“Thanks.” I smiled back. “What time is the service?”
“Not for another half hour,” Father Gabriel said.
“I’m looking forward to it,” I said.
“Lucky can show you around the church while I prepare,” the priest replied. “If you’ll excuse me?”
“Of course.” I smiled at him again. He was a hunk, this priest.
He went up to the altar to get something, then exited the church through the same side door he had used to enter. Going back to his study, I supposed, or whatever kind of room priests used to get ready for Mass. Vestry? Crypt? Dressing room?
Maybe I’d ask the Catholic guy I was dating.
If he was still dating me, that was.
“Flirting with a priest,” Lucky muttered. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“I wasn’t flirting,” I said.
“Oh, then what was that great big smile you gave him?”
“Well, maybe I was flirting a little,” I admitted. “That’s one cute priest.”
Lucky looked shocked. “There’ll be none of that here, young lady. Besides, ain’t you got a boyfriend? A possessive one, as I recall?”
“Do I?” I wondered morosely. “I hope so.”
“Well, he ain’t gonna like hearing you flirted with a priest,” Lucky warned.
“Then he’d better not hear it,” I replied.
“Hmph. Come on. Let’s sit down. We’re wasting time.”
Lucky walked me to the center aisle of the church, genuflected next to a pew that was about five rows from the front, and gestured for me to take a seat.
Then he sat down next to me and said in a low voice, “The word from the top is, we can’t have someone feeling free to whack a made guy without permission or warning. Especially not a good earner like Charlie.”
“So Charlie was telling the truth about being a good earner?” I mused.
I chose not to dwell on whether Charlie had also been telling the truth about being great in bed. It seemed too improbable, and the images invoked by such pondering wouldn’t be good for my mental health.
“So I gotta find who hit Charlie, and I gotta whack him,” Lucky said matter-of-factly.
“I don’t think we should be talking about whacking in church,” I said uneasily.
“What do you care? You ain’t even Catholic.”
“Even so, it doesn’t seem appropriate.”
“Hey, this is the place where we confess our sins,” Lucky said. “So we might as well plan ’em here, too.”
“There’s a certain warped logic to that,” I admitted. “But I don’t want to be involved in planning a retaliatory homicide.”
“Huh?”
“Er, I don’t want to help you whack someone.”
“You think I’d take a girl along on business?” Lucky said dismissively. “You’re just gonna help me figure out who done it, so I can make sure he don’t do it again.”
“I think we should leave this to the cops,” I said firmly.
“Until when? Until you get whacked out?”
I flinched. “What makes you think I’ll get whacked out?”
“Cops think you saw something, don’t they?”
“But I didn’t!” I insisted.
“You know you didn’t. But if the cops keep saying you did, how long do you figure it’ll take the hitter to decide he should tidy up his loose ends, just in case?” Lucky said.
“Tidy up . . . You mean, kill me?”
“A lot of these young guys . . .” Lucky shook his head. “No patience. No self-control. It’s disgusting, the things they’ll do when they get a little nervous.”
I started rethinking my position on protective custody.
Lucky said, “So it’s best if you tell me whatever you can, kid. Did Charlie say anything to you before he got whacked?”
I nodded. This, at least, was a subject that I didn’t think would make me a potential accessory to homicide. “In fact, he said a lot.”
“He had problems? He knew something was up?”
“He knew he was going to die.” I added, “But Charlie sounded crazy, Lucky.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Lucky said. “What did he say to you?”
“He said he’d been cursed, he’d been marked for death.”
“Hmm. Marked for death?” Lucky nodded. “Go on.”
“He talked about la morte—”
“He talked Italian?” Lucky stiffened, as if the use of Italian made the situation doubly serious.
“A little. La morte was the only part I understood. Oh, and something about a dope.”
“A dope?”
“Um . . . a doppio?”
“Doppio.” Lucky frowned, puzzled. “A double?”
“Yes! He kept babbling about a double.”
