It was even better than a mound of cash. It was the Necronomicon.
Joshi looked up at Gallo with his eyes sparkling weirdly, as if the mere sight of the book had imparted that light to them. “Who do you want me to kill first?” he whispered.
3: Wiseguys from Yuggoth
“And they call me crazy,” Gallo said, reading a newspaper article about Joseph Colombo’s Italian-American Civil Rights League. While Gallo had still been in prison, crime boss Colombo had created the organization to battle the negative stereotyping of Italian-Americans. In 1970, Colombo had organized an Italian-American Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle. Now, according to the newspaper article, Colombo had planned a second Unity Day rally to again be held in Columbus Circle, on June 28th.
“I’m telling ya, Gambino is not happy about Colombo drawing attention to himself like this,” said Kid Blast, gesturing in the air with his cigarette. The men were sequestered in their headquarters on Brooklyn’s President Street.
“But Frank Sinatra was happy enough to do a benefit for the League at Madison Square Garden, last November,” said Larry Gallo. “Can you imagine? The stupid fuck.”
“Larry,” Crazy Joe said, pointing at his older brother, his pale blue eyes meaningful. “Don’t knock Sinatra.”
“Gambino will back us up on anything we do to Colombo,” Jerome Johnson said, again referring to Carlo Gambino, the powerful mafia don who had once been allied with Colombo – but no more. Johnson was seated at a table, trying to twirl spaghetti around his fork as deftly as his white comrades did. Slurping an unruly strand into his mouth, then speaking around it as he chewed, he urged, “Let’s stop fuckin’ around and do it, boys. Stop wasting Joshi and the book on these little fish and go for the big man, huh?”
But Gallo had been a little reluctant to go after his more important, high-profile enemies with their newfound weapon, because of its unpredictability and the possible attention it might bring back to him (and this from a man who normally reveled in attention). There had been a number of experimental hits, as Johnson had said, on lesser figures in Colombo’s ranks. Some of these had gone okay. In one man’s bedroom, a doorway had been opened up. His hysterical widow – still in psychiatric care – claimed her befuddled husband had approached the portal…and long, multiply-jointed arms like those of the king of all Alaska king crabs had suddenly reached out of the murk beyond the threshold and pulled her husband through, out of sight. She had heard brief, distorted and gurgling cries, and then the doorway had darkened and vanished, leaving only some icy water spattered on the carpet. No body. The victim was sleeping with the fishes of another dimension.
Yet then there had been the hit where another technique had been used. The grimoire described the use of a lens in combination with certain potent chants. By this means, the spell-caster was said to be able to peer through the lens into other realms – or focus, magnify and project his mental energies. Joshi had suggested that any sort of lens might serve this purpose, from one’s own spectacles to a camera. On the night in question he had used his reading glasses, and consulted some notes in his lap, copied from the book back in his apartment. He had been sitting in the passenger’s seat of a car at the time, Jerome Johnson behind the wheel, and Johnson had watched him read and reread the notes, memorizing them, then lift his gaze and direct it toward the tenement building they were parked across the street from. Specifically, at the bedroom window of an apartment in which one of Colombo’s men resided.
There had been a short, sharp crack like a miniature clap of thunder, and Johnson later described to Gallo seeing two blue streaks shoot from Joshi’s spectacles, through the closed car window, and through the glass of that third floor window. (Later they realized these extra sheets of glass had tripled the intended effect.) The next thing they knew, the darkened room behind that third floor window lit up with intense blue light, the glass exploded outward, and the exterior of the entire tenement building was crawling with a web of crackling blue electricity. This net of unearthly power danced and flickered for nearly a full minute, and Johnson got the car moving out of there. The next morning, they all learned from the newspaper that their target had indeed perished – as had his wife and three other of the building’s tenants who hadn’t escaped the fire that raged through and ultimately gutted it. “Nice work, Superman,” Gallo had told Joshi, swatting him with the rolled up newspaper.
