Sacha squinted at Moishe, trying to remember if he’d seen him before. Could this be the skinny redhead his father had been teasing Bekah about? But no, that was impossible. the very idea of plump, pretty, vivacious Bekah with this fellow was ridiculous. There were thousands of skinny redheads on the Lower East Side, and if Bekah was seeing one of them, it definitely wasn’t this one!
“Aren’t you a little … er … young?” Wolf asked.
“What’s young? I’ve been a presser at Pentacle since I was eleven. and most of the seamstresses are younger than me.” Moishe assumed a heroic stance — or, rather, a stance that would have been heroic if anyone else had assumed it. “The youth is our future!”
“Do you mind if we come in? This might take a while.”
“Say,” Moishe exclaimed as Sacha followed Wolf into the apartment, “aren’t you Bekah’s little bro—”
“No!”
“But—”
“I live uptown! Never been here in my life! You must be thinking of someone else!”
“Wha—?” Moishe said, his face frozen into a comical look of surprise. “Oh! right! Definitely!”
Moishe was a pathetically bad liar. Not that that was a surprise, Sacha thought sourly. He hoped the Pentacle workers weren’t depending on Moishe’s bargaining skills to end the strike. With that kind of talent on their side, they’d end up paying Morgaunt to let them go back to work.
Luckily, Wolf and Lily were too busy staring at the chaos inside the tenement to notice Moishe’s bad acting.
It was a regular Babel. people — girls, mostly — were running around yammering at each other in Yiddish and Italian and English. One gaggle of girls was setting up rickety card tables. Another group was magically unpacking boxes of pamphlets and broadsheets — so enthusiastically that Sacha was sure one of those pieces of paper zinging around the room was going to give someone a nasty paper cut. A third group was huddled around the stove poring over the hot-off-the-presses evening edition of the Yiddish Daily Magic-Worker, which one of the girls seemed to be translating into Italian for the others.
“These are your strikers?” Wolf asked Moishe. “Aren’t there any grownups working at Pentacle?”
“The grownups are all bourgeois reactionaries,” Moishe said with a dismissive shrug. “They have to ‘make a living’ and ‘feed their families.’”
Wolf scrubbed a hand through his hair as if he thought the friction would help his brain work better. “Is there somewhere we can talk that’s a little more private?”
“Sure,” Moishe said. And stepped straight out of the open window.
Lily gasped.
“Well?” Moishe said, looking back in at them from the fire escape. “Are you coming or not?”
“Phew!” Lily whispered to Sacha as they stepped out the window behind Wolf. “I didn’t know there was a fire escape. I thought he was going to fly or something.”
Sacha gave her an incredulous look.
“Well, they are the Industrial Witches of the World, after all.”
“Witches don’t fly,” Sacha said scathingly. “You’ve been reading too many penny dreadfuls.”
“That’s ridiculous! And what do you know about witches anyway?”
Sacha decided he’d had it with Lily Astral’s know-it-all attitude. “A lot more than some Fifth Avenue debutante who’s using her daddy’s pull to make Wolf let her play at being an Inquisitor.”
Lily spluttered in fury, but Sacha was already stepping through the window onto the fire escape.
Outside, Sacha relished the fresh air and quiet — or rather the relative quiet, since Moishe was already talking Wolf’s ear off about how the Pentacle strike was going to blow the lid off Big Magic’s corporate conspiracy to keep down the working witch.
But eventually Wolf brought the conversation back around to Morgaunt’s accusation.
“You’re kidding me!” Moishe cried when he finally figured out what Wolf was getting at. “J. P. Morgaunt is accusing me of trying to assassinate Thomas Edison? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard! What are you going to do now, drag me off to jail and throw away the key until Morgaunt tells you to find it again?”
“Actually, no.”
“Why not?” Moishe sounded insulted, as if he actually wanted to be arrested.
“Because I don’t arrest children.”
Moishe put his hands on his hips and glared ferociously at Wolf. Sacha could tell that he was trying to look dangerous enough to be worth arresting. It wasn’t working.
Wolf managed to keep a straight face, though he did succumb to a suspicious fit of coughing. When he had recovered, he started explaining about the dybbuk.
“Dybbuk, shmybbuk,” Moishe scoffed. “There probably is no dybbuk.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Isn’t it obvious? It’s a red herring Morgaunt’s throwing out to distract people from the real crime.”
“What crime?” Wolf asked hopefully.
“Why, Morgaunt’s crime, of course. running a magical sweatshop!”
“Oh, right.” Wolf sighed. “That.”
“Everyone knows he pays off the Inquisitors to turn a blind eye to it. And then they go around shutting down mom and pop operations and hounding his competition out of business. and if he gets his way with that Etherograph of his, it’s only going to get worse. Magic-workers will become fugitives. They’ll have no choice but to take whatever rotten deal he gives them or the Inquisitors will deport them. I’m telling you, someone in this city has to stand up to him or—”
“Right … well … getting back to the dybbuk…” Wolf interrupted.
Moishe shrugged. “What do I know from dybbuks? I’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. The only people in the Lower East Side who know from dybbuks are rabbis. And they’re all just gutless bourgeois reactionaries who want us to let the Morgaunts of the world stomp all over us so we can reap our reward in heaven or Brooklyn—neither of which, allow me to point out, has ever been scientifically proven to exist.”
“But — but—” Sacha stammered, “Brooklyn — I mean, come on, Moishe! The subway stops there!”
“Hah! If you believe everything you read on a subway map, I’ve got a bridge to sell you!”
Sacha was still shaking his head when he followed Wolf and Lily downstairs. Wolf pushed through the front door, muttering something about a cab, and Sacha rolled his eyes. There hadn’t been a cab sighted on Hester Street in living memory!
Still, Wolf raised his hand and forged into the crowd like a swimmer wading into rough surf. And, sure enough, an energetic little horse came trotting around the corner just in time for its driver to jump down and usher Wolf inside.
“I’ll give you both a ride back to the office,” Wolf said while Sacha was still staring. “Otherwise you’ll never get home for dinner.”
Sacha hesitated. It was late afternoon by now, and it really didn’t make any sense for him to ride all the way back to Hell’s Kitchen just to take the subway home again. But he couldn’t think of any excuse for staying behind. So he climbed in, resigning himself to a long, pointless, expensive round trip.
By the time Sacha finally climbed out of the subway at Astral Place, night was falling.
He hurried nervously down the Bowery. It was that deserted time between rush hour and the after-dinner theater crowd. The only people on the sidewalks were tourists going slumming in Chinatown — and all the petty and not-so-petty criminals who preyed on them. The Elevated roared overhead every few minutes, spitting steam and coal dust. Every time it passed, Sacha looked around warily.
He sped up, trying to look tougher than he felt and telling himself he was only a few short blocks from home.