The Watcher in the Shadows

by Chris Moriarty

  “I’m sorry, Sacha.” Wolf turned a worried gaze on him. He seemed to be waiting for Sacha to fall apart. But Sacha only felt numb and disoriented, as if he were moving through a dream that made no sense to him.

  “Your mother’s fine,” Wolf said. “I got her to your house, and your father and sister are taking care of her.”

  Sacha felt a wave of relief sweep through him—the only emotion he could identify in the swirling fog that had filled his mind since he’d watched his grandfather die. The relief didn’t quite take away the terrible image of that death. But it did remind him that things could have been worse—much, much worse.

  “Who called the police?” Lily asked.

  “They’re here to help Mr. Morgaunt.” Wolf’s voice was suspiciously bland. “It seems that the one of the servants panicked when the dybbuk attacked Morgaunt and ran to the nearest call box to report a magical assassination.”

  “Is Morgaunt dead?” Sacha asked, feeling a wild surge of emotion that he didn’t want to put a name to.

  “No. But he’ll carry those scars for the rest of his life.”

  “Good!” Lily said with savage satisfaction. “And at least since someone called the police in, they won’t be able to just cover the whole thing up this time!”

  Wolf smiled bitterly. “I wouldn’t count on that.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Elijah Cup

  THE NEXT WEEKS crept by excruciatingly slowly. Every morning, all Sacha could see around the breakfast table was the fact that his grandfather wasn’t there. Every night, the feather bed felt emptier than it should be. It felt like there was an aching hole in the family on Hester Street that would never be healed over. And worst of all, he could see the rest of his family constantly trying not to talk about it—and trying not to blame him for it.

  He couldn’t stop blaming himself, though. He couldn’t stop going over all the decisions he had made that led up to that terrifying night at Morgaunt’s mansion, thinking of everything he could have done differently. Still, time passed, and life gradually began to return to normal. According to the newspapers, Morgaunt lay at death’s door for weeks. Whoever was managing Pentacle in his absence must not have been as tough as he was, because they abandoned the fight, shipped the Pinkertons out of town, and handed the IWW what amounted to an almost total victory. Everyone at Pentacle went back to work—everyone, that is, except Sacha’s sister. A few weeks after his grandfather died, Sacha finally confronted his father about the apprentice’s pay that was accumulating in the bank for his “education.”

  “I’m never going to use that money,” he told his father. “And Bekah could use it. She’s the one who ought to be going to school, not me.”

  “No!” his father snapped. “You’re saving that money for college, and that’s that!”

  He sounded uncharacteristically stern, but Sacha had known he would. There were few things that mattered more to him than Sacha’s education.

  “No, I’m not,” he insisted. “And I want Bekah to have the money.”

  “You’re not old enough to make that decision!”

  “I’ve already made it!”

  “Then you’ll unmake it, young man!” But then, before Sacha could get out the hotheaded answer that was on the tip of his tongue, Mr. Kessler laughed. “How can I suddenly sound so much like my father?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sacha said. “I never heard him sound that way.”

  “That’s because he knew better by then,” Danny Kessler said ruefully. “And I should know better too. You truly want to give Bekah that money?” he asked in a softer voice. “You’ve really thought about what you’re giving up?”

  “I’m not giving up anything that matters as much to me as going to school matters to her.”

  “Well, you’re earning a man’s wages, so I guess it’s time I started trusting you to make a man’s decisions. But don’t start thinking you know better than your mother about anything! I can tell you right now that’s not going to get you anywhere!”

  So Bekah stopped working and started going to school full-time. Meanwhile, the cold and snow relinquished their grip on the city, and the skies turned blue again, and every day spring seemed closer, until suddenly—without Sacha even quite noticing that April had arrived—it was Passover.

  Passover might not have been the most important holiday of the year, but it marked the arrival of spring every year, and somehow it always felt to Sacha like it brought with it the promise of a fresh start and new possibilities. And it was the one holiday that no one on the Lower East Side complained about, not even the most stalwart atheists or the most flaming Anarcho-Wiccanist revolutionaries. Mordechai would be home soon. And Moishe was already here, sitting on the old feather bed beside Bekah as her unacknowledged (at least by her) boyfriend. Even Bekah, who wouldn’t be caught dead in synagogue on any other holiday, didn’t think taking a stand against bourgeois convention meant you couldn’t enjoy Passover.

