Doppelgangster Read online

  “I guess it’s always good to keep learning,” I said.

  “Alas we never met. But no doubt Nelli chose her name because she shares my feelings of affinity with the great Fulcanelli’s work.”

  “No doubt,” I said, glancing at the drooling dog. “But you seemed sort of, um, disconcerted by Nelli when I arrived.”

  “I had not expected quite so large a canine,” Max confessed. “For a few moments, I thought I had made a dreadful mistake and conjured some sort of…”

  “Hellhound?”

  “Precisely.”

  I looked at Max’s familiar again. As we exchanged gazes, Nelli began wagging her tail. It was long and thick, and its wagging carried enough force to knock over a floor lamp.

  I caught the lamp before it fell. “But, Max, I thought familiars were always, you know, black cats or something.”

  “Cats can be familiars,” Max said, “but it’s not as prevalent as people think. That was mostly a rumor started in the sixteenth century by men who resented widows who preferred acquiring a good mouser to acquiring a second husband.”

  “So a dog can be a familiar?”

  “A familiar can take any animal form it chooses,” Max explained. “My difficulty in summoning this one was—Well, in point of fact, my first mistake was in assigning the task to Hieronymus, as you may recall.”

  “I don’t think he was making the effort he told you he was making.”

  “Indeed, no. And since his dissolution—”

  “Let’s not use that word,” I suggested, thinking anxiously about Lopez, various episodes of Crime and Punishment, and my desire to stay out of prison. “Let’s get into the habit of saying since he left. Okay?”

  “Of course, Esther. If that will make you more comfortable.”

  “It will.”

  “Since Hieronymus left, I have found the demands of protecting New York City from Evil to be a little overwhelming on my own, so I’ve been increasingly anxious to find a familiar to support my efforts until the Magnum Collegium can send me another assistant.” He added a little bitterly, “Preferably one who doesn’t want to take over New York by demonic means and, in the process, kill most of its citizens.”

  “So you kept trying to summon a familiar after Hieronymus left?” I finished my sweeping and poured a dustpan’s worth of disgusting substances into the urn that served as a garbage can.

  “Yes, but I mistakenly interpreted the spirit I was summoning as avian in nature when, in fact, it found the canine lifestyle more congenial.” He shook his head. “I’ve been distracted by my various duties, as well as by a summons from the Internal Revenue Service, or else I’d have realized sooner that I was able to conjure nothing but feathers because the familiar offering its services to me wanted a different corporeal form.”

  “So a familiar, er, applies for the job?” I said.

  “It would be more precise to say that a particular entity chose to answer my summons,” Max said. “An entity that deemed itself equal to the task of helping me protect New York from Evil.”

  Nelli rolled over onto her back. Her tongue dangled sideways out of her mouth. Her paws flailed as she wriggled to scratch her back against the floor.

  Lucky, who had been sitting immobile in a chair with a dazed expression on his face, suddenly became alert. “Did you say the IRS is bothering you?”

  Max said to me, “Ah! I think your friend is feeling better.”

  “ ‘Cuz, you know, I can maybe help you with that,” Lucky said. “Discourage unnecessary inquiries into your perfectly legitimate business interests. As a favor. For a friend of Esther’s.”

  I was glad that the very first thing I had thrown into the garbage urn was Lucky’s gun. I didn’t think he had noticed its rematerialization, and I thought everyone would be safer if he didn’t get his hands on it again.

  I said firmly, “I don’t want anything bad to happen to a civil servant, Lucky. On behalf of me or Max.”

  He shrugged. “If you change your mind…”

  Despite some misgivings, I decided it was time to make introductions. “Lucky, this is Dr. Maximillian Zadok. He’s sort of a specialist in strange events.”

  “Yeah,” said Lucky. “I think I get that. How do ya do, Doc?”

  “How do you do, Mr…”

  “Lucky Battistuzzi,” was the reply. “I’m a hitter for the Gambellos.”

  “A hitter?” Maxed asked with a puzzled expression.

