He had just passed the reassuring lights of the Metropole when he realized someone was following him. Within the space of a few ragged breaths, he went from wondering where that odd echo of his footfalls was coming from to knowing for dead certain that there was someone behind him.
He cursed himself for not having gone into the Metropole. Uncle Mordechai might have been there. Or at least someone he knew well enough to ask them to walk him home. But it was too late now. There was nothing for it but to keep going.
He turned the corner onto Hester Street, hoping to see a friendly face or two smiling at him from the front stoops of the tenements. But there was no one. The shoppers and pushcart peddlers were long gone. The cobblestones were littered with old food and bits of tailors’ clippings and sooty drifts of crumpled newspapers. Misshapen piles of crates and boxes loomed outside the shop fronts. Laundry dangled from the fire escapes like hanged men. Sacha had never seen Hester Street so silent and lifeless. Even the mannequins in the shop windows seemed to stare out at him with blank, uncaring expressions.
It was dark too. The Bowery was one of New York’s famous White Ways, lit up night and day with Edison’s new electric lights. But back in the narrow tenement streets, people still made do with gaslight. And not much of it either. The flickering halos around the occasional lampposts were only faint islands of light in an ocean of shadows.
Now he was a block from his building. Now half a block. Now three storefronts away. And still the footsteps sounded behind him. Not gaining on him, not falling back. Just following. Sacha felt like he was caught in one of those awful dreams where you run and run until you finally realize that the only way to wake up is to stop and let the monster catch you.
Finally, the urge to look back became unbearable. He glanced over his shoulder, trying not to be too obvious about it.
And there it was. A moving shadow just beyond the glow of the nearest streetlight. It was vague and indefinite and yet unmistakably there. He couldn’t see its face. But there was something unnervingly familiar about the set of its slim shoulders.
Sacha looked away, gauging the distance that still separated him from the front stoop of his own building. His legs trembled. His entire body tensed like a coiled spring. What if he made a mad dash for it? Would he make it? And what would happen if he didn’t?
It was only the briefest of glances, a flick of his eyes toward the stoop. No natural creature could have vanished into the shadows that quickly. Nonetheless, when he looked back the watcher was gone.
Sacha cast his eyes frantically around the silent street, but there was no sign of the shadowy figure. If it weren’t for the icy chill still upon him, he could almost have convinced himself he’d imagined it.
As he reached the third floor, he could hear his mother and father bickering affectionately with each other, and Bekah setting the table for dinner, and Uncle Mordechai chuckling over something in the Daily Magic-Worker. Sacha was just pausing outside the door for a final moment to enjoy the comfortable sounds of home when a skeletal hand reached out of the shadows to grip his shoulder.
He gasped and spun around, heart pounding — only to see Moishe Schlosky, of all people.
“Shhh!” Moishe whispered. “Stop shrieking like a girl!”
“I was not shrieking like a girl,” Sacha protested, torn between anger at Moishe and embarrassment about the admittedly somewhat high-pitched sound that had escaped him when he felt Moishe’s bony fingers on his shoulder.
“You were too. Anyway, never mind. I have to talk to you.”
“Fine, so talk to me like a normal person! Don’t sneak up on me in a dark hallway!”
“Do I look like the landlord?” Moishe asked comically. “Now it’s my fault there’s no lights in here?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Moishe! What do you want already?”
“A favor, just a favor. You’re working for that Inquisitor, right?
“So?”
“So you know what he’s up to and how his investigation is going.”
“I guess,” Sacha said reluctantly, not liking where this conversation was headed.
“Well, then couldn’t you just … you know … kind of keep me posted on it?”
“I could get fired for that!”
“Class solidarity demands it of you!”
Sacha guffawed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I dare you to say that again with a straight face.”
Inside the apartment the friendly voices were drowned out suddenly by the rapid-fire clatter of Mrs. Lehrer’s foot-powered sewing machine. It was probably Mo at the sewing machine, knocking off another dozen shirts while his wife fixed dinner before doing her nightly quota. It seemed a hard life suddenly — miles away from Lily Astral’s world of mansions and limousines.
“Is that all you want in life?” Moishe asked, as if reading Sacha’s thoughts. “To be an errand boy for the Carbuncles and Vanderbilks and Morgaunts? Don’t you believe in anything?”
“I believe in taking care of my family,” Sacha said stubbornly.
“Of course you do. We all do. That’s what your sister is working for, and a lot of other girls like her. We’re just asking you to help.”
“Well, ask someone else.”
“Look,” Moishe said, “couldn’t you just think about it?”
“Moishe, I’m not going to do it no matter how long I think about it.”
“Oh!” Moishe cried in a voice worthy of the mourners at the Wailing Wall. “Oh, that a nephew of Mordechai Kessler should have come to this!” He was still shaking his head when the door to Sacha’s apartment popped open and Bekah stuck her head out.
“Sacha!” she said. “What are you doing lurking in the stairwell! Dinner’s already on the ta—”
She caught sight of Moishe and stopped abruptly.
Sacha looked at Bekah. Then he looked at Moishe. Then he looked back at Bekah again. “Are you blushing?” he asked her.
“Don’t!” Bekah warned. “Don’t you dare say one more word!”
“Bekah—” Moishe began.
“And you!” she snapped, sounding uncannily like their mother. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble? Get out of here already!”
Moishe started to protest, but then he took one look at Bekah’s furious face, tucked his tail between his legs, and slunk away like a man who knew when he was beaten. Sacha couldn’t help grinning at the sight; obviously Bekah already had Moishe’s training well in hand.
Bekah held the door to their apartment open, but Sacha wasn’t ready to go inside yet.
“No way!” he said, just quietly enough to make sure their mother wouldn’t hear him. “Moishe Schlosky?”
“Oh, and I suppose you’re dating Mary Pickford? I’d bet good money you’ve never even kissed a girl!”
“Yeah, but … Moishe? He’s so … so … so skinny!”
“You are the most shallow, superficial, trivial—”
“Are you two waiting for the Messiah out there?” their mother shouted from inside the apartment. “Come in and sit down already! Dinner’s getting cold!”
Sacha was still shaking his head in amazement when he sat down to dinner. Indeed, he was so busy being amazed at the idea of Bekah being sweet on Moishe that he almost forgot Moishe’s outrageous idea that he ought to spy on Wolf for the strikers. As if he didn’t have enough problems already!
When the rest of his family was settling down for coffee and after-dinner chatter around the kitchen table, Sacha went to the window and cautiously lifted the curtain.
There was nothing there. No watcher in the shadows. No dark figure standing at the edge of the streetlights.
For some unfathomable reason, that made him feel worse instead of better. Who or what had been following him? And could it possibly be a coincidence that this silent watcher had first appeared on the very same night that Edison and Sacha’s mother had both been attacked?