  And it wasn’t just the Kessler family gathered around the table this year, either. Sacha’s mother had taken the unprecedented step of inviting Lily Astral to the feast. And then, to everyone’s amazement, she had issued an invitation to Inquisitor Wolf as well.

  “He saved my life, after all,” she said when Sacha tried to protest that this might be a bit too familiar. “That makes him my friend too. Besides, he’s an orphan. And it’s a mitzvah to feed orphans on Passover.”

  Sacha could have pointed out that Wolf was a grownup with a job and a salary, not a starving waif in need of sustenance. But why bother? Wolf was coming, and there wasn’t a thing Sacha could do about it. And the funny part of it was that, as soon as he saw the Inquisitor’s lanky frame folded into one of the wobbling chairs around the old kitchen table, he didn’t want to do anything about it. His mother had been right; Wolf did belong there that night. If nothing else because having him and Lily around the table made Grandpa Kessler’s spot on the feather bed seem less gapingly empty than it had for the past month and a half.

  At the last possible moment—with his usual unerring instinct for the exact moment when all the work was done and there was nothing left to do but eat—Uncle Mordechai swept through the door with flowers for the table and flowery apologies for Mrs. Kessler.

  He caught sight of Lily Astral, half raised his hand in greeting, and then eyed her with a vague look of confusion on his handsome features.

  “Have we met somewhere before?” he asked doubtfully.

  But Lily didn’t seem to have any doubt at all about it. She gasped out loud and jumped from her chair as if it had just caught fire.

  “Count Vogelonsky!” she cried, curtseying—or at least Sacha thought that was what she was trying to do. “I never imagined I’d see you here!”

  “Er, yes,” Mordechai said, glancing apprehensively at his sister-in-law. Once he had made sure that Mrs. Kessler was busy with the food, he swept elegantly across the floor—or as elegantly as he could, given the need to sidle around the kitchen table without burning his pants on the stove—and leaned over to kiss the back of Lily’s outstretched hand. “Enchanté, I’m sure.”

  Unfortunately, however, he had bumped into Mrs. Kessler while trying to get around the stove. She had turned around just in time to catch sight of the hand kissing and was now staring hard at him with her own hands balled into fists on her hips.

  “Mordechai Kessler,” she said in a tone of voice that Sacha had long ago learned meant it was time to duck for cover, “what on earth do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing, nothing!” Mordechai assured her. “Just welcoming our fair guest to our humble abode—”

  “Do I look like an onion?” Ruthie Kessler demanded. “Do you think I grow upside down with my eyes closed and my head in the ground?”

  “Er, um—”

  “This is all part of that appalling scheme you and Nathan Feldman cooked up to break the hearts of poor defenseless young women for money, isn’t it?”

&n
bsp; “No, Ruthie, no! You don’t understand—”

  “Oh, I understand. And I’ve got a good mind to make sure Nathan’s mother understands too.”

  “That, my dear woman, would be extremely unfortu-

  nate.”

  “Extremely unfortunate for you, you mean!”

  “So just who are you anyway?” Lily asked doubtfully. “Is your real name Count Vladimir Vogelonsky or Mordechai Kessler?”

  “Ha ha! Mordechai Kessler indeed!” Mordechai gave Lily his most charming grin. “That’s just a little joke my friends are having with me—”

  “Mordechai!” Sacha’s father growled.

  “All right, all right!” Mordechai cried. And then he gave up the fight and confessed everything.

  Lily seemed completely overwhelmed by Mordechai’s confession. She kept opening and closing her mouth, trying to speak, and looking back and forth between Mordechai and Sacha as if she thought he was somehow involved in the charade.

  “Close your mouth,” Sacha told her with a smug sense of satisfaction, “You look like a carp in a Chinatown fish shop.”

