The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2)

by Richard Levesque

  Elsa nodded, the smug expression still in place. “Very good,” she said. “So, you’ve explained away Bruno. How do you explain Heinrich, then?”

  Behind her, a second man stepped out of the darkened doorway. His face was another exact double of the image of Frank Attentater that I’d shown around at burlesque houses all afternoon. And he was pointing a venomous little Luger at me, his expression smugger than Elsa’s.

  I kept the gun on Elsa, my mind doing acrobatics as I tried to jam this new piece into the puzzle. “Triplets?” I said.

  Her smile grew wider.

  “And Hans?”

  Another man stepped out of the darkness, this one from the other side of the door. Hans and Heinrich stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway, their faces exact doubles of each other. The only difference was that while Heinrich pointed a gun at me, Hans held the little electronic device that Elsa had zapped me with. He stood closer to me than his double did, the nasty zapper pointed right at my head.

  “Shit,” I said. And then I saw his thumb press the trigger.

  * * * * *

  When I woke up, I’d been bound to one of the chairs, my hands behind my back. My ankles were tied to the chair legs, and when I tried to move my wrists, the restraints dug into my skin sharply, making me wonder what I’d been tied with. My back was to a corner of the room, so I faced the entrance and the window I’d peeked through earlier. Elsa sat in a chair opposite me, my gun in her hand. On the table beside her was Guillermo’s portable telephone, and when I saw it I guessed that the antenna had been unspooled and used to bind me to the chair, probably without my captors understanding the connection between the wire and the little phone. I also recognized the little rectangular object I had seen through the window but hadn’t been able to identify; it was a book with a plain leather cover, no writing at all that I could discern. It was small for a book, about four inches by three and almost two inches thick. If the cover had been black, I’d have made it for a little Bible, but I knew that was not the case. I had a pretty good idea of what it was instead.

  Arranged behind Elsa, a wall of Teutonic grimness, were Bruno, Hans, and Heinrich. One of them held the Luger I’d seen before, and the other held the electronic stunner I’d already been nailed with twice. All four of my captors were staring at me, the smug expressions gone.

  “What do you call that thing, anyway?” was the first thing I said after giving my head a shake, hoping to stir the dust that the zapper had seemed to coat my senses with.

  Elsa shrugged. “The German term for it would not translate well. Think of it as a voltage gun.”

  “A voltage gun,” I repeated. Gritting my teeth and screwing up my eyes for a second, I added, “Well, it works. Congratulations on that.”

  Elsa smiled. “I’m sure the technicians in my country will be happy for the glowing review.” Then she leaned forward as the smile faded from her lips. “What are you doing here, Mr. Strait?”

  “Looking for that guy,” I said, nodding to the men behind her. “Or at least one of them.”

  Now I understood how Sherise Pike and the proprietor of the Speckled Hen could both place Frank Attentater in their clubs at the same time. Had I kept up my exploration of Hollywood burlesque houses, I probably would have found a third person who had seen him somewhere else on Saturday night around ten o’clock. Which one had gone from there to kill Klaus Lang was anyone’s guess.

  “I’ve never heard of identical quadruplets,” I said. “But it looks like that’s a thing now.”

  Elsa nodded. “Your explanation makes sense given your pitifully limited understanding of science, Mr. Strait.”

  “There’s no need to be insulting,” I said.

  “Insults serve a purpose sometimes.”

  I thought of a few choice ones that I could have tossed at her on the spot, but I kept them to myself, my bondage putting me at a definite disadvantage.

  “So now what?” I asked instead.

  “The fact that you’re still alive tells you that I’m not yet finished with you, yes?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “The problem, though, is that I am finished with you. Whatever you’ve got in mind, you’re driving down a one-way street. I’m not meeting you halfway.”

  She nodded. “I think you will. Given time.” Turning to the table, she picked up the portable phone. Then she held it up toward me. “Where did you get this?” she asked.

  “I won it in a card game, took it off a little old lady from Santa Monica.”

  She nodded, her eyes on the phone. I could tell that she liked what she saw.

  “Can you be serious, Mr. Strait? As serious as your situation warrants?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll start now.”

  “Good.” She set the phone down and turned her gaze back to me. “I would like very much to know more about the woman you share your house with. This…Carmelita, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. “That’s her.” Then I shrugged. “Not much to tell. She’s a bit of a homebody. No hobbies that I know of.”

  “What is she, Mr. Strait? I can tell that she is not a human being, but she is far too sophisticated to be an automaton. What, then?”

  “I don’t really know how to answer that, Elsa. And even if I did, why would I?”

  “To keep yourself alive.”

  I nodded. “I’m not saying I know the answer to what you’re asking, but if I did know, wouldn’t you just go ahead and kill me once you got the information you’re after? So, in that case, not telling you is what’s keeping me alive. Kind of complicated, isn’t it?”

  “If you continue being coy, you’re likely to get a few more volts.”

  “Understood,” I said. “I’ll strike coy off the list. Seriously, though, I don’t have answers on Carmelita. I know as well as you do that she’s not…normal. But beyond that…the information is above my pay grade. All I know is that she tends to get herself into trouble, and I’ve been sort of drafted to keep an eye on her. That’s it.”

