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Authors: Laura Resnick

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BOOK: Dopplegangster
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As we sat sipping our coffee, I said, “Hey, I guess something else we know now is that the Corvinos were telling the truth. They didn’t whack Charlie and Johnny. I mean, now one of their capos has been hit, too.”
“And the Gambellos didn’t do it,” Lucky said.
“Will the Corvinos believe that?” I asked.
“It depends on whether Mikey Castrucci and Fast Sammy decide to believe what we told them last night,” Lucky said. “And whether they can convince the guys upstairs.”
“Upstairs?” Max asked with a frown.
“Their superiors,” I explained.
“Ah.”
I asked Lucky, “Can you make some calls and find out?”
He nodded and pulled out his cell phone.
Max offered me a cookie. I accepted. Nelli gnawed on her bone.
Lopez called my cell phone while Max was pouring another round of coffee and Lucky was trying to track down Fast Sammy by phone.
“I’m not going to make it tonight,” Lopez told me apologetically.
Suspecting the reason, I asked, “Why not?”
“I’m in Brooklyn. We’ve got a dead Corvino capo here.”
I wasn’t surprised, but I felt genuine disappointment. “But maybe after you’re done there . . .”
“I don’t think so.” He sighed. “We’ve just had a Gambello wannabe picked up after he boasted in a bar that he did the hit, but—”
“What?” I frowned, thinking I had heard wrong.
“—his claims aren’t very credible, so this is going to be a mess. I’ll be working late again.”
“You’re saying someone’s
confessed?
”
Max and Lucky looked at me.
“Oh, he won’t confess in the legal sense. But he’s taking credit, you might say.” Lopez sounded disgusted. “And he’s probably lying. Which creates extra legwork for us.”
A Gambello wannabe . . .
“Is it that busboy I work with? Angelo Falcone?”
“I can’t answer that, Esther.” He sighed again. “Even though it’ll probably be all over the news by tonight.”
“How about this? Just tell me if I’m wrong.”
He didn’t say anything. And since I doubted he could say anything else to me about the case right now, either, I said, “Call me tomorrow?”
Apart from wanting to finish our interrupted tryst, I knew it was time to come clean with him—though I wasn’t yet sure just how much that meant telling him.
“I will,” he promised. “And if there’s a miracle and I’m wrong about working late tonight . . .”
“Let me know,” I said.
After I hung up, I told Max and Lucky what had happened.
“Oh, dear,” said Max.
“Angelo? That punk!” Lucky said in exasperation.
“How do you think he learned about the hit so quickly?” I wondered.
“Word travels fast in our business,” Lucky said. “And that Falcone kid is always hangin’ around and trying to soak up juice. He probably heard about the hit before your boyfriend did.”
“So you agree with Detective Lopez’s initial assessment that Angelo Falcone didn’t commit the murder?” Max said. “But I don’t understand. What does the young man get out of falsely claiming he did it?”
“He
thinks
he’s getting the attention of the don,” Lucky said. “What he’ll
actually
get is an early grave. If the Corvinos don’t whack him, the Gambellos will.”
“Goodness! Why?”
“Because of all the trouble that putz is about to cause.”
“Is it that bad?” I asked.
Lucky nodded. “Even with Vinny, Nathan, and Bobby telling the Corvinos the truth, it wasn’t gonna be easy to convince the family that the Gambellos didn’t whack Danny. But now, with that
babbo
boasting about the hit, they’ll think he did it to get his button. They’ll figure we ordered the hit. Or at least hinted that we wanted it done. What else
could
they think?”
“But if the cops don’t think Angelo did it,” I said hopefully, “then maybe the Cor—”
“It don’t matter what the cops think.” Lucky shook his head. “Angelo has stood up for the hit. In our business, there’s no taking that back.”
“Not even if we can find out who’s really doing all this?”
“That won’t help Angelo stay alive. It might calm down the two families, though,” Lucky said. “But we ain’t having much luck so far in figuring out this thing.”
“We’ve got to do better,” I said.
“Yes, we must,” Max agreed.
Lucky nodded. “Or there’s gonna be a full-scale mob war the likes of which ain’t been seen in a long time.”
I knew he was right. I also suspected that now that Danny was dead, everything Lucky had said to him last night might be interpreted by the Corvinos as a threat rather than an attempt to help him.
Whatever dark feelings I had about Lucky’s murder of Elena Giacalona’s second husband, I didn’t want him to die. And I knew that what he wasn’t saying was that he would be high on the Corvinos’ list of targets now.
17
 
“S
helley, the English poet, saw his doppelgänger shortly before he drowned,” I said wearily. “Fascinating.”
“ ‘He’? The guy’s parents named him Shelley?” Lucky shook his head. “I guess they took one look at that baby and could tell he’d grow up to write poetry.”
I looked up from the book I was perusing with fast-growing boredom. “Actually, they named him Percy,” I said. “Percy Bysshe Shelley.”
“Percy.”
Lucky rolled his eyes. “What’s with the English, anyhow?”
Sitting at the big table in Zadok’s Rare and Used Books, I flipped impatiently through the pages of the volume in my hands. “According to this, a double or
doppio
may also be known as a ‘beta body,’ or a ‘subtle body,’ or—”
“Ain’t nothing subtle about getting whacked,” Lucky said gloomily.
“—a ‘fluidic body.’ In Irish and English folklore—”
“The English again,” Lucky grumbled.
“—it’s called a fetch.”