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Lehrer had been bustling around the room putting the finishing touches on things. Finally, eve-­ rything was ready. The rickety kitchen table was splendid under Mrs. Lehrer’s grandmother’s snow-white lace tablecloth. They had laid out the Passover dishes and silver. The lamb shank glistened and steamed on the Passover platter. The afikoman snuggled in its cloth. Everything was in its place. All was ready. And everyone who should be there was there. Except for the one person who would never be there again.

  Sacha felt a lump rising in his throat, but before he had time to think about it, his father got to his feet. Mr. Kessler looked around the table. The rest of the family stared back at him, as silent and white as if they were ghosts themselves. Sacha looked at his mother and saw unshed tears glistening in her eyes. Suddenly he was struck by a thought almost too appalling to put into words. Was his father going to cry? He’d never seen his father cry in his life, and he wasn’t sure he could stand it.

  Mr. Kessler coughed and looked off into the distance for a long moment. But when he finally spoke, his voice was clear and steady.

  “My father always said it was a sin to be unhappy on the Sabbath,” he told them. “So I don’t even want to think about what he’d have to say to anyone who dared to be sad on Passover.”

  And then he began leading the Seder as naturally and comfortably as if he did it every year. It took the rest of the family a few moments to catch up with him. But they managed it—mostly because it was plain from Mr. Kessler’s face that he expected them to.

  Wolf and Lily seemed surprisingly at home around the Kesslers’ kitchen table. Wolf went along with the Passover festivities as if he’d been at a hundred Seders before—which, for all Sacha knew, he had been. And Lily was happily eating everything in sight, asking his mother what went into the haroset, and displaying a ghoulish fascination with the ten plagues.

  Still, Sacha wondered how strange this three-thousand-year-old story of slavery and deliverance must seem to them. And when his father began to tell the story of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt, he felt a sharp twinge of guilt about one face that was missing from around the table: Philip Payton’s. He had asked Philip at the same time he’d asked Wolf and Lily. But perhaps he’d asked him awkwardly; he often felt awkward around Payton. Whatever the reason, Payton had refused the invitation. Now, listening to his father tell the Passover story, Sacha thought of Wolf’s other, unofficial apprentice—for, after all, hadn’t Wolf once said that Payton would have been an apprentice but for the color of his skin? What did Payton think about that? Would he even keep working for Wolf when his family moved to Harlem? And would they find what they were looking for there? Somehow Sacha doubted it—and he seemed to hear an echo of Bella da Serpa’s mocking voice telling Wolf that democracy was nothing more than a lynch mob.

  Sacha glanced at Lily. Maybe Payton had talked to her about it; she’d always seemed to get along with him much better than Sacha did. He was pretty sure that Payton told her all kinds of things he wouldn’t dream of talking to Sacha about. And then Sacha intercepted a knowing look between Bekah and Moishe—and decided he’d better not even look in Lily’s direction anymore, lest anybody get the wrong idea.

  And then, all too soon, the last word of the ancient tale was spoken. Sacha and Bekah took up the traditional children’s chorus (“Can we eat yet?”), and their father pretended to be shocked and appalled by their lack of manners, as always.

  But just as they were all about to tuck into the copious main course of Mrs. Kessler’s magnificent Passover dinner, there came a thunderous knocking on the front door that could only mean one thing.

  “I, uh, was having Passover dinner with my mother upstairs,” Benny Fein said, lumbering through the door that Mo Lehrer had jumped up to open for him, “and, uh, I tought I’d come up and say a Happy Passover to youze all,” Benny said. But while he spoke, his eyes were roving round the room, searching for Bekah. And when he finally found her sitting next to Moishe on the feather bed, a black scowl settled over his face.

  “Why don’t you pull up a chair and join us, Benny?” Mr. Kessler suggested when it became painfully clear that nothing short of an earthquake would get Benny out of the apartment.

  Lily took the hint and squeezed onto the bed next to Sacha. But Benny accepted her chair without thanking her—or even glancing away from the two young lovers. He sat down and distractedly accepted a heaping plate from Mrs. Kessler. Then he leaped up as if the seat of his chair had suddenly become burning hot. Then he sat down and stood up and sat down again.

  Finally he raised his unused fork in the air and proclaimed, “I can be silent no longer! A guy’s gotta say what a guy’s gotta say!”