  Lucky waved aside the question. “Mostly retired. I just come out now and then when something special needs doing. Like this problem we got here.”

  “Ah, a problem!” Max looked interested now. “I suppose that explains why you’re here so late, Esther?”

  “Late?” I glanced at my watch. “Max, it’s not even nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “It’s Saturday morning?” he asked in surprise.

  “Sunday morning. Just how long have you been in the lab?”

  “Good heavens! I really did lose track of time.” He explained to Lucky, “Conjuring a familiar is most absorbing work. Not to mention time consuming.”

  “Are you talkin’, like, a sorcerer’s familiar?” Lucky asked.

  “Precisely.”

  “That’s your familiar?” Lucky asked, pointing at the dog.

  “Yes.”

  “That dog?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It’s your familiar?”

  “Yes.”

  Lucky took a long look at Nelli. She looked back at him. After a long moment, the gangster said, “In that case, Doc, I’m real sorry I tried to whack it.”

  “Hmm.” Max tugged absently on his beard as he considered what we had told him about Chubby Charlie’s death. “Interesting. Very, very interesting.”

  “Yes, but is it supernatural?” I asked.

  I immediately realized my mistake. Max started lecturing. The gist of it was, there is no such thing as “supernatural,” that’s a false construct; almost everything (though not quite everything) in the universe is natural, but some things are mystical or magical, and some are not.

  Lucky summed up my feelings perfectly by interrupting Max’s monologue to say, “Whatever. Who cares? The point is, Doc, do you got any idea what the hell is going on here?”

  We had left the laboratory and were upstairs in the bookstore, sitting in comfortable, prettily upholstered chairs in the reading area set up around the fireplace. The shop had well-worn hardwood floors, a broad-beamed ceiling, dusky rose walls, and a soothing atmosphere.

  I had gratefully helped myself to coffee at the small refreshments station that Max kept stocked for his customers. It sat near a large, careworn walnut table with books, papers, an abacus, writing implements, and other paraphernalia on it.

  Max didn’t bother opening the store for business yet. No one but us was awake this early on a Sunday in the West Village.

  Nelli was busy exploring the shop, getting acquainted with her new home by sniffing row after row of bookcases, snuffling at modern books on the occult, and sneezing at ancient leather-bound volumes that needed dusting.

  “Well,” Max said, “I hesitate to theorize about poor Chubby Charlie’s death without more information, but it sounds to me as if he may have seen his doppelganger.”

  “His doppelganger?” I repeated. “I’ve heard the word, but…” I shrugged to indicate that my familiarity with it stopped there.

  “Understandable,” said Max. “It’s a very rare phenomenon, and the study of German mythology doesn’t seem to have deeply absorbed your generation in the New World.”

  “Kids these days,” Lucky said, shaking his head. “If it ain’t on MTV, it don’t exist.”

  “Indeed,” said Max. “Plus ‘doppelganger’ is hard to spell.”

  “So what does a doppelganger do?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t really do anything,” Max said. “It’s traditionally a portent or omen rather than a proactive agent.”

  “Huh?” said Lucky.

/>   “A doppelganger is an apparition,” Max elaborated. “Loosely translated, the term means ‘double walker’ or ‘double goer.’ It’s a second physical version of a person. A perfect double.”

  I noted, “That’s exactly what Charlie said. That he’d seen his perfect double.”

  “In some cultures,” Max continued, “it’s believed to be a reflection of a person’s soul; in others, it’s considered an entirely separate entity from him. In any case, it is a seemingly exact replica of a living person.”

  Lucky said, “So are you saying this thing, this dopp… dopp…”

  “Doppelganger,” Max supplied.

  “This doppelgangster—do you think it could’ve done a smooth hit?” Lucky asked. “Because if it was a replica of Charlie, well, he had a lot of experience at that.”

  “A smooth hit?” Max repeated, puzzled.

  I explained, “Lucky’s asking if the doppelgangst… er, doppelganger could have killed Chubby Charlie.”