  She nodded at this. “I don’t think I believe you. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who would do well without knowing all the facts. What is it you Americans say? You’re a noser, yes?”

  “I think you’re trying to say that I’m nosey.”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s it. Nosey. Not a good quality.”

  “It helps pay the bills.”

  Elsa let out a sigh. “I have a proposal for you, Mr. Strait. My companions and I are leaving your lovely state in the morning. I want this Carmelita to go with us.”

  This was a wrinkle I hadn’t expected. “I don’t think she’ll be a willing participant,” I said, trying to figure what could be behind Elsa’s request.

  “I never said she had to be willing.”

  “Well, I don’t see how I’m supposed to get her out here—willingly or not. I’m a bit tied up at the moment.”

  She half turned in her chair, and it squeaked under the movement. Picking up the telephone, she turned back toward me. “We can use this, yes?”

  I shook my head. “I need more, Elsa.”

  She looked confused. “More what?”

  “I can’t give Carmelita up that easily.”

  “Not in exchange for your life?”

  This whole business with Carmelita wasn’t anything I’d been prepared for, so I didn’t have a ready-made lie to toss out in my defense. Still, I’d managed to spin half of one while going through this exchange with Elsa, and now I let it fly. “My life isn’t going to be worth much if I lose her. The police have some dirt on me. They made a deal with me—keep Carmelita out of trouble in exchange for staying out of jail. If Carmelita disappears, I may as well be dead thanks to the charges they’re likely to level at me.”

  “You’ve been so bad?”

  “The LAPD holds a grudge.”

  She raised an eyebrow and seemed to be seeing the truth in my statement. “This doesn’t surprise me. I still don’t see what you want in exchange for your Carmelita.”

 
“If I can give the police the truth behind the killings—Mercy and Klaus—they might look favorably on that.”

  Elsa shrugged. “You call her first.”

  I shook my head. “No. You talk first.”

  She smiled. “I’m holding the gun, Mr. Strait. You’re fortunate that I’m even considering your terms. I could just kill you and be done with the whole affair.”

  “But you want Carmelita,” I said.

  She frowned.

  Then she turned to the men behind her and said, “Out.”

  The one who held the Luger looked confused. From where I sat, I couldn’t see the look Elsa shot back at him, but it must have been a good one. He turned, put the Luger in his waistband, and led the other two outside.

  “Close the door,” Elsa said, and a few seconds later her command was fulfilled.

  “Idiots,” she whispered.

  I raised an eyebrow at this.

  “Mr. Strait, you said they, along with the dead Franz, were quadruplets. In a way, you were correct, but they are not so linked by birth in the sense that you meant.”

  “No?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “What do you know about Klaus Lang?” she asked.

  “Not much,” I answered. “He’s dead. One of your boys killed him. He was Mercy Attentater’s father-in-law. That’s about it.”

  “Nothing from before? From his work in Germany during the first war?”

  “The old man dropped some hints,” I said, recalling Lang’s story of having fled with baby Franz, but I didn’t want to let Elsa know how much he’d told me. It would be better to keep what knowledge I had to myself if I could get away with holding onto it. “He wasn’t very specific. That’s not what I was after.”

  “And what were you after?”

  “Information on Mercy. What he could tell me about her dead husband or this guy who looked like him and started this whole mess when he went into the Rose Room.”

  She nodded. “Now you understand that part,” she said.

  “Most of it.”

  She let out a long breath, possibly still trying to decide if she should let me in on the real story behind the murders her boys had committed. When the exhalation had exhausted itself, she must have made up her mind. “Klaus Lang was an extremely gifted man, Mr. Strait. Gifted in many ways. You will never find mention of him in our history books, but if the truth could come out you would see that he spent the early years of this century as Germany’s most prolific assassin.”

  Attentater, I thought, remembering McNulty’s lesson on the word’s German meaning.

  Elsa went on. “He eliminated enemies of the state with precision and cunning, never disappointing his superiors.”

  “I suppose that’s a good trait to have in some circles.”

  She ignored my comment, continuing with her story. “I said he had many gifts. In addition to his prowess as an assassin, he had a mind for science. He studied and wrote and theorized and experimented, all under the eye of the German government, of course. The story as I’ve come to understand it is that he finally grew conflicted over his avocations and wanted to be freed of his obligations as an assassin.”

  “But German high command wasn’t too happy with that,” I interjected.

  “They were not.”

  “So, in between assassinations, he was forced to create quadruplets in a lab?” I asked, having been wondering how any of this was going to link back to Frank Attentater and the three thugs who looked just like him.

  “Nothing like that, Mr. Strait.” She shook her head and went on. “Klaus Lang had long theorized that there are other worlds than this, other Earths as our friend Cosmo Beadle says in his quaint little book.”

  A humming started in my ears as I listened to Elsa take the story in a direction I had not anticipated.

  “He found a way to travel to these alternate worlds, parallel with ours.”

