Doppelgangster - Laura Resnick [26]
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 to 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