As a result of this experiment in particular, at times Gallo had had second thoughts about continuing to use the book as a weapon; once he likened it to picking off ants with atom bombs. But then, he figured it probably had more to do with Joshi’s abilities in interpreting and executing the book’s spells and invocations. Maybe the man just needed to continue to hone his craft, his sniper’s eye and trigger finger.
“Nobody heard from Joshi yet?” he asked the others now. They’d called the occult scholar’s apartment a half dozen times that day.
“Nope, Joey,” said one of his soldiers.
“Okay, Jerome, go over to the book worm’s place and see if he’s there. If not, wait there for him – and give him a slap in the head for not being around, when he does show up.”
“Got ya, Joe.” Jerome wiped his mouth with a napkin as he pushed himself up from the table.
Talk turned again to Colombo, but it was only a half an hour after he’d left the gang’s headquarters that Jerome Johnson called and asked to speak with Crazy Joe. “Yeah?” Gallo said into the phone.
“I’m at the book worm’s place,” Johnson said, careful not to mention names in case the phone was being wiretapped. “I think you should get over here, man.”
“What’s so important?”
“I really think you oughta see this for yourself.”
“All right, all right, I’m on my way.”
Within another half an hour, Gallo stood beside Johnson in the livingroom of Joshi’s apartment, staring at the body of his former unlikely assassin. Joshi sat in a cozy armchair, a book still open in his lap. His arms were draped comfortably on the chair’s armrests – but there were no hands at the ends of them. Nor was there any longer a head atop Joshi’s torso. And yet, there was no blood; not a speck of it. Joshi’s neck, and the stumps of his wrists, ended in odd twists as if the missing parts had been screwed off.
“Did you look around for the head and hands?” Gallo asked Johnson without taking his eyes off the corpse.
“Yeah, man. Nothing.”
Gallo leaned over the body and closed the cover of the book in its lap. “This isn’t the Necronomicon.”
“No, it isn’t,” Johnson agreed. “We can’t find that, either.”
Gallo straightened up fast, his eyes going wild and twitchy. He had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic back in 1950. “What do you mean?”
“Whoever did this took the book, too.”
“Fuck! Who else but Joshi or you or me would know what this thing could do? Know enough to take it? And who would already know this magic shit good enough to do this?” He waved his hand at the abbreviated cadaver.
Johnson leveled his gaze with Gallo ominously. “Gavin, Joey. He must have heard we’re at war with Colombo, and gone to him. Man needs his fixes, you know.”
“Madonne,” Gallo murmured, looking to the headless corpse again.
4: Camera Obscura
Joseph Colombo was all smiles as he moved toward the stage and its podium, so as to address the sizable crowd gathered for the second annual Italian-American Unity Day rally, in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. (Named after that positive Italian role model, Christopher Columbus.) And why shouldn’t he smile? The man was having it both ways. He was the don of one of New York’s five mafia families, and also the man who had convinced the Justice Department to stop using the word “mafia.” Because of Colombo, the word “mafia” would not be uttered in the film The Godfather, as well. Mustn’t have the world getting the wrong idea about his people.
Jerome Johnson was nudging his way through the crowd at the sa
me rate Colombo was, his heart rocking with the applause that surrounded him. Despite his clearly being African-American rather than Italian-American, his progress went unquestioned; Johnson had managed to acquire credentials as a member of the press, flaunting a dated and oddly adapted camera. Joshi had been working on this device at the time of his death, and not only that, but folded in Johnson’s pocket was the sheet containing the copied chants Joshi had uttered that night parked in front of the enemy soldier’s apartment building. Johnson had been memorizing the lines all last night and this morning.
Colombo had almost reached the stage now, but was pausing here and there to shake hands – under the stern and attentive gaze of his bodyguards, including his son, Joe Jr.
Johnson was tempted to call out for Colombo to stop and turn toward him, to give him more time to raise the camera to his eye and frame his target in the viewfinder, but he was afraid to be so obvious, to call attention to his supposedly innocuous actions. In his mind, he was already saying the chant over and over. It lay on his tongue like a bullet in the chamber of a gun, his finger slowly tightening on the trigger.