I’d told Napoli about this, too, but he had dismissed it—just as I had dismissed it when Charlie was clutching my arm and raving about it. Napoli went over and over some parts of that conversation with me, though, since he found it noteworthy that Charlie believed he was going to die. The detective obviously thought that, somewhere in that ranting, Charlie had made a revealing statement about the anticipated homicide that I’d either missed, forgotten, or was deliberately concealing.
Lucky asked me, “What about a double?”
I thought back. At the time, I’d been convinced Charlie was having a medical or psychotic episode, and I’d been more concerned with trying to get help than with listening to him.
“He said something about the evil eye,” I said.
Lucky clutched the pew in front of us. “The evil eye?”
“I thought it sounded silly, but he—”
“Hah! Don’t mock the evil eye, kid.”
“He said he’d seen his perfect double. That it looked, walked, and talked like him. I thought he had looked at a mirror and had a hallucination, but he insisted it was real. He said that he’d looked into its eyes, that it had spoken to him, and so now he was marked for death. I know it sounds crazy . . .” I spread my hands.
Lucky rubbed his jaw as he thought it over. I noticed he needed a shave. “But is it crazy?”
“Well, something was certainly affecting his brain,” I said. “Remember how strangely he behaved the other night? The night he came back to the restaurant and acted . . .” The memory suddenly hit me in a completely different light. “Acted as if . . .”
Our eyes met.
“As if,” Lucky said, “he hadn’t been to dinner yet.”
“Hadn’t asked me to sing for him,” I said. “Hadn’t been inside the restaurant at all yet.”
“As if he was . . .”
A chill crept through me. “A different Charlie.”
“A second Charlie,” Lucky said.
“Charlie’s perfect double.” It took me a moment to realize my jaw was hanging open. “My God, Lucky, we saw him! It? Er, the double.”
He nodded. “The same night we saw Charlie.”
“So which one of them was the real Charlie?” I wondered. “And which was the double?”
“I dunno. They both looked like Charlie to me.”
“And they both behaved exactly like Charlie,” I said.
“But one was a fake. A ringer.”
“Why?” I wondered. “And how?”
“And where the hell did it come from?”
“That was the last thing Charlie said before he died,” I recalled. “That he didn’t know who had sent it.”
Lucky thought it over. “So did Charlie’s double whack him?”
“Wouldn’t someone have seen it? Charlie’s double was every bit as big as Charlie, after all.”
“Yeah, that’s another problem we got. If the double was the hitter, did it become invisible or something?”
“Has anything like this ever happened before?”
Lucky shook his head. “I been in the business more than forty years, kid. I never seen or heard of nothin’ like this. It’s weird. I got no idea what t
o do about it.”
Wondering just how big a can of worms I was opening, I said, “I know someone we should talk to about this.”
“Not your boyfriend,” Lucky said firmly.
“No,” I said. “Definitely not him.” Lopez might have me locked up in a padded cell if he knew what I was planning to do. “Lucky, I’d like to introduce you to Max.”
5
Zadok’s Rare and Used Books was a cozy shop in an old, ivy-covered townhouse in a quiet street in the West Village. The discreet exterior meant that few window shoppers or casual browsers ever entered the bookstore. But since the shop specialized in rare and expensive occult books, many of them written in ancient languages, it wasn’t really a foot-traffic kind of business, anyhow.
“Your friend’s a bookseller?” Lucky said as we approached the shop. “Our problem don’t seem to me like a book problem, kid.”
“Max has special expertise that we may need. He just sells books to show the Internal Revenue Service a visible means of support,” I explained.
“Ah,” Lucky said, nodding. “You mean the store is his perfectly legitimate business interest.”
In a sense, that was exactly what I meant.
“I just don’t know if he’ll be awake this early,” I said. We had come by foot, cutting over to Hudson and heading north, since it was an easy walk and since I thought Max might be more coherent if I let him sleep as long as possible, instead of dashing here from Little Italy in a cab by dawn’s early light. “He often works late into the night, and—”
A muffled explosion coming from the depths of the bookstore made me flinch.