  Everyone froze, forks stranded in midair and mouths hanging open.

  “Mr. Kessler!”

  “Yes, Benny?”

  “I know I don’t have duh best reputation of any guy on duh block. But I swear I’ll take care of her. I’ll treat her like a queen!”

  Benny waved dramatically to underscore his point, but he had forgotten that he was holding his plate in one hand. The plate crashed into the wall behind him and shattered. Mordechai laughed, and Mrs. Kessler kicked him under the table and then buried her head in her hands. Meanwhile Benny picked up the shattered pieces of the plate somewhat sheepishly, frowned at them for a moment as if they had broken his train of thought, and then placed them carefully back on the table.

  “Anyway, duh point is,” he told Mr. Kessler, “no one will ever disrespect your daughter when she’s my wife.”

  “Your wife!” Bekah and Moishe cried at exactly the same moment—and Sacha couldn’t say who sounded more outraged by the idea.

  Benny didn’t seem to hear Moishe at all, however. In fact, Moishe might as well not even have existed, for all the notice Benny paid him. Instead the gangster turned to Bekah, one hand laid upon his massive chest as if he were a medieval knight about to proclaim his undying love for his noble lady.

  “Miss Kessler,” he declared, “there’s some things I just gotta tell you. First thing, I never met a girl like you, and as we have discussed prior to this time, I would like to take you home to meet my mother. Second thing, I’m not such a bad guy once you get to know me. Just ask Meyer. Third thing—”

  But whatever the third thing was, Benny never got to tell Bekah about it. Because before he could open his mouth, Moishe dashed around the table, wound up like a fastball pitcher, and belted him in the nose.

  There’s lucky and there’s lucky. And, truth be told, Moishe’s punch was just about the luckiest one Sacha had ever seen in his life. If Benny had been looking at Moishe instead of Bekah, he would have ducked. And if he’d been standing up—or even sitting down for that matter—the blow would have bounced off him like rain off a duck’s back. But instead it landed just as Benny was dropping to one knee. Moishe’s fist was coming up. Benny’s nose was headin
g down. And the two of them collided like a pair of freight trains running in opposite directions on the same track.

  A resounding crack echoed through the room.

  Bekah squeaked.

  Mrs. Kessler gasped.

  Benny stopped in midsentence, raised his eyes to the ceiling, said, “Whu—?” and then toppled with the slow majesty of a redwood falling in the great forest wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.

  Every woman in the room shrieked, and every man shouted. Bekah leaped up to tend to Benny’s wounds, scolding Moishe all the while (but nonetheless looking flushed and a little pleased, or at least so it seemed to Sacha).

  Benny sat up, holding his nose, and gave Moishe a mournful look.

  “I didn’t know she was your goil,” he said accusingly. “And what’s the point of hauling off and hitting a guy widdout any warning like dat, anyway? How’m I supposed to know stuff if people don’t tell me nothin’?”

  “First of all,” Bekah began, “I am not ‘his’ girl—”

  “Yes, you are!” Moishe snapped.

  “I’m not anyone’s girl!” Bekah cried. “I’m a human being, not a pound of pickled herring! And if you can’t respect that, Moishe Schlosky, then—”

  “I respect it! I respect it! But this is between me and Benny!”

  “Some revolutionary you are!” Bekah huffed. “And then you men have the nerve to go around accusing women of being counterrevolutionary!”

  Lily guffawed at this, and even Wolf looked blandly amused.

  But although Bekah kept on fussing over Benny’s nose, Sacha noticed that she didn’t look nearly as mad as she sounded. Meanwhile, Moishe—who suddenly seemed to have forgotten that he’d ever disliked Benny at all—was helping Mrs. Kessler put ice on the gangster’s nose, and Mr. Kessler and Mo Lehrer were dissecting Moishe’s boxing technique, while Mordechai had started in on some ridiculous story about his adventures in high society that eventually had eve-­ ryone laughing until tears leaked from their eyes. And when Benny’s nose stopped bleeding and Bekah sat down to eat, Sacha noticed that she sat down next to Moishe—and maybe even a little closer than before Benny came in.