Doppelgangster

by Laura Resnick

  I gasped. “That’s right! When Johnny’s double met Danny’s double, he was as clueless about its true nature as the real Johnny would have been.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Lucky said. “Does this mean I could be a doppelgangster and not even know it? Or one of you?”

  “That reminds me! Danny’s death almost made me forget,” said Max. “I continued my reading this morning, after a few hours of sleep, and I found the solution to one major aspect of our problem. It turns out that it is childishly simple to identify a doppelgangster!”

  I blinked. “It is?”

  “Do we need holy water?” Lucky asked. “I know where we can get all we need.”

  “No, not necessary,” Max assured him.

  I said, “I thought you were using Nelli to identify doppelgangsters?”

  “Alas, until she actually exposes one, we have no way of being sure that she can identify these creatures. But according to my reading, we needn’t worry.”

  “Under the circumstances, I’m probably going to keep worrying,” I said. “But go ahead and explain. How can we identify a doppelgangster?”

  “As we’ve learned, such a creature is made of ephemeral substances empowered through mystical means. One way in which the duplicates we’ve encountered fit the classic doppelganger pattern is that their function is specific and limited. Therefore, all the effort invested in fashioning a doppelgangster goes to its outward appearance and its imitative behavior. For a brief period, it must seem to be the real thing, that’s all.”

  “So?” I prodded.

  “So its internal mass is undisguised ephemeral matter.”

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about,” Lucky said.

  “In other words, they’re not real people,” Max said. “They’re mystical in nature. So although you may hear a heartbeat if you get close enough—because this seems to be a very talented and thorough sorcerer who would not neglect such important details—there isn’t actually a heart. Or a liver or bones or lungs or soft tissue or blood!” He looked at us triumphantly.

  Lucky and I looked blankly at each other for a moment.

  “So, Max, you’re sayin’ we gotta whack someone and open him up to see whether he’s a person or a doppelgangster? That don’t seem like much of a solution.”

  “No! No, nothing so extreme. Don’t you see?” Max said. “Doppelgangsters don’t have blood. They don’t bleed!”

  “So we gotta stab someone we suspect?” Lucky guessed.

  “No,” Max said. “We just need to, oh, prick him with a needle, for example.”

  “Oh! I get it now,” I said. “We only need to do enough damage to see whether someone bleeds like a normal human being?”

  “Exactly!” Max said. “If you prick someone’s finger with suitable emphasis, and there’s no sign whatsoever of blood, you’ve just found a doppelgangster.”

  “And once we find one,” I said, “how do we, uh, neutralize it?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. We simply decapitate it.”

  “What?”

  Max added, “From now on, we should keep large bladed weapons handy at all times for this purpose.”

  “Max!”

  “It won’t be like human decapitation, my dear,” he said reassuringly. “Remember, doppelgangsters don’t bleed or have any connective tissue.”

  “That’s not the point!” I rubbed my hand over my face. “At least, it’s not the main point. If we’re going to cut off someone’s head, we’d better be damn sure the individual in question really is a doppelgangster!”

  “Oh, yes,” Max agreed. “Yes, indeed.”

  “Damn sure, Max!”

  He nodded and patted my hand. “That’s why it’s so important to prick someone and check for blood before you attempt decapitation, Esther.”

  “I can’t decapitate someone!” I said, aghast.

  “Strictly speaking, you won’t be decapitating someone ,” Max said, “but rather some thing.”

  “Either way, I can’t do it,” I insisted.

  “Don’t worry about it, kid. I’ll take care of it. I’m used to it.” Lucky added to Max, “It’s not something a young lady should do.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Max said.

  “But we’re all gonna have to learn to identify doppelgangsters,” Lucky said firmly.

  Feeling rather frazzled, I said, “Maybe we should get a test kit for diabetics. They have to prick themselves enough to bleed, don’t they?”

  “I’ve always got a couple of knives on me. For backup,” Lucky said, reaching into one of his pockets. “I’ll give you one. That’ll do the job better than a needle.”

  “I don’t think I want a knife,” I said doubtfully.

  “There’s three guys dead, and we got no other way of identifying these creatures.”

  “Okay, I’ll take a knife,” I said. “You have a way of putting things into perspective.”

  “Here, have this one. It’s small, a good size for a woman.” He gave me a switchblade that seemed like some sort of stealth weapon. The curved blade was a dull gray color and barely two inches long. “You’d better start by using it on me.”

  “What?” I blurted.

  “I feel perfectly normal,” Lucky said. “But we’ve already figured out that every doppelgangster thinks it’s for real. So before we do anything else, we better make sure nobody here is one of them things.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to cut me?” I asked anxiously.

  “Yep. Don’t worry, I’m an expert, you won’t feel a thing.” He offered me his hand, palm up. “But since only wiseguys have been duplicated so far, I’m the most likely ringer in the room. So go ahead and make sure I really am who I think I am.”

  Grasping the little knife, I took Lucky’s hand in mine, brought the sharp, dull-colored blade close to his flesh… and then said, “I can’t do it.”

  “Go on,” he urged.

  “I’ve never cut someone. I don’t know how.”

  “It’s just like cuttin’ meat.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, revolted. “That didn’t help.”

  “Take the point of the knife and poke my finger.”

  I tried again, then shook my head. “I can’t do it.”

  “I can see you really are gonna have trouble decapitating an ephemeral mystical creature,” he said. “Come on, just do it, kid. Hey, I got an idea. Think about Salvatore Fatico.”

  That helped. I poked the blade into his finger.

  “Ouch!” Lucky said. “Not so hard!”

  “Oops! Sorry.”

  “I’ll get a bandage,” Max said.

  While Max fetched something for the bleeding, Lucky looked at his wounded finger. “Well, at least we know I ain’t a doppelgangster.”

  Since I obviously needed practice, the two men insisted I had to be the one to test Max, too. I didn’t cut him hard enough the first time, which led to a tense moment among us all before I tried again and drew blood. Then Lucky tested me. Despite his guarantee, I felt the cut. But I only bled a little.

  “Okay, so that’s done,” Lucky said matter-of-factly. “We’re all the original versions of ourselves. Good to know.”

  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 h
er 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

  “Shelley, the English poet, saw his doppelganger 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 doppelgangers 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.