“What the hell was that?” Lucky demanded.
“I don’t know, but it came from below the shop!” Worried about Max, I headed toward his door.
“Wait a minute, Esther!”
“He might be hurt!” Though he was a skilled sorcerer, not all of Max’s alchemy experiments went smoothly.
When I opened the door of the shop, Lucky said, “It’s not locked? There’s something fishy about this.”
In fact, it was locked. Magically. Max couldn’t keep track of the key, so he used a spell that kept out strangers when the shop was closed but allowed him access at all times. I had become a regular enough visitor since Golly Gee’s disappearance (and subsequent reappearance) that Max had modified the spell so that I, too, could enter the shop at will.
But this was no time for an explanation that would require even more explanations. So I just said, “No, it’s fine.”
I entered the bookshop and quickly headed to the back of the building. There was a little cul-de-sac there with some storage shelves, a utilities closet, a bathroom, and a door marked PRIVATE. I opened that door onto a narrow, creaky stairway.
One set of steps led down to the cellar, where Max’s laboratory was. The other steps led up to the second floor, where he slept. There was also an apartment on the top floor. Hieronymus had lived up there, and I assumed Max’s next assistant would, too. It had been empty for several weeks now. Apparently, finding a decent sorcerer’s apprentice wasn’t easy. Especially after recent experience had convinced Max to add “must harbor no evil ambitions whatsoever” to his list of requirements for prospective candidates.
“Whoa!” Lucky said behind me. “Weird.”
I assumed he meant the method of lighting the stairwell: there was a burning torch stuck in a sconce on the wall. Like the front door lock, it functioned via mystical means.
I smelled something foul floating up from the laboratory, a putrid, acrid odor mixed with smoke, incense, and . . . wet dog fur?
“Max?” I called.
The only response was a menacing sound—like a hungry demon’s stomach growling.
“Max! Are you all right?” I called, my voice sharp with anxiety.
Lucky elbowed me aside to peer down the steep, dark stairway that was filling up with foul-smelling smoke. “You ain’t saying he’s down there?”
I faintly heard some coughing from below.
“Max?” I shouted.
The growling sound turned into a roar.
Then I heard a man scream in terror. “Argh!”
“Max!” I started down the steep, narrow stairs, holding tightly to the railing so I wouldn’t stumble.
“Esther, no.” Lucky made a grab for my arm, but I slipped away, too scared for Max to pay attention. “I’ll go. You stay—goddamn it!” I heard the thud of his footsteps behind me as he started descending after me.
The roaring sound from the laboratory got louder, bouncing off the narrow walls of the stairwell.
I choked on the smoke, covered my nose and mouth with my hand, and shouted over my shoulder, “Watch your step! These stairs are uneven!”
“No shit!” Lucky shouted back.
I knew the bad language—so common among wiseguys, but so rare for Lucky to use in a woman’s presence—was a sign of how perturbed he was.
Understandable. As the roaring reached a pitch that seemed to make the stairs shake, fear ran through me hot and fast. I reached the landing and burst into the laboratory.
At first glance, I thought Max was being attacked by a demonic hellhound. I stared in shock, peering through the smoke-filled room.
Max, a small and slightly plump man, was rolling around on the floor, grunting and crying out in protest. His long white hair was disheveled and tangling with his beard as he tried to ward off his attacker.
An immense, tan canine beast was jumping up and down on top of him as it barked noisily. Its teeth were bared, its pink tongue lolling and its big ears flopping around. The huge creature’s paws batted playfully at Max as its tail wagged . . .
Its tail was wagging?
I said, “What the hell—”
“Esther, get down!” Lucky shouted. “I’m gonna blow it away!”
I turned around to find myself facing the barrel of a gun. I gasped and staggered backward.