Colombo had stopped for handshakes enough times, luckily, for Johnson to have sufficiently closed the gap between them – and he had another stroke of luck, when a legitimate photojournalist asked Colombo to turn toward him for a shot. When the mob boss complied, still grinning like the showman he had become, Johnson pressed his eye to the viewfinder and centered Colombo’s face within it. “Say cheese,” he muttered, and then launched swiftly but carefully into the memorized words of power.
Three times he depressed the camera’s button, and three times loud cracks rang out. Blue streaks like tracer bullets launched from the camera’s lens three times. It wasn’t as subtle as he might have hoped, but Johnson reassured himself once again that if people did single him out, seize and search him, they would find no gun upon him. Just this harmless, quirky old camera.
Colombo had turned his head again just as Johnson pressed the button the first time. Three clean black holes appeared to open in his head and neck as if by magic, and in fact for an instant Johnson saw a few forks of bluish electricity flick from the wounds, like the tongues of serpents hiding inside his skull. Then the man dropped out of the camera’s viewfinder.
Johnson lowered his camera in time to be grabbed roughly. He twisted around, saw that it was one of Colombo’s bodyguards. “Hey, man,” he protested, his voice all but drowned out by a roar of horror and fear from the crowd, “what’s going on?”
But now Joe Jr. had a hold of him, as well, and a few moments later two uniformed policemen joined in. One of the four, Johnson wasn’t sure which, had grabbed the camera from his hands. That was okay. They’d find no weapon secreted inside it. Without the chants, without the knowledge of the Necronomicon, it was nothing but a piece of junk.
Johnson was still more confident than he was nervous, even as the policemen began to handcuff him. That is, until he turned his head and saw another man staring at him from a few feet away. This man was not crying out, screaming, panicking like all those others around him. Johnson met his eyes squarely – and realized he knew this man, though he had never known him to wear wire-rimmed glasses before.
“Gavin!” he said.
Then there were three loud reports, three bright blue flashes before Johnson’s eyes, and he felt three holes open as if by magic in his body. Three deep holes. After that, going limp in the arms of the policemen who had restrained him, Johnson felt no more…and the former collector of rare books turned junkie melted innocently back into the crowds.
5: Clam House
Joe Colombo didn’t die of his wounds…that is, not right away. Not until 1978, in fact. He remained in a coma, and who could say what strange and terrible dreams he might have experienced in those years – and been powerless to articulate, or escape?
Caporegime Vincenzo Aloi was moved up to take Colombo’s place as the acting boss of the family – at least, until the penal system was finished with the actual new boss, Carmine Persico. But regardless of who had run the family before, and who would run it now, they all hated Crazy Joe Gallo the same.
Gallo knew the war was hardly over, whomever his opposing general might be, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to celebrate his 43rd birthday in a big way. (Did he ever do anything any other way?) He started out on the night of April 6th, 1972 with a trip to the Copacabana night club with some of the celebrity friends who had lionized him since his release from prison – the comedians Don Rickles and David Steinberg and the actor Jerry Orbach. But from there, in the early morning hours and in search of breakfast, Gallo and his wife Sina (a former nun, whom Gallo had married only a few weeks earlier), Sina’s young daughter, Gallo’s sister, and his bodyguard Pete “The Greek” Diapoulos, moved on to Umberto’s Clam House. This was in Little Italy, considered to be sacred ground, not to be violated. That was part of Gallo’s reasoning. But Little Italy or not, what was it all worth if one couldn’t enjoy the fruits of one’s labor? Gallo had just spent ten years behind bars, and now those bars were gone.
“Fantastic,” Gallo raved about his dish – scungilli in clam sauce – to Sina, “this is just the best. I’m gonna want seconds. Seconds for everybody, all right? Except for you,” he teased Sina’s daughter Lisa, imitating Don Rickles’ voice and mannerisms. “You win a cookie.”
Pete the Greek spluttered and almost choked on his food. “Stop it, Joey!”
Gallo craned his neck, looking for their waiter so as to call a second round of food to their table. He was seated facing the door, and so it was that he saw a curious figure enter Umberto’s before any of the others in his party could notice.