  My mouth had gone dry. That canteen I’d seen before was no longer in sight; if I’d seen it now, I would have begged for water. Still, I managed to say, “And when you say travel?” as I thought of the traveling I’d done, both with the aid of technology and through the strange out of body experiences my music sometimes triggered.

  “I don’t mean the impotent visions that Cosmo and his followers claim to have partaken in. Or the ones you claimed to have experienced as well, Mr. Strait.”

  “What then?”

  I was both afraid and eager to hear her answer.

  “I mean actual travel. A machine that transports the observer bodily from this world and into a parallel universe, one where another version of himself might easily exist, one where he could exercise his free will to explore and gain knowledge that has not yet been arrived at in our world.” She paused, scrutinizing my expression, and I hoped my face was revealing none of what I was thinking—that this machine she was describing would do much more for my own quest than the set-up Guillermo had devised. And then Elsa said one more thing. “One where the observer could bring items back into this world, things that never existed here…or copies of things that should have been unique.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “The babies…” I managed to say, my mind spinning at the implications. These goons of hers had something profoundly in common with me, a connection I couldn’t afford to let Elsa know about.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But…why?”

  She shrugged. “The picture we have is incomplete. Klaus had a team he worked with. They were interviewed extensively after his disappearance—before being set to work on undoing the damage he caused. He kept them in the dark on the truth of his goals, but enough was pieced together after the fact. It would appear that near the end of the first war, Klaus started using his invention to seek out other versions of himself in the other worlds, hoping to find an alternate who had successfully extricated himself from his entanglements with the German government. He appears to have failed at this endeavor, but in the attempt encountered several Klaus Langs who were younger than himself. Our guess is that he tried convincing these doubles of his not to follow his same path. At least four of the Klaus Langs he encountered were significantly younger, however, and he appears to have taken things into his own hands to steer them toward a righteous path.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Infant versions of himself,” I said.

  “Yes. How this is possible, I cannot guess. Why would the timeline be different in these other worlds?” She shrugged. “If there is an official explanation, I’ve never heard it.”

  I wouldn’t have been able to understand it myself if I hadn’t seen the reverse earlier in the day with my vision of an older version of myself. Even then, it wouldn’t have made sense if Guillermo hadn’t explained it all to me.

  “You’re telling me…he kidnapped his other selves?”

  Elsa nodded. “It would appear so.”

  “Four of them?”

  “Yes.”

  This meant that until Frank Attentater’s death, there had been five versions of Klaus Lang in this world. Having five of a kind in your poker hand would get someone shot, I told myself, and I suspected that having five Klauses in this world had led to more deaths than I could imagine.

  It also explained the similarity I’d noticed between Klaus Lang and Frank Attentater, something I’d written off as coincidence when Klaus had told me his “son” had been adopted.

  “And then fled with one of them?” I asked.

  Another nod followed.

  “Why not all?” I asked.

  “There is no way to know for sure. Most likely, he planned to take all four but panicked, or perhaps felt that the noose was tightening on him. His assistants, you see, were beginning to suspect that he had less than righteous intentions for the use of his discoveries.”

  “Righteous from the viewpoint of German high command,” I added.

  “I suppose you could argue that such things as righteousness are a matter of perspective.” She seemed t
o consider this for a moment and then shrugged. “Regardless, he fled with one of his infant selves and all the documentation from his experiments. He destroyed the machine as well, melting it down so no one would be able to recreate it.”

  “Not even his assistants?”

  “They were…how do you say it? Kept in the cold?”

  “The dark,” I said.

  “The dark then,” she said. “At least where the highly technical end of things was concerned.”

  Here, I caught her eyes shifting for just a second to the little book on the table, then back at me.

  “So, the remaining Klauses were raised with different names to tell them apart,” I said.

  “Correct.”

  “But I’m guessing the German government sought to exploit their predilection for murder?”

  “Political assassination,” she corrected me. Then she shrugged again and said, “They are not as talented as the original Klaus, but they are impressive.”

  “So why wasn’t Franz a killer, too?”

  “Because that fool Lang didn’t raise him to be one. Genetics are only part of the equation, Mr. Strait. If Klaus had given Franz the proper training, he would have been as deadly as his fellows. As it was, I expect he had great aptitude as a soldier.”

  “Killing Nazis.”

  She gave me a cold stare at this but said nothing.

  I took the opportunity to ask a question. “If Klaus knew so much, why’d you kill him when you found him?”

  Her eyes shifted to the little book again, a momentary tell that said a lot about what had gone on in that sad little apartment in the hours between my leaving it and Elsa’s early morning appearance in my bedroom. I imagined the old man putting up a fight, swearing that there was no written record of the technology that had been his salvation and his undoing and then, eventually, Elsa or one of the other versions of himself coming across the nondescript book, hidden in plain sight just like I’d advised.

  “I didn’t kill him,” Elsa said.

  “A technicality. One of your playthings did, at your direction I suppose.” Then, considering that the three assassins were just younger versions of Klaus from other worlds, I added, “A sort of murder and suicide at the same time, wasn’t it?”