I stepped on Max, who howled in pain. Startled, I lost my footing. I tried to regain it, but I instead did an involuntary barrel vault over the dog. I landed on my head and lay there in a helpless daze as an immense pink tongue started washing my face.
The beast’s breath smelled exactly the way you’d expect a hell-spawned canine-demon’s breath to smell.
“Esther?” Max said.
The disgusting facial was interrupted by a paw, which was the size and density of a baseball bat, poking me for signs of life. The creature’s nails needed cutting.
“Get down!” Lucky shouted—presumably at Max, since I was flat on my back with a massive paw giving me a dermabrasion treatment.
There was an explosion of noise so loud I thought my skull would shatter.
Lucky had fired. The shot missed the dog and instead hit a jar full of dried animal organs. The jar exploded, sending a spray of organs and organ dust all over me. This revived me enough to sit bolt upright and scream. Then I gagged on the acrid smoke and dust I inhaled.
Another shot convinced the now terrified dog to try to hide, and I nearly smothered when it chose my lap as the handiest refuge. Pinned down by the beast’s weight, I was unable to escape when Lucky’s next wild shot shattered a beaker that spilled some sticky blue substance all over me and the animal.
“Don’t shoot!” I screamed, shoving at the dog and trying to see Lucky through the gradually clearing smoke.
If his next shot came closer to the dog, he might kill me, since the creature was huddled on top of me, whining and drooling in my hair.
Max shouted something in another language as he pointed at Lucky. Suddenly the mobster’s gun flew out of his hand and turned into a bat—the nocturnal kind with creepy looking wings. The bat hovered over Lucky for a few moments, as if contemplating biting him.
Lucky’s eyes got as big as golf balls. He fell to his knees and crossed himself.
Then the bat flew toward me. I don’t like bats, so I screamed again and covered my head with my arms. The dog thought I was trying to play and, r
ecovered from the emotional crisis inspired by Lucky’s gunshots, it started jumping up and down on top of me.
“Max! Help!” I cried.
“To the rescue!” A moment later, Max grabbed the dog around the neck and heaved backward with all his body weight.
The dog resisted for a moment, then decided to play with Max instead of me. The two of them flew backward together and landed with a thud. The dog got up and wagged its tail, looking from me to Max, who lay prone and motionless.
I sat up, trying to catch my breath as I looked around warily for the bat. I saw it sinking to the floor on the far side of the room. To my relief, it was dissolving and oozing back into its original shape, the inanimate weapon which had given it such brief life. Moments later, Lucky’s gun lay on the floor where the bat had been.
I glanced at Lucky. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he was praying fervently in Italian.
“Max? Are you conscious?” I asked hoarsely.
“More or less,” came the faint answer. After a moment, Max sat up slowly, disheveled and panting. He rubbed his shoulder as he asked me, “Are you all right, Esther?”
“Sort of.” I coughed again and waved smoke away from my face. “How about you?”
“I think I’m being robbed,” he said, eyeing Lucky anxiously.
“Oh! No, no,” I said, “he came with me.”
Max looked confused. “Are you being robbed?”
“I didn’t know he had a gun with him. I swear.” But I supposed it should have occurred to me that a notorious hit man—even a semiretired one—probably never left home without his piece. “He’s a friend of mine, Max. The gunfire was, um, a misunderstanding.”
“Well . . .” Max watched Lucky praying. “At least he seems repentant.”
After the smoke cleared and we felt strong enough to haul ourselves off the floor, it took us some time to convince Lucky to stop praying and have a seat while we restored order to Max’s laboratory. It took even longer to clean up the mess.
The room was cavernous, windowless, and shadowy. The walls were decorated with charts covered in strange symbols and maps of places with unfamiliar names. Bottles of powders, vials of potions, and dried plants jostled for space on the cluttered shelves. Beakers, implements, and tools lay tumbled and jumbled on the heavy, dark furniture. Today there was also a lot of shattered glass to clean up, as well as crumbling pieces of dried animal parts and a sticky blue liquid that was staining everything it touched, including me and the dog.
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