dropped her. And then Wolf and Payton were beside him, their hands wrapped in rags plucked from the pile beside the sewing machine.
As they laid his mother down, Sacha heard a sound like the muffled tinkling of leaden bells. A handful of brilliant gemstones fell from Mrs. Kessler’s mouth and spilled across onto the dusty floor. At first Sacha thought they were diamonds. But then the diamonds began to smoke and sizzle. As the steam rose off them, they turned from white to orange to the angry red of smoldering coals, hot enough to scorch and pit the wooden floorboards.
The Watcher in the Shadows Page 21