The man wore a fedora pulled down low over his eyes, shadowing a pasty white face. He was tall, and an oversized overcoat made him look broad and bulky, but it hung on him oddly – as if on some strange framework instead of a man’s body. His baggy trousers were knobby in the wrong places, too loose and empty elsewhere. And his gait…weirdly awkward, like a man tottering drunkenly, or on new prosthetic legs.
Could any other man possess these same peculiarities? Unless he was an identical twin, in identical clothing? Yet on the heels of the first strange figure, a second man stepped through Umberto’s doorway. Same fedora, bulky and ill-fitting coat, baggy trousers jutting in unusual places. And as the pair crossed the threshold, a funny sound accompanied them. It was rather like the buzzing of electric hair clippers, and it mounted in volume quickly.
Whatever was wrong with these two men, it all added up to no good as far as Crazy Joe was concerned, and even before the second man had passed through the doorway Gallo said sharply to his bodyguard: “Pete!”
Pete the Greek looked up in mid-chew and said, “Huh?” Too late, he spotted the figures. Saw the two of them had raised both their hands. Clenched in each hand of the freakish duo were revolvers, and the four revolvers began firing simultaneously in an abrupt and deafening barrage.
Gallo threw their table over immediately in order to shield his family. “Get down!” he yelled at them. Peripherally, he saw Sina drag Lisa to the floor. Amid the wild firing, as the two shooters came shambling closer, Gallo bolted in their direction so as to pass them, headed for the door. His intention was to draw fire away from his loved ones, but also to escape outside, to where his Cadillac waited at the curb.
But he felt a bullet smash one of his elbows. Another struck him in the spinal column. He followed through with his momentum, however, charged as he was with adrenaline. In his desperation to escape, he crashed through the restaurant’s plate glass door. The shooters had turned, however, following him with their fire as he’d lunged past them. A last bullet caught Gallo in the neck, severing his carotid artery.
He went down on the cold pavement, his Cadillac tantalizingly near – gleaming in the early morning light that was resurrecting his beloved city from the formlessness of night. He was dying, his blood pumping out of him onto the sidewalk, but he turned his head and watc
hed the two assassins push their tall, wide bodies sideways through the shattered glass of Umberto’s doorway. The first assassin tore his sleeve open in the process, but the second one was even less lucky. A fang of glass snagged him under the jaw. Seemingly heedless to this, however, the shooter kept going – and his head, hat and all, was lifted off his shoulders and thudded to the sidewalk.
Gallo wondered if what he was seeing was the delirium of his encroaching death.
The first killer had somehow folded his uncanny form into the backseat of a car that had just pulled up to the curb behind the Cadillac. (From behind, his coat jutted here and there even more bizarrely than did his legs, as if he carried something on his back beneath the coat.)
The second killer, though, paused, turned around, and with some effort stooped to retrieve his dropped head. Gallo saw two things then that only furthered his sense of delirium. One was that the hand reaching for the head now extended beyond the cuff of its sleeve, and in so doing, revealed a wrist that looked like bare, spiky bone. Or perhaps, the chitinous limb of an insect. The appendage seemed to wear the human hand at the end of it like a glove.
The other thing was the head itself. It lay on its cheek, as did Gallo, and he could see the slack white face well enough to recognize it. The fallen, sightlessly gazing head was that of his old fellow prison inmate, Joshi.
The headless killer scooped the dropped head under his arm, turned back toward the waiting car and staggered to it as quickly as he could manage. With the roar of shooting now finished, Gallo could hear that buzzing sound again, following after his assailants. He could also hear a cacophony of screams and shouts through Umberto’s shattered door.
Gallo again turned his head on the sidewalk to follow the second assassin as he crammed himself into the passenger’s seat, up front beside the driver. For a few moments the dome light was on, and in that light Gallo saw the driver look over at him with a small, satisfied smile. It was the last face Crazy Joe Gallo would ever see – and yet he had never met the book collector Gavin before, and so he didn’t recognize him.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 - Issues 10 through 20 Page 66