I sighed and tossed the book aside. It hit a pile of other equally boring books sitting on the edge of the table. They fell over and crashed to the floor. Lucky, who was pacing around the shop, drew in a sharp breath and flinched. Nelli, who was napping, woke up and leaped to her feet with a sharp bark. Max, also sitting at the big table, looked up from his reading, blinked, then went back to reading.
“Sorry,” I said to Nelli. “My fault. Go back to sleep.”
She yawned, wagged her tail, then turned three times in a circle before lying down and returning to her slumbers. I gathered up the books and restacked them. “And in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead,
” I said to Lucky, “a double is called a Bardo-body.”
“Who cares?” he said.
“My point exactly. Who cares?” I sighed, folded my arms on the table we were sitting at, and rested my head on them. “We’re not getting anywhere.”
The shop’s telephone rang. It startled me, but I didn’t even lift my aching head. I heard Max rise and cross the floor to answer it.
“Zadok’s Rare and Used Books. How may I help you? Yes, this is Max . . . Hello? Hello?”
I lifted my head in time to see Max putting the phone back into its cradle. There was a puzzled expression on his face.
“Who was it?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Max frowned. “The caller said, ‘Max?’ When I said yes, he said, ‘Shit’ and hung up.”
“The voice didn’t sound familiar?” Lucky asked, also frowning.
“Does
anyone’s
voice sound familiar on the telephone?” Max asked, glancing at the modern device with open distaste.
“But it was definitely a man?” I asked.
“Yes. I mean, I think so.”
Lucky and I looked at each other. Then I gasped.
“Max! It . . . it couldn’t have been
you
, could it?”
Lucky blinked. “You think his doppelgangster was phoning him?”
“Oh, dear,” Max said. “I hope not.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, kid,” Lucky said to me. “This is a store. That call coulda been from anyone who likes dusty books. Or it coulda been the IRS.”
“Oh, no!” Now Max was
really
alarmed.
“Ah, don’t worry, Doc, I can take care of that little problem for you.”
I said, “Lucky, I don’t want you to—”
“My point is, let’s not make ourselves crazy. That’s exactly what the hitter wants, right?”
Max took a little breath and nodded. “You’re absolutely right, Lucky. We must strive for rational thought at all times.”
“You’ve got be kidding,” I muttered, looking at my pile of literature on doppelgängers and etheric bodies.
“Let’s get back to work,” Lucky said.
“Work?” I said to him. “What work are
you
doing?”
“You been on my back since last night,” he said irritably. “What’s with you?”
I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Max, since I was the one who had introduced Lucky to him. So I said, “
We’re
studying stacks of books with long-winded print the size of subatomic particles, while
you’re
pacing around and talking on the phone.”
“
You’re
the one who told me to try to find out what the Corvinos are saying about Danny’s death,” he pointed out. “And it was a good idea, so that’s what I’m doing.”
Obviously trying to prevent an argument, Max said, “Esther, perhaps some ice cream will help you keep your strength up? There’s some Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby in the freezer.”
I took a steadying breath. “An excellent idea.” I rose to my feet to get sustenance, spoons, and bowls. “Who else wants some?”
We spent the rest of the evening studying. In between Lucky’s phone calls, we exchanged ideas.
“If I’m correct in my theory that the victim’s encounter with his own doppelgangster unleashes a powerfully fatal curse,” Max said, wiping some Chubby Hubby from his beard, “then our short-term strategy should be to attempt to mitigate the effect of the curse.”
“Huh?” Lucky said.
“To try to take the juice out of the doppelgangsters,” I translated.
“Gotcha,” Lucky said. “No curse, no hit.”
“So how do we mitigate the curse?” I asked.
Lucky said, “By chopping off the doppelgangster’s head before it meets the victim.”
“That would be effective,” Max agreed. “But only if we meet the doppelgangster before the victim does.”
“Surely it would also only be a temporary solution?” I said. “I mean, if whoever’s behind this can create a doppelgangster, then can’t he create a replacement for it?”
“Possibly,” Max said. “It depends on how the creatures are being created. Which we still don’t know.” Nelli came to the table to examine our empty ice cream bowls. Max petted her absently while he said, “And, unfortunately, the other potential means of blocking their power also relies largely on understanding how they’re created.”
“What means is that?” Lucky asked.
“If I knew more about their creation or how their power functions,” Max said, “then I might feasibly be able to develop a potion or spell to help protect the victim—even if only temporarily—from their influence.”
“Well, Charlie and Johnny would’ve gobbled up any drink we put in front of them,” Lucky said. “But Danny was real careful about his diet. So whether or not that’ll work will probably depend on the target.”
“It will also depend on learning more,” Max said. “Without sufficient information, such intervention could easily endanger the next victim more than help him.”
“Yeah, my grandma—the
strega
—once accidentally gave someone a hernia when trying to get him to fall in love with her client.” Lucky shook his head. “Potions and spells can be tricky.”
“Indeed,” Max said.
“Whether or not you can protect the next victim also depends on our knowing who it is,” I said. “Which we don’t. Maybe there’s another doppelgangster wandering around out there right now, and we just haven’t heard about it yet—or heard about the resultant death.”
“I got my ear to the ground,” Lucky said, tapping his cell phone. “I’ll know if any more Gambello duplicates turn up at least.”
“And our ultimate objective, of course,” Max said, “is to unmask and stop our adversary. If the deadly effect of the curse can be eliminated or reduced, the sorcerer creating these entities would have to regroup and adapt. And that might give us time to find and expose him.”
Looking at the problem from another angle, I said to Lucky, “So with Danny dead, too, do you see any link among the victims yet? Something they all had in common?”
BOOK: Dopplegangster
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