  “Ah! I see. A ‘smooth hit’? What an interesting expression.”

  “It was very clean,” Lucky said. “Very professional. One shot to the heart, instant death, no muss, no fuss. And no witnesses.”

  “And no logical explanation for how it happened,” I said. “At least, not so far.”

  “So what I’m wondering is, did this doppelgangster whack Charlie?” Lucky said.

  “Whack?”

  “Hit,” Lucky clarified.

  “You think the creature struck him?” Max asked.

  I said, “Lucky’s asking if the doppelgangster killed Charlie.”

  “Interesting!” Max said to Lucky, “Your dialect fascinates me. May I ask where you learned it?”

  Lucky shrugged. “I’m from Brooklyn.”

  “I see.”

  “To return to the question, Max,” I said. “Could the double have shot Charlie?”

  “It seems unlikely,” he said. “The appearance of a doppelganger is associated with the imminent death of the person replicated—”

  “So that’s why Charlie was so sure that seeing his perfect double meant he was going to die,” I mused.

  “—but the doppelganger merely portends death, it doesn’t actually kill the replicated individual.”

  “How you pretend death?” Lucky asked.

  “Er, I mean the doppelganger is a warning of death,” Max explained. “It’s a sign. As Chubby Charlie seems to have known, seeing your doppelganger traditionally means you’re going to die by nightfall.”

  “But does it mean you’re going to get whacked out by a hitter no one saw and a bullet that traveled around corners?” Lucky asked.

  “Not as far as I know,” Max said.

  “So do you think a doppelgangster could do a hit like that?” Lucky asked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know enough about doppelgangsters—er, doppelgangers—to postulate a response to that at this juncture,” Max said. “I’m not familiar enough with the phenomenon. Did I mention that it’s very rare? I’m going to need to do some research on this.”

  Feeling very tired, I looked around the store without enthusiasm. “Does that mean we have to start reading?”

  “Unfortunately,” Max said, “the Germanic portion of my library is very thin. I will need to summon assistance.”

  “Will there be more smoke and explosions involved in this summoning?” I asked anxiously.

  “No, no. I mean to say, I’ll need to make some telephone calls to see if I can locate some useful material.”

  “What do you need Germanic books for?” Lucky asked. “Charlie was Italian. His enemies are all Italian. It don’t make sense that a German would be involved in this.”

  “He had enemies?” Max asked with interest.

  “Oh, yeah,” Lucky said.

  “Deadly enemies?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hmm. In that case, we can probably rule out my second theory.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “That Chubby Charlie merely imagined seeing his double, and his violent death on the same night of these delusions was pure coincidence.”

  “So you think there really was a double?” Lucky said. “A doppio? A doppelgangster?”

  “A man with deadly enemies who sees his perfect double and then dies by nightfall? Absolutely,” Max said. “But the manner of the killing… Hmm, clearly there’s something here that we don’t understand yet. I must get some Germanic texts.”

  Lucky objected, “But like I just told you—”

  “Yes, I understand, my dear fellow,” Max said. “But the great German thinkers wrote about doppelgangers in more depth than anyone else, as far as I know, so my research must delve into their works if I am to gain sufficient knowledge of this rare phenomenon.”

  We heard a sudden, piercing wail come from the far side of the shop, followed by Nelli barking. Then we heard the slapping and slamming of rapidly closing doors and drawers.

  “What’s that?” Lucky jumped to his feet and automatically reached for his gun. I was glad he didn’t have it.

  “Oh, dear. That thing is such a trial to me,” Max said.

  “I think it’s scared your dog,” I said. “Er, your familiar.”

  We rose to our feet, too, walked past several bookcases, and found Nelli barking in fear at a massive, dark, very old wooden cupboard that stood against the far wall. It had a profusion of drawers and doors, and it was about six feet tall and at least that wide. As near as I understand these things, the cupboard was enchanted by Max’s predecessor, and the effects seemed to be permanent. It could be dormant and inert for weeks at a time, but then suddenly, without warning, it would act up again. Apparently Nelli’s curious sniffing had stirred it up.

  Its drawers and cabinets were opening and closing rapidly, slamming shut with a violence that seemed downright irritable. As we watched, flames started pouring out of some of the drawers.

  “That’s dangerous,” said Lucky, wide-eyed and disapproving.

  “It’s a…” I tried to think of a way to explain it to Lucky. “It’s a sort of…”

  “It’s a possessed cupboard, right?” he said.

  “Er, right.”

  “My grandmother’s family had one, back in Sicily.”

  “I see.”

  “I keep trying to neutralize its energy,” Max said wearily, “but I don’t know how it got this way, and my predecessor cannot be reached for consultation.”

  This sort of confusion seemed to be rather common among Max and his colleagues. In fact, Max was 350 years old because he’d unwittingly drunk a life-prolonging elixir in his youth (back in the seventeenth century) that no one could replicate, no matter how many times they tried. He had imbibed it so unwittingly that he was in his fifties before he realized that he was aging at an unusually slow rate.

  He wasn’t immortal, but it seemed likely he’d be around for another century or so. Unless Evil got him first.

  Unnerved by the aggressive, flaming, drawer-slamming cupboard, Nelli gave up barking at it and instead opted for hiding behind us and whining.

  My head was starting to pound, and I decided what I needed most of all was a few more hours of sleep.

  “I’m going home,” I said to my companions. “I’m tired.”

  “I’ll contact you after I’ve learned something more about this phenomenon,” Max promised, looking pretty tired himself after spending the weekend summoning his whining familiar.

  “Wait, Esther, there’s one more thing we gotta talk about.” Lucky turned to Max and said, “She saw the hit. Do you think she’s in any danger?”

  Max frowned with concern as he considered this, but finally said, “I doubt it. I really do. A man with deadly enemies saw a portent of his own death. I think it very likely this was an isolated incident that will not recur, let alone involve Esther any further.”

  At the time, it was a reasonable supposition. We had no way of knowing then just how wrong he was.

  6

  CHORUS GIRL W
ITNESSES MOB HIT! was the first head line I saw on my walk home from the subway station.

  “Chorus girl,” I muttered unhappily as I picked up the tabloid and read the caption beneath a photo of “alleged Gambello hitman” Lucky Battistuzzi embracing me outside of Bella Stella last night.

  I tried to resist looking at the other tabloids, but there’s a certain ghoulish fascination to seeing yourself demeaned in semiliterate prose at the local newsstand.

  CHUBBY CHARLIE CHECKS OUT! announced The New York Post.

  ACTRESS ALMOST AXED? asked the Insider. This “news story” reported that a “confidential source” claimed I might be the intended victim of last night’s hit, and Charlie Chiccante just an innocent bystander. Since the story below this one reported that Donald Trump had been dead for a decade and an impersonator had been running his empire all this time, I didn’t worry too much that Charlie had actually died because of me.

  BELLA MORTE? quipped another headline. The article noted that this was the third violent death at Bella Stella in five years.

  “Hmph.” I put the tabloid back down after reading a few lines. Then I saw that holding it for thirty seconds had been long enough to stain my hands with ink.

  “Hey, ain’t this a picture of you on the cover of the Expose?” asked the guy who ran the newsstand. He’d sold me my weekly copy of Backstage for several years, as well as various newspapers, magazines, and the occasional candy bar, but we’d never chatted before.

  I took a good look and saw he was reading a copy of the Expose that had my picture in it. I was not flattered that he’d been able to identify me from this shot: I was squinting and hunched over, trying to avoid the glare of the flash, and my mouth was gaping open in surprise. Lopez, whose arm was around me, had mostly been cropped out of the photo.

  “That’s the photo they decided to use?” I said. “What did I ever do to them?”

  The news seller frowned as he looked at me. “You got blue stuff on your face now.”

  “I know.” The blue substance that had spilled on me in Max’s laboratory was on my arm, too, thanks to Lucky